Are you considering starting an affiliate marketing business and wondering about the costs of doing business? I will show you two scenarios: the first costs forty-nine dollars a month, and the other less than a hundred dollars a year. The first option is a training platform; the other is built through self-study.
Affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, is promoting other people’s or businesses’ products through links in content YOU create and collecting a commission when your audience buys that product.
I’ll use a blog about ping-pong balls as an example. You write about ping-pong balls, put a link in your article, send someone to Amazon to buy them, and they buy the ping-pong balls. You collect a commission on the sale.
It’s a simple business model in which you can make a lot of money, and anyone can do it. But not everyone does do it for the same reason I’m not an astronaut. I don’t want to be an astronaut. Not everyone wants to do affiliate marketing. I’m glad we cleared that up.
Let’s look at the cost-effectiveness of a training platform.
Training platforms like Wealthy Affiliate and a few others offer all the tools necessary to build a fully scalable affiliate marketing business under one roof. W.A. costs 49/month. What do you get for forty-nine dollars a month?
- Website Hosting. A home for your website.
- A Domain Name. The name of your website. Mine is Yourturnmarketing.com.
- Niche Training: Learn how to choose your passion and narrow it down to target people to make the most sales.
- WordPress Training. WordPress is one of the top content management systems in the world, making it easy for you to create a website in minutes. There is no need to learn coding.
- SEO Training. Search Engine Optimization shows you how to get Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., to index and rank your content.
- Compliance and Security. A good platform handles site security and web compliance issues, so you don’t have to figure these out yourself.
- Intangibles. Community engagement and sharing make it simple to get answers quickly without waiting for lengthy email response times.
The list goes on.
Is investing in a training platform worth it? If you are serious about affiliate marketing as an income source. A good training platform like Wealthy Affiliate shortens your learning curve and hastens success compared to figuring it out alone.
Balancing your budget while learning may lead you away from the subscription approach. If that’s your jam and you want to start as close to free as possible, we’ll move to the second scenario, DIY affiliate marketing. Let’s go.
Budget-Friendly Approaches to Affiliate Marketing
Starting affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget is very doable. Check out the hosting prices on Comparing Web Hosting. You can quickly be up and running with a site for as little as a dollar ninety-nine a month. Some of these hosts offer WordPress, as described above.
Evaluating the best hosting sites for affordability and reliability is essential. You want to check ‘Uptime’ percentages, customer reviews, and what you get for your money. Do you get a domain name, or will that be an additional cost? Does the domain name come with an SSL certificate?
An SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer certificate) is a digital certificate that authenticates the identity of a website and encrypts information sent to the server using SSL technology. It serves two primary purposes:
- Authentication: An SSL certificate verifies a website’s identity, ensuring visitors are not interacting with a fraudulent site pretending to be a legitimate one.
- Encryption: SSL certificates encrypt data transmitted between the user’s web browser and the web server, preventing interception and tampering by third parties.
In essence, SSL certificates help establish trust and security on the internet by ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data exchanged between users and websites.
Some dependable domain name services include GoDaddy, and Namecheap. There are many others, but I have found both to be reliable.
If you find hosting that doesn’t offer content management, WordPress.org is all you need.
Self-study is an alternative to a training platform. Click on these links to access free resources and communities. No worries–they’re free.
The bottom line is that the cost of DIY affiliate marketing is meager. For less than $100/year, you should be able to get what you need. The only downside is that you must figure out a lot of the training independently. That’s where a program like Wealthy Affiliate has an advantage.
Click on this link, Wealthy Affiliate, for a free look at it. You will have to leave your name and email as all starter members do, but you don’t get a forty-nine-dollar subscription unless you want to. You can play with the platform to see what it’s about, and who knows, maybe you’ll like it.
Strategies for Effective and Economical Affiliate Marketing
Everyone’s goal when taking the affiliate marketing plunge is to maximize returns with the right strategy. I think a training platform is the way to go because it offers a faster return on investment (ROI).
The fact is, however, that the best strategy is the one that feels right to YOU. Determining the best training sites without breaking the bank depends on the size of your bank, right?
Once you get going in affiliate marketing, remember to be willing to adapt to market changes, learn constantly, and have a ton of fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right.
Feel free to ask any questions you have below. Take care.
Dave
Yourturnmarketing.com