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Affiliate Marketing
Simple Overview and Three Men Who Can Help You
By Gloria Merle Huffman
9/16/2021; Edited 1/14 & 9/17/2023
The digital world of affiliate marketing, in which you sell the products of other people online for a sales commission, doesn’t require a degree, but does require an advertising budget if you want to see results within a reasonable period of time.
Three of the many men who have become digital affiliate marketing millionaires have gone on to create online courses to help other people do the same (Robby Blanchard, Jeff Lerner, and Anik Singal). To be totally honest, they use all the tricks at their disposal to maximize their profits from sales of their online courses.
Anik Singal, who is endorsed by Robert Kiyosaki, author of the famous personal finance book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” has free materials that outline his methodology without being specific on the details (for specifics, you would have to pay).
One such free resource by Singal is the little book “Circle of Profit.” The 2021 3rd edition paperback currently sells for $16.60 on Amazon, and the 2nd edition paperback is $9.87. In mid-2021, Anik Singal sold the ebook version for $1.99 in a special offer on a Facebook ad (maybe you'll see such an ad if you're on Facebook; you can also join the "Lurn Nation *Official*" Facebook group). You should first set up a free account on Anik Singal’s website www.lurn.com. After you pay for the ebook (at full price or at a discount), it will be delivered digitally to your account at www.lurn.com/my-books. If you have trouble finding your book, email support@lurn.com and they’ll send an email with a link to your free account. Click on the email link, and then click on My Books in the left side pane of your lurn.com account. You have to read it there.
If you really want to make money in affiliate marketing, you need to take a deep breath and learn all about email marketing and especially the email autoresponder. There are two ways to use email in a marketing plan (you use both, not just one): autoresponders (which can be set up in advance for a whole series of automatically-generated emails based on a kind of IF-THEN universe; these are impersonal, generic messages, like the “Thank You” email that a customer gets after buying or requesting something) and broadcasting (that's when you send out an email to your list to create a personal connection with your customers and potential customers, such as talking up the great event you had last weekend). Your email addressees can unsubscribe at the bottom of any email, of course.
If you don’t have money for an advertising budget of at least $15-$20/day ($450-$600/month), you might want to do a simpler digital business to generate that income. One such enterprise is selling coffee mugs online. You don’t have to store any coffee mugs anywhere, because they will be created as people buy them. This falls into the category of “print on demand” products (a.k.a. JIT, or Just In Time, production). They are shipped by the company that makes them. You create the design, upload the image to the company’s website, and a digital sample of the newly-designed mug will be displayed there. Create sales listings for the mug at places like Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and eBay. That way, you’ll get free traffic (known as “organic traffic”) from the millions of people who search there for coffee mugs to give as gifts throughout the year. It’s not nearly as fast as the traffic you would get from paid ads, but you could plow your small profits into paid ads pointing to the coffee mug. Then when your profits are large enough, they could fund paid ads for affiliate marketing of pricier products on sites like ClickBank.
The free PDF ebook "Zero to MUGpreneur," by David Kettner, can be downloaded from www.lurn.com/mugbook. David Kettner became a millionaire on Amazon, and co-authored his book “The Amazon Millionaire" with Robert Kiyosaki (author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”), who sees online marketing as the way of the future that was thrust into the present by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Kettner also partners with Anik Singal, who has been tapped by Kiyosaki as his successor in financial education.
CD Baby - DIY (Do It Yourself) Musician sent out an article by email on 9/16/2021[1] on the ways musicians can use these same kinds of sales methods, including affiliate marketing. However, it's better to read the literature put together by people who are "crushing it" in non-musical areas. Why? Because millionaires have the money to pay people to take their time in producing high-quality how-to books. No matter how intelligent or informed or capable musicians are, few (if any) have the resources to "dig deep" in laying out with any detail the steps to take. That being said, some millionaires are more organized than others. Here are a few comments about the free materials put out by the three men who were mentioned at the beginning of this article:
(1) Robby Blanchard (Commission Hero at www.robbyblanchard.com): He talks 90 mph in his free videos, probably to give good content while hoping nobody can keep up (he didn't count on whiz transcribers inching their way to and fro through the video to follow every word and every screenshot to get a Clickbank campaign going). For several years he has held the title of #1 Clickbank Affiliate in the world. He should know a thing or two about how to do that. You can join Commission Hero at the entry level for about $1,000. Click “Guides” in the Menu on the Home page at robbyblanchard.com to access a whole series of How-to videos that tell you how to begin your affiliate marketing business and get started making money online. Once you’re in Commission Hero, you are eligible to join the Commission Hero group on Facebook (no cost). There, certain staff members hold Question and Answer (Q&A) livestreams to address the questions people type into the chat window. What an inefficient way to get your question answered, if you do. You can email the support team for more personalized help at this lowest level of general membership in Commission Hero (support@robbyblanchard.com). However, there is an important caveat for joining Commission Hero at the entry level. Your $1,000 does not give you the hand-holding you will surely need. It merely makes you a customer with "skin in the game" whose first phone calls from the staff will be sales pitches for the $4,000 Inner Circle hand-holding package. Be forewarned that all of the affiliate marketing online educators utilize the same style of selling their courses and mentorships with “upsells” and “downsells.” They are masters of sales funnels, and it is up to you to figure out how to navigate the twists and turns built into the sign-up process so that you wind up where you want to be instead of where the funnel wants you to go. Funnels are click-by-click trails (like the bread crumb trails of the fairy tale children Hansel and Gretel) that take someone through a pre-planned path to a goal. Your first goal as a marketer is to get someone's email address in exchange for giving them something for free, like an ebook or PDF report. (That's how you - the marketer - develop a large email list.) Your second goal as a marketer is to lead a prospect to the sales page where they click to buy a product. (That's how you - the marketer - make money.) After years of offering only in-person or video training, Robby Blanchard finally published a free ebook in January of 2021, “$1K A Day” (use the Chrome browser to see the dialog box where you enter your name and email address): https://robbyblanchard.com/1k-manualv1/?gc_id=13443386821&h_ad_id=526578611759
(2) Jeff Lerner (Entre Nation at https://entreinstitute.com/): Even his free or low-cost materials are excellently organized, very teacherly while being friendly and accessible. He's the one who helps you put all the ducks in a row so that you're clear about the big picture of a well-rounded life before you begin. This is critical for helping you to stay the course when things get tough. If you understand where you are in the overall time frame of effort, you won’t become discouraged and drop out at the beginning when you don’t see wealth materializing as fast as you had hoped. If you would appreciate an eloquent teacher, Jeff Lerner is your man. He compares the three business models with which he has had personal experience, so that you can choose where you want to start: affiliate marketing, digital agency, or digital courses. Jeff Lerner offers a relatively inexpensive ($39) introductory "Blueprint" series that reveals the basics of these areas of income generation after establishing the importance of pursuing excellence in the Personal, Physical, and Professional aspects of a well-balanced life. It is not a step-by-step tutorial for how to get set up and how to begin actually making money online, but it is still invaluable as mental orientation and preparation. Pay your $39 here (good luck with getting past the confusing upsell forks in the road; you can do it!): https://secure.entreinstitute.com/?now=1&aff=admin&t=homepage
(3) Anik Singal (Lurn Nation at lurn.com): The free videos I've seen so far have some good content, but the passionate guy who led the 9/13-17/2021 free "5-Day Challenge," based on the free book "5-Step System," rambled a lot, he was more than repetitive, and the livestream for just one day went on for three hours (on another day it was over four hours) with all his ramble-repeat fluff filling up extra time; it may have been intentional, like a water mark, to discourage people from copying the livestream or the Replay video. It’s easy to imagine that the same verbal fluff would be found in the higher-level paid materials, as lengthy emotional appeals are made to prospects for the next-rung help package. However, in his free videos and books, Anik Singal puts things in perspective and correctly emphasizes what's important and what's not. His 100-page ebook, "The Email Edge," is a treasure trove of information about more than just email. It's a better look into his content and style than the brief ebooks that were intentionally crafted to be given away. He still doesn't give away specific steps. Update: As of 1/14/2023 you can access the PDF version online for free (click on this link and the 100-page book pops up instantly on your browser tab): https://lurndownloads.s3.amazonaws.com/The-Email-Edge-Book.pdf
None of these men are going to give away the store in their free materials. All of them have moved beyond whatever they used to do and on to the lucrative world of online courses (with much higher prices per item/package). The only way to access the hand-holding help is to pay a lot of money to join whatever they've named their inner circle, starting with $500-$1,000, and going up from there. As soon as you join, you'll be the target of marketing for more upsells, and they are pretty much infinite. There's always another package on the next hill.
Your money goes to two main things:
1) education or hand-holding
2) marketing and advertising
If you have the financial means to pay for those two areas, you can progress incredibly rapidly to becoming a millionaire. Some people are spending $5,000+ a day on Facebook ads. They don't do that until they've tested their products and campaigns and have seen that the niche(s) and product(s) they've chosen are viable. Once they've got a winner, they "scale" up (i.e., spend a lot more ad money) and plow their profits back into more advertising. That pumps out more commissions, which increases their income exponentially. At some point they can begin to enjoy some of their profits for themselves.
You can see the problem with musicians. They are not wealthy enough to be the targeted potential clientele for ever-more-expensive upsells in the scramble to become filthy rich. The guest speaker 9/16/2021 on Lurn Nation was a college athlete who got his worthless MBA and is now a digital millionaire. It's hard to believe all the stories some of these men tell about living in their cars before building their digital empires, although that's not impossible. Some, yes, but so many? Maybe living in your car isn't as rare as some people think. Maybe being reduced to living in your car is the ultimate motivator to never being poor again.
You need advertising money, pure and simple, to generate traffic. "Traffic" is people looking at your hook or your sales pitch online. No traffic = no sales = no profits. Yes, there's free traffic, called "organic" traffic, but it's very slow because you're hoping somebody will stumble across the product you're selling. For free traffic, you need to list on platforms like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and Etsy, where people search for product categories. They might find your product in the results - at no cost to you - and maybe buy it, maybe not.
Perhaps free traffic is called "organic" because it's like organic matter (s#!t) compared to paid traffic. Precisely-targeted paid ads are much better. But precisely-targeted emails (via MailChimp, aweber) are the most efficient and cost-effective method of driving traffic to your products wherever they are listed.[2]
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NB 9-17-2023: Here is Ioanna Karelia's review of "Best Free Affiliate Marketing Course" (Authority Hacker Free Web-Class) https://beyourmaverick.com/best-free-affiliate-marketing-course/
• and her review of "Best Affiliate Marketing Course" (The Authority Site System by Authority Hacker) [$1,499 = $749 after $750 discount] https://beyourmaverick.com/best-affiliate-marketing-course/
• plus her excellent overview "Authority Hacker Review" https://beyourmaverick.com/authority-hacker-review/
• Follow this link to a free 29' Authority Hacker training webinar: https://www.authorityhacker.com/free-training/
• Ionna Karelia says Commission Hero is the "best affiliate marketing course" if you can afford to pay for traffic (she suggests $500+/day on adspend = $3,500/wk). [GMH: But you can spend $5-$20/day to get a feel for how things work.]
• Here is Ioanna Karelia's review of Commission Hero by expert Robby Blanchard: https://beyourmaverick.com/commission-hero-review/
• She has a link to this YouTube video with Robby Blanchard telling his own rags to riches success story "*STORY TIME* From Struggling Gym Owner to Making MILLIONS Online (HOW I DID IT)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6plX3RwmAs&t=634s
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[1] Thu., 9/16/2021 5:37 pm EDT – CD Baby | DIYMusician
"How to Earn Passive Income as a Musician," by Greg Majewski | September 14, 2021
1. Affiliate programs
• Amazon Associates Program (Music Deeplinks; Embed Widgets)
• Apple Music Premier Partner Program
• Deezer’s affiliate program
2. Fan subscription revenue
• Patreon
• Bandzoogle
• (Set it up yourself)
3. Monetization
• YouTube Content ID (via CD Baby)
• Sync Licensing (via CD Baby)
4. Online Courses
• Skillshare
• Udemy
• Teachable
[2]NB: Perhaps 50% of the material in this article was free from the three men above.
[1/14/2023 Updated last sentence in the Anik Singal paragraph re free PDF book, "The Email Edge."]
[9/17/2023 Added Ioanna Karelia reviews, edited font formatting for ease of reading.]
© 2021, 2023 Gloria Merle Huffman
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