Earning money online without investing sounds great, but is it possible? Financially, we naturally want to run as little risk as possible when we start a new (online) business. We want to be sure that every euro/pound/dollar we invest comes out at least twice as much.
It may also be the case that you currently do not have the financial resources to start a business or you only have the opportunity to invest with a low budget. But a few questions are wandering in our minds. I.e, how to start affiliate marketing with no money? Can you still become successful online? Yes, that’s possible!
There are various options to make money online without the need for a (high) investment. One of those options is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you can set up an online business with low start-up costs that can generate high income.
You can grow to a passive income and create freedom for yourself in several ways. We will tell you what affiliate marketing is, what benefits it brings you, where you can save when starting affiliate marketing, and what costs are unavoidable in the beginning.
What Is An Affiliate Marketing?
With affiliate marketing, you promote products or services of another company on your website (or another channel such as social media or YouTube). You can choose to create articles or write a blog, for example.
In the article or blog, you can then place a link to the company you are promoting. When a visitor clicks on your unique affiliate link and subsequently makes a purchase, you will receive a commission. This could, for example, be a fixed amount per sale or a percentage.
For example: You have a passion for traveling and would like to write a blog about it. In a blog, you can inform visitors by sharing the knowledge and experiences that you have gained during your travels.
For example, you can write blogs about: ‘The best places to visit in Italy’, ‘Why choose Cyprus as a holiday destination’, ‘Love adventure? Visit this great metropolis!’.
For example, in a blog post about ‘The best preparation for backpacking in Bali’ you can promote campaigns for airline tickets, travel gear, entrance tickets to attractions or days away, visas, car rental, and much more.
You can incorporate one or more campaigns into your blog that match your chosen topic. If, after reading your blog, someone becomes enthusiastic about the travel gear you talked about, clicks on the link, and then makes a purchase, you will earn a commission! Yet there is one more question to answer: do you need a business license for affiliate marketing? Not necessarily!
What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing has a long list of advantages, making it an interesting online revenue model. As with any online revenue model, affiliate marketing also has disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage… We will talk to you about that later. First, we’ll take you through some of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing!
Affiliate marketing provides a lot of freedom
One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is the amount of freedom it gives you. This makes it the number one online revenue model for many affiliates. You can choose when you work on your affiliate website. You choose how many hours and/or days you spend on your website per week.
Do you prefer to work on your affiliate website one day a week or do you prefer to spread the hours over several days a week? You choose! Because you decide when you work on your website, it is ideal to combine it with, for example, a (full-time) job, study, or internship.
In addition, you can work on your website anywhere. All you need to work on your affiliate website is a laptop and internet connection. With affiliate marketing you are not tied to one location, so you can work independently. This means you can work from all over the world and make money online at the same time.
Do what you like
You can go in any direction with affiliate marketing (em walcott affiliate marketing). This allows you to do exactly what you like! Would you like to write a blog about the first months as a new mother, inform others about the best ways to maintain your garden, share your great travel experiences, create a website about fishing, enthuse others about the benefits of greener living, and so on?
The possibilities are endless and there are companies you can work with for almost every subject. The most important thing is that you choose something that suits you, that you have an affinity with, or already have some knowledge about so that your website will also succeed in the long term.
Few risks
With affiliate marketing, you create relevant content for the visitor. With affiliate marketing, the following applies no cure, no pay. This means that only when you sell the promoted products with good content will you receive a commission.
This of course works differently with, for example, a webshop. With affiliate marketing, you have no purchasing of stock, no storage space, no hassle with sending and receiving packages back, and no customer service.
The final sale is not made by you, but by the company you are promoting. You mainly work in the background, which means that many responsibilities that you have with, among other things, a webshop, do not apply here.
Create high income
It is possible to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. Many affiliates have managed to build an income from their website that can pay the bills or even a lot more! Affiliate marketing is an online revenue model that will not allow you to earn thousands of euros within a few weeks.
Anyone who thinks they can make money quickly with affiliate marketing will unfortunately be disappointed. Affiliate marketing is an interesting online revenue model to earn a lot of money with, but your website needs time to grow. If you continue to work on your website consistently and improve it, revenue will grow and continue to grow.
Build passive income
In addition to high income, you can build on passive income by continuing to work consistently on your website. A passive income is an income that you continue to receive month after month.
It is possible to achieve this with an affiliate website if you have been working for a longer period. An article you write now can generate income in several years. You must set up your website, optimize it, and continue to scale consistently so that you can grow to a high passive income.
Affiliate marketing is a fair online revenue model
There are several ways to make money online on the internet, but not every online revenue model works equally honestly or is misleading. A major advantage of affiliate marketing is that it is a fair online revenue model.
You must provide value to visitors and work with advertisers to make it a success. With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to doubt whether you are honestly making money. There are many companies and affiliate networks you can work with that offer good products or services. In addition, you only receive a commission when a sale occurs.
Of course, it is up to you to only put correct information on your affiliate website and to adhere to the terms and conditions of the company you are promoting. Misleading information or incorrect promises ensure that your website will not succeed in the long term.
But do I need a large budget to start affiliate marketing?
No, especially when starting up with affiliate marketing, you can keep the start-up costs very low. You can start affiliate marketing with just a few bucks. This is of course a huge advantage because, in the beginning, you will not earn enough from your website to cover the costs incurred.
The first few months you will mainly focus on building your affiliate website and creating new relevant content. How much you invest in your website is of course your own choice. At the start of your affiliate marketing adventure, you can choose to invest in, for example, tools for keyword research or hiring a copywriter, but you can also do much of the work yourself to keep costs very low in the beginning.
Can you start with affiliate marketing without high start-up costs?
You will of course spend some money in the beginning for a domain name and hosting of your website. These costs are unavoidable because you need a website and domain name to get started.
The amount of these costs depends on the hosting package you purchase. Purchasing a domain name costs us less than $10 (one-off) and the hosting of our website is between $20 and $40 (per month).
In addition to these unavoidable costs, you can save many points to keep start-up costs low once you start affiliate marketing. How can you save on start-up costs? We’ll tell you more about that in a moment!
The most important investment
The most important investment in affiliate marketing is your commitment and time. Once you start with affiliate marketing, you will initially be mainly concerned with creating content and designing the website.
When your affiliate website goes online, you will of course not have enough visitors from day one to earn a lot of money. If you make enough time to work on your website and continue to work on it consistently, your website will automatically grow and continue to grow.
The organic visitors will then come automatically when you continue to add value to your website. With a lot of effort, perseverance, and the right mindset, you are much further ahead than most starting affiliates.
On average, it takes most affiliates 3 to 6 months before they earn their first commission. After the first commission has been earned, the second and third commissions will come your way much faster.
As we previously indicated with the advantages of affiliate marketing, there are also disadvantages to affiliate marketing (like lauren loveless amazon storefront), as with any online revenue model. The biggest pitfall for starting affiliates is perseverance.
If you work several hours per week for an employer, you will receive the wages you earn in your account at the end of the month. With affiliate marketing, you will be working for the first few months, but you will still earn little or nothing from it. It takes time to achieve good positions within Google and this is the most difficult point with affiliate marketing for most.
Unfortunately, many affiliates stop after 2 to 3 months because they have not yet received any income. Those who persevere and work consistently can become successful with affiliate marketing and earn a lot of money.
A low budget to start with? With this, you can start a successful affiliate website!
After purchasing a domain name and hosting, you can get started with your affiliate website. In the beginning, you naturally want to provide the website with good content, design it with professional images, promote campaigns, use tools for information and statistics, and much more.
Is it also possible to save on this to keep the start-up costs for your affiliate website low? There are several things you can save on so that you can get started with your affiliate website without high start-up costs.
You can write content entirely yourself
You can outsource writing articles or creating a blog to an experienced copywriter, but you can also choose to do this yourself. By writing the articles or blogs yourself, you naturally save a lot of money because you do not have to invest in a copywriter. You can always choose to have the texts written by an experienced copywriter later once you earn money with your affiliate website, but until then you can do it yourself completely for free!
Use various affiliate networks for free
There are several well-known Dutch affiliate networks where you can register for free and promote products or services. A frequently asked question is whether it is possible to register with multiple affiliate networks at the same time.
That is not a problem at all! We even recommend registering with multiple affiliate networks so that you have a good overview of the different campaigns that are currently available. This way you can immediately see when there are new interesting campaigns and you can get started right away.
An affiliate network works as an intermediary when you want to start promoting products or services on your affiliate website. Companies can register their products or services with an affiliate network and you can register with the affiliate network to easily get in touch with these companies.
After you are registered with an affiliate network, you will receive an overview of all available campaigns from the different companies. This also includes information about the conditions for the promotion, the amount of the commission, promotional material, contact details of the company, and more.
Here are a few famous and profitable affiliate programs you must join;
- Amazon Associates UK
- eBay Partner Network
- PayPro. A well-known and large affiliate network is PayPro. Registering with PayPro is not completely free, but will cost you a one-off fee of $7.50. If you want to use PayPro as an affiliate network, that will not be a major investment! Most campaigns displayed on PayPro are digital products such as courses, e-books, and training. You will find some physical products there, but this range is not large. After you are registered with PayPro you can immediately start promoting campaigns
- Bol.com. Registering with Bol.com is completely free. However, an important condition of Bol.com is that your affiliate website has several articles or blogs before you are admitted. Therefore, first, make sure that you have written a number of articles before you register your affiliate website with Bol.com.
- Awin. When you register your affiliate website with Awin, there are no registration fees or costs for using the network. Awin will, however, want to verify your account number after submitting your registration. This cost us €1.00 at the time.
Please note: There are various Dutch and International affiliate networks for which (high) costs are charged for registering or using the affiliate network. Therefore, always make sure you read the terms and conditions carefully before registering with an affiliate network to avoid unexpected costs.
Use free keyword research tools
Before you start writing texts, it is important that you do good keyword research. Keyword research ensures that you gain insight into popular keywords, problems your visitors encounter, or what questions they have about a certain topic.
This allows you to write more specifically to address your target group better and faster. There are various keyword research tools available on the internet. Various tools are (limited) free to use and can help you enormously in creating good content for your website. Which tools can you use (limited) for free?
- Ubbersuggest.
- Semrush
- Semscope
- Answerthepublic
- GoogleAdsense
Dress up your website with free professional images
A beautiful affiliate website with a professional appearance is extremely important if you want to become successful with affiliate marketing. There are several websites online where you can download beautiful, high-quality images that are copyright-free.
It is important that you do not simply take images from the internet and put them on your affiliate website. This can cause you unnecessary problems and also cost you a lot of money. It is possible, without warning, to receive a fine that can be extremely high.
Therefore, only use images that you have created yourself or images that are free of copyright. Well-known websites where you can find copyright-free images are Pixabay.com, Pexels.com, and Unsplash.com.
Keeping statistics is also possible without investment
To optimize your affiliate website, it is important that you understand the statistics of your website. Using the statistics you can see what is going well, what could be done differently, and what you can still add to the website.
Requesting statistics does not require any investment because there are various tools that give you free insight! With Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Ubbersuggest you can view a lot of important and detailed information about your affiliate website.
You do not have to purchase stock
As we mentioned earlier, affiliate marketing does not involve purchasing inventory. With affiliate marketing, you promote the product or service, but the visitor ultimately buys the product from the company you promote.
This of course ensures that you can keep the risks very low when you start with affiliate marketing. Purchasing stock involves many different risks that fortunately you do not have with affiliate marketing.
In addition to the risks, it obviously saves a lot of money if stock is not necessary! Purchasing stock naturally results in extremely high start-up costs.
Organic visitors don’t cost any money either!
As you consistently work on your affiliate website for some time, the organic visitors to your website will increase. These visitors are completely free! With a website, it is possible to advertise so that you immediately appear at the top of Google’s search results.
Especially if you have no experience in advertising on Google, it will cost more money in the beginning because you have to test a lot about what works and what doesn’t. With good keyword research and good, high-quality text, you can achieve good positions within Google’s search results.
This will not be immediately within a week after posting an article because this needs time to grow, but by consistently working on your website, the organic visitors will grow after some time and continue to grow.
Lots of free information
There is a lot of information on the internet that can help you become successful with affiliate marketing. Besides the fact that you can find a lot about affiliate marketing on various websites, there are also interesting podcasts, forums, videos on YouTube/TikTok, and more. Take advantage of the free information available on the internet to learn about affiliate marketing for even more success!
Read Also: Blog vs Vlog: Which Will You Choose to Earn More Revenue in 2024?
In short, can I make money online without investing?
Many in today’s digital era question whether it is possible to earn money online without incurring substantial upfront expenses. If that sounds appealing, take a peek into affiliate marketing; here you’ll discover a world in which even minimal investments can lead to potential returns – starting out may only require domain and hosting costs! Prepare yourself for an exhilarating adventure filled with fresh insights and experiences on this path; it won’t just remain a pipedream any longer! So get set because making money online is no dream but a tangible reality! So get set because making real money online doesn’t just depend on being successful but instead, with hard work!
