Jeff Lerner here and in this video we're going to be talking about how to get
started with affiliate marketing. In reasonable terms, in realistic terms, no
hype and all BS aside. It's like the closest thing there is to a hands off
stress free business because you don't have to have any employees, you don't
have to have any inventory, you don't have to deal with customer service, you
don't even have to deal directly with customers at all. You basically just get
paid for referring people via automated links that you don't even have to like
be involved with other than posting and they get clicked and you're totally
hands off and you just get paid. That's affiliate marketing in a nutshell, but
let's talk about how to get started with this incredible business model..
So affiliate marketing, it's the closest thing. Like I said, that there, there is
to a sounds too good to be true type of business. I have a special place in my
heart for affiliate marketing because at a time in my life when I was really down
and out, I was a broke jazz musician who actually had hurt his hand. So I
couldn't even play that many gigs and I was living in a spare room and my wife
was leaving me and I was in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt cause I
tried to start a brick and mortar business, all kinds of life chaos that I
don't need to belabor and
bore you with all the details of. Basically affiliate marketing like saved
my financial life. I don't know if it saved my actual life. I don't know if I
was like on a road to total destruction, but I know it really sucked and my
future was pretty bleak and affiliate marketing was there. It was like this
thing that I could get my hands on where if I could just get people to click the
links, I could get paid and I didn't have to like staff up. I didn't have to
have an office, I didn't have to put on like a dress shirt. I literally learned
to affiliate market in a bathrobe and slippers at a time in my life when I was
like literally like kind of depressed and I didn't shave and I looked a mess I
was overweight and I never went outside. But affiliate marketing doesn't
discriminate. It doesn't even care if you take care of yourself, it'll take
care of you once you learn it. It was amazing. I ended up generating a lot of
money from affiliate marketing, paid off hundreds of thousands of dollars in
debt, was able to move, you know, move out of that town and kind of start a
whole new life. And really it was the starting point of everything I've been
able to accomplish since then. You know, since then I've gone on to start an
agency and sold the agency and do e-commerce and I
started a teaching company and I do YouTube videos and all this stuff. But
at the core of it all, at the base of it all is affiliate marketing. And here's
the thing I love about affiliate marketing. Yes. As a business model,
it's so elegantly simple. You're just getting paid for referring people to
links where they go do business on other people's websites and you just get money
for it and that's cool. But what I really love about affiliate marketing is
the skills that it forces you to learn because basically if you learn the
skills of affiliate marketing, you have such an advantage in starting any other
type of business. Because with affiliate marketing, since all you're focused on
is the front end, all you're focused on is getting people to be interested in a
thing and click the link and go to a place and purchase the thing. And then
from there you don't have to handle it. You don't have to learn business
operations. You don't really have to learn finance other than just making
sure that you're not spending more on ads than you're collecting in
commissions. But you don't have to learn operations, you don't have to learn
finance, you don't have to manage people, you don't have to learn, you
know, long form pipeline management and customer relationship management and you
don't have to get involved in enterprise resource planning and all the
complexities of, you know, I mean I've run businesses
at the largest, I had over a hundred employees between two businesses that I
was the CEO of at the same time and it was like, Oh my gosh, there's so much to
do every day with affiliate marketing. It's actually like a joke. I mean it's
something I laugh about. I have friends that are, that's all they do is
affiliate marketers. I'm like, man, you guys are always on vacation. Like I know
that if I need something done, call an affiliate marketer because they spend a
huge amount of their time just collecting checks from, from links that
they've already posted and assets that they've already created. They tend to be
pretty available. Let's dive into, you know, how to get started with it. And I
want to start with the assumption for purposes of this video that you don't
have a lot of money, that you're basically, you're trying to get started
for free. That's what this video is. How to get started with affiliate marketing
for free. You know, I generated multiple eight figures with affiliate marketing.
I did by no means did I do that for free. I was, you know, there were times
I spent multiple six figures a month on running ads. Um, but you know, always
profitably, we're taught, we're having a walk before you run conversation and so
we're going to start here with assuming that you have like no money to spend on
ads. You know, at bare
minimum you may have to have like a subscription for like an email service,
like A Weber or a, you know, a MailChimp or a constant contact or send lane or
something and you're probably going to need some kind of like a website or
funnel tool. I use a lot of, I have used ClickFunnels many much in my day. I
still use it to some degree. We can pop some links for those down below this
video. But anyway, beyond those just basic tools, we're going to talk about
strategies that require no money. So here's how I suggest people get started
with affiliate marketing. Because what I found with affiliate marketing is if you
can just get a few small wins, if you can just get those first few sales,
those first few referrals those first few commissions, you start to get
momentum, you start to get belief and you start to develop a little bit of a
tolerance to say, Hey, maybe I can put a little bit of money into this. You know,
if I was able to get a few sales for free, then maybe I can spend a few bucks
to drive some traffic to my funnel or my pages and try to get a few more sales.
It's like your willingness to invest a little bit of money in your business and
in yourself goes up. If you can just get those first few wins. That's what I want
to focus
on is, is a formula here. You know, several steps that I've kind of broken
into, like five steps that you can use to start getting those first few sales
with no money out of pocket. And the first thing is find products from your
actual life that you think might have what's called an affiliate program that
they might exists. Well, first of all, anything that's sold on Amazon is part
of the biggest affiliate program in the world. Amazon is itself an affiliate
program. It's called the Amazon associates program. So any product you
can buy on Amazon, you can promote as an affiliate and get paid a referral
commission. So start there. Think what are the products in my life that are
available on Amazon? And right there you have a giant list of products that you
can promote. And the reason that I suggest you, you pick products from your
life as a starting point is because until you start to develop skills as a
marketer, meaning you know how to write compelling sales copy or you're using
language to drive people's behavior and get them to take action and you'll learn
how to, you know, do what's called direct response marketing where you know
how to like design a page and you know how to structure your funnel and get
people to do the thing you want them to do. Before you have any of those skills.
What you have is
your natural ability to persuade your natural enthusiasm, your natural
passion, your natural willingness to kind of throw your emotional energy
behind something if you believe in it. You know, as marketers, people who have
marketing skills, we don't necessarily have to believe in a product. Certainly
we like it if we do, but if you give us a set of features and benefits, we know
how to write about a product in a compelling way because there's an actual
art and a science to doing that. It's kinda like knowing how to write poetry.
You know how to write sales copy. There's, there's rules. If you know how
to write a sonnet and iambic pentameter, that's one thing. You don't have to
necessarily love the subject of your poem to write that way. We'll just like
that we as marketers, we know how to just write copy in a compelling way, but
before you have all those skills, like I say, if you just love the thing or at
least appreciate the thing, you'll be able to talk compellingly about the
thing. It's like referring someone to a movie that you liked. You don't have to
be a savvy film critic. You don't have to be an expert in the how. You know
that film technique derived from Orson Welles, early works of this. You don't
have to know all that. You just have to be like, yeah, the movie was awesome. It
was intense. It
made me feel good. I was leaning forward in my seat. You got to see it. You know,
just enthusiasm is still the most powerful sales technique there is. And
so if you start picking products from your own life, you'll naturally be able
to promote them without having to have actual technical marketing skills or
training per se. Right. So make a list, let's say 10 products that you use in
your own life that you know are available on Amazon. If there's any like
online courses or products that you know are sold online, like maybe like if
there's been something that's powerful for you, like a health product. Heck, a
certain type of protein powder or something that helps you lose weight or
something that helps you quit smoking and then go online and actually Google,
you know, affiliate program, blank or blank affiliate program. Let's say it's,
you know, for me, uh, I've got this mic here, I don't want to pick it up cause
it'll make a loud sound cause it's recording right now, but it's a, it's a
Blue Snowball mic. If I Google Blue Snowball mic, I know at the very least
they sell it on Amazon, but it may well be that the actual company that sells
the mic, which I think is Blue, they may have an affiliate program or for
example, they may also sell it at Best Buy and Best Buy has an affiliate
program. So that's step two is after you make your list, find the best paying
affiliate program option for the different products that you promote. I
want you to add to your list. So you start with products that you have a
natural passion for natural enthusiasm for cause you use them in your own life.
And then I want you to actually start to learn about these affiliate networks out
there because you know as you start delving into this world of affiliate
marketing, you'll find that there is just this massive universe out there of
opportunity and products and things that you never even imagined. Because the key
is you rarely want to just be an affiliate of one product. You want to
use your affiliate product to cultivate what's called a buyer list. A list of
people that are interested in that thing. So let's say let's use protein
powder. Let's say there was a protein powder that you loved and you found a
website that sells protein powder and they had an affiliate program and you,
you promote it. Well now you have a list of people who bought a thing, but that
tells you something about those people. Like, Hey, these are people that are
interested in fitness. So maybe I should now send them a link to a 90 day
training program. How to train for a marathon or how to, how to shred body
fat or
how to gain 10 pounds a muscle, or you know, some, some kind of a course or a
program or something. And you develop these interest based category lists and
now you can follow up. And so when you go onto these affiliate networks, and
I'm gonna give you the name of two of them in particular. One of them is
called ClickBank. One of them is called JV Zoo. Actually, I'll throw in a third.
There's one called Share A Sale. There's a lot of these, you can actually find
information, mostly digital products or information products that you can
promote to people who you've already pre-qualified as being A purchasers.
There are what we call buyers. They are people that will actually purchase
products, they have working credit cards and a willingness to make an online
purchase and they have an interest in that category. Well that's a great
person to send a follow up offer to and now you'll have offers that you can
follow up to the products in your life that you were, you were passionate
about. And so once you have products and you have your and offers, which are not
to get too technical, but products and offers are kind of two description, two
sides of the same coin. The product is the thing that it's sold that is sold.
The offer is the way that it's sold. It's the language, it's the page, it's
the presentation, but now you need traffic and
or traffic or audience or a following or you know, sometimes you'll hear the term
list lists kind of means just anybody that you have any influence with. And
for most people, you know, we actually already have an audience. A lot of times
we don't think about it. It's people in our immediate circle. And so a lot of
people get started with affiliate marketing literally just by getting
links and posting them on social media, whether that's Facebook, Instagram, Tik
Tok, Snapchat, whatever. And that's where having a list of products that
you've personally used is really, really powerful. Cause you say, Hey, this, this
is a great product. You know, it, it helped me lose 10 pounds and I just want
to share it. If anybody's, you know, making a resolution to get back in
shape, this was really helpful for me. You might like it and people click it
and if they buy it, it's not like it doesn't cost them more. People are
always so worried about, well I don't want to refer my friend if they find out
I made money. It'll be weird. It doesn't cost them any more. It's not like when
you sell something through an affiliate link, they mark the price up. You just
happen to get a cut because you did some of the work of promoting and advertising
the product on behalf of the merchant. So anyway, and from there, from
your personal list, you can expand obviously with social platforms, you
start putting out relevant content and you'll attract a following. You know,
for example, I've been doing these YouTube videos for about a year. I
started from scratch. I've got 2000 subscribers now. I expect that number to
grow exponentially over the next year. It just, you know, with any of these
social platforms, the growth kind of compounds faster and faster. The more
you do it and the more consistent you are. If you want to get into like
blogging, if you, if you have a lot to say and you want me to shoot videos or
write articles and put them on a website, um, that stuff will get
organically indexed by the search engines and start to naturally attract
more people. And then there's all kinds of advanced tools you can get into. And
I teach about this stuff in, in ENTRE and um, I do some other videos about
some of this fancier stuff. Things like messenger bots and SMS marketing and,
all these different ways you can build your communication lists. But really
just as a starting point, just think about producing content and growing your
reach on social networks. Here's the best way to get your affiliate links out
there in a way that entices people to want to click on them and get you paid
is to actually review the product. So like I've got the new
AirPods here, I'm dating this video, but I've got these new AirPods, they're
AirPod Pro I think is what they're called. And honestly, they're amazing.
They have noise cancellation. You can also just pinch them and then it
actually creates, I think it's called transparency, where it doesn't just let
sound through, but it actually will amplify the ambient sound. So let's say
somebody's talking to you and you've got these in and they're on noise canceling
and you can't hear a word, they say, you pinch them and then it will actually not
only allow the person's sound to come through, but it'll actually amplify it
and you can hear them better. It's like having a hearing aid. They get, they
toggle between noise cancellation and they'll actually function like a hearing
aid. It's amazing. And if I was an affiliate for an Apple product, which by
the way, I totally could be cause they sell these at Best Buy and I could be a
Best Buy affiliate. I would've just told you that and tried to sell it to you. It
wouldn't cost you any more, but I would still get paid because I referred you.
You know, just start doing reviews of products that you like. It's, it's that
simple. So get started. Affiliate marketing, like I said, it's such a
powerful business model. It can change your life. It changed my life. I've
shown you that you can basically get started on
it for no money. If you like this video, I'll invite you to subscribe to my other
videos. My channel is all about helping people have an awesome life and showing
them ways to pay for it. So if that's something that you might be into, go
ahead and click the button to subscribe. Click the little bell to get notified as
I put out new videos, I'll see you on the next one. And thanks for your time..