And then I’ve got some bonuses for you after the training. And there was two major things that changed my life. Number one, that was YouTube, and the second was affiliate marketing. And the combination of those two things will what eventually allowed me to build a life on our terms and to create side income and passive income, and eventually a six-figure and multiple six-figure income just from affiliate marketing, and that’s what I wanna talk about today. And the way it all started was actually just like some weird experiments. In fact, this video right here, Gift Ideas for Him, was just a video that I did. I was kinda learning that, okay, you can get affiliate links off Amazon about anything and they sell everything on Amazon. And then YouTube’s also a search engine, so people are looking for stuff. So, if people we’re going, maybe it was like a wife or a sister or some female in somebody’s life or a male that was looking for gift ideas for anybody for a guy, that they would type that in YouTube and they could find that video. And then in the video, I just went around my house, and I was like, I’m a guy, I’ve got some stuff.
So I grabbed some books and I grabbed some headphones and some different things. And I put those on a video and essentially, I just shot a video sitting on my couch, talked about a list of things and put some affiliate links in the description, just said, hey, everything I’m talking about will be in the description below. And side note, that’s my dog, Rosie. She’s an Apple Head Chihuahua, so she’s really cute and no real point with that, that’s just my dog Rosie.
And then I remember though, I’ll never forget my first affiliate payment. And raise your hand if you’ve generated any money online at all. Raise your hand high if you generated. That’s awesome. We’re here at VidSummit, like, a lot of people are raising their hand. And I bet you remember that first money you made though and I bet that it might have looked something kind of like it did for me and this was what it was, November 2nd, 2010, I made $2.12. (audience applause) Thank you, everybody, have a good night. Okay. And so, you know, and that’s like, it seems insignificant but I really believe this. That’s so significant because that’s proof of concept, like that’s proof that it’s possible and really that we need to not despise small beginnings ’cause even if you can make a little bit of money, then you can learn more tips and more strategies and you can scale that. And so, when I saw that, I was, like, man, how do we take this to another level? And then from that time, it’s been absolutely insane. In any given month, we got like a 147,000 clicks on Amazon links, something like, this is Amazon’s revenue, but we do something like multiple millions of dollars in sales for Amazon every single year and that generates a lot of top line revenue and a lot of profit, and not just sales for Amazon.
And then other affiliate program, so this is like a completely different affiliate program doing, like, $54 every single day and it’s actually not really off new content. This is off of content that has been posted even six months, 12 months, two years ago, and you could see what that’s doing, and it’s actually just one video. And we’re not really talking about ranking videos in search and discovery, but this video is about video editing software and that’s the affiliate commissions from talking about some different software, and that’s the power of just one ranked video. We got a lot of views. But with high views and the right optimization, you can generate some real income. This is an entirely different affiliate program, like, $15 every single day, passively off of some search in ranked videos that has been produced there, and it’s just one video about how to make bumpers and kind of like the animated intros and logos to your videos. So, if you’re new, and we’re gonna get into some advanced tactics, but just to kind of get us on the same page as it pertains to affiliate marketing, this is what affiliate marketing is.
And actually raise your hand if you started doing affiliate marketing. Wave at me if you’ve started. Cool, so maybe like 50% of the room, and online, let us know if you can comment if you have done affiliate marketing. But affiliate marketing is when you review and recommend a product online and you earn a commission when someone purchases that product. And so, another way to put it is, a cool way to make money, sharing the products that you love and use. Like, whatever you love, whatever your niche is, whatever you talk about, there’s probably an affiliate program for that. Like, whether it’s physical products, whether it’s digital, whether it’s software, whether it’s even services, even events oftentimes have affiliate programs. And it’s really that if you generate business for anybody, you send traffic there way and there’s any kind of sale transaction that you can get a commission. And so, here is how it works.
If you were to do it on Amazon, you can just sign up for the affiliate program and if you haven’t connected with Amazon in the Influencer page, Influencer Program here, do it before you leave VidSummit because now, they have so many cool tools for us as creators, as YouTubers, to set up our own custom page, organize products and things we love in a different category, so stop by their booth. But you can just go to the Amazon Associates Program to get started, and it’s even in multiple different countries now, so you can sign up wherever you are based. And there’s something called OneLink and even things like Genius Link or Kit.com, where you can actually sign up for lots of countries if you have an international audience. And going through OneLink, you can actually get paid from all around the world. So now, we get checks from the UK and checks from Canada being sent to us without actually doing new work, it’s super cool. So you sign up, and then basically, you get, you sign up for an affiliate program, could be any affiliate program.
And then you can be able to start creating trackable links, right? So, trackable links that you could share in your YouTube description, but this will be true for, like, your show notes, for a podcast, or on your blog, or really anywhere, in an email that you send out to your newsletter. And in this case, on YouTube, you could put that link in your description and when some visitors click on that link, if they buy something, you make money. Pretty cool, right? Like that’s how you can do affiliate marketing.
So those were the affiliate marketing basics, and keep in mind that that is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we talked about Amazon, but there are so many programs out there. I mean, it’s almost like everything has an affiliate program, Nordstrom, Target, Lowe’s, Home Depot. There’s networks like rStyle or ShareASale or ClickBank, there’s a lot of other things that we’re gonna be covering in future videos. But hey, if you got value out of this video, can you smash the Like button? That would mean the world to me. And make sure you’re subscribed because in part two and three, I’m actually gonna be breaking down how to make as much as six figures a year with just affiliate marketing, and I’ll link to that playlist on the YouTube card, as well as post it in the description below as well.
Question of the day. Have you started affiliate marketing yet? And what are your biggest questions about it? I’m excited to maybe take this series a little bit further, so post in the comment section below, what are your challenges and your questions about affiliate marketing. (moderate electronic music) .
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