How much money can you make as an affiliate?

How much money can you make as an affiliate?

The volatile nature of the business makes it mindless fantasy to calculate your annual salary on the back of one day's profits. If this is your first day of affiliate marketing and you earn $1000, don't assume that you'll bank $365,000 in the next year. Your current earnings, in relation to a salary, 

are $2.73/day.

Technically, a guy earning $300,000/month in revenue could be worse off than the guy making a steady $100/day with no outgoings. Admittedly he would have to be blind, dumb, deaf, drunk and stupid to continue swallowing such a skinny margin, but it highlights one of the rare laws of affiliate marketing:

Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.

A unique characteristic of our industry is how the mighty can fall overnight, often in spectacular fashion.

You can go from earning $3,000/day to sod all in the space of a lunch break. And vice versa. 

An Intermediate affiliate may drop a level after losing his best campaign, while the Affiliate Apprentice can turn Top Doggy Baller overnight if he stumbles in to an unsaturated niche and makes it pay (a daily occurrence in 2009, rare in 2013). 

The Bag of Dicks Affiliate may continue to prosper, or complacency may bite him in the arse, but he’ll always be a bag of dicks as long as he judges others for how happy they should be with their income.

$300/Day vs. $300/Today

Many affiliates can’t seem to tell their daily income from their today’s income. 

The volatile nature of the business makes it mindless fantasy to calculate your annual salary on the back of one day’s profits. 

If this is your first day of affiliate marketing and you earn $1000, don’t assume that you’ll bank $365,000 in the next year. 

Your current earnings, in relation to a salary, are $2.73/day. 

Repeat your success tomorrow, then the day after, and so on in to the foreseeable future. Only then can you start throwing out whimsical multipliers on an income that isn’t yet yours.