Can you really make significant money using affiliate marketing?

Because you’re on top of the answers, I’m not replying to you, but adding my answer here, so people that come across this question don’t stop short at your answer.

I’ve been involved in the affiliate marketing business for nearly 17 years through various companies and across very competitive verticals - Gambling, Trading, Adult.

While you have a few valid and good points in your answer, the particular question you’ve been asked to answer: “Can you really make significant money using affiliate marketing”, you are 100% wrong… And it’s ok to be wrong.

First of all, let’s define a few things so we’re all on the same page:

Significant money: Depending on where you live, significant money can be 2000$ or 20000$ (per month).

In the course of my career I founded several affiliate programs and managed thousands of affiliates. I’m not doing it anymore, and i’m not promoting a product through affiliates (although TrackingDesk has a referral program), so what I’m about to say has no impact on my current ventures or occupation.

When I left the gambling affiliate program that i was running in 2007, we were paying about $4′000′000 of affiliate commissions on a monthly basis.

Some affiliates were cashing in $1M, some others $500 and some had to wait for the next payment schedule to get over the minimum payment.

We had plenty of affiliates earning consistently between $10k and $30k were strong in ppc, seo or email marketing. Others had some shady tactics - blackhat ppc, seo etc… But overall, those figures didn’t surprise anyone.

Here is the big secret - The internet is so vast, the possibilities so unlimited, that you can make $1M in a month and nobody will even notice, and you will certainly not advertise it;)

*Hint/edit from May 2019: some of the people who upvoted my answer were among our top earners:)

“Making money” is driving affiliate marketing. Naturally, the first guys that made money realized that the “get rich quick” methods they were selling to mom and papa to become day traders and make millions, could simply be adapted to other market segments. So they created “make money” courses that people bought to become “solo entrepreneurs” / affiliates.

Same recipe, same method, same trigger…

Long story short: Yes, you can make money being an affiliates. But that doesn’t happen out of thin air. It requires hard work, persistence, creativity, agility and plenty of other little things that are discovered through trials and errors.

I’m now running Anytrack.io, a conversion tracking platform used by affiliate marketers to run and measure their paid and organic campaigns. We see all sorts of users and of all size. From time to time, I personally run “one on one” demos with new users and I realize that there is not one single method to make money as an affiliate. There are so many ways, so many Subtleties and tactics. Everyone tries to find its angle and edge, because it’s precisely there that the margins and scale can be found.

The answer to the question is a big YES