5 Ways To Make Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

Many people start with affiliate marketing because of the passive income opportunities. But is it real, can you make passive income with affiliate marketing?

In the last few years, I’ve made multiple websites that are making me passive income to this day, and the main monetization method: affiliate marketing. So, YES you can make passive income as an affiliate marketer, but how?

There are actually multiple ways you can automate your affiliate marketing business. Some factors are more important than others, but you still need to implement the right strategies. To make passive income with affiliate marketing you need to set up the right system. Here’s what you need to focus on:

1.     Grow Your Organic Traffic

2.     Earn Recurring Commissions

3.     Two Tier Affiliate Marketing

4.     Use an Affiliate Marketing Bridge Funnel

5.     Grow Your Email List

In this article, I’m going to show you how to actually automate your business and affiliate income with actionable steps. Without further due, let’s jump right into it…

Disclaimer: This article may contain affiliate links where I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. For more information read my Disclosure.

How To Make Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

If you want to completely automate your affiliate marketing business, you need to set up the right system, but what does that mean?

This means you need to generate traffic and sales on autopilot! Most affiliate marketers spam their affiliate links in Facebook groups and forums, that’s not the way to do it…

If you really want to succeed as an affiliate marketer you need to think long term. Affiliate marketing is a marathon, not a sprint! Remember that.

The successful affiliates you see all over the internet have been doing this for years. Success didn’t come overnight, and it won’t come for you either. You need to work smart and be patient because most affiliates quit too soon because they don’t see results right away. So what are the secrets to making passive income with affiliate marketing?

The first thing you need to take care of, is the traffic:

You Might Also Like: How To Make A Full Time Income With Affiliate Marketing

1. Grow Your Organic Traffic

Every single person you see making passive income with affiliate marketing has some sort of organic traffic involved in their success. Why is traffic so important? Because that’s one of your main tasks as an affiliate marketer! The reason it’s called affiliate marketing is that you’re marketing other companies’ products. it’s simply digital marketing. Your job is to generate traffic.

So, if that’s your main job, what would it look like if you were generating free organic traffic on autopilot?

If you want to make affiliate marketing a passive income source, you need to start growing your organic traffic! If you manage to do this, you’re basically 80% done.

How much time and energy do you use to generate traffic at this point? My guess is that it’s a lot, right? Imagine you’re able to generate 10,00 visitors each month, or more, organically. What would that mean?

To start with, that is several hundred dollars in Facebook advertising. If you can generate organic traffic, you save both time, energy, and money. But how do you do this?

You might already know this, but the best way to generate organic and passive traffic is with SEO (blogging) and YouTube. You might not be a fan of writing articles or making YouTube videos, but that’s the best way of generating traffic, that’s a fact. Your visitors will be free, organic, passive, and targeted, which makes them much more likely to buy your affiliate product.

It’s fine to think that you don’t want to create your own blog or YouTube channel, but how badly do you want to succeed with affiliate marketing. It’s about doing what it takes, not what you like.

I’m going to be honest, writing articles all day long isn’t what I enjoy the most, but it pays the bills and that’s what matters.

To start growing your organic traffic you NEED to start a blog or YouTube channel. If you want guidance to start blogging and ranking content on Google, then you should check out Income School’s Project 24. That’s the course I learned blogging and search engine optimization. I highly recommend you check it out!

You could also check out other blogs and YouTube channels in your niche to get ideas on how to do it.

2. Earn Recurring Commissions

The next step to earning passive income as an affiliate marketer is to promote products or services that pay out recurring commissions. If you do this you get paid month after month for just one sale. Often the people you referred to stay as paying customers for years, meaning you’ll receive a monthly payment for years.

This point is an important one because you want to automate your affiliate business as much as possible.

Think about this: If you’re promoting products that payout 10% commission every time it’s sold, you would need to sell hundreds of them just to make a full-time living. What if you sold a product that had a recurring payment plan? Then you would get paid every single month from that first initial sale. Every month your income rises instead of starting at zero.

So where do you find products that pay out recurring commissions? In my experience, software does a very good job on this.

Most of them have a recurring payment plan where the customer needs to pay each month to use the service. If you promote a product like this, you’ll get a commission each time they pay, which is once a month.

A software I’ve been promoting lately is Clickfunnels. it’s a funnel-building software that lets entrepreneurs and business owners sell their products online.

Clickfunnels costs $97/month and pays up to 40% in monthly commissions. This means I earn $38.80/month for every member I refer. Do you see the power of this?

By referring a customer once, I earn $38.80 month after month in passive income. When I’ve referred 100 customers to Clickfunnels I’ll earn around $3,880 each month, completely passive income. At this point, I could stop doing affiliate marketing and still earn a decent amount of money on a monthly basis.

If I wanted to make this kind of money with a $100 product that pays out 10% commission for every sale, I would have to sell 388 units every month just to make the same as with the software.

I hope you see the power of promoting products with recurring commissions. That’s the way ”affiliate gurus” makes most of their money.

3. Two Tier Affiliate Marketing

What is two-tier affiliate marketing? Basically, you sign up new affiliates to the affiliate program you’re in.

Inside the dashboard of your affiliate program, you can find a unique affiliate link to refer new affiliates. When people sign up through this link they become 1st tier affiliates for the company and you’ll become their 2nd tier affiliate.

The people you’ve referred to the affiliate program are called sub-affiliates.

When your sub-affiliates (1st tier) promote products they earn a normal commission for the sale (which can range from 1%-50%). As a 2nd tier affiliate you normally earn 5%-10% of that sale.

Example: Your sub-affiliate sells a $100 product with 40% commission rate and receive $40. Then you’ll get 10% of that sale which is $10.

The customer does not need to pay anything more and the 1st tier affiliate don’t lose any of it’s commission rate. You only take 5%-10% extra for the sale, which means a bit less money for the company.

This is a great way of automating your affiliate income, but remember this: If you and your sub-affiliates only care about referring others, nobody is going to make a dollar.

The only way to make money with affiliate marketing is when a sale happens!

To make sure the people you referred into the affiliate program becomes great affiliate marketer, it’s smart to give them some sort of training.

For example, Clickfunnels has a two tier affiliate program, meaning you can sign up for new affiliates. To make things as smooth as possible, Clickfunnels has made something called the Affiliate Bootcamp which teaches new affiliates how to promote the software. This is a great feature because you becomes their 2nd tier affiliate and they learn how to promote the product.

Note, not all affiliate programs has a two-tier referral program. You’ll need to check if your affiliate program has one.

Related post: What Is A Two Tier Affiliate Program? (With Examples)

4. Use an Affiliate Marketing Bridge Funnel

Above, under the 1st sub heading I said that 80% of being an affiliate marketer is about generating traffic. When you master that part, you’ll become great at affiliate marketing, but there’s still 20% left. What’s that all about?

The final 20% is the selling. If you’re not able to sell the products you’re promoting, how do you expect to make any commissions?

By using an affiliate marketing bridge funnel you’ve taken care of this part. It’s an automated sales machine that will drive you referral commissions all day long if you do it the right way…

So what is an affiliate marketing bridge page? Here’s Russell Brunson explaining.

 

This is also known as an opt-in page. The squeeze page works as the landing page and it’s the first step in the bridge funnel. Your only goal for this page is to collect email addresses. There is no need to be selling or promoting your affiliate product here. The only thing you should focus on is to create something valuable you can give away for free in exchange for their email addresses.

2) Bridge Page

After your visitor has given you their email at the squeeze page, they’ll be sent to the bridge page. Here you’re going to warm up and pre-sell you current leads so they’re more likely to purchase the product your promoting. If you want to this effectivey I recommend you make a video where you talk about their problems and pain points, then represent your affiliate product as the solution. (Make sure to add a Call To Action button).

3) Sales Page

After the bridge page, your leads will be taken to your affiliate offer. If you follow the steps above they’re much more likely to buy the product because they’ve been educated about it. This is where you make your money.

I’ve used this method myself and it has worked perfectly fine. When you build a bridge funnel you also create an automated sales machine, that can make you affiliate commissions 24/7. This way you both increase your conversion rate and automate your business.

If you want to give it a try I highly recommend you use Clickfunnels to build the bridge funnel. It’s super easy to use and perfect for affiliate marketers. Clickfunnels also have pre-made bridge funnel templates, so you can just pick one and everything is done for you. It is as simple as it gets.

Start Here: Click here to create your free account on Clickfunnels.

5. Build Your Email List

Why do affiliate marketers use email marketing in their business? To not miss out on potential sales!

If you don’t use email marketing and have someone go to your affiliate offer and don’t buy, you’re not able to reach them again! If you want them to see your product's sales page again, then you would need to spend money on ads, etc.

Email marketing is a MUST HAVE as an affiliate marketer. Since we don’t control the sales page, we can’t change it or put retargeting ads on people who ”almost bought”. We would miss out on a ton of sales!

On the other hand, when you do collect email addresses you get multiple chances to sell people your affiliate product, without the need to spend money on retargeting ads.

You can simply create an autoresponder that sends out promotional emails all day long. It’s an excellent way to automate your affiliate marketing business, and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to pull this off.

If you use the bridge funnel method shown above, all of this gets even easier. While you’re collecting emails on the opt-in page, your leads go through the funnel and some become paying customers. The ones that don’t will be retargeted by your automated email sequence. It really is as simple as it sounds.

But, if you need someone to show you how to set all of this up, then I highly recommend you check out the Partner With Anthony program. In that course, you’ll learn how to build a bridge funnel, create an email list and autoresponder, and how to generate traffic to that funnel. You’ll learn how the most successful affiliates make their money. Click the link above to check it out.

What Is Passive Income?

Passive income is the art of making money while you don’t work. That doesn’t mean making money without any work.

In fact, in most cases, you’ll need to put in a large amount of hours upfront (normally unpaid) to get the reward later.

Passive income is an amazing way of making money, but you don’t always see results as fast as you desire. Many people don’t see results at all, which leads to them quitting. They will never earn a dollar in passive income in their life.

You need to work through the times where you don’t see results. If you stay consistent over a longer period of time, you will eventually see results, and get paid for the work you’ve put down. And that money will taste better than anything else.

Final Words

There are plenty of ways you can make passive income with affiliate marketing. The strategies listed above are foolproof because I’ve done them myself. You can make it real if you want it enough!

Hope you got some value from this article, if you did feel free to read more of my content, and/or share the post with a friend. Keep hustling!