You earn a small commission when people buy through your links. Most earn little, and the few who earn a lot built an audience first.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$1,300
Most people
$0
Top few percent
$130,000
There is no Job Bank wage for this. In Influencer Marketing Hub's benchmark survey, 57.55% earned under US$10,000 a year, and many beginners earn nothing. So about $1,300 a year in Canadian dollars is a fair typical figure. About 1 in 9 in the survey earned over US$100,000.
About 1% to 10% on Amazon.ca
Amazon.ca Associates commission, by product category
Clothing, shoes, jewellery and beauty pay the most, about 10%. Grocery and video games pay about 1%. A $50 purchase earns you between 50 cents and $5, so you need a lot of buyers.
10% to 75% elsewhere
Software, brand programs, and digital products on sites like ClickBank
Digital products pay the most, but many are low quality and refunds take your commission back. Recommending one bad product costs you more trust than it earns.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a free account on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok and the phone you already have; joining Amazon.ca's Associates program is free. The high end is a niche website for a year: a domain, hosting, a keyword research tool at around $140 to $180 a month in Canadian dollars, and some paid writing or editing. Most tools bill in US dollars. Paid courses are not needed and are not counted. The real cost is a year or more of posting before the money is meaningful.
The cheapest start is posting honest reviews of things you already own.
A smaller market
Canadian shoppers buy through Amazon.ca, a much smaller store than the US one, so the same traffic earns less.
Commission cuts
Programs can lower rates at any time.
Search updates
One Google update can halve a website's traffic overnight.
Platform reach
YouTube, Instagram and TikTok can change what they show with no notice.
Returns
Refunded purchases come back out of your commission.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
No diploma or licence. Affiliate income follows an audience, so the audience comes first.
Pick one topic you know
1 month
Winter gear, budget tech, camping, baby gear. Narrow enough that you can be the most useful voice.
Choose a channel
1 month
A website found through search, video on YouTube, or an email newsletter.
Publish useful content for months
6 to 18 months
Real reviews, comparisons and how-tos. Most sites and channels earn almost nothing for 6 to 12 months.
Join programs and add links
Ongoing
Amazon.ca Associates, Canadian retailers' programs and brand programs. Disclose every link.
Grow and spread the risk
1 to 4 years
Earners who last use several programs and channels, and build an email list they own.
English, and French for a Quebec audience
Clear writing and scripts are the whole product.
Media arts
Filming and editing video.
Math and data management
Reading click and sales numbers to see what works.
Computer studies
Building and fixing a simple website.
The Competition Act applies to anyone promoting a product, and the Competition Bureau says you must disclose commissions, free products and discounts. Put it where people will see it, on every device, without tapping to expand, not lost in hashtags or your bio. Ad Standards publishes detailed disclosure guidelines. Commissions are business income you report to the CRA (Canada Revenue Agency). Past $30,000 over four quarters, you may need to register for GST (goods and services tax) or HST (harmonized sales tax).
Small review websites built for search traffic were the classic affiliate business. From 2023, Google's helpful content and core updates hit many of them hard. In 2024 Google said its changes cut low-quality, unoriginal content in results by 45%. Sites with real testing and first-hand photos held up better, and many affiliates moved to video and email, where they own the relationship.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Amazon.ca Associates
Easy to join, trusted by buyers, modest rates.
Canadian retailer programs
Many big Canadian stores run programs through affiliate networks.
Brand and software programs
Higher, sometimes recurring commissions, harder to get into.
ClickBank and digital products
High rates, more refunds, quality varies widely.
Newsletters
A list you own keeps earning when platforms change.
SEO (search engine optimization)
Getting pages found on Google, now harder than it was.
Video
Hooks, demos and honest comparisons.
Copywriting
Explaining who a product is and is not for.
Analytics
Knowing which posts actually lead to sales.
Many videos on your feed are about TikTok Shop affiliate commissions. As of 2026, TikTok Shop is not available in Canada, so that route is closed for now. You will also find people selling affiliate courses with screenshots of big dashboards. Many earn more from courses than links, and a dashboard shows sales, not the hours or the months of zero.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
You check yesterday's clicks and commissions, then research what people in your topic are searching for. Most of the day is making things: testing a product, filming a review, writing a comparison page or an email. You fix old posts where prices or links changed, then reply to comments, which is how trust gets built.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The Competition Bureau says your disclosure should be visible on all devices without tapping to expand a post. A note in a long caption or a pile of hashtags may not count.
In Influencer Marketing Hub's benchmark survey, only 3.78% of affiliate marketers earned more than US$150,000 a year. More than half earned under US$10,000.
After its March 2024 update, Google said search results showed 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content. Many affiliate sites built mainly to rank were part of what disappeared.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Online business first, then the rest of the field. See all online and self-made careers.
Last checked October 2026. This is self-employment, so there is no government wage data for it. The income figures come from the studies and platform data listed above.