I Made $50M With Affiliate Marketing, Here's Everything You Need To Know

I've made over $50 million with affiliate marketing. And in this video, I'm going to break down everything you need to know to make a buttload yourself as well. So, without further ado, let's go over to my computer. So, let me share a little bit about my background and what kind of led me to affiliate marketing in the first place. I was adopted when I was born and otherwise I had a pretty normal childhood here in Los Angeles. But I always had a sense of that competitive drive, a sense of impostor syndrome, the sense that I was kind of an outsider amongst people, if that makes sense. When I was 6 years old, I started selling lemonade and I got my first kind of thrill of interacting with people and making money, you know, which was really exciting. At 8 years old, my dad got a computer. Now, this is 1995, so this is still pretty early. And I started learning programming because honestly, there wasn't a lot of other stuff to do those days on the internet. Not to age myself, but I don't know if anybody here remembers this. I know my audience is younger, but this was literally the sound back when I started on a computer that you had to go through just to connect the internet. I'm just going to play a little bit of internet history here because this is the dialup sound. [Music] and you're connected to the matrix. I just think that's absolutely nuts. Now after college I joined a digital marketing agency as a pay-per-click account analyst failing as an entrepreneur for a number of years before that and I learned a little bit about Google ads. So I was hired, but what made it great was I had a fantastic boss, Dovavid, and he was one of my first mentors. And he really took a personal approach in helping me learn both, you know, dealing with clients, pay-per-click management, conversion rate optimization, just generally direct response marketing. And I was amongst a whole group, a department of people. So I had a community of folks that we were sharing knowledge with day in day out to get better results for our clients. Now, I was a fantastic employee. I added over $200,000 of billables to the agency. I didn't see a piece of it. One of my first YouTube videos was actually from this era. Now, in my off time, I did affiliate marketing. I was trying to work for myself. I wanted to travel the world and I wanted to be a rock star basically. And I finally had my first big win. It was this crying girl ad. I'll pop it up on the screen. This campaign netted me about $25,000 over the course of about two months. And this was the first campaign that led to me quitting my job. I was making 6,000 a month at the time. And when I realized that, you know, I'm already making more than I was making at my job in my off time and I could make more if I devoted my days to that. And that's what I did. And over the course of the next few years, I increased my income from what I was making 6,000 a month to making over $200,000 take-home profit every month and $500,000 a month of revenue. And needless to say, years of making these sorts of numbers and numbers in this range, I saved up a lot of money. Although my first million got completely wasted in Las Vegas. Don't ask me where it went or how it went, but you know, it went. it flew out. But I think a lot of internet marketers have kind of the same story now. I tried and failed at affiliate marketing for four years. And some of the initial struggles that I faced, the first one was just not having a actual mentor or somebody, a buddy or somebody I could turn to and ask questions and just get a is this real or does this make sense or is this right type of approach, right? Somebody that knows what they're doing to check my work. The second thing is there was a lot of complex software just setting up a website putting in the link tracking correctly making sure that you know Facebook or Google ads I was advertising on Facebook this was 2010 I was one of the first advertisers on Facebook but I didn't know how to set up track and I didn't know how to set up a website either so that really sty my efforts and finally just knowing what product to market or what's a good product to market was difficult but where I found that information was being a part of a forum called Stack That Money, which was the predecessor to what is now the Affiliate World Conferences. The one thing I did not have to worry about, and really most people didn't, way back in the day, and this is like 2010, is you didn't have to worry about ad bans. You didn't have to worry about Google or Meta banning your ad accounts because, you know, they just came out with advertising. It's hard to imagine that now, but this was all new. Now, the moment where I realized that affiliate marketing could actually work for me before I had been actually making money with it was when I was at this Tony Robbins event in I believe West Palm Beach and I met another person attending. You know, this is like a rahrrah self-improvement thing. It's like a 4-day event basically to get motivated and set your goals and all these things. And one of the other attendees I met was a young guy. He was young 20s. And I was talking to him. He had his own private play. I was asking him what he did. And he did affiliate marketing. And nobody knew his name. You couldn't find any information about him on the internet. He didn't use his face for anything. He was purely behind the scenes making ads that converted well and promoting products. When I met somebody face to face, right, and heard that, I realized I could do it because at the job I was working at the time, I knew I was the best at what I did, you know, at Google Ads. I knew every single account I took over, you know, they'd already had people working on their accounts. These are companies spending at least $10,000 a month. And so, I could see what other folks how they were managing ad accounts. I always did better. So, I knew I was very good at what I did. I've always worked hard and taken pride in building skills, you know, and that's something I teach in my programs is actual marketing skills. Now, the specific approach that I took that turned everything around and made everything profitable on a massive scale was first off that hunger from meeting this guy. He's in his young 20s owning his own plane, right? not working in that normal job, having passive income. It fueled that hunger in me to absolutely attack this and make money right away. And I approached it like that. So I did the fastest thing possible, which is I simply copied other affiliates ads that were working. I copied messages, images, videos, landing pages. if I could see that it was working and that those ads had been running for, you know, at least some period of time. And I did this out of a pure eagerness to make money. Not that there's anything wrong about copy and it worked. Now, I also combined this approach with data analysis. I've always been good at math. I scored perfect on my SATs in the math. But frankly, internet marketing, it's just second grade level math. It's like, is this number bigger than this number? But it's knowing how to look at, you know, what data to look at and when to look at, I'd say is part of the art and science of data analysis and marketing. The third thing I did was just absolutely relentless is launch every single day. And I give every one of you a challenge right here. If you want to make money on the internet, you have to be posting something every single day. Launch new ad, launch a new campaign, set up a new website. One of these three things you should be doing every single day if you want to get to a level where you are earning thousands, tens of thousands, millions of dollars a month without using your face. Now, the reason this strategy works where so many other strategies fail in affiliate marketing and just in marketing in general is because the hidden secret that they don't want you to know is that human communication is mostly programmed. programmed through cultural beliefs, programmed through education, programmed through so many things and that it is predictable. Since human beings are so programmed, we can literally predict human behavior and that's what we're doing online. Human behavior, it doesn't change. And by using what already works, we can get the intended result, right? People buying whatever we want to sell. This also applies to in-person human communication. I studied under a lot of people. I've spent millions of dollars on my own self-improvement and education. I love marketing as much for the money as I do just for the knowledge and the understanding of communication. I've studied under hypnotists like Mark Zel. Absolutely mindblowing stuff like Joel Bower. I've studied under a number of relationship coaches. And I've hired an FBI interrogation specialist to teach me body language. I've hired very weird experts to learn the nuances of human communication and the formula, not just online, but also impersonal. Now, here's a weight loss ad I copied and literally started seeing money come the same day, profits. Exact same ad that makes no sense. I mean, what the heck is that thing? It's like a weird pancake. A meat pancake. I don't know what that is, but it works, right? You don't need to know why it works, but it works. It just doesn't make sense to me. But I guess that's maybe why it works. I wouldn't think of ever using an image like that in a weight loss ad, but I don't need to think when I'm focused on copying what works. Now, scaling my advertising was easy with this one because all I did was I used headlines that people were already using in weight loss ads. And I just try different headlines. I just change it out, change it out, edit the image with a different headline, edit the ad with a different head, and I'd see what performed best. And I'd simply use this process of testing a bunch of new ads and then cutting everything that wasn't the best performing. And that process allowed me to scale up my revenues. In this case, weight loss was the product that got me to my first half a million dollar month. And now here's another example of an ad that I copied, but this time for my educational stuff where I copied word for word from Jeff Learn, right? Word for word. He had a similar ad and I changed a few words around maybe, you know, I changed like e-commerce to affiliate marketing or something like that and it worked. Sam Ovenans webinar if anybody remembers Sam Ovens I didn't mean that as a dig you know I just haven't seen you post in a few years man you know I copied his webinar and that was my introduction to the education business and that got me a million dollars in its first year right this is after I sold my business in 2016 now times have changed a lot since back when I started but now we have an absolutely amazing tool called AI that makes everything so easy and if you want to learn how I'm doing marketing marketing nowadays and how students like Ronnie Sandlin was able to quit his job and earn six figures a month from affiliate marketing, then make sure to check out the link in the description that goes to AI Marketers Club and that's the community I founded to kind of bring people together so we can all talk about and share tips on tools and I show you how my students are absolutely crushing with AI and affiliate marketing and what we're doing. But let me walk you through a little bit about how I've systemized my approach. When we're doing data analysis, we're only actually looking at four things initially. Four things we're tracking. Impressions, views, clicks, conversions. Now, these are important things to know. First off, impressions. Impressions are how many times your ad has been seen. This is normally how we are charged for advertising in some way of shape or form. Views. How many people actually viewed our landing page? How many people tapped on our ad or clicked or whatever they did and viewed our landing page? And the third one is clicks. How many people clicked on our affiliate link on our landing page or on our ad or wherever it was. How many people went to our affiliate? You know, the actual offer. And finally, conversions. How many sales did we get? And what we're doing with these four different metrics is we're steadily improving the ascension rate of each of them. We're making sure that the impressions are turning into views of our landing page as much as possible. And we're optimizing here until we get to the next level, which is clicks on the affiliate link. And then we're optimizing the ascension from here. You know, I tell my students 20 to 35% clickthrough rate until we get more people ascending to the actual sale. And then our job is very easy as we have Google and our affiliate network or Facebook and our affiliate network or wherever we're posting and our affiliate network talk to each other so that we get more sales and that our ads automatically go to people who are more likely to buy. Now, in my high-end programs, I go over paid advertising stuff. That's not in the AI Marketers Club, but you can get access if you want to upgrade to my paid advertising trainings. You can do that in there. But in those, I go through screen share videos, tutorials of showing up, you know, the settings on ads and all the little minor things that go into advertising because it is a skill. It is a art and it is a science. Now, there's three key elements that are really important if you want to scale from doing thousands of dollars with affiliate marketing to doing millions of dollars a year. Now, the first thing is website load speed. And there's a lot of free checkers for these online, but you definitely want to make sure you check how fast does your website load. And how fast does it load on a mobile device because how fast your website loads will have a huge effect on your conversion rates and your sales and your profits. I've seen campaigns that have been unprofitable turn profitable literally because we simply compressed some of the images and we removed scripts that were slowing down the page and stuff like that. Now I already said the second one which was image compression but the third thing that's very important for scaling is mobile responsiveness. If you are not actually looking at your website on a phone, and a lot of people do this because you're really going to have to build a website on a computer, right? A lot of folks that build their website on the computer don't actually check it on the phone. And most people are going to access your website through the phone. So, you got to always check out your website and all of these things on the phone as well. and make sure that everything, all the style, all the CSS, everything scrolls right and everything works correctly. Pop-ups can be closed and people can move along. Now, the automation and the processes that make this all possible are really it's having a website. I resisted this step for so many years, folks. It's having a website. Okay, this allows it to be under your control and also it makes growth sustainable and allows you to launch more campaigns etc. Get a website folks, right? I'll have an affiliate link to you know who I recommend which is Bluehost. The second thing is if you really want to scale run your own servers and I have my own servers on Host Dime. I'll include an affiliate link there. I don't really talk about it so much, but I'm big into running my own servers and actually setting up my web host. I would encourage folks to at least learn how to do the same because then you're not dependent on a website builder tool necessarily. And the third thing is, you know, it seems weird to talk about nowadays, but it is community. I felt so lucky because I came out about a time when work was still mostly in person and I got to learn from 12 dudes in a room doing ads and conversion optimizing as our job nowadays. I pay money to be in rooms, to be in mastermind meetings, go to conferences, to have that same experience of being in a room with 10 other people just with our computers out working and talking about how to do ads better, how to do marketing better, you know, going over things we didn't even know we didn't even know, right? And I'd say that's what's missing from a lot of folks nowadays. And once again, I'm going to plug my community, AI Marketers Club. I encourage you to join because everyone needs a touchstone. If you want to get your time back in your life, you need to work with a community of people that are also doing the same thing that you can ask questions from or just get reality checks. But let's talk about what's working right now in 2025. Okay. Now, first I'm going to give a little bit of like a brief history of affiliate marketing. It's evolved a lot since I started doing affiliate marketing way back, you know, in 2009, right? Many of y'all probably weren't even born, which is crazy. Okay, now in 2016, many ad networks banned before and after image ads. Love those. They work so well, right? Other substitutes that we use are charts and, you know, earning screenshots and stuff like that nowadays. Commissions notification screenshots, stuff like that. In 2017, Twitch launched their affiliate program and that marked kind of the beginning of what I consider a massive era of creator economy affiliates. So nowadays you have so many people as affiliates for Lululemon, for Shayen or Shine or whatever, NordVPN, you have Mr. Beast. He was an affiliate for Honey and all these different creator economy affiliates really started around I think about this time and you just saw an explosion of traffic on all sorts of you know Tik Tok shorts etc. Now in 2018 I'd say affiliate marketing starts kind of coming out of the shadows a little bit and Nerd Wallet gets valued at over half a billion dollars. Now this is a baseless site. It's just a site that reviews credit cards and it reviews banks and it reviews other financial devices and is an affiliate in turn for credit card companies, home loan companies, banks, etc. Now, of course, if you're working in the financial industry as an affiliate, right, there's a huge money there. It's a hard industry to break into, but huge money. And an affiliate site being worth over half a billion dollar, a site that was started by two dudes for less than $800 and a lot of time is amazing. Now in 2020, COVID hit and marketing grew like crazy for affiliates, right? Because everybody gets logged onto the computer. So immediately you saw just anything internet related explode in revenues, especially stuff like digital products. People are spending money on learning and online education. In 2020, you also have Honey, which is an affiliate browser extension. Honey is the affiliate, right? Honey is an affiliate themselves for companies, right? They get bought for over $4 billion. They're an affiliate for companies and they pass on points to their users or something is the way I believe it works. Now, 2022, we start seeing more regulation online. We're approaching the end of the cowboy era of the internet. There's less and less opportunity as we go along in life, but that's going to be true any point in time that you are. And Google and Meta crackdown on people like me, business opportunity gurus and teachers for whatever reason. In 2024, Chat GPT is launched and changes the game of marketing for ever. This tool is so powerful out of the box. even more powerful when trained for specific purposes or roles. It's mindblowing. And my top students are all using some form of AI in their workflows now. And many affiliate marketers were some of the first people actually adopting AI technology. And finally, we get to 2025, right? We have more regulation of the internet than when I started. We have a lot more problems with ad accounts and approvals and stuff like that. I remember back in 2010, people were saying the same exact thing. Oh, it was easier doing advertising back in 2005. Oh, it's much harder now. People were saying the same thing when I got started, folks. There's never a better time than now. There's never a better time in any industry than right now and approaching things with a freaking rapid hunger to get money because it's out there, but it's not going to wait for you. you have to go and get it. Now, what's generating the most money right now is faceless videos and ads using AI. That's what we're doing. And the ads are absolutely incredible of what it takes. Where the industry is going is I believe there's going to be more regulation on the internet as time marches forward. And there's going to be more kind of like know your customer type requirements. And also the internet's going to get more split up. Right now you're able to live in Pakistan and advertise to people in the United Kingdom. But what happens when lines start being cut across the ocean? What happens when internet access gets more and more limited for folks in different regions of the globe depending on who's ruling that area. This is where the world's moving. The other place the world is moving is folks are going to be selling AI agents to businesses. AI agents themselves are the software and we will be selling them. People are already selling them for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. I'm talking about a little simple TXT file. It isn't even big enough to pack a floppy disc. That's where the internet's going. So, get good with AI. Get good with creating AI agents and make some money. So, knowing all these strategies is just the first step, though. If you want to start making money online, right, a join ClickBank or Digi Store affiliate networks and be an affiliate for my community. I'm paying you 90% of what you earn. So, you can make a lot of money up to $800 per sale. So, you have a huge income opportunity and you have a lot of assets available for you to promote AI Marketers Club. Second off, just join the community. We have a pretty cool community. We do weekly webinars in our mentorship program and give hands-on help. So, if you're interested in joining that, either way, there's a link in the description. Join AI Marketers Club or be an affiliate for us and make money or do both. Either way, there's a lot of money to go around. You just have to tap into it. It was great talking to you. Stay subscribed for my live streams. Enable all notifications and I will talk to you soon.