Affiliate Marketing or Ecommerce - Where Should YOU Start?
Here are a few things to consider when starting out, along with what worked for me.
For the sake of this post, let’s assume you’re broke starting from zero (remember, broke is a mindset anon). Here’s what you should know when beginning your wifi money journey:
Understanding The Basics: Affiliate Marketing vs Ecommerce
Making money online will only ever scale when you’re able to get paid while you’re asleep. Otherwise you’ve likely bought yourself another job (I’m looking at you agency owners).
And the only real way to make money online while you’re *asleep* is by either..
a) Selling your own product online and recognizing profit (ecommerce), or
b) Selling someone else’s product online and receiving commissions for every sale/action (affiliate marketing)
Those are the main differences. That’s it. It’s really that simple.
Both require knowledge to some degree of being able to sell. That’s often why having a background in sales in your career will give people an advantage when starting their wifi money journey. But we can still make do without it.
The goal for many is often times to get good at affiliate marketing first, and then move into ecommerce to build something real long term.
I would recommend to be well-versed in making ads online and copywriting. This will decrease the learning curve and give you the best possible shot at making this work.
I’ll cover how to make a high-converting ad in a future post but for now get familiarized with Canva for visuals and read Cashvertising for copywriting (read the sparknotes or ask ChatGPT to summarize the keypoints if you’re short on time).
If you want to take copywriting a step further, there are some prompts you can use on ChatGPT and knowledge articles you can use on Claude that produce some quality headlines (step-by-step guide in a future post), but for the sake of getting started, Cashvertising will suffice.
Now that you have the baseline skills to succeed in making money online, let’s jump into the costs.
Startup Costs & Investment
Affiliate Marketing
It goes without saying that affiliate marketing is the far cheaper option if you’re strapped for cash. In fact, this is where I began my online income journey.
Depending on how you’re planning to sell things online, you really only need around $500 when starting off to be safe before you can make your first dollar online with affiliate marketing.
I chose to go the blogging method when I was in college since it was the cheapest form of affiliate marketing and this is what my stack looked like when I got started:
Canva
Domain name
ChatGPT 4o
Ahrefs
SurferSEO
(I’ll cover all the different forms of affiliate marketing and the pros vs cons of each in a future post. But long story short, blogging was the best low-cost way to get started with affiliate marketing but required a lot of sweat equity to get the ball rolling.)
The main benefit of affiliate marketing is being able to jump onto the next offer whenever it runs dry.
You are not bound to any company at all. You hold no inventory. You simply sell someone else’s product for as long as it benefits you, then move on to the next product. That is your advantage as an affiliate marketer.
Ecommerce
If you’re unable to sell anything online from affiliate marketing, I would strongly advise against ecommerce. It’s a whole different beast that can easily drain your wallet if you aren’t smart enough.
In my experience, things tend to move faster in ecommerce with a higher likelihood of things breaking.
There’s a ton of moving parts (customer service, product-related issues, advertising, 3PL, manufacturers, etc.).
Personally, I’ve had to dish out close to around $10,000 to get started in ecommerce. This included things like:
Canva
ChatGPT
Domain name
Shopify subscription
Shopify plug-ins
Product samples/inventory
Ad spend for demand testing
3PL providers
and so much more.
The main benefit here is having a product/business that you can really call your own. For many people (myself included), this serves as a motivating factor in building your brand from ground-up.
I often found myself nitpicking over the smallest details just to ensure everything was perfect… something I would not bother to necessarily care about while doing affiliate marketing.
The downside? Basically the inverse of affiliate marketing.. if the brand crashes and burns, you go down with it. There is no other offer to jump to next, and you’d have to start all over again. Again, keeping things really broad here.
Effort & Time Commitment
Another reason why I recommend getting started with affiliate marketing first is because of the effort and time commitment needed to start seeing results compared to ecommerce.
You don’t need to worry about the product itself and can start pumping out ads/content right away to drive traffic to an offer.
But if you have the money, skills, and work remote (or at least have a cubicle), that’s the perfect set-up to excel in ecommerce.
Personally, I would work on affiliate marketing while I was in the office with an open-floor plan sitting right beside my boss 5x a week, 10 hours a day. No excuses. (thanks laptop privacy screens).
Writing blog posts, making ad creatives, and checking up on your ad performances is a lot easier to do when you’re in the office. But if you’re trying to do ecommerce? Good luck being able to jump on a call with your manufacturer/3PL team with your manager right beside you. It’s not impossible depending on your workplace set up, but it definitely becomes a lot harder.
Earning Potential
Depending on how you’re doing affiliate marketing, you can often see results within 24 hours. I briefly did affiliate marketing with TikTok Shop some time ago and made money the very same day I started.
My blog took about a year to make my first dollar. It was slow and steady but ultimately my goal was to create a digital asset that I could sell for some event-based income as opposed to chasing only commissions.
But over the long-term, I made way more money with my blog than I did with TikTok shop.
That’s because the blog fit my lifestyle and I was able to stick to it for years. All I had to do was upload one post a day that I would type up during work. Going live on TikTok and filming content while in the office 5 times a week was a lot harder so it was pretty short-lived.
Ecommerce on the other hand will take a lot more effort but the payouts are plentiful. If you can nail the ads, product landing page (hopefully skills you picked up during affiliate marketing), and product itself… you’ve essentially created your own money printer.
Not only will you make money from the sale of each product, the exit income is large once you’ve built a real business (think 3-6x annual profit).
Your ecommerce business made $100k in profit? Congratulations, your business can be sold for approximately half a million dollars.
“But Lemon, you’re being too optimistic! I can’t possibly do these numbers.”
Then why are you doing this in the first place? Don’t even bother doing any of this if you think this can’t be you.
Not selling any dreams here, but you need a certain degree of optimism to push through the days where you can’t see the light.
TL;DR: Generally speaking, affiliate marketing is faster money with no exit opportunities. Ecommerce is slower but larger exit opportunities.
Making The Choice
Don’t worry, I’m not going to say it depends. Get started with affiliate marketing if you’re starting from zero.
There’s limited downside and unlimited upside.
You need far less cash and time with affiliate marketing. The skills needed to get good at ad creatives and copywriting will only benefit you in the long run. If the brand you’re working with begins to go to shit, just jump over to the next offer.
Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to get good at advertising on different platforms (X, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.) without burning much of a hole in your pocket.
And most importantly, if you can’t sell someone else’s product.. what makes you think you can sell your own?