Every so often I get the same question from someone who wants to start a blog, a YouTube channel or a TikTok account: does affiliate marketing actually pay, or is it another one of those models that only work for the gurus selling courses about the model. The short answer is that it does pay, but with a condition that motivational videos tend to leave out of the script. You need traffic, and building traffic is serious work. In this guide I explain what affiliate marketing is, how it works under the hood, how much you can earn with realistic numbers and how to start in Peru without burning out along the way.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a model where you recommend another company's products or services through a trackable link, and that company pays you a commission every time someone buys (or sometimes, every time someone signs up) after arriving through your link.
It works much like a real estate broker. The broker does not own the house, does not set the price and does not handle the paperwork, but if the sale closes thanks to their work, they take a percentage. In the digital version, you do not manufacture the product, hold inventory or answer post-sale complaints. Your job is to connect a person who has a problem with a product that solves it, and to document that connection with a link.
Four actors participate in the system. The merchant, which is the company that owns the product. The affiliate, which is you. The platform or affiliate network, which tracks the links and manages payments. And the buyer, who ideally never notices the difference, because they pay exactly the same as if they had arrived directly.
That last point matters. The commission comes out of the merchant's marketing budget, not the buyer's pocket. For the company it is a sales channel where they only pay when there are results, which is why so many are willing to offer one.
How does it work under the hood?
When someone clicks your affiliate link, the platform drops a cookie in their browser that says "this person came through this affiliate". If the purchase happens within the program's attribution window, the sale is credited to you and your commission is generated.
The details of that mechanism define a large part of your income, so it pays to look at them before signing anything.
The attribution window varies enormously between programs. Some credit purchases made up to 30, 60 or 90 days after the click, while others only count the first 24 hours. With a short window, you only get paid for what people buy almost immediately.
The commission depends on the type of product. For physical products the usual range is between 3% and 10% of the price. For digital products, such as courses or ebooks, it can climb to ranges of 30% to 50%, because the marginal cost of selling one more copy is close to zero. And in subscription software there are programs that pay recurring commissions: a percentage every month for as long as the customer you brought keeps paying, which is the most interesting format for building stable income.
There are also programs that pay per signup or per qualified lead instead of paying per sale. They tend to pay less per action, but they convert more easily.
How much do you earn with affiliate marketing?
This is where I would rather be the party pooper than the smoke seller. Let's run the exercise with invented numbers, but in the right order of magnitude.
Suppose you have a tech blog that gets 10,000 visits a month, and 3,000 of those visits land on your articles with affiliate links (reviews, comparisons, buying guides). Of those 3,000 people, 30% click through to the store: 900 clicks. The store converts 2% of those clicks into sales: 18 sales. If the average order is 400 soles and your commission is 6%, you earned 432 soles that month.
The exercise leaves two lessons. The first is that with small traffic, commissions cover your hosting bill and little else. The second is that the model scales almost linearly with traffic: the same blog with 100,000 monthly visits, holding the other rates constant, would be generating around 4,300 soles a month with the same content structure.
That is why I insist that affiliate marketing is, at its core, an audience business. The product already exists, the store already exists, the logistics already exist. What you bring is the ability to attract people with purchase intent, and that ability is built like any other asset: with time, with method and with content that answers what people are searching for. If you come from the world of ecommerce or have looked at models like dropshipping, the logic will sound familiar, because the bottleneck is the same. Getting the visit costs more than processing the sale.
Is affiliate marketing legal in Peru?
Yes, it is a completely legal commercial activity. What you need to keep in order are two fronts.
The first is taxes. Affiliate commissions are income, and as income, they are taxable before SUNAT. The exact category depends on how you are organized (individual with a business, a company, independent services) and on where the payment comes from, since many platforms pay from abroad. I am not going to hand out tax advice here because I am not an accountant and every case has nuances; my suggestion is that once the amounts start to matter, that conversation with an accountant pays for itself.
The second front is transparency with your audience. The general rule in advertising is that a paid recommendation must be recognizable as such, and the healthy practice (also required by most serious programs) is to disclose that you use affiliate links. A simple notice along the lines of "if you buy through my links I receive a commission, at no extra cost to you" does the job. And it has a side effect I like: it forces you to recommend only things you can defend, because your credibility is on the line with every link.
Which programs should you start with?
Rather than giving you a list of names, let me leave you the three big groups to look in, because programs change their conditions frequently and what matters is knowing how to evaluate them.
The big international networks group thousands of brands in one place, with a single payment system. That is where you will find digital product platforms, very strong in the Spanish-speaking market, and networks representing global software and retail brands.
Direct programs from stores and brands tend to pay better than networks, because there is no intermediary. Several large stores in the region have opened their own programs; before committing to a niche, check which programs accept affiliates from Peru and what currency they pay in.
And subscription software is the group that shines the least in tutorials and pays the best over time, thanks to recurring commissions. If your content targets companies or professionals, it is probably your best option.
When evaluating any program, look at four things before the commission rate: the attribution window, the minimum payout, the payment methods available in Peru and the product's reputation. A 40% commission on a product people keep returning builds nothing.
How do you start, step by step?
First, choose your niche with data and not on a hunch. Before writing a single line, check what people are actually searching for in your topic: Google searches are the cheapest market diagnosis there is. Look for topics with searches like "best X", "X vs Y" or "X review", because that is the person who is one step away from buying.
Second, start with products you genuinely know. A comparison written by someone who used both products shows, and one assembled by reading other reviews also shows. Google has spent years adjusting its algorithm to reward first-hand experience, and AI answers cite people who contribute original information more often.
Third, build a traffic asset, not loose posts. It can be a blog built with solid SEO writing, a YouTube channel or a newsletter that makes you independent from whichever algorithm is trending. The format matters less than consistency and than choosing topics with real demand.
Fourth, think of your content as a funnel. You need pieces that attract the broad audience and comparison pieces that convert, linked to each other. The classic mistake is producing only the former (lots of traffic, zero commissions) or only the latter (lots of intent, zero traffic).
Fifth, measure and prune. Review every quarter which pieces generate clicks and commissions, update the ones losing positions and remove links from programs that changed their conditions. Affiliate sites that stop being maintained lose income faster than they earned it, because comparisons age with every price or catalog change.
The mistakes I see most often
The first is choosing a niche by commission size instead of demand. If the product pays a 50% commission but 50 people a month search for it in Peru, the math from the example above tells you everything you need to know about that business.
The second is depending on a single traffic source or a single program. Platforms change rules, stores cut commissions and algorithms update without warning you. Having at least two traffic sources and several active programs gives you room to absorb those changes without losing the whole month's income.
The third is producing filler content at scale. Google's latest spam updates hit affiliate sites with hundreds of generic reviews and no real experience behind them especially hard. In this model it pays to bet on a few well-worked comparisons with real experience rather than a catalog of recycled product sheets, both for rankings and for conversion.
To wrap up
If you want to test the model, this week you can run a concrete exercise without spending a sol. Pick a topic you know well, write down ten comparison searches a buyer in that topic would make, check them on Google and look at who is answering today. Then check whether the products involved have affiliate programs open to Peru. If you find searches with demand, mediocre answers and available programs, you have a real opening. And if you do not find it on the first try, change topics and repeat: the exercise costs one afternoon and saves you months of work aimed at the wrong niche.