I Tried Earning 7 Figures in 12 Months

by Dan Brock March 7, 2020

The majority of this is from free traffic. Full transparency, I did spend some money on contests (I’ll talk about that in a second), a little bit of retargeting ads, but the majority was from free traffic.

What I want to talk about are the myths and the steps to pulling this off.

seven-figures-in-12-months

Myth #1: Free Website Traffic Is Dead In Affiliate Marketing

This is complete cr-… hoopla. I’ve seen this argument for the last 20 years. Even 20 years ago people were like, “Free website traffic is dead. Blogging doesn’t work. Forum marketing doesn’t work.”

All of these are proven ways to make money online. Article marketing still works. Depends where you do it, but it’s still a powerful way to get traffic to your website.

Video marketing, blogging, all of these things are very long-term ways to get traffic FOR FREE on the internet.

Question for ya: is acting dead? is professional sports, like the NFL or the NBA, are those things dead?

I know that’s a very random analogy, but just because a lot of people do them doesn’t mean that it’s not profitable and that you can’t make it work.

There are still new celebrities, new sports players coming up all the time. If you have the will, there is a way.

Proof in the pudding… here is a YouTube channel that I made back in 2012 and look at the views…

Even today, it’s still kicking. I haven’t done anything to it. Where can you get paid traffic like that, which lasts 7-8 years after having created that content?

It doesn’t exist.

Myth #2: Better To Sell Your Own Product Than Affiliate Offers

This is not necessarily the truth. If you look at my stats here, half of those sales were affiliate offers.

And I didn’t spend much time with affiliate offers for this particular channel. It was 10-15% of my effort (at most).

Imagine if I’d spent all of my effort working on affiliate offers, just focusing on the marketing and letting someone else handle the support and delivery, the product creation. All the hard things.

I know I would have made much more money, had I just focused on being an affiliate marketer. So, just because you can make your own product and make more profit, doesn’t mean that you still can’t make more money with affiliate marketing.

In other words, you can still make millions of dollars on your own, just as an affiliate.

So keep that in mind.

Myth #3: SEO Is Not Worth The Time For Affiliate Marketing

This is far from the truth. Every content platform that you work on (Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Quora, Medium), all of these have a heavy search-based algorithm.

What that means, in nerd speak, is LEARN SEO. Learn how to find the keywords for your niche. Understand long-tail keywords and backlinking and you’ll do well in 2020 and beyond.

I have tons of videos on the topic of SEO. Do a search on my YouTube channel. I have advanced training so that you make your content the right way. Get the best results with literally just a minute or two of tweaking (once you know how to do it).

Now, let’s get into the process of getting to those numbers, seven figures in one year with free website traffic.

Step #1: Find The Best Platform In Your Space

Not everything is popular on Facebook as it is on YouTube or blogging websites. It’s based on the topic that you’re writing about.

For example, on Pinterest, food topics, recipes, arts & crafts… stuff like that does much better there than, say, Facebook.

That’s not always the rule, but usually, with your topic, there is one platform that you can focus on and get the best results.

Spend a minute now to figure out what that platform is, and then put 70% of your effort into cracking that one platform.

Once you start getting traction…

Step #2: Put 20% Effort Into Building Up Other Platforms

Facebook, Pinterest, all the “secondary platforms” (like blogs), whatever it is, put 20% of your time into that.

Why do that, you may ask?

Several reasons:

  1. Great way to get more people (more “hooks in the ocean”, so to speak)
  2. Sends social signals to these platforms to determine whether your content is valuable

For example, say you have a YouTube video or a blog. It’ll help to have a Facebook page that you can drop your content on to link to your blog posts. You get traffic from there and get that social mojo going for your content.

So make sure you spend a little bit of time building up those secondary platforms.

Step #3: Write For Authority-Based Affiliate Marketing Websites

This is something I’m actually doing right now. For example Entrepreneur, Forbes, etc.

All of these are great authority websites that you can contribute content to and get published on.

Here’s the caveat to this: it takes more time and you’re gonna get vetted to qualify to be on these platforms.

It’s not like the other sites where you just start typing away. To be a contributor to an authority site, you usually have to apply and have some kind of credentials.

It’s going to take time to get to this point. If you’ve got a social media following that you built up over time, this is a great way to leverage that, and you can also offer to promote the article from their site to your social media profile.

If you have some skill and knowledge and that following, this can be a great way to get into these blogs.

This is something I’m working on now. The benefit is threefold.

  1. You can get in front of an entirely new audience that you wouldn’t be able to any other way.
  2. This gives you a lot of authority in your space. For example, have you ever seen authors on Amazon say, “I’m a best-selling author on Amazon. I have a New York Times bestseller”? Doesn’t that change your perspective of that particular author? That is what’s known as “authority”. By writing for these websites, you build your authority that much more.
  3. Backlinks from these sites are highly, highly valuable. 

So spend about 10% of your time writing some good content for these sites. You don’t have to go nuts.

Just a few on these sites will go a very long way.

Step #4: Do a Give-Away Contest To Boost Affiliate Marketing Results

You should do a giveaway contest for your website or YouTube channel. You don’t have to give-away $1,000 or anything crazy like that.

$50 can go a long way. Even a gift card, or some kind of accessory that’s related to your topic.

For example, let’s say you have a video-creation channel. You could give away a free GorillaPod or free webcam.

$50-$100, even $30 is fine for a give-away. So, why do you do this?

This is a great lead magnet to get people to your channels, to subscribe, and do what it is that you want them to.

There’s a cool service called Gleam.io that will handle the entire contest service for you. You can entice people to share your videos, watch your videos, subscribe to your channel, subscribe to your blog, whatever that is can be managed through Gleam.

It’s very easy to do and it’s worth mentioning the content on every social media platform that you have.

This is how you can explode your growth and subscribers. Use this as a way to segue into bigger and better things.

Step #5: Publish Affiliate Marketing Content Across All Platforms

There’s a little bit of a secret to it. Learn to repurpose your content.

For example, you can make a blog post, then hack it up and turn it into a YouTube video, a podcast, and infographic and send them across the internet in the way that these platforms are designed to support.

Instagram, for example, you don’t want to take a YouTube video and plug it right to Instagram. It’s just not gonna work.

Here are some examples of some video content that I made. Shorter videos do well, and little posts to help build your brand.

Instagram is also a great way to help people remember your brand and interact with you across different platforms.

Why do you do this?

Think of it like this: let’s say you have a new YouTube video. You created it. You published it in the morning.

Well, not everyone is going to be on YouTube to see it at that time. Or they might see it and forget to click on it or get distracted and click someone else’s video.

So your video might not get the exposure that it needs.

Now, let’s say you also have a Facebook page. What you could do is, an hour later, take a segment of that video and post it on your Facebook page and recommend people to watch the full video on YouTube.

This gives people another opportunity to be reminded of your video. More importantly, this gets people coming from Facebook and over to YouTube. YouTube loves this!

Vice-versa, too. If you send YouTube traffic to Facebook, platforms love when they get people from other traffic sources.

Consider learning to take your piece of content, segment it out, and also drip feed it over a certain period of time. Anywhere from a couple of days up to 10 days.

What this signals is that your content is getting traction.

So, you can post it across all the big platforms, like USAToday. All the sites that signal to Google, YouTube, and Facebook that your content is valuable.

The concept here is that if you create good content, after that first week to 10 days, it’ll start to take on a life of its own. It will become viral, if you will.

This is how you start that mojo.

Affiliate Marketing Bonus Tip #1 & #2

Tip 1: This is super cool! If you have the money, you may consider investing $50-$100 building up likes/shares on a particular platform.

What you can do is pay Facebook to drive “likes” to your page.

And once people like your page, you can then start recommending content for them to view. This way, you will have a small audience right off the bat.

If you’ve been wondering how you can build that initial audience, it can help to spend a little bit of money and inject it into building up a particular platform. And once you have that small audience, you can start promoting your content.

Tip 2: A lot of these platforms give away free credits. When you create a new account, some will give you $50, $100, or even $150 of free ad credits just for signing up.

They do this to entice people to use their platform. You don’t have to keep spending money, but you can use this to start directing traffic wherever you want for free. Just make sure if you want to discontinue paid traffic, cancel your account.

How Bad Do You Want Traffic For Affiliate Marketing?

This is my question to you: how bad do you want traffic? If you are serious, if you’re not going to use this to exploit people, if you’re not a tire-kicker, if you’re not one of those phonies/wanna-be…

…I have a live workshop that I’m putting on. Go to deadbeat.com/jay and we’re gonna show you exactly how you can take a piece of content that you don’t even have to create, splice it up (the right way), and syndicate it out to over 150 different high-authority websites.

I’m talking, the ones that you see on a daily basis and some of these you can’t get into even if you wanted.

If that’s something that you’re interested in, we have a live workshop. We’re gonna show you exactly how you can get into this and do all of it in just 6 minutes or less. Any piece of content and, more importantly, to promote affiliate offers and really get those buyers through your links so you can make those affiliate commissions.

Go to deadbeat.com/jay, this is a live workshop, so make sure you sign up. Get your seat and see ya there!

  •  
  •  
  •  

I Tried Earning 7 Figures in 12 Months

by Dan Brock March 7, 2020

The majority of this is from free traffic. Full transparency, I did spend some money on contests (I’ll talk about that in a second), a little bit of retargeting ads, but the majority was from free traffic.

What I want to talk about are the myths and the steps to pulling this off.

seven-figures-in-12-months

Myth #1: Free Website Traffic Is Dead In Affiliate Marketing

This is complete cr-… hoopla. I’ve seen this argument for the last 20 years. Even 20 years ago people were like, “Free website traffic is dead. Blogging doesn’t work. Forum marketing doesn’t work.”

All of these are proven ways to make money online. Article marketing still works. Depends where you do it, but it’s still a powerful way to get traffic to your website.

Video marketing, blogging, all of these things are very long-term ways to get traffic FOR FREE on the internet.

Question for ya: is acting dead? is professional sports, like the NFL or the NBA, are those things dead?

I know that’s a very random analogy, but just because a lot of people do them doesn’t mean that it’s not profitable and that you can’t make it work.

There are still new celebrities, new sports players coming up all the time. If you have the will, there is a way.

Proof in the pudding… here is a YouTube channel that I made back in 2012 and look at the views…

Even today, it’s still kicking. I haven’t done anything to it. Where can you get paid traffic like that, which lasts 7-8 years after having created that content?

It doesn’t exist.

Myth #2: Better To Sell Your Own Product Than Affiliate Offers

This is not necessarily the truth. If you look at my stats here, half of those sales were affiliate offers.

And I didn’t spend much time with affiliate offers for this particular channel. It was 10-15% of my effort (at most).

Imagine if I’d spent all of my effort working on affiliate offers, just focusing on the marketing and letting someone else handle the support and delivery, the product creation. All the hard things.

I know I would have made much more money, had I just focused on being an affiliate marketer. So, just because you can make your own product and make more profit, doesn’t mean that you still can’t make more money with affiliate marketing.

In other words, you can still make millions of dollars on your own, just as an affiliate.

So keep that in mind.

Myth #3: SEO Is Not Worth The Time For Affiliate Marketing

This is far from the truth. Every content platform that you work on (Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Quora, Medium), all of these have a heavy search-based algorithm.

What that means, in nerd speak, is LEARN SEO. Learn how to find the keywords for your niche. Understand long-tail keywords and backlinking and you’ll do well in 2020 and beyond.

I have tons of videos on the topic of SEO. Do a search on my YouTube channel. I have advanced training so that you make your content the right way. Get the best results with literally just a minute or two of tweaking (once you know how to do it).

Now, let’s get into the process of getting to those numbers, seven figures in one year with free website traffic.

Step #1: Find The Best Platform In Your Space

Not everything is popular on Facebook as it is on YouTube or blogging websites. It’s based on the topic that you’re writing about.

For example, on Pinterest, food topics, recipes, arts & crafts… stuff like that does much better there than, say, Facebook.

That’s not always the rule, but usually, with your topic, there is one platform that you can focus on and get the best results.

Spend a minute now to figure out what that platform is, and then put 70% of your effort into cracking that one platform.

Once you start getting traction…

Step #2: Put 20% Effort Into Building Up Other Platforms

Facebook, Pinterest, all the “secondary platforms” (like blogs), whatever it is, put 20% of your time into that.

Why do that, you may ask?

Several reasons:

  1. Great way to get more people (more “hooks in the ocean”, so to speak)
  2. Sends social signals to these platforms to determine whether your content is valuable

For example, say you have a YouTube video or a blog. It’ll help to have a Facebook page that you can drop your content on to link to your blog posts. You get traffic from there and get that social mojo going for your content.

So make sure you spend a little bit of time building up those secondary platforms.

Step #3: Write For Authority-Based Affiliate Marketing Websites

This is something I’m actually doing right now. For example Entrepreneur, Forbes, etc.

All of these are great authority websites that you can contribute content to and get published on.

Here’s the caveat to this: it takes more time and you’re gonna get vetted to qualify to be on these platforms.

It’s not like the other sites where you just start typing away. To be a contributor to an authority site, you usually have to apply and have some kind of credentials.

It’s going to take time to get to this point. If you’ve got a social media following that you built up over time, this is a great way to leverage that, and you can also offer to promote the article from their site to your social media profile.

If you have some skill and knowledge and that following, this can be a great way to get into these blogs.

This is something I’m working on now. The benefit is threefold.

  1. You can get in front of an entirely new audience that you wouldn’t be able to any other way.
  2. This gives you a lot of authority in your space. For example, have you ever seen authors on Amazon say, “I’m a best-selling author on Amazon. I have a New York Times bestseller”? Doesn’t that change your perspective of that particular author? That is what’s known as “authority”. By writing for these websites, you build your authority that much more.
  3. Backlinks from these sites are highly, highly valuable. 

So spend about 10% of your time writing some good content for these sites. You don’t have to go nuts.

Just a few on these sites will go a very long way.

Step #4: Do a Give-Away Contest To Boost Affiliate Marketing Results

You should do a giveaway contest for your website or YouTube channel. You don’t have to give-away $1,000 or anything crazy like that.

$50 can go a long way. Even a gift card, or some kind of accessory that’s related to your topic.

For example, let’s say you have a video-creation channel. You could give away a free GorillaPod or free webcam.

$50-$100, even $30 is fine for a give-away. So, why do you do this?

This is a great lead magnet to get people to your channels, to subscribe, and do what it is that you want them to.

There’s a cool service called Gleam.io that will handle the entire contest service for you. You can entice people to share your videos, watch your videos, subscribe to your channel, subscribe to your blog, whatever that is can be managed through Gleam.

It’s very easy to do and it’s worth mentioning the content on every social media platform that you have.

This is how you can explode your growth and subscribers. Use this as a way to segue into bigger and better things.

Step #5: Publish Affiliate Marketing Content Across All Platforms

There’s a little bit of a secret to it. Learn to repurpose your content.

For example, you can make a blog post, then hack it up and turn it into a YouTube video, a podcast, and infographic and send them across the internet in the way that these platforms are designed to support.

Instagram, for example, you don’t want to take a YouTube video and plug it right to Instagram. It’s just not gonna work.

Here are some examples of some video content that I made. Shorter videos do well, and little posts to help build your brand.

Instagram is also a great way to help people remember your brand and interact with you across different platforms.

Why do you do this?

Think of it like this: let’s say you have a new YouTube video. You created it. You published it in the morning.

Well, not everyone is going to be on YouTube to see it at that time. Or they might see it and forget to click on it or get distracted and click someone else’s video.

So your video might not get the exposure that it needs.

Now, let’s say you also have a Facebook page. What you could do is, an hour later, take a segment of that video and post it on your Facebook page and recommend people to watch the full video on YouTube.

This gives people another opportunity to be reminded of your video. More importantly, this gets people coming from Facebook and over to YouTube. YouTube loves this!

Vice-versa, too. If you send YouTube traffic to Facebook, platforms love when they get people from other traffic sources.

Consider learning to take your piece of content, segment it out, and also drip feed it over a certain period of time. Anywhere from a couple of days up to 10 days.

What this signals is that your content is getting traction.

So, you can post it across all the big platforms, like USAToday. All the sites that signal to Google, YouTube, and Facebook that your content is valuable.

The concept here is that if you create good content, after that first week to 10 days, it’ll start to take on a life of its own. It will become viral, if you will.

This is how you start that mojo.

Affiliate Marketing Bonus Tip #1 & #2

Tip 1: This is super cool! If you have the money, you may consider investing $50-$100 building up likes/shares on a particular platform.

What you can do is pay Facebook to drive “likes” to your page.

And once people like your page, you can then start recommending content for them to view. This way, you will have a small audience right off the bat.

If you’ve been wondering how you can build that initial audience, it can help to spend a little bit of money and inject it into building up a particular platform. And once you have that small audience, you can start promoting your content.

Tip 2: A lot of these platforms give away free credits. When you create a new account, some will give you $50, $100, or even $150 of free ad credits just for signing up.

They do this to entice people to use their platform. You don’t have to keep spending money, but you can use this to start directing traffic wherever you want for free. Just make sure if you want to discontinue paid traffic, cancel your account.

How Bad Do You Want Traffic For Affiliate Marketing?

This is my question to you: how bad do you want traffic? If you are serious, if you’re not going to use this to exploit people, if you’re not a tire-kicker, if you’re not one of those phonies/wanna-be…

…I have a live workshop that I’m putting on. Go to deadbeat.com/jay and we’re gonna show you exactly how you can take a piece of content that you don’t even have to create, splice it up (the right way), and syndicate it out to over 150 different high-authority websites.

I’m talking, the ones that you see on a daily basis and some of these you can’t get into even if you wanted.

If that’s something that you’re interested in, we have a live workshop. We’re gonna show you exactly how you can get into this and do all of it in just 6 minutes or less. Any piece of content and, more importantly, to promote affiliate offers and really get those buyers through your links so you can make those affiliate commissions.

Go to deadbeat.com/jay, this is a live workshop, so make sure you sign up. Get your seat and see ya there!

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  •  
  •