In 2020, I made over half a million dollars in profit from affiliate marketing.  Today I will share the 7 life-changing strategies that got me there.  

 

 

#1. Email Leads

Emails are the livelihood of an affiliate marketing business — at least a successful one.  When I first started affiliate marketing, I was sending the right traffic to the right offers but something kept happening to me over and over again.  Affiliate programs would change and consequently, my income stream would change as well.  I learned to protect myself by collecting email leads.  

The amazing part about capturing a lead is that once you have it, it's yours to keep and nobody can take it away.  Say you are selling a weight loss product and the offer is doing really well.  Chances are that your audience will be willing to use other weight loss products in addition to the original to help them along your journey.  As long as you have the leads, you can keep pushing relevant offers until the end of time.  And the best part is that you only have to pay for the lead once!  

I started collecting the leads above on March 24th, 2020.  This goes to show how fast you can acquire leads.  These 38,000 leads are ones I collected for my personal brand.  That being said, I have email lists for every single niche I’m in.  I can't stress enough how valuable collecting leads is to an affiliate marketer!  

#2. Retargeting 

The most expensive thing you can do online is acquire a customer who is cold.  Cold means that they have never come across your page before or they don't know who you are.  It's extremely hard to get cold traffic to pull out their wallet or hand over their email on the first try.  

Retargeting leverages the traffic that already recognizes your brand and retargets them with a message.  This creates warm traffic.  Everytime I set a retargeting campaign into motion, my conversions are 10 times better than my initial cold traffic ads. 

If you know anything about me, you know that I live in a van, I make money online, and that I love to drink coffee.  Now, my personal brand website is mostly business related but I actually use a retargeting strategy on that site to promote a coffee related affiliate offer.  The company is called Kimera Coffee and what makes them different is that they use nootropics in their formula.  I use the warm traffic from my website and retarget videos of me making or drinking coffee to them.  The traffic knows my face, recognizes me, and hopefully makes a purchase!  My AOV is usually over $100, making my profit $10 to $15 after I subtract the cost of the lead.  

#3. TikTok

Before you skip over this one, no, you do not need to shake your stuff in order to be successful on TikTok. 

Now that that’s out of the way, TikTok, just like any platform that is new, allows anyone to create content and get exposure.  Most affiliate marketers are spending money to get said exposure when they could utilize TikTok for free!  

I have been on TikTok for about 18 months and I post pretty aggressively.  In one of my videos, I plugged an offer I have with a company called Acorns.  It is a site that allows you to invest spare change without you even thinking about it.  That video alone (which I admittedly half-assed) was shown to 23,400 for free!  Let me tell you, it brought in some nice sales.

#4. YouTube

YouTube is great for affiliate marketing for 2 reasons.  First, it allows you to create long form content which is always the best way to get a sale.  A picture ad versus a 10 minute video that explains the benefits… the video is guaranteed to win.  The only catch is that a video takes a lot longer to produce than a picture ad.  The content must drive value and tell a story.  You know what they say, facts tell but stories sell!  

In April, I uploaded an informational video that helped people sell print on demand journals and notebooks on Amazon.  The video is almost 15 minutes long where I give a transparent review of the platform used to create said books.  I honestly talked about the pros and cons, I walked through how to use it, and I even made a real product with the software.  At the end of the video, I mentioned that if my viewers wanted to try it themselves, they could click my affiliate link.  In the past 30 days, I’ve had 522 transactions and a total of $2,077.67 earned.  The best part is that since it's a software, users must subscribe which brings me reocurring revenue.  

#5. Blogging

Blogging is the original affiliate marketing.  Creating content online and waiting for it to rank organically is really hard these days.  That being said, let's take a look at a beauty brand that I own that successfully uses blogs to make money.

Each blog post on this site has one or more affiliate links embedded.  The post above is titled “10 Ways to Practice Self Love on Valentine’s Day”.  As you can see, it offers lots of value and suggests relevant offers to the female audience that I target.  I don't feel sketchy promoting offers like this because I know it delivers value and education!

#6. Facebook Ads

When I hear the words Facebook ads, I feel all sorts of emotions.  I’ve had times where I wake up and my ad dashboard is banned!  I’ve woken up to realize the algorithm has changed!  Other times, wake up to sale after sale!  All of the drama that comes with Facebook ads is worth pursuing because it offers the opportunity to scale.  

You may know that I was a top-selling affiliate who made over 1 million dollars with a brand called LadyBoss.  I ran all of my revenue through Facebook ads.  I scaled LadyBoss from zero all the way up to the point where they were paying me an income of $30,000 a month.  Here's my current LadyBoss dashboard… 

Where did all of the money go?  Well, I was only running Facebook ads while optimizing for leads.  Like many great companies, LadyBoss provided me with all of the swipe files and content.  Literally all I had to do was run the ad, and I did.  Then, basically overnight, Facebook changed their algorithm, LadyBoss decided to leave ClickFunnels and go to an entirely new platform which meant all my data was gone, and they changed their commission structure.  My $30,000 a month income washed up in a matter of 30 days.  

Luckily, I still had all of my data on Facebook.  Even though LadyBoss’s offer changed, all I had to do was find a similar offer that fit my already existing audience and push it out to them.  

#7. Google Ads

You may have read the YouTube example earlier and laughed because I have 140,000 subscribers and you are probably just starting out.  How can I fairly compare us?  Well, let me show you how much I spent to promote that video.

My total cost was $453 and I sent 747 clicks.  My average CPV was a penny and my view rate was 43.90%.  These people were complete strangers yet nearly half viewed my video!  That's crazy to me.  You can do this no matter what following size you have.  All you have to do is hand pick the videos you would like to market your video to and choose the right audience.  

Those are just 7 of the dozens of ways that you can find extreme success in affiliate marketing.  This side hustle has absolutely changed my life.  I hope it can change yours too.

Peace and God bless.  

 

 

I make new content every single week, so be sure to subscribe to my Youtube and follow my Instagram @brambilabong and TikTok at @AdrianBrambila. I also have tons of resources and courses on my website that you won’t want to miss. Head over to www.adrianbrambila.com to learn more about what I do and how I live a financially free life.