Affiliate marketing is hailed as a great way to earn recurring passive income. With brands like Wirecutter doing around $30 million in sales with a focus on affiliate marketing, it’s easy to see why.
But how much does the average affiliate marketer make? And is this really a good business model?
Today, I’m going to answer those questions and discuss how you can get some of that affiliate money, too.
New to affiliate marketing?
Read our beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing .
How do affiliate marketers make money?
Affiliate marketers make money by promoting other people’s products or services in exchange for commissions.
For example, if you have an affiliate link on your blog that directs users to purchase a product from Amazon, you will earn a percentage of the commission each time the link is clicked. The dashboard looks like this:
However, it doesn’t have to be just physical products.
You can also make money through affiliate marketing of online courses or software. You may have seen videos on YouTube that say “Sponsored by Skillshare” or “Sponsored by Fiverr.” These platforms also offer affiliate marketing programs.
Alternatively, you can also make money by working as an affiliate marketing manager for a company. I will also talk about the salary of a hired manager.
How Much Money Can Affiliate Marketers Make?
According to Glassdoor , the average annual salary for affiliate marketers is $59,060. Salaries range from $58,000 to $158,000, including “extra income” such as cash bonuses, commissions, tips, or profit sharing.
This applies to salaried employees, though. What about freelancers or business owners who do affiliate marketing themselves?
According to a survey by Influencer Marketing Hub, the specific situation is as follows:
In other words, more than half of affiliate marketers make $10,000 or less per year, while only about 33% of affiliate marketers make $10,000 or more per year.
That’s… not great. It’s certainly not enough to make a living in most countries. But I think that’s because most of the respondents aren’t doing affiliate marketing full time.
Being in the affiliate marketing space myself and networking with hundreds of other affiliate marketers gives me a hunch that most full-time affiliate marketers make less than $100,000 per year, probably around $30,000-50,000.
That being said, this is my personal experience, not a survey or study, so take it with a grain of salt.
Revenue and Net Profit
When answering how much money affiliate marketers make, you have to consider the actual net profit figure, not just the revenue.
Revenue is the profit of a business before expenses are deducted . Net profit is the profit after expenses are deducted.
Profit, therefore, is the actual take-home income your business generates during the year.
That’s why I say most affiliate marketers make between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. This refers to profit after expenses.
How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing
If these numbers sound good to you, and you’re ready to start affiliate marketing, here’s how you can get started:
- Choose a Niche
- Identify content channels
- Produce and promote your content
Step 1. Choose a niche market
Your niche is what you talk about. It can be a hobby, a lifestyle, a quirky scientific theory, or anything else. As long as there is a product, service, or course to promote, you can make money from it.
To find your niche, ask yourself:
- What am I good at?
- What do I like to do?
- What am I curious about?
- What have other people told me I am good at?
The overlap of these four questions is usually a good bet for a niche. Or at the very least, it gives you some ideas to think about.
For example, my answer might be:
- I enjoy playing video games, writing, traveling, and playing music.
- I love doing all of these things, as well as journaling, hiking, and lounging in my hammock.
- I am interested in silversmithing, fire dancing and motorcycles.
- Others told me I was a great salesperson and that I gave good massages.
Based on my answers, I had a bunch of niche options: traveling, hiking, video games, sales, entrepreneurship, and even hammocks. This was a fun little exercise to quickly come up with ideas.
If you’re still having problems or want to learn more, check out our guide on finding an affiliate marketing niche . This guide will walk you through how to find affiliate marketing niches while using Google Search in your daily life.
As you can see in the screenshot above, Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar will show information about each keyword you search for, like how many people search for that keyword each month and how difficult it is to rank for.
Step 2: Identify content channels
Once you’ve chosen your niche, you’ll need to choose how you’re going to promote your affiliate links. You can create a niche website, a YouTube channel, social media accounts, or an email list.
My personal favorite method is to build a website and use search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your site's ranking on Google. This will allow you to get a constant flow of organic traffic (and sales).
For example, one of my sites is monetized through Amazon affiliates, and I wrote a review post about camping mattresses that looked like this:
If you’re interested in this style, then niche sites might be your best option.
However, just because you build a website, doesn’t mean you can’t also be on social media and YouTube. I’ve found that focusing on and mastering one thing before moving on to the next has helped me a lot in my career.
Step 3. Create and promote your content
Finally, you need to learn how to create great content and promote that content to attract eyeballs.
Affiliate marketing is a content-centric business. You won’t be successful without mastering content creation. Whether it’s writing blog content, making videos, or taking photos, you need to learn how to do it better than most.
But it’s not enough to just create great content. You also need to learn how to promote your work, whether that’s building backlinks to your articles for SEO purposes or simply getting more views on your videos so that the YouTube algorithm recommends them to more people.
[]()## How to maximize your affiliate profits
Now you know the basics of being an affiliate marketer. But how do you make sure you earn as much as possible within the scope of what you’ve shared?
Here’s how:
- Start by Finding the Best Affiliate Program
- Improve conversion rates
- Achieve SEO Victory Fast
- Negotiate a better price
Let's analyze it.
Find the best affiliate program
Amazon is great for beginners, but with commission rates of only 1-3%, it’s far from optimal.
The easiest and quickest way to increase your affiliate profits is to find a better affiliate program that offers 5%, 10%, or even 50% commission on sales.
The most common range is 5% to 10%. This is still almost three times what Amazon pays, so don’t let that discourage you.
Improve conversion rates
Besides simply promoting better affiliate deals, the next quickest way to maximize profits is to focus on conversion rate optimization.
Meaning, you should make some small improvements to your website to get more visitors to click on your links and buy the products you recommend.
Generally speaking, there are a number of things you can do to help with conversions, including:
- Use high-quality images.
- Create a call to action (CTA) box for the product you recommend.
- Display a comparison chart so readers can quickly see the differences.
- Make your number one product stand out.
- Build your brand and focus on EAT (expertise, authority, trust).
Example: This page converts really well thanks to these custom recommended product boxes:
You can have a developer make these for you, or use an editor like Elementor or Thrive Architect.
The Wirecutter does a great job of building its brand and establishing E-A-T. It showcases the source of its information, which builds trust.
Achieve SEO Victory Fast
Most tasks in SEO take time to bear fruit, whether it’s creating great content or building links. But there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in SEO that can produce results faster if you know what you’re doing.
These include:
- Improve your internal linking structure.
- Use caching to fix your website speed.
- Recover lost backlinks.
- Optimize your title tags.
- Refreshing your content.
And there's more.
Negotiate a better price
Finally, the quickest and easiest way to maximize your affiliate profits is to negotiate better rates with your current affiliate partners.
This method doesn’t work for generic programs like Amazon and Walmart, but it definitely works for smaller brands. Usually, if you’ve already driven a lot of traffic to your partners, they’ll naturally increase your commission.
Word it in a way that shows them that you will use the extra profits to reinvest and promote them further – it’s a win-win situation.
This is best done over the phone, but even a well-worded email can increase your commission by one or two percentage points.
Final Thoughts
So now you know that most good affiliate marketers make under $100k per year. But there are many who make much more than that.
You can choose – become an affiliate business owner or an affiliate manager for other companies.
Both are lucrative options. One of my favorite affiliate program partners has an affiliate manager making nearly six figures a year — and they give him ownership of the company so they can share in the profits.
Affiliate marketing is a great career no matter what. Want to learn more? Check out these other guides:
- How to start affiliate marketing with zero capital in 2025? (5 steps)
- 6+ Tips to Promote Affiliate Links and Products
- Best Recurring Affiliate Program: Earn Passive Income for Life
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