After being in the marketing industry for a couple of years I have come across people who get their degree in marketing only to find out that they do not like the job. I love it and I do not consider it a job because I find so much joy doing it. But I wanted to write this post to help people identify if they are a good fit for a marketing career.
A career in marketing has a median salary of $65 a year after you get a bachelor’s in marketing. A marketing manager with 20+ years of experience has an average salary of $104,748. A career in marketing can be rewarding if you enjoy analyzing data and figuring out what makes people buy products. source, source
Further down you will discover what it is like to be a marketer. Find this out before you spend years going to college and paying for it.
These are the topics that we will cover:
- How much does a career in marketing make?
- What online marketing job can you do while going to college?
- What kind of affiliate marketing offers should I look for?
- What skills does a marketer need?
- How to make more as an affiliate marketer?
Take a look at an interview with the 3 best marketers.
How much does a career in marketing make?
A career in marketing can make someone millions if you build a business around your marketing skills. If you decide to take the more practical route and work for someone you can expect to make about $65K when graduating. After 20 years of experience, you can demand a little over $104k for your salary.
| Location | Average Annual Salary | 10+ Years Experience | 25+ Years |
| New York | $75,605 | $79,742 | $99,765 |
| Florida | $69,219 | $74,38 | $96,570 |
| Texas | $66,858 | $68,816 | $76,610 |
| California | $69,219 | $74,038 | $96,570 |
| Chicago | $69,041 | $71,669 | $85,903 |
| Boston | $72,885 | $77,230 | $88,615 |
| Denver | $63,826 | $66,242 | $96,889 |
| Atlanta | $66,265 | $68,261 | $86,333 |
As you can see from the chart a career as a marketing manager can pay well. You will have to develop your skills as a marketer.
Right out of college you will have to build up experience and your starting salary will not be much. This is why I encourage anyone who is going to school for marketing to become an affiliate marketer.
As an affiliate marketer, you will gain first-hand real-world marketing experience. You will learn everything that has to do with marketing. Learning above and beyond what your marketing classes teach you will only help you in your career.
Affiliate marketers can make great money once you know what you’re doing.
As an affiliate marketer, you definitely can make enough money to get you through college. It’s perfect for anyone who does not have a lot of time.
You can do it from home and all you need is a laptop and an internet connection. You do not have to punch into a time clock at work, the freedom of working when you want is convenient when you have classes at different times and on different days.
Most affiliate marketers make less than 20k a year but there are plenty that makes more. This opportunity is great if you are looking into a career in marketing.
You will learn how to create ad campaigns on different marketing platforms. You will be familiar with running ads on Facebook, Instagram, Tik tok, Twitter, Pinterest, Native ads, Push ads, etc.
There is nothing that will prepare you for a career in marketing than actually doing the work for your own business as an affiliate.
What online marketing job can you do while going to college?
A job as an affiliate marketer gives you the flexibility of working from home and this is convenient for college students. Affiliate marketing offers you an opportunity to support yourself while going to college.
Affiliate marketing is when you promote links to offers or products on the internet for a commission. Amazon has an affiliate program and if you are excepted into their affiliate program you will be able to promote items that are for sale on Amazon and if the person buys you will get a percentage of the sale.
Amazon is not the only big company that has affiliate programs. Best Buy and Homedepot also have affiliate programs. You will be surprised at how many big companies have affiliate programs that you can join and start making commission checks from.
To find affiliate programs go into Google and search for a store name or brand name and follow it with the words affiliate program. This will show you if that store or brand has an affiliate program.
You can also become an affiliate marketer for digital products like software. These tend to pay a better commission because the margins are higher with software products and so the commission can be higher.
What kind of affiliate offers should I look for?
Any affiliate product that has continuous communications for any of their offers is a good product to promote. The LTV (lifetime value) of the customer will help your ROAS (return on ad spend).
If it is costing you $25 for each conversion and the payout is $26 you are only profiting $1 per conversion. But if the offer has continuous commissions you can make a nice profit with the offer.
At a 20% return conversion for each conversion, you will be adding another $5.20 per conversion. That raises your average profit for each conversion to $6.20.
With 30 conversions a day that breakdown would be $30 a day profit with no continuous commissions. But with recurring commissions that same campaign will get you $186 a day of profit. Plus a commission every time that customer pays for more services or products.
This is why when looking for offers as an affiliate marketer you should give special attention to any offer that has continuous commissions.
What skills does an affiliate marketer need?
Developing some basic website design skills will help you create websites or landing pages for your affiliate offers. Learning how to create compelling short and long-form ad copy is important. The ability to put together a sales funnel that converts is how an affiliate marketer makes a living.
A landing page or website will be necessary for any good affiliate marketer. If you want to create a website for a specific niche that you want to run offers in, you are going to have to learn how to build the website yourself.
The good news is that you no longer have to know how to code to create a website. There are a few good website building programs that you can build your website on.
If you want to build your website I recommend creating it on WordPress. They have many plugin options that will help you customize your website.
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You will need hosting for your website and as a beginner, your best choice is Blue Host because they are so affordable and they will give you more than you need to start.
The best part about Blue Host is that they make it super easy for you to host your WordPress website. Sign up for blue Host and they will automatically download Word Press to your computer and you can get started with your website.
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I recommend getting Short Pixel as a plugin. It compresses your pictures and helps your website load faster and this helps with conversion. I prefer Short Pixel compared to the other options because they reduce file sizes the most and the price is great.
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Capturing email addresses from visitors to your website will help you generate more revenue. You already went through the trouble of getting them to your website so you might as well try retargeting them with future similar offers.
If you have a nice email list and you have a website in the fitness niche, you can retarget new fitness offers to your email list. You do not have to invest anything in marketing to target them.
The industry average value for each email is fifty cents. Make good use of an email list and enjoy the profits.
The best email marketing software is AWeber.
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If you want to send your clicks to a landing page I recommend Landerrize or Clickfunnels. I recommend Landerrize over Clickfunnels because it’s a lot faster and you will not lose any conversions due to slow page load speeds.
Clickfunnels is easier to work with but their load speeds are horrible in my experience. I was getting 5 to 6-second page speeds on my lender. Your conversion rate will be less than 1% of your page speed is above 4.2 seconds. Source
For pages that load faster than 2.4 seconds, the conversation rate is 1.9%. This means that if you have a lander on Clickfunnels that loads in 5 seconds and you are making $200 a day on that offer, you can change to a fast-loading landing software like Landerrize and your campaign should jump up to about $380 a day.
I would love to promote Clickfunnels because the commission and the recurring commissions are great but I can not promote a product that has lost me money.
Link with a free 14-day trial offer below.
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The skill of creating compelling ad copy on your website or lander is the difference between an affiliate marketer that makes 20k a year and one that makes 100k+ a year.
Learn what power words are. Use them and read a book on creating ad copy. The universally known 12 steps to creating good ad copy is a must-read.
For the famous 12 step foolproof secrets of great ad copy join our email list and mention “12 steps” and we will send them to you in a PDF.
Use the Hemingway app when creating ad titles and descriptions. Use the app to keep the grammar at a 5th-grade level or lower.
Keep it simple and practice and test different ad copy. You will start to learn what type of ad copy works best for the vertical that you choose to work in.
How to learn to be a good affiliate marketer?
I recommend 4 different affiliate training. If you want to learn how to create content on your website to drive traffic organically your best choice is income school.
They teach you how to create a blog targeted to your niche. You will learn how to Google optimize your website. Knowing how to win the Google snippet is worth so much money because what they teach works and has generated me a few placement zeros.
They also teach you how to create info products and how to drive traffic to your YouTube page. This is the best affiliate training I have ever received but its SEO. Search engine optimization takes time and a lot of hard work.
Keep that in mind before joining their community. If you want fast results that are easy to do you will not complete their course.
On the flip side if you do put in the work you should be generating a good income from your blog in about 8 months.
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John Crestani has an affiliate course that is great for beginners. He teaches you how to get set up with the Amazon affiliate program. He has some cool secret sauce on paid ads and a few free traffic hacks.
Take a look at the article Forbes wrote about him: Click here for Forbes article
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Colin from Dij University is another great course. He has a forum that is very active (so does income school) and he teaches push ads and native ads.
If you have a budget of above $1,000 to invest in testing campaigns and want to get fast results I recommend Dij University. To better your odds I think a budget of $3,000 should give you enough bankroll to invest in testing enough campaigns to find profitable ones.
Colin teaches what the big time media buyers are doing. This is high end secret sauce and it’s where you go from beginner to advanced.
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Click bank is an affiliate program where they have hundreds of affiliate offers for you to choose from. It is where most of us affiliate get started with our affiliate careers.
Not only do they have hundreds of affiliate offers but they have a training. Who else to teach you the ropes than someone who makes money when you make money.
Choosing the right mentor for your affiliate career will be difficult. I would not recommend anyone else other than the ones on this list. There are many different courses by supposed gurus and I wasted my money on those courses.
I learned the most from these courses. As I grow as an affiliate I look to learning more secret sauce by buying and joining affiliate groups.
Depending on what your goals are and what your financial situation is, it will determine who to go with at first.
I will try to break it down a little further.
- For a complete beginner, I say: John Crestani or Click Bank
- For someone who knows how or can learn how to create a website on WordPress but does not have a big budget to test ad campaigns I recommend: Income School (SEO takes time and work but it’s FREE)
- Someone who can create a website or a lander and has some knowledge about marketing, I say: Dij University
Related Question:
How to make more as an affiliate marketer?
Find a mentor that can tell you what strategies work and what strategies you need to avoid because they are dead ends. Finding a mentor will help you speed up the process and cut the cost to get started. Find a mentor that has an active chat because it will be a community and the group can work together.
Related Information that will make or save you money: