As much as we might wish to know how to earn money from home without any investment it is close to that with affiliate marketing. For one you can start with Web 2.0 sites. Blogger.com can be a good place to start, you will start straight away with no investment. However, we strongly discourage that, unless you are really tight with cash.
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money from home. You will need a bit of money to start an affiliate marketing business and below is a breakdown of the budget.
Does It Cost Money To Do Affiliate Marketing
The kind of money you need is in the region of buying a computer if you don’t have one, paying for internet, buying hosting and some domain names for your affiliate websites. As you can see this is not huge investment!
Depending on which part of the world you are, in regard to acquiring a computer and paying for internet, it might start off a bit heavy on the pocket. But this is the kind of heaviness we are talking about – a computer and internet subscription.
Affiliate Marketing Set Up Costs
At the basic level you will need money for internet subscription, hosting fees and domain names and a laptop if you do not have one already. So an initial budget of $500 and a monthly budget of around $70 if you choose to pay hosting and internet subscription monthly. In some cases there are annual subscriptions, however, below are the basic affiliate marketing set up costs!
Internet Cost
Depending on where you live in the world you will need an internet subscription and that can cost as much as $50 per month. And is most cases that can be adequate bandwidth to work with.
Computer Cost
A computer might cost between $150 to $300, you do not need anything fancy…
Check here from Amazon for ideas. The cheapest laptop at the time of this writing is Dell Latitude D830 15.4″ Laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz, 120GB Hard Drive, 2048Mb RAM, DVDRW Drive, XP Profesional). Or the runner up Acer Chromebook CB3-131-C3SZ 11.6-Inch Laptop (Intel Celeron N2840 Dual-Core Processor,2 GB RAM,16 GB Solid State Drive,Chrome) which has over 1561 reviews with an overall of 82% positive feedback.
This is just to give an idea of how much a laptop computer would cost. If you have it already, you do not have to worry about that.
Hosting Cost
Hosting is necessary for your business. Back in the day you could start with Web 2.0 sites like Blogger.com, Weebly.com, WordPress.com, etc. But gone are those days, besides they are risky.
You could lose your business out of nowhere, like what happened with Squidoo lenses.
When you buy hosting, we advise that you buy a Reseller Package or a VPS Hosting Package instead of Shared Hosting. This is because with our affiliate marketing plan you might need a Reseller/VPS Hosting account.
The way our affiliate marketing plan works, you might end up selling some of your websites for lump sum of money and a Reseller/VPS Hosting account makes it easier and seamless.
A Shared Hosting Account is also fine especially if finances are an issue. Apart from the limitation you might have when selling some of your websites it is a conservative choice.
Domain Name Cost
A domain name can cost anything from $0.48, when on promotion with Namecheap.com, or just over $10.00 for a period of a a year, that is you pay $10.00 and you are covered for the whole year.
And a lot can happen in those 12 months. With our affiliate marketing strategy guide, it is possible to make your first sale within 3 months, however results vary.
With affiliate marketing it is normally advisable to have several websites in different niches. Average commission for affiliate programs is around 4% for most physical products. This means for every $100 product you sell you make $4.00 and if your goal aspirations are to make at least $500 a week, that means your website must make 120 sales a week. And that could be hard with 1 website and much easier with 10 or so equally good niche websites targeting profitable niches with low competition.
SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate is a necessity these days and some hosting companies enforce it. For every website or domain name, they force you to have an SSL certificate.
These add some figures to your overall budget, but Namecheap.com offers them at $1.99 as promotion and renewable at around $10.00 every year. However, this is a promotion and not sure when it will end.
As a point of advice, do not ignore installing an SSL certificate on your domain thinking it is meant for websites that require visitor or something. These days when you search on Google for any keywords, the websites that come up are predominantly “https”.
The standard price of an SSL certificate starts at $7.95 at Namecheap.com
How Much Does Affiliate Marketing Make?
When you have good affiliate websites, you can make salary-replacing income from affiliate marketing. You can also earn as much as your whole year’s salary in one month – 12x your salary, once!.
You can set the figure and work towards it. You can say you want to make $500 a week which is very possible and a lot of successful affiliates are achieving that, what is important is the strategy.
A strategy one can have is have several websites on different niches. On average many affiliate programs offer a 4% commission and it can be a challenge to achieve $500 a week with one website.
So in conclusion a budget of $500 initially and $70 monthly can be enough to start your affiliate marketing business. However, if you need to be learning new things, like how to build your own affiliate website, etc. obviously you need more to buy courses and all. But before you go exhausting your budget, stick around a bit. There could be ways around that will help you spend way less and we would like to share those with you!
Once you are all setup, you need skills to win at affiliate marketing. The good thing with this business model is you can learn as you go along. Do not make the mistake of wanting to go for great niche ideas, start small to learn the basics first. Start with good affiliate websites grounded on good setup, good niche selection, top selling products, good review articles for those products and good white SEO!