Welcome to “Affiliate Marketing Success Stories: How Ordinary People Become Successful Affiliate Marketers”. In this post, we’ll be learning how regular people without any particular expertise built up thriving affiliate websites and income streams from scratch to eventually earn full-time livings and achieve financial independence.
Affiliate marketing has become an extremely popular way for ordinary people to earn money online. With affiliate marketing, you promote products or services and earn a commission whenever someone makes a purchase after clicking your affiliate link.
While it may seem too good to be true, affiliate marketing does work and has allowed many people to quit their day jobs and build successful online businesses. But how exactly do amateur internet marketers with no reputation or clout succeed with affiliate marketing? What does it take to achieve that elusive passive income and freedom lifestyle?
This article dives into the affiliate marketing success stories from normal people who went from $0 to making a full-time living with affiliate websites, proving that you don’t need special skills or loads of money to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Read on to find out how they turned affiliate marketing into a profitable business.
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Why Affiliate Marketing Is Worth Getting Into
Affiliate marketing has exploded in popularity due to the low barrier to entry and high earning potential:
- You don’t need any upfront investment or inventory. You simply promote products you like as an affiliate and make commissions from sales.
- Global affiliate industry revenues have reached over $12 billion annually. Clearly there’s ample money to be made as an affiliate marketer.
- Top affiliate marketers are earning 6 and even 7 figures per year with their websites. So $1 million+ incomes are possible with affiliate sites.
- As search engines reward websites publishing lots of high quality content, affiliate sites naturally align well with search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
- Anyone can get started with affiliate marketing by signing up for affiliate programs like Amazon Associates or individual company programs. No special tech skills are required.
With the flexibility to work anywhere and just needing a laptop and internet connection, affiliate marketing offers an accessible path to financial and location independence for anyone willing to put in consistent effort.
Next let’s look at some real-life examples of affiliate marketers who started from scratch and were eventually able to quit their day jobs and enjoy full financial freedom.
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner Goes from $100k in Debt to Running a Successful Affiliate Site with 1 Million Pageviews
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner nearly went bankrupt in 2005, owing over $100k in credit card and student loan debt. While working as a preschool teacher, she began learning about blogging, affiliate marketing and search engine optimization.
In 2007, Michelle launched Making Sense of Cents, a personal finance blog covering topics like budgeting, paying off debt and making money. She monetized her website with affiliate programs like credit cards and banks. Thanks to lots of high quality content and SEO best practices, her site started ranking well and gaining significant search traffic.
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By 2013, just 6 years after getting started, Michelle was already making $100k per year from her one site, which had reached over 1 million pageviews per month. The impressive traffic and conversions allowed her to easily scale up earnings.
Now Michelle makes a full-time living from her affiliate site, which provides enough passive income for her to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. She’s paid off all her debts and is location independent. And she’s helping audiences improve their financial situations.
The strategy for the growth and promotion of the blog was to write more SEO-optimized content. Everyone involved in affiliate marketing and SEO will tell you that it all comes down to quality content that ranks and gets good backlinks.
Michelle’s journey highlights how with consistent effort put into an affiliate focused website over time, you can go from being financially struggling to complete freedom and security through leveraging affiliate marketing.
Pat Flynn Forgoes Architecture Career for Affiliate Marketing and Creates Multiple Six Figure Income Streams
Pat Flynn was working as an architect when the 2008 financial crisis hit. He got laid off as the real estate market collapsed. Dealing with the stress of job loss, Pat decided to start an online business focused on something he loved — LEGOs.
He launched a small hobby site about LEGOs just to test out affiliate marketing with the Amazon associates program as a source of side income. Within a few months the site started gaining traffic from Google rankings. Soon it was earning over $7,500 per month in commissions from LEGO affiliate sales, far above what Pat was making as an architect!
Encouraged by his affiliate success with the small niche site he ran as a side hustle at first, Pat decided to go all in on online business. He launched Smart Passive Income covering how to make money online, again monetized with affiliate marketing.
Now Passive Income earns over $500k per year, allowing Pat to be a full time content creator and educator. He makes money from affiliate programs, online courses, coaching and his popular books like “Will it Fly?” for validating business ideas. Pat credits SEO, email lists, and delivering consistent high quality content over the long run as the keys to affiliate marketing success.
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Like Michelle, Pat’s journey shows how beginning as a complete novice, you can leverage affiliate marketing to produce multiple income streams and eventually reach complete financial independence. With hard work and persistence, the possibilities are endless.
More Examples of Regular People Finding Success With Affiliate Marketing
There are many real-world examples out there highlighting how ordinary people with no special skills or advantages are building thriving affiliate marketing businesses from scratch and making $xxx,xxx+ per year.
A few more inspiring success stories demonstrating how absolutely anyone can make big money with affiliate marketing:
- Making Sense of Cents: Michelle Schroeder-Gardner went from being $100k in debt to running a successful finance blog making over $100k per year within 6 years. Her site now earns income through affiliate partnerships and gets over 1 million monthly pageviews.
- Your Money Geek: Founder Kyle Kroeger was stuck in a boring IT job when he began a personal finance blog focused on using credit card rewards programs to travel for cheap. As an Amazon affiliate, he published in-depth guides and product reviews about the best travel rewards credit cards. Within just 2 years Kyle was making over $100k per year from Amazon affiliations and was able to quit his job. Now Kyle makes over $200k per year from his Your Money Geek site thanks to an entire content focus around ranking for terms related to “best credit cards for travel miles”. He is location independent and gets to travel full time while running his biz. This example demonstrates how with laser targeted content, huge success is possible specifically with the Amazon affiliates program.
- Smart Passive Income: Pat Flynn got laid off from his architecture job but then created a niche site about LEGOs that soon earned $7.5k per month. He then launched Smart Passive Income blog which now makes over $500k per year from affiliates, courses, coaching and books.
- SkinnyMs.: After failing to find success with network marketing, Kim lost 60 lbs by changing her diet and launched SkinnyMs. to share healthy recipes and tips. She now makes a full-time income from her site via fitness and kitchen appliance affiliate commissions.
- Outdoor Gear Lab: Started by a software engineer as a side project reviewing outdoor gear, this site now earns over $300k per year primarily from affiliate commissions from top retailers like REI and Backcountry. The founder can now afford to enjoy his passion for the outdoors full time.
As you can see from these real-world examples, affiliate marketing can provide life-changing income for regular people willing to put in consistent effort over time, with no special skills or credentials required. Through their stories, we can also learn that there are numerous paths to success in affiliate marketing. Now it’s your turn to begin writing your own success story.
Key Takeaways and Final Thoughts
The affiliate marketing success stories highlighted in this post reinforce several key lessons:
- Affiliate marketing works for beginners. With a bit of effort, anyone can start a profitable affiliate site from scratch and make significant money online. Financial barriers to entry are very low.
- It takes time and consistency to see success. Many of these example sites took 2-3 years from starting out to making full-time incomes. Affiliate marketing rewards playing long game.
- Passive income takes patience at first. But affiliate earnings can snowball as site traffic and reputation build up, eventually allowing for true passive income potential.
- SEO, content marketing and email lists lie at the core of most successful affiliate models and enable growth. Focusing on organic traffic, valuable content and email subscribers from the start is key.
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The bloggers and business owners featured in this post prove that affiliate marketing offers an incredible path to financial freedom accessible by anyone willing to put in consistent effort over the long haul. If you’ve ever asked “can I really make money as an affiliate marketer?”, these real-world examples unequivocally demonstrate that yes, affiliate marketing absolutely can provide life-changing income.
Now it’s your turn to begin writing your own affiliate marketing success story.
Thanks for reading my article on “Affiliate Marketing Success Stories: How Ordinary People Become Successful Affiliate Marketers“, hope it will help!
