And how much can you make?

 

Affiliate marketing is an incredible online business.  It’s my top source of income and I’ve made millions doing it!  So, is it for you?

Well, I’m currently in Texas and am running my affiliate marketing business as we speak.  Even when living in a van and dealing with crappy WiFi, you can do this side hustle too!

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is basically being an online salesperson.  the only difference between the old school sales people and today's internet sales people is that the former could only call so many customers or knock on so many peoples doors.  On the internet however, you can sell 24/7 to millions of people every single day.  In fact, when I die I hope I leave behind this quote…

“If you know how to sell you'll always have a job, but if you know how to sell online you'll never need one.”

Imagine having a business where you don't have to worry about customers, you don't have to carry inventory, and you don't have to deal with customer complaints.  Sounds spooky, right?  Instead all you have to do is promote the offer or sell!

You can be an affiliate for pretty much any company or product that has an affiliate program.  To find said companies, it's pretty easy.  All you need to do is type in the company name and then the words “affiliate program”.  If one pops up, great!  If not, you're out of luck.  

Say you post a list of your favorite birthday present ideas on the internet.  In the post, you include affiliate links to each of the products.  From here, anytime someone clicks the link and makes a purchase, you'll be handsomely rewarded with a commission.  Your job as the affiliate marketer is to connect the product with the right buyer.  

How to Scale

I've sold millions through affiliate marketing because I’ve mastered the game of pairing affiliate offers with paid ads.  Paid ads are when you pay a platform to host an ad that promotes your offer.

The next way to scale quickly is by having a large following.  You actually don't need any following at all to become a successful affiliate marketer (but it can help!).  

Lastly, the quickest way to scale using affiliate marketing is to apply for programs with lifetime commissions and recurring revenue.  Many health and supplement based programs offer recurring revenue because they are products that need to be bought on a monthly basis.  

 

Driving Traffic

To be really good at affiliate marketing, you need to know how to drive traffic.  In the world, there are two types of traffic: organic and paid.  

Organic traffic takes a long time to build.  This is when you post a piece of content and hope the algorithm takes your post and sends it off to the world.  

Paid traffic is when you are paying for a platform to show your ad to qualified buyers.  This type of content is guaranteed to go viral but it will send you the traffic you are looking for.  

Once your post pops up in your intended audience’s feed, they will hopefully click on your offer (this could be a blog post, free guide, template, etc).  Within your offer, you should include affiliate links.  Note that pasting in these links shouldnt feel scammy.  Instead, they should be real genuine recommendations that you just happen to be profiting from. 

 

Cookie Windows

So, how does the computer know that it was you that sent the customer to the website?  That's where cookie windows come in!  A cookie is something that stores your online date.  For a marketer, it is brilliant!  For a consumer it's kind of creepy.  Anyways, when somebody clicks on your affiliate link, a cookie window is opened on their computer.  These usually stay open for 30 days.  

This means that even if the consumer who clicked your link doesn't buy on the first day, as long as they come back by day 30, you will still get credit for sending them to the site.  Companies will use their own marketing tactics and budget to retarget this consumer and convert the traffic that you are bringing to their site into real sales.  

My Affiliate Marketing Story

No, I didn't just make these strategies up.  However, I did find a company that I got really good at promoting and stuck with it.  For full transparency, the company is called LadyBoss and I’m still an affiliate for them today.  I scaled to the moon and ended up generating over $1,000,000 in sales for them!

 

I wish I could say that my successes were solely because I was amazing at driving traffic — but that's not 100% true.  When you find a really great company (like LadyBoss), as long as you send them the right traffic, the company will finish out the conversion process.  

Case Study: Neurohacker

 

Making $1,000,000 from affiliate marketing is super unrealistic if you're just starting out. Lets walk through another company I worked, Neurohacker, and go through the affiliate process step by step.  

Neurohacker makes amazing, high quality nootropics which are supplements that help you focus, immune support, energy, sleep, etc.  

As you can see in the application above, the cookie days and base commission are listed.  For this company, the values were 30 days and 15%, respectively.  Also take note of the phrase, “we retarget customers on our dime and you still get the commissions'' under the Offer at a Glance section.  This means that even if you don't have the extra money to retarget and convert, you'll still get a commision for purchases made after the initial visit as long as they are within 30 days.  Lastly, notice that Neurohacker offers lifetime commissions.  This is great because they are a health/supplement based product that needs to be repurchased.  

For these three reasons, Neurohacker checked all the criteria on my list that I look for when applying to affiliate programs.  

Case Study: ClickFunnels

Another affiliate program that I’ve found a lot of success with is ClickFunnels.  However, be warned — I think the hardest affiliate marketing niche to be in business.  It's very cutthroat and competitive.  If you enter the business niche, you're going to be competing with people that are already masters at selling and marketing online.  

That being said, don't let this discourage you.  I often mention that the internet is too vast for saturation.  If you want to become an affiliate for ClickFunnels, go for it!  There are so many people that could use the platform and benefit from it.  

Your Plan of Action

Your job as an affiliate marketer is to find the value points of the offers you are promoting and then educate or inspire people to test out the said offer.  Another tried and true quote I think about is… 

“If you want to be a millionaire, help a million people.”

You can be the person that helps out a company that's struggling to get the word out about their product.  You can be the person that connects a customer to a company's product that will add value to their life.  It's almost like playing matchmaker.  

The scariest part about being an affiliate marketer is promoting other people's products.  Any day the companies you promote could change their terms of service on a whims notice.  Even though this is a risk, I still urge you to try affiliate marketing out.  Here's why…

• It's passive.  Like I said, I live in a van and am traveling across the U.S. while managing all of my online businesses and making around $75,000 alone from affiliate marketing.  What other job allows you to do this?
• It’s cheap to start.  Affiliate marketing is great if you are ballin 'on a budget.  There is relatively no overhead and can be scaled organically via blogs or social media platforms like TikTok.  
• It applies to every niche.  No matter what you're interested in, there's probably an affiliate program for it.  

Before I leave you, let me leave you with the 2 steps you need to take to become an affiliate marketer.

1. Pick a Niche.  You need to pick a niche.  It’s super hard to create a store that tries to promote to everyone.  As you grow, you can get broader but at the beginning you need to be focused.  What are you interested in?  What can you talk about confidently?  Do you like sports? Health? Cooking?  Fishing?
2. Create an Offer.  Your offer should be tested by proof of concept (we talked about this on Day 5).  This offer could be a free guide, white paper, ebook, audio book, presentation, infographic, list, etc.  The goal of giving out this free offer is to receive an email in return.  As soon as you collect the email, you can promote whichever affiliate offers you'd like as long as it is connected to the original offer.  

The biggest problem I see with people who sell online is that the majority of them do not collect emails.  The only reason I make the money I do today from affiliate marketing is because I collect emails!  I treasure my leads; I never spam them because they are the lifeblood of my business and I know how important they are.  

Affiliate marketing has truly changed my life.  If you want to take a deeper dive into this side hustle, I created a super intense, everything you need to know course about affiliate marketing.  I share my best secrets, my winning campaign formula, and my behind the scenes research process.  If you want to check it out, go to adrianbrambila.com/affiliate. 

Thanks for sticking with me until the end.  

Peace and God bless!

For the complimentary worksheets and resources, go to adrianbrambila.com/30days.

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.