GSD 210: How Promote A Sales Funnel As An Affiliate

Welcome to today’s episode of GSD Daily. Today, we’re going to talk about how to promote or how to make money with the sales funnel as an affiliate. Now, this is a little bit of a mind fuck because of you… it’s part of the make money online, the creator economy. In generating sales online and making money online every… there are a couple of different ways to do it, right?

You can put banner ads on your website, you can take sponsored posts, you can post something on your blog, and bank 50 or a hundred bucks for it. Or you can make some money posting something on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. Sponsored posts sponsored listings, or you can sell stuff.

Now, we’ve talked quite a bit about creating products and having a sales funnel for your product, but we haven’t talked about some of the other ways that you can make money online selling products.

Now, there’s this thing called affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing was what I started doing way back in the day. It’s how I got started online, I didn’t have my products. I sold other people’s products. And back then… Well, even more so now, because affiliate marketing is really… it’s pretty mainstream. It’s not quite… It’s pretty mainstream.

One of the first affiliate programs to come out was Amazon’s affiliate program. And basically with Amazon’s affiliate program, you can still… It’s called Amazon Associates. And basically, what it lets you do is it lets you recommend products and earn commissions. So once you become an Amazon Associate, you’ll get access to this program. It lets you paste a little link online. And you get paid a commission when somebody buys from Amazon using your link. Not just for that one thing, but, unless they changed the program recently, you get paid for 24 hours. Whatever somebody buys in 24 hours after clicking that link, you get paid for it.

So it might be a book recommendation, it might be a vacuum, it could be a stroller, whatever. You get paid for that thing. So in simplistic terms, that’s what affiliate marketing is. You post links online, you get paid when somebody clicks those links and buys. Now, affiliate marketing is way fucking easier than it was back in the day because people are used to clicking a button and going and buying shit from Amazon and buying stuff from this vendor and that vendor and this Shopify store and whatever.

Post Covid, everybody is buying shit online. So people are used to it now. When I first got started, it wasn’t the case. It was more difficult to post affiliate links because not everybody was comfortable or used to shopping online.

Now, basically, as an affiliate, when somebody offers, when a vendor or a creator has a program and they offer an affiliate program, what you’re able to do is sign up as an affiliate, get a link for their product, and sell through their sales funnel. So that’s the key to getting sales, of making commissions through the sales funnel as an affiliate. So you are sending traffic to their sales funnel, and then every time somebody buys, you get paid.

Now again, in the old days when folks were selling 2000, 3000, and $5,000 programs, it was very common to make 50% commission whenever you posted something online. So there were days that I got 20, $25,000 commission checks by just selling 20 or 25 things because I would make a thousand dollars commission per product sale.

And then what happened was that paid traffic got infinitely easier. So Facebook ads started and it was just easier and cheaper to drive your traffic than it was to pay affiliates. So if you can get that same $2,000 sale, spending $200 on Facebook ads, why would you pay an affiliate a thousand dollars to get that same sale for you? So that’s where the role shifted if you will.

Now, there are still lots of affiliate programs out there, so you can still promote a lot of sales funnels and a lot of products, and a lot of creators, you can still promote their stuff as an affiliate. You just have to know where to go and find the links.

So Amazon Associates is one of the best. So Amazon is all about e-commerce products. You’re going to be selling everything on the Amazon platform. The first two products that I sold online, were both on Amazon. So the first was a free trial with Audible, and for every three-month free trial that you send to Audible, they pay you 25 bucks.

That was the very, very, very first commissionable sale that I ever made, was selling a free trial with Audible, and I made 25 bucks from it. Then I made a bunch more money from that same free trial offer. Then Amazon had a wireless program, so it was wirelessamazon.com. And they were reselling at AT&T and Verizon’s cell phone plans. So I started promoting that, the service, and basically for every $1 phone plus plan that you signed up for, they paid me a bounty of $65. So I was making 2 $3,000 a month just from reselling cell phones.

This is an interesting coincidence because my first sales job when I was 16 to 18, was selling cell phones. So I took that knowledge maybe and transferred it online and made money as an affiliate, and I didn’t have to show up at work every day. So Amazon is a good platform to use.

There are a couple of other ones. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Go ahead, and do a Google search for affiliate marketing programs or affiliate links or whatever. The platforms out there like ClickBank, ClickBank is a way that you know can start here or log into your account. And ClickBank sells a lot of digital products where you’re able to make money and monetize through these creators, through these vendor’s sales funnels.

Another one is CJ or commissionjunction.com. This is more along the lines of a CPA affiliate network, and they have thousands of products here. You sign up for an account, you apply to be an affiliate for a program, and then you can start promoting through their sales funnels.

Another one is, it was formally LinkShare. Right now it’s Rakuten Advertising.com. But again, it’s another one of those affiliate CPA networks. So if you go down the affiliate marketing path, you can become what is known as an advertiser, and then that’s the language that this particular CPA network uses, a publisher or an advertiser. Advertisers promote products, publishers have products to be promoted. And Rakuten brings both of those sides together.

And the other thing I want to mention is most of the big shops, the big digital publishing companies, and publishing companies, have affiliate programs. So if they don’t have it on their website, where you can click the button and apply for the affiliate program, you can ask them. And affiliate marketing is mainstream enough that if there’s enough demand, they either have an affiliate marketing program or they can put one together pretty quickly.

So your favorite products, don’t be shy about asking if there’s an affiliate program. Worst case scenario, they say no. In the best case scenario, you’ll be able to promote using your affiliate link through their sales funnel. You’ll be able to promote and make 15, 20, 30, 50%, or whatever. Digital products are a little higher than physical products.

So if you liked this video and you want more tips and tricks on how to make money online, grow your sales online, scale your business, or any of that kind of stuff, go to gsddaily.io. Sign up for the newsletter and the freebies, and we’ll make sure that these get sent to your inbox. If you’d like to put together an inbound marketing sales funnel that uses affiliate marketing, it’s one of the things we set up for a lot of our clients. If you would like to jump on an action plan call where we talk through your sales funnel and the steps of it and different traffic channels, affiliate marketing being one of them, go to doneforyou.com/start.

And if you have any questions, go ahead and ask them below this video. I’ll make sure to get them answered. And please make sure to like and share this video if you’re finding value, if you like it and if you learn something. And I will talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.