Interview with Chris Reader: The 23 Year Old Affiliate That’s Taking Clickbank By Storm

We are bringing you an interview with Chris Reader, a 23-year-old Australian affiliate marketer who is killing it right now by sending Facebook and Youtube traffic to Clickbank affiliate offers. Chris recently came up with a new Youtube ads strategy that has helped him and his team to generate millions of dollars in affiliate commissions and currently, many Clickbank affiliates are taking notes from the 23-year-old.

Follow along with this interview held by the team at the 7-figure Entrepreneur Podcast, as Chris shares his journey from being a full-time gamer to starting an e-commerce store and finally becoming an affiliate marketer. He also talks about his untapped  Youtube Ads method that is making him over $10 000/ day in affiliate commissions.

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Now let's dive into this article...

Chris, give us a breakdown of what you do.

So I am an affiliate marketer. Most people on here probably know what that is - we sell products that are created by vendors and we get a split of their sales. So originally, I did Facebook Ads and I had my biggest success running Facebook ads. I still run Facebook ads heavily and it’s a big part of my business alongside Youtube ads. We run Youtube pre-roll ads and then we send the traffic to a landing page then to offer. We mainly do health supplement offers.

You mostly work with Clickbank, is that correct?

Yes, I work with Clickbank, Maxweb, and some other CPA networks.

What were you doing before joining the online marketing space and how did you get started?

I used to play competitive video games. I used to play Counter-Strike a lot. I used to be super competitive, and I could play video games all day because I was really good at it. I remember I used to play with people that were 25 when I was 16. I remember telling myself that once I turn 18, I'm never playing a video game again because I was just seeing all these people that I would play with were super old and I was like, I can't be doing that till that age. So I went down the self-development route, and I went through the breakout of the matrix phase.

I watched the documentary Zeitgeist. I don't know if many guys have watched that but it’s very heavy. I watched that when I just came out of high school. In high school, I used to crush economics and business studies. I always knew I wanted to be in business and I just wanted to be a dude in a suit that just made heaps of money, work in the big buildings, something like a CEO. But after watching that documentary, and my whole reality blew up. It changed my mindset to I'm never getting a job, I’m never being a dude in a suit and that started my self-development and entrepreneurial journey.

So I finished high school and I worked in a coffee shop that I hated. I would always ditch my shifts because I just hated it so much. I barely had any money but then everything changed when I created my first e-commerce store and promoted it on Instagram. I made about $5 000 in my first 2 months with the store and that’s how I discovered the possibility of making money on the internet.  

What was your first Shopify store, and what did you sell on that store?

I sold wrench rings. I sold them through Instagram mechanic meme pages because I figured that's the target market. I would just pay mechanic meme pages to promote my stuff, so I wasn’t doing paid advertising at first but much more of influencer marketing. I didn't know how to run Facebook ads at this point but after I made the first $5 000 I tried to run Facebook ads for the first time. I remember putting up the worst ads ever and I lost $400.

How far did you go with the e-commerce store in terms of revenue?

I probably did like $15 000 in revenue and between $5 000 to $7 000 in profit within 4 months and that was the most money I had ever made in my life at that point at age 18. It was purely from Instagram influencer marketing.

So what happened next after making that money with e-commerce?

I joined the university to study marketing. One day, I watched a YouTube video of some dude who was revealing Tai Lopez's ex-business partner. He revealed this guy that lives in Bali called Gerry Cramer who did affiliate marketing. So I ended up buying Gerry’s course whereby I learned how to do affiliate marketing with Facebook ads. Then from there, I started doing affiliate marketing. I started having like $10 000 days when I was 20 years old.

Which offer were you running at that time?

That offer was Flat Belly Flap Fix from Clickbank.

So you started by doing e-commerce and then you went to promoting diet pills on Clickbank. Which other offers did you promote?

Back then, Clickbank affiliate offers were mostly ebooks and information products. That was during the first year when I joined affiliate marketing. But then some big affiliate vendors recreated the structure and started selling supplements. That ushered in a whole new model that started crushing it.

So what was the biggest day you’ve had since starting affiliate marketing in terms of profit?

Across all my verticals, I had a $25 000 profit day.

Do you have a team you work with or is it just you?

It was me originally until the time when I went to Bali to speak at an event by Gerry Cramer. That’s when I met my current business partner who lives in France now. He's been a pretty big part of the business too.

So do you guys just purely run ads or have you ever thought about getting into the other side of the business?

We are looking into vendor stuff now. We are going to be creating some products and we are currently working with copywriters. Personally, I have sort of two things going on now, I'm running the ads business and then I've also created a course. It's crazy to think because I joined as a student of Gerry, now he invites me to speak at events. So far I’ve spoken in Las Vegas, San Diego, and Bali.

I dropped out of university in my second year doing marketing too. It’s crazy because in my first lecture the lecturer said that if you ever find an opportunity outside of the university, you should just quit university and pursue that because the university is always going to be there. So I literally quit my marketing lectures, to give marketing lectures at 21.

What made you pivot from Facebook advertising to Youtube advertising?

Facebook just got so harder than before. At first, it was for beginners and intermediates but currently, it’s for advanced marketers. There are a lot of back-end tactics that aren’t even related to running ads.  So, we viewed Youtube as an untapped traffic source for the kind of affiliate marketing that we do. We started doing Youtube and it's my other business partner Keegan who was in charge of Youtube. He had never gone negative for 6 months with Youtube. There was a certain method that we were applying and he taught it to someone who went straight from $2 000/day to $31 000/ day in 2 days with this method.

It's pretty unbelievable because the method is just about using robot voices in the videos instead of human voices. Our business model on Youtube is about creating a sales script, then making a video ad with the robot voice speaking the script, then a simple landing page, and finally the offer.

We tested this method against real human voices but the robot voice always performed best. So we started running it and the results are pretty insane, to be honest. I've never seen anything that on Youtube and there's still so much money to be made on Youtube as it is still untapped by affiliates. With Youtube, you can scale from $2 000 to $15 000 in one day while increasing ad spend and your ROI will stay the same.

So can someone doing lead generation on Facebook try to run these videos ads with robot voices and then send traffic to a landing page, then to the offer?

We haven’t tried it on Facebook yet because we pivoted to Youtube and it's interesting that Youtube doesn't hate it. On my Facebook ads, I just run casual videos but not with robot voices. But the trick here is to have the video scripts spoken in robot voices, especially user testimonies.

What does that voice sound like?

It's like the voice of Siri or Alexa, kind of an AI robotic voice.

Do you guys do much split testing on the landing page side?

No. With Youtube, we get a pretty high click-through rate regardless. So we just test the videos. If a video has good front-end stats like many views and high CTR but has no sales, that’s I’ll have to test the landing page. But usually, I don't test anywhere on the landing page when using Youtube ads, unlike with Facebook ads.

Do you pay a copywriter to write your script or do you just write it yourself?

I write the scripts myself. The first 15 seconds of the video are the most important. And with Youtube, you don’t pay if viewers don’t watch past the first 5 seconds, so that’s your hook. You have to call out your audience within the first 5 seconds. If you’re advertising auto insurance, then call it out in the first 5 seconds so that those not interested can skip and you don’t get charged.

How do you set up your targeting with Youtube?

So when we first started, we targeted topics and placements. Topics are like interests on Facebook and placements are the specific Youtube channels. But targeting these didn’t work for us, we just went broad and let Google’s algorithm play its part because Google’s algorithm is stronger than Facebook’s. It can find the buyers somehow.

Sounds like you're literally just printing money on Clickbank?

We started a course, Profit Singularity and we formed a group of 15 marketers, some experienced ones and some not really experienced. We shared the method, ideas, resources with every member. Within 2 months, the members generated $2 500 000 altogether on Clickbank. We took a product on Clickbank that was ranked on the 10th page to becoming the 3rd top offer.

What made you pick a product that’s on the 10th page?

It was by a vendor that had other good products. People in the group were competing against each other by promoting that product but we had 3 members who sometimes had $30 000 to $50 000 days. That shows that competition and saturation don’t really matter when you have a broad audience.

So let's talk about picking offers on Clickbank. How do you go about picking good offers?

If offers are at the top on Clickbank rankings, they are obviously going to convert pretty well. But affiliate marketing is just about testing. What I like to do is I'll test $500 across 3 offers. If one of them is negative, one of them is at break-even, and one of them is at 100% ROI,  then you can immediately tell what’s going to work.

Have you ever had any situations on youtube where your ad spend just burst and you lost it?

Yes. Youtube is funny because it can do that and also sometimes it doesn't spend at all. This is because Google is weird but you just have to learn how to tame the algorithm for it to spend the right amount. I’ve had days where I'm spending $10 000 a day and it will spend the budget super quick within the first 10 hours of the day which isn't what I want because I wanted that to be stretched throughout the entire day. But fortunately, it would break even or be positive.

So if someone wanted to launch this youtube method besides buying your course, What kind of suggestions do you have for them?

To learn direct response marketing scripts. These can be learned for free on Youtube, from people like Alex Becker who makes Youtube ad tutorials. Learn how to write a good script because the script is what sells. With Facebook it's the pre-sell page that sells but with Youtube it's the script.

The first 15 seconds of the video are the most important. So when you're split-testing videos, split test completely different scripts and then select the best one. Then split test it again with different hooks for the first 15 seconds. So the concept is to test completely separate things on a wide spectrum and then take whatever side of the spectrum that works best and then refine it by doing smaller split tests.  

What's your motivation to keep on going and keep making moves? Is it all money, lifestyle?

Originally it was money because I never wanted to work a job again and I never wanted to be in the traditional work system. So of course making heaps of money is good and I still want to build generational wealth.

When I first started, my goals used to be like I want to travel, buy Lamborghinis but now I want to build a farm. I want to funnel all my online money into a massive agriculture business and just chill on a farm out of town while I might still have a supercar like a Porsche.

Conclusion
Chris has shared some amazing insights and we believe that everyone will find value from this. Make sure you follow him on his social media channels @chrisreader and if you are interested to learn deeper about his method, here is a link to a video explaining this Youtube strategy.