How to Make a Passive Monthly Income from Affiliate Marketing

Imagine continuously earning from something that you set up a year ago. In most forms of affiliate marketing, this is definitely within reach! However, you’re probably wondering whether the income generated from affiliate marketing is worth it. More specifically, you’d like to know how much affiliate marketing income per month you could realistically generate.

If you’re considering trying to earn a solid affiliate marketing income per month, keep reading. This article will cover all the basics. By the end of this blog post, you’ll have foundational knowledge in affiliate marketing and will know how to transform it into a passive income stream.

Learning How Affiliate Marketing Works: The First Step to Achieving Average Affiliate Marketing Income

Before you can use affiliate marketing to generate a passive income stream, you must first intimately learn about the world that you want to get into. Everything discussed in the following subsections can affect your eventual affiliate marketing income per month. We will discuss the following:

How affiliate marketing works;
How the various players are connected;
Which niches can generate the highest affiliate marketing income per month.

All these points should point you in the right direction. You’ll get a solid understanding of how the entire ecosystem works and will be able to identify a good starting point on your way toward profitability.

The Key Players in the World of Affiliate Marketing

Your potential affiliate marketing income per month is directly dependent on three key players.

Affiliates: The affiliate (that’s you!) has control over which platforms are used and how to advertise. Every decision you make will have an impact on your affiliate marketing income per month.
Merchants: Merchants are the creators of the product and are in charge of converting leads into sales. The price they sell the product for and their established commission payment will affect your earnings.
Affiliate networks: A network allows you to participate in various commission programs under one platform. Your affiliate marketing income per month may be expanded or limited by the merchants they support.

Basic Principles of Affiliate Marketing Income

Now that we’ve covered the key players, let’s move onto the basic principles of affiliate marketing. How do you calculate your affiliate marketing income per month? All of these factors must be present in order for you to earn with affiliate marketing:

Affiliate partnership: This means that there’s a company that produces a product while a different entity (that’s you!) sells it.
Tracking and attribution: Since everything’s digital, there must be a way for you to track your eventual commissions. An affiliate link is assigned so that your leads will be credited to you.
Commission structure: The most common commission structure is getting paid for the sales generated through your link. However, you may also be paid for every lead or every click.

Which Niches Have the Highest Affiliate Marketing Average Monthly Income?

There’s no requirement to publish affiliate earnings, so the best estimate that we can get is based on the size of the industry. For example, it’s safe to say that the average affiliate marketing income per month in SaaS is bigger than the furniture industry. So, here are the most lucrative niches today:

SaaS
Finance
Travel
Adult
Dating
Technology
Artificial Intelligence
Gaming

However, remember that it is possible to be successful and earn a significant affiliate marketing income, no matter what niche you’re in. If your expertise and interests lie in something other than what’s mentioned here, know that there are so many factors that can affect how much you make.

How Do Marketers Get Their Affiliate Marketing Income per Month?

The commission structure dictates when you get paid. The more actions (like per lead AND per sale) that are compensated, the higher your average income from affiliate marketing can be. But where are links transformed into money? You may use these platforms to earn from promoting products or services:

Websites: This is the most common. The links may be woven into the content or be directly sold through a sales page.
Social media platforms: You can share your link with your followers to encourage them to purchase, thus increasing your affiliate marketing income per month.
Emails: If you have an email list, you can sell to them for free!

For a more comprehensive take on the money-making side of affiliate marketing, see our post about how to start affiliate marketing.

Exploring Affiliate Marketing Income Potential: How Much Do Affiliate Marketers Make?

A lot of aspiring potential marketers ask this question. But the answer is a little more nuanced than what you might think. Affiliate marketing income per month can vary widely, so, before we talk numbers, let’s first understand the factors that can affect affiliate marketing income per month. By doing so, we hope that you understand that there are many factors that go on behind the scenes; it’s not about dropping a ballpark figure.

Factors Influencing Affiliate Marketing Income per Month

These factors can determine the profitability of your efforts as an affiliate marketer:

Niche: The popularity of the niche with the audience and the existing supply of reputable brands affects your potential affiliate marketing income per month.
Content quality: Engaging and high-authority content is more likely to convert. Traffic source: A traffic source that’s a good match for the promoted product generates more leads than non-targeted traffic.
Affiliate program: The terms of the program largely affects your affiliate marketing income per month, including the commission rate structure and cookie duration. If you want more guidance on selecting the right affiliate program, read our blog post where we compiled the best AI affiliate programs for you!

Average Income Ranges for Affiliate Marketers

So, what is the average income for affiliate marketing? You’ve seen how many factors can drive the number up or down, making it impossible to settle on a figure. Authority Hacker placed the average at $8,038, but affiliate marketing income per month is too affected by outliers for that figure to be even remotely accurate. According to Influencer, an approximation starts at $0 to $1,000 monthly for beginners. Intermediate and advanced affiliate marketing income per month is $1,000 to $10,000 and $10,000 to $100,000, respectively. They also claimed that 80% of marketers are earning between $0 to $80,000 a month.

Strategies to Maximize Affiliate Marketing Income per Month

Depending on what your expected outcome from this passive income stream may be, the numbers discussed above may either be encouraging or discouraging to you. But even the most realistic affiliate marketing average income per month is just that — an approximation. Even though there are factors that you have no control over, there are even more where what you do will matter. So, why don’t we focus on things that you can do to impact your affiliate marketing income per month? Keep reading to see how you can level up your earnings with easy-to-implement strategies.

Choose the Right Affiliate Programs

Since they’re in charge of your payout, the programs that you choose can determine your affiliate marketing income per month. So, be sure to consider these factors when selecting your affiliate program:

Offer relevance: What you’re going to sell should be something your target market is interested in.
Commission rates: The higher the commision rate, the better!
Cookie duration: It’s a plus if the cookie duration is long. However, look into the scenario for who earns if a user clicks someone else’s affiliate link after yours. This may affect your affiliate marketing income per month.
Reputation: Other affiliates’ experience with the platform can help you predict how it will go if you sign up with the platform.
Resources: Especially if you’re just starting out, resources can help boost your ability to earn a decent affiliate marketing income per month.

Implement Optimization Tips for Affiliate Campaigns

Even if you’re already receiving good payouts, you shouldn’t stop optimizing your campaign. A few tweaks here and there can further improve your affiliate marketing income per month. So, try these out:

Monitor trends to keep your ad fresh and relevant;
Make sure your site loads quickly to reduce bounce rates;
Optimize your ad and all other campaign elements for mobile users;
Segment your audience and create different ads and content;
Cloak affiliate links if allowed so they don’t look spammy.

Just a slight change can have a huge impact on your affiliate marketing income per month! So, always look for where there is room for improvement. It may just be what you need to extract more out of your campaign.

Build a Strong Online Presence

Your potential affiliate marketing income per month is built on trust. Would you trust the recommendations of someone you’ve never heard of? Probably not! That’s why it’s important to build a strong online presence. Here’s how it can improve your affiliate marketing income per month:

Improved search rankings: This makes it easier for people to find you, giving them a chance to click your affiliate link.
Engaged audience: With more digital assets, there will be more that your audience can engage with. See your affiliate marketing income per month increase with followers who are always ready to buy!
Open monetization opportunities: If you build your brand, you can attract sponsorships to augment your affiliate income.

Tools and Resources for Affiliates Who Want to Increase Their Affiliate Marketing Income per Month

You have the strategies, but that shouldn’t be the end of it. You still have to implement them before you see them pay off. The final piece of the puzzle of improving your affiliate marketing income per month is accessing the tools and resources that can help optimize your results. Through your journey in affiliate marketing, remember that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You also don’t have to do everything manually. Take advantage of all kinds of resources to more efficiently increase your affiliate marketing income per month. In the following subsections, we’ll share the tools and resources that you need to help you succeed as an affiliate marketer.

Essential Tools for Tracking and Analytics

Monitoring and analysis are both important in ensuring that you’re getting the most out of your affiliate marketing efforts. By empowering you to make information-based decisions, you’ll be able to raise your affiliate marketing income per month. We highly recommend AI tools for affiliate marketing because they help automate processes. They work like traditional tools, but because they’re AI-powered, they can also alleviate some of your decision-making burdens. There are so many to choose from, but let us tell you about our favorites.

TubeBuddy

Video content is more engaging, making it a great medium for convincing your audience to purchase. It can also further elevate trust since you’ll be able to demonstrate how the product works. If you get the majority of your affiliate marketing income per month through YouTube, you’ll love TubeBuddy. Its built-in tools, such as the thumbnail analyzer, keyword explorer and split testing, all help you earn that click to your video. Once they see your awesome content and recommendations, your affiliate marketing income per month will increase! There are more than 50 tools that you can get with your subscription. Plus, it’s available as an extension on Google Chrome.

Frase.io

Marketers who rely on blogs and the traffic they generate to get a good affiliate marketing income per month will love Frase.io. With SERP analysis, outline builder and content optimization, you can create text content destined to be at the top of the search results. It was recently updated with AI writing capabilities as well, which helps free up more of your time so you can find more ways to grow your affiliate marketing income per month. If you’re starting a blog site from scratch, it will allow you to generate first drafts more quickly.

Resources for Learning and Growth in Affiliate Marketing

Have you joined an affiliate network? Trust us when we say that they’re more than happy to help you increase your affiliate marketing income per month as much as possible. So, if there are resources within the platform, that’s the first place you should go to for learning. The content that you’ll see is most likely going to be specific to their features and services. But since you want to maximize your potential affiliate marketing income per month, it’s not enough to stick with just one resource.

MGID

Even the post that you’re reading right now is a learning resource! Pretty amazing, right? We’ve already covered so much about this topic, and you can use MGID’s blogs to identify gaps that you can close. Just type affiliate marketing into the search bar and see everything we’ve written about it so far to improve your affiliate marketing income per month. We also announce on our site if there are industry events, so you get the chance to gather insights from the key figures within the sector.

Self-Paced Courses, Books and Videos

No matter your learning style, you’ll have the opportunity to increase your affiliate marketing income per month. You can find valuable learning resources in every medium, so it’s all just about finding the best fit for you.

Self-paced courses are great if you like having some structure for learning about how to improve your affiliate marketing income per month but can’t commit to a schedule.
Books are for you if you prefer to read about things instead of watching videos.
Videos are great for studying how to increase your affiliate marketing income per month. You can pick and choose what you want to learn.

There are many resources available for free, as well. We suggest starting there before going for paid options.

Challenges in Meeting Your Desired Affiliate Marketing Income per Month

In your journey towards profitability, you may encounter certain challenges that can discourage you, especially if you’re only at the beginning of your journey. Remember, no one started earning thousands of dollars in affiliate marketing income per month. Behind every success story were a lot of untold challenges that had to be overcome. As you build the potential of your assets to generate a solid affiliate marketing income per month, let’s hope that everything goes smoothly for you. But as they say, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. We comprehensively covered this in our text about navigating the challenges of affiliate marketing. However, we have also covered the top three challenges in the following subsections.

Managing Competition and Market Saturation

Your affiliate marketing income per month may dwindle as more players enter the niche. With the tighter competition, it may be harder for you to capture the attention of your target market. Once the point of saturation is reached, you may see your affiliate marketing income per month drop significantly. In this case, you can:

Establish a differentiator so you can continue to stand out despite this market change;
Create unique ads and content that still deliver value to the target market.;
Prioritize platforms that contribute more to your total affiliate marketing income per month.

Doing these things allows you to fortify your bases while standing out from the crowd.

Ad Fraud

Ad fraud is when you’re getting impressions and engagement from bots or users who are not really interested in your promotion. This can vastly inflate your ad spending without yielding a good affiliate marketing income per month. To protect yourself from financial wastage, we recommend being proactive in preventing ad fraud. This includes:

Implementing fraud detection protocols;
Partnering with trusted ad platforms;
Continuously monitoring ad performance.

Are you using native ads to improve your affiliate marketing income per month? You’ll be glad to know that MGID employs fraud detection software that guarantees at least 96% human engagement.

Issues with Conversion Rates

If the affiliate marketing income per month from your ads is somehow stagnant or going down (and you’re 100% confident it’s not fraud), it may be worth checking whether your conversion rates are at the level you want them to be. If they’re not, you can do the following to increase your affiliate marketing income per month again:

Experiment with different ad placements;
Check if the transition from the ad to the landing page is smooth;
Refine your targeting or abandon segments that are not performing well.

When implementing changes, we recommend doing them one at a time. This allows you to zero in on the cause of the conversion issue.

How High Will Your Affiliate Marketing Income per Month Go? Only Time Will Tell!

Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative passive income source. However, if your long-term goal relies mostly on organic search, it may take a while to see a decent affiliate marketing income per month. For now, be patient and do the work. Keep on promoting and creating quality content that resonates with your target market. Should you decide that paid ads are the better way to achieve your desired affiliate marketing income per month, consider incorporating native ads into your strategy. If you do, create an account with MGID to access advanced tools, a personal manager and a department of creative specialists. Let’s reach your goal for your affiliate marketing income per month together!