MY AFFILIATE INCOME JOURNEY FROM VND 100,000 TO $50,000

Updated: May 2026

Hi everyone, I’ve been lurking in this group for a while. Since I have some free time today, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share how I started earning money through affiliate marketing.

The truth is, I’ve learned so much from the experiences shared by others, both older and younger than me, and I think now is the time to thank them through this little post.

This post covers 3 points:

• My journey from earning my first VND 100,000 to $50,000 by treating affiliate marketing as a real job.
• Lessons from my journey for people new to affiliate marketing.
• How to pursue affiliate marketing sustainably.

Who is this post for?

• Complete beginners who know nothing about affiliate marketing.
• People who are just getting interested in Internet Marketing or, more broadly, Digital Marketing.
• People who want to trade office life for the freedom to travel anywhere, like I did.
• People who want to change their circumstances because their situation prevents them from having a better life.
• And all these people share a powerful belief that affiliate marketing will definitely help them build a better life than they have now, achieve FINANCIAL FREEDOM (overseas, passive income isn’t considered the goal), or earn passive income ranging from a few hundred thousand VND/month -> a few million -> tens of millions (depending on what satisfies you).

As for getting rich, I can’t promise that. I’m still learning more about building wealth myself.

Okay, let’s get straight into it.

Part 1: My Journey from Employed to Unemployed.

It was a dispiriting afternoon, and I was torn between staying at a company where my starting salary after graduation was quite high—3 times the going rate elsewhere—or heading out into the real world and building a blog around my personal interests: travel and shopping.

At the time, I couldn’t concentrate at work, but I was afraid I’d struggle to survive if I left and couldn’t find another job. I’d only graduated a few months earlier (the company had hired me halfway through my third year). With no knowledge, experience, or connections outside, how would I make a living?

I also talked to my family, but unfortunately, instead of listening, they got angry and said I was crazy. And honestly, I was a little crazy back then. My family lives in the countryside, where jobs are scarce, and even if you get one, you have to stay on the boss’s good side. Then there’s paying money under the table to get hired and all that, which I didn’t like. I wanted to be independent, so I decided to stop discussing it with my family and quietly make a plan for a new journey.

My Plan to Quit My Job and Earn My First VND 100,000 from Blogging

I had just turned 24, and after 1 year of working, I’d saved a little emergency fund, a few tens of millions of VND, enough to live comfortably for 6 months without a job. I stayed in my university dormitory (VND 150,000/month) in District 9, took the bus to work for VND 6,000 a day, spent VND 30,000 on lunch, and had dinner for VND 20,000 + a pot of yogurt for VND 5,000 + a balut egg for VND 5,000. That was how I lived for 1 year.

Keeping your finances under control from the start will help you keep failure at bay for as long as possible.

While I was still working at the company, I would stay after work until 8:30 to use the company’s Internet connection for my own work. That was when I built a blog called 9coupon to share discount codes and online shopping tips. The idea came from seeing my coworkers shop online as a habit, while the working moms at the company worked themselves to the bone and had no time to research good formula and diapers for their children.

So I went out and bought a domain name, hosting, and a theme, spent about VND 3 million setting everything up, and published articles I thought office workers would need. Then I shared them on my Facebook, on YouTube, and in my coworkers’ Zalo and Skype groups.

At first, I wrote about what I knew without knowing anything about Accesstrade. After I’d written around 10 posts, Accesstrade (AT) came along and emailed me an invitation to become a publisher. From then on, I added links to my articles to earn commissions. Then Lazada and Deca.vn also invited me to become a publisher. I worked harder on writing and sharing more posts. In my first month, I earned VND 100,000 in commission from AT—that was the month after Lunar New Year (Tết). I was unbelievably happy. I kept saying “yeah!” because I knew the path I’d chosen was showing promising signs.

Learn more and register as an Accesstrade Publisher here

After that, I poured my energy into my blog, joined all kinds of offers, and was lucky enough to succeed with my first AT offer, Vietnamwork. I kept working diligently, almost without caring how much money I was making anymore. And I realized that when I do work I enjoy, I always have enough energy to get through the day without feeling tired.

Then, at the end of the year, I received awards as one of the top 10 publishers by sales for Lazada (LZD), Deca, and AT. That was when I realized that to make money from affiliate marketing, you absolutely need somewhere to share things. My main place was my blog, where I built a personal image and story so readers could trust that I was just like them, only with more time available to share useful information that helped them save time shopping. As a result, in the following years, many advertisers booked posts on my blog and even videos reviewing their products. After the review, they’d even let me keep the phone :v.

I took it home and gave it to my dad, and I’d also managed to save enough to give my mom the latest iPhone at the time. Pretty great, right?

Following that journey, I learned more about affiliate marketing and came to understand how it differs from referrals, how different companies’ marketing models work, and whether they were worth investing my time in. I became determined to make this my career.

I also started working in travel through this same 9coupon blog. In 2016, I became a top ambassador for Hotel Quickly, with so much credit that I could stay at resorts, hotels, and villas in Vietnam (VN), as well as other countries across Southeast Asia (Đông Nam Á). Wherever I went, I wrote reviews. Although sometimes I thought my videos didn’t offer much value.

Later, I realized I should just keep doing it, because many people haven’t had the chance to visit the places they dream of, the way I have. Reading their emails and personal stories felt as though I was living out their dreams for them. I was truly moved that my articles and videos inspired so many people, young and old, and I came to understand my readers’ behavior better.

My advice is to start with the smallest things already around you and believe in what you’re hoping for. Don’t overthink the rest; just do it. Everything has its own value.

And so I kept traveling solo, writing reviews, making the most of everything I had, and accepting every opportunity that came my way. As Ngọc said, I was also joining other international and domestic affiliate programs to earn extra money, and around that time I’d saved enough to build a hostel in my hometown, so I branched out into the homestay travel business too.
I now also have a blog sharing my journey of making money from homestays. I’m still earning from this travel niche, which brought in somewhere around VND 350 million last year without requiring any staff or time.

By the beginning of this year, it had brought me more than VND 150 million. It’s all thanks to affiliate marketing and the mindset it gave me, helping me gain another skill and a new tool for sharing value with the people around me.
Since you’re going to spend time learning and working anyway, choose a niche that you feel you CAN DO -> Is Worth Doing -> Then Get Started, and the results will surely come sooner rather than later.

Part 2: Lessons for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

The story above sums up my journey; of course, I’ve left out some of the difficulties.

Here are a few lessons I’d like to share with beginners.

Invest in an online platform from the outset to build your personal brand.

It could be a blog, a Facebook page, an Instagram account, or your personal profile. It needs to show who you are and who you want to become. And you need to believe that you can succeed at small things first; then your readers will trust you, grow to like you, remember you, and support you. At that point, you can sell anything.

Just do it; don’t think big. That might sound a little counterintuitive, but Ngọc made that point too. Earn your first VND 100,000 online without relying on any connections, and only then will you develop the mindset to earn VND 1 million/day online, then scale up to VND 10 million/day… and you’ll discover how much the Internet can teach you. There were days and months when I ate instant noodles and had no salary or income, but I was still happy and cheerful because I knew and believed the future would be brighter. And because I’d seen encouraging signs. The reverse is also true.

Prepare a Plan

Always have a plan. Don’t let yourself become dependent on money, because then you’ll stop following the path you wanted, and things won’t be the same as they were at the start. Many people enter this field, get taken in by fraudulent multilevel marketing schemes, then scam others themselves and end up with nothing. No reputation, no relationships, no opportunities, and no way back to where they started. So prepare a thorough plan for both your finances and your knowledge to get your business off to a successful start. Turn it from 1 side income stream into several side income streams (what if they add up to your main income?).

So you have the motivation and a financial plan. How do you start putting that plan into action and generating passive income?

There are 3 ways to turn your plan on paper into reality:

• Learn online (Google, YouTube, Facebook, online courses, MMO forums, affiliate marketers, bloggers, and following the pages and Facebook users who have what you need).
• Train and develop your skills in AIDA copywriting, learning, research, SEO content, editing articles, video, designing images for Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook page covers, Inbound Marketing…
• Build relationships with people who are further along and meet them offline more often; they’ll often share attractive offers you can join. Or work with them on different projects, and they’ll equip you with hands-on knowledge.

Once you have all the tools, skills, connections, and mindset you need, choose attractive offers with strong customer demand, high conversion rates, and high commissions, then invest your efforts in them. Rest assured, the higher the commission, the harder it is to close the sale :v, so you need skills to make good money.

Share your experience and knowledge with newcomers who find you through your platform, build a small community of your own, and they will help you achieve your goal of creating multiple income streams.

In my experience, this process repeats with every new project I undertake. And it takes around 10–15 months to achieve the goal of turning it into a stable income stream.
Some of my projects have shown encouraging signs in just 2 months.

So don’t worry. Instead of worrying, get started.

For those who see this as a side job, something to do when you have free time and skip when you don’t, I think you’re probably best off simply posting links in comments across platforms. Decide how much to invest based on whether each campaign is short-term or long-term. If you want to earn more, invest in your own knowledge from the start.

Another thing: affiliate marketing helped me develop a financial management mindset right from the beginning. So calculate how much time you put in and how much money you get back!

For one of my projects, the profit I earned relative to the time I spent writing was around $1000/article ~ $10/minute. Pretty amazing, right?

With AT alone, the third campaign I worked on took 10 hours and brought in over VND 20 million.

Calculating it this way lets me see how much time I actually spend working. From there, I can tell whether I’m slacking off and correct it immediately. I can get complacent and lazy very easily. Normally, when I work at a company, I work continuously for 8 hours. But when I work for myself at home, it’s very easy to fall into laziness, so tracking time this way helps me notice and get back on track right away.

Part 3: How to Pursue Affiliate Marketing Sustainably

I’ve already shared this in the previous section: simply build your own media platform, then connect with others (advertisers, marketers, bloggers, etc.) to distribute one another’s products. Turn your platform (Facebook page, Instagram, blog, YouTube) into a machine that earns money for you, even while you sleep.

It’s that simple. Even simpler: build a blog. Because a blog belongs to you, while Facebook pages and Instagram belong to someone else and can disappear at any time. So treat other platforms as satellites that draw people back to your blog. That’s how you make it sustainable.

That’s everything I wanted to share about my journey into affiliate marketing. I don’t know whether this post will help you, but I hope it gives you a fresh perspective on affiliate marketing, along with more hope and motivation to earn money in this field, because everyone starts from zero :)))

Source: Minh Niệm

The journey of building a one-person business.

The hands-on journey of Xuân Hiếu.

Transparency: This article may mention affiliate marketing. Read the review & disclosure policy.

Affiliate income is not guaranteed. Any figures provided reflect individual cases or personal experiences and do not represent your results. Disclosure.