Making money online through affiliate marketing is a daunting task, and the fact that thousands of people worldwide are putting in significant effort to do so makes it even more competitive. As a result, many people have signed up on affiliate marketplaces like Clickbank and used paid ads to promote their affiliate links, but they are still losing money. This is not because marketplaces or advertising platforms are bad, but because marketers need a proper strategy to profit from them.
In this case study, we will look at how to make over $1 000 per week through affiliate marketing.
Luke Robins is an online marketer and a YouTuber who has successfully tried many ways to make money online, such as email marketing, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing. He has a YouTube channel where he documents his journey to self-improvement. He said,
"I aim to go from being a broke college kid to making a full-time income online. My dream is to be able to work on my passion while also being in control of my work schedule."
Luke's first step is to identify a niche, and then within that niche, look for a product that has likely been promoted or a product that can deliver on its promises. Following that, he uses email marketing and a lead magnet for promotion.
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Let's dive into this article...
Choosing a Profitable Niche
The first and most important step is to select a niche that interests you and in which you can create content at any time, but the problem is that most people's interests are not profitable. For example, Luke is very passionate about football, but it is not a very profitable interest to earn an affiliate commission.
As a result, it is best to choose a niche related to wealth, health, or relationships because everyone can relate to these three categories, and people are willing to spend money to solve related problems.
According to Luke,
"It was a hard decision to sway from my passion, but ultimately, I decided to go with the online business niche."
Picking Profitable Products in Your Niche
The next step is to select a product(s) in that niche. There are two types of products available for the online business niche: software (an online tool) and online courses. These products provide value to people in this niche and solve their problems; however, Luke chose from both product categories.
For the software category, he chose Jasper, and for the online course category, he chose the 15-day Business Builder Challenge by the Legendary Marketer. While stating his view on the two products, Luke said,
"Jasper is an AI copywriting tool that I've used in the past, and the developer offers a 30% recurring commission rate. Also, the 15-day Business Builder Challenge by the legendary marketer is a course I took when I was first starting with making money online, and I think it is a pretty good course for seven dollars."
There is only a three-dollar commission for each sale brought in by an affiliate for the 15-day Business Builder Challenge course, but the course also includes many other courses. If any of your referrals ended up purchasing any of the additional high ticket offers, you would be paid commissions on those sales as well.
Using Email Marketing to Promote Affiliate Products
Email marketing is a great way to get traffic for affiliate marketing. You can send emails to people who have already purchased an affiliate product about similar affiliate products in the same way that large online retailers like Amazon send emails to their customers informing them about similar products other customers buy.
The difficulty in obtaining people's email addresses and establishing relationships with them is the flip side of email marketing because no one wants to receive a spam message from a stranger recommending an affiliate product. As Luke suggested, use a lead magnet to get around this flip side. A lead magnet is anything given to people for free in exchange for their email addresses, and to create something worth exchanging email addresses for, you must first create an avatar.
Avatars are fictitious people with similar characteristics such as age, income, location, and so on. They are commonly used in marketing, to identify one to three different groups of people who might be interested in your products. The more you learn about these people, the easier it will be to create a lead magnet for them to exchange their email addresses. Put yourself in these people's shoes and make a list of everything you think they might be interested in their fears, age, location, frustrations, what they do on weekends, and so on.
Using fear as an example, some of the fears Luke came up with were: fear of being a disappointment to his parents, fear of not getting any momentum with his side hustle, fear of dropping out of college, and fear of becoming invisible to society, retreating into isolation and loneliness.
Luke said,
"Several times, the avatar you come up with is just yourself one or two years ago which is awesome because you know all your problems, insecurities, and what drives you. Thinking about these things will give you the ability to come up with the type of content that this type of person finds interest in."
After creating an avatar of the people whose email addresses you want, the next step is to create a lead magnet, and there are several options for creating a lead magnet. You can create an ebook, a video, or a PDF report; however, Luke decided to create a short video training about online businesses and use Clickfunnels to create a landing page for the video.
Setting up an Automated Email Sequence For an Affiliate Product
It's not a good idea to bombard an email subscriber's inbox with promotional offers on the first day of his subscription. Building trust in people takes time, and this is true even when sending emails. Once potential customers have entered their email addresses in exchange for the online business training video, Luke uses a simple epic follow-up email sequence.
The consumption sequence is the first step in the sequence, in which you provide the promised product, which is the lead magnet. After the subscriber receives the product in the first consumption email sequence, you'll move on to the "Getting to Know You Sequence", and this is where you introduce yourself to the email subscriber. After, you can begin promoting your affiliate offers to them via email.
Generating Traffic For Your Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel
Setting up email sequences after creating a lead magnet is not the end of Luke's strategy because buyers must go through the funnel. He used TikTok to drive traffic to his affiliate sales funnel because, in his opinion,
"They both had a 'short' video feature, and it is the current trend. Everyone is doing short-form content, so I decided to follow suit. Making a video and reposting it on YouTube shorts, Tiktok, and Instagram reels is an efficient content strategy that maximizes my overall reach per video produced."
He already has a TikTok account with over 1000 followers, but he needed to create new accounts on Instagram and YouTube for this affiliate marketing campaign. In the video descriptions of the three social media platforms, he includes a link to his lead magnet landing page.
He also investigated what other creators in the online business niche did well, how they produced their content, and the questions the audience asked in the comments section. Based on his research, he started posting one video per day for seven days across three platforms, and he also went through the top-performing video scripts in the online business niche, copied them, and tweaked them to make them his own.
He retweeted previous viral videos in the online business niche by creating the video with a split screen, placing himself in the corner of the screen while the previous viral video played. He explained,
"Reacting to the videos requires little effort, and sometimes you don't even need to say anything. This means I'll be able to produce more content at a faster rate."
The Result of the Affiliate Marketing Campaign
The videos for this affiliate marketing campaign on his Instagram account received no views, whereas the YouTube account performed slightly better, with a few of the videos ranking well and gaining some subscribers. The most views and engagement came from the Tiktok account.
Jasper received 509 referrals, 45 signed up for a free trial, and total sales were $17 after about a week of running the affiliate marketing campaign. Four people signed up for the 15-day Business Builder Challenge, and one of them joined the marketers club, which is a recurring membership.
Surprisingly, one of Luke's referrals ended up purchasing an upsell for more advanced training, which cost $2 500, and he earned a $1000 commission because the commission is based on 40% of the product sold. So, in total, Luke earned $1 023 in commission and gained over 4 000 email subscribers, to whom he can remarket in the future.
Income
- Revenue from JasperAI: $0
- Revenue from the 15-day Business Builder Challenge: $1 023
- Ad spend: $0
- Total number of email subscribers: 4 000
- Income: $1 023
Recommended Steps to Take when Using Clickfunnels
Here are the basic steps to use ClickFunnels:
- Sign up for an account and choose a template: After creating an account, you can choose from a wide range of templates for sales funnels, opt-in pages, and other types of pages that you want to create.
- Customize your funnel: Once you have selected a template, you can customize it by adding your branding, images, videos, and other content. You can also add products, upsells, and downsells to your funnel.
- Set up your payment gateway: ClickFunnels integrates with various payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net. You can set up your payment gateway and pricing options for your products.
- Set up your email marketing: ClickFunnels also integrates with popular email marketing services like Mailchimp, Aweber, and GetResponse. You can set up your email list and automate your email campaigns.
- Publish your funnel: After you have completed all the customization and setup, you can publish your funnel and start promoting it to your audience. You can share your funnel on social media, your website, and other channels.
- Monitor your performance: ClickFunnels provides analytics and tracking tools to monitor the performance of your funnel. You can see the number of visitors, conversions, and other key metrics to optimize your funnel for better results.
Conclusion
By promoting niche products for his online businesses, Luke earned $1 023 in affiliate commissions. He chose a profitable niche, which makes choosing a product to promote easier, and his products are JasperAI and the 15-day Business Builder Challenge course.
He used avatars in his email marketing strategy, an online business training video as a lead magnet to collect email addresses from potential customers, and Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube to drive traffic to his affiliate marketing campaign sales funnel. Although he had a Tiktok account with some followers before the affiliate marketing campaign, Tiktok is now more accommodating in ranking the contents of new creators.
