Affiliate marketing opens up a world of opportunities for creators and publishers, offering numerous benefits that can help monetize an online presence and maximize revenue potential.
In fact, according to affiliate marketing statistics, there are 31%Â of publishers have affiliate marketing as one of their top three revenue sources with 9% having it as their top revenue source.
By partnering with brands and promoting their products or services, publishers can tap into a vast network of affiliate programs, earning attractive commissions for every successful referral they generate.
With low barriers to entry and the ability to leverage existing content and audience, affiliate marketing empowers publishers to turn their passion and influence into a profitable venture, while providing valuable content and recommendations to their audience.
Whether you want to supplement your income by utilizing your audience or build a completely new audience to promote products or services to, the benefits of affiliate marketing are undeniable.
Let’s take a quick look at what exactly affiliate marketing is.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where affiliates earn commissions by promoting products or services and driving traffic or sales to the merchant’s website.
There are several steps involved in affiliate marketing:

- The user, which is you, will sign up for an affiliate program or network.
- Once approved, you have access to brand assets and trackable links to products, services, and pages of that brand or company.
- You create content surrounding what you are promoting and insert these links or assets into the content.
- A user will search and find your article (if it ranks on search engines) or check the description of your video/social media, and then click on the link or asset.
- Once they click the link, they will be redirected to the brand or company page you have specified with a unique URL link that contains your affiliate ID.
- Once they purchase the item, or sometimes any item on the site, you will receive a commission percentage of the eligible products or total order.
- Depending on the company/affiliate program, the user will also have a cookie that is valid for 24 hours – 30 days – lifetime (unless erased) which means they can come back and purchase another day and the sale will be attributed to your affiliate ID.
- The affiliate network or company will then pay you after a certain threshold is reached and after a certain time period (most of the time it is between 30-90 days)
Generally speaking, the more difficult the product is to sell, the higher the commission rates.
Commission ranges are usually between 1% and 100%.
For example, Amazon has a very low commission rate – as it’s more likely that people will purchase something through your link – even if it’s not what they clicked on.
This multi-billion industry is the perfect way to earn income through content creation, as a supplement to your existing earnings. In fact, 20% of brand marketers say that affiliate marketing is their number one customer acquisition channel (Pepperjam).
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
There are numerous benefits to affiliate marketing including low cost, low risk, easy to start, and high earning potential.
Before I cover these points – Affiliate marketing is NOT passive income. You have to continuously learn, optimize, and create to be successful. It’s still common to see affiliate marketing mistakes in the industry, so be prepared to put in the grind.
Let’s take a look at the benefits in more detail:
- Easy to start
- No advanced knowledge needed
- No money investment needed
- It’s Scalable
- High Earning Potential
- Low maintenance costs
- Low risk
- It’s Flexible
- Performance-based
1. Easy to Start
Unlike traditional business ventures, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest to get your foot in the door (if done correctly).
You don’t need physical inventory, a location, staff, products, or anything that requires significant investment.
This also includes customer service – which is a huge win for many people out there.
As affiliate marketing is easy to get started, it allows creators to test different waters. Such as different topics or product promotions, without the need to invest thousands of dollars.
Although, it’s worth noting that although one of the benefits of affiliate marketing is being easy to start, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to succeed.
Content and blog websites earned almost a 40% share of publisher commissions in the U.S
Source: Awin
To be successful, you will still need to invest a huge portion of time into it, spend time obtaining new knowledge every week, and continuously optimize your content.
2. No Advanced Knowledge Needed
Whilst affiliate marketing does require knowledge in itself and your chosen niche, it’s not essential at the start.
One of the many affiliate marketing benefits is that anyone can get started. A simple affiliate marketing for beginners guide or YouTube video can get you set up and ready to go.
You will learn and increase your knowledge as you go, whether it’s through content research, competitor analysis, or by watching videos/courses.
Every resource you need to be able to grow in affiliate marketing is available for free online.
This includes YouTube videos, articles, social media groups, media websites, and even affiliate platforms themselves that have an ‘academy’ or training materials.
So if you are worried about getting started in affiliate marketing or even about how to write or create content, you will improve the more you do it.
3. No Money Investment Needed
As already mentioned previously, affiliate marketing requires minimal upfront costs.
Of course, there is web hosting, domain name, and small expenses such as a logo, but nothing that will cost over $50.
If you focus on social media or YouTube as your promotion channel, then you won’t have to invest any money at all.
Once you start gaining traction, you might decide to hire a content creator, invest in paid advertising, a website redesign, and other factors that are important to you.
This will start bringing in costs, but should only be necessary when you have the income to supplement it.
Leading to the benefit of affiliate marketing which is scalability.
4. It’s Scalable
Affiliate marketing is incredibly easy to scale – whether it’s for an individual website or starting multiple sites and having an affiliate business.
Once you start earning income from your affiliate efforts, you can reinvest that into growth and scale your business.
This could include hiring a writer so you can produce higher quality content and increase production – allowing you to focus on other areas.
You can start venturing out into high-ticket affiliate products/services to increase revenue.
You can even explore ‘horizontal scaling’ by expanding sub-niches or starting new websites in different topic areas.
Not forgetting social media and YouTube, you can also invest time into those platforms and reach new audiences.
Similarly, if you started out on social media or YouTube, you can invest in a blog.
As soon as you have revenue coming in, it becomes much easier to grow affiliate marketing sites and can also cut down on the time it takes too.
There really is no limit on how much you can grow or earn – it all depends on your goals and determination.
5. High Earning Potential
If you didn’t already know, the affiliate marketing industry is worth over $17 Billion!
When you look at your net profit – the amount you make after expenses – affiliate marketing has an incredible margin.
In the most lucrative niches such as credit cards and insurance, your earnings can be astronomical.
Of course, in the beginning, your earnings will be relatively low whilst you build out your audience and start establishing your promotion channel.
However, once you start hitting $500+ per month you can begin to scale and watch your earnings increase more and more.
81.2% of affiliate marketers make over $20,000 per year
Source: Affise
Another important thing to keep in mind is that your affiliate revenue isn’t the only thing adding to your earnings.
There will also be advertising, brand partnerships, sponsored posts, and even sub-affiliate opportunities to boost your income even more.
The amount you earn will depend on the types of affiliate programs, the products, the commission rates, how effectively you grow your promotion channel, and many other factors.
6. Low Maintenance Costs
In addition to the low cost to start affiliate marketing, it’s also low cost to keep things going too.
You will have a yearly fee for your domain and either a yearly or monthly fee for web hosting – other than that, you don’t have to pay anything to keep your site going.
Once you start investing into content writers, paid advertising, and perhaps paid software to measure and improve your affiliate marketing, then you will add to those maintenance costs.
However, you will only need to do that once you start earning more income and scaling.
Either way – it’s incredibly lower than having to pay building rent, staff overheads, research and development, suppliers, etc.
So as a business, it’s very minimal in terms of maintenance costs.
7. Low Risk
It’s a bit of a no-brainer, especially after all the other points, but one of the most attractive benefits of affiliate marketing is that it’s low risk.
Due to the low costs needed to start and only requiring an investment of your time, there is little to no-risk involved.
However, if you are an established content creator or business looking to start affiliate marketing, there is a heightened risk of alienating your audience.
But this still doesn’t compare to the risks of a physical business for example.
8. It’s Flexible
Affiliate marketing is content-based and focused on online platforms, so it can be done anywhere in the world.
Similarly, you can also target anywhere in the world with your content and audience.
This benefit of affiliate marketing is what attracts so many people initially.
The idea of working in another country while traveling, fitting it in around school and family life, or just escaping the 9-5 are some of the motivating factors.
Working from anywhere is a huge benefit, just always be aware of tax implications and remember that you still need to invest time and effort into growing your affiliate business.
9. Performance-Based
A huge benefit of affiliate marketing is that it’s performance-based.
In a nutshell, that means you get out what you put in.
Someone who puts in 70+ hours per week (in the right areas) will grow and make much more than someone who puts in 10 hours per week.
There is no ‘standard’ to follow here.
If you are happy with an extra $1,000 per month and know it takes 15 hours of your time, that’s ok.
However, if you are only spending 5 hours on your site and can’t understand why you aren’t making money or growing, you are not looking in the right place.
Of course, performance is not just about the time you put in.
You have to focus on the right areas, use data and metrics to drive decisions, optimize, learn about your audience, and have a strategy.
The more time you spend focusing on these areas or the areas that your affiliate marketing venture requires, the more you will learn and the better you will become.
This will ultimately lead to improved growth and income.
Conclusion
Overall there are several benefits of affiliate marketing that give plenty of reasons to get started. With low costs and no technical ability required, there’s no reason why you can’t get started today.
However, always remember that affiliate marketing is competitive and challenging. You need to be prepared for a long time investment before anything pays off.