Its amazing to me how I’m even writing this blog post about how I’ve achieved over $20k in affiliate income. 4 years ago I was just trying to sustain my little freelance web design business and taking whatever work I could…
I was barely making $20k a year with my business and my wife was also working full time…
A fellow web designer told me about a new hosting company called MidPhase that was paying him $100 for each person he got to sign up…
I signed up using his affiliate link and he confirmed the company sent $100 to his PayPal account…
At that moment I was hooked…
I became an affiliate and started recommending that hosting company to old and new web design clients…
Seeing affiliate income sent to my PayPal account felt refreshing…
Unfortunately, it was only a one-time payment of $100 for each person that signed up…
That meant I would have to keep getting new clients signing up all of the time to make this a sustainable source of income…
Now, before you judge me too hard, please know that this blog is being hosted with Midphase even though I don’t get money from them now…
Anyhow, in search of a better way, I stumbled upon an opportunity to generate recurring revenue in April 2016…
I took a financial risk and invested in a new system that ended up generating my first $475 in recurring affiliate income by May 2016…
How This Extra Stream Of Income Has Changed My Life
Since May 2016, its been quite a ride…
Starting out was slow but I’ve been able to grow my income to a consistent $1,000 a month or more…
This has freed up my time, allowed me to stop working for a few bad clients, and allowed my wife to stop working and volunteer her time at my children’s schools…
My personal favorite highlight is in April 2017 I got as much in affiliate income that I made working my butt off a year earlier…
However, it hasn’t all been blissful…
I’ve taken several losses that has required me to reinvest in my affiliate business to keep the momentum moving forward…
Along this journey, I’ve learned some lessons that I want to share with you today…
5 Lessons I’ve Learned About Earning Affiliate Income
Lesson 1: Find The Right Product(s)
Finding the right product to promote is vital to having success. When I’m promoting something, I want to make sure it meets a few criteria:
It needs to be a product I actually use
There are so many marketers out there promoting products that they don’t actually use and end up being garbage…
However, its important to me that I remain ethical and only promote products that I use or have used…
I believe this has been a key distinction that has led to my affiliate income growth…
If I’m not willing to pay for a product I’m promoting, how can I expect others to buy it?
It needs to have a good reputation
With so many marketing scams and false software claims online its important to find a product that has a good reputation…
It needs to pay recurring commissions
This is vital to growing your affiliate income. If a product isn’t going to create recurring commissions for you then reconsider it…
If you’re going to push a product that only pays once, make sure it compliments another product that will generate recurring revenues…
The goal for most people (including me) is to free up time by generating a continual stream of income…
You can’t do that if you are constantly having to bring in new people to make enough money to live…
Lesson 2: You Need A Solid Strategy
When I first got started, I didn’t have a strategy…
I just wrote a blog post that ended up generating my first $475 in affiliate income…
After I realized the potential of writing blog reviews I formulated my casual strategy…
I used my search engine optimization knowledge and began focusing on ranking my blog posts on page 1…
The blog was ranking very well without any backlinks and had generated over $4,500 for me when all of the sudden, my rankings dropped as more people started competing for the same keywords…
This forced me to concentrate on developing a better search engine optimization strategy to get my blog ranking back on page 1 for several terms…
It has been a challenge with rankings shifting weekly, but I’m on page 1 again for my money keywords…
I’ve invested a lot of time and money just to get where I am, which leads to lesson 3…
Lesson 3: Be Ready To Invest Time & Money
One mistake I’ve seen a lot of beginners make is they want a get rich quick solution…
There is a point at which people can make big time affiliate income…
I’m here to tell you its not easy and you have to be committed for the long haul…
This means you will have to invest both time and money into the product you want to promote…
It also means you have to invest time and money into driving traffic to what you’re promoting…
There is two main traffic sources to accomplish this…
Search traffic or paid traffic…
I’m continually investing my time and money into building up the search engine visibility of this blog for the keywords I want to target…
This is my main traffic strategy and its works well for me, but SEO is a slow-burn method…
But, for the fastest results, paid traffic is the only way to go…
There are several popular sources of paid traffic including Google Ad Words, Facebook ads, and banner ads…
I’ve tried them all with varying degrees of success…
However, a newer method that is proving to be the best traffic investment for me is Solo ads…
Solo ads are guaranteed high quality clicks from a Solo ad provider’s email list…
You determine how many clicks you want to pay for and place an order…
Two of the best sources for Solo ad traffic that I’m using right now is Crazy Good Traffic and the Udimi Marketplace…
Its a bit of prep work to get your offer ready for a solo ad, but I’m finding its well worth it…
If you’re looking for a recommendation on where to start, begin with Solo ads…
Then invest some time into learning SEO and incorporate it into your traffic strategy…
But I’m warning you you in advance, as you are driving traffic and making sales you need to prepare for losses…
Lesson 4: You Will Have Losses
This next lesson has been painful…
Throughout my journey I’ve had several losses…
At the beginning, I was not prepared to lose money from people who cancel a service or get a refund…
If you look at the image above this article you’ll see that I had a loss of $77 recently…
In fact, I calculated that I’ve lost $5,337.44 in commissions since I started…
This doesn’t account for recurring commissions that I missed out on…
It stings to expect a certain amount of income only to have a chunk of it refunded one day before you’re supposed to get paid…
But if you prepare yourself for potential losses in affiliate income then you will be able to bounce back quickly and make up the lost revenues…
One time in particular, I remember I had a person reach out to me about a product I was promoting…
They told me they couldn’t afford it, but then suddenly they signed up…
I thought everything was good but the very next day they cancelled and got a refund…
So they signed up long enough to get what they wanted and bailed…
There will be people like that and you can’t really avoid it…
But then there are other people who are hyper-buyers…
I had one guy who bought a group of products within a day and I ended up getting $900+ in affiliate commissions…
So recognize upfront that you will have losses but don’t give up because you will have more wins than losses!
Lesson 5: Grow Your Email List
Ever since the early days of my web design career, I’ve understood the importance of building an email list…
However, now that I’m growing my affiliate income by promoting products that I believe in, its more important than ever…
If you really want to grow your affiliate revenues, you need to build your email list…
See, SEO and paid traffic are all traffic sources that you control…
But your email list is traffic that you own…
While the ultimate goal is to get an affiliate sale, that isn’t always going to happen right away…
By capturing the name and email of potential buyers of your product you can follow up if they don’t buy right away…
You now own that information and if your traffic source were to suddenly disappear tomorrow, you still have a way to keep generating sales…
Your Affiliate Journey
So there you have it…
Those are 5 lessons I’ve learned during my journey to making $20,395.89 in affiliate income…
I hope these help you if you’re just starting out or if you feel lost about making affiliate marketing work for you…
However, I want to leave you with something actionable to help you start making money…
I’ve developed a new strategy that has been working well with my Solo ads and I want to share it with you today…
My Affiliate Income Solution For Beginners
I call it the No Paycheck Needed Quickstart System…
I used to work 40+ hours a week to earn a paycheck in my early days of web design…
But, I only had so much time I could trade for money which limited how much I could earn…
Affiliate marketing has allowed me to generate “non-earned” income…
This makes it scaleable and doesn’t require a trade of my time for every dollar earned…
So I’ve created a 6 step process to get started quickly with “non-earning” affiliate income…
This system works because its based on 3 factors…
1. A High Converting Product
I originally designed this system to promote ClickFunnels but I found that most people cancelled before I ever got a commission due to the high monthly cost…
I still promote ClickFunnels because its how I made $20,395.89 in affiliate income, but it’s not my main focus anymore…
So this system now promotes BuilderAll, which I’ve personally been using for almost a year now…
What makes it work so well is that it has everything we need built in and its only $49.90 a month vs $297 a month with ClickFunnels…
This makes it easier to promote and retain people who buy…
But, the best part is each sale gets you 100% commissions within 7 days and then 30% recurring commissions for each month after…
2. A Done For You Funnel
To make it easier to start with BuilderAll, I’m giving you a copy of my funnel…
I also give you a six step training that gets you started as a BuilderAll affiliate, customize your funnel and set up your email list for follow-up…
In as little as an hour, your funnel can be set up and ready to start “non-earning” affiliate revenues…
If you’re not sure what a funnel is, check out my post about a a sales funnel vs a website…
You’ll also get a full 6-day email sequence you can copy and paste into any email marketing software…
3. A Low-Cost High-Converting Traffic Source
Solo ads are proving to be the quickest and most valuable source of traffic I’ve found…
So, inside the system I provide a video that shows you about Solo ads and what Solo ad providers to start testing with…
You can try to start with free sources of traffic like social media posts…
But, if you’re serious about making money with affiliate marketing, you need to invest in a good traffic source…
I recommend starting with a 100 click test for any Solo ad provider and then examine how well it converts…
If you find a provider that gets you good results then you can invest in more clicks…
There really isn’t a limit to how much good converting traffic you could send to your funnel…
Grab Your No Paycheck Needed Quickstart System
The No Paycheck Needed Quickstart System will help give you the start you need to begin making money with affiliate marketing…
Just remember that there will be ups and downs but as you stick with it, the benefits of growing your affiliate income will outweigh any losses…
If you’re ready to get started, click here…
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