5 Reasons to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

By: David Aston     Topics: Making Money Online

Everyone knows that starting a new online business nowadays is tough. Raising the initial capital, working on product development and hiring the right team can seem like an impossible pipe dream to some people.

If you want to start working for yourself, but haven’t got the resources to start big, then affiliate marketing could be the right avenue for you.

Take a look below at my 5 reasons for starting an affiliate marketing business over the next year.

5 Reasons to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

#1. Low Startup Costs

Unlike other startups, you don’t need to spend 6 months raising a large capital investment from investors or crowdsourcing sites such as Seedrs.com, or even investing in stock before your business can function.

In fact, in affiliate marketing, you only need to spend $3/month on hosting plus $7 for a domain in order to launch a website (sometimes you don’t even need a website!).

Check out our full list of startup resources.

From then on, your only true costs are content (which you should be able to write yourself), choosing a nice CMS and website design (you can use wordpress, which is free) and then writing a blog to help generate traffic and sales to your site.

Even once you start earning an income with your site, your overheads will still remain low. You don’t need to hire an expensive office to meet clients in, you don’t need to hire anyone to deal with customer support (like you would in an ecommerce venture) and you don’t have live with costs such as chargebacks and credit card fraud, and if you use accounting software such as Quickbooks.com then you don’t have to pay for an accountant either.

#2. Earn An Income Relatively Quickly

WebMakeMoney.com is full of entrepreneurs’ stories of how they made their money. However, in a lot of cases people spent 6 months to a year before they started making a profit and re-investing in their business.

With affiliate marketing, you can literally start making money almost straight away.

If you work in niches such as igaming for instance, then you can earn $100-$500 for every customer you refer to a casino. You only need to refer a few customers every month to make $1,000. This is how I started my own affiliate marketing business around studying at college. I then kept re-investing and doubling my income to the point where I was making enough money to pursue it full time as a career. It really can scale quickly once you start to see your first sales.

Remember, you don’t need to provide any ongoing support or services to your referred customers. Once you’ve referred them, the operator/merchant will take care of the customer loyalty and upsell marketing campaigns.

You also have the freedom to choose and promote different operators in a given market. If you’re operating in a competitive market where operators are hungry for a listing on your website then you can even start to charge fixed-fee listings or distribute your own media pack. This also helps to automate the process of generating an income on your site.

#3. You Can Make Millions From Affiliate Marketing

One of the misconceptions of affiliate marketing is that it’s only for small businesses. However, there are plenty of cases where affiliates have gone on to build multi-million pound brands and ventures.

Mark Pearson launched MyVoucherCodes.co.uk in 2006 for example and sold it last month for £60 million. Mark, aged 27 at the time, set up the website linking to deals for different vendors. It was all set up as an affiliate marketing operation that quickly scaled into something incredibly successful.

There are many other cases of affiliates scaling their operations into million pound ventures such as Money.co.uk, OddsChecker.com, LatestCasinoBonuses.com (which recently acquired another site for $2.5 million) and the newer holiday booking sites such as Hotels.com and Booking.com.

One of the things that most of these sites have in common is that they jumped into an emerging niche early and focused on maximizing customer value to provide the best services possible. This is what helped establish themselves as industry leading brands that created more growth.

One of the lessons to be learned here is to launch an affiliate marketing business in a high growth industry or one where you can add your own unique value to your visitors. This is what will help you scale your site quicker and reach that dream of retiring at 21.

#4. It’s Easy To Scale An Affiliate Marketing Business

Many successful affiliate marketers have discovered that scaling their businesses into white label, drop shipping or whole sale operations was not a terribly difficult task.

An increasingly common thing I’m seeing successful affiliates do nowadays to scale there operations is to launch their own white label operation or skin.

Launching a white label is incredibly easy to do. In niches such as Forex, iGaming, Finance, Insurance and App development for example, you can launch your own white label brand in less than 2 weeks.

Use AwesomeWeb if you need a designer or developer who could’ve started yesterday.

Let’s use bingo for an example; You can launch your own white-label bingo site via the Live Bingo Network skin, which automatically includes a license to meet the necessary UK bingo regulations. Therefore, it’s almost exactly the same as being an affiliate except that you now have a fully functioning website to market.

The advantages of starting your own white label is that you can increase your conversions by reducing traffic leakage as well as recruiting other affiliates to promote your brand on your behalf.

It also is very easy to scale an affiliate marketing site in eCommerce by venturing into drop shipping or wholesale.

#5. Many Monetization Sources

Affiliate marketing lends itself really well to different marketing channels and sources of customer acquisition.

For example, at RightCasino we’ve managed to monetize traffic through industry and entertainment news, Twitter, PPC (we’ve just translated our site into foreign languages to take advantage of cheaper sources of traffic in other countries), email marketing and others.

Some brands even let you advertise your affiliates links directly on media and PPC networks such as Facebook. This means you don’t even need your own website to start affiliate marketing.

If you enjoyed this post, definitely check out the beginners guide to affiliate marketing.