How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business
How’s it going? Peter here, and I have a few tips that I want to share.
Whenever we’ve done conferences or have helped out with conferences in the past such as the Charles Ngo events and talked to students. People have asked mostly about practical things like offers, traffic sources, and Facebook tips.
Another topic that has come up a lot is “how to go full time” in affiliate marketing.
At a mastermind, there are usually about 30-50 students, of which 60-70% are making a little bit of money in affiliate marketing but have not gotten any kind of success to be able to actually do it full time.
I’m going to teach you what I believe it takes to go full time.
It’s not about a dollar amount.
A lot of people have their mindset completely wrong on what it takes to go full time in affiliate marketing.
They think they need to make $10,000 to 20,000 a month.
The reality is, it’s not about a dollar amount.
It’s not that difficult to earn $20,000-30,000 in a month from a good Facebook campaign, but you shouldn’t base your entire full-time status as an affiliate marketer off of just 1 or 2 Facebook campaigns.
You need a diversity of campaigns.
“So, how do I go full time?” My answer is:
You have to have strong enough diversity to still make money even in the event that 80% of your stuff got shut down or stopped working.
If you work a full-time job and have an income, and then you quit that job to go full time as an affiliate… and then everything got shut down or stopped working… then THAT would be stressful! — going from getting a paycheck in a job to not making anything at all.
Have diversity in your business that is bulletproof.
This means you need to avoid having just one large campaign. You shouldn’t be going full-time off of the dollar amount or a single ad campaign. You should only go full time when you have 5 or 10 winning campaigns, over multiple traffic sources.
We have internal media buyers who are still working other jobs right now but are doing media buying for us on the side, part-time, and some of them want to leave their jobs.
I tell them, “It’s not just about having 1 big campaign! It’s about having 10+ Big Campaigns!”
So How Do You Get Diverse?
You can’t be an affiliate who just does car insurance on Facebook and think you can go full time just doing that.
So, in what ways can you diversify?
a) Multiple campaigns in different verticals.
Even if Facebook is your “only” traffic source, you can at least run different verticals: car insurance, edu, refinance, car loans, credit cards.
Having a wide diversity in the verticals that you’re running is key!
b) Run multiple traffic sources
Once you start earning, you should take your winning campaigns and attempt to put them on different traffic sources to see if the campaign will profit there as well.
Let’s say that you have a really strong car insurance campaign on Facebook, you should also try the same campaign over Bing Search, Google AdWords Search PPC, Adwords Display, run it on YouTube as well.
“Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket with a single traffic source.”
About four years ago, we decided to diversify. What’s different nowadays is that we are not completely reliant on our email income. (We used to be when we started off!) Now we have Facebook income, native ads, some SEO traffic, YouTube, and email traffic.
In order to build a stable, substantial, full-time business, you need to have a model that is bulletproof, and the model has to be able to withstand any potential storms.
So, we outline a plan that consists of running multiple traffic sources like Facebook, native ads, email, search ads, and even some SEO.
Obviously, our plan has been changing and improving over time, and to be candid, There were lots of ups and downs in our business; times when 60-70% of everything we did failed
But it was okay, because we developed a model that even if 80% of our offers shut down, we would still earn income, and we built a business around that premise.
Build a team!
My last tip is to build a team.
This is really important, Tyler and I had an advantage from the start because at least we were a team of two!
Many affiliates are just a one-man-band.
You need a team of, at the very least, virtual assistants, independent contractors, or media buyers. Right now, we have 10-20 media buyers that are willing to run campaigns for us at a push of a button.
We have multiple full-time media buyers as well, working 50-60 hours a week with us. We have people on a minimum payroll with bonuses, so, it’s a substantial team now.
When you are alone, at least think about how you are going to get that first virtual assistant or first media buyer to start helping you with your campaigns.
Final thoughts
I hope this video blog brought a lot of value to you.
We have a very fast-growing Facebook group called Affiliates Ask Anything. The goal here is to build an extremely large community to make it the #1 place for affiliate marketing knowledge on the internet.
Do we have courses?
We do, Tyler and I have a course with Charles Ngo that is launching soon again — right now it’s only available at certain periods of time, so if it is available, take action on it.
Do you get more detailed information and get more advanced training in the paid material that we have?
Absolutely.
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I hope your business succeeds and we’ll talk soon. Also, check out this post on cpa marketing training.
Facebook Group – Affiliates Ask Anything
– Peter