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💰 How much money do you need to be successful in Affiliate Marketing? 📈🤔 (7)

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Hi guys!

The question of how much money is needed to start in affiliate marketing is among the most often asked in the community. 🤔

We decided to review what are the costs of affiliate marketing and how much money do you really need to invest to become successful. 🙉 💸

💵 What are the costs of affiliate marketing?
To start in affiliate marketing, you need to know what to do and how much it actually costs.
First, you need to sign up to an affiliate network and choose an offer. That part is free, but requires research and preparation. The next step is signing up to a traffic source and making your first deposit. The sum of the deposit and the budget for traffic depends entirely on you and what kind of offer you chose.
Usually, the optimal daily budget for testing amounts to $100, with recommended testing period length being 3-5 days. That sort of budget should work for most low payout offers.

📚 Should you spend money on affiliate marketing courses?
Affiliate marketing influencers and social media gurus offer plenty of paid courses for beginners. Some of them offer personal help, skype masterminds or additional guides and industry content as well. The courses vary in length and revolve around different verticals, traffic sources, affiliate networks and trackers. They can be a great way to start your affiliate marketing journey, offering exact step-by-step instructions that leave no room for unnecessary beginner mistakes.

But the truth is... one day you will have to take the reins and manage affiliate campaigns on your own. You can learn a lot using freely available resources such as affiliate marketing-related blogs and websites as well as various forums. It’s bound to take you longer and you will encounter plenty of different strategies and opinions but learning affiliate marketing on your own is definitely possible!

🛠 How expensive are the additional affiliate marketing tools?
An affiliate network and a traffic source are essential to start in affiliate marketing. But there are additional tools that can come in handy sooner or later. Tracking software is the most important out of the additional tools. It’s so important that we can even say it’s essential!

Affiliate Ad Trackers offer the widest range of plans. There are free plans available and they are definitely sufficient for beginner affiliates. However, the free plans tend to have limitations which become too restrictive once the affiliate starts scaling or expanding. The more advanced the tracking plan, the more expensive it becomes. The monthly prices start at $0 and can go up to $799.

Spy tools allow you to take a look at how your competition runs their ads. By using tools such as Anstrex or Adplexity, you gain access to millions of ads and landing pages used by other affiliates.

Spy tools also offer different options for various ad formats, verticals and devices. You can buy a solo plan for one ad format, or a bundle plan for more. There are a few free options with limited databases, but the most prominent spy tools on the market are in the monthly price range of $49 to $249.

There are many lander building websites and tools. Their features range from very basic to highly advanced. There are various plans on the market and their prices range from up to $25 per 6 months for the most basic plans to $637 for the most advanced plans.

Translation services usually charge below 10 cents per word for a quick and short translation, and unless you need a whole advertorial translated, it really shouldn't be that expensive. Translation via Google Translate might work for shorter texts but using a professional service will raise the credibility of your ads.

Other costs might include things like landing pages server costs, advanced optimization tools, VPNs, bot-detecting tools, and various small payment fees. All these costs depend on your level of experience and the strategy of your affiliate campaigns. We won’t focus on them too much, though. They are minimal and not significant in comparison to traffic and tool costs.

⚖️ Revenue vs. profit
Realistically, in order to make a lot of money in affiliate marketing, you need to invest… a lot. The higher the revenue (which equals spend plus profits), the more potential for earnings. Also, affiliate networks often appreciate advertisers who can show a high and consistent revenue by giving them payout bumps or contacting them first to run a promising new offer.

If you spend $100 every day with an average ROI of 20%, your daily profit will equal $20. If your daily spend reaches $1000 and your ROI stays the same, your daily profit will equal $200.

In short, focus on your revenue rather than profits! It might not be something you want to hear as a beginner but the bigger your budget is the higher your chances of becoming successful.

💸 Cash Flow
When you are running an offer on a traffic source, the money goes into traffic and whatever you earn flows into a different account — the affiliate network. The network then holds onto your money while doing quality checks. After that process is done, your earnings can be paid out.

The money you earn during a pay period is released to you sooner or later depending on your deal with the affiliate network. If you prove your quality and reliability it’s possible to reach a point at which you get paid daily. Depending on how long you’ve worked with the network and how many valuable conversions you bring on a daily basis you will receive a shorter or longer pay frequency.

🤑 Managing expectations as a beginner in affiliate marketing
It’s best not to start affiliate marketing hoping to make quick and easy profits. It’s not a get rich quick scheme, it’s an actual job requiring skills and effort. In a survey conducted on one of the community forums affiliates shared how much money they had to spend before becoming profitable.

$0-500 USD had the biggest number of votes but overall the majority (63.7%) of respondents had over $500 spent before seeing their first green numbers.

• Want to know what is the estimated optimal monthly budget for affiliate marketing? 💰
• Are you wondering what are the cheapest and the most expensive verticals? 📈
• And where to learn affiliate marketing for free? 🧐

Magda

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Great post but I have to disagree a bit with it.

It´s true that campaigns with higher revenue have more potential for earnings and it´s also true that a bigger budget helps alot to succeed.

This is also true, when you show the networks that you can send high volume it can help alot to get some benefits.

But I have to disagree a bit with this part.

In the end you should always focus on profit and nothing else, neither ROI nor revenue/volume.

In a very simplified way when the ROI stays always the same the calculation is absolutely correct but mostly this doesn´t happen.

On low(er) volume campaigns, especially in low tier geos, you often run at much higher ROI.
When you scale or run in higher tier geos the ROI usually goes down but the additional revenue from the higher volume then compensates the lower ROI.

It always depends on the campaigns you are running if it´s better to focus on ROI or revenue/volume to increase the profit.

I agree that in most cases it´s good to optimize and scale for maximum volume and revenue to reach the highest possible profit but this thread is geared towards beginners and as a beginner you have to deal with different stuff than advanced affiliates.

The typical beginner doesn´t go all-in from the very beginning and rather starts with lower volume campaigns in lower tier geos.

Such campaigns often run on higher ROI compared to high tier geos, the disadvantage however is that often you can´t really scale these campaigns for more volume.

When you already run the campaigns on maximum daily spend and just can´t scale towards more volume then it´s better to optimize towards higher ROI because then the ROI is the variable that can increase the profit.

Same goes for capped offers.

When you only have a cap of 50 or 100 conversions a day and you max it out already then scaling for more volume won´t help at all.

Then it´s also better to work with what you have already and try to optimize for a higher ROI for more profit.

This:

Becomes true when you come to the point where you scale to high enough volume that the profit from higher revenue and lower ROI surpasses the profits from lower volume and higher ROI.

I am absolutely with you that often high volume on lower ROI brings more profit that low volume on higher ROI.

But for beginners it´s often easier to find good converting low volume campaigns than getting lower ROI campaigns running on high scale.

In other words, for a beginner it´s often easier to find 10 campaigns with $20 spend/day at 100% ROI than finding 10 campaigns with $100 spend/day at 20% ROI or 1 campaign with $1k spend/day with 20% ROI.

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@twinaxe these are some really good points, thank you for sharing your perspective!

I did write this article with mostly beginners in mind and there is no one simple way of making money that can be universally applied to all campaigns and budgets. I choose to go with this somewhat generalised perspective because it seemed applicable to a lot of cases we're dealing with on a daily basis. People tend to put in very little money and create just a couple of campaigns just to quit shortly after because they haven't earned enough. That's why focusing on revenue is really important for those who expect to earn money with very little investment (and what goes with that not enough testing).

Agreed! However... it's rarely the case that beginners make use of the whole available volume. Campaigns are often limited by low budgets and it often happens that they get optimized (or over-optimized) into negative ROI. In which case, I thought it was, once again, quite important to mention that increasing the revenue might have better success rate than attempting to optimize.

Another thing I had in mind writing that section was that increasing the revenue means also testing higher bid = testing higher quality of traffic and also testing more variables in general which leads to newfound profitable sources and even higher revenue. Should have definitely elaborated on that more, though 😅

Either way, thanks for all the valuable insights. We've updated the blog to include your quotes. Hopefully, they can shed some light on different cases of prioritizing revenue vs. profits.

Magda

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Nice article

But the correct answer is $5000

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Oh yes, this is so true

Yup, often these people who start over motivated and tell they will earn 4 figures a day as fast as possible are also the ones who are not seen anymore pretty fast

But from my experience, also from my coaching, I have often seen that it´s much easier for beginners to make first profits with lower volume and higher ROI campaigns.

Especially in the beginning I always try to keep the financial risk as low as possible for the beginners so that they can learn how to test, optimize and scale campaigns in a rather safe environment and there these lower volume campaigns are pretty good for.

Rather easy $XX/day profit with low risk are always better than possible $XXX/day with higher risk to lose more money

Of course such campaigns are often pretty limited so sooner or later you just have to scale for more volume -> revenue -> profit

100% agree, optimizing to death is something I also see pretty often.

Browser versions, OS versions, device brands and all such stuff.

When you have to optimize by such small metrics then the campaign is clearly no winner

Anyway, I don´t want to post too much about it.

The thread is really nice and I hope many starters will read it

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Nice article
Building an affiliate business isn’t something that is going to happen overnight. It times time, a lot of effort and the right approach to get this right.
You might not succeed the first you launch an affiliate venture but by laying the right foundations you will get yourself a great chance of making money through affiliate marketing.

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Great article! So as for the money, in my opinion it's at least $1,000 before stacking the green

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