Can Affiliate Marketing Be a Career? [4 Steps to Build an Affiliate Business]

Affiliate marketing is a great entry point for making money online, but can you do it full-time? Can affiliate marketing be a career?

Yes, affiliate marketing can be a great career for aspiring entrepreneurs and online business owners.

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly-growing industry projected to reach a whopping $39 billion in revenue by 2031, which makes it a fantastic place to invest in for your long-term career while building key skills along the way!

In this guide, I’ll dive deeper into what that looks like and how to transition from an affiliate side hustle to a full-fledged affiliate career!

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Many people start affiliate marketing as just a side hustle. This is a great way to make extra money from your online audience or your digital marketing skills – we’re talking hundreds of dollars per month at this level.

There’s often a misconception that side hustles are just that – on the side – and can’t evolve into full-time careers.

But for some, they can!

Affiliate marketing on platforms like ClickBank can provide you a reliable source of income that scales up alongside proven strategies. The more skilled you get at promoting affiliate products, the more you can grow your side hustle into a full-time source of income capable of supporting your lifestyle and your long-term goals!

Of course, the important step is to realize when your side hustle has become a functioning business model. Many of ClickBank’s most legendary affiliates, such as Francisco Valenzuela or Joel Peterson, went through this transformation. They used strong SEO or media buying strategies to generate a powerful income stream through affiliate commissions across niches and commission structures.

So, can you turn affiliate marketing into a career? With a strong understanding of how affiliate marketing works, anyone can build their career as a professional affiliate marketer!

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is a business model that allows skilled marketers to earn commissions by promoting other people’s products.

You earn a commission each time someone buys a product through your affiliate tracking links. With ClickBank, that commission is predictable and reliable, and generating a tracking link is as simple as hitting the “Promote” button next a product that looks good!

Even better, many quality affiliate products are paired with rebilling commissions, such as software or supplement orders, so you can continue to earn passive income from those same customers for as long as they continue to buy.

This can make affiliate marketing a great way to build your career as a successful marketing pro. Many starting entrepreneur affiliate marketers appreciate the low upfront cost, minimal barriers to entry, lack of inventory, and array of tools and resources available for those who want to get started – especially with AI tools cropping up left and right to smooth over the more difficult aspects of this business.

Can Affiliate Marketing Be a Full-Time Career?

Yes, it is possible for affiliate marketing to become a full-time career.

But I don’t want to sugarcoat it.

While ClickBank has several hundred affiliates who generate more than $250K per year in sale on our platform – which we call Platinum affiliates – the VAST majority of active affiliates on ClickBank and elsewhere earn a more modest side income from affiliate marketing.

And of course, there are even more people who earn next to nothing, because they don’t stick with the business model long enough to see success. Even for me, it took several years before I got my first sale on ClickBank.

Whether you’re focusing on organic content and growing an audience, or you’re mastering the art of paid ads on Facebook, YouTube, or native platforms, if you can secure a steady stream of sales for your affiliate products, then affiliate marketing can become a full-time career for you!

Among the people who make it to full-time status are hundreds of ClickBank Platinum affiliates who have earned $250K+ per year. At ClickBank, we provide reliable payments and a marketplace of attractive affiliate offers to empower affiliates.

Most people stop well before earning more than a part-time income with affiliate marketing. However, it can still be a valuable way to build up “passive income” with affiliate marketing as a side hustle.

How to Make Affiliate Marketing Your Job

Are you passionate about digital marketing? Would you love building a career as an affiliate marketer promoting products you love?

If so, it IS possible to make affiliate marketing your job through proven marketing strategies and dedication. As one of the world’s oldest and most-trusted affiliate networks, ClickBank can help you achieve affiliate success through our world-class affiliate education platform, our quality tools, and of course, our marketplace of brands and offer owners who will pay commissions for every product sale you generate for them!

Affiliate marketing CAN be a career. But it takes a lot of work and a sharp set of digital marketing skills.

Start building your path to success with the following 4 steps:

Step 1: Master a Traffic Source

Choose how you will drive traffic to your affiliate links.

Most affiliates start out with a major fork-in-the-road decision: go with the free traffic route or the paid traffic route.

• Free traffic involves organic social, SEO, and content creation.
• Paid traffic involves paid ads on platforms like Meta, Google, YouTube, or native. 

Here’s what to know and how to choose between these two very different types of traffic.

Free Traffic: Content and SEO

The free traffic route is ideal for content creators who already have a following or are ready to build one.

You might be a blog writer, video producer, TikTok dancer, or social media influencer. Your goal will be to organically build an audience, use SEO and platform-specific tactics to draw attention to your content, and use that momentum to promote affiliate products.

This method works best when your products align with your audience’s initial motivation to engage with your content.

Example: A cooking influencer on Instagram and TikTok who promotes digital cookbooks and kitchen gear.

Paid Traffic: Paid Ads

The paid ads route involves buying media on popular platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google/YouTube, and even newer platforms like TikTok or NewsBreak.

Your ads appear as sponsored content in specific and highly visible locations, like the Facebook feed or pre-roll ads on YouTube videos. However, media buying also requires competitive bidding and a skillful targeting strategy to make sure you make more in affiliate commissions than you spend on ads. (This is called return on ad spend, or ROAS.)

If you can effectively promote affiliate products through paid ads, then you’ll have a reliable way to grow your affiliate income.

Example: A media buyer who leverages Facebook Ads to drive traffic to a weight loss supplement.

Step 2: Choose Your Niche

Consider the power of targeted niche audiences.

Targeting one of the top affiliate marketing niches can help you connect more strongly with your future customers and become a known expert. Mastering your niche will enable you to get inside the head of your prospect and either create valuable content for them that rises above the rest, or figure out the angles and hooks that will resonate with them and encourage them to learn more about what you’re promoting.

In other words, the niche you choose will determine how successful you are with both organic and paid ad strategies.

Niching Down

Niching down is a tried-and-true path to success for affiliate marketers. You’ll see this over and over in our ClickBank affiliate success stories – they had to choose not just a single niche, but also one specific traffic source to master in order to compete and eventually come out on top.

We recommend you choose a niche that you resonate with. In fact, some of the most effective marketing comes from being your OWN target audience. For example, you tell business owners how to succeed after you’ve found success in your business, or you share your own weight loss journey to inspire others, or you reveal the equipment you used for woodworking projects.

The main thing is to tap into your passion and your frustrations for the niche. Pain points are a powerful way to show a target audience that you “get” them – which makes them more motivated to consider whatever product(s) you’re promoting.

Ultimately, having a strong connection to your niche builds trust with your audience and powers the most effective marketing strategies!

Step 3: Find Affiliate Programs to Promote

Once you have chosen your traffic route and target audience, it’s time to find the perfect affiliate programs and products to promote.

Choose products you’re curious about or have had a good experience with and can enthusiastically promote to your chosen audience. The more a product will resonate with your brand, niche, traffic channel, and marketing tone or style, the better your campaigns will do as you inspire audiences to make a purchase.

One of the best places to find affiliate programs and offers to promote is on the ClickBank marketplace. We have a vast marketplace of quality brands and products to promote. For a rundown of the latest and greatest, you can always check out our monthly post of top ClickBank products.

Step 4: Master the Skills

Steps 1-3 are crucial to begin affiliate marketing as a side hustle.

But when you’re ready to make affiliate marketing into a career, the final step is to master the affiliate skills that create help you scale your sales.

The most important skills you’ll need to find success as an affiliate include copywriting, landing page building, paid ads, email list building, and resource management to build your affiliate marketing venture into a full-fledged business.

You’ll never stop learning, but if you can get a firm foundation into copywriting, building landing pages, and one specific traffic source or channel, you’ll be in great shape to build an affiliate business that lasts.

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Francisco Valenzuela

What does it look like to make affiliate marketing a career?

You can check out the stories of any of our Platinum affiliates who make over $250K a year. Each success story is unique. However, they often have a few shared elements!

One of my favorite case studies for affiliate success is Francisco Valenzuela. He’s a young man from Chile who I had the pleasure of interviewing a few years ago.

He started affiliate marketing during COVID to support his small business and make it through college. Through expertly honed paid marketing strategies, Valenzuela quickly began to build his online business.

Soon, Valenzuela saw his first $1K. Since then, he has made over $1M in affiliate marketing sales. When I interviewed him, he was Platinum – and last year, he achieved Diamond status, which means generating $5M in sales just on ClickBank.

Francisco was one of the most driven and determined people I’ve ever met, and that intensity helped him find a full-time career in affiliate marketing.

Now, he’s leveraging that into building up his personal brand, but none of this would have been possible without mastering affiliate marketing first!

How Much Do Affiliate Marketers Make?

You can expect to see a wide range of incomes for affiliate marketers.

Beginner affiliate marketers may make as much as $1,000 a month as they get started building an audience and honing their marketing campaigns.

More established affiliate marketers can make six and even seven-figure incomes through the affiliate business model. This is especially possible with paid ad strategies, but even organic affiliates and email marketers can get there – it just takes longer to build up to these income levels.

Ultimately, ClickBank is home to hundreds of Platinum-level affiliates who make over $250K a year, as well as several dozen Diamond affiliates who make over $5M a year through ClickBank affiliate sales alone.

We’re proud of the fact that even when you start out without any experience, you have the potential to build affiliate marketing into a full-time career and business beyond your wildest dreams!

Affiliate Marketing as a Stepping Stone

I want to point out that many people can use affiliate marketing as a stepping stone to online business success.

While affiliate marketing can be a career in its own right, it’s ALSO a great way to perfect your online business skills and then start a business for yourself, whether that’s creating software as a service, selling an online program, or becoming a supplement brand.

With affiliate marketing, you’ll learn the fundamental building blocks of digital marketing, including how organic content and paid ads work. Y

ou may have the chance to grow an audience who believes in your unique online brand, design sales funnels from scratch, and of course, handle other key functions of a business, such as managing finances or brushing up on legal concepts.

All told, this experience serve as the foundation you need to become a successful online entrepreneur in your own right.

Many of ClickBank’s top affiliates go on to create their products to sell, provide coaching and consulting services, or work other jobs.

While Francisco stayed pretty focused on affiliate marketing until recently, Joel Peterson is a perfect example of someone who started as a wildly successful affiliate, but eventually moved into a profitable business selling high-ticket digital programs and coaching.

The cool thing is, you don’t have always have to choose! Become a successful affiliate and once that’s working for you on autopilot, shift gears toward another business without giving up the affiliate revenue you’ve built for yourself.

Can Affiliate Marketing Be a Career Wrap-up

In th end, building your career as an affiliate marketer starts one step at a time.

Whether you want to become a Platinum affiliate or leverage your affiliate marketing chops to launch your own online business, ClickBank is here to help you take flight.

Get started with useful resources like ClickBank for Beginners or the Spark by ClickBank learning platform. This is where you can explore skills like free traffic (I teach SEO myself!) or paid traffic courses (like Meta Ads and YouTube Ads from paid media experts) that can help affiliates looking to make affiliate marketing their career.

Whatever you decide to do for yourself, I wish you the best of luck. Happy scaling!