Step-by-step to an affiliate marketing system to create passive income every month.
I’m revealing an affiliate marketing system that helped me boost my monthly income four-times over in just a few months. I make over a third of my monthly income from affiliate sources and this strategy puts all that on auto-pilot.
Not only will this funnel strategy make money but it’s completely passive and works with any blog or YouTube channel. In this video, I’ll walk you through how to set it up and make money.
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Why Your Affiliate Marketing Needs to be on Auto-Pilot
We talk a lot about making money on the channel but if I had to pick just two videos as the most important, with the most potential to make you money online, it would be this one and the previous video here on affiliate marketing.
That’s because I’m taking you step by step into a funnel system you can use to SELL ANYTHING. You can use this system to sell your own products, to get commissions on affiliates or for anything you want to sell online. Best yet, after setting it up, it’s completely passive income so you can move on to creating the next sales funnel and the next and the next. Each one is going to work for you continuously MAKING MONEY EVERY MONTH.
Now in our last video, I took you through the basic process of this affiliate marketing funnel. We talked about that biggest problem in selling online is that people just aren’t ready to make a decision so putting your affiliate link in a post or a paragraph about your course just doesn’t make any sales.
We talked about how this funnel sales system guides people through that process to buy a product. We talked about how it nurtures the relationship through multiple videos or posts and through a series of emails to build that trust in you as a resource.
Don’t miss the first video and this FREE checklist with everything you need to set up your first affiliate funnel. Click here to download your free checklist.
Setting Up Your First Affiliate Funnel
In this video, I’m going step-by-step into setting up the most crucial part of your affiliate sales funnel. I’ll show you how to set up your landing page and email sequence to completely automate the system. By the end of the video, you’ll be able to replicate this system to earn money online every month.
First you’ll set up a landing page, this is the page that people will go to from your blog posts when the want to download the free handout and where you’ll have the email capture form. These can be a regular blog page but more common is to set them up with a special plugin that let’s you create a page on your blog without the menu or sidebar.
What that does is focus the reader’s attention completely on the page and that signup, without distracting them with links to other pages or anything else.
This is a landing page I set up for my build-a-blog series and you’ll see that these do not have to be long or complicated. You want just enough information here to convince them to give their name and email for that free handout.
A few things you can do to grab someone’s attention. Use bold or italics at different places to focus their attention on a point or callout words like free. You can use bullet points and graphics like these arrows to kind of guide them into the email form.
What’s great about using a landing page plugin is it will connect directly with your email provider so I can click on the form and connect it to ConvertKit. Then I’ll connect it to a specific form in ConvertKit, I’ll show you how to create this form next.
This is going to make it so people signing up on this page are put into a specific, separate list in ConvertKit. It’s going to make our system automated from signup to emails and a great source of passive income. I can also change some of the text in the email boxes, maybe make the wording a little more persuasive.
I don’t like to put too much information on a landing page. If they’ve clicked here, they already know they want the free handout or whatever you’re offering so don’t try too hard to sell them. I do like to put in some testimonials if I have them, something from past customers or bloggers that relates to the handout.
Then you can put in a short bio about yourself, just something to build a little credibility and then one last form to capture the email. You link this one up to ConvertKit just like you did the first and that’s it. Short and sweet.
There’s an important point I want to stress here. In any of these steps, these pieces to your sales funnel, they don’t have to be perfect. You can always go back and refine them, ask someone else for their input and improve them later. Don’t get that analysis paralysis where you never get started on something because you think it needs to be perfect.
Get these done and start making money, then worry about perfect.
How to Create a Form on ConvertKit
Then you’ll create a form in ConvertKit and you can actually create your landing page here so you don’t have to have a plugin on your site. It makes it seamless but I already had the landing page plugin so I’ve kept with that and just using the forms on ConvertKit. I’ll click on inline which is going to be a form that is static on the page versus this option for modal which is like a popup I can create.
There are a lot of features and options on ConvertKit, it really is an all-in-one marketing tool for your blog. That’s why I use it over the other email providers and I’ve used them all; MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact.
Besides using it for this affiliate marketing funnel, you can create lots of other forms to get email subscribers on your site and really grow your community. The platform offers a two-week free trial if you want to try it out.
Try ConvertKit FREE for two weeks to create your first affiliate funnel
You’ll also have the option of choosing from different form templates. I use some of these others for general email signup on the blog but we just need the basic template to connect with our landing page.
Setting up your form, you can show signups a message or just redirect them to a page after they’ve signed up. I like to redirect them to a welcome page where I can let them download the free handout. Here they’re also able to kind of look around the blog and I can put in other links.
You can also have ConvertKit send an incentive email, so those confirmation emails that will deliver your freebie handout. I like to click this auto-confirm box as well just in case they don’t click confirm on that email, I still want them getting the email series. If you do send the confirmation email then you can have the same redirect page or an automatic download when they click on their email.
How to Create an Email Sequence in ConvertKit
So you’ve got the landing page and it’s linked up to ConvertKit, now you just need something to send people once they’ve signed up. Let’s look at how to create that email sequence and set it so it’s completely automated.
Setting up your email sequence is really easy, you’ll first name your sequence and everything is on one page here which makes it very convenient. In each email, you can choose the delay for when it goes out. I like to send the first email out immediately, so when everything is still fresh in the receiver’s mind, and then send each of the following emails out one day after the other. Since we’re only talking about two or three emails, it’s not something that’s going to get annoying because we’re only talking about a few days.
You can enter your subject line and any of the content in the editor here. On the left side, you’ll be able to add as many emails as you want in the sequence. We’re only doing three emails here but I’ve got sequences of up to 12 or 15 emails for general blog visitors. They go out once a week pointing out old blog posts and really just building that relationship with the reader.
So you type out your emails for each blog post or video. You want to include a personal story or some kind of story or anecdote to make that connection with the reader, something to help them relate to the problem. Remember, the email series is meant to guide them through this decision-making process so you want the first email to be about the first blog post and make it a progression until the last email is about the affiliate and that last post or video.
Within each email, you want to link the blog post a couple of times. So I’ll usually do that early in the email and then again towards the bottom, just to give them a couple of chances to click on it. You click this little link icon and then add the URL address to your post or video. Then there are a few options here. You can make it so when they click, it opens up a new window which is nice if they want to come back to the email.
You can also tag anyone that clicks on this link which puts them in a special group in ConvertKit. This is a great way to customize your email list, putting people in groups according to what links they’ve clicked so you know exactly what people are interested in and what they’ll respond to best.
Before you move on to the next email, you can move this one from draft to publish so it’s live and then do the same for your other emails. Finally you click save all and your email sequence is ready to go.
Automating ConvertKit Emails
Now the only step left is to tell ConvertKit who to deliver this email sequence to by connecting the form you set up with the emails. So you click on Automation up top in the menu and New Automation. Then you want to say anytime someone signs up to this form, so you select joins a form and then find your form here in the dropdown. Then click on add action for what you want to happen and select this email sequence, find the sequence in the dropdown here and click add action.
There are a lot of other options here to segment your email lists, really customize the path for each person that comes to your blog, so it’s a great tool to have. This just allows you to give each person that personalized feeling and they’re going to be a more engaged subscriber. One last note on the automation here, make sure you go up here to turn on the automation. It’s one of those little things you can forget so just double-check.
Once your email sequence is live and delivering to people, you can always go back in to make changes or check on how well it’s doing. The reporting in ConvertKit makes it easy to see how many are opening your emails and clicking on links. You can even re-engage with people that didn’t open an email so you make sure you reach as many as possible.
Before your blog posts or videos go live and you actually start this funnel, you want to go through it yourself and ask a friend to go through it as well. That means going to the landing page and entering your email. You’ll receive the email sequence and make sure that all the links work. Don’t neglect this last check. You don’t want all this hard work to be wasted because a link didn’t work or maybe you forgot to change an email from draft to publish or whatever.
Now I know this all seems like a lot of work and it is. You’ll create multiple blog posts, a landing page, an email sequence and that free handout all for this one affiliate funnel.
But these funnels do work and they work like magic for making money every day. You can’t expect to just drop your affiliate link into a post and have people clicking through. We’re overwhelmed with links and commercials every day, people have ad blindness and will just ignore your affiliate links.
This process creates and builds that relationship with your community. It keeps them focused on that one topic while they’re making a decision and it guides them through the buying process. Take it from someone that’s been blogging for more than six years, you will see your income jump as soon as you use this process.
Get Started with a Two-Week Free Trial on ConvertKit
Make sure you watch that first video with the basic how-to of the affiliate funnel and download the checklist to create your first affiliate funnel. Create just one new affiliate funnel a month and I GUARANTEE it will start building passive income for you just as it has done for me.