- I'm gonna do my very best
to rein in my overwhelming sarcasm throughout this video,
but I probably won't succeed.
Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake of robertoblake.com,
helping you create something awesome today.
So, in today's video, we're going to tackle
an interesting topic that centers around passive income,
and specifically we're gonna talk about affiliate marketing,
everyone's favorite scam.
And I'm being very snarky when I say that,
because affiliate marketing is not a scam.
And I'm gonna preface this by saying that,
if you have friends that are married,
and they're in love, and they're in la-la land,
they will tell you that marriage, and love, and having kids
is the greatest thing in the world,
and that it's such a joy.
Right?
Okay, now if you have a friend that is single,
has been jilted, has been cheated on,
and is stumbling into the bar every other night,
then they're probably gonna tell you that
love is a sham, it is a lie,
and that everyone is only out for themselves,
and that you're only waiting to be disappointed by people,
because that's their experience.
Meaning that people who have been
successful at affiliate marketing
will tell you that it's amazing and it's fantastic
because it's been very good to them.
People who have tried it and have been met with
nothing but failure will tell you that it's a scam
and that it's a lie because it didn't work out for them.
And you have a real life example in the same form of
life, and relationships, and love.
Happy people who are in great, healthy relationships
will tell you that it's great,
and that you should go out and find someone and get married.
People who have been disappointed, and jilted,
or cheated on will tell you that
it's only setting yourself up for disappointment.
It's the same thing.
Everything usually comes down to those kind of,
you know, binary decision-making things.
So, let's talk about why people
aren't necessarily successful,
what my experiences are, and let's deal with
some of the myths around affiliate marketing,
and passive income in general.
When I talk about passive income,
I'm not using your grandpappy's definition.
I'm using the definition used by
people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Pat Flynn,
John Lee Dumas, people who are actually successful.
And by that, I'm being, again, snarky and sarcastic because
I'm trying to drive the point home that there is
a modern interpretation of a word,
and then there is a traditional or stuffy, professional
version of a word, and those things evolve.
It's not that people are making up
their own definitions or changing them,
that these things do evolve.
Uber wasn't in the lexicon just a few years ago.
The lexicon just keeps evolving and changing.
With that in mind, let's deal with
one of the elephants in the room.
You need a big audience to be successful
in affiliate marketing.
A lot of people have said that
the only reason I can talk about
how successful I've been in affiliate marketing
through platforms like Amazon, or through web hosting,
or through TubeBuddy when it comes to a YouTube plugin,
or other things, it's because,
well, you have this large audience in YouTube
and in your other social media platforms.
There's some validity and truth to that,
that it makes it easier, in theory,
to be successful, but it's not a measurement of
whether you can be successful or not,
just because you do or don't have
those numbers in your favor because,
anyone who's ever actually done sales
and/or marketing knows there's actually
only one number that matters: conversion rate.
Conversion rate actually matters,
meaning that if you have an audience of 100,000 people,
but 0.01% of those people convert,
it's not really doing that well for you.
On the other hand, if you had 1000 people in your audience,
and 10% of them converted, depending on what the margin is,
you're doing fantastic.
Let's put that into perspective here.
What if I told you that even if you only have an audience
of 100 people, that you still have a disproportionate
opportunity to make a lot of money.
Well, how is that possible?
What if you were selling a product that has a really good
conversion rate for your particular type of audience?
And what if the margin on that in terms of your commission
was really good?
A primary example would be, what if you were getting
$100 per sale through referring a service of some kind?
Web hosting is a really good example of this.
Meaning that if you had an audience of people that
absolutely, absolutely need a website,
and you had an audience of 100 of them, even if
only 10% of them were to convert the first time
that you talked to them about it, well,
10 x 100 is $1000, so all of a sudden,
you have the capacity to make $1000 through the commissions
on that sale.
And that's not far-fetched, because companies like
Bluehost do $65 payouts in commissions for the lowest-priced
product that they offer in terms of web hosting,
for people to build a website.
And there are other ones that offer a little bit
more than than, just depending on
what company you're talking to.
Some of them have higher tiers based on the product that you
sell, meaning that if you sold the second cheapest,
not even the most expensive, the second cheapest
web hosting product that Bluehost offers,
you'd get probably about $100 off of that,
and if you aren't sharing shared web hosting,
and you're starting to sell something really robust
like dedicated servers, because maybe your audience
are the type of business people that would actually buy
a dedicated server, and would need an SSL cert
because they're doing e-commerce.
Well those people, those commissions?
They're a lot more, that's hundreds of dollars a sale.
So, all of a sudden, your audience size
doesn't matter, right?
Right.
So that myth can be squashed, it all comes down to
what you're selling.
What if you're trying to do something like Amazon
affiliate marketing because that's the easiest thing to do
in terms of an affiliate program,
and you still don't have a huge audience?
Well, if you're specifically trying to convert people
and sell laptops and you're doing laptop reviews,
I've got news for you.
As long as the laptop's about maybe $600 plus,
the odds are your commission is gonna be about $25
based on the way they cap it out.
If you sell a cheaper laptop, the price could go down,
but as long as you're selling a laptop that's at least $600,
you probably make $25.
So all of a sudden, trying to make $100 a day
doesn't seem that far-fetched.
But to actually start to be successful at this,
you don't have to make $100 a day.
If you start making even $30 a day doing something online
that doesn't take you a lot of time to set up,
you'd be making an extra $900 a month.
If you're making an extra $900 a month, congratulations,
you gave yourself a 10K a year raise,
maybe you're not quitting your day job,
but you can take a vacation.
So, I really feel that if you're struggling with the
concept of affiliate marketing, it might have to do with
you looking at it the wrong way,
only seeing problems and not seeing opportunities.
Not crunching the numbers, doing the math,
and making it practical.
And maybe you're just listening to people who are
forlorn and jilted, like
the drunk guy who's been cheated on or the spinster,
you're listening to them instead of people
who actually have what you want, a good relationship.
If you wanted to go out and you wanted to get married,
you probably should be hanging out with and talking to,
and being mentored by people who are in healthy, happy,
loving relationships, instead of listening to people
who are single and miserable,
about what a relationship is or isn't.
Unless it's, hey, don't do all the things I did
to end up where I am, that's perfectly valid
to take mentorship from them if that's the case.
So again, if people are telling you, oh, affiliate marketing
is a scam, or no one can be successful at it,
or so on, so forth, I would advise you and encourage you to
look at people who have been successful at it,
find people that have been successful at it,
and figure out what they did differently
than people who aren't successful at it,
and then, if they're willing to share that secret with you,
replicate their success, do what they did,
and you will probably see similar results.
Just like if you went and you found somebody that's
actually fit and healthy, and has rocking guns,
they're probably a fantastic person to be your
personal trainer.
If you find somebody that's not that, and is not happy
with their body image, and is morbidly obese,
probably not the best person to be taking
nutrition and workout advice from.
Probably not a good idea.
Again, I'm being snarky, but I'm dead serious about this.
That is a lot of the issue with when people talk about
marketing, or online, or video, or YouTube,
or anything that they wanna do, if you actually look at
and model people who are successful,
and Evan Carmichael has a YouTube channel
that's all about this, by the way,
about modeling the success of other successful people
to get there yourself, and finding out what they did
versus what you're doing that hasn't worked.
That matters.
Not only what you did that hasn't worked in the past,
but what other people have done that
created their failure points.
If you identify where the failure point is,
and then you're able to actually work toward addressing it,
that creates the potential for success, right?
If you find somebody who's been successful,
and you follow the same breadcrumbs as them,
then you'll probably be successful.
It's why we use our parents a lot of times
as a model for certain things that we want,
because we use them as a baseline for success because
they're the most immediately, readily available example.
But, when it's time for us to go beyond the knowledge
that they have, we seek out people who are experts
in a very specific thing, in the form of,
when you want to play football, you're usually learning that
from your football coach.
When you want to learn martial arts,
you're going to the martial arts instructor.
When you want to learn cooking,
you're going to culinary school.
There are people who have done a very specific thing,
they are good at it, and if you want to
be good at that thing, learning from somebody who's
mastered it, or is at least reasonably good at it,
is the best thing you could possibly do for yourself.
Anyway I hope this video helped you guys understand
a little bit more about how affiliate marketing
and passive income can work for you,
if you actually put in the work to make it successful,
and why, in my opinion and my experience, it's not a scam.
Like anything else, you get into it what you put out of it,
if you're doing it efficiently and effectively,
and if you're doing it with an actual plan that's been
proven to be successful.
Anyway, I'd love to know what you guys think
in the comments section.
Also if you have a video request for a small business
and social media Saturday videos, let me know that as well.
Always love you guys' feedback, always love the ideas
that you guys give me for new videos.
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As always you guys, thanks so much for watching,
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