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How to start an affiliate income stream

Find out how to start an affiliate income stream, and you could start making commissions from the tools and services that you use for your work. 

12.5 minutes
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The main advantages of affiliate marketing 

One of the main advantages of affiliate marketing is that it’s quick and easy to sign up and potentially start earning money. Especially if you already have an audience via your website or social media networks, and there are good schemes offered in your industry.  

It’s also extremely low cost, and fairly low risk. You don’t need to invest in any inventory, equipment, or software to get started. And once your first affiliate links are published, they can potentially earn you referral commissions indefinitely without any extra effort. So, it’s possible to find you’re making sales through content you’ve posted months, or even years ago.  

Affiliate marketing also allows you to experiment and learn sales and marketing techniques, with many businesses providing useful information and assets to help you improve your efforts. And you could then apply similar techniques to help your own business, or clients running their own affiliate schemes. Along with rewarding you financially for improving your SEO, content marketing or social media efforts. 

Another advantage is if you’re looking to build an additional income stream which isn’t related to your main self-employed career. It’s never been quicker or easier to launch websites, social media profiles, or a YouTube channel, which can start sharing affiliate content and links in whatever industry you’re looking to move into. 

With enough time and effort, it’s possible to build entire websites focused predominantly on affiliate marketing. And in some cases, these can deliver significant revenues if they become popular enough, or target particularly high commissions. That could enable you to eventually swap client and contract work for running your own properties. Or to sell them in the future for multiples of your current and predicted earnings, which can potentially run into five or six figure sums. 

You’ll also be far more likely to notice when you’re reading articles, guides or social media content which includes affiliate links, making you able to decide whether you can trust the advice being offered.

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Generating traffic and increasing your revenue 

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