- We've talked a lot about passive income
on this YouTube channel.
And that's because passive income is always a hot topic
and that's one of the reasons
why there's so much misinformation around it.
And so today I wanna make a video that focuses on
the very specific ways that I use affiliate marketing
to make passive income.
I wanna talk to you about how to do affiliate marketing
in a very authentic way.
This video is inspired by my good friend, Pat Flynn,
from Smart Passive Income.
He's actually the person who really motivated, inspired me.
I don't think I would have ever gotten into doing anything
with affiliate links without Pat.
And there's a lot of ways that he's just impacted my life.
If you ever get a chance,
you should check out his channel and his podcast.
But today, what I really wanna get into is
I'm going to talk to you about how I'm making
over 8,000 plus dollars a month in passive income,
specifically from affiliate revenue.
But I'm going to also be very upfront.
This took me year to do,
and it focuses on the concept of affiliate income
from software as a services
that pay monthly commissions, in perpetuity.
So monthly lifetime commissions
is something that you don't hear about
in videos about affiliate marketing or passive income.
And part of it is because if you are getting
recurring income from sales that were already made
from lifetime customers, it does become true passive income.
I know it's become very popular
to say that there's no such thing as passive income.
Here's a fun fact for you about passive income.
The IRS acknowledges that passive income exists.
It acknowledges passive income from rental income,
interest income on a savings bonds,
a dividend income from stocks and capital gains from stocks.
The IRS acknowledged that passive income exist.
Modern passive income could probably be more accurately
and honestly defined as automated income.
Automation is something that's becoming a reality.
And it's something that we should all be very interested in
because it is disproportionately replacing people's jobs,
but it's also allowing solo entrepreneurs
and self-employed people to radically scale their businesses
without necessarily having to work singularly harder
because labor scales linearly,
which basically means it doesn't really scale at all,
especially if it's just yourself,
but creativity and intellectual property scales non-linearly
and therefore infinitely.
If you think making money in your sleep,
which you will not do overnight, by the way
is absurd and fictitious,
you need to remember that there are authors on my bookshelf,
and there are musicians that you're familiar with
that are making money from the grave.
If making money in your sleep is interesting.
What about making money after you're dead
for your descendants, for your successors,
for the people in your family after you're gone,
that is something that is very real
and something that happens through royalty income,
something I'll talk about in another video.
Since this one is focusing on leveraging affiliate marketing
and affiliate links,
it's important to acknowledge that
in order to accomplish this, you have to build an audience.
But we're in the 2020s.
It makes sense in general,
to build an audience as it stands
and to build a personal brand
or to build an entertainment property.
If you look at what's happening
with the explosion of podcast, YouTube, Tik Tok,
this is something that young people understand.
And so those of us over 30 shouldn't be mocking it.
We should be learning it.
I'm 37, I know it's a good, clean, healthy living for you.
I'm 37, so I'm very passionate about this
because this is not something that I grasped
or understood at age 27.
And if I had it would have made all the difference
in the world in my life.
So when you understand that automated income makes sense,
we should be automating our money in general.
That's what putting your bills on auto pay.
If you make enough to accommodate better for,
putting your retirement on auto pilot, that's important.
You want to not have to spend mental and physical energy
and also have decision fatigue around these things
if you're going to do them.
And you don't wanna necessarily have to hustle
16 hours a day,
you might have to work really hard at the start
to build something.
Especially if you already work a nine to five job,
building something is much harder
when you have a nine to five job
and you can't focus on it 100%.
My transition was not into passive income.
It was into freelancing and then that came later.
And so what I want to talk to you about is the specifics
around recurring affiliate marketing commissions,
because I know that that's what you're really interested in.
I'll talk about my freelance journey and other stuff,
and the practical parts of active income in another video.
I've already shown in previous videos
that my largest affiliate is TubeBuddy
over the last five years, since working with them,
I've done over $300,000 in revenue,
and that is passive income
from affiliate commissions in perpetuity.
I average five to $6,000 a month in passive income
from TubeBuddy alone.
Now just remember out of my $25,000 a month income
from 2020, and that's what we sent out to the IRS.
This is what my bookkeepers and accountants came up with
is that's how much money we made, which was shocking to me.
It doesn't feel like it, but that's how much it was.
So you have to remember, I'm not relying on any one thing.
I have a vast diversity of income sources,
maybe as many as 17 different ways that I make money.
So take this with a grain of salt.
TubeBuddy is five to 6,000
in recurring affiliate commissions.
So 6,000 from that Kajabi
is another software as a service platform
doing about maybe 1800 a month.
So this puts us at almost 2000,
the specific one was 8,000 a month, right then and there.
Then you have to consider
that I have Amazon affiliate marketing.
The affiliate commissions on a professional camera gear.
I have almost every single Sony G Master Lens.
And I'm building out in completely
new YouTube channel creator gear guide.
That's going to actually take the affiliate marketing
from the Amazon side to the moon because I'm only focused
on content creators there and helping them
make buying decisions around their gear,
comparing all the different camera lenses,
multiple professional camera bodies,
a few budget gear for entry-level people, microphones,
lights, all of that stuff.
So you can imagine that when you look at the fact that
Amazon affiliate commissions on professional camera gear.
A professional camera lens could have an affiliate
commission of 100 to $250,
depending on the camera body, camera lens.
That's a lot of money for one sale, all right.
So you can already start to gain a picture here.
There are other affiliate programs.
You guys are a probably know about Audible,
There are things like Skillshare,
Epidemic Sound, Story Blocks.
There are so many different affiliate programs out there
for both hardware and software.
Some of them pay bounty commissions.
Some of them pay monthly recurring affiliate commissions,
Bluehost, Wix and Squarespace,
60 to $100 commissions for sales on those products.
Those are bounties.
That is more sporadic,
but I probably average maybe 1000 to $1,500
on web hosting affiliate recommendations,
largely from old evergreen content
that I've already made on YouTube and on my podcast.
Recommendations and listicle articles
and blog posts for PC parts components.
These things do very well.
And again, those are bounty commissions
and that's where the revenue fluctuates wildly.
So it can be $10,000 or more in affiliate revenue
when it's all said and done per month.
However, what is consistent is software
as a service recurring affiliate
because with TubeBuddy as a super affiliate,
I get 50% lifetime commissions in perpetuity
for every sale that I make.
Now, if you wanna understand
the beauty of affiliate marketing,
imagine if you were an employee,
but your company did a revenue sharing model
for all of the wrap value that you create for the company
in terms of actual sales, right?
So if you sell something for a hundred dollars,
imagine every time on a hundred dollars sale
that the company gave you a 20% commission,
you'd be getting $20.
Wouldn't that be amazing?
I want you to think about this.
What if the company you currently work for
gave you 20% of all the sales you made?
Let me know how much money you think that could be per year
in the comment section.
'Cause that'd be very interesting to me.
This is a concept that people don't understand
about passive income
and about affiliate marketing specifically,
when you do affiliate marketing and you do it correctly,
you're creating traffic for yourself,
but also traffic for the brand that you're associated with.
When you make authentic good quality content, tutorials,
comparisons, top 10 list,
roundups, things like that.
You're creating trust for you and for the brand.
And then you might have the opportunity
to have an affiliate transaction
that might lead to somebody buying
the right camera gear for their situation.
You wanna do wildlife photography,
get a super telephoto lens,
get something like the 100 to 400 millimeter
Sony G Master Lens.
Or if you feel you need more reach than that,
you could save $500 and get more reach
with the 200 to 600 millimeter.
You see, I literally in 60 seconds,
gave a use case comparison between two camera lenses
for niche photographers, doing wildlife.
And it actually would make sense to them
to compare those two things and look at the dollar amount,
the value, what they're shooting as subjects,
the range and the reach.
And the thing is I could do a five or 10 minute video
that helps them make that buying decision
and I will get a couple of sales from that,
and it makes sense, value is being created.
That's why the transaction is justified by the trust,
but also the specificity of the value
is creating the traffic.
This is what I refer to as the money triangle theory,
which is a traffic, trust and transaction, okay.
And it's the way to do authentic business,
whether it's e-commerce affiliate marketing,
brick and mortar or services, it's pretty much the answer.
building an audience and getting traffic
comes from creating valuable content
and understanding what people value.
That's gonna come through search and social media
in most cases, some people will do paid advertising.
All three methods are valid.
I usually only reserve paid advertising
for selling my own products or services
rather than affiliate marketing, but you can do
what you like as long as it's within the terms of service.
Tutorial content is one of the most valuable things
on YouTube, not only from an ad revenue and CPM standpoint,
but it's also valuable in the affiliate marketing space
when it comes to software as a service,
when you have companies that will pay 10%, 20%, 30%,
and up to 50% lifetime commissions for every dollar of value
that you create.
Now, for a lot of you,
you don't have the expertise in a software
or a software as a service platform,
like a Kajabi or Shopify
or a software plugin like TubeBuddy, or vidIQ
or things like that.
So this is why a lot of you have not heard about this,
because it requires
some level of technical proficiency and expertise,
which is why it's not a get rich quick scheme
or any type of overnight successes
because you'd actually you'd have to be good at something.
Even the same thing with technology
and doing affiliate marketing,
like the big YouTube channels,
Marquez has Brownlee, Austin Evans, iJustine.
You actually have to either understand tech
or be a tech enthusiast.
You also have to have the money to afford
the tech in the first place.
That's what makes it a barrier to entry for a lot of people.
And I'm just being honest about that.
So what a lot of people in that situation do
is they're not making either the large bounties
off of these things or the recurring affiliate commissions.
I didn't when I first started either,
I made very modest budget, friendly videos
around the gear and tech that I could afford.
And that added up and I was able to make
a thousand dollars a month off of Amazon.
The affiliate program was much more generous back then.
So grain of salt.
At the same time as I got into this,
and largely I was inspired by Pat Flynn,
I started looking at fact,
I had a background in web design
and graphic design and web hosting.
I could explain things, I knew things about that.
And so I started doing some of that, paired with Amazon,
and that got me to a place where I started
making $2,000 a month in affiliate revenue.
Once I realized I was capable of that,
it occurred to me that I was capable of more,
if I could get to 1000 and then 2000, why not 4,000,
why not 5,000.
And it gets to a place to where you could make a living come
off of that passive income stream
if it's recurring affiliate revenue
on work you've done up front.
Whether they that's one year, two years, three years,
then maybe it's truly passive at year three, four or five.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Even along the way,
if you don't need to live off of that income,
what if that income is invested into assets
that are appreciate that go back to the things
that the IRS calls passive income.
What if that automated income funds the passive income
in terms of your investments in stocks,
crypto, real estate, rentals, Airbnb, what have you.
Are we gonna say that there's no such thing
as true passive income then
and the passive income doesn't exist?
So I'm trying to explain this to you
and I'm trying to make it make sense for you
by showing you how it makes dollars, why it makes dollars.
And that you can do it authentically
the way that Pat Flynn does the way that Miles Beckler does,
the way that I do.
There are legitimate forms of passive income.
And they're not all the old school methods that you know,
that sometimes are cost prohibitive to you.
You can get the funding for those other methods
of traditional investing in passive income
that the IRS acknowledges
through legitimate things like e-commerce
affiliate marketing, membership websites,
and YouTube passive income through ad revenue
or royalties from intellectual property like eBooks,
audio books, music, any number of creative endeavors.
Stock video and photography.
I actually am starting to license my wildlife photography
that I do, that I shoot with these expensive lenses for.
I'm actually starting to license
some of those photos and videos,
and that is actually going to make passive income as well.
And I can then invest those profits
in things that appreciate and value.
Now keep in mind, I've made hundreds of videos,
hundreds of articles and listicles,
thousands of post in Twitter and Facebook,
over a number of years that makes this possible.
It is not over-night success.
Even building the income from TubeBuddy
that I had to make dozens of videos
over the course of five years,
to be able to make that much passive income from TubeBuddy.
And in reality, I could have hustled harder
or focused on the YouTube growth niche.
Not really something I wanted to do exclusively.
Even if it would've made me more money.
One of the smartest things I could tell you to do
is figure out how to effectively monetize
things that are meaningful to you.
Things that you care about,
things that you won't get burnt out from
and things that you feel good about,
something that matches your values.
And for me, teaching people on YouTube,
a lot of this stuff for free
is something that I'm passionate about
because it wasn't there and didn't exist
when I was younger and it would've helped me.
I can't go back in time like Biff Tannen
and hand myself the playbook.
But if I would, I could, this is the next best thing.
And everybody wins because everybody
is exchanging value in the process.
Value is created and exchanged,
and that is how we profit and prosper.
No real other way to do it.
And I think that that is something
that we can wrap our head around and it makes sense.
With affiliate marketing,
if you are doing it the way that I'm talking about,
you are sharing directly in the benefits
that you are creating for a brand or a business,
and they are giving you an investment lifetime
in the value that you created
if it's recurring affiliate commissions.
Now, if you're looking for the best affiliate programs,
I did make a video about that.
I don't need, if it popped in the algorithm,
or it didn't get a lot of views,
but I did make a video on why I feel
are the 10 best affiliate programs
that anybody could sign up for.
So I will link to that in the description down below,
I highly encourage you to check it out.
Question of the day.
What is your biggest takeaway from today's video?
I'd love to know in the comment section.
If you enjoyed this video,
watch my other video on six ways to make passive income.
I think you're really going to enjoy it.
Also watch the playlist I have here
on starting your own online business.
I think that has a ton of value.
Both will be linked in the description down below.
As always, thank you so much for watching.
And don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.