Welcome to Affiliate Marketing!

Greetings and thank you so much for being here!

I’m happy to be your guide into the wonderful world of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a very rewarding venture, but it’s not all easy. You can’t just assume there is no work involved and that it is an easy way to make money.

Affiliate marketing is hard work (at least at first). If you are taking this course to earn your first $10k in affiliate marketing, you are likely still working a full-time job. You maybe even have a family that you want and need to spend time with. These things make life as an affiliate marketer even harder in the offset. This hurdle is why people like us think that we can’t get our side-hustle off the ground.

The great thing is though, that if you do it right, affiliate marketing CAN turn into something that is automated, rewarding, and allows you to live a freer lifestyle than you ever imagined.

It’s getting to that point that takes hard work, planning, and dedication.

This course is meant to help you get to that desirable point in your business, make your first $10,000 in affiliate marketing, and give you this point of launching off from.

Yes, $10,000 is a launching off point.

Consider yourself at below stage 0 right now. There are a lot of people out there who make millions of dollars per year just by being affiliate marketers. You need to get your systems in place, start making money that you can reinvest in your side-hustle to turn it into a business, and automate as much as you possibly can to free your mind for strategically taking your business even higher, all while having more time and headspace for your family, friends, and personal life.

If $10,000 sounds like a lot of money to you right now, then this is your first homework assignment. Forget all of your limiting beliefs about money. $10,000 isn’t a lot of money. $1 million isn’t a lot of money either, if you have the right mindset.

If you have limiting beliefs, your efforts in affiliate marketing will be limited. If you think that you lack the time it takes to make this work, you will find yourself without the time to make it work. If you think any amount of money is a lot, you will project that belief into your efforts and onto your audience. You will think “why would anyone pay $297 A MONTH for software? That’s A LOT OF MONEY!”

That’s game over thinking right out the gate.

Banish that type of thinking, open your mind, and let’s free our lives by setting up our automated revenue streams through affiliate marketing.

Let’s GO!

This is a beginner’s course, so naturally we will start at the beginning by defining what affiliate marketing actually is.

My definition of affiliate marketing is: building a business through the promotion of products created by another company.

So a few things to unpack here.

When most people think of affiliate marketing they think of signing up for a program to get a link that they can then share with their friends and make money.

While you can do this, and may start your affiliate marketing career this way, this shouldn’t be your main way of marketing (and will also lose you a lot of friends from being annoying).

The goal of affiliate marketing should be to build a business. You can do this in various ways, but for now just know that you need to be building a brand, becoming a voice for your audience, and seeking to build your own business instead of just being a nameless middle-person looking to score a commission.

Affiliate offers can support your existing business by providing an additional offering in your value ladder (more on this in later lessons), or it can help you start your business by having something to sell to people. 

I would also like to touch on the point of building through promoting other people’s products.

It’s an amazing world we live in where we are able to start and grow a business without even having our own product. We can simply find something we want to promote, make a deal with people to share their preexisting product in exchange for a sales commission.

Now, as I believe the goal of affiliate marketing is to build your own sustainable business, promoting other people’s products should lead to the creation of your own. Not only do you have more control over selling and pricing your own products, but you really build your brand when you are selling your own products.

What’s more, you will likely need to work on creating your own products and services as a bonus that you give away to entice people to buy the affiliate offer through your link. We will discuss this concept of bonuses more later in the book, but just keep in mind that you will likely need to be creating your own content and bonus products to really make this work for you. 

Please also note that full product creation is outside the scope of this course. What we will work on is the bonus content that we can add to make affiliate offers even better for our users. It’s step 1 in mastering your affiliate marketing journey.

Only within the past year have I begun to create my own bonuses in order to help my audience. 

Can you guess when I passed the $10k mark in affiliate marketing?

Yep. Within the past year.

This is where the hard (and rewarding) work comes in, but you don’t need to worry. I will walk you through bonus offer creation in this course since it is a major staple to early affiliate success.

Since there is so much to do to get good at affiliate marketing, you will oftentimes find yourself working nights and weekends, as well as days. You may be working on your downtime, especially if you have a full-time job and are doing affiliate marketing on the side (think breaks and lunchtime).

Again, the hard work is rewarding, you just have to put in the time up-front.

Before we get into the specifics on how to start finding affiliate marketing offers, identifying what makes a program good to join, and building out our overall strategy, I wanted to run through some ways NOT TO DO AFFILIATE MARKETING.

I feel like this is important to tell you in the offset so you don’t make some of the mistakes that I and many others have made when just getting started.

First, one thing that you don’t want to do is continually talk up your friends and family on social media. You may get your start this way, and can find some good, long-time customers because this set of people already know, like, and trust you, and if you are helping to solve their problem, then great!

The issue here lies in the continual salesy push. Whenever you talk to someone and the only thing you talk about is selling them something, that’s a fast way to lose friends.

You also shouldn’t be sending out new friend requests to people you knew back when, just to immediately be hitting them up for a sale. Your account may get flagged, and you definitely won’t be able to use social media for legitimate business if your account gets taken down.

To this point, if you make your friends and family on social media mad by pushing someone else’s product on them that they don’t want, someday when you do have your own product to sell, these people will already be wary of talking with you and won’t want to hear what you have to say.

Approach friends and family with caution.

The next thing that you won’t want to do in your affiliate marketing business is to send people straight from your content to the affiliate website. By doing this you will be the anonymous middle-person in the mix and you won’t be building any kind of relationship with your audience.

In this course we will be devising ways to collect emails from people before sending them to your affiliate offer, thus opening the opportunity to build and ongoing relationship with them.

Lastly, you want to avoid being the oily-haired car salesman. This leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. Once you have all your systems and automations in place, if you use your power and time to manipulate people into buying from you just to make money, you will bust your relationships with your audience, ruin your reputation, and ultimately make less money in the end.

Money is the by-product of what we do, not the end-goal. More on that in the next lesson.

So we aren’t supposed to spam our links across the internet, beg family and friends, or dupe people into buying something that’s a bad deal or that they really don’t need.

Then how do we make money?

From now on you should think of your job as an affiliate marketer, and as a seller of anything really, is being the person who solves people’s problems by providing them with the best solution.

That’s it.

That’s your one job.

While this job comes with many strategies and tactics, the underlying goal is to provide people with solutions to their problems.

In affiliate marketing we do this by finding products that we believe in that will help people, and then finding the people whose problems we can help solve.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that we don’t need to create our own product first, so we can start helping people immediately.

I later lessons we will go over how to plan our strategy for helping people and the different vehicles you can use to reach said people that need help. 

When we genuinely put our heart and soul into helping a specific set of people reach their goals, it becomes easy for them to pay us money.

That’s why money is the byproduct. Helping comes first and money naturally follows.

Imagine that you have a kid that is starting to show natural talent at piano. If you don’t know how to play piano yourself, how much would you pay for a course by an expert who specifically knows how to teach children piano?

If you suddenly found your job is moving you to Italy, and you don’t speak Italian, how much would you pay for training by someone who’s already made the move for business and learned to master Italian and thrived in their new position?

Lastly, you are likely in this course because you know people are making money online, but how to start seems like an enigma, and you don’t really have a ton of time to get the process started and hopefully get out of your 9 to 5 job you hate.

That’s why I created this course. To solve your problem. I’ve been in the same boat and so far spent 5+ years learning how to make money online. I want to shorten that timeline for you and others because 5 years is way too long to keep doing what you hate.

By helping you, you can learn to help others, and that seems like a very fulfilling goal for me, and as I said, money is always a byproduct of helping.

For now just know that your one job is helping people find solutions to problems.

The subheading for this course is “Your guide to making your first $10k in affiliate marketing even if you are working a full-time job and living a busy life.”

Based on the fact that you saw that and bought the course, I’m going to assume you are a pretty busy person.

I, myself, work a full-time job, have a wife and 2 kids with another kid on the way. Yes, life is busy, but I still manage to carve out time to not only work and spend time with my family, but also spend time on my business. 

It can be very frustrating at times, because you know you have SO MUCH stuff to get done in your business to get things accomplished and move your goals forward. But you also know that spending time with your family is also VERY IMPORTANT.

So what’s to solution?

Well, as I’ve mentioned before, my goal is to condense much of my 5+ years of learning down into this course for you to save you all that time and heartache in learning, testing, and trying things.

Next, it helps to keep a to-do list that is numbered by the most important tasks. Each day try and complete the number 1 task, and then move on to 2 and 3 if you have time. A lot of days, you won’t have time, but if you get up a little earlier, carve out a little time after the kids go to bed or right after work, and get that number 1 task done, at least you will be moving your business along a little bit farther every single day.

Lastly, invest in help.

I know this seems counter-productive. We are trying to spend money, not make money.

But the thing is, you have to look at this as an investment in future time saved.

I made over $10,000 with affiliate marketing in 2020. My business still went negative. Am I asking you to do this? No. Learn from my mistakes. I was investing in Lifetime Deals on software. This software helps to automate my processes and helps save time in the long-run. It’s a good investment, but I didn’t have a clear goal on how I wanted to run my affiliate marketing business, so I bought a bunch of software I didn’t really need.

The next type of help I invested in was outsourcing.

ZipRecruiter, an job board company we were partnered with through the mom blog that we run, was offering $200 to write content that featured their product. I was working on other projects at the time, but still wanted this deal, so I paid people $100 per article to write the 6 articles. I paid $600, got $1,200 ($600 profit) and we still get $100 per trial signup we get from the company.

All I had to do for this project was outline the article I wanted written, proof the articles that were completed, and send them in. I saved at least 6 hours of work and still made money on the deal. This is the mindset you need for reinvesting your money in your business. It’s not spending money if it saves you time and makes you more money.

I took this concept a step further and hired my own writer from the Philippines. This is a full-time, 40 hours per week, worker that costs me $100 per week. That is well above minimum wage for them, she is learning about SEO and marketing, sharpening her writing skills, and providing us with killer content. It’s a win all around.

$100/week may seem like a lot of money, but I have built my systems up in my business so I am making more than that on auto-pilot. Now I don’t have to worry about getting enough content out on my blogs. I get an article per day, and basically spend $20 per article from a dedicated worker, instead of $100 per article from a random freelancer who has 10 other jobs from other clients at the same time.

Even more recently I hired, and am currently training, a full-time VA that helps with promoting the content our writer is producing via Pinterest and social media. This person will also help with my podcast soon, as well as other customer support and organizational efforts.

It’s all about saving precious time in exchange for money that is incoming anyways.

It takes some work and a little investment up front to train people, but it will save you tons of time and make you way more productive in the long-run.

If this sounds like something that interests you, I use onlinejobs.ph to find my VA workers.

If you are still here, affiliate marketing must sound interesting to you, and a good way to start making money online.

Since this is the case, you are now probably wondering who this Justin Coleman character is, and why he’s qualified to teach anything on affiliate marketing.

It all started with my daughter being born in August of 2016. I had just graduated with my Master’s Degree in Business Admin with a focus in Entrepreneurship in March of that year, which had a price tag of $30k in student loans that were going to start needing to be paid in October.

I ran a fledgling wedding videography business I had started a few years prior, but all my money was going back into the business. I was already working a full-time job, and I also didn’t want to be gone on weekends filming wedding when I had a newborn and wife at home I wanted to spend time with. We had loans on 2 cars, and were paying a mortgage.

With the finances and the time-crunch bearing down on me, it’s safe to say I was FREAKING OUT.

Long story short, I ran the wedding business into the ground trying to expand too fast and hire people to help me out. After my daughter was born I decided that I wanted to make some money online to free up my time and conquer my financial situation.

In the first 2 weeks after she was born I’d built a crowdfunding website. Having no traffic, I started to Google how to get found online and came across SEO and eventually sales funnels.

My first real affiliate program was with a program called Funnelytics. In the fall of 2018 I took the last $600 my business had and bought lifetime access to the program. They had an affiliate program and I began to try and sell it to others.

I’ve made $1,459.60 on that program as of this writing on 6/12/2021. Not life changing, but it’s helped buy some software and help for my business.

Another program that we were a part of was the Noom weight loss program. They gave us free, unlimited access to their program in exchange for a review. I did them one better and we took the program ourselves. So I lost a bunch of weight, wrote some articles, and over a few years have made $2,805 helping them sell their program. That’s 141 people who have signed up through our link, and I hope at least half of those people have found success in weight loss, because I know it’s a struggle and can be a burden in life.

We’ve also partnered with various other brands through the Impact Radius affiliate marketplace. Our main partner here is ZipRecruiter. We’ve had a special working relationship with them where they are paying us directly for articles and videos, and we also get $100 for free trial signups from them. Through our partnership with them and other various brands on Impact we’ve made $4,759.98.

My most lucrative venture to date has been selling through the ClickFunnels platform. I found ClickFunnels in August of 2019 when I took their One Funnel Away Challenge to take a crash course on sales funnels. My experience in selling through them is a little unorthodox though. 

Most people either sell ClickFunnels itself, the free books, or the One Funnel Away Challenge. I know that market is saturated (though I won’t stop trying to sell those things either). But you see, I had gotten in on the Funnelytics Lifetime Deal as a founding member, and so became friends with the guy who ran the affiliate program. 

Through this relationship I got a heads up that Funnelytics still had a lifetime deal, but it was hidden. It was now the one-time offer on the back end of the Traffic Secrets funnel. I quickly began promoting this deal, and things started to take off. 

So far through ClickFunnels I’ve earned $13,636.80, mostly from selling this deal. I found what I consider the true value in the funnel and let people know about it.

So that’s $22,661.38 total I’ve made in affiliate marketing over the past few years, minus a few small commission amounts on other platforms that aren’t significant enough to mention (talking about you, Amazon).

Is this a life changing amount. Not entirely. I haven’t made millions of dollars (yet), but I’ve fought some battles on the field of affiliate marketing that have taught me some lessons, made me better at what I do, and overall helped me obtain a steady foundation and an arsenal of tools to help me build and grow my business to new heights.

I’m not the million-dollar guru, and I’m not here to teach you a get rich quick scheme. 

What I’m here to offer is my hard-won insights on how to get started in affiliate marketing, make your first $10,000 (hopefully much quicker than I did), and setup the foundation to build your business, free up your time in life, and get out of your 9 to 5.

I hope you’re here to kick ass and get what you want in life. I’m in your corner. I’m here to help and answer questions. I’m more guide than guru, and half the gurus out there are full of shit anyways.

I’m confident in my teachings because I’ve actually done it. I’m not sitting here promising you will make $1,000,000 when I’ve only made $22k myself. I’m here to teach my methods and help you get to the other side, from having no idea where to start to making your first $10k in affiliate marketing.

Thank you for your trust in me to guide you.

Most courses that you buy come with a 30-Day money back guarantee.

These courses are also usually produced by the gurus who promise you the moon and don’t expect you to find out that they can’t within a 30 or 60 day window.

Sorry, but this course doesn’t make any money-back guarantees.

I also can’t guarantee that you will make $10k if you buy this course. 

Why not?

I don’t control the amount of time and effort you put into affiliate marketing.

As I’ve stated, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme. It’s a put forth the time and effort and build something that will reward you with recurring income for the rest of your life non-scheme.

It’s about helping people find their solutions, and you are either going to put in the effort to find your target audience and connect them with the solution to their problems, or you will browse this course, close out, and go back to your 9-5 job that takes all your time and energy away from what you really want to be doing in life, and the time you have with your friends and family.

The only guarantee I can give is that if you put forth consistent effort over time you will move the dial, and you will be better off each day you put in the time and effort into building your systems, researching your audience, and helping them meet their goals.

One of the reasons you are likely interested in affiliate marketing is the life freedom it seems to offer.

Being able to set up systems to make you money while you sleep, go to work, or hang out with your family sounds tempting.

I get it.

Working a 9-5 job is grueling, whether its a factory job or an office job. Doing something you don’t want to be doing for that long is trying on the brain. 

While the freedom of your life and time can come eventually, there is no guarantee that you will get there, or at least get there soon.

It all depends on how you build up your systems and workers to replace you.

Yes, replace you.

My main goal in my business is to always work towards the next level of replacing myself.

A few months ago, I was struggling to write enough content for my blogs. 

I would get 1, maybe 2 articles at best, written per week during my breaks and my lunchtime at my full-time job. It was a terrible feeling because I had so many ideas for articles that would help my business, but no time to get them done. 

I felt truly stuck. I didn’t have time to get to things like creating this course and other high-level tasks and strategizing within my business because I didn’t have the time to get back the basic level of content creation.

Then I decided to hire a writer. I replaced myself as the writer in my business. I consider myself an SEO and content expert, and have a full-time job proving so as well, but this is the first position I replaced myself in. I hired a writer, trained her in blogging and SEO, and now I don’t write near as many articles.

Why did I replace myself in what I am best at? 

Life freedom.

My end goal in all of this is to be able to have a business that mostly runs itself, where I am the owner and have the life freedom to pursue creative activities and spend a lot more time with my family without the worry of money to hold us back.

If I replaced everything but myself as a writer, I’m still stuck doing a job.

Once I had replaced myself as the writer I was getting 4-5 articles per week, AND my writer likes making graphics, so I didn’t have to spend time making graphics for the blog post, AND she was making pins for our Pinterest account. Much more productivity and growth.

Because we had so much content coming out now, my new job became content promoter. We had to get the word out about all of the new articles our blogs had. So I was spending my time pinning pins, posting to social media, and again, not spending time on high-level activities like making this course.

So I recently hired a general virtual assistant that would help with these tasks as well as others going forward. Now I don’t have to spend my time pinning, and she will be doing transcriptions for, and posting, my podcast for me, so I will have time to actually start recording my podcast again and reaching new audiences.

The point to this story isn’t to brag by saying I have people working for me to help save time. The point also isn’t to show my shortcomings of not having a full-fledged business right now where I’m sitting on the beach at some resort while people make money for me.

The point is that gaining life freedom through affiliate marketing is a process.

Whether you are hiring people with money you make from your business to further grow your business, or you are purchasing software to help automate your processes while you still run things yourself, just know that it’s a process, it takes time, but the end goal is so sweet.

Think of your end goal right now, whether it’s freedom of time and money, or something else entirely. Write it down. Stick it up where you can see it. This is your driving force that will keep you going through the hard times when you just want to quit.

Your freedom is out there. You just have to put in the time and effort to earn it. Hard work for 2-3 years before you reach your goal is much better than working 20-40 more years making someone else’s dreams come true.

Now let’s get started and see what makes a truly great affiliate marketing program to join.