I’ve been an affiliate marketer for five years. I sell stuff through this blog, and I’ve done so with zero formal background in marketing. After making thousands selling this and that over the years, I’ve concluded that:

Marketing is, well, dumb.

Like, for real.

Don’t believe me?

I’ll prove it.

Examples of dumb marketing

• Exhibit 1: ChatGPT has no fancy landing page nor clever copy. And yet, within hours of the launch, the site had so many users that it broke. All they had was a product nobody else had at the time.
• Exhibit 2: I spent over $1,200 buying a dumbass online course on copywriting because someone I looked up to said it was the shit! My money went to shit alright.
• Exhibit 3: I made an online course a couple of years ago and since then I’ve made over a hundred grand selling it. I’ve spent zero bucks on ads or any type of fancy marketing. I just sent my email list subscribers regular reminders that I had this course, and it kinda sold itself. I guess people just really wanted what I was offering.

The two things I learned, not from a marketing degree, but from observing sheer dumbness all around me

Whether it’s the biggies like Amazon or Facebook, or tiny creators like me and many others like me out there, you just need one of these two things to sell:

1. You either sell a product so unique that you have no competition whatsoever, or,
2. You get people talking. Recall exhibit-2 where I spent twelve hundred dollars I didn’t really have on a course I realized I didn’t really need? Yeah. That.

(You hit a jackpot when you combine the two, but that’s rare.)

People talking is affiliate marketing

Examples are the best way to demonstrate anything. So, allow me to give you an example:

I’m an affiliate for a website hosting company called SiteGround. It’s actually a really good product that I use myself, unlike the 1200-dollar copywriting course I mentioned before.

My job, as an affiliate, is to talk about the product (or write about it since I’m a blogger) and share a link to that product. It’s a unique link to me that this company can track.

So, every time someone visiting my blog clicks that link and ends up making a purchase, SiteGround pays me a hundred bucks as a commission.

$100 for a single sale. Not too shabby, eh?

Now imagine you get 10 people to buy SiteGround hosting using your affiliate link. That’s a thousand bucks!!!

And that is affiliate marketing.

In short, as an affiliate marketer, your job is to be the person who talks about a product a lot.

So, now, I’ll share three (3) crazy simple strategies to make a shit ton of money as an affiliate marketer. And believe me, these three tips are all you need! (OK, maybe a few other things, but these are the important ones.)

Crazy simple affiliate marketing tip # 1: Talk. A lot

Yeah. That’s all you need to do. Just talk a lot. And by “talking,” I mean creating a ton of content around that product; whether it’s blogging, creating videos, or whatever it is you do.

Early on in my blogging career… wait… is blogging even a career? When I was an electrical engineer, that felt like a career… this is just a serious extracurricular activity that, somehow, pays my rent and bills??? And it’s just, not as hard as engineering and quite fun too?

Err… I digress.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:

Early on in my blogging career, I realized that I had to talk about what I wanted to sell. A lot.

In fact, every time I wrote a blog post, I found ways to insert a link or two to SiteGround hosting (see what I’m doing here?) And what do you know?! Soon enough I was making 10 sales per month (that, as we’ve calculated already, comes down to a thousand bucks at $100 per sale), and often more than that.

Crazy simple affiliate marketing tip # 2: Pick a few over a lot

As in, pick a few products to promote than a lot of products.

Because it is easier to talk a lot about a few products than talk a lot about a lot of products.

Yikes. That sentence is like a tongue-twister.

But you get my drift, yea?

As a solo blogger and part-time online entrepreneur, I learned that it is better to pick a few good products I don’t feel icky talking about a lot, like, all the time.

So, earlier, I mentioned that I found ways to insert a SiteGround affiliate link in almost all of the blog posts I was publishing. I could do that because I was only focused on promoting SiteGround and a couple of other products, and not a gazillion products.

Basically, pick your products carefully, and pick just a few good ones.

You don’t need to sell too many different types of products to make money. But you do need to sell a lot of products to make money. And it just happens to be easier to sell a lot of the same product when you zero in on your talking points.

Crazy simple affiliate marketing tip # 3: Pick a product that pays a lot

Or pick a product that you love so much that it doesn’t matter if it’s cheap.

If it is a high-commission product: 

SiteGround commission is $100 per sale. I love promoting that product because just 10 sales make me a thousand bucks.

If it’s not a high-commission product:

That doesn’t mean I don’t sell cheaper products. There’s a product that pays anywhere between $6 and $12, approximately, per lead or sale. I make a decent income from that product (psst, it’s Canva!) because I talk about that product a lot.

Like… A LOT!

Always remember tip # 1. That’s the most important affiliate marketing tip; it’s the tip of all tips!

I digress. Again.

So, because I talk about Canva A LOT (because I really love Canva!) I end up making a decent number of sales every month, which ends up making a decent amount of money even though the product is so cheap.

---

And there you have it. Three stupid easy affiliate marketing tips that will make you money money money!

It’s really that simple.

And well, just in case you want the more complicated (but thorough) version of affiliate marketing how-to’s, then read the ultimate guide to affiliate marketing for bloggers right here:

How to Make Money Blogging with Affiliate Marketing – A Guide for Beginners