Probably the biggest question on anyone’s mind who is considering starting an affiliate marketing business is, “How long does it take to start making money with affiliate marketing?”
Truth be told, when I hear about any business model designed to make money online, this is the question I ask!
A lot of people are going to give you many different answers, but I’m going to give you the best guidance I can so you know what to expect. So keep reading below to get a realistic timeline and see if affiliate marketing is for you!
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Expectations Are Hard To Pinpoint
One of the reasons the question is asked so often is because there are so many variables that play into the results you can expect. Affiliate marketing isn’t something that a lot of people understand or even know that it is a business model for making money online.
If you were going to open up a McDonald’s franchise, for example, there is a wealth of information at your fingertips that can guide you into a realistic timeline to become profitable.
You can find all kinds of statistics from the corporation itself and your city council to help you determine what you should expect from a franchise restaurant in your area, such as:
- Size of your restaurant
- Number of seats available
- The population of the area you are in
- Wages you will need to pay
- Corporate taxes that will be levied, and so on…
All of this information will be used to create reliable projections about how fast you can become profitable. It’s much easier in this case to have a good, realistic mindset going into your business.
However, with affiliate marketing you can ask 10 people how fast you can start making money, and you’re likely to get 10 different answers–with no real expectation of which one is more accurate for you!
So I’m going to give you a basic timeline that is realistic for most people starting out in this business. Then I’ll go over some factors that can cause this timeline to slow down or speed up.
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A Timeline For Most Beginners
~ First month–Finding a quality hosting service to set up your website can be done much easier than years ago, so you accomplish this within one day. Then during this first month you:
- Choose a niche
- Pick a name for your website
- Start your site on a free subdomain or buy a domain
- Choose a theme for your site
- Create your base pages–About Me, Affiliate Disclosure, and Privacy Policy
- Start writing your first posts, which is your content
- Research and apply to affiliate programs to monetize your site
~ Second and Third Months–You are going to be adding content, but writing is likely to take a while. The research for each post is time consuming, and you’re working on things like your writing style, how to find topics, what keywords should you use, how to add great images, and how to target your key audience. For a lot of people, it’s intimidating trying to write 1000 word posts regularly–I was one of them!
Your posts are getting indexed on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but they will dance in and out of the rankings. Your site is young and not established as an authority yet, so good rankings aren’t likely at this point.
It’s likely that you’ll have a lot of questions about working in the back office of your website during this time. You will want a secure site that offers a great experience for your visitors.
So you’ll know what you want to do, but it will take time and research to figure out how to do it. There are great plugins you can add to your site to give it more functionality, but it takes time to find them and try them out.
~ Fourth thru Sixth Months–Your writing is getting faster and you’re getting into a good rhythm writing about 3 posts per week. It’s less time consuming, and writing 1000 words is getting easier every day. By the end of this time period, you have somewhere around 50-75 posts on your site.
Your posts are getting indexed faster, and you’re starting to see them rank faster. However, it’s still normal to see them dance in and out of the search engines. You’re adding product reviews and seeing that they are getting ranked faster on Google.
You start seeing your traffic increase, although it’s still fairly low. It’s not unusual to see sites younger than 6 months old still getting only 10-15 visitors a day or even less.
Many people abandon their sites during this time if they’re not seeing the results they want, so Google can be stubborn about sending traffic your way when your site is this young yet!
You start looking at social media more during this time as ways to promote your site. After signing up for a few of them, you post your new content regularly, and you start getting followers.
You may or may not have gotten any sales during this time. If you have, you’re feeling pretty good, but if not, you’re getting down and frustrated!
That’s OK, because whether or not you get sales during this time is not an indication of whether your site is going to be a success or not. Many successful marketers have taken months before making a penny.
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~ Six Months to One Year–Six months of effort and sacrifices of time to work on your business with not much money coming in are taking a toll. You take a few days off, relax, and come back refreshed–but you don’t quit!
These six months are the breaking point of your site because you need to have faith that the effort you’ve been putting in will start paying off.
Your traffic starts increasing gradually, and the numbers are trending in the right direction. Once the traffic increases, clicks on your affiliate links increase, and you see sales begin to rise. Seeing results motivates you even more, and you start publishing four posts per week!
You start your email marketing campaign by signing up for an autoresponder service and creating a subscription form. This starts your email list building, and you start sending out a newsletter twice a month with your recent posts and promotions.
You also start working on creating videos for your site and create a YouTube channel.
Your sales start to increase each month, and by the end of your 1st year, your earnings are consistently rising slowly each month into 3 figures. You’ve got somewhere around 100 posts or more on your site.
~ The Second Year–The results of your hard work keep showing. You keep adding regular content to your site, posting on social media, and sending newsletters to your email list–rinse and repeat!
Putting some of your earnings back into your business will help you scale your profits faster. So you start some paid advertising campaigns and your earnings rise.
By the end of the 2nd year, there are 250-300 posts on your site, your earnings are increasing, and you’re making 4 figures every month or possibly more!
Now you decide to scale your business even further by outsourcing content and beginning another website!
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Factors That Can Extend Or Shorten Your Timeline
There are many factors that can change the story above to making money faster or slower, and they all depend upon you! So you will need to look at your own situation to see if there are variables that may slow down your ability to make your business profitable.
Here are some of the factors you need to consider:
~ Time–This can be the biggest obstacle in my opinion. I started affiliate marketing when I was still working a job where I was on call and also taking care of my grandson many nights.
Finding the time to write was a struggle for a while, and things progressed slower for me in the first few months.
If you’re in a position where you don’t have the time to write 3-4 posts a week, don’t worry that your business won’t succeed. It may just take longer to see results. One of the biggest benefits of an online business is the ability to work on it at your own pace and fit it into your life!
~ Writing Ability–Everyone has different skills and abilities, so writing may be easier or more difficult for you. I know marketers who can write 3000 to 4000 words before lunch, and there are those who struggle to write 1000 words in 8 hours.
If you have excellent writing skills and can publish more posts with longer word counts, it’s very likely that you can shorten the timeline above to start making money. If you struggle to write good content, you could take longer to reach your goals.
~ Experience or Training–If you have ever created a website before, sold products online, or written for a blog before, you can definitely shorten the above timeline.
But if you are a complete newbie, you can expect to make money within that timeline or it could be extended depending upon your learning curve.
~ Affiliate Programs–All affiliate programs have different terms and commission rates and this can affect how long it takes to start making money. For instance, if you are promoting a high-ticket item, you’ll have fewer sales, but the profits will be larger than small ticket items. With fewer sales, it may be longer before you see any income.
~ Product Reviews–Google loves to rank product reviews! So if you have product reviews on your site, you’ll get faster ranking. If you don’t do them, it may take longer to see traffic. This is dependent upon your niche, some of them may rank very well without doing reviews.
~ Quality of Your Site–The quality of the user experience on your site will definitely impact how well your visitors will convert into customers. If it’s well written, with easy navigation, and gives your audience information that they find helpful and enjoyable, your site will retain visitors well. The search engines reward sites like these with great rankings.
If your site is not well written, the navigation is confusing or hard to find, or your audience doesn’t find quality information, they won’t stay long or come back. Your site will not rank well, and it will be difficult to increase traffic–which means it will take longer to make money!
~ Free vs. Paid Traffic–In the timeline above, it’s assumed that you will use SEO, Search Engine Optimization, to drive organic traffic to your site, and use paid traffic after making money.
If you have a budget for paid traffic, you can kick start your traffic sooner, which means that it’s very likely that you’ll start making commissions sooner as well.
Keep in mind that paid traffic can be very expensive, especially for those who are not experienced. It’s not uncommon to spend hundreds of dollars a month without getting comparable sales for beginners!
Watch Out For False Promises From Scam Promoters!
There are many, many sites out there that are promising beginners huge earnings fast–sometimes within 24 hours! I have yet to find one that is able to back up their claims.
In fact, a lot of these sites are only around for a few months, but then new ones pop up all the time.
Always be aware of anyone who tells you that you can make easy, fast money online because they are trying to sell you something.
Beginners buy these programs and their upsells for hundreds of dollars and then sometimes spend hundreds more on paid traffic trying to get them to work before failing to make money.
Here are a few programs that I’ve reviewed recently to show you what I’m talking about:
The fact is that making money online takes time, patience and hard work. You can try to take shortcuts or buy done-for-you programs that say they’ll do it all, and you may make some money with them.
But significant, long-term, consistent income is the goal most people are looking for, and you won’t find that by taking shortcuts.
==>==> See how to avoid scams and spot legitimate affiliate marketing programs <==<==
Find Out Why Great Hosting And Training Can Be Key
Great website hosting with all the features you need to run a successful, secure business is essential to becoming profitable.
But if you add in step-by-step training, live webinars, live chat, and a community platform that is accessible 24/7, you will have the very best chance of getting your business profitable as soon as possible.
My #1 recommendation is Wealthy Affiliate, and this is the program where I host all my sites and learned how to make money online.
Their Starter membership is free for life, and you can create a free website and have access to Level 1 of their Online Entrepreneur Certification Training–no credit card required.
I encourage you to check out my full review of Wealthy Affiliate and see if it’s right for you. I’ve been someone who wasted thousands of dollars on programs that turned out to be nothing more than get-rich-quick schemes.
So when I experienced the quality of Wealthy Affiliate’s features firsthand, I had no doubt that it would work.
You won’t hear anyone at WA tell you that you’ll make money fast with affiliate marketing. But they will show you how to create lasting, passive income with Time+Patience+Hard Work!
So if you hear someone ask, “How long does it takes to start making money with affiliate marketing?”, let them know there’s no such thing as fast, easy money on the internet.
But if they are willing to put in the work, their income potential is virtually unlimited!
Have you ever wanted to earn money online with affiliate marketing? Have you tried any program that promised you fast money with little effort? Share your experiences or any questions you may have in the comments below!
Janelle
I'm Janelle, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother of 5 angels (most of the time)! I started BuildYourEarlyRetirement.com as a way to show how anyone can become financially independent and retire early. As I build out this site, I hope you'll comment and share your experiences as well. Good luck in all your endeavors, and may your success start now!
Great article about affiliate marketing you know there seems to be lots of trial and error in affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing is all based on you and what you put into it and in lots of cases takes time not only to gain trust within search engines but also to gain the trust of your customer affiliate marketing is different for everyone and is not for everyone it takes a lot of dedication and hard work and you have to be open to change and stay up To date on what’s trending in your niche it was a huge learning curve for me that I’m Still having difficulty with but I’m in it for the long haul because I’m determined to be one of those huge success stories and I’m gonna be no matter what it takes i enjoyed your article it realy provides helpful information
Jonathon
Having realistic expectations and being in it for the long haul are the first steps to achieving a profitable affiliate marketing business–I wish you every success!
Well I agree with all you have stated here and I would say, it is all about what you make it to be. Making money online can actually take very long and it can take short period if time too depending on the desire to work and to actually do things more smartly than having to stick forever with not doing it at all. Thanks for sharing here
You’re welcome, and thank you for stopping by and taking the time to share your thoughts!
In my own humble opinion, the amount of time it takes to make money with affiliate marketing totally depends on how much time one spends developing the site. The person must be dedicated to working on it every day, writing content adding links in the correct way.
If there is a training platform involved, first they must find the right one and then the person must steadily work through that training and learn all they can from the experts and the community if there is one.
Success comes from action and I can testify that if you don’t take the action (as I have not) you will not find the success you are looking for and it will take a very long time to make money if it actually happens at all.
Wayne
I 100% agree with everything you said, and my favorite part is “Success comes from action”. Affiliate marketing is just like any other business in that you have to put in the time and effort to get the results you want. With the right expectations and commitment, anyone can make money online!
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!
This is a very important review every beginners must read. Many beginners ended up giving up when what they were expecting are not in their reach. I was once a victim. I pull myself back after reading a motivating reviezw some weeks back. This post also add more to it. There is nothing more frustrating than to put in all your efforts on something and the result ended up being awful. Lack of traffic was part of the depression. Also false belief was part of it. Before I started my online business, especially wealthy affiliate, I was told by a friend that I will be making money quickly. But now that I have known that it is not a platform for people with shiny object trait,am in for different mindset. Time is also very important on my side. There are some time, I do think 24 hours in a day was not enough for me to perform a task. lols. This was actually lack of time management which is part of many challenges many are facing in online business world.
The first time I tried to make money online years ago, I let myself fall for a program that swore you could start earning thousands within a month. But after losing a lot of money AND trying another program like it and losing more money, I finally realized that these were basically get-rich-quick schemes.
But there are so many of these schemes out there and so many people promoting them, that it’s no wonder beginners go into affiliate marketing with the idea that they should be making money quickly.
Hopefully my timeline will give them a better understanding of what to expect and motivate them to put in the time and effort. Successful results are definitely worth it!
Hi Jannelle,
Really enjoyed looking over your website, lots of details, blogs about how to make money online thru affiliate marketing.
I really liked the side hustles blog as it has given me some ideas on what else I can do to bring in extra money to speed up my retirement on top of being part of WA and building a site based on my passion…Cats.
I’m going to look onto pet sitting and call centre rep.
The 10 internet success stories were very inspiring and really helps to motivate me to keep taking it one day at a time, work on it every day, do the training, don’t rush, keep learning and growing.
I still have more to read on your site, will work at getting to some more of your blogs when I can.
Take care, all the best wishing much success to you
Sue 🙂
You’ve just made my day–I’m so glad that you’ve found my information helpful!
My first niche at Wealthy Affiliate was in pets as well…dogs. It took awhile to start making money, so whenever I found myself lacking motivation, reading the success stories really kept me going. Having a niche that I was passionate about really helped as well because I enjoyed the process so much.
Good luck with your online business and any side hustle you start–I wish you every success and hope that you’ll visit again soon!
This is the answer that I have been waiting for. Often times I get vague statements. Sure, they would say, “it depends” but didn’t really explained anything at all. What I like most about it is that you included the possible timeline during the whole process of putting up a website and waiting for it to rank. Most would just tell you to give it 4-12 months.
I also appreciate that you gave away what a content reader would expect on sales and commission with the products of affiliate program. Now I am thinking if I would really go for high ticket item or just move to low ticket and earn quick. Now, it’s ok for me to hear things such as , “give it a time” and the dreaded l, “it depends”. Thanks to you, you made everything clear!
I’m so glad I could help! I think it’s a shame that there’s a lot of people who could really make a success with affiliate marketing, but give up way too soon. Most of the time it’s because they didn’t have the right expectations going into it.
When you start a journey knowing how to get there and how long it will take, you’re much more likely to successfully reach your destination!
There’s so many factors that come into play and noway there can be guarantees. But I have heard of people who haven’t made money for a longtime and then there are people who seem to grasp things fast, hit the pavement hard and gets results within 4-6 months. I think the best thing people can do is approach affiliate marketing as if they are launching a business because that is pretty much what they’re doing.
You’re exactly right! No person is going to have the same journey when they start affiliate marketing. There’s only 1 factor that will be the same for everyone, and it’s the fact that everyone has to put in the work to make their business a success.
Thank you for stopping by and sharing your thoughts!
Thank you for this insightful post. This quite helpful for newbie like who expected to just start making money once I joined the affiliate market industry. So many people are lost in designing ways to make money internet. It takes strategy has highlighted in this post, with consistency and drive to start making money on affiliated marketing.
There are so many programs out there that promise you can make huge amounts of money fast online, but they’re just trying to empty your wallet. Those who go into affiliate marketing with the right mindset and understand the time and effort it takes will have the best chance to be successful!
Hi Janelle,
I was fascinated by reading your article. If I did not read this blog I cannot find the details about take to start making money with affiliate marketing. I think this article has helped me so much. In recent times, there are so many shot options available for online earnings. I read every single word you wrote because I am trying to know “How long does it take to start making money with affiliate marketing?”. Actually I’ve been working more than 1 year online but there is not much traffic or sales, so I started to feel depressed. I believe that affiliates marketing is not a magic that can be filled overnight, yes it will take some time to avoid being frustrated, for that you need to choose a good niche. And I think patience is going to be a good way to get good traffic. Thanks again once for awesome post I’m going to bookmark and share with my friends.
I’m so glad you found it helpful! Everyone is different–I know those who have made significant money within their first year and those who took 2 to 3 years to do it. Consistency, patience, and commitment are 3 things that will help you achieve success!
That’s a pretty helpful timeline for people just getting into affiliate marketing. I think most people who want to make money online are turned off by the idea that it takes a year or more to start making any significant income. I’m currently publishing once a week and still seeing slow results. You mentioned that by year 2 when the website has 250-300 posts and can reach 4-figures in income, what if instead of 2 years I’m able to write that many posts in let’s say 6 months? Or is time still the bigger factor?
The more content that you write, the faster you’ll definitely see results. However, time still plays a factor since so many websites get abandoned by the time they’re 6 months old. After that, if there’s still a lot of content being added to your site, your rankings should improve considerably.
Also, keep in mind that quality plays a factor as well as quantity. If your articles are well written and visitors are staying on your site to read them because they’re finding great information, that’s a big plus. But if all of the articles are 500 words, don’t provide a lot of information, and visitors are leaving right away without spending much time on your site, Google will look at it like there’s not much quality there.
Consistent, quality content and a great visitor experience will absolutely get you noticed by the search engines, and they’ll reward you with great rankings!
Great and interesting article! This rather gives a more realistic timeframe to beginners looking to get into affiliate marketing. It is true that you wouldn’t have it all rosy at the beginning but with the appropriate guidance, you’ll be able to set up your site, choose a niche, apply to affiliate programs and monetize your website.
Exactly, in the beginning you’re just building the foundation for your business. For those who stay with it and keep adding quality content to their sites, they are well on their way to being successful in affiliate marketing!
Hello Janelle,
I read your article and thought I would share some of my experiences as well.
I was not aware that product reviews on your site, you’ll get faster ranking. If i had have know that I would have started writing them a lot earlier than I did but it took me several months of writing to really define my niche well enough.
Here is a few extra steps that I also fit in around the 12 month mark.
SEO – understanding SEO was a huge learning curve and also something I wish I had have known around earlier.
SALES FUNNELS – this is really when you start getting intelligent and start planning ahead. Sales funnels is the path that customers take from entry to exit on your site. If you can understand these early one you will be ahead of the pack.