How to Earn Money From Affiliate Ads, With Brian Luebben

Picture this, you are relaxing on the beach in Greece with your significant other. It's beautiful. I mean, it's literally the blueest water you've ever seen. A little later tonight, you're going to go into town and grab a bite to eat, and tomorrow you're going to do it all over again. And the best part, you're going to keep having these perfect days indefinitely. You can stay in Greece as long as you like because this isn't a vacation. You've just quit your nine to five job, not because you didn't like it. You quit because you don't need it anymore. You've got so much revenue coming in from your podcast that a salary isn't necessary. You've got a ton of free time on your hands and a really fantastic income. So you've decided to travel the world with the one you love. Sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, that is actually a reality for today's podcast guest. His name is Brian Lubin, and he's the host of the Action Academy podcast. Brian actually joined the Grow the Show accelerator eight months ago back in November 2021. And when he joined, he was working a nine to five. He had barely just launched his podcast. Fast forward to today, and he's quit that job. And in just a couple of weeks, he'll be traveling the world with his girlfriend. He was able to do all this thanks to the income that he earned from affiliate marketing via his podcast. And that's what he's going to teach you how to do today. By the end of this episode, you're going to know how to set up a successful affiliate marketing strategy for your podcast. So that regardless of your download numbers, you'll be well on your way to creating a sustainable podcast income. And who knows, you might even see Brian in Europe. This is Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmidland, and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to get more listeners and make more money from your show. Today, we're going to be talking about the second half of that statement, and we are going to be diving into the world of affiliate marketing. And you're going to learn how Brian Lubin has completely changed his life by launching a podcast and converting his listeners to customers of someone else's business. So much so that he quit his nine to five, and he is about to travel the world. So if you want to learn how Brian Lubin has mastered affiliate marketing for his podcast and how you can too, then stick around to this episode of Grow the Show. Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Lubin, host of the Action Academy podcast, a podcast where we talk about the mindset's methods and actionable steps to earn freedom in your life and business, also a real estate investor and entrepreneur. Brian has always been a fan of podcasts. He likes to listen to real estate and business shows to get expert advice. So when a friend suggested that he start his own podcast, you'd think he'd be all in. But that wasn't the case. I had a limiting belief that I wasn't far enough along in my financial journey to be able to offer anything of value to large scale entrepreneurs. Listen into me. I said, I don't have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of apartment units and stuff like that. What do I have to offer? And he said, no, you have a knack for storytelling and asking the really, really good questions and extraction of knowledge and information from people that are hard to extract it from. Do it. As it turns out, those two things are basically the main qualities that any great podcaster needs. So Brian did a ton of research and he started to come up with an idea for a show. And we finally come and start producing our episodes, start launching them to the world. There's a big dip in the beginning where all of our ancestors, cousins, and moms are listening and then it dips and then we freak out what now. And this is where I am in this value of despair and I get a cold email from this man named Kevin. That's me. And then he said, Hey, this is a podcast, grow the show gives you free information, click on that, go through the link, get introduced to the funnel, essentially, to where I'm listening to this show that I'm a guest on now, which leads me to the Facebook group for free, all free information. And then there's an option to upgrade that to get one on one support to accelerate all this. And so I obliged and now I am at six and a half months, about to hit 20,000 downloads. I'm at 19,650 some odd, super niched, I got me to about about 12 to 15 grand coming in for a month right there, 12 to 15 grand. Yeah. So at that point, I was like, why am I working? And I am about to go to Greece July 6th, going to go travel around the world for a while with my girlfriend. And that's been one of my life streams forever. And I quit my corporate job. And now I'm doing podcasting 100% of the time. And I've built a couple of side businesses off of that now through affiliations that are now funding my lifestyle and I can do those anywhere in the world. Now as I've said before on this show, in my opinion, there really is only one way to monetize a podcast audience and that one way is selling something, either your product or service or someone else's product or service. For many of you, the first option is going to be your primary strategy, like it is for me and this show converting listeners to customers of your products or services. But for others, launching a product or service really isn't on the table. You might not be able to do that or you might not want to. And that's okay because today we are focusing on the other option. How to make money from selling someone else's product. There's really two ways to do that. The first way that most podcasters think of when they think podcast sponsorship is CPM or flat rate ads where you get paid to just talk about another product. The other way to do it, which is what we'll talk about today, is called CPA ads or cost per acquisition ads. Another term for that is affiliate marketing. That's when you actually don't get paid to talk about the product. You get paid when your listeners buy the product. And this is how Brian has been able to consistently make enough money to quit his job and travel the world with his girlfriend. You're about to learn how he did it. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and even the New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guests' internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech but easy to use. Unlike Zoom, you don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either. And did I mention that the audio quality is way better? If you're recording your interviews remotely, get off of Zoom now and hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Head over to Riverside.fm and use code Grow that's GROW to get 60 free minutes of recording and 15% off a membership plan. The link is in the show notes. Now back when Brian joined the Accelerator program, he was in a slump. His listenership had started dropping and he couldn't figure out why. As soon as people start dropping off from your show, you have a negative reaction to that emotionally. And as soon as you go through all the training and the courses and the high level mash run that we do here at Grow the Show, you're able to realize that that's a good thing. It's good they're not listening to you because they're not your target audience. Your mom doesn't care about investing. I've learned that very quickly. And that's okay. So, niching down and just getting down as far as you can to your specific audience avatar, that was a huge game changer for me, speaking to someone directly. And being okay with that group being specifically who you're talking to. Ah, yes. You have to be more specific and niche down your audience. And when you first do that, your download numbers might initially go down because the people who are listening to your show who really aren't your target audience will stop listening. And that is a good thing because that means you're on your way to serving a really specific and resonant audience. But the big question is, when you're niching down, how do you know when you've reached the right audience for you? How do you know when you get to the point where you define your audience in a way that's going to work? Has to fire you up because in the beginning, I was talking to people at like a beginner's level and that wasn't firing me up. I wanted to let my guests speak as high levels they wanted to. So I said, okay, we're going to speak to higher level people. I'm going to get past that belief. And then so that became my niche and the richest are in the niches. And that was a huge part. Once you have a better defined niche, what's the next step in eventually monetizing your podcast with affiliate ads? Focus super hard on TDE, targeted daily engagement. Targeted daily engagement is one of our two audience growth frameworks here at Grow the Show. If you want to learn about that more in depth, you can check out episode eight of this podcast. But in short, TDE means you go on social media. You find your target audience in the comments of posts and in groups. And here's what you do be the life of the party because that's how people get attracted to your show. You're not here to sell anything. That happens as a natural byproduct of passion and direction. Here's how Brian does TDE and how he really started to get momentum growing his audience. I'll go and find wherever people are talking about the subject and I'll offer insight. And then those comments pop off so much and they are so full of engagement that it trickles over and then you can get to them in the messages and say, Hey, you know, if you want, I've got a show coming out next Tuesday about this. If you want me to give you a heads up or if you want to the link, they're like, absolutely. So I do it in advance personally. And so I built up a little bit of suspense and it also allows them to be a subscriber instead of just going and listening. So they'll subscribe and then they'll pop up on their feed on Tuesday. Once Brian was able to get TDE rocking and rolling, he started to think about monetization. But like last time before we really got Brian and his podcast to make good money, we had to change his mindset about monetization. All I knew about was, Oh, if I'm Joe Rogan and I'm advertising Trigger Grill, he's going to get a seven eight figure deal for that. So but how does that apply to the little guys? It doesn't. It's peanuts. There's no point. But then you said, Hey, you know, you could do affiliates and you can have a business built behind this. And that idea was worth the entire price of the mastermind for me because now I'm not just the podcast. I'm a business that is using podcasts as my medium and that entire frame shift is what calls what we have today, which we can go into here in detail. So your mindset has changed and you're like, Whoa, I can do, you know, I don't have to wait until I have, you know, a million listeners and, you know, we get sponsors just bike rills. So what was the next step that you took in this process of, okay, now I want to turn this into a business. So first thing you do is you, you assemble your core group, which we talked about in the training, you're 12 to 20 people. And you figure out, you know, a, where they hang out, you learn everything about them. And then I'm doing my show and it happens naturally. If you speak to your niche, then all of a sudden, a couple of episodes and a couple of weeks in maybe a month, then people will start resonating with things you're talking about. And they'll reach out to you. If you're doing your job right and you're really actually speaking to the people you're trying to speak to, people started Facebook messaging me and they're saying, what's this mastermind you're talking about? I qualify, I heard about it in the show. And people started saying, Hey, who's this coach, your referencing? Like I really have a need for that. And I hear you talking about it. Who is this? And so what that resulted in was me bringing the CEO of the mastermind on my show, me bring in my coach on my show. The result of that being so many people signed up because they heard them that it was just a mutually beneficial relationship to where I said, Hey, guys, this is working. I want to form a relationship here. I said, Look, don't pay me. They don't pay me a salary. You're anything? So let's do this. Have this be flat rate for people that come through the show and people that are interested and that we could create something here. And then that's what it turned into because for a business, what do they have to lose? They're not paying you anything if you don't bring anybody in. So they're paying you nothing. So there's nothing for them to lose. Okay, so this is the part where I can hear you thinking, I don't know if I want to do a deal where I might not get paid for it. And I hear you, I used to think the same thing. At first, when I first started monetizing my initial podcast, Philly, who I basically told myself I would not accept an affiliate ad. Sponsors had to pay me upfront and they had to pay me regardless of whether the sponsorship actually worked. And while it is good to hold yourself in high esteem like that, what I learned is that if sponsors are not getting customers from your sponsorship deal, they're not going to stay sponsors. They're going to leave because sponsorships are not companies paying you to make your podcast. Sponsorships are companies buying customers for you. And if you're trying to convince yourself that it's anything other than that, you're probably going to have a really hard time with this. So while it might be scary that these affiliate ad deals won't pay you if they're not effective, it's actually really good for you because then you learn how to be effective. And it's also good because affiliate ads are way easier to sell at the beginning. You can just say, Hey, I've got this podcast. This is specifically whom my audience is your exact target market. I would love to do an affiliate relationship with you. If no one signs up, no skin off your back. If they do, I'd like a little bit of a cut. That's a win win. How do they say no to that? That's the easiest business decision ever. So how much of a cut do you ask for? Well, it really depends on the product or service that you're advertising. For Brian, his focus was on high ticket masterminds and coaching programs. So I just asked for 15% honestly. So for me, that's my niche. So plug and play whatever you want to say and whatever niche you are. The financial price point would be whoever you're speaking to, you know, if you're speaking to highly targeted high level entrepreneurs like I am, then the stuff that I'm offering is high level. So I just said a flat rate percentage. I offered a percentage so you can do that, but you can figure out a different way to do it. That's just how I did it. I don't have any formal playbook behind it. I just made the offering and said, this is a no brainer 15% yes, do it. Now there are a couple of things that are really important for you to remember as you go about doing this. Number one, it's important to note that Brian wasn't just cold, emailing random businesses. Remember, these are products and services that he himself was using and I had relationships with the people now. They're my friends. They're my mentors and it was an obvious business relationship. And now people are pouring in trying to also join affiliates with me. And I have to say no to a lot of them because the only way that I'll do an affiliate relationship with people is if it's something that I'm paying for myself, that's it. This is where you can capitalize off of your pre-existing network. The people that you already know or are adjacent to in your industry. I like to say there's always money hiding in your audience. For example, maybe you're a fitness coach and in your own fitness journey, there was a dietician that really helps you develop a healthy relationship with food. If you mention that dietician on the show and your listeners seem interested, you can reach out to that dietician to see if they would be interested in an affiliate deal. And because they know who you are and they know that you're great to work with, they're going to pick up the phone when you call and go, of course, I'm in. That sounds fantastic. The other thing that you have to keep in mind is that once you get your first affiliate deal and honestly, the moment you decide to go get your first affiliate deal and the moment you decide your podcast needs to be monetized, your podcast is no longer just a podcast. It's a podcasting business. That means that you have to be very mindful and organized, collect emails. That's what I'm doing right now is I'm about to just be super, super organized on emails. So everyone that reaches out before when I first started it, I was just having conversations but then I realized I was like, oh, it's a very quick shift. I need to keep in touch with these people. So make notes, say, hey, talk to this person later, follow back up, circle back up with this person. So that's how I run it as a business. And then so now it's just to the point though, where if you're podcast, the point of is to provide value and just value value value, you'll never run out of opportunity. I'd say that because like for me, the profit is just byproduct of passion. So for me, even if my sponsorships don't want to do it, like we will have other sponsorships that would fit because I'm just trying to provide value and then people that are aligned with that will instantly gravitate. What's something that you wish, you know, thinking back to the people that listen to the show, their folks who are generally under 1000 downloads per episode, just kind of starting out, trying to get the lay of the land here. What's one thing that you wish to the understood? I'm still under 1000 downloads in episode, say more about that. Yeah, understand that. Like, I mean, right now I'm averaging about 1500 downloads a week, 2000 a week now. And it's a compound game. It's none of this is linear. It's what I would explain to them that don't think that because you have 100 downloads in episode now that you can have 200 downloads next month. And then only 300 downloads next month and only 400 downloads the following month. It doesn't work like that. It's a hockey stick. So it'll be like 100 300 500 1000 2000. That's how it works. If you're really doing what you're supposed to be doing and you're really engaging in producing quality content, that's what will happen and that's what's happening with me. So right now, yeah, it's about 1500 2000 a week. And then so I do three episodes. So that's awesome. 400 500 and episode downloads. So you could do it. My show is not huge, but it will be. Yeah. And the beautiful thing is that you've learned how to make it insanely profitable now. You don't have to wait like you don't have to wait until you are Joe Roganly on the way to a huge audience and make good money building it up and make even more money later. Yeah. Exactly. And what it all comes down to for me at the end of the day is really just the relationships because that's why I started all of this because I looked at Joe Rogan. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think that Joe probably feels the same that I do and that's why he's successful. And I think this is the secret sauce is I don't think he really cares. It's good to be intentional about it and he's intentional about it, but at our core, he just does it because he really enjoys meeting and talking to interesting people and good people about things that interest him. And then he's able to just monetize that. I think that's where the rubber meets the road because that's what I care about. I care about the relationships at the end of the day. That's forward 50 years. If you talk about the success of the show, sure I'll have monetary. But what I'm going to really say is look at all my friends that I have that are phenomenal people. Kevin, you're included like me and you wouldn't have met without my show. So same thing. Yeah. And it's just like relationship and you're always one relationship away from 10Xing, whatever you thought was possible. If I hadn't have met you, I wouldn't have gotten all these business concepts in my mind about how I could run the show and how I could provide value because I happily went through your entire sales cycle and paid for your accords and I never felt like I was sold and I was happy to do it, which is what I now do. So it just is a trickle down effect. If I could emphasize one thing, it is that monetization and audience growth is all relationships. TDE and TPP are two audience growth frameworks here at Grow the Show are all about building and nurturing collaborative relationships. The same thing is true. With monetization, your sponsors, whether affiliate or CPM are going to be likely relationships that you already have, at least your first ones. Down the line, once you really get growing and monetizing, yes, you will have an ads outreach pipeline, which basically means you have a system for reaching out to businesses to see if they want to advertise on your show. But if you're really only going after your first one, two, even 10 advertisers, those are almost always going to come from your network. It's all relationships because especially early on, the biggest selling point of your podcast isn't going to be your listenership. It's going to be you. So here's my challenge to you, regardless of where you are in your podcasting journey. Think about the people that you already know. They might be audience members, they might be friends, peers, they might be weak ties in your network, but think about people that you already know who have a product or service preferably that you actually already use, but maybe not, maybe one that you can just try and who might be interested in setting up some sort of affiliate deal. Just like Brian has outlined, all it takes is a conversation to turn that relationship into a great partnership and to get your very first affiliate ads. Now before we roll the credits, I want to mention one more thing about affiliate ads. It's important to know that the more expensive the product or service is that you're selling, the more money you'll make per deal. And so yes, you can absolutely start affiliate relationships with products that are a couple of bucks, five, 10 bucks, maybe it's a monthly service for $10 a month or something like that. And a lot of those companies will actually let you set up an affiliate relationship without actually talking to them and just by going to their website and creating a code. And that's awesome. I just want to call out that the reason why Brian's income level is so high with just a few affiliate deals is because he is selling high ticket masterminds and he gets a significant percentage of those sales. You can do this too. Please, please, please. Don't allow the thought that you can't help sell expensive things to your audience. Stop you. Your audience already buys expensive things. And they're going to love for you to introduce them to the next expensive thing for them to buy. They'll be thrilled that you get a cut of it because they love you. Now this is not to say that you can't do affiliate ads with less expensive things. You can make affiliate income on products that cost five bucks. The only thing to know is in order to make enough income for you to quit your job and travel the world, you're going to have to sell a lot of five dollar items. So that's not to be just curaging. It's just to call out what Brian has achieved, which is incredible. And so that you have a realistic understanding of what's possible out of the gate. So my challenge to you is this. Think of a product or service that you use that your audience probably would love to hear about. Don't assume that they've already heard about it. You would be, Lord, trust me, simply reach out to the product or service. See if they offer affiliate deals. Sometimes you can just go to their website and without even talking to them, you can generate an affiliate link. Or if you already know that company personally reach out and just ask them what Brian suggested you ask, let them know that you have a really specific audience that would probably love their product or service and that you would be honored to share that product or service with your audience for an affiliate commission. Do that with three to five products or services and I'm willing to bet at least one of them is going to say yes and you will have your first affiliate deal. Now if you have any questions for Brian at all about how he has managed to change his life via his podcast in a matter of only eight months, then I invite you to ask him in the Grow the Show Facebook group. He's one of the most active contributors and he would love to explain further and he's also super transparent with his numbers and what he does. So if you have anything that you'd like to ask Brian at all about his experience growing and monetizing his podcast, the link to access him directly via the Grow the Show Facebook group is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was hosted and produced by me. It was written and produced by Catherine Nails with host production by Jeremy Bishop. Here is a very special thanks to Brian Lubin for joining us today for sharing his story and also a huge congratulations Brian. It has been super cool to work with you and watch this fast-tracked success. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland, I'll see you next time.