Little-Known Secrets on How to Run a Successful Affiliate Marketing Business

Eric Beer 0:00
I'll take you back to where Clickfunnels started, right? There were people on the team looking for influencers, right? The Dream 100, they're out there. And they're trying to find those influencers, and they're trying to convince them to promote the ClickFunnels offer, whatever that offer is, whether driving traffic to the ClickFunnels software to get a free trial or the driving traffic to a webinar or they're driving traffic to the One Funnel Away Challenge, right? It doesn't really matter. But what their job is, is they are affiliate managers, right, and they're out working for a company trying to get distribution or traffic.

I spent the last 17 years building my eight-figure performance business without using any of my own money, working with some of the most brilliant direct response marketers in the world today. Now I’m looking for entrepreneurs to join my affiliate army built on ethics, transparency, and good old hard work. Join me to change the perception of how people view the greatest business in the world, affiliate marketing, and follow along as I learn, apply, and share performance marketing strategies, working with some of the brightest people on the planet. My name is Eric Beer, and welcome to the Performance Marketer podcast.

Eric Beer 1:20
Get involved in affiliate marketing, you think that you have to have this big audience. Think you have to have this following. And it would be great if you did, right? That's a bit more established business. Right? When you're starting your business, you want to try to create some cash flow. You can do it with leads.. lead gen arbitrage. You can do that..you can do that, right? You go out, go and find some buyers. You go generate leads to..so those lead to those buyers, and you generate that lead for less than what you're selling, right? Then you build a list. And that list is ultimately where you have the ability to market to that list. And at that point, you try to monetize them. And that's a nice business, really good business if you want to do that. But there's, there's there's a lot that goes into that, you know. There's a lot of expertise that goes into that, and a lot of hustle and some pieces that you need to put together. Right? So like when people say, How do I get started? I'm gonna explain to you, this is how you get started. And you don't have to have a following. You don't have to have anything. Right. I'll take you back to where ClickFunnels started, right? There were people on the team looking for influencers, right to Dream 100, they're out there. And they're trying to find those.. those.. influencers, and they are trying to convince them to promote the ClickFunnels offer, whatever that offer is, whether driving traffic to the ClickFunnels software to get a free trial or the driving traffic to a webinar, or they're driving traffic to the One Funnel Away Challenge, right? It doesn't really matter. But what their job is, is they are affiliate managers, right, and they're out working for a company trying to get distribution or traffic for them. Right. And then they're given a task, and they're told what they can pay for the traffic. Right. And in this scenario, on a CPA cost per acquisition, that means that they pay when they get a sale, CPS cost per sale, CPA cost per acquisition means you acquire a customer, that customer is a sell in this case, right for them. They're out there, they don't have an audience, they're working for the company, that's the exact same thing you do. You're just not working for ClickFunnels, you're in for yourself. And they make it very, very easy for you to do it by giving you your own affiliate links. If you get an affiliate link, what that means is you would sign up for an affiliate program Companies all over the world have programs, okay? There's.. 2021 $7 billion was spent in affiliate marketing..$7 billion. And it's grown, right, I think the lead gen spend for advertisers was was about three point something billion, and that scale, right? So you said about like $10 billion in the market that you can take for yourself?

Eric Beer 4:12
It's a lot of money, man. It's a lot of money. Right? And it's only growing because once people are realizing, oh my god, I can do this. There's gonna be more and more and more and more and more, right? It's just getting the word out, and it's hustle. But so what you would do is you would go, and you sign up for an affiliate program. You would get all the assets, the creatives, and they would provide that to you ClickFunnels. They know their business better than you do. They provide all that information to you. And they give you a unique link. To some of you may be asking, well, how did they know it came from it? I sent traffic to ClickFunnels, right? What app to give you a unique link, right when you sign up for an affiliate program in our system, we call it a pub ID, right? A publisher ID, publisher identification number, and then that is in what we call a parameter inside URL, right? So it'll be, you know, www.clickfunnels.com.pubID=456. And they know that 456 can be made. Right? So anytime somebody comes to my link with pub ID equaling four or five, six, and they sign up and become a customer of ClickFunnels, I get paid, I get a commission. That's how you do it. Right? So if you sign up and you get your own links, your own assets. Now, your job is the exact same thing as if you were working for ClickFunnels. Now ClickFunnels might be paying people to do this for them. Right? No brainer, you have to. But if you have an affiliate network, it’s called Affiliate Network, or you have affiliates, who can take your offer and promote it, there are some that have audiences and some that do not, the people that do not go and find the people that have the audience, right? I say this all the time - the quickest way to wealth is to find something that works and introduce it to somebody who doesn't know about it. Well, there are people that don't know anything about ClickFunnels, right? They may have an audience, they're focusing on their business, right? It's hard to go and build up a business, a platform, there's influencers that don't know anything about it. And no ClickFunnels is out there. Now it's a big business. So people know about it. But there's, there's plenty of offers out into the world that are unknown, that you can go, you can take that link, get people to sign up and get paid a commission. You could be a broker. Right? You literally..you go, and you get an affiliate link from the advertiser. Yeah, you go out, and you figure out where are the people congregating… your target market, right? Your Dream 100. Right. The online congregations have specific target markets is how they said Dream 100 is defined. So you're gonna figure out where people have the audience of who would likely sign up for ClickFunnels. There's definitely communities out there that they have not touched. Right? How you position, how you do it is another thing, but you can take that link and then go and do that exact same deal with somebody, give them your affiliate link to run traffic to. And then when they run traffic, you're gonna pay them a commission. And what you do is you pay out similar to what you're getting paid, that's the way you have the least amount of risk. There's other ways to do it, where you can arbitrage it. But I'm not going to get into that right now. Today, I've talked about it a lot on other videos. But ultimately, there's different ways that you can get people to run traffic for you, that you can make it more compelling, right, because, in this scenario, the person makes money when there's a sale on something, whatever that is that you agree to whatever you're promoting, through promoting the software, when someone signs up for a 14-day trial, and then becomes a customer, you get paid. And you're gonna get paid on a monthly basis. Right? Now, this guy over here, this is this, this publisher that you found, this publisher that you now have under your umbrella, you do a deal wit, however, you can cut that deal. Right? You can, hypothetically, right? You could do a deal where you pay them one lump sum payment that's larger than most people based on a customer coming in. Right? So let's say your commissions are 200 bucks, right? To make money, you'd have to pay less right to be profitable.

Eric Beer 8:54
Well, maybe pay him $50. Sorry, maybe you pay them $150, $50 be like. I'm getting 25% of it. Right? Which wouldn't be so exciting because small performance well, but if you give him 150 bucks, and you're keeping 50, so you're keeping 25%, right? Because they're the ones driving the traffic, makes sense. That's very usually what happens is the publisher should get more than you as the affiliate in between the affiliate broker, and affiliate manager, right? The guy that's finding the traffic or in some scenarios, it depends, like, if your publisher is buying traffic in arbitrage traffic, and they're the ones out there generating this traffic, they don't have an audience. They're not an influencer, which there's tons of publishers out there that do that they have costs than they need to get paid much more. But there's also scenarios where you go, and you get an influencer who has a following on TikTok. They're not buying those clicks, or buying that audience. That's why they call it earned media. Right? So for you to pay them 50% is attractive. Because almost everything's profit to them, they don't have any cause to get that traffic, that audience takes a long time to build that up. But when you do, that's what's compelling about it. That's what's exciting about it, right? And as long as you keep them engaged and add value, and they stay there with you, you can monetize them forever. And you don't have to pay, and it's, it's, it's free money, free money. truly free money, right? My world.. I arbitrage me, right? I don't, up until like, the last few years, I haven't been doing this I haven't been on on YouTube telling people how I make money, you know, what I'm doing, you know, my strategies and my vision and my frameworks. I've been doing that.. I'm in a podcast, right? I didn't do.. I actually dreamed of never doing that. The opposite. I used to go to these shows and see people go on stage and, and tell others about, you know, their, their secrets on how they drive clicks and sales, and bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, and what are they doing? What? Why are they doing that? I didn't get it. I didn't get it. It makes sense to me. I get it today. I get it today. And I love it. I love it. But at that time, I didn't get it. Right. And that's, that's the thing is that, if I didn't know how to do that, if I didn't know that that was out there, how do I make money, but I gotta buy a click, I gotta go to Facebook and pay for that click no matter what, and drive traffic somewhere, and have confidence that that thing's going to convert on the backend. And I'm going to be able to monetize that click and make more money than then I paid out. So if I spend $2,000 with Facebook, I would be hoping that I make more than $2,000 on that media by whatever my model is. So that's how a tremendous amount of people in this world make money and earn money. They don't even know anything about this whole Dream 100 thing, right? If you're in the ClickFunnels community, you're gonna know about it, right? Because it feels like everyone knows about it. And those are people that you engage with. But you're talking about like 100 will go to find what 5,000, 10,000 people, maybe not, not that many actually maybe like five to 7,000 people, right in this world are going to that show. I promise you, there's more people out into the internet that are.. that are marketers promoting things. And they have no idea about this. They're out already to arbitraging media, they're building up an email list, and then sending offers to their email list, building to an SMS list building up, you know, driving calls into a call center,

Eric Beer 12:32
building up a content site and pumping out good content to get people to come and read articles. And they're putting advertisements all around these advertisements, right? Creating fun communities and games where they can earn virtual currency. Or they can get cash back. Right. All right. Ebates… Ebates was one of them. Right? You go, and people love Ebates, you know, the left because, you know, some people on general world, including my wife our and then they'll see some like, Ebates, I know Ebates. Yeah, I use Ebates. Yeah, so I just click on that link, and then it takes me to Nike, and then when I buy it, I get cashback, that's really cool. Yeah, that's happening all over the internet. There's more places like Ebates that are doing that. Right. Ebates, what they're doing is they're building up a membership of people that are part of Ebates. And Ebates goes and does deals with different companies, retailers, awesome brands, and what.. whatever deal they strike in the simplest way. They're getting an affiliate commission for every time somebody buys something from their link. And what they're doing is they're just giving a percentage of whatever they're making on that affiliate commission back to the consumer. Their thoughts are what, why not? Right? I'm willing to pay you. The people, the consumers like, wow, it's awesome. Ebates give me money back there. All they're doing, if you really think about it, all they're doing is just playing the middle. They are not paying you $1 until you, as the person, the member, buy something from a retailer. So if you go and buy 250,000 children's $50 sneakers from.. from.. from Nike, right, and Ebates deal is that they get 10% commission on every sale, then they make 25 bucks. Right? And now, what are they doing with the cashback to their members? I don't know. Let's say they're giving you 10% back for whatever you buy. That's how it's structured. I don't use Ebates but let's say they're giving you 10% back. That means that Ebates just made 25 bucks when you spent 250. And now Ebates is going to take 10% of that. So 250 and give it back to the consumer work. So Ebates makes $22.50 from you being a member and buying Nike sneakers through them through their affiliate link. That's the business. And they're massive. They may even sold for like, hundreds of millions of dollars. Right? And it's like, it's a glorified affiliate. It's a glorified Dream 100. Right. It's the same thing as you having somebody follow you on TikTok, and then you're promoting somebody else's offer, they take an action, and then you get paid for. It's just a different concept. Exact same thing, same model, right? The difference is, is that Ebates is out acquiring people to become part of their membership. They're trying to find them to come in, they're buying traffic, buying clicks, there's a team that's in charge of customer acquisition, to build up the membership for Ebates. And then there's a team that needs to go and find advertisers to make the product awesome for when people are in the membership, to stay in the membership and have some value. And they're doing deals with these companies saying, hey, if I get your sale, what are you willing to pay me? Right? So they flip it, right? At the end of the day, those people that are doing that, that are those affiliate managers that work for Ebates, trying to find the advertisers to come into their system to have some value for their members that advertiser does the exact same thing is, it could be ClickFunnels. Right? ClickFunnels is looking to go get traffic from the Dream 100. But there's also affiliate managers looking to get traffic for their product or service because they're trying to monetize their flow. So sometimes what happens is you.. if you have an awesome offer, somebody might come to you and say how I want to run your offer. Right? I've had, I've had situations where I'm the agency of record for different advertising deals. And what happens is, is we're promoting, and it's working, it's working for different publishers, they're making money from running that offer with me, Well, naturally, people talk. And there are other people out there that are looking to monetize their traffic. And when they find out that their buddy Joe is making money running my offer, they want to come and talk to me and run the offer with me. They're begging to run the offer with me.

Eric Beer 17:28
That's like a sweetheart when you have an offer that works. And it makes money for the publishers, for that.. your Dream 100. I mean, it's a massive business, massive business, and you can make so much money doing it, where you go, and you get those deals set up. And then they just run, its run. I'm not suggesting you do it. But you could just sit on a beach in Italy and make money. You know, I always say that you should be building your pipeline, finding more offers, finding more distribution. If you have an offer, try to find more distribution, more publishers, find more people in your Dream 100 so that when one goes down, you still have some other stuff going on, right, at the same time. You don't always want to rely on just one offer. If you're doing this because offers always stop at some point, they always go away. Right? They're great until something happens or the world changes, right? For whatever reason. I don't know, number reasons, companies about a business companies get acquired. I was agency record for realage.com, Dr. Oz. I was in charge of driving their customer acquisition to build up their list and email. And then their model was they were mailing newsletters to these people that were taking the real age quiz. And they were partnered with all these pharmaceutical companies that were paying tons of money to get in front of their audience. They had millions of people on their list millions. Our job as the agency was to go and get people to take their real age quiz because we got paid when someone signed up to take the real age quiz. And then they monetize it on their back end with advertising through email. And through getting them back to their site. That's the model that was business, right? It's all kind of the same if you look at it. So just like they all kind of like, it's just who's playing what role, right? It all kind of falls together. What happened was, they were owned by Hertz, and Hertz sold RealAge to some other company. And when that happened, we lost the deal. We had to deal for a number of years, you know, 4 or 5, 6..6 years. And when they sold the company, that company may have had a team to be able to go out and acquire customers then they didn't need us anymore. Just it is one of those I didn't do anything wrong. It was a good run there. I mean, it went for many years. It was awesome. I loved it. But it always ends some, some way, something happens. So you want to build up your pipeline. Plus, hey, listen, you get a deal running, and it's working. Think about this, nothing stopping you from doing that exact same thing, go find another offer, and then go get distribution. If you.. if you have publishers that have traffic, and you're making them money with one offer, they're gonna like you. And like you a lot, right? Because a lot of these publishers don't even know how to go and find the right deals, or they don't have the manpower to do it. They're focusing on their business, what they're doing, they're focused on building up their audience, creating content, creating, like a good user experience, they need people like you to go out and help them. They're relying on people like you, right? Thing is, is not paying you anything, you don't get paid until you drive some action. And that's why they'll hire somebody who they pay to be their affiliate manager because they're getting paid by the company, and they have to go out and do the exact same thing, right? But if you're better at it, if you're really good at it, you don't need to get paid. Because what will happen is they'll pay the guy, you know, $60,000 a year and some small commission, and they'll make X amount of dollars, where if they were running it on their own, the affiliate commissions can add up to millions and millions and millions of dollars. It's just you gotta take risk. You got to be willing to take that risk.

Eric Beer 21:23
Would you like to learn how I built my business using other people’s money? If so, then join my 21-day challenge at performancemarketersecret.com. I look forward to meeting you and welcome you into my family. And remember, results don’t lie, but the people who don’t he any do. Thanks for listening.