If you search for different ways to earn money online, I can almost guarantee that you will come across a blog or forum comment advising you to try affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online with minimal investment. However, The road to affiliate marketing success isn’t always smooth and easy.
It’s frequently filled with obstacles and challenges, but all that hard work, blood, sweat, and tears pay off in the long run when it is done right.
In this article, I have compiled some of the best affiliate marketing success stories to inspire you.
While not everyone will achieve the same level of success as the individuals in this article, I hope these examples motivate you by showing you what is possible if you stick to it and take it seriously.
The short version: Some of the best affiliate marketing success examples include Pat Flynn, Darren Rowse, and John Chow. These people have put in a lot of hard work and reaped the rewards.
Read on for more details about these great affiliate marketers and how they achieved success!
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
Before we get into the list, though, I wanted to give a brief introduction to affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is often hailed as one of the easiest ways to make money online because of the minimum investment it requires.
You don’t have to purchase products and stock them. Affiliate marketing has a very simple model, which involves promoting other people’s products and earning commissions on the sales you make.
For example, let’s say you promote a pillow sold by Amazon. Someone visits your site, sees your pillow recommendation, clicks on your unique affiliate link, and buys the product from Amazon.
Amazon will then give you a small commission.
While Amazon usually gives commissions of 4%, it is possible to earn a lot more than that by promoting digital products such as ebooks.
Since ebooks and other digital products don’t involve any additional overhead (such as warehouse rental space), many affiliate programs are more than happy to give you commissions of 50% or even more – I’ve seen commissions as high as 80%.
You do need to drive traffic, though. Many people set up a blog that reviews different kinds of products, but you can also drive traffic through social media and email campaigns.
However, while blog and social media traffic is free, it can also take a lot of time to drive enough traffic to earn a full-time income from affiliate marketing. That is why many affiliate marketers recommend using paid advertising campaigns to drive traffic, which speeds up the process.
Here are some forms of paid advertising that you can use:
- PPC ads on sites like Google and Bing
- Social media ads (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Solo ads (paid emails sent to other affiliate marketers’ email lists)
Also Read: Best Affiliate Link Cloakers
Affiliate Marketing Tips To Consider
Now that you have a general understanding of affiliate marketing, let me briefly share some of my top affiliate marketing tips before getting into the list of the best affiliate marketing success examples.
- Choose the right niche. It should be a niche you are passionate about, so you can keep going even if things seem to be progressing slowly. It should also be an evergreen niche (not something like Christmas decor) and one with a high and consistent demand.
- Try to focus on digital products, such as courses, membership sites, software, and ebooks, if possible. They tend to offer better commissions.
- Start off with at least $1,000 (at least for things such as a unique domain name and hosting), and try to supplement free traffic with paid traffic if you can afford to do so. Try out different traffic sources until you find one that has a good ROI.
Let’s get into the list!
10 Affiliate Marketing Success Stories to Inspire You
1. Pat Flynn
Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income is one of the biggest names in the affiliate marketing industry. When people think of affiliate marketing success stories, Pat Flynn often comes to mind.
He is also a published and respected author, having written various books on business and developing an entrepreneurial mindset. Some of his books include Will It Fly? and Superfans.
His Smart Passive Income blog, which he founded in 2008, was meant as a way to help others make money with affiliate marketing and other online methods, just like he did. The fact that he founded it back in 2008 shows that he really was a pioneer in the affiliate marketing scene.
He actually got into affiliate marketing when he was laid off from his job as an architect. While he didn’t go to business school, he was still able to use affiliate marketing to build a seven-figure income on the Internet.
He also hosts a podcast – the Smart Passive Income podcast – where he discusses topics related to affiliate marketing, achieving financial freedom, and becoming your own boss.
He also sells a wide range of courses in which he teaches beginners and more advanced people alike how to achieve success with affiliate marketing.
How much does Pat Flynn make? Some years back, he published regular income reports, so let’s take a look.
According to his December 2017 income report, he made over $166,000 in gross earnings that month alone, and over $105,000 of that was from affiliate marketing. Remember, Pat sells his own courses and books as well – it is important to have multiple income streams.
Pat stopped publishing his monthly income reports, but I am assuming his income only grew as the years went by and his business expanded.
If he earned that much in a month, it means he earns over one million dollars a year from affiliate marketing! That is a massive amount because it shows that if you do it right, affiliate marketing can easily make you a millionaire.
2. Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse, @Problogger, Twitter
Darren Rowse is an Australian businessman and affiliate marketer. He is best known for his ProBlogger job board and blog.
The ProBlogger website is a blog where Darren shares tips on blogging in general and affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing helps to monetize a blog, although you can also monetize it by running ads or selling your own courses.
He started blogging back in 2004-2005, and he now earns a full-time income from blogging. His ProBlogger blog contains tips, resources, and more.
It also has a job board, where people post blogging and writing jobs – mostly freelance jobs.
Darren doesn’t like to give exact dollar amounts of how much he earns. However, back in 2016, he did share a breakdown of his income from his online businesses.
A whopping 46% of his income came from affiliate marketing. That included promoting software, courses, ebooks, and even Amazon products (although Amazon affiliate commissions only accounted for 9% of his income).
If you visit his articles, you will notice affiliate links. They allow him to earn passive income, but he has also diversified his income by selling his own products, charging clients for posting jobs on his job board, and more.
Also Read:
3. John Chow
Creative Visual Productions, YouTube
John Chow is a really interesting character. His website is ranked #1 among the Top 50 Canadian Internet Marketing Blogs, according to his About page.
By working just two hours a day, he was able to take his new blog from earning nothing to earning $40,000 a month! He uses a variety of methods to make money, including affiliate marketing.
He won the 2012 Affiliate Marketing Award as well as the Affy Award at the Affiliate Summit in New York in 2012. Also, he published a couple of books, including Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul, in which he shares how people can copy his strategies to be successful online.
So, what’s so intriguing about John Chow’s story? He has very humble beginnings, being born in a small farming town in China.
His parents immigrated to Canada when he was just seven years old. Growing up as an immigrant, he obviously faced challenges.
However, he persevered, and by 2009, he reached an income of half a million dollars.
He is also a member of the Save the Whales Association and a contestant for the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). He is a man who wears a lot of hats!
This just goes to show you that the world of affiliate marketing is diverse, and all sorts of people have achieved success with it. You don’t have to fit into a certain mold to make good money with affiliate marketing.
4. Kyle and Carson
The two founders of Wealthy Affiliate are simply known as Kyle and Carson, although their full names are Kyle Loudon and Carson Lim.
Wealthy Affiliate is an affiliate marketing training platform and membership site that teaches people how to make money with affiliate marketing.
Many people have successfully used the strategies taught by Wealthy Affiliate to become successful affiliate marketers themselves, but that’s not the focus of this article.
Instead, let’s focus on Kyle and Carson themselves, two of the early pioneers of affiliate marketing, who really helped it become popular.
Wealthy Affiliate is a bit controversial, having received criticism for charging high monthly membership fees (although a free membership option is available). It also seems to encourage members to promote Wealthy Affiliate, leading to a lot of blog posts praising Wealthy Affiliate only to include an affiliate link to the site at the bottom.
Nevertheless, promoting Wealthy Affiliate is optional – you can choose to promote other niche products instead.
Despite all that, we can’t deny that the two founders have been incredibly successful. Wealthy Affiliate has been around for almost two decades, so it must be doing something right.
Obviously, the strategies they have been teaching have been working, not only for themselves but for others as well. That is how they have managed to make Wealthy Affiliate such a big name in the affiliate marketing industry – if you have ever researched affiliate marketing, you have likely come across Wealthy Affiliate at least once.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliate with Wealthy Affiliate, and I am not promoting it here. I am simply using Kyle and Carson as examples of successful affiliate marketers.
5. Patric Chan
Patric Chan is an affiliate marketer and online entrepreneur who has managed to build a small empire of products and passive income sources. He and his products have been featured on major publications like Forbes and CNN, according to his website.
He is also an author. Based in Malaysia, he is known for the products he sells on ClickBank and for being a ClickBank affiliate marketer.
ClickBank, while not as popular as it used to be, is one of the largest affiliate marketing marketplaces. On ClickBank, you can find all sorts of digital products to promote as an affiliate, including software, ebooks, and membership sites.
In fact, Patric is a ClickBank Super Affiliate and has been awarded Platinum Partner. He has also been invited to the ClickBank headquarters in Boise, Ohio, making the distinction of being the only Malaysian affiliate marketer to have been invited.
He is also a speaker who has spoken in 11 countries.
He now helps others make money online, both with affiliate marketing and through other methods, such as building apps.
6. Nate O’Brien
Nate O’Brien, NateObrien.com
Nate O’Brien is an affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. His YouTube channel, where he has over one million subscribers, talks about personal finance, affiliate marketing, financial freedom, and other related topics.
His journey started in 2017 when he started his YouTube channel with the goal of educating others on personal finance. He was still in college, and he actually started the channel from his dorm room.
While his website and YouTube channel primarily teach others about personal finance, he does make money from affiliate marketing himself.
To make money, you don’t have to teach others how to be affiliate marketers or start a blog about affiliate marketing. That is a common misconception.
Instead, you can start a blog about any subject, such as personal finance.
7. Matt Diggity
Matt Diggity is an affiliate and digital marketer who has been doing affiliate marketing for over a decade. He is also an SEO specialist, and aside from affiliate marketing, he makes money by helping clients rank their sites and by providing SEO services.
His lifestyle has allowed him to travel to over 50 countries while making money online. While he has lived in places as remote as Costa Rica and Japan, he is currently based in Chiang Mai, like many other affiliate marketers and digital nomads.
Chiang Mai has become known as a hotspot for digital nomads – people who make money online while moving from place to place or living remotely.
He even created a product called The Affiliate Lab, which helps users rank their affiliate websites in profitable affiliate niches.
In one monthly income report, he reported earning six figures from ClickFunnels course sales. That same month, he sold over 128,000 units of toilet paper as an Amazon affiliate.
While that didn’t net him a lot of money (Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate program – is notorious for paying very low commissions), the fact that he sold so many units is very impressive.
8. Charles Ngo
Charles Ngo is a well-known former affiliate marketer who achieved a lot of success with affiliate marketing until he retired in 2019.
While he no longer practices affiliate marketing and prefers to maintain a low profile, it’s worth including him simply because his story is so fascinating and motivational.
He started with online selling by finding discounted items and selling them for full price on eBay. This kind of business is often called discount hacking – you might buy entire shelves of items being sold on clearance at your local Walmart and then resell them on eBay.
He made $25,000 while he was just a college student, but PayPal eventually banned him. I don’t know why, but I’m not surprised – PayPal has a habit of banning people for no good reason.
A lot of people forget that PayPal is not a bank and doesn’t operate under the same regulations as banks, which means they can freeze your account without facing the same repercussions a bank might.
In any case, he eventually discovered affiliate marketing while researching additional ways to earn an income online. At first, though, it was a massive failure.
He tried 14 different traffic sources, and none of them were successful. In fact, he lost $4,000 trying to drive traffic from these sources.
However, he didn’t give up, and his 15th traffic source proved to be profitable. In fact, he made $75,000 from that traffic source.
That year, he made $1 million in total, which is a crazy amount of money.
One thing that strikes me as interesting is how Charles said that he mostly uses paid advertising and paid traffic methods to earn his affiliate commissions, with the exception being only his blog.
He said he’s not a fan of free traffic because it takes forever to get results. I agree – back when I did affiliate marketing myself, I spent hours writing content on my blog, and it took many months before the initial sales started coming in.
In any case, in 2019, Charles retired from affiliate marketing. I don’t think the reason is that he wasn’t making enough money – if you are making $1 million a year, that’s pretty good money.
However, perhaps he found something even more lucrative. Or, perhaps he sold his business for a lot of money, enough money to let him retire for the rest of his life – who knows?
Either way, his story should motivate and inspire you.
9. Mark Ling
Mark Ling is an affiliate marketing and internet entrepreneur who started a lot of companies, including Affilorama and SaleHoo, which are the two companies he is most well known for.
SaleHoo is a premium directory of dropshipping suppliers.
Meanwhile, Affilorama is a community and training course that teaches people how to make money with affiliate marketing, using the strategies that Mark himself used to achieve success. With over 100 video lessons, anyone can become a successful affiliate marketer.
Another product is AffiloTools, a suite of tools that will help you boost your SEO campaigns.
Mark Link reportedly became a millionaire from his internet ventures at the tender age of 21. Either way, he has shown himself to be a competent affiliate marketer, and he has helped many of his students become successful internet entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers as well.
10. Attila O’dree
Attila O’dree, IAmAttila.com
Attila O’dree is an affiliate marketer who has been in the game since 2008. In 2013, he created his blog (I Am Attila) to help others learn to be successful affiliate marketers as well.
In one interview, O’dree stated that his highest monthly income was $900,000. Can you imagine making that much in just a month?
According to his website, he actually started with online income back in 1998, when he was just 15 years old. He started a small web design company that designed logos, flash presentations, and more for clients.
He eventually abandoned the company and got a “real” job (in tech).
After he got married in 2006, he was in Serbia, and he tried to make money by organizing and hosting parties, but he lost over a hundred thousand dollars at first. Eventually, he realized that to avoid having to go back home to Canada, he needed to make money online, so he started with various niches and eventually started killing it.
He now helps others become affiliate marketers, but he’s realistic, which is a breath of fresh air. His FAQs page is clear that you should have at least $1,000 to invest to get started with affiliate marketing.
Final Words
So, there we have it: some great examples of people who have achieved great success with affiliate marketing. Many have gone on to help others become successful affiliates.
Do note that affiliate Marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick way. It requires hard work, perseverance, and patience.
So, stay dedicated and don’t give up on your affiliate marketing journey just yet.
