Was My First Affiliate Marketing Strategy in 2020 Successful?
No. Well kinda. Here’s what I learned…
Why Did I Begin Affiliate Marketing?
My ecommerce journey began with dropshipping while I was still playing professional baseball. I ran an ocean themed Instagram page and Shopify store for a few months before moving into the pet niche. As sales started to flow in from Instagram influencers, I was gearing up to start running Facebook ads. I’d done all the research, paid for courses, and felt like I would be very successful. But, in business and life things are unpredictable and unexpected.
Who knew that Chinese New Year meant that all AliExpress suppliers shut down for two weeks during January? Cause I had no idea.
Then the coronavirus arrived and completely through dropshipping out the window for the next few weeks. It was during this time that I began looking into other ways to make money online, and I decided to try out affiliate marketing.
I studied the techniques of Russel Brunson and Franklin Hatchet through their YouTube channels. The technique made sense. Converting cold traffic is difficult, so you need to provide potential customers with value first. This step starts to build a trusting relationship you and customers. In short, this is the affiliate marketing strategy that I used after studying the gurus:
- Choose a profitable niche: health, wealth, or relationships
- Pick an offer from a platform like ClickBank to promote
- Create a funnel using ClickFunnels to generate leads by giving away something for free
- Direct those leads over to the offer using your affiliate links
- Sit back and pray for money to flow in
I chose the health niche because I felt like the offers available in this niche were the best ClickBank had to offer. I promoted the Custom Keto Diet using their affiliate tools to begin creating my landing page. I downloaded their free keto recipe book to give away to potential leads. I started my free 14 day trial with ClickFunnels and began building my sales funnel.
It’s important to note that if you’re using paid ads like Facebook to promote affiliate products you cannot directly send potential customers to your affiliate offers. You must first send them to a landing page where you collect their email and give them something of value in exchange. It’s not that this process is easier, but Facebook does not allow the use of affiliate links for their paid ads. Life would be too easy, and everyone would be doing this if it were the case.
Here’s the landing page I created using ClickFunnels:
My affiliate strategy included offering a free keto recipe book to potential leads. When they clicked through my ad and arrived on the landing page, they’d be prompted to click the “download now” button. This would then open up the popup where they entered their email address to receive the recipe book.
To make this process work I created a GetResponse account using their 14 day free trial. I integrated the software into ClickFunnels to collect leads and send them their recipe book. Over the course of one week I collected over 100 emails and leads:
After customers entered in their email address, they were taken to the second page of my funnel. On this page, they were prompted to take the custom keto diet quiz by clicking the button. I used this page to sell them on what the diet had to offer and to show them the benefits of taking the free quiz. I linked my affiliate link for the custom keto diet to the button, so when leads clicked on the button they were taken to the company’s quiz page. Here’s what the second page of my funnel appeared:
Everything was set up exactly how I learned from watching the gurus’ YouTube videos. I thought I made a million dollar funnel that would start bringing me passive income in no time.
To position my brand better, I created an Instagram and Facebook page with the same name as my website. The more uniform everything is the more trustworthy your brand appears.
I got everything set up, now for the results:
After promoting the offer for a week, I had 92 hops, or people use my referral link to checkout the custom keto diet. Of those 92 people I made one sale…my mom.
Yep, you read that right. I showed my mom the offer and she thought she could use it so she bought it using my link. I made no sales, so I considered my first short affiliate marketing endeavor a failure.
How much money did I spend on Facebook ads?
$93.37.
I finally decided to shut down the ad campaigns after dealing with the headaches of Facebook ad account bans. Yep, my ad account got banned 3 times for no reason at all. Banned 3 times and reapproved 3 times all within 3 days. But that’s another story for another post.
Why wasn’t my affiliate marketing strategy successful?
There’s no one thing to point to, but I think the main reason is because I didn’t give it enough time to work. My ads were actually running really well. I was getting link clicks from my ads for just $.30 each. Of those 148 clicks I got 113 emails, but they weren’t just emails. They were potential leads that I could continue to sell to via email marketing. Of those 113 leads, 92 of them visited the custom keto diet quiz website through my referral link. But, none of them purchased the $35 custom keto diet meal plan.
I believe that if I would’ve stuck with it and spent $250 to $500, I would’ve began seeing success. The issue is your Facebook pixel doesn’t have any data to rely on when you start out. Your pixel is learning as you go. Once it begins finding the right people who make a purchase, it begins to learn which type of people are best to target. Over time your pixel becomes more optimized, and you start seeing better and better results.
To learn some of the affiliate marketing strategies that I used checkout Russel Brunson’s YouTube channel:
You can also checkout this affiliate marketing strategy guide in the ClickFunnels blog.
I’m not into all the people who post BS screenshots of results that they got from somebody else, my goal is to keep this blog as real as possible. Although my affiliate marketing strategy in 2020 wasn’t successful, I learned a ton about Facebook ads, ClickFunnels, and GetResponse. You learn more through failures than you do with success. My goal is to share all the knowledge I’ve gained through my own failures and successes throughout my ecommerce journey.
Since my first affiliate marketing venture I got back into dropshipping using a new blue ocean strategy that I hope will be successful! I’ll begin showing you the results and behind the scenes within a few weeks.
In the meantime, checkout a few of my latest blog posts for more of my ecommerce experiences:
- Sell The Trend Shops: Revolutionizing E-Commerce with Branded Website Creation for Dropshipping
- How Sell The Trend Uses AI to Find Winning Products in 2024
- Sell The Trend Review: Discover the Secrets to Winning Products
- How to Find Winning Dropshipping Products: Sell The Trend vs. Other Market Research Tools
- A Comprehensive Guide to Using Sell The Trend for Your Shopify Store