How Much Money Is Needed to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2024 — Expert Opinions

Affiliate marketing is one of the jobs on the internet that is very trendy these days. Because there is also the matter of Covid-19, many people have turned their faces towards businesses that they can easily do from home, and with a simple computer. When you want to start doing affiliate marketing, because it is something that is kind of unique, you come across many questions, situations, and options to choose from for your affiliate marketing business. One of these questions is how much money do I need to start making an online affiliate marketing business?

We have two pieces of news for you. One is that the amount of money is different depending on the situation. The second news is that we are going to explain to you A to Z about how much you need to start affiliate marketing in this article. Whether you are a student or a guy looking to make a living out of affiliate marketing, this article is for you to start affiliate marketing the right way.

A Short Explanation

Before we start on how much you need and what you need to get started in the world of affiliate marketing, let us have a clear mindset about what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is a business in which you promote someone else's product in your marketing place. You sign up for an affiliate program, get a link from them, and promote that link. When someone buys that product you are promoting from your link, you will earn a commission off that. Here is the reason why affiliate marketing is a thing.

The reason why is that the company that advertises is saving the trouble of marketing, and it is passing it to you, so affiliate marketing is a win-win for both sides of the deal. You do marketing for the advertiser, you get money. You have to remember that the good thing about affiliate marketing is that you are doing the easy work. The hard work goes to the other companies that have to design products, create products, have an inventory for the products, ship the products, have customer services, and so on. And all these things will cost them a lot, but how much will it cost you as an affiliate to start earning money by promoting other company's products and earning a commission?

You Can Do It the Free Way

Starting an affiliate marketing business takes no money. This is why affiliate marketing is a great business that is like no other business.

Affiliate programs are mostly free. There are some exceptions, but %99 of them are free. Facebook does not charge you anything. Instagram is free, YouTube is also free, same goes for TikTok, and Google is also free. In fact, you can start having an online affiliate marketing business simply with the same device you are reading this article on right now.

Although we just mentioned that affiliate marketing is a business that you can easily start without having any budget for it, we do not recommend you to start your business without spending anything on it.

When you spend money on further improving your business, you are not wasting it, but you are investing it in your business. The more you invest in your business, the more likely it is for your business to become successful.

In affiliate marketing, money is a little bit different, and if you want to spend money, it is more about what you want from this business and what are your goals. Overall, the role of money in an online affiliate marketing business is to make the process of starting a business easier, smoother, and more simple. As a person who wants to take their first steps in the world of affiliate marketing, that is exactly how you want to start a business. Simple, smooth, and easy.

What You Need to Start Affiliate Marketing

When we talk about having an affiliate marketing business, we do not mean we are going to open a store, or a mall, or anything like that. We are talking really small, and you should be taking small steps at first. Most of the experts in the affiliate marketing business recommend other people that want to start affiliate marketing first to get a job first and build themselves a little income. There are two reasons for that.

Robby Blanchard explains about having a budget before starting an affiliate marketing business.

Different from real-life businesses, affiliate marketing takes a bit of time to get you to a passive income. This is why you need to have at least a little bit of money because you do not want to spend your time working on your affiliate marketing business without having any money to pay for your living. When you are just starting your affiliate marketing business, you are not going to have much income in the first months of your business because, on the internet, it takes a bit of time for people to find out about you, and until then, you want to have some money to support your life.

Another reason for that is for expanding your business, and to make the process a bit easier and smoother like we mentioned before, you require a small amount of money. Nothing fancy like starting other kinds of business, but a low amount. Even if you do not have a lot of money, you can easily pay the expenses of a good affiliate marketing business at the start.

The difference in how much you are going to invest in your affiliate marketing business is dependent on what your goal is. You either want to make a little bit of money as a second job, or you have long-term plans for your business, and you want to make a living out of affiliate marketing. There are a lot of optional options that you can choose from. But if you want to start affiliate marketing the easy way and the right way that will eventually lead to a six-figure income, here is what you are going to need and how much they cost.

Branding

Affiliate marketing expert Andy Haffel explaining the two things he used for a successful affiliate marketing business

The first step that you want to take is branding. There are different things that you can make a brand out of, but in affiliate marketing, the experts often advise you to make a brand out of yourself. You can also make something similar to a company, or maybe you are not alone, and you are a small team, you can also make a brand for your team, but the best option is to make a brand out of the members or yourself if you happen to be working alone.

A company is often directed to one category or niche, and it is not very flexible in terms of covering different niches. But an individual is much more flexible, and you can promote whatever product that you want. With a company or a brand that does not represent you, you will not get a lot of variety in terms of your traffic. For example, if you are doing affiliate marketing for beauty and health, you cannot switch your niche to something like wealth because your current traffic is not going to be interested in it.

Domain

For your branding, the thing you need is a domain name that you want to have as your brand name. There are a lot of domain names, but the thing about it is that some or takes or some might be a bit expensive for someone who is just starting an affiliate marketing business. Having a website can really help your affiliate marketing business in branding, in getting traffic, and it is one of the best platforms that you can promote your affiliate products. It will help your affiliate marketing business a lot in the long run.

 However, having a domain, and having a website is not free. You need to get a domain, get a host, add content and design your website. Some people do pay other people, so they write content for their website or webpage, but it is not necessary, and you can also write your content yourself. For starters, you can get domain names at a very low price such as 3 or 4 dollars monthly. The maximum amount of money that you are probably going to spend on a domain name is 10 dollars per month for a starter. You can also change your domain name to something else later on. But for the starter, 10 dollars is not a lot.

Brand Naming

In affiliate marketing, the important thing in branding and choosing a name is to avoid any confusion. You need to pick a self-explanatory name, and there is no confusion about the name. For a store, it might be a good idea to pick weird names, but in affiliate marketing, it is not.

Hosting

Another matter that you are going to need to make a website is hosting. For a host, you need to pay monthly, but it is not very expensive for a website that does not attract a lot of traffic and does not have much content in it. The bigger and more advanced websites might spend a couple of hundred dollars monthly on a host because they get a lot of traffic and they have a lot of content, so they must keep their website fast and optimal for the users. You do not struggle with any of these, so at max, have 20 dollars per month for Web hosting. However, you can also get a host with a couple of dollars per month as well, and some of the web host providers do give you a free domain name as well, but we are considering the maximum amount of money that you should be having for it.

For now, you can get these two components: a domain and a host, with a low amount of 10 or 20 dollars per month without a problem.

The YouTuber John Crestani; an affiliate marketing expert, talking about the cost of domain and hosting.

Logo

Alongside branding, it is also to have a unique logo for yourself. People will remember visuals more than names or text, so having a good logo that will stick to people's minds and make them know you is essential for a good branding.

You can easily get a logo for your starter on a website like Fiverr. It is going to take about 10 dollars for a logo, and what Project Life Mastery (Stefan James) suggests you do is to order 3 logos from 3 different people and choose the best one that you feel is good for your logo. It is going to cost you about 30 dollars to do so.

WordPress

After having a website with a domain, now you need to design it and give it some functionality. For this, we recommend WordPress. You can give your website to a professional team to build it with a lot of programming and give it a fancy-unique look, but that is going to cost you a lot of money, and later on, it might not be even good in terms of speed and being optimized. What you can do instead is use WordPress.

WordPress is a simple-to-use framework that you can make your website in, and install themes, and kind of customize your website however you like, without even writing a single line of code. It is so simple that you can even do it yourself, and you will probably finish the design in a matter of a day or two. It is that simple to use. You do not even need to give it to anybody to do it for you.

WordPress is fast, scalable, and flexible, and there are a lot of great websites using WordPress. Walt Disney, Newyork Times, Bbc America are some of the examples that are using WordPress.

The good news about WordPress is that it is free, so you do not even need any amount to design and create your website.

ClickFunnels

Another tool that we recommend affiliates to use is ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is a tool that a lot of affiliates use to do email marketing. How it works is that you will give something to your customers such as a discount code or a special offer, or maybe something for free, and in return, you will get the contact info of that user using a landing page you created with ClickFunnels. Before your notice it, you will have a list of emails on your hand, and you can spend some time doing email marketing. Some affiliate marketers call a list of emails a list of money.

Email marketing is really valuable for affiliate marketers. What email marketing does for affiliate marketing is that it will keep you customers that may never visit your website again.

ClickFunnel is probably going to be the most expensive thing that you need for this business, and the price is 97 dollars per month. But every expert recommends email marketing, so it is well worth the investment.

Also, if you do not want to spend any money on email marketing, it is possible. WordPress itself has a tool for email marketing, but working with ClickFunnels is a lot easier, and more comfortable than working with WordPress.

AWeber

The next thing that you need is to moderate that list of emails that you have, and send them emails about what is going on, and keep sending them emails. You are going to be needing a tool for that such as AWeber. You can connect AWeber to your website or your ClickFunnel.

With AWeber, you can organize your email list and make broadcast emails and send them to that list. You can also make auto-responsive emails. For example, if someone goes through a funnel, they will receive emails that you have pre-written, automatically. This way you can build long-term relations with your customers.

Stefan James tells about the benefits of email marketing and its long-term relation-making, that they got a customer back to their website after 5 years.

Right now, the price of AWeber starts at 16.15 dollars per month. And again, you can skip this, but everybody recommends you to do this. It is a great investment, and it will bring you so much more than what it costs in the long term.

How Much Do You Need

Now let us look at what we have to pay for now. 20 dollars or even 30 dollars for both hosting and domain, 100 dollars for ClickFunnels, and 20 dollars for AWeber. That's a total of 150 dollars per month and 1800 per year. That is nothing compared to any other business.

The affiliate marketing expert Stefan James estimating how much you need to start affiliate marketing.

John Crestani estimated that you are going to need about 3656 dollars to start affiliate marketing in 3 months, but with some optional and extra steps that we are going to explain below.

Ads

As we mentioned before, affiliate marketing and getting traffic on the internet will take a little bit of time. If you want to shorten that time and boost your reputation by spending a little bit of money, advertising is the way you want to do it.

A lot of affiliate marketing experts do recommend that you do advertising, and they are constantly advertising to get even more traffic. In an online business, advertising is a key ingredient to success, and almost nobody can get anything without advertising.

The amount of money that you want to spend on advertising depends on you. If you want to grow fast, you might as well spend fearlessly. One thing you should keep an eye on is to advertise your money smartly. If you have 2 000 dollars, and you are planning to spend all of it for a month of advertising, do not.

With 2 000, you have a lot to work with, and it can take you a long way. Experts suggest that the optimal amount of money you can spend is somewhere between 400 to 600 per month. You can spend more, but the minimum amount which is enough is that amount. Or in another saying, around 30 or 20 dollars per day.

The minimum amount of money the expert Robby Blanchard recommends having for advertising.

Another expert, John Crestani, recommends having 1 000 dollars for advertising. (For three months.)

Training and Support

Almost all the experts in the affiliate marketing business recommend you to get some sort of training and support as a beginner. You might think they are saying that because of their own profit, but the truth is, when you are starting a business, not everything is step by step and clear for you. This is the difference between a job and a business.

When you are just starting, you 100 percent are going to face some problems and obstacles, and for that, you might need a guide or someone to help you. Sadly, no help is free, and you should have some money saved up for it.

Have a good 1000 dollars saved for training and support, and it should cover you for at least 2 or 3 months. By that time, your business should be on a roll, and you should be making something out of it.

Affiliate Summit

One thing I saw John Crestani mention in his video was to join the Affiliate Summit every year. Affiliate Summit is a conference for all affiliate marketers. This conference that happens once a year, is a very good opportunity for you to be because there are a lot of other affiliates and you can make a lot of contacts. In an online business like affiliate marketing, making connections is an excellent advantage. They will help you in your way, and you can promote each other. Different from the real world, in the world of affiliate marketing, having partners who do the same is a good thing.

Equipment

Let us say you are an affiliate marketer that wants to do affiliate marketing on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Current mobile phones are really powerful, and they can get quality videos. They have both good cameras and good microphones. But if you want something professional then it is a wise move to invest in better equipment. If you want something that will help start boosting your business, a fine camera will cost about 300 dollars, and you also need a microphone that can cost about 500 dollars as well.

If you want to get a camera then you need a microphone as well, and you better save about 1 000 dollars for that as well. But this is totally optional, and mobile phones will not have that much effect.

Conclusion

In this article, we explained to you what you need to get started with an affiliate marketing business so you would not have to go and buy one of those 1 000 dollars courses. All of the things we mentioned in this article are the opinion of the experts, and they are guaranteed. They have taken these steps and know that it works. All we mentioned in this article is completely optional, and you can start doing affiliate marketing even for free, but these steps for you to take are recommended by every expert and you do not need to take all of these as a waste of money but as an investigation. If you do these steps with a little bit of knowledge, there is nowhere wrong you can go with this.