Hey everyone. I’ve just added a new category to my blog named “Affiliate Marketing“. I’ve talked about what affiliate marketing is and why it’s my favorite source to make money online.
While I’ve been doing a lot of stuff ranking websites and building Facebook Fan Pages in the past, I think it’s the right time to add a new category and explain how I make money from almost any website or traffic source I can find, and the quick answer is Affiliate and CPA marketing.
2 Weeks ago I published a guide to making money with Google Adsense and viral posts on Social Media sites like Facebook. The process is really straight forward and there’s no magic formula behind it. However, it takes some budget to get started, creativity, and a lot of patience to get started.
But there’s nothing new there. The process to build a website/blog and monetize it with CPC/CPM Ads like many of us have done before is the same. The only thing that changes is that we’re getting massive traffic from Facebook instead of getting organic traffic from search engines.
Table of Contents
What is CPA Marketing?
CPA means Cost Per Action, and it’s the basis of any affiliate marketing program out there. Where Adsense or many other programs pay you for ad impressions or clicks, CPA Marketing pays you per action. Because of this, it’s also called performance-based marketing.
There are some key pros and cons if you compare it to traditional CPM/CPC methods.
Pros
- The offers pay more. Sometimes a lot more.
- You can get quick payments (weekly or every 15 days) if you earn a good chunk of money. Daily payments are available too.
- If you have targeted traffic, you can earn a lot more from affiliate marketing than with Adsense or other competitors.
- You can buy paid traffic for instant profits instead of waiting for Google to rank your website
Types of CPA offers:
- CPS: Cost per Sale (Amazon Affiliate or Teespring)
- CPL: Cost per lead (can be single or double opt-in)
- CPI: Cost per install (a mobile app, a toolbar, a game or anything else)
- etc.
Cons
- Since it’s performance-based, if you receive 1 thousand visits but nobody does an action, you earn $0
- There are a lot of offers and networks to test. You need to find the best networks.
- You need to create your campaigns and split test the whole time
- You probably need a tracker and redirect scripts
- You need a budget to get started
Of course, you can do a mix of both, and promote CPA campaigns with organic traffic to make profits with massive ROI, but I’ll cover that in a future article next week.
Today, we’re focusing on selling T-Shirts with Facebook Fan Pages and/or Facebook Ads.
There are 2 ways of doing this. The slow/steady and easy way, and the fast but not so easy way.
- The steady but good way to do this is by setting up a new Fan Page and grow it by buying Facebook Ads for likes.
- The fast but more difficult way is trough Facebook Ads for Website clicks and conversions.
I’ve done both, and I’ve made both work. I’ve made more money with Facebook Ads for clicks and conversions but also spent more money. So it’s up to you if you want to build a large audience, engage with them and make sales, or if you just want to sell them cold straight in their Newsfeed. If you want to learn more about this you can check my CPA Marketing blog.
Let’s focus on likes first.
$350 with Facebook Fan Pages
The trick here is to build a big Fan Page on a niche you like, or a niche you think many people will love. For example, I built a few pages based on some TV characters I love from some very famous TV series in the USA.
I grew them to 2-5k likes to start and then I created a T-shirt design and published it on Teespring.
Creating a campaign on Teespring is quite easy. Just sign up and create your account here: Teespring
Now click on the “launch a campaign” button at the top of your dashboard and a simple T-shirt model will appear. Add some text or load up an image (PNG or JPEG files are fine) as you desire for your audience.
Teespring will show how much the base price is. It should be something between $9 and $15, depending on your design. Try not to use too many colors and difficult figures to print, so your shirt is less expensive and you can make more money per shirt sold.
I’d price it anything between $19.99-$24.99 depending on the T-shirt and the audience.
Finally, select your colors and other T-shirts available if you want (e.g. a Hoodie can be a good idea) and launch your campaign. Teespring will give you a URL so you can promote it with Facebook.
How would you promote it?
I guess that’s the question everyone is going to ask. Here are some examples I’ve done in the past. This was done with a Fan Page with 9,000 likes or more if I remember correctly.
As you can see, I just grabbed the link and let Facebook generate the preview image on this one. I got 67 likes and 11 shares and reached around 1,400 people. I sold 2-3 shirts from that post alone (around $20 revenue).
Make sure you try different angles and colors. 2 days after that, I tried the same T-Shirt in green. Here are my results:
As you can see, this time I got 167 likes and 35 shares. I changed my text so that everyone knew the shirt was priced at $19, and they shouldn’t miss the chance to buy it. I made around 5-6 extra sales from that post alone, so around $30 more in revenue.
Of course, I posted the same shirt once or twice more during that week and made some extra sales, but make sure you still post some content and engage with your fans or they’ll think you’re just there to sell. I was posting 2-3 funny images from the TV series per day (schedule your posts with FPTraffic) and I posted a link to the shirt 2-3 times per week.
[convertkit form=4981485]
Overall, I made around $350 and sold almost 40 units from posting shirts for 1 month in 3 Facebook Fan Pages. You can request your Teespring payment right after your campaign ends, which is really cool. They usually take 1-6 days to send your payment (PayPal is my favorite method) depending on the day of the week.
Of course, the big problem most people seem to get when they start using Teespring is that you need to reach a 10 sales goal before the campaign is actually completed. For starters, selling 10 shirts might be difficult (update 2019: Teespring has reduced this goal to 3 so now it’s easier to get started!). Especially if your Fan Page has less than 5,000 fans. However, there are many good alternatives out there like Sunfrog Shirts, which pays you per every shirt you sell no matter if it’s just 1 or 4 or anything below 10.
Some of their features are:
I tried Sunfrog at first when I was first growing my Fan Pages and I had 2,000 fans or less and still got a few sales. Sunfrog allows you to sell other designs so you don’t need to create your own.
Here’s an updated list with the best print on demand websites to start selling custom clothing and more.
Overall, I feel like Teespring converts better than Sunfrog, and the website has a better design, but it’s still a good choice for starters who can’t sell more than 10 T-shirts.
I received a few payments like this back in January-March. Just keep in mind they pay on a NET 30 basis. So everything you earn this month will be in your account at the end of the next month, whereas Teespring pays right after your campaign’s end:
$800 with Facebook Ads
There are a lot of people promoting T-Shirts from Teespring right from Facebook Ads in the Newsfeed. In fact, there was a time a few months ago where 50% or more of my Ads where Teespring T-Shirts calling out names, football teams, year of birth, and similar. Nowadays those niches are banned from Facebook and they might shut down your ads account. However, there’s plenty of money to be made with Teespring if you’re creative. Some niches where selling shirts can work quite well are:
- Beauty niche
- Travel niche
- Lifestyle niche
- Pets niche
- etc.
Pretty much any niche where you can create and resonate with passionated audiences.
I launched a few more campaigns and promoted them via Facebook Ads without having big Fan Pages and still made some great profit.
Not all of my campaigns were profitable, of course. I launched 15-20 campaigns between April and June, but only 3-4 of them were profitable. It was an interesting experiment anyway.
One of my campaigns was targeted to a field study (e.g. computer programmers or marine biologists) thanks to Facebook’s advanced targeting and I got an ROI of %110.
I spent over $300 on that campaign alone but ended up making more than $620 back in just 5 days. That’s why many people love Facebook Ads. Because once you hit a jackpot, you can scale it super fast and end up selling a lot of shirts. Some guys earn more than $30,000 per month with Teespring alone and they don’t build Fan Pages for that.
They just sell the shirts plain cold right in your newsfeed, but thanks to Facebook’s targeting option, you can narrow your audience to something very specific and get them to buy your product.
Overall, I made around $1,200 with Teespring in 2 months and a half. I’d love to launch more campaigns, but I’m focusing all my time on doing SEO, launching new websites, and learning Mobile traffic at this point. Also, to be honest, I’m not a really good designer and I’m sure many people have more original/cool ideas for T-shirts than me. It’s basically an excuse, but at the same time, it means you can probably do a lot better than me.
Building your list on steroids with Facebook
I’ll publish a separate case study on how I built a 700 subscribers list in 2 days with Facebook using a Teespring campaign and Convertkit and got some of that money back just 3 days later. That case study will probably be published this Friday or the next Wednesday. However, here’s how it works:
As you can see, I used a T-Shirt design on Teespring to create a giveaway in one of my Fan Pages. Instead of asking them to buy the T-Shirt from my link, I prepared a landing page so that they could win one shirt if they subscribed to my email list. I got 700 subscribers in just 2 days, and when the campaign tipped, I contacted a random winner so I could buy the shirt for him and send him to his address.
It’s a very interesting way to build a list in any niche, and the conversion rate was super high on my Landing page (more than 90% conversion rate).
Stay safe and let me know if you have questions below in the comments 🙂
