Do you want to know how to make money with affiliate marketing in 2025? Then this is the article to read from start to finish.
In this post, you will learn:
And because this guide is for 2025, you’ll also learn how to use the recent advances in artificial intelligence to help you do some of the tasks that may be considered difficult for your level. Or how you can use AI as an assistant in your affiliate marketing business every day.
My name is Jay Gumbs and I’ve been doing affiliate marketing full time since 2009. If you’re just starting out and want to know how to do affiliate marketing, I can help you to get started.
This post may contain affiliate links. ThriversHub earns commissions at no extra cost to you when purchases are made through links on this page. For more info, visit the disclosure page.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
The core idea behind affiliate marketing is that you can earn money by promoting products sold by a company and earn commissions whenever a shopper buys that product based on your recommendation.
There are usually three parties involved:
- You (the affiliate) – You’re the middle man between the shopper and the product sellers. You provide value in the form of reviews and recommendations usually to satisfy shopper queries.
- The product seller – This could be a company or anyone who is selling a product that solves a problem or meets a need. These product sellers have an affiliate program where they will give you special links to sell their products and pay you commissions when you make a sale.
- The shopper – This is anyone who is actively looking for a product or service. If they decide to trust your recommendation and make a purchase then the money they pay is split between you and the product seller.
It’s important to not look at affiliate marketing as a money-making scheme but as a way of being helpful to people who need to make a buying decision at some point in their search.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
For affiliate marketing to work, you’ll have to create some type of content that people will find that is relevant to product that you’re promoting. Then you’ll need to place the link given to you by the company in your content so that the shopper can find it.
When the shopper buys the product, this is where you’ve successfully earned commissions from affiliate marketing.
The following graphic breaks down the process visually so you can see how affiliate marketing works.
Affiliate Marketing Examples
So what does affiliate marketing look like?
Maybe you’ve searched for something before and came across affiliate marketing but didn’t even know people were making money from the article you read.
In this section, I’ll show you a few examples of affiliate marketing in action.
Example #1: Good Housekeeping Online Magazine
In this example, I did a search for “best espresso machines” and clicked through the Google results to this site. Good Housekeeping is a magazine with an online website and they do reviews of various household products.
In the above screenshot, you can see that they’ve listed some of the best espresso machines as part of an article on the “best espresso machines”. This list has links to Amazon where readers can click to go buy the espresso machines listed.
These links are tagged with Good Housekeeping’s Amazon id to make sure they get credit in the event of any sales. They’ll earn a commission whenever someone reads their article, clicks on a link and goes to Amazon to purchase an espresso machine.
Example #2: Urban Gardening YouTube Channel
You can also do affiliate marketing on YouTube and this channel by Urban Gardening is a great example.
The brand, which has over 1.6 million subscribers, creates YouTube videos showing people how to grow various plants at home. This is a very helpful channel and if you take a look in the video description, you’ll see where they recommend a lot of products shown in their videos.
When someone opens the video description and clicks on a link to buy hand pruners or any other recommended product, they’ll be taken to Amazon where they can buy the product. If they do buy the product, the creators of Urban Gardening gets credited with a sale and will get a commission from the sale.
You’ll notice that both examples are for affiliates working with Amazon but there are literally hundreds of thousands of other companies that you can work with as an affiliate called affiliate programs.
5 Great Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
There are a lot of reasons why people get into affiliate marketing and why it’s an easy business to start even for people with very little money.
Here are 5 reasons why affiliate marketing is a great business to start in 2025.
1. Low cost
Unlike starting a real-world business, affiliate marketing is very low-cost. You do not need a lot of money to get started. You can even start with no money if you’re strapped for cash.
If you use YouTube, you’ll need just a camera or smartphone, which you probably already have and not much else.
Starting a website requires a domain name and web hosting which together may run you less than $50 for the first month. This is significantly lower than most businesses that need to invest in stock, rent space and get permits just to get started.
There’s not much to risk when starting affiliate marketing. If you start a website and decide on another direction, you’re out the cost of a domain and web hosting which is not a lot compared to other traditional startups.
2. Become your own boss
When you start an affiliate marketing business, you get to make all the decisions. You’re your own boss.
This is one of the best benefits of affiliate marketing because you get to run your business on your terms. For this same reason, it can also be a down-side depending on how motivated you are to get things done.
But let’s keep on the positive side here. Being your own boss is pretty cool since you get to work your own hours, take time off when you need to and spend more time with your family.
3. Work from anywhere
Since the only requirements to start an affiliate marketing business is to have a computer and an internet connection, you can work from anywhere in the world.
You can work from home or from a cafe. Or you can do affiliate marketing while traveling. Unlike traditional businesses, there is nothing to tie you to any specific location. Your office can be a beach in the tropics or an airport lounge.
4. Make money while you sleep
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn passive income. Once you create the content, you can earn money while you sleep as your website or videos are accessible 24 hours a day to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
And if you choose to promote the right type of affiliate programs, you can make recurring commissions for years even if you never make another sale or create another piece of content.
5. No special education needed
No need for a masters or a bachelor’s degree. Affiliate marketing does not require any formal education or special qualifications.
All you need to know is how to create content for your website which involves writing. Currently, you can use AI content writing tools to help you do most of the work.
If you don’t know how to write or prefer a method that doesn’t involve a lot of writing then you can do simple YouTube videos as your main affiliate marketing strategy.
One thing you’ll need to learn though, is how to do affiliate marketing using the strategy that you choose. Being proficient will come with experience doing the same tasks over and over but taking a structured affiliate marketing course can help.
There are lots of free and paid courses that do a great job of giving you a detailed outline for an affiliate marketing strategy you can adopt for your business.
There are lots of other benefits to doing affiliate marketing and you will start recognizing them as you become more involved in the business. For now, the 5 mentioned above are the most common reasons why many people are getting into affiliate marketing on both a part-time and full-time basis.
How Much Can You Earn From Affiliate Marketing?
With affiliate marketing, there is no ceiling on what you can earn. There are super-affiliates who are earning over $50,000 per month!
According to AuthorityHacker.com, the average affiliate marketer earns $8038 per month. This is taking into consideration the vast amount of beginner affiliates who earn very little and the small percentage of super-affiliates earning over $50K monthly.
Affiliates with more than 3 years experience earn almost 10 times more than affiliates who are just starting to make money with affiliate marketing. This is why you should stick with your efforts because more earning comes with experience.
There is definitely a lot of potential to earn with affiliate marketing. Whether you just want to earn some extra money to supplement another income source or you want to make $1 million dollars a year, it can happen but it’s entirely up to you and how much effort you put in.
How To Get Started with Affiliate Marketing
Now that you have an understanding of what affiliate marketing is, how it works, the benefits and the earning potential, it’s time to get started.
I’m going to walk you through the steps. There are different ways in which you can go about doing affiliate marketing but no matter which way you choose, the steps outlined below do not change.
Here are the steps you need to follow in order to get started with affiliate marketing.
Step 1: Pick a niche market
The very first step in affiliate marketing is to choose a niche market. This is usually a specific topic that you’re going to talk about.
Choosing a specific topic to talk about is better than having a broad approach because you can focus on a group of people with a common interest instead of trying to reach everyone.
In fact, a niche isn’t defined as a topic, interest, product or keyword. To make it easy to understand, I usually tell people to say what group of people they want to help.
- people who want to learn how to take drone photographs
- women who want to lose weight on the keto diet
- engaged couples who want to build a wedding website
- people who want to learn how to create bead art
- people with who want to grow strawberries at home
It is also important that you choose something that you love doing or have a genuine interest in learning. This is because it will be much easier for you to create content around your topic. In affiliate marketing, you have to always be creating new and interesting content for your audience if you want to make consistent sales.
Choosing something that you’re not interested in will only cause you to give up in a few months when you realize that you don’t want to create content around the topic.
Finding your niche will allow you to come up with a good business name and domain and you’ll have content ideas that you’ll want to create.
Here are some questions to consider when trying to find a niche.
- What am I really good at?
- What can I talk about all day if I was paid to do so?
- What do I love doing and can do all day if I had the chance?
- What am I really interested in learning?
Step 2: Choose a platform
After you’ve decided on a niche, the next step is to choose a platform where you can create content to reach your audience.
It is recommended that you choose a website or blog as the platform where you will create your affiliate marketing content. The biggest reason for this is because you’re creating on a platform that you own so you have more control and can create content on your terms.
Other platforms include:
- YouTube – for video content
- Social Media – (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook etc.)
- Podcasts – for audio content
Your choice of platform can also depend on your. Some niches are more visual than others. For example, if you were teaching someone how to play pool, YouTube videos would be a better choice than website articles.
This is why finding a niche is the first step before choosing your platform.
Creating a website requires that you register a domain name (your website address or .com) and also getting web hosting. Web hosting is a server where you website files are stored and served when someone finds one of your website pages.
You can get a .com domain name for about $12/year or for way less with a discount. Web hosting can start as low as $1 for the first month depending on who you choose to host your website.
Step 3: Create lots of great content
Once you’ve had your content platform set up, you’ll need to create lots of great content to attract visitors and make sales.
Your content will need to be very good since there are other affiliates trying to get the attention from the same people in your niche.
One thing your content doesn’t have to be though is perfect. You just need to start and refine your content as you progress. Whether you’re writing articles or creating videos, you just need to focus on what your reader or viewer wants based on the keyword you’re targeting, and create helpful content.
The content creation process starts with keyword research to find keyword topics that has less competition so that you’re able to show up on the first page of Google when someone searches for that keyword.
Step 4: Find affiliate programs
Next comes the fun part of finding affiliate programs to join. This is the connection that makes you money from your content creation efforts.
Affiliate programs are free to join and while some just let you sign up and get a link to place on your website, others require approval. They’ll want to see your website and ask how you plan to promote their product.
Some affiliate programs are part of an affiliate network, a site where you can browse through hundred, sometimes thousands of different programs. Affiliate networks are great because you can work with a number of different brands and get one consolidated payment at the end of the pay period.
There are different types of affiliate programs too.
- CPA (lead) – you don’t need to make a sale. The brand will pay you a flat commission to get an email address or for someone to simply enter their credit card info for a free trial.
- One-time sale – you get paid a percentage or dollar amount when someone purchases a product through your link.
- Recurring commission – In the case of subscriptions or memberships where someone pays every month or annually, you can get paid every time the customer is billed.
Some affiliate programs even pay bonuses and incentives when you make a certain amount of sales to encourage affiliates to take action.
Know what your niche audience wants and join affiliate programs that sell those products.
Many of the best affiliate programs will give you links and banners to place on your website and even pre-written emails you can send to your list of email subscribers.
Step 5: Promote and get traffic
Your job isn’t finished after you’ve written the best 2000-word post you’ve ever written and inserted your affiliate links. You still need to get that awesome piece of content in front of your niche audience.
This means promoting your content to get all the traffic you can get. Here are some of the most common strategies.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When creating each individual piece of content for your website, it is important to write with a specific keyword in mind and optimize your post so that it shows up on the first page of the search engine results page.
Most content creators typically optimize for Google search since Google is the most used search engine today.
SEO is one of the most common ways to get traffic because it is free, organic and very targeted.
Although SEO can be very technical, the most basic things to do to optimize your content are as follows.
- Put your target keyword in the title of the post
- Include your target keyword in the content a few times
- Add your target keyword to your post URL
- Add links to authoritative pages that add value to your content
- Link to your post from other pages on your website
- Ensure that your website pages load fast (under a second in most cases)
- Get links from external sources whenever possible
- Update your posts to reflect new and up-to-date information
YouTube is also considered a search engine and not a social media website. If you’re doing videos then there are SEO techniques for video that will ensure you get the best placement for YouTube searches.
Paid Traffic
Affiliates can also pay for traffic. You can buy ads in a number of different places including popular media sites, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and anywhere that sells ad space.
The good thing about paid traffic is that as soon as you turn on the ad, you’ll get traffic based on the criteria you set up. This could be bidding on specific keywords (in the case of Google PPC) or reaching certain demographics or persons with a common interest (in the case of Facebook and Instagram ads).
But this method costs money and the traffic automatically stops when you turn the ad off or the ad budget is exhausted. Paying for traffic eats into your profits and may not be a good long term strategy for most affiliates.
Email Marketing
One of the most secure traffic methods you can use is email marketing. You offer something of value to your visitor in exchange for their email address and you can send emails to them using an email automation service whenever you want.
You can essentially market to a loyal reader for years, getting repeated sales whenever you send out a promotional email. You still need to offer value though, and maintain a good balance of helpful and promotional emails to keep your readers subscribed.
Social Media Posting
Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram can be very good sources of traffic. Your audience is more than likely already on these websites engaging with content that they like. All you need to do is to create valuable content on these websites and get them to go to your website.
If you have an email signup form on your website, then you can turn these random folks into loyal subscribers.
Savvy marketers repurpose their content so they can use it on other platforms. I could easily repurpose this 4000+ word article and make several videos about this topic, tweet these 6 steps as a series on X, or make a graphic carousel post for Instagram.
Step 6: Master different skills
One good side-effect of learning affiliate marketing is that you’ll learn some other useful skills along the way.
After years of doing the different tasks of content creation and managing your website, you’ll notice that you’re good at a few things that you learned along the way.
These new-found skills may include:
- writing and editing – you get better at writing content for the web
- research – from doing keyword research to topic research for your content, you’ll feel like you can find anything
- video editing – if you’re doing YouTube videos then this skill will naturally improve
- graphic design – whether you’re creating the featured image for your blog article or Pinterest pins, your design skills will get better.
You will learn how to use AI tools to help you become more efficient as an affiliate marketer in 2024. The longer you keep doing affiliate marketing, the better you’re going to get a it.
Affiliate Marketing Tools You’ll Need
To help you run your affiliate marketing business more efficiently, you’ll need some tools.
The ones listed below aren’t an exhaustive list and there are alternatives to every one listed. These are the ones that I use and I also recommend them to you. Most of them are free and some are paid with free versions.
12 Tips For Affiliate Marketing Success
Whether you succeed or you fail with affiliate marketing is totally up to you. You can have the right strategy and all the best tools, but if you don’t apply consistent effort and best practices then those things wouldn’t matter.
Based on years of experience, here are 12 tips you can use to make sure that you achieve success with affiliate marketing.
FAQ About Affiliate Marketing
In this section, I answer some frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing. You might even have some of these questions.
Affiliate marketing does not require a lot of money to get started and you could start a website or blog for under $50.
If you have no money, you can choose YouTube as your platform since all you really need is a smartphone and the ability to create videos around a topic that is interesting and helpful to people.
Affiliate programs are free to join and you can use your YouTube video description to post your links.
You do not need to attend any special classes or get someone to teach you affiliate marketing. Most people learn affiliate marketing by following structured courses on the internet. There are free and paid courses available that will teach you affiliate marketing step by step.
It helps if you belong to a community where you can learn socially and get guidance and answers to your questions as well as keep up with advances and changes in the affiliate marketing landscape.
There is no ceiling on how much you can earn with affiliate marketing. $100/day can be 4 sales at $25 commissions or 1 sale of a product that pays $100 commission per sale. Depending on how much traffic you get and how your content converts, you could easily make way more than $100/day.
