Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It? 2025 [Honest Opinion]

7 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing Is Worth It

Affiliate marketing is a powerful business model.  I wanted to provide an honest opinion on why you should still pursue becoming an affiliate marketer to promote products and earn commissions.

Here are the reasons why affiliate marketing is still worth it today.

1. Passive Income

A lot of people consider affiliate marketing to be passive income, and I’d agree but only if you define passive income properly (Related Post: Does passive income exist?).

I like to define passive income as generating income from work that you did upfront and in turn, requires only a very small time commitment to maintain the same level of income.

With this definition in mind, affiliate marketing is very much passive income.  Especially, when you compare it to a consulting business.

So, really the only thing that’s required to start building up affiliate commissions by creating high-quality content consistently over time.

2. Stable Income Is Possible!

If you do it right, affiliate marketing can become a stable source of income.  The best way to reduce the risk of an affiliate marketing business is by focusing on diversifying your marketing streams.

Some marketing streams that I recommend to drive traffic to affiliate offers are:

• Blogging – Create your own website and drive traffic from Google and other search engines using the power of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  If you’re interested in learning SEO, then check out this post I made on the best sites and YouTube channels to learn SEO for free.
• YouTube Channel – A YouTube channel will help you greatly to de-commoditize your content.  As the face of your brand, you can start to build a community and trust which makes it much easier to sell info products down the road.
• Podcast – A podcast is a great way to connect with your audience in the moments where they may be trying to multi-task.  It’s a great way to always have content that your audience can listen to on-the-go.
• Email List – Your email list is an asset that you own.  It’s a great way to warm up a cold audience and also share your latest content as it gets released.

3. Work From Home Or Just About Anywhere With Internet Connection

Working from home is a huge plus for affiliate marketing and is likely a reason why you’re pursuing it as an online business yourself.

The benefits of this are obvious and you can travel and work from just about anywhere.

4. Leverage Big Brand Names

Affiliate marketing specifically is an incredible way to break into a niche or just get started with any online business in general.

Chances are you don’t really have an audience when starting out and you certainly haven’t built up your company name to be a worldwide brand. 

The cool part is that you can promote products on Amazon and other huge global retailers and online e-commerce stores that people are already familiar with.  This in turn greatly increases the conversion rate giving you more commissions when starting out.

5. Super Scalable Business Model

When you create an online business, there are really two options for driving traffic from either organic or paid methods.

Unlike consulting or any active job, affiliate marketing doesn’t directly trade time for money.

This means you just need to create more content or put more money into profitable ads to scale up and generate more sales for your business.

6. Product Creation & Support Is Unnecessary – Just Drive Traffic!

My favorite part about affiliate marketing is that you can get started promoting a product right away if you want to.

It’s not like creating software or any other product because the product is already made for you.

All that’s left for you to do is simply drive traffic to the affiliate offers that you’re promoting.

7. Very Minimal Startup Cost

When you compare affiliate marketing to starting an offline business such as a restaurant, you start to see just how minimal of a startup cost there is.

With affiliate marketing, you can build a YouTube channel, start a Facebook group, or start a blog for next to nothing.

3 Downsides To Affiliate Marketing

With all the great things that come with affiliate marketing, there are still a few things that aren’t so great that need to be mentioned.

Here’s the list of downsides to affiliate marketing that I came up with.

1. Affiliate Programs Can Cut Commissions

Amazon is a company that’s notorious for cutting affiliate commissions.

Sometimes they’ve even cut commissions by more than half for there affiliates with only a week’s warning.

If you’re relying solely on affiliate marketing and Amazon or any single affiliate program, then you will want to consider promoting more programs.

The more you can diversify, the better prepared you are for when an affiliate program cuts commissions.

2. Affiliate Programs Can Be Shut Down

Not only can affiliate program commissions be cut without warning, but affiliate programs can also be shut down entirely.

This doesn’t happen often if you choose the right affiliate programs which I’ll get to later on in this post.

3. ROI & Sales Tracking Is Difficult 

If you’re selling your own digital or physical products, you can easily track the ROI for you business since you have full control over the sales process.

The affiliate link tracking software that I use to be able to dynamically track were affiliate sales are coming from to counteract this tracking issue is called ClickMagick.  It’s an awesome tracking software that will help greatly.

3 Best Types Of Affiliate Marketing Programs That Are Worth The Effort Of Promoting

The final thing I wanted to discuss was different affiliate programs you can join to better ensure the success of your affiliate marketing business.

1. Evergreen Affiliate Marketing Programs

Evergreen affiliate programs are where you can promote products that will be needed year-round for years.

Sure, you could promote products that are trending.  However, this is a big risk and means your content will be out of date once the product itself is. 

You should instead focus your time on products that will likely still be around for the next 10 years.

2. High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Programs

It’s not absolutely necessary to promote high ticket products if you’ve got a large amount of traffic.  Promoting both low-ticket and high ticket products works.

However, when you focus on high ticket products that give you over $1,000 for a single commission it greatly reduces the amount of traffic you need to reach the level of income that you need.

The big thing you need to nail down for it to work is your process of warming up leads and gaining trust.

3. Recurring Affiliate Marketing Programs

Monthly and yearly recurring affiliate programs are a huge goldmine.

If I were you, I’d focus my efforts on promoting primarily recurring affiliate programs.

This ensures that you’ve got a much more stable income over time to work with for your business that keeps coming in even if you don’t send more traffic to the affiliate product for awhile.

Final Thoughts: Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?

If you haven’t guessed it yet, my opinion is that affiliate marketing is worth it to pursue for your online business.

Eventually, once you’re making substantial income with affiliate marketing I’d recommend pursuing building your own digital product to sell.

This eliminates the issues of affiliate programs shutting down or cutting commissions.  You’ll have to put in more work upfront before you see any sales but is definitely worth it to diversify and spread out your income streams.

If you’re interested in more posts on affiliate marketing, then you can keep reading by checking out some of the suggested posts below.