Earning One Million Dollars in One Year through Affiliate Marketing

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At the end of last year, I had the realization that my decade-old freelancing career was stagnant. Although I’d been earning a healthy six figures each year since 2010, I recognized that, without major changes or the ability to give myself more than 24 hours in a day, I’d capped my earning potential. Additionally, I was getting tired of trading hours for dollars and of being stressed and under-appreciated by my clients.

So, I knew it was time to shake things up!

I began the year by exploring numerous opportunities and trying to decide where my passions were leading me.

My freelancing career was built around marketing. Some of the client work I’d focused on over the years included:

• Brand and product (physical and digital) launch strategies and campaigns
• Influencer marketing strategies and campaigns (I was a contract VP at an Influencer Marketing Agency for 3 years!)
• Affiliate program setups and launches
• Affiliate management
• Social media management
• Community management
• Copywriting
• Blog management
• Digital marketing and PR
• Email marketing
• Etc, etc, etc…

Many of those items still excited me and I knew I needed to find a way to merge my marketing passions with my desire to get out from under the grind of client work. As the sole breadwinner of our family, I also knew whatever I chose would need to generate at least as much as my current income of $10k/month and that I’d need to get there quickly and then have the ability to scale exponentially.

I pondered that list of skills above for a few weeks and kept coming back to the same thing — affiliate marketing. I COULD BECOME AN AFFILIATE MARKETER!

WHY I DECIDED TO BECOME AN AFFILIATE MARKETER

Affiliate marketing was the no-brainer answer that would allow me to leverage my skills and experience, generate income quickly, and scale in a way that would take our family’s income to a whole new level.

There honestly is no cap to how much you can earn as an affiliate marketer. There are plenty of million dollar affiliates out there! Earning at that level definitely isn’t common and it requires hard work, knowledge, skills and dedication. It can be done though! It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme (run far and fast from anyone that tells you otherwise), MLM or pyramid scheme. In fact, some of the largest affiliate marketing programs out there are run by Amazon, Target, Apple and other major brands.

Affiliate marketing also possessed another key component that was very important to me. It has an extremely low barrier of entry and can be done by nearly anyone, regardless of their skill levels. It’s easy to learn and easy to teach. I could find paths to success and use those to create duplicatable systems which I could easily share with others.

You see, as a freelancer, I’d been passionate about teaching others how they could get started with freelancing. I firmly believe that there is NO reason why anyone today can not make money online. I’d helped countless friends, family members and acquaintances — from stay at home moms to burnt-out corporate ladder-climbers — start doing just that by sharing the methods and resources I’d used to build my freelancing career. So, it was imperative to me that whatever new path I chose would allow me to continue helping others start making money online from home.

And third, if done correctly, affiliate marketing can evolve into a passive income stream. Granted it requires months (and maybe even years) of hard work up front, but once you have the proper systems in place it snowballs and your efforts start to feed themselves.

This ability was critical for me because our kids are getting older and our time with them still under our roof is getting shorter and shorter.

GOING ‘ALL IN’ ON AFFILIATE MARKETING

Once I’d made the decision that affiliate marketing was the path for me (and the path to freedom for our family), I went all in!

I decided some additional training was always a good thing and I wanted to start investing in this decision ASAP. After all, when you pay, you pay attention! Plus, I wanted a simple way to get the whole family excited and involved since this decision was going to affect us all.

So, at the end of February, I signed up for the One Funnel Away Challenge from Clickfunnels. This is a 30-day training and live coaching program.

Here is how Clickfunnels describes the OFA:

“The One Funnel Away Challenge is NOT just some “course” that you’ll never use…

It combines the right marketing KNOWLEDGE…

With the SHOVE you need to EXECUTE your funnel…

And a “no-excuses” ACCOUNTABILITY coach who won’t let you off the hook…”

My husband and middle three children (14, 13 and 11 years old) all followed along with each day of the challenge as well.

The challenge also includes an amazing physical product kit, including a 550-page book with the plans which thirty million-dollar-entrepreneurs would use to rebuild their empires in 30 days if the lost everything and had to start over. I have read this 30 Days book from cover to cover two times now and know that I’ll refer back to it over and over again in the weeks, months and years ahead. (Check out some of these plans in the FREE 30 Day Summit here.)

The training was phenomenal and easily worth 10x the $100 price tag. The kids even chose an affiliate product and started building their own funnels throughout the challenge. So now they are earning monthly income as affiliate marketers as well!

If you want to check out the One Funnel Away Challenge, you can do that here.

TRANSITIONING TO AFFILIATE MARKETING

By the time the OFA Challenge concluded, I’d already made several hundred dollars through affiliate promotions, as had the kids. That forward momentum really convinced me that this was the right path to pursue from both a business and family perspective.

My husband and I had countless conversations over those weeks to make sure this was the right path for us. We both acknowledged the stagnation of the current business as well as our desire for growth. Our desires for our family include the ability to:

1) travel more frequently

2) spend more time together

3) encourage the kids on their own entrepreneurial adventures so that they can fully fund their college educations

4) build generational wealth, and

5) be able to retire within 10 years

That’s a pretty lofty list but it is absolutely doable with lots of focus, determination and a willingness to fail fast.

We devised a plan with those desires top of mind. I’d commit myself to spending as much time as possible over the month of April to see just how viable this whole affiliate marketing game would be for us. If it panned out as we’d hoped and I was able to earn at least $10k during that month, I’d give a two-week notice to all of my clients on May 1st.

I’m never one to go small or hold back, so I called my shot and went one further. I said…

…if I hit our target number by the end of April, I’ll commit to earning one million dollars within one year!

I might have already given myself away here, but can you guess what happened?

Actually, you might be surprised to find out that I didn’t actually hit that $10k mark by the end of April. I fell just a bit shy of that goal and ended the month at $9,863.

So there were some long talks with my husband as a result. Fear and feeling the need to absolutely stick to my word had me planning to try again in May. My husband pushed a bit though and asked how much I honestly believe I would have made if it wasn’t for the 62 hours per week I was spending on client work. He had a point. With all of that extra time, I could definitely scale quickly and exceed my freelancing income pretty easily and with less focused time. That meant more time to pour into the kids, my marriage and our community. And I loved that idea.

At the end of the day it was still a painfully difficult decision to make. But I felt peace when I hit send on each of the emails to my clients.

THE DECISION BECOMES REALITY

Transitioning away from my client work turned out to be much harder than I thought. If you ever want to know how valuable you are, just try training your replacement!

My largest client — the one that I spent more than 40 hours per week on — asked me to stay through May 24th. They also offered me the opportunity to continue on in a consulting role for 20 hours per month at a considerable hourly rate increase. I said yes to both and poured myself into finishing up pending projects and training my replacements. My affiliate efforts were unfortunately pushed a bit to the side while I focused on closing things out without burning a single bridge.

On May 26th, my husband and I headed out for a week-long vacation to celebrate our 15th anniversary.

This was our first kid-free trip ever! It was filled with lots of relaxation, eating, and long, excited discussions about the future that we were going to start building as soon as we got home.

We got home on June 1st. On June 3rd, I settled in for my first day of work sans clients!

And now the future looms large in front of me…

I am calling my shot again here, publicly for all to see — by next year at this time, I will have made one million dollars through affiliate marketing!

It’s going to be one hell of a ride and I’ll be documenting it all right here. I can’t wait to share everything I learn, including all of my successes and failures. I won’t hold anything back. I hope you’ll join me!