Why I’m Learning Affiliate Marketing

Ever since I read The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris last summer, I knew that I wouldn’t be happy in a 9-5 job in the long run. I would start my own business, and I would eventually free up most of my time by making my income largely passive so that I could use the money I earned to fund the endeavours I would carry out in the rest of my time.

This was a distant goal though, and I had no idea where or how to actually start. At the time, I continued to focus on university and my job, and the business idea took a backseat in my brain.

Fast forward a year, I had begun my research and had a list of different side hustle opportunities - mostly around selling digital products online - that I wanted to try at some point and had not yet gotten around to doing.

Recently though, I have been getting recommendations from several affiliate marketer accounts on Instagram, and after having a quick look online into what this really is, I added it to my mental to-do list as something to explore when I had some spare time.

It was marketed as a side hustle that people with no prior experience in the field could do; a passive income strategy that could be sustained by only a couple hours of work a day; and, most importantly, something with massive earning potential. Captivated, I ended up following a handful of affiliate marketer accounts on Instagram. These were people claiming to be earning tens of thousands of dollars a month and living their dreams.

A friend asked me recently, if I had to commit to doing one thing my entire life — I could do other things on the side but I needed to keep doing this one thing — what would it be? I responded, writing. I would do a hundred different things, and then I’d write about them. I’d make a digital diary out of my life.

And I thought, if affiliate marketing can be incorporated into that — if I can simply keep living like I want to, while writing about the things I do and reviewing the resources I use to earn an affiliate income — then I could just do what I love, and make a living out of it.

Part of my brain was intrigued by the opportunity to make passive income this way, but the bigger part of it believed that it was too good to be true. Regardless, I knew that if I didn’t try it out, it would keep bugging me and I would eventually come and revisit it a few months or years down the line just to make sure I hadn’t hopped over a potential gold mine.

As a fresh graduate, having just quit the corporate job I'd been working alongside my last year of university, I was burnt out and on a much-needed break before I looked for any new work. This abyss seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with something like affiliate marketing, since the opportunity cost was next to nothing. If I succeeded, great. If not, I would have gained valuable knowledge and experience around marketing and online business strategies, which would undoubtedly help me somewhere in life.

Moreover, I had just moved back to my family home for this break, meaning that living expenses were negligible and I could invest in this endeavour guilt-free to a certain extent. I decided I would give it a real shot. Lock my doubts away and believe that all the people getting crazy results are telling the truth. Go into it with the mindset that I would also succeed. That brings us to now.