We learned the hard way when our income dropped a lot for a week. We spent most of that week swapping creative ideas and rewriting a couple of landing blocks. We thought the traffic had gone stale, but then someone finally looked at the conversion breakdown. They saw that the number of clicks and sign-ups was fine, but the number of deposits was down. The advertiser had a problem with one payment method in the country we were sending people from. After spending a week working on the wrong part of the project, I realised the answer was right under my nose the whole time.
The habit we try to keep (and don’t always manage to) is pretty simple. Whenever the final number changes, go back up the funnel step by step until you find the first place where the line breaks. Only then should you start making changes. If you change three things at once without knowing which step broke, you’ll just have more confusion in the data you’ll need next week.
The usual pitch sounds great. You put a few links on a website after work, go to bed, and wake up to commissions that came in while you were asleep. Some of that is true, because a link that works will keep working even when you’re asleep. What the pitch doesn’t mention is the long wait before the link starts working, and the small costs that build up while you’re waiting.
We started this way ourselves, in the evenings after our main jobs. For the first few months, we were getting used to checking the stats every evening, but we were getting annoyed because there was nothing there. We were telling each other that this was normal, but it was hard to believe. We’ve also seen lots of people quit in the second or third month, and it was rarely because of a lack of talent. Usually, no one warns them that the stats will stay empty for so long. This article is about the boring side of things: how much it costs, how the money gets to you, and what the first months are like when you only have evenings and weekends to yourself.
Your biggest cost is time, not money
When people ask us about costs, they usually mean money. But when you have a side hustle, the real cost is your free time, and most people don’t think this will be a problem. It can take a whole evening to write one useful review, and a website needs lots of them before Google takes it seriously.
If you have a full-time job, you’ll probably have five to ten hours a week for this, and some weeks less. That’s enough to build something, but not enough to build it quickly. We think that’s fine, as long as you plan for a slow start and don’t judge the project by what it earns in the first month.
We’ll admit that we didn’t do this part very well. Our first area of interest had about two months of evenings before we realised the big sites had already answered all the questions we wanted to ask. We didn’t lose much money. The evenings were gone forever. So now we spend a weekend checking out a particular area before we write anything, looking at who already has a high ranking and whether the programmes there pay enough to be worth the effort.
What you’ll actually spend money on
The good news is that affiliate marketing is one of the cheapest side projects you can start. You just need a website and a few tools, and many tools have free versions that are good enough at the start.
Here’s how we’d go about working out the main costs. Prices are approximate and subject to change, so treat them as a guide. We made a mistake in the last column, because that part is more useful than the prices.
| Cost | Need it at the start? | Rough price | Where we got it wrong |
| Domain name | Yes | Around the price of a pizza per year | Spent a whole evening choosing a name nobody remembers anyway |
| Hosting | Yes | A few dollars a month for basic plans | None, cheap hosting was fine |
| Theme or builder | Not really | Free to a one-off fee | Bought a paid theme, then went back to a free one because it was faster |
| SEO tools | Later | Free tiers, then a monthly fee | Paid for a keyword tool for months before the site earned enough to cover it |
| Paid traffic (ads) | No | As much as you’re willing to lose | Tried it too early on an offer we didn’t understand |
That’s the list, as it used to be called. The honest advice is actually pretty simple. For the first few months, don’t buy anything except the domain and hosting. Everything else can wait until the site makes a bit of money. Paid traffic is the most important thing to remember here, because it’s the fastest way to waste money when you don’t have time to watch campaigns.
How commissions are actually paid
This is where a lot of beginners get confused, because “commission” means different things in different programmes. Which model suits you depends on the niche and on how patient you are.
| Model | How you get paid | Why it suits a side hustle | What to watch out for |
| Per sale (CPS) | A percentage of each purchase | Easy to understand, fits product reviews | Low rates on cheap products, refunds cancel it |
| Per lead or action (CPL, CPA) | A fixed amount when someone signs up or deposits | You know what each conversion is worth | Quality rules, weak leads may be rejected |
| Revenue share | A share of what the customer brings over months | Income keeps coming without new work | Slow start, early months look disappointing |
In iGaming, for example, programmes such as Pin up affiliate program offer both a fixed CPA and revenue share, and on revenue share you earn from a player for as long as they keep playing. For a side project that can be a good fit, because a page you wrote a year ago can still bring in money from players it sent back then. Just keep in mind that rules on promoting gambling differ a lot from country to country, so check what’s allowed where your audience lives before you build a site around it.
Also, many programmes only pay once you have a certain amount in your account, and some wait a few weeks to check for refunds or fraud. It might take a while for your first commission to be paid into your account.
Here’s a simple summary of what’s happened in the first six months
This is pretty typical of the first six months when you work in the evenings. It’s a typical picture of the people we’ve worked with and of our own start.
You won’t earn any money in the first two months. You pick a specialised subject, create a website for it and write your first ten or fifteen articles. Google doesn’t pay much attention to you, and the stats page shows a few visits, most of which were probably your own. This is where most people give up, because it feels like shouting into a room full of people. We almost quit here too, more than once.
The first real visitors come in months three and four. Once you’ve got a couple of articles ranking, you’ll start to see your first clicks on affiliate links. Our first commission came in month four. It was tiny – about the size of a lunch plate – and we still took a screenshot of it. Then nothing happened for about two weeks, and we started to think it had just been luck. It wasn’t, but those two weeks felt like they dragged.
You can see the pattern in months five and six. Sometimes, a few pages keep bringing in clicks. Other times, nothing’s moving and you need to change something. By now, it’s usually pretty obvious which type of content works, and the smart move is to write more of that, not to start a second site.
This is roughly how we check whether a project is on track by the end of month six:
- Some articles bring in search traffic even though we haven’t touched them.
- There are a few commissions, even small ones, from different pages, and not just one lucky one.
- We know which offer works best for this audience.
- We still want to open the laptop in the evening, which is as important as the numbers.
To be honest, we don’t go through this list on a set date. Usually, we remember it when a month goes badly and we start wondering whether to give up. But that’s exactly when it’s useful.
Realistic expectations, as we’d explain them to a friend
If a friend asked us whether affiliate marketing is a good idea as a side hustle, we’d say yes, but not for the reasons the ads give. It’s cheap to get started with, you can pick up some useful skills (like writing, SEO and reading data), and if it works, you can still earn money even if you take a week off.
We’d tell them not to expect to make money quickly. For most people, the first year earns between nothing and a nice extra bit each month. The ones who go the extra mile usually pick one area, stick with it for longer than they would have liked, and treat the evenings like a proper job.
What really frustrates us is when someone says “it doesn’t work” after two months and immediately moves on to a new area. Then a year later they come back and ask how our site got traffic. The answer is boring. We didn’t leave.
We were a bit weak in one area. The most important thing is to choose an offer that’s right for your readers, not one that pays a lot. We still sometimes look at the payout first and only then check whether it fits. We know it’s wrong. It still happens. It’s better to give your audience a small reward that they really need, rather than a big reward that they don’t. We’ve learned this the hard way.
So the idea of earning money without having to work isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t have the first part of the story. The links do work while you sleep, but only after a long run of evenings when you were awake, writing pages that nobody read yet.
Cameron S. writes the kind of financial planning essentials content that people actually send to each other. Not because it's flashy or controversial, but because it's the sort of thing where you read it and immediately think of three people who need to see it. Cameron has a talent for identifying the questions that a lot of people have but haven't quite figured out how to articulate yet — and then answering them properly.
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