How much of a difference would making a $1000 a week have in your life?
Would you be able to replace your current salary? Would it give you the certainty to pursue another passion or side hustle?
Whatever your goals are, $1000 a week is more than the average American does (1) and for most of us, it represents the freedom and comfort we want in our lives.
I am sure you have seen other articles with long lists of ways in which you can achieve this. From UberEats, to transcriptions and garage sales, so I’ll save us both some time and won’t repeat them.
Instead I am going to tell you about one of my favorite ways of making $1000 a week (and more)…Affiliate Marketing.
So let’s get started!
Making $1000 a week Online with Affiliate Marketing?
In case you are not familiar with Affiliate Marketing, it is a pretty simple concept. It basically means you promote a product or service in exchange for a commission.
85% of companies use Affiliate Marketing as part of their marketing strategies. It allows brands to expand their audience and make more sales and they only need to pay the affiliate when a sale is made so it is 100% risk-free for them.
You have probably seen marketers and influencers telling you to click their link or use their code to buy a certain product they are promoting. This was most likely an affiliate offer since that is how companies keep track of sales.
When you sign up for an affiliate program, you receive a link or code which will be used to know which sales were referred by you, so you can be compensated.
Why use Affiliate Marketing to make $1000 a week?
If you were to get a regular job or even a side hustle where you basically exchange your time for money, you can technically make $1000 a week by finding something that pays $25/hour and do it for 40 house a week (25×40=1000).
But if what you are looking for is a way out of your current job or a potential opportunity to more freedom and money, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to exchange one hourly-based job for another.
Even if you’d change a job you don’t like for one that you do like, your time and potential earnings would still be limited.
On the other hand, with affiliate marketing, you will need to spend some time, in the beginning, setting everything up but once you have your process in place, you can invest as much time as you want on it.
Additionally, you can start making money with affiliate marketing while you work on your current job and you can scale it as much as you want without being limited to the time you invest.
So, how to make $1000 a week with Affiliate Marketing?
There is not only one but MANY ways of making money with Affiliate Marketing. I, for example, started with funnels and Facebook ads and have after expanded to blogging, native ads, and Facebook groups. So the possibilities are endless.
In this section, I will share the basic steps you need to follow as well as the options for each one so you can pick the ones that work better with your goals and likes.
Eventually, I’d advise you to focus on one strategy until you master it and then you can expand to include new ones and increase your profits.
That being said there are 3 basic components to this method no matter your choices:
- The offer: The product or service you choose to promote
- The funnel: The process you’ll create for your potential buyers to follow
- The traffic: The external source(s) you’ll use to bring people into your funnel.
If your goal is to make $1000 a week, you can easily achieve it by choosing a product with a profit of $20 for example and selling 50 of those a week. That will come down to less than 8 sales a day which, when seen like that, is a lot easier to grasp.
Now, let’s begin with the actual strategy.
Making $1000 a week online as a beginner
If you are thinking, “this sounds too good to be true, why isn’t everyone doing this”, I get it, that’s what I thought when I first learned about affiliate marketing.
But the truth is, if you are new to digital marketing, it can be a bit overwhelming. People who start without a clear plan or thinking it is a ‘get rich quick scheme’ usually end up quitting when when they don’t get rich after a month.
But if you are able to put some time and effort to build a solid foundation, you can be successful not only in the short but in the long term as well.
Step 1: Choosing your offer
As I mentioned, more than 85% of companies have an affiliate program so finding an affiliate offer you want to promote won’t be a problem.
However there are some factors to consider when choosing the best offer:
- Niche: Is the category or industry in which you’ll decide to focus on. Some examples of broad niches are health, fitness, finances, relationships, pets, etc. But inside each one of these, there are smaller and more targetted niches which is what you want to focus on. E.g. Fitness> Women’s fitness> Postpartum Women’s fitness.
Consider that most profitable niches are Health & Fitness, Relationship, and Money/ Financial. If you are a beginner sticking to those niches would be a good bet but that being said, those tend to have the most competitive there and you can absolutely make money in almost any niche.
- Commission: This is the percentage you can make with each sale and it varies from 1% to 40%. Amazon, for example, has one of the biggest affiliate programs but they recently cut down most of their commissions to 1% so I wouldn’t advise investing your time with them.
On the other hand, companies with digital products like courses, memberships, and software have much higher commission since their costs are significantly lower and their profits, higher.
- Approval: For most affiliate programs, you need to go be approved to able to promote them. The application process in some cases is easier than in others which is why I recommend keeping your option open by applying to a few different ones and specially, to affiliate networks which have lots of offers to choose from. I will explain more on that later.
So, how exactly to find and choose affiliate programs?
While many companies run their own affiliate programs independently, a good option is to find and apply to affiliate networks like Clickbank, MaxBounty, and M4trix, Mamong others.
These networks act as intermediaries between publishers and affiliates so they manage lots of affiliate offers. This means once you are approved to join, you can choose between their many offers to promote.
There are many other networks but the ones I have mentioned are characterized by having a significant amount of digital offers. Which means they also have higher commissions.
In the image below you can see some of the offer of Clickbank where you can finds lots of digital products with 70%+ in commission or $30+.
Suggested Read: Clickbank Review
Another example is M4trix, which has lots of eCommerce products with payouts of $30+ per sale.
In comparison, the highest categories in Amazon pay 3% so when you see it that way, it is pretty obvious which sort of program you should apply for.
Note: Though I would clarify, I do not make any money by you joining these programs.
I 100% encourage you to do your own research and find the affiliate offers that most appeal to you but, for the purpose of this article and its goals, I’d recommend choosing one that pays at least $30 per commission.
Otherwise it’ll just be harder to achieve those $1000/week. For the most part, you’ll need to put the same time and effort for a $3 payout offer than for a $30 one so you might as well choose the one with the higher profit.
Step 2: Your $1000/week funnel
I know the word funnels is very overused and widely misunderstood but hopefully, in this section, I’ll manage to clear out some confusion and explain why this is the most important part of your journey to make $1000 a week.
To put it simply, your (sales) funnel will the the process your potential buyer will follow from the first time they come across your offer until they decide to purchase it.
In this case, we are talking about a sales funnels that happens 100% online so the process will start when your customer first finds your ad, article, or landing page (more on that soon) and will end when they choose to buy from you. Although if you are smart, it will actually never end.
As you can imagine, there are lots of different ways in which you can create an online sales funnel to increase your chances of selling as well as your profits. Some better than others…
Option 1: Direct linking
When you are approved for an affiliate program you will receive your affiliate links. You will use these to direct people to the offer’s page and at the same time will be use to track your commissions on the program’s dashboard (that you’ll have access to).
Lazy affiliates and those who want to make some ‘quick money‘ don’t want to put some time into creating anything more than a few ads so they tend to use ads or other strategies like commenting on blogs to share their links and hope for a sale.
I won’t go into too much details about why this is a bad idea but once you red the next options you’ll understand the differences.
Option 2: Bridge Page
A bridge page, as it sounds, is a page that exists between your traffic source and the affiliate page.
Some platforms like Facebook ads, google ads and formerly Pinterest, wouldn’t allow the use of affiliate links so people would use a bridge page as a ‘cushion’. This way they’d send people first to the landing page and from there to the affiliate page.
This is obviously way better than direct linking since you are the owner of the bridge page and can pre-sell the customer on the offer improving the conversion rates and also the user experience.
Option 3: The Opt-In Page
The third option and the one I recommend is to create an opt-in page where visitors are asked for emails in order to get access to the affiliate offer.
This might seem like a small difference but most times, it is what separates a successful campaign from a failed one.
You see, most people won’t buy an offer the first time the come across it and that’s why collecting their emails is crucial.
After you collect their emails you have the alternatives of sending them to the affiliate offer which is still acceptable since you have already achieve the most important goal (the email).
But another option is to include a Thank You Page where you add your personal take or experience with the offer before sending them to the affiliate page. This can be very powerful to predispose the visitor to buy the product and it also helps you start building a relationship with them.
Once you have their emails, you can follow up with them and highlight different benefits of the products that appeal to different needs. It also allows you to build trust with their audience and there’ll be a percentage of them who will end up buying the offer who otherwise would have never done it.
Aditionally, this allows you to start building an email list of people in your niche who you can continue to promote other offers for life and without having to spend any money on ads.
The average email subscriber can make you anything from $1-$3/month depending on the category which is why successful affiliates know that the key to a profitable campaign is collecting emails and following up with them.
So, how to build this $1000/week funnel?
If you have no prior experience with digital marketing, you might be wondering how would you eve start building this funnel.
But worry not, luckily nowadays there are many funnel building tools that allow you to do it without any programming or design knowledge.
I personally use Clickfunnels and it is the one I recommend to my clients. Another alternative if you are looking for a cheaper option is GetResponse which also has a plug-and-play “auto-funnel” option so it’s worth checking out.
No matter what tool you choose to use, it is the message of your pages and your follow up emails which will allow you to make $1000 a week.
Step 3: Choose your traffic source
Once you have your funnel set up, the next step is to choose what platform you will use to bring people in. This is where options get even broader since there are dozens of channels and methods you can utilize.
How to choose one will depend on your personal preferences around time investment, money investment and if you like to be on the spotlight or stay behind the scenes.
Free VS. Paid
One of the decisive factors you’ll consider to choose your traffic source is if you want to use a free one or a paid one.
Paid traffic sources like ads will logically bring you traffic more quickly and free traffic sources will require you to put in more time.
You can make $1000/week with either one but if you are using paid ads, your profits will be smaller. That is not a problem since you can increase your traffic and in consequence, make more sales a week.
It is just something to considering and one of the reasons why I recommend choosing an offer with a decent payout so you can choose to use paid ads and still keep a healthy margin.
Without further adieu, here are some of the best traffic sources you can use:
- Facebook Ads: They are very popular since they give you the option to start driving traffic to your funnels almost instantly. You can create a campaign in a few minutes and have people coming to your offer on the same day.
The drawback is that, like any other platform, it has a learning curve and if you have no experience with it you’ll be spending some money as you learn, find your right audience, and improve your images and text.
Eventually, it’ll be worthwhile since you can turn your ads on and get traffic on demand but if you are on a tight budget I would recommend staying away from Facebook ads at least for now.
- Facebook Groups: They are a great untapped source of traffic. People are on Facebook literally all day and they “hang out” in groups with people who shared their same interests.
Also, compared to Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups have a much bigger organic reach which means people will see your posts on their feeds if you do a good job at keeping your group interesting and spam-free.
In this case, you’ll need to spend some more time growing and engaging with your group but the benefit is that it is 100% free.
You can use the groups’ announcements and pinned posts to share your funnel link and direct new members to your offer. You can also make sporadical posts about it but make sure to post consistently and engage with the members so they are happy to check out the offer when you do share it.
Recommended: Best Strategies for Affiliate Marketing On facebook
- Google Ads: in most cases, google ads are a much better option for beginners than Facebook Ads (in my humble opinion).
With Google, you choose who you want to show your ads to, based on the specific search they make. This can practically guarantee you that person will be interested in what you have to offer.
Additionally, you can get away with targeting very specific keywords with a lower cost and competition which is great for someone on a low budget.
- Instagram Shoutouts: These are something not a lot of people talk about since they are kinda “unofficial” but they are a great alternative for a beginner who doesn’t have a big budget to spend on ads or the time to grow their own platform.
Instagram shootouts can be a cheap way to reach a big audience but you have to do your due diligence to evaluate a page’s true potential. Influencers can be a lot pricier than theme pages so I’d recommend starting with the later while you grow your profits and budget.
When looking for an Instagram page for a shoutout, you want to think about your audience and what type of page would they follow. This strategy might not work for all niches and markets but there are Instagram pages for a wide variety of interest so it is worth considering it.
The cost for a shoutout will depend on how many followers a page has as well as its engagement rate. A good engagement rate means users are actually interacting with the page and are not just robots or bought followers.
You can use pages like this to calculate a page engagement rate and use the following table to see if it is a good one. But you also want to manually check their posts and make sure the comments are genuine.
Alternatively, if you have some the time and patience, you can create and grow your own Instagram page and use it exclusively to bring traffic to your offer for free.
- Youtube: It is a great long term strategy since videos can generate free traffic for years but they also take some time to rank and of course, to produce.
If you are looking for a long term strategy for almost passive income, I’d recommend considering Youtube.
There are many types of videos you can make to promote your affiliate offers, such as reviews, comparisons, “best of” videos, tutorials, or “how-to” videos where you suggest the product as part of the solution.
You want to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think of what type of videos or answers they’ll be looking for on Youtube that you can solve with the affiliate product you are promoting.
And if you are camera-shy, you can also create videos by using animations, images, or videos where you don’t appear on camera so don’t let that be an obstacle.
- Pinterest: this platform works both as a search engine and a social media so it is a great option to explore depending on your niche.
The majority of Pinterest users are women aged 30-49 and some of the categories that work great in this platform are health, fitness, fashion, beauty, travel and cooking.
If your offer is among these categories or even a different that can appeal to this audience then definitely give Pinterest a try.
- Others: It would be impossible to name all the traffic source but these are the ones I’d suggest considering as a beginner. Other options people use include forums like Quora and Reddit, solo ads, native ads, TikTok, and blogging.
Regardless of the traffic source you use, make sure you stick to it long enough until you have mastered it. You can have success in making $1000/week and more with any traffic source. The worst you can do is switch from one to another without the proper dedication and time it takes to learn them.
Suggested Read: Exploit your Profits with Youtube for Affiliate Marketing
Making $1000 a week funnel example
Now that you know the process you need to follow in order to make $1000/week with Affiliate Marketing, let’s take a look at an example so you have an even clearer idea of what it look like.
Step 1: Choose your offer
For this example, I will choose the Diet and Weight Loss niche and look for an offer between the many available on Clickbank.
I will choose the product above which is an offer for a customized keto meal plan and has an average payout of $42.36 which means if I wanted to do paid ads I could afford to pay up to $20 per sale and still have a very profitable margin.
Step 2: Choose your funnel
Once you have your affiliate offer selected, the next step is to create your funnel. I will go with an Opt-in page to collect emails, a Thank You Page where I will include the affiliate link and will follow up those who didn’t buy with an email sequence.
This is also what I recommend you to do. It might take some minutes or hours more to create but it will make a huge difference in your overall results.
- For the Opt-In Page, I will use a “freebie” or “lead magnet” which will encourage people to give me their emails. This is also something I’d recommend you doing since you are giving some extra value from the beginning and it will improve your conversion rate significantly.
You can create a free pdf guide or have someone do it for you for a reasonable price on Fiverr
If your affiliate offer contains a video you can also ask for the email as a way to give access to the video. Something like “Exclusive video reveals… Enter your email here for immediate access”
- After people “opt-in” on the first page, they’ll be taken to the Thank You page where they will get the message that their guide will be sent to their inbox. You can set up to be done automatically in any of the funnel builders I mentioned above.
Additionally, we’ll use this page to present our affiliate offer. This is where you’ll place your affiliate link.
Psychologically, Since people have already agreed to give us their email and we have earned their trust by delivering the promised offer, they are now more open to whatever offer we present.
Please consider that this is only an example and your work as an affiliate is to come up with an attractive freebie, landing page, and text to capture your audience.
- Finally, when people click on the button above, they’ll be sent to the affiliate page which in this case looks like this.
- The rest of the selling is in hands of the affiliate company. Some of the visitors will turn into buyers and some will choose not to buy at this point. You’ll be able to track the sales in real-time in your affiliate dashboard.
This is why you’ll have created an email sequence to try to convert some of those who didn’t buy or didn’t even go to the affiliate page.
In the case of Clickbank, some of the offers even have email swipes available that you can use or you can write your own if you prefer. You can also set those up to be sent automatically through your funnel building software like Clickfunnels or GetResponse
Step 3: Choose your traffic source
Finally, once you have your funnel set up, you can start sending traffic with the method you prefer. In this example, we used mostly free traffic sources like Instagram Pages and Facebook groups but you could choose the traffic source of your preference.
- Instagram Page
- Facebook groups
What is more important is that you focus on just one traffic source, one funnels and one offer until you have mastered them.
After that, you can continue to expand your traffic as well as your profits.
As you can see if you choose an offer with a payout of $30 on average, you’d only need to make 4-5 sales a day to achieve your goal of making $1000/week. And the best part is that once you have everything set up you can make sales when you are away or working on something else.
But remember than most sales will come not from the first visits but from the people you follow up with via email so don’t leave that part out. A lot of affiliates neglect their email campaigns and think they can make up for it by spending a lot of money on ads.
This leaves them spending more than they make and complaining that affiliate marketing doesn’t work.
Optimizing your way to $1000 a week
This might as well be the most important pieces of your money making recipe: optimization. This is just another fancy marketing word for tweaking and improving the different pieces of your funnel.
Myself and thousands of other marketers know this method work but that doesn’t mean it will be perfect or profitable from the beginning, specially if you choose to use paid ads as a traffic source.
So, the difference between a yet not successful campaign and a successful and profitable one lies in how much you continue to optimize all the pieces that it contains.
Each part of the funnel can have an impactful difference in your overall results. An opt-in rate of 20% vs one of 10% would cut down all your possibilities in half. The same applies for your email open rates and how many of those click on the links (click-through-rate).
So, you want to continiously be testing different options of images, copy, email subject lines, etc., in order to achieve better results.
Again, this can be done easily through your funnel software where you can create an A/B variation and compare the difference results each one gets.
Making $1000 a week FAQ
How long will it take to make $1000/week Online?
It will depend on you and you only. Realistically, you can create everything in a couple of weeks if you work on it 1-2 hours a day.
If you decide to use paid ads, you can start getting traffic inmediately and make $1000/week on your third week.
If you decide to use a free traffic method, it will take some time to grow and get consistent traffic but on the good side, it is free.
Do I need money to make money?
Investing money can make things happen faster like in the case of paid ads but you can also create this for yourself without having to invest.
If you decide to use a free traffic source, the only thing you’ll need to pay for is your funnel platform which costs $49 a month with GetResponse and $97 with Clickfunnels However, they both have free trials which give you plenty of time to set everything up.
Making $1000/week summary
Making $1000 a week is not complicated. It is also not easy or anyone would be doing it. It requires some work, perseverance and patience.
If you are new to this, it might take you some more time than it would to someone who has been doing it for years but think that you are learning valuable skills that you’ll make you money for years.
I have used this strategy since my beginning years as an affiliate and have been able to make money with different niches and offers so I know it works. If I was able to do it, with no experience back then, you can do it too.
Unfortunately, I can not tell you exactly what offer to promote or how to do it since that is part of every affiliate’s own job and talent. But I do can tell you to give it a shot if you are looking for a consistent way to make $1000/week and more. Once you make your first sale you will be hooked!
