Quickstart Guide to Affiliate Marketing

My Affiliate Freedom guide will show you how to get started with affiliate marketing and boost your income without creating your own products. I show you why NOW is the time to get started, how to start, and virtually guarantee acceptance into any affiliate program.

 Advanced Ads

Advanced Ads lets you choose your display ads for specific pages, categories, or whatever criteria you choose. It also lets you choose whether to display an ad on mobile, desktop, or both. Very cool tool.

 Thirsty Affiliates

This is my favorite affiliate link management tool for WordPress. You can easily manage all of your affiliate links INSIDE of WordPress, add the links to posts, cloak the links, and even track the performance of each link all in your WordPress dashboard!

 LinkTrackr

Simply put, this is a link tracking program. It's super easy to use and allows you to track the performance of different ads, copy, placement, etc. If you want to get serious about your promotions, I recommend checking out LinkTrackr.

Facebook Ads

A lot of people think of promoting their OWN products through Facebook Ads, but not affiliate offers. Facebook Ads are one of the best ways to promote affiliate offers, though. You can target very niche audiences (including just your own list). The typical ROI is very high with Facebook Ads.

Know What to Promote

Not sure what to promote? That's the biggest obstacle to making more money as an affiliate. There are so many possibilities, so which ones to you choose? This free scorecard shows you exactly what offers to promote...and which ones to skip. It's the exact scorecard we use to choose what we promote.

How to Win at Affiliate Marketing with Little or No Following

My free report shows you that you don't need a huge list to succeed with affiliate marketing. I share two strategies you can use right now (no matter how big or small your following is) to earn significant income.

ShareASale

ShareASale as long been my favorite affiliate network. While I don't use them as much as I used to, it's a great place to find merchants with affiliate programs for the topics you want to promote. Their system and their team are the best.

Raven Tools

Awesome tool for tracking all of your marketing online. Similar to Google Analytics (which you can get for free) but more robust and allows you to track social media as well. If you want to get better at SEO without becoming an SEO expert, their site auditing feature is a must-have.

iDev Affiliate

This is by far the most affordable (yet reliable) affiliate management program out there. It does almost everything you could need and is simple to use. Tracking is very accurate and reporting is fairly easy to use. We recommend this to anyone who is just starting out.

InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft is the only affiliate backend that we personally use. In conjunction with our Affiliate Portal Builder, it offers affiliates reliable tracking via cookie, contact record (email), and IP. In addition, the reporting is second to none. It is also the world's best marketing software out there. If you have the budget and are serious about growing your business, InfusionSoft is the tool for you.

Affiliate Portal Builder

This is the one product of ours that we literally use every single day. Give your affiliates a one-stop portal for everything they need to rock your promotion. We've built affiliate portals for some of the top online entrepreneurs like Michael Hyatt, Josh Turner, Ray Edwards, and more. Let us do the same for you.

Product Launch Formula

Jeff Walker literally invented the formula that is now so common in product launches. You may think that you can reverse engineer the process by watching other launches, but this course gives you the solid framework you need to succeed. My team and I plan to regularly go through this course as a refresher. Its a significant investment but worth every penny. 

LeadPages

This the tool we use for a lot of of our landing pages, optin forms, and sales pages (the other is ClickFunnels, which you can find below). There are literally hundreds (maybe thousands now) of easy-to-use templates for collecting optins, webinar registrations, video pages, book sales pages, product information pages, and so much more. 

WebinarJam

This is one of the few tools we recommend but do not personally use. WebinarJam is an all-in-one out-of-the-box solution for promoting and hosting webinars. We do not currently use it because we create custom pages, but it's a solid product, especially for those who don't know coding.

Teachable

Teachable is the platform we use for many of our courses...and we LOVE using them! More importantly, our students love using them! We've been able to implement some really cool tools that get results. Like quizzes, progress reports, timed emails based on where students are in the course, and so much more. We are huge fans of Teachable for building courses! 

Ruzuku

Ruzuku is a simple, intuitive solution for creating online courses. It’s everything you need to create, sell, and run your course, all in one place. It’s ideal for entrepreneurs and small businesses who don’t have a lot of technology resources or knowledge and want to be able to just create their courses, without having to figure out a lot of backend integrations. (BEGINNER-LEVEL)

Kajabi

I have personally never used Kajabi for setting up a course, but we have multiple clients who use it to deliver their courses. In addition, I have taken numerous courses on it. It's great from the consumer side and our clients seem to like it from their side. One caveat is that it is definitely not for the non-techie.

Click Funnels

This is one of our newest "toys" and we are absolutely in love with it. To date, we've moved nearly half of all of our optin pages to Click Funnels with new ones being added every week. There is simply no better tool for building easy-to-use sales funnels, webinar pages, and so much more!

Canva

This is my go-to graphic creation tool. It is super easy to use, even if you have no design-skills whatsoever. They have hundreds (maybe thousands) of templates for every type of design you can imagine. ALL of my graphics on my site were done by me in less than 10 minutes using Canva (and I am NOT a professional designer).

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is our new email provider, after switching from MailChimp, who we had major issues with. ConvertKit is an all-in-one source for landing pages, optin forms, and email marketing. Great alternative to using LeadPages and MailChimp separately. Get a 30-day FREE trial using my link!

W3 Total Cache

This is the exact plugin I started using three years ago that instantly improved my web site speed by more than 50%! Web site speed is SO important and this simple little plugin does a lot of the work for you. It caches your pages, images, and much more to make it load significantly faster. That means your site ranks better, people stick around and...well, you make more money!

Zapier

Simply put, Zapier makes our jobs 10X easier. It’s like plumbing for the internet. Zapier connects all our favorite apps so we can automate tasks in the background. Trigger an action in one app and the results show up in another without us lifting a finger. The robots handle the mundane work so we can focus on what’s most important.

Pretty Link

This is the tool I use to shorten URLs and make them "pretty." It's great to creating URLs that you send in emails, mention on podcast interviews, or share out and about. The free version, Pretty Link Lite, works for most people, but there is a paid version. 

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is how we schedule most o our social media posts for Twitter and LinkedIn. It makes it super easy to bulk schedule messages and manage all of our different categories of messages (content, promotional, lead magnets, etc.). We've tried just about every social media management tool and this is the best by far!

Repurpose

The coolest new tool I've found in a while. We use Repurpose to take our podcasts and Facebook Lives and automatically post them to YouTube, automatically post podcast clips to Twitter, and so much more! It saves us thousands of dollars a year and gets our content a LOT more exposure!

HootSuite

HootSuite is what we use to manage one-off messages for Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as replies and monitoring. The free version is great but does have its limits. Which is why we recommend MeetEdgar (on the left) for scheduling posts. HootSuite is the best tool we've found for managing replies and monitoring mentions, though!

ATR2100 Microphone

This is the microphone I use for most of my podcasting. I also use it for most videos and livestreams. There is simply NO better mic for anywhere close to the price of the ATR2100. It's usually less than $75 on Amazon (link below) and most mics that are $300+ are no better. Easy plug-and-play USB and works on any computer.

Windscreens

Windscreens remove a LOT of the background noise from getting through to your mic. They are cheap (usually less than $10 for a 5-pack) but dramatically improve the quality of your sound. Make sure to grab a 5-pack at least as they do wear out over time and it's nice to have them handy when traveling. They also make a great cover for your phone mic if you are talking on a windy day!

Auphonix Microphone Pop Filter  

If you've ever heard a podcast recorded WITHOUT a pop filter, you've probably heard the hard "P" and "T" sounds. It can be distracting to the listener and this little tool removes them. The Auphonix is my favorite. It's only a few bucks more than the cheapest pop filters and worth the extra money. 

Audacity

Audacity is the 100% FREE tool to edit podcasts. I've used Audacity for nearly a decade to edit my podcasts and highly recommend if you are on a budget. It has virtually all the tools you could possibly need to edit and export your podcast in high-quality formats.

Libsyn

It might seem like you can just host your podcast on your own server...but that is NOT a good idea! There are countless reasons why, but one is that you can host your podcast for only $5-15 on Libsyn, which is reliable and they don't charge you per download like most regular hosts will. Their stats rock, too!

Smart Podcast Player

This is the podcast player we use on my blog. I've tried just about every other player and this one, from Pat Flynn, is THE BEST! He created it for his own podcast so you know he's going to make sure it keeps up with the times. Check out all the features using the button below.

Logitech C922x Pro Stream Webcam

This is the camera I recommend if you are on a budget and want to do high-quality videos or livestreams. I've never seen it cost more than $78 on Amazon at the link below. It's a plug-and-play USB camera that works on every device I've tried. NOTE: If you are on a Mac, make sure to install the Logitech Camera Settings app.

Logitech BRIO Webcam

The BRIO costs more than twice as much as the C922x and it's only slightly better. Since it saves us a few minutes per video in editing, it's worth it, but I used the C922x for years before upgrading. Only use this if you truly need the slight increase in quality and don't mind paying $150+ for a webcam. Also plug-and-play USB and if you are on a Mac, you'll need the Logitech Camera Settings app (FREE).

Linco Studio Lighting Kit

The number one factor in video quality is the lighting. Bad lighting = bad videos. Good lighting = GREAT videos! This is the best lighting kit for the money BY FAR! Usually under $125 at the link below. I've paid 3-4 times as much for worse products. This kit has everything, including backgrounds, two reflector lights, two umbrella lights, carry bag, and more.

Asana

I resisted using a tool like Asana for a long time. But now that we use it as a team, I cannot imagine my work life without it. Asana is by far my favorite project management and task management tool. It's easy to use and makes collaboration and delegation super easy. You can start with the free version, which has worked for us for more than a year.

Slack

This is just about the only tool my team uses to communicate with each other. No more long email chains, random texts, or forgetting to copy someone. Slack is the go-to communication tool for almost every online business I know. And you don't need a huge team to get started. I got started with just three of us...for free!

Simple Gmail Notes

We used to a use a paid service ($1,000+ a year) to accomplish what Simple Gmail Notes accomplishes for free, so we switched. This is a very easy-to-use Gmail plugin that allows you to put notes on emails. My customer service team can summarize emails for me to answer, ask questions, and we can easily correspond without having to leave Gmail.

Our Products

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My Recommended Books

Books have made a huge difference in my business and my personal growth. I put together the ultimate Marketing and Entrepreneurial reading list here.