This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, all right, welcome to Cytosol School, kicking off the new year here, episode 2,558. So glad you're tuning in. If you're brand new, welcome. Every single day, a new episode about making money without quitting your job, using the skill you already have without going into debt. That's what we've been about for seven years now, seven plus years, in fact, going into season eight.
I'm looking forward to sharing some all new ideas and strategies with you. So let's just jump right in. Today, we're gonna look at being an Audible affiliate. Now, you may have seen these ads on YouTube. One of our listeners is gonna reference them in her question.
Is becoming an Audible affiliate the golden ticket to Cytosol success? Well, perhaps for some people, but of course, let's look at the claims and realities. All right, our listener, Tara, she's seeking an honest assessment of the potential profitability of this program. I'm gonna do my best to run it down. Is Audible a good affiliate partner?
You always get my own filtered opinion. Shout out to our sponsor and then the listener question followed by my answer. [Music]
Hey Chris, I'm Tara from Phoenix. I've been seeing a lot of ads and content suggesting that being an Audible affiliate is the best side hustle right now. But what's your take on this?
Does partnering with Audible as an affiliate really pay off or is this just a turning hype? I'm looking for an honest assessment of its potential as a profitable side hustle. [Music]
Hey Tara, thanks for the question. It's great that you're scrutinizing these claims critically. Definitely Audible can be a good affiliate program.
It's one of the most common programs. So it's easy to get onboarded. They approve pretty much everybody. You can jump in right away. But of course it doesn't mean you're going to be making tens of thousands of dollars a month or whatever ridiculous amounts that some of these YouTube ads claim.
So what does it actually look like? Well, basically when you're promoting the Audible affiliate program, you're trying to drive people to a trial subscription. And that's what Audible is paying for. There are some different tiers. The rates are different in different countries.
Sometimes there are promotions and so on. But just to give you a rough number, most of the time they're paying about $15 for every listener who signs up for a free trial through your affiliate link. So $15, not a ton of money. At the same time, they try to make that conversion process really simple. And again, the ask is a free trial.
So it's a little bit different than saying spend $500. If you got paid $15 for every $500 purchase, for example, that's not a very good rate because not many people are going to convert. Whereas if you do have a good amount of traffic or listeners or readers or followers, whatever the metric might be, and they don't currently have Audible accounts, well, that can be lucrative in some cases. So that's what you wanna think about. Like if you have an audience already, might they be a good fit for signing up for Audible?
And ideally you want an audience that kind of turns over, like over time. You don't want the same people because of course once you've pitched them a couple of times, they've either taken action or not taken action. So if you have a YouTube channel, for example, and you are bringing in new viewers all the time for some popular videos, then it can add up to a lot of money. It doesn't have to be YouTube, it could be something similar, but otherwise it might not. Like if you're not connecting with a lot of people, if you don't have great reach or engagement, then maybe something else would be better.
So that's the long and short of it, or at least it's the short of it, I could say more. You wanna think about audience match, you wanna think about how your audience turns over and how you might be able to convert them to free trials. That's what you need to know. I don't think you're gonna make tens of thousands of dollars a month, most likely, but could you make a few hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month, or maybe even a little bit more depending on your audience? Yes, of course.
So worth looking at for some people. Listeners, let me know what you think. If you have some experience in that or something else, if you have a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. I'm building out episodes for the year. I wanna make sure they are helpful, highly relevant and practical for you.
So let me know. I'll be on tour at some point again this year too. Hopefully we can hang out in person. But for now, I'm signing off. New episode of the podcast every day.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
