Affiliate marketing appeals to many because of the low start up costs, you dont need staff, storage and daily trips to the post office like a typical internet business and therefore there is little risk.
The costs are dependent on the individual you can use free hosting, no domain and free advertising methods or go all out buy a premium domain, dedicated servers and spend hundreds on ppc and media buying.
I am therefore going to record my spending and keep it under £500, once I have reached this I will not spend anymore until I have recouped it from affiliate revenue. My costs have been as follows:
15 domains x£7.03 – £105.45 (my first thought! wow i’ve spent over £100 on domains!)
Studiopress wordpress theme – £28.59
Woothemes Canvas theme -£48.56
1 year webhosting – £44.99
So in total: £227.59 – almost half of my budget and I haven’t even got a site up yet, hmm.. hope things take a positive turn 
I ended up spending close to £200 on domains in January for micro-niche sites… as it stands the products are not yet commonly available but will be from next month. Finger’s crossed they do well!
Being a financially struggling beginner affiliate that’s a lot of money to lump up front… but then if you don’t play you don’t win.
That’s quite a risk! Good luck with them I hope it pays off for you!
aside from the webhosting and maybe 3/4 domains, i think you’ve overspent, do you really have the time to setup and optimize 100 domains? even if they are ‘micro-niche’ and you use adwords to drive traffic to them you’re still in a conundrum of not having enough time…which means they’ll sit there and gather dust.
as for the themes, there are plenty of free themes out there that you can alter and make more unique, several of my sites run off the same theme and after a little play with some of the PHP, they work and rank just fine.
you really don’t need to spend that much just to get started.
Thanks for the comment! I know I have far too many domains but I have been buying them over abour 4 months and really didn’t realise how many I had especially as only about 5 max could be classed as micro niche sites, the rest feature quite a few products and about 5 of them are huge sites. I thought I had only spent £50 max until I had a look to do this post.
My first two attempts at an affiliate website were using free themes but I dont have enough php knowledge to get them to do what whereas the premium ones seem to be easier to modify and I had spent hours looking for a decent free theme without spammy links in the footer. In hindsight I probably didn’t need both the Woo themes and studiopress theme I should have had a bit more of a playaround with the one I had bought first, but hey, it’s easier to learn by doing than learn by
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