Affiliate marketing has a strange relationship with the word free.
You will hear that you can start for free.
That’s true.
You will also find people selling $2,000 courses, $200-a-month software packages and elaborate systems that make it look as though you need a small pile of money before you’re allowed through the front door.
That’s not true.
The useful answer is somewhere between the two.
You can begin affiliate marketing without spending anything if you use platforms you already have access to and promote products through free traffic. Digistore24, Amazon Associates and Awin, for example, all currently allow affiliates to join without an ongoing signup charge.
But that isn’t quite the business we’re building in this series.
We’re building around a website.
If you’ve been following along, that’s our imaginary hiking site. If you’ve arrived here from Google, all you need to know is that we’re using a simple hiking website as our example while we work through how an affiliate business actually gets built.
A website adds a few real costs.
Fortunately, they aren’t enormous.
The First Question Is What You’re Building
Before we put a number on affiliate marketing, we have to decide what we’re including in the number.
You don’t technically need a website to be an affiliate marketer. You can build an audience through social media, YouTube, email or other platforms and use affiliate offers where their rules allow it.
We’ll look at whether you actually need a website in the next article.
For now, I’m going to assume you have decided to build the kind of business we’re building here: useful content on a website that you control, with affiliate products added when they make sense.
That changes the question from:
Can I start affiliate marketing for free?
to:
What do I actually need to buy to build a basic affiliate website?
That’s much easier to answer.
Not very much.
Your Domain Name
The first thing I would buy is a domain name.
That’s your address on the internet. If our hiking site were real, it might be something like bettertrailgear.com.
I’m making that up. Please don’t rush off and buy it because I typed it here.
A normal .com domain commonly lands somewhere around $10–$20 a year, although promotions, extensions and renewal prices vary. Some hosting companies include the first year of the domain when you buy an annual or longer hosting package.
The important word there is renewal.
A company may offer you a domain for almost nothing in the first year and charge a normal price when it renews.
There is nothing particularly sinister about that. Introductory pricing is common.
You just need to look at the second price as well as the first one.
Saving $10 today isn’t especially exciting if you are surprised by the bill next year.
Web Hosting
Your second likely expense is hosting.
The domain is the address. Hosting is where the website actually lives.
For a new affiliate site, you do not need a giant server, an enterprise package or anything with enough computing power to launch a small moon mission.
Basic shared hosting is usually enough to begin.
Current entry-level hosting offers also show why I don’t want to give you one magic price. Some hosts advertise plans for only a few dollars a month, but the price may require paying for a year—or several years—upfront. Renewal can also cost considerably more.
That’s more useful to understand than memorizing which company happens to be cheapest today.
Look at what you actually have to pay now, how long you’re committing for and what the renewal will cost.
A hosting company may show you:
Your credit card may hear:
$143.52 please.
Both numbers can be correct.
They’re answering different questions.
For a beginner, the amount actually leaving your bank account matters more than the giant number on the sales page with /month printed beside it.
The Website Software Can Be Free
Now we get some relief.
WordPress itself costs nothing to download and use. It is open-source software, and there are thousands of free plugins available for it.
You can also begin with a free theme.
Will you eventually decide that a paid theme, plugin or other tool makes your life easier?
Possibly.
That doesn’t mean you need it when you start out.
It would be better to start with a clean, readable site using free tools than spend three weeks comparing premium themes because one of them has a nicer animation when the menu opens.
To use our example, nobody is coming to your hiking site for the menu animation.
They came because their feet hurt and they want to know which boots to buy.
Solve that problem first.
A Lot of the Other Tools Can Wait
This is where a cheap business can quietly become an expensive one.
One subscription doesn’t look too bad. Then another one appears:
Keyword research.
SEO software.
AI tools.
Image libraries.
Email marketing.
A premium page builder.
A writing tool.
Something that promises to find “winning products.”
Pretty soon your inexpensive affiliate business has acquired a monthly payroll, except none of the employees are human.
Some of these tools are excellent.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is buying them before you know why you need them.
There are good free tools available for many of the jobs you need to do at the beginning. Google Search Console can show you how your site is appearing in Google. Design tools have free plans. Email platforms often have beginner tiers. Keyword research can also start with free tools before you decide whether deeper data is worth paying for.
That doesn’t mean you should never upgrade.
It means you don’t have to buy the advanced version of everything before the first person has visited your website.
Paid Tools Should Solve a Problem You Actually Have
There is a point where paying for software makes perfect sense.
Suppose you’re researching keywords manually and it takes you three hours every time you plan an article.
You try a paid keyword tool.
Now the same research takes forty minutes, and you’re getting information that helps you make better decisions.
Fine.
We have found something worth considering.
The mistake is reversing the order.
Buy tool → hope it creates business.
It makes more sense to do it the other way around:
Build business → find problem → buy tool if it solves the problem.
That’s how I think about courses too.
A good course can save you months of wandering around trying to piece something together yourself. I’ve paid for education when I thought the knowledge was worth more than the time it would take me to find it elsewhere.
But buying five courses on affiliate marketing doesn’t make you five times more prepared.
At some point you have to stop learning how someone else built their business and begin building yours.
What About AI?
AI belongs in the same category.
It can be enormously useful for research, brainstorming, organization, comparison, editing and a long list of jobs that would otherwise take more time.
You don’t need to begin by buying every AI service you see.
Free access exists for a number of useful AI and research tools, while paid plans usually become more interesting once you’re using them enough that the extra capacity or features save meaningful time.
Again, the question isn’t:
Is the paid version better?
It probably is.
The better question is:
Do I need the better version yet?
Those are not the same question.
Do You Need to Pay to Join Affiliate Programs?
Usually, this isn’t where your startup budget disappears.
Several large affiliate platforms are free for affiliates to join, including programs we’ve already talked about such as Amazon Associates, Awin and Digistore24.
That doesn’t mean every program in the world will have identical terms.
Check before you join.
Be suspicious of anyone telling you that paying a large fee is simply the normal price of getting access to affiliate offers.
The affiliate program is supposed to pay you when you produce the agreed result.
What About Email?
I like email.
Eventually, having a way to reach people who have chosen to hear from you can become very valuable.
But email software is not a reason to delay starting the business.
Free plans exist, and you can upgrade when the audience or the things you want the system to do actually justify paying for it.
This is going to become a recurring theme:
Let the business earn some complexity.
You don’t have to build the final version of the company on day one.
Paid Advertising Changes the Budget Completely
There is one important exception to almost everything we’ve talked about so far.
Ads.
In the last article, we mentioned another route: paying for traffic. You run ads, send people to a landing page or funnel, and try to earn more in commissions than you spend getting those visitors there.
That can work.
It also changes this entire conversation about startup cost.
If you’re building with articles and other free traffic sources, it makes sense to talk about getting started for roughly a hundred dollars.
Once you’re buying traffic, that number stops being very useful.
Your cost depends on what you’re advertising, where you’re advertising it, how much each visitor costs, how many of those visitors buy and how much you earn when they do.
And there is another cost that is easy to forget:
Testing.
Your first ad may work.
It may also teach you that your first ad was terrible.
Your landing page may need changing. The offer may not convert. The audience may be wrong. You may have to spend money simply to learn which part of the system isn’t working.
That doesn’t make paid traffic a bad idea.
It makes it a different kind of business decision.
With the website route, much of the early risk is your time.
With advertising, you start putting real money into the experiment as well.
For that reason, I would keep any advertising budget completely separate from the basic cost of starting an affiliate website.
We’re building the website-first route here. That’s the budget we’re trying to keep simple.
There May Be Business or Tax Costs Too
There is one expense I can’t give you a useful universal number for.
Where you live matters.
Business-registration rules, taxes, accounting requirements and whether you choose to create a separate business structure vary depending on the country and sometimes the state, province or local area.
I’m not going to invent a neat number and pretend it applies everywhere.
When those costs become relevant, check the rules where you actually live.
Here, I’m talking about the practical tools needed to get an affiliate operation started, not every possible legal or tax cost of running a business.
So What Would I Actually Budget?
If I were beginning our hiking site today, I would put $100–$150 aside.
Not because I think I must spend all of it.
I wouldn’t want to.
I would expect that money to cover a normal domain if the hosting package doesn’t include one, basic shared hosting and perhaps one small expense we didn’t anticipate.
For the first version of the business, I would try to keep everything else at zero.
WordPress can be free.
A basic theme can be free.
Useful plugins can be free to begin.
Affiliate-program membership can be free.
Initial keyword research can be free-first.
Design tools can be free-first.
Email can be free-first when we’re ready for it.
Then I would start publishing.
A couple of months later, maybe I discover that keyword research is taking forever. Maybe the free email tool no longer does what I need. Maybe enough people are visiting the site that a better piece of software would genuinely save time.
Now there is a reason to spend.
More importantly, I know why I’m spending it.
That’s very different from buying a pile of tools on day one because somebody’s list of “17 things every affiliate marketer needs” told me I should.
Cheap Doesn’t Mean Effortless
There is an odd thing about this business.
Its low financial cost is one of its biggest attractions.
It’s also one of the reasons people underestimate it.
If opening a small shop required $75,000, you would probably spend a considerable amount of time thinking before signing anything.
Affiliate marketing may let you begin for around a hundred dollars.
That makes it very easy to think:
I’ll give this a try.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
Just remember what we learned in the last article.
The money you don’t have to spend upfront is replaced, at least partly, by time.
You’re going to research, write, learn, make mistakes, improve things and wait for some of that work to begin producing results.
The fact that WordPress is free doesn’t write the articles.
A $15 domain doesn’t bring anyone to the website.
Cheap to start and easy to build are two different things.
Spend Slowly
Let’s go back to our hiker.
Suppose we have $500 available to get the site started.
We could spend it.
That part would be easy.
A premium theme, an SEO subscription, a logo, an AI subscription, a course and a few plugins could take care of most of it surprisingly quickly.
Then we’d have a very well-equipped website that hardly anybody visits.
There is another option.
Spend enough to get the site online.
Keep the rest.
Then start working.
A few months from now, maybe keyword research is taking too long. Maybe the free email system is holding us back. Maybe there are enough visitors that paying for a particular tool would genuinely make the business better.
Now we have a problem worth solving.
And we still have some money to solve it with.
That’s the approach I prefer.
Don’t buy solutions while you’re still guessing at the problems.
Affiliate marketing is one of the relatively inexpensive online businesses you can test. Take advantage of that.
Get the basics in place, build something useful and see what happens.
Then let the business tell you where the next dollar should go.