In this post, I’m going to share with you my affiliate marketing strategy for generating over $14,000 in sales commission from Payhip. Let’s dive right in.
From time to time, I like to share with you what I’m doing to earn passive income from my blog.
If you’ve been a long-time reader of my blog, you’ll know that one method that I use to monetize is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is, in my mind, one of the most effective ways to earn passive income online. And no, you don’t have to be a blogger either. Most people that do affiliate marketing aren’t bloggers.
If you’re new to the world of making money from blogging, I wrote a detailed post sharing some tips for making your first $1k from your blog. You can check it out here.
That said, when I’m doing affiliate marketing, I like to approach each product or service that I want to promote, differently. In other words, I don’t always use the same tactics or publish all of the content in one place.
Let me start by talking about the platform Payhip.
You may have come across several posts on my blog regarding Payhip. Or you may not. In either case, here’s a quick lowdown.
Payhip offers easy-to-use yet powerful tools for entrepreneurs and bloggers wanting to sell digital downloads and memberships online.
The company was founded back in 2011 by Abs and Karin Farah and has since grown to achieve its goal of helping 1,000 creators reach $1,000,000 in sales.
Payhip has over 130,000 sellers from across the world.
I joined Payhip’s Partner Program back in the Spring of 2018 after falling in love with their service.
In fact, I’ve used Payhip since the beginning of 2017 to sell my own digital products, including my Ultimate Pro Blog Planner.
Payhip has helped me generate over $1,600 in eBook sales since around that time. This is a service that I use, trust, and therefore love recommending to budding bloggers and entrepreneurs.
From my first affiliate payment of $105 received from Payhip back in August of 2018, I never imagined that the commissions would amount to well over $14K…
OK… So that might not sound like an absolute ton of money, considering it’s over a three-year period. But here’s the thing:
Asides from the initial work that I put into promoting Payhip, these days, I do very little and the commissions keep coming. You know the saying, right? Put in the hard work first, and reap the benefits later.
So, now for the moment, you’ve been waiting for.
What tactics did I use to promote Payhip’s awesome services and grow my commissions to over $14K in the last few years?
Let me share those with you right now.
Here’ what I’ll be discussing –
Now, let me dive deeper into each of the things above.
Over the last decade of my affiliate blogging venture, I have never once promoted or recommended a single product or service that I have not used or trusted.
This is one thing I preach about the most when it comes to doing affiliate marketing the smart way.
You categorically should not promote or recommend on your blog or website any product or service, unless you’ve had first-hand experience with it.
This tactic is simple: Use it before you promote it.
Why is this important?
Because of trust. Trust is everything in blogging and affiliate marketing.
If you’re trying to build trust with your readers, subscribers, listeners, watchers, etc. You don’t want to start by promoting anything you find. You don’t want to be known as the blogger that promotes any old shady product for a quick buck, do you?
Moreover, anyone wanting to purchase a product or service online usually likes to see how the product is being used to solve a problem. What features are beneficial, etc?
If you’ve never used a product you’re trying to promote on your blog, how are you going to demonstrate it?
OK, so you get the point I’m trying to make.
I used Payhip to start selling my eBooks for just over a year before I decided to promote it on my blog. The same goes for all of the recommended products and services on this blog.
One of the things I like to do when researching, is to check to see what content already exists regarding a product or service.
This is simple and I don’t usually use any special tool other than Google search. Sometimes, the Google Trends tool.
Sometimes, I will do a little keyword research ‘related’ to the product or service, but not always. The few keywords that I looked into for promoting Payhip were:
After scouring the web and finding a few mediocre blog posts, and hardly any video content specifically using Payhip, I decided to move on to the next step…
This was the fun part for me. Once I had my small list of keywords, I began writing a list of ideas for the content I would need to create to successfully promote Payhip.
These included –
As you can see most of this content is on my blog, and that’s because I like to publish my best content on my blog. Other platforms that I use include YouTube and Apple Podcasts.
With my content strategy penned out, I then dedicated the time needed to create each piece of content. Now, this is where most bloggers trip up.
So many bloggers try and create one great review or one piece of marketing content, then expect it to make them tons of money overnight. I’m not saying that won’t work, but definitely not overnight.
Plus, why only create one piece of content when you can dedicate some time to creating several pieces?
What is this one thing that I’m talking about often here on my blog?
Well, it’s actually a really good book by author Gary Keller with Jay Papasan.
It’s about a simple mindset and strategy that focuses on working towards one thing at a time, as opposed to a million things at the same time.
Here’s my favorite quote from this book –
“You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.” – Gary Keller
I used this strategy to work on promoting Payhip. That means for the first five to six weeks, I did nothing else other than creating marketing content to promote Payhip.
If you ever get the chance, I recommend reading The One Thing, it’s a great productivity and self-improvement book for entrepreneurs. It’s available on Amazon. Here is the link.
Wow… there it is, this is the big one.
Affiliate marketing without marketing? Well, it doesn’t work.
How successful you are as an affiliate marketer depends on how much time you are willing to invest in marketing and promotion.
After ensuring that I’ve done everything I can in creating the right kind of content, which I guess is part of the marketing process, I then think of ways in which to promote that content on the web.
SEO is, of course, critical. Organic search engine traffic is free and can provide many years of quality leads and affiliate sales if done legitimately. So, that’s the first thing I make sure I’m doing right.
I try and optimize each blog post and video the best I can for search engine visibility. I’m not an expert and you don’t have to be either.
For my blog, I use the Rank Math SEO Pro plugin. Check out this post for top tips on YouTube video SEO.
Next up is email marketing. This will not obviously work if you don’t have an email list. But what I do is create several shorter pieces of content to send out to my email list whenever I want to promote a new affiliate product.
If it’s something brand new that I’ve never promoted before, I will spread the campaign out over the course of a few weeks, to begin with. Here’s an example I used for Payhip:
Tip: What I never do, nor do I recommend doing, is posting links directly to the affiliate product in an email newsletter. Never do this. In my opinion, it comes across as spammy and desperate. Always link to the marketing content that contains your affiliate links, whether it’s a video, podcast, or blog post.
For the example I used above, this applies to one piece of marketing content. Each time I create a new piece of content that mentions the affiliate product in question, I will promote it in the same way.
Here are some other posts that I’ve mentioned Payhip, for example –
For social media, I would create unique pieces of content for –
These usually consist of visual content such as featured images, custom graphics, Instagram posts, and short videos. I find sharing visuals to be more effective and engaging than sharing a random link and description of a review post.
Here’s a fun marketing statistic –
62% of consumers watch a product review video before making a purchase – Source
One thing that a lot of new affiliate marketers forget to do after they’ve spent hours crafting their marketing content is to actually go back and analyze to see what’s working and what’s not.
Once a week, over the course of three to six months, I will go back and evaluate each piece of content to measure traffic, shares, rankings, engagement, etc.
If something needs tweaking and adjusting, I’ll do it all in the background. Reviews generally only need updating once per year in my opinion.
Is it?
Yes…
After spending five or six weeks focused on creating all of the content needed to promote Payhip’s platform, and after several months of tweaking, monitoring, and analyzing, more patience was required…
What, did you think after all of this I was expecting sales? Nope.
I always think of promoting any affiliate product as planting a Sunflower seed. It takes time to nurture and grow a Sunflower to six feet and higher.
I’m no gardening expert, by any means… But I know Sunflowers don’t grow overnight. It’s the same with your blog, online business, and affiliate marketing.
This is the Sunflower in all its glory… Standing tall, bright yellow petals… the reward.
As I said at the start of this post, I joined the Payhip Partner Program at the start of 2018. In the Spring, roughly. My first paycheck came in August of the same year for $105…
After that, it was nothing but regular monthly payments, which slowly increased each month…
The purpose of this post, again, was not an opportunity for me to gloat. I never do this and if you scour my blog, you’ll soon see that I rarely share how I’m earning passive income from blogging.
I wrote it to demonstrate a few things –
I’m no one special. Yes, I had a little bit of marketing experience running an eCommerce website before I started blogging and affiliate marketing, but I wasn’t born with this knowledge. Anyone can do this, absolutely anyone.
So, with that, hopefully, this post has inspired you to find a great product, get to work promoting it, and reap the rewards later.
And just think, this is just one product. There are thousands of great products and services out there you can turn to a monthly profit. So, do your research carefully, pick the right ones, use them, then go to town creating great marketing content for them.
Affiliate Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links to the Payhip website. This means that if you click on one of these affiliate links and purchase a plan from Payhip, I will be paid a small commission, at no additional cost to you. You can read my full earnings disclaimer following the link in the footer of this website.
