From the desk of David Utke
Subj: Making $23.50 can’t be that hard right?
Once you make a one off $23.50 from an affiliate sale, you can try for a more consist sale volume week over week. Making your way towards $100 a day which is a solid benchmark to reach.
I intend to explain to you exactly how you can leverage some simple strategies to start earning a small amount of money (with effort) through affiliate marketing.
A history of making money online.
Back when I was in Connecticut I had no idea how to make money online.
I got the idea in my head that it was possible because I read a blog by Yaro Starak called “Entrepreneurs Journey.”
This blog, watching Yaro build it up, make money from affiliate marketing and then life changing money from selling his own products was very inspiring.
I had this weird misconception that I think a lot of people share; in order to develop an online income the best way was through display advertising or by selling a physical product through Ebay or something.
I had to chose a niche, write a bunch of content that ranks and people would hit the site, click the ads and I would make a money.
That is one way to make money online…
Display ads do make sense for a lot of publishers.
But if you’re just building an information site, something that exists on the internet, then you’re creating something that lives in black and white and not in full color.
You’re not creating a brand people love, link to, tell their friends about want to come back to.
I did this with my online teaching website.
I wrote and outsourced around 150 blog posts and 50 or pages about teaching online and abroad, made a bunch of money from Amazon Associates and Google AdSense over the course of two years.
Then whoops!
Google changes their algorithm and my income from that site dropped from $1500 a month to $500 a month.
Still not bad as just a thing I built that exists and collects money.
Then whoops again!
China banned online teaching and that site maybe now makes $100-300 a month. It’s too tied to a specific topic so pivoting away is not really possible.
In general, “niche sites” are a dumb business model.
You’re just the middle man and at the whim of an algorithm.
You’re again not building a brand that people love and want to come back to for more.
Sure, it was a fun little side thing. Some publishers even pulled it off and built multiple niche websites.
But with niche sites, you have to create dumb, overly optimized SEO content.
Like “best Instagram bios for Valentines day.”
Dumb. So dumb.
If you aim for a dumb audience, you have to write a dumb blog.
I certainly don’t want to do this, and neither do you.
I realize a certain percentage of my readers are absolute idiots, but I’m not writing this for them.
I’m writing it for you smart people out there.
Dumb people: this is your cue to go back to TikTok. This website isn’t for you.
How I made my first $23.50 online, and you can too.
Fast forward to Thailand circa 2012 and I’m running a personal development blog as a broke English teacher.
- I’m writing a blog about dating, personal growth and my experiences being abroad.
- I noticed Pat Flynn was doing a “niche site duel.” Publicly he was Mr. White Hat Good Boy playing by the rules with his SEO. The reality however was that he was spamming the hell out of forums with links to his security guard training website.
- Using online tools, I was able to reverse engineer the backlinks as he was making them, and I did exactly the same thing he did. Get these forum links and point them to my article about “how to tell if a guy likes you” as well as my sites homepage.
- Boom, that article starting climbing then it started getting natural, organic links. A few months later i was ranking #1-3 for that long tail keyword phrase. Getting hundreds of visitors a day to a single article.
- This article was a perfect fit for a product by a female dating coaching I knew about. He had an affiliate program where he paid out 50% commissions to affiliates.
So, that day I signed up for a free account on his site to join his affiliate program.
I simply navigated to my top ranking blog post that was getting Google traffic and social shares and edited the top, middle and bottom.
The bottom of the blog post I simply used a casual reference:
“If you want to dive deeper into this topic, my friend Evan has a helpful book you should checkout called “Why He Disappeared.” It breaks down step by step how to get the man you want to actually commit to you.”
Then I went to the gym, cooked up some steak and eggs for dinner, and went to sleep as rain splattered forcefully on my windows as it was monsoon season in Thailand.
The next morning I woke up, got my morning coffee at a local cafe and noticed something:
“Sale – Evan Marc Katz- ID:XXXXXXXX Why He Disappeared”
Wow.
What?
I made $23.50 while sleeping. That was like, 800 Thai Baht in a single day.
I’d made money in my sleep
Now, $23.50 might not seem like a lot of money, but at the time I was making $1000 a month as an English teacher at a government school in Ratchaburi Thailand.
Over the next year those commission started coming in like clock work from this single article.
Taking that one small step really gave me a lot of confidence that this whole business model might actually work.
You only need to be making $100 a day to do $36,500 a year.
That’s enough money to move the needle for most people.
Now, I’m doing more than $100 a day.
But you have to first start at that first sale. That first $23.50.
If you think about it, how much harder is it to make $100 a day after you’ve made $23.50?
Actually, not much.
The biggest leap is the first dollar. It’s the hardest because you have to struggle to find your thing that people respond too.
You don’t need to be making millions to be free, just $150 and you can live abroad if you’re debt free.
It’s not as hard as you think it is.
How to sell online
Affiliate marketing is awesome, you can sell other companies products and get a cut. No product creation, no refunds, no customer support.
But to make money you do eventually want to sell your own stuff. To do so you need a way to accept payments via credit cards and PayPal.
Here are some platforms I suggest if you’re creating low ticket products..
E-junkie – Simple classic option
E-junkie is a pretty basic service that handles transactions for digital downloads automagically. It’s a steal a $8 a month if you’re selling a digital product like an ebook, checklist, audio file, whatever.
I suggest E-junkie for two purposes:
- If you want to sell your own low cost digital products. E-Junkie handles the distribution, payment, and affiliate payouts for your products, All you have to do is add a buy button to your website. With any product you’re selling you should consider creating a dedicated sales page and adding a big buy button that links to your product hosted on E-Junkie.
- You get your own basic affiliate program. Yep, with your E-Junkie account you can have your own affiliate program, that means people can promote your product to their audience and earn a commission.
- It’s cheap. E-Junkie is a full feature shopping cart. You can use E-Junkie to create a basic online store, host your products and there are no bandwidth limits or transaction fees. Just a simple flat monthly fee.
Thrive Cart – Much better checkout page
I actually prefer Thrive Cart over E-Junkie, but at one time price point of $495, it’s a bit expensive for most starting out. However, I think it’s worth the price for a few reasons:
- Can customize the checkout page and set a cross sell. Thrive Cart comes with a drag and drop builder so you can customize the checkout page. A cross sell is a related product you can offer when someone is on your checkout page to increase the total cart value. This alone is why I prefer it to E-Junkie as Thrive Cart checkout pages look very professional.
- You can also have an affiliate program for your products through Thrive Cart.
- You can sell both low cost digital downloads like ebooks or video courses. For video courses you will need to purchase video hosting like Vimeo.
Thrive Cart is ideal for the professional marketer who will create a sales page for their product.
Teachable – Course content
Teachable is the best if you want to create online courses which you can sell at a higher price point as well as digital downloads like ebooks.
Teachable also lets you offer coaching through your Teachable account. With your purchase, you get video hosting, a dedicated website to host your courses and a sales page builder for each course.
Fiverr – Sell your time
While not hands off like the other options, selling a service is the quickest way to make money online. Right now you can hop on Fiverr (or UpWork) and start offering services.
You can then link to said services from your website and social media platforms. As you deliver results, your gig will start to get organic sales without you having to do any marketing.
How not to be sketchy
One of the biggest take-aways with making money online and selling your own stuff is that trust is your most valuable asset and people won’t buy from you until they’ve interacted with you over the courses of a few months.
Big flashing red buttons, pyramid schemes, and selling people shitty products that don’t help them are out. Instead, being an affiliate for products that actually help people and is in alignment with your audience needs is where it’s at.
This is why I never recommend products that don’t contribute to my life and you shouldn’t either.
Also, remember that most — probably 95% of your readers don’t necessarily need the product you’re recommending.
So, don’t bang them over the head with it.
Just say “hey, I this thing is useful and it taught me about this or these are my results. If you’re into this, maybe check it out.”
Simple, but it actually works.
Not, OMG “buy this NOW, it’s the best thing ever made.” Our sketchification alarm goes off and we tune it out..
Strategies for landing your first few dollars
Finally, here are a few simple strategies that I use to sell products as an affiliate.
Pay attention!
The quick mention in-post.
Sometimes if I’m talking about a subject that’s similar to a product I’ve read, I’ll mention it casually at the very end of the post. Not in a bombastic way, just a legit recommendation.
Like, “Hey if you want to dive deeper into this topic, the best book I’ve come across for how to get out of debt is [product name] by [author]. It helped me, maybe it can help you too?
Lead of with a casual mention at the top and bottom of the article and you’re good to go. Link to the product a few times in the article.
Believe it or not, the casual reference sometimes does WAY better than trying to do a review of a product in the traditional sense.
A review assumes your entire audience might want the product, which really depends on your topic and audience.
Casual mentions, that break down how to do something and review style content work best. But obviously do your own testing to see what works best with your audience.
Product review post
Product review posts that are well designed, thoughtful, accurate and cover both the positives and negatives work best.
Like my piece on the best cameras for YouTube.
I make video content, I have a YouTube channel, so I actually know what I’m talking about.
In that post I break down a wide range of cameras for different video styles and I help you my audience out by telling you the positives and negatives of each option.
The point of this style of writing is to help your audience out, but to also create something that gets traffic day in and day out from search engines and makes sales.
The long term goal of a review post is to rank well for “review” focused search terms so they get steady traffic day after day.
Tutorial content
Long form tutorials can do really well with affiliate marketing as you’re instructing your visitors on how to do something using specific tools. Like in my tutorials for creating a website or starting a blog.
I link to my personal web host I actually use as well as the domain name registrar I use to.
The only frustrating aspect of tutorials is that they take a tremendous amount of work and are usually going after a competitive search term.
But if you can drive traffic from YouTube, X, LinkedIn to your articles and email list. Having a quality long form tutorial with an embedded video images and detailed text works great as you’re helping your audience out for free.
Online marketing is not for everyone.
I get it, sitting at a laptop constant, editing videos, writing blog posts, and living in your email sounds awful to some people.
This is still work guys, you don’t get to skip over the work of learning how to implement online marketing strategies.
The point of this article is simple: learning how to make a small amount of money, even $23.50, can boost your self-confidence immensely and show you that this business model is real and can work.
If can find your thing and make that first $23.50, then it’s possible to break $500 a month, then $1000.
Then more? Well… you’ll have to find out yourself.
–
If you learned something from this, I’d love it if you could help share it with someone who it will help.
Send this to them.
Facebook and X are good choices.
Sharing is one way you can say thanks to me
Thank you!
How I can help you. You're here, let's do this:
1. Website Review Your website may be clear and specific to you, but it may be really confusing to anyone who visits. That's where I come it, I'll give you actionalbe feedback to improve your site with my highly rated gig.2. My YouTube channel Helpful video tutorials showing you how to launch, grow and monetize your audience.
