Hello and a very warm welcome to this video. My name is Uzair, and I've got a very special guest and a friend with me, Anna from MaxWeb. So this video is all about affiliate marketing, and Anna is going to talk about what it is all about, how you can get started, and why you should consider affiliate marketing.
If you are looking to generate a second income along your full-time job or your business, if you're looking to get started with a side hustle for 2024, or if you want to just earn a bit more extra money, then affiliate marketing is for you. But before we get onto the call and the questions, Anna, a very warm welcome and thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm honoured. I'm excited. I look forward to all the questions and from someone that has learned everything about affiliate marketing the last eight years, I am thrilled to be able to share some of that with all of you. Brilliant. So before we dive into the questions, could you please briefly tell our audience who you are and what you do?
Absolutely. So, my name is Anna, really. My friends and family call me Anca. If you are my friend on social media, you probably see its Anca everywhere. The big secret behind that, my American friends had a hard time pronouncing Anca, so then we just took the C and turned it into N. So Anna, Anca whatever. It's easier for you.
The big story behind my company, My Baby MaxWeb, is that we are an affiliate network. We have over 40,000 affiliates, so that's a beautiful number. You can imagine. We have affiliates that do a bit of everything. We create offers for them. We have a self-serve platform. So, my job is to make sure we have good offers for our affiliates, good support, good account managers.
By the time you start making sales, if you're just getting started, there are so many resources out there, and we will get to that. MaxWeb probably targets medium-sized affiliates that have started affiliate marketing. But I really encourage everyone who's a newbie. And being a newbie doesn't mean that you don't have experience. It just means that you're learning how to do this specific niche.
Perfect. So I've got lots of interesting questions, so let's dive into the first one, which is, what is affiliate marketing and how does it actually work? That's a great one. So, the easiest way to explain it, think of it as a marketing model, just a marketing model where you have third-party affiliates and we'll get in a minute as to what type of affiliates you can have that just promote a merchant's offer, a merchant, product owner or vendor.
They decide to create a supplement, an eBook, and they put it on a platform like MaxWeb, a network, and then you as the affiliate, you can have zero experience or lots of experience. You come to that platform and you get an affiliate link to promote a specific product and you make a commission every time a customer takes an action.
So, in some cases, you, as the affiliate would make money when a customer just puts in their email. That's called lead generation, Right? Like Lead Gen. Or if the customer purchases a supplement bottle, you get a cost per action. So, you get, let's say, $100 for every customer. That's how it works. Brilliant. And you offer both the models, the e-commerce, as well as the lead gen.
We just offer CPA. That's our superpower. In a way. It's the same with lead generation. You get a very small CPA, maybe a dollar or two, Right? With supplement brands or even digital products, you get more. For example, we have digital products on MaxWeb, like a digital eBook for back pain. And the cost to the consumer for a back pain eBook is probably, I don't know, I want to say $37.
But you, as the customer, you get $15 for every customer because it's our job in the backend to monetize the lifetime of that customer. So that's why you see those big CPAs, because in our space, in our industry, it's our job to monetize the backend. So you as the affiliate, as long as the traffic quality is good, you're going to get a lot per customer.
So, the publisher or the business owner has mapped out their backend because they know every time somebody comes up and buys that $37 front-end offer, they are going to upsell them. Or later on, along the line, they are going to buy more products from them or do phone sales. Right? like the Avenger cards. As a product owner, we also create products.
So it's our job to make sure you know how to monetize, do not take it from the affiliate earnings. So the front end, in my opinion, should all go to the affiliate. Perfect. So why should someone start affiliate marketing? Oh My God. Because you can make so much money. And when I got started, it was that angel and devil on your shoulders.
It's like make money online. It sounds like someone is trying to steal from you or there has to be something shady going on. When you start researching. Let me just put it like that in a nutshell, when you start researching affiliate marketing, you're going to get a lot of bad and good information. Because of the reputation of affiliate marketing, if it's not done correctly, it can be full of fraud, full of backlinks and just very messy.
But the real affiliate marketing, you should definitely try it, because you can make money from your family. Even if you already have a job, if you have the hustle, the determination, the desire to make more for yourself, it's easy. Because with affiliate marketing, the number one thing you need to invest is your time. And in my opinion, that's pretty darn beautiful.
Because it doesn't matter if you were born in the Balkan area in Southeast Asia or South America with affiliate marketing, as long as you have a good internet connection, you get a chance. So you can pretty much live the true laptop lifestyle where you've got the location freedom. You do. Exactly. But one thing I always want to say, right, it's very important you have the location freedom, but you still have to work.
And I say this because people think like our affiliates make a lot of money and everyone assumes it's very easy. They work for 20 minutes on the beach and that's it. No, they still work very hard. They still work the 8 hours. The beautiful part is they choose which 8 hours of the day to work. Right? And in time, as they get very good at what they do in 4 hours, they can probably get done everything.
They used to take them 8 hours a long time ago. But you still have to work. Yes, you can make the money. Yes, you'll have the location freedom, but you still need to put in the time and effort. Perfect. So this sounds very techy and you need to know your way around the Internet and apps and computers and software.
Do you need to be tech-savvy to do affiliate marketing? Or somebody who knows how to operate a computer, which everybody knows how to do these days. Can they get started with affiliate marketing with minimal knowledge of the Internet? Absolutely. Well, you do need minimal knowledge. Like you need to be comfortable using a computer, researching stuff, researching websites, and information, but that's about it.
Because everything else you can learn as long as you have that good internet connection, that desire to learn. Because even if you're going to start researching how to set up a blog, Right? You’re going to need the time to look into it, to know how to pull the website pages. But technically, you don't need to be a developer, you don't need to know how to run code or do backend details just to be comfortable around a computer.
That's pretty much it. The desire to want to work is probably the most important. And even if somebody is struggling with affiliate marketing, you have a great customer support team to help everybody at every stage of their affiliate marketing journey. Oh, absolutely. And we have a good Academy page. Once you're in a MaxWeb affiliate, you get access to all our blogs, all our academy.
We even have like when you get to the academy page, it has a beautiful glossary of terms. If you're not sure what a post-back pixel is, you just go in and your research is like, oh, a post-back pixel is just like, it's going to help me track this affiliate link, Right? So, we try to make it as easy as possible for people that are just getting started.
It now you mentioned earlier on about that you need to invest a bit of time to get it going. And the more you do it, the faster you're going to achieve the results. What about the cash investment? Because you need a little bit of cash to drive traffic or you don't need to buy the products, obviously, and stock up.
That's the beauty of affiliate marketing, that you don't need to do drop shipping and stuff like that, which I'll come on to in a minute. But what's the bare minimum would you advise? I know it's a very broad question that what sort of money does somebody need to get it going? It's a great question and I get it a lot and I love answering it.
You really don't need money to start affiliate marketing, but I would encourage you to try to set some aside just because, yes, you can make money from using search traffic. Just plain old blogs, which you probably to create those you'll still need probably I don't know how much it costs nowadays to have, like a ClickFunnels backend, a few tools.
Let's say $50 a month for all the tools you need to create that blog, Right? So you still need the actual tools to create the blogs. So then you can just do it all organic and free. But if you're serious about it, if you want to do GDN or if you want to do Google, I mean, we love Google just because it's easy and it's accessible.
Let's say you want to do Facebook or YouTube, even with those, like $20 a day, it's the minimum you should do to be able to scale your campaigns. You should only start spending money once you've learned how to do that. There are courses that information out there. So technically you don't need money. But it's going to help if you're serious about this business.
Because even let's say you're going to promote something on Facebook just to your Facebook friends, Right? You’re going to get 20 views. You're trying to sell a supplement. If you add a few ads even like $20 on the same over a couple of days, chances are you're going to get more views. And if one customer buys, you get $100 from the product owner because that's how much we usually pay for one customer.
So you're spending $20, $40 probably. But if you do it right, you're going to get that money back and then I would recommend you to invest everything you make, at least the first few months until you really get the hang of things. Yeah. So basically, the testing phase is that learning phase where you have $20, $30, $50 a day, get the results.
If you don't get the results, doesn't mean that you have wasted the money or you have failed. You have learned. Because then you know what is working, what's not working. And yes, you're right, you can put up organically on blog posts, on social media or wherever, but that takes a long time to build up traffic. If you want instant results and fast results, then you need to have a little bit of cash to invest into paid traffic.
Exactly. Whether you go with Google or YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bing, you decide where you want to go. Brilliant. I agree. There aren't that many businesses where you can start with $50, $30, $50 a day correct, this is kind of like a business, full-time business. People I know and you know, have quit their jobs. Oh My God. That's our goal.
When I opened the network, that was my goal. And that's a success story for me. When one of our affiliates, like now, they became friends after all these years, they used to have regular jobs, 9 to 5. And then after a while of doing this, it's so profitable, they were just able to quit, but also have so much more money for their families.
It's beautiful and it's and it's so much room for everyone, Right? Yeah. And then you get that true location freedom, time freedom and financial freedom. Exactly. That's the aim. So you start small and build it up. Brilliant. So someone who is working full time and he's got a 9 to 5 job, can he or she also start doing affiliate marketing?
Oh, absolutely. That's how most of affiliates start. Because, you see, most people don't just have the sure, some do, but most people don't have the time and money to just do this full-time. So most people start they'll invest 2 hours every evening after work or 2 hours every night after the kids go to bed. Research. Do you want to do YouTube?
Do you want to do Google? Do you want to do Facebook? Basically, they look into the best traffic source. There's so much information out there. Just look at your YouTube channel. It's so beautiful. I mean, if I was 19 getting started, I would probably start with Google, Right? But long story short, of course, it's possible. And that's how most affiliates do it.
They don't just automatically start making a month from day one. So you mentioned $50k a month, and people are earning that kind of cash with affiliate marketing. Super affiliates earn that in a day. I know, it's crazy to think of it $50k that you could feed a whole village somewhere. But that much some affiliates make in one day.
Of course, those are the exceptions. Most affiliates make $50k in a month. Some make $2k in a month. And they're very happy because in Eastern Europe if you make $2k a month, you don't need to work a boring job. That's stressful. So it's so beautiful. And we love and respect all those affiliates in between, because as long as you're doing this and you're providing for your family, good for you.
Yeah. Even if it takes you a year, two years, three years to earn thousands per month, it's worth having a go at, because you can't start with day one on such numbers, but you build it up slowly, slowly. Exactly. And affiliate marketing is not going anywhere. On the contrary, I think most brands are just getting started to see how profitable it is.
Profitable? It is brilliant. Now, another interesting question I've been sent is the difference between affiliate marketing and drop shipping, because drop shipping is what a lot of people know because of Amazon. Right? How would you differentiate between the two? Well, with the drop shipping, you're basically in charge of everything. You're in charge of having to research the product, decide how to make the store, make sure the fulfilment the customer service.
You have to worry about all those details. With affiliate marketing, you care what you choose. But the product owner, the network has to decide about all of that. All you have to do is decide on the traffic. You get your link. Let's say you get a link for a supplement product. That's all you do. You have to figure out, am I going to put that link on Facebook.
And am I going to put it on YouTube? Where am I going with this link? That's all you have to worry about. So it really takes a lot of the stress with Drop shipping is a whole business. You're the product owner, you're the affiliate, you're the fulfilment centre, and you’re the customer service. I'm sure many people love it.
It's a good business model for some. But in my opinion, if you're just getting started, it gets complicated quickly. And I guess before you take on a publisher or an advertiser, you research the background or the product market fit and is it converting or not. Do you look at those metrics before you say yes to them? Because then you put that product in front of your affiliates.
Well, we say no 90% of the time. We say no to product owners because sometimes if we don't know them, if they don't have a good reputation, we just say no because it's not worth the risk. And we have so many product owners creating offers just for us. So Of course, it's a huge responsibility putting a product in front of the affiliates, because it has to convert.
It has to be something that customers need. Right? And I don't judge the things people like to promote. Right? It can be a face cream. It can be something very vain like that. But if you need a face cream, just promote it. Right? It can be a pillow, but basically, we do research to make sure the offer is good and it converts.
That's very important. Perfect. Another interesting question is, how big is this affiliate marketing niche? I guess in billions. I guess we're definitely in the billions. It would be very hard to estimate because all the big brands have an affiliate marketing department. Even Victoria's Secret or Nike. They even have an affiliate marketing department. Even Amazon has an affiliate marketing department.
Right? You can be an Amazon affiliate. With Amazon, you make like 20% of the sale. So it's different from our specific health and fitness industry where we pay a lot per customer, but it's the same idea. Same idea. Being an Amazon affiliate or a MaxWeb affiliate is the same idea. You pick a product and you decide how you want to promote it, and how you want to market it.
But it's probably the biggest thing about Shopify and all the sales they had for Black Friday. I would bet you most of those came from affiliates because the brands don't feel like putting in the time and effort to market themselves. If there are affiliates out there that do this for a living yeah, because they drive the relevant traffic to that product at the right time.
Exactly. So, you mentioned about super affiliates. How does someone who's starting right now aspire to become a super affiliate, and what stages or what levels do they need to go up to become a super affiliate? And do they get any special treatment or offers which the others don't receive? That's a great question. So super affiliates really just refer to the amount of money they make.
It's no social standing of any sort. It's a way to refer to people that make $50k in a day or $50k in a month, people that make a lot of money. And the perks are that product owners and networks trust them, because you obviously trust someone that has had the energy to put into your offers and bring you that cash flow depending on the average order value, because they bring so many sales, they might get better CPAs.
Honestly, for a network or product owner, the desire is to pay as much as we can, because we know that's how we're going to get traffic. For you to aspire to be a super affiliate, there are a couple of things. The most important is to work very hard. I mean, it's not enough just to watch videos, try to get into a community.
There are so many forums, Facebook groups, Skype groups, telegram groups, ask questions try to get a mentor. If you don't like to work with someone one-on-one, try to listen to YouTube videos. Do a course. You know, there are courses that are not that expensive out there. So in order to become a super affiliate, you need to put in the work.
And also, if you can afford going to conferences, this is an important one. And I know it's not easy for everyone to travel, but when you go to a conference, you can become friends with other affiliates. And that's how I've seen a lot of our affiliates grow in the community. Because YouTube or Google, whatever your niche is, when you start discussing with someone else that does the same thing, you start giving advice to one another, and then you learn and you grow.
So as soon as you can afford to travel and nowadays, there are conferences on every continent, every country, Right? It doesn't have to be something in the US. It can be for us, even if MaxWeb is based in the US. I moved back to Romania a couple of years ago, and I love going to conferences here in Europe, Right?
I don't have to always have to fly across the ocean to meet affiliates. So, if you're serious about this travelling and basically building a community, it's an important part. Brilliant. Now, the first question will somebody starting affiliate marketing is which product or niche do I go into and how do I find the right product? So is there a way where you can help somebody decide which product to start with?
Well, yes, the most important thing is to pick a network that everyone knows, right? It's easy to go out there, see where affiliates do, you know what type of networks they're talking about. For MaxWeb, for example, we sometimes hand affiliates to other networks just because we don't do finance, Right? We don't do Medicare or, I don't know lead gen, or we don't do a lot of specific ecommerce, like drones and stuff like that.
So if you're an affiliate and you have a blog about finance, MaxWeb is probably not going to be the best for you. Right. We would recommend the network that has offers, like, okay, but basically do a bit of research because people are talking, even doing a Google search, you'll see the networks that come up, Right? The networks that everyone talks about.
And more important than choosing a product is choosing a network. Because as soon as you get on that network, you're going to get an account manager, and that account manager is going to ask you, tell me, how do you want to promote this? Did you decide if you want to do a blog, you want to do a YouTube video?
Tell me, do you have an email list? And once you tell them how you want to promote it, they're already going to know the type of offers that you will know. Like for email, I can already tell you five offers on the network that do best for email, Right? So I know that a lot of people give the advice to look for something you're passionate about.
Honestly, if you want to be profitable, let the network guide you, because you can be passionate about fitness. But the offer that does best on YouTube might be a back pain offer or skin offer, Right? So you need to get a bit out of your comfort zone and listen to advice on what's the best offer for your traffic source.
So kind of like follow the money really honestly, I know people, I've heard this question answered and almost everyone is going to tell you, well, try to research something you're passionate about. And I have a business background, not a marketing one. So for me, that doesn't make sense because maybe I'm passionate about skincare, but on YouTube right now, skin is not the most paid good.
It's vision, its joint pain, it's nerve. I'm going to go a bit out of my comfort zone trying to learn how to sell a nerve supplement because I know that's going to make me a lot of money. And then down the road, when I have that money, I can look into promoting stuff that I'm passionate about. Yeah, and also, you don't need to be an expert in some supplement or a dieting product or cream or something like that.
It's just you need to become really good at driving traffic and paid advertising if you want to get good results very quickly. 100%, because we know the product converts. Exactly. So that's my advice as a network. And listen, because they know they can see where all the money is coming from. So is there interest for you to be making money on their platform?
So there are two metrics which I would like you to touch upon. One is the EPC, the earnings per click, the payout, and then the conversion rate. Is the conversion rate worked on the total amount of traffic going to that page and then the averages across all the visitors? Absolutely, So that's a great question. On MaxWeb, I know every network decides their own metrics, but they're the same.
Conversion rates and EPC, they go hand in hand. It's a formula in which you cannot have one without the other. They both have to be good. It's impossible for an offer. I mean, you can get a lot of clicks, but most of the time they go hand in hand. Right? The earnings per click is, let's say, 100 customers go to the website, 10 of them are going to click, so one of them ends up buying.
Right? So, the earnings per click is the formula of how many of those people actually purchased after click. That's how we look at it. And because we see every click, we know the conversion rate, it's same. You just don't look per click, you look at how many people actually buy your product. Because for us, the ultimate goal is for them to buy.
So to make it easy for you when you go into the health and fitness industry, for example, a good conversion rate is over 2% as a ballpark. Right? For Native, I've noticed some of our affiliates, native is more complicated, so I don't like to always go based on that. They're happy with like 0.7%, 1% conversion rate, which doesn't seem very high, but because the CPAs are so high, they don't need a conversion rate to be incredibly high.
Right? With social, with YouTube, you can go up to 3% conversion rate, and that's good, but it's basically the amount of people that end up buying or clicking from the amount of customers that you send. So if you send 100 or 1000 customers, 100 of them buy the product, that's crazy, that's good. That's 10% you're already that's impossible.
It's like you're doing something too well, but obviously, we want that, Right? That's good. So, the conversion rate of around for a product, and obviously the payout is whatever is the product paying you, whether it's $100 or $50 exactly. It can be $80, it can be $100. It depends a lot on the average order value right of the product.
Because after we fulfilment and customer service, you're left with and for some product from some niches, like joint pain, a lot of the customers buy just one bottle to see how they feel. For other stuff, like, I don't know, vision, or there are certain aspects where they like to buy six bottles. Right? So then it's easier to pay the affiliate because the customers buy more in that niche.
So that's how we it's in our interest to pay as much as we can to the affiliate because then they'll have more money to spend on the traffic. Okay. Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. Anna, thank you. The best question I've saved for the last is how do I know if the traffic, which I'm sending to the landing page converts and how do I track it?
So that's why you need a platform like MaxWeb because that's our job. Our job is you're going to have a back office, you're going to log in, you're going to have your email and your passport, and you're going to have your stats. So you're going to go to the reports and you're going to see every single visit recorded under that product.
Let's say you apply to promote Join Pain. You see that in your page, and then you go to the reports and you're going to see, oh, I've sent 100 visits and two people out of those 100 visits purchased. That's good. And then you're going to see the conversion rate under the report, which is going to tell you, and you're going to see your earnings, Right?
Because maybe per customer, you're making $98 or $100. So that's the big secret. I mean, affiliate marketing, it's only easy if you have a platform you can trust, Right? Because you need to trust every single click. And that's our job and our reputation to make sure that every click is tracked and every sale goes to the affiliate.
And that's why affiliates trust certain networks because in time, we can have a different podcast about this. But there are ways for networks, product owners, not to be fair to the affiliate, but affiliates always know because it's easy to see the amount of clicks and how much sales you make. And the very last question I forgot to add, I didn't see that one, is how do the affiliates get paid?
Is it by MaxWeb or by the advertiser and how often? Because if they're spending money on ads and they have to wait 60 days for their payments, they're going to run out of cash. So for cash flow purposes, how do they get paid? It's a great question. They get paid by MaxWeb because that's our job. That's why we're here, Right?
We cater to affiliates. We tell affiliates come to us. We have great products, so it's our job to make sure they get paid. And that's the big thing. Even if we wouldn't get paid for something, let's say a product owner decides they're going out of business, they're not paying us. MaxWeb, we are still going to pay the affiliate because that's our responsibility, Right?
That's how we became good in the space. Because quickly affiliates learned we could trust these guys. They're paying us on time. They're paying us even when product owners are going out of business. So, yes, MaxWeb is paying everyone by default. Affiliates get paid once a week, but if you start making money and sales, you can choose to get paid three times a week.
Some people don't like getting paid that often because they like to, I don't know, some have peas with their banks or whatnot, but for native traffic, they love it. They get paid every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but at least once a week. I know, I've heard the stories. There are networks that pay every few months. That's silly because you need your cash sometimes.
Even if an affiliate is paid weekly. They just got started. They only made I think you need to make I don't want to give you the wrong I think you want to make like $15k a month by the time you're moved to faster payments. But honestly, that's just a number. That's when the system kicks in and pays you more.
If you tell your account manager, hey, I just made $500, I would love that money to get to me sooner. They can do a few clicks and get that money to you. If an affiliate network tells you, oh, I'm sorry, accounting won't let us because it's the network's job to pay the affiliate. Right? I mean, obviously, we want to wait a bit for quality, Right?
If you're brand new, the network is probably going to wait a bit, probably 30 days to make sure everything is legitimate. But after that, you should get paid as fast as you need. In massive cases, we pay up to three times a week because it's important to get the cash flow there. Brilliant. Thank you so much. And before I let you go, because I appreciate your time and respect your time, what's the last couple of tips you would like to give to someone who really wants to get going?
He or she is ambitious to earn money and doesn't know about affiliate marketing. What would you do if you were in their shoes? I love this question. So, number one, ask lots of questions. I know a lot of us come from cultures where it's so important. I mean, I have a lot of friends in South-eastern Asia, South America.
I'm Eastern European. Born and raised in Romanian. I moved to the US when I was 19. Long story short, a lot of us come from cultures where it's important to be humble to not ask a lot of questions. Try to figure it out yourself. That's kind of viewed as being strong and doing your own thing. In this day and age, in this digital world, it's so important to ask questions.
Yes, do your research, but ask questions. There are forums. There are people out there that already know you want to get into YouTube, ask 100 people about it because it's in ask if two of the people take the five minutes they need to answer you and you're going to know the answer. So ask lots of questions. And the other one, I always say this, and I know it's very cheesy, but be kind.
I know you have this view out there of the Gary Vees and people that swear and seem very cool, but the people that actually make a lot of money, not just the one pretending to drive a Lamborghini and have a lot of debt. The people that actually make lots of money in our space are very kind, are very good people that always be on time and always respect the person they are talking to.
If you want to get ahead in this industry, do not play the I'm too cool for anyone act. My advice is to be humble, be kind, listen, and it's going to take you a far, long way. I know for us, if we see affiliates that give us a big attitude, it's like probably not a good fit. Thank you so much.
Great advice and words of wisdom. So thank you so much and I truly appreciate your time with us. Thank you. Thank you to everyone watching this video. Now, if you would like to get started, go to maxweb.com. The link is also below this video. You can sign up for free, create an account, start a conversation with an account manager and just try a few things out and see how it goes.
So, once again, Anna, thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you sometime soon. See you guys. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Brilliant. Thank you.
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