How to Create a Simple Affiliate Marketing Funnel and Start Making Money

Affiliate marketing funnels are a craze these days. Looks like every marketer online is talking about it. And why not? They are very effective and if created properly, they can increase your conversions dramatically and make you a ton load of money.

In this article we are going to show you how to create a simple but powerful affiliate marketing funnel from scratch. You can use this exact same method of funnel creation to promote any product online. It is very effective.

So let’s jump right in and get started.

What Is an Affiliate Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel can be described in simple terms as the journey your visitor takes through different pages, where he/she is made to accomplish different tasks, leading the visitor to your final pre-determined goal.

Your final goal may be anything. It may be selling your product, making an affiliate sale or signing your visitor up for your coaching service, etc.

Step by step, you lead your visitor to your goal using the sales funnel. The main goal of a sales funnel is to turn the visitor who finds your website or video into a lead, and then into a customer.

When the funnel you are using is created for the purpose of making an affiliate sale, such a sales funnel is called affiliate marketing funnel or affiliate marketing sales funnel. Let’s start building our funnel now.

Affiliate Marketing Funnel Blueprint

Here’s how it is going to work.

At first, we will need to choose an affiliate product to promote. Then we will get our affiliate link and all the emails that are included in the affiliate resources section of the product.

Then we will go to our email service, create a list and arrange the follow up emails into a sequence.

Once that is done, we will create a thank you page and then the opt-in page. We will then connect the opt-in page to our email autoresponder service and the thank you page. And that’s it. Our affiliate funnel will be ready.

That is the plan. Now let’s have a look at the tools we are going to need to build an effective affiliate sales funnel.

Tools Needed to Build an Affiliate Funnel

We are going to need the following tools for building an affiliate marketing funnel.

Page Builder Tool

We use Thrive Architect to build landing pages, opt-in page, thank you pages etc. It is a WordPress plugin using which you can build unlimited pages. But if you don’t have a WordPress website, Thrive Architect won’t work. If that’s the case, you can use LeadPages to build high converting funnel pages.

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Email Marketing Service

This is a service using which you are going to be collecting the email addresses of your subscribers, and sending them emails. With this service, you can automate your emails and create the email sequence.

You can also use this service to build your funnel pages. By using your email service provider to build pages for your affiliate funnel, you can eliminate the need for another page builder tool.

However, it is always a better idea to use a separate page builder tool, because if you want to change your email service provider in the future it is going to be easy that way.

The email marketing service we personally use is GetResponse. It is beginner-friendly and costs only $15 per month for maintaining a list of up to 1000 email subscribers.

We can also send unlimited emails, build unlimited landing pages and do a lot of other cool stuff using GetResponse. You can sign up for their 30 days free trial from here.

Creating the Affiliate Marketing Funnel

Before building our affiliate funnel, let’s first look at the funnel itself. Here’s how our simple affiliate funnel is going to look like.

As you can see in the image above, there is an opt-in page where the visitor will sign up to get something of value in return for his/her email address. Once the visitor signs up on the opt-in page, there are two things that happen.

First, the visitor’s email address will be added to your email database and the follow-up email sequence will be triggered. And second, the visitor will be redirected to the ‘Thank You’ page, which will act as a bridge page between the opt-in page and the offer.

Finally, from the ‘Thank You’ page the visitor will be redirected to the affiliate offer we are promoting. We will also be promoting the same offer to our visitor through the email follow up series which we have set up earlier.

That’s in a nutshell how our affiliate marketing funnel is going to work. Before building an affiliate sales funnel one thing you have to remember is that always build a funnel in the reverse order.

Meaning, first choose the affiliate product/offer, then set up your email sequence, then create the thank you page, then create the opt-in page and then finally connect all the elements together.

Following the same formula, our first step would be to choose an affiliate product to promote.

Choose an Affiliate Offer to Promote

Let’s choose an affiliate product to promote. To do that, let’s head over to ClickBank, one of the most popular affiliate marketing platforms out there.

We need to choose a product that has a good gravity score and has a great affiliate resources section. Click the following link if you don’t know how to get started with ClickBank.

We are going to choose a product from the ‘Spirituality, New age, and Alternative belief’ niche. and the product we will be promoting is called ‘Manifestation Magic’. BTW read the following article if you want the list of best selling products on ClickBank.

Now the first thing we need to do is grab the affiliate link. To do that just click on the ‘Promote’ button and get the link. We need to store this affiliate link somewhere safe because we are going to need it again.

Create an Email List and Add Follow Up Emails

The next thing we need to do is create a new email list and add the follow-up emails. These are the same emails our subscribers are going to get once they opt-in to get our freebie.

The product we have chosen to promote already has a great affiliate resources page, which includes the follow-up email sequences.

We are going to copy and paste those emails into our autoresponder. Of course, we will need to edit them a bit before hitting the publish button. Above is a screenshot of one such follow up sequence.

Once we have created the list and built the follow-up series, it is time to move on to the next stage and create a ‘Thank You’ page.

Create a Thank You Page

As mentioned earlier, the page builder we are going to be using is Thrive Architect. You can get a copy of this amazing page builder tool from here.

We are going to create a simple ‘Thank You page’ with a headline, short description, call to action and a video.

We are first going to thank the subscribers for opting in and later inform them about the download link which has been sent to their email address. Here is the screenshot of our thank you page.

After that, we will present them with an offer, which in this case is the Manifestation Magic product. We are also going to include a video on the thank you page, which hopefully will boost our conversions.

Creating the Opt-In page

Once the thank you page is done it is time to build the landing page or the opt-in page. It is the page where our visitors are going to land, hence the name ‘landing page’. On this page, we are going to offer a free download in return for our visitors’ email address.

The download we offer on the landing page should at least have some kind of connection to the product we are promoting in the end. It shouldn’t just be something random.

For this example, we are promoting Manifestation Magic, which is a ClickBank product from the Spirituality and Self-development niche. And that’s why we have chosen to offer an Abundance Tone MP3 file as a free download. You see the connection here, right?

Abundance tone and manifestation magic both are the parts of the same system. They both are tools of manifestation. And that’s our connection.

Final Steps of Funnel Creation

Once the opt-in page is ready, it is time to connect all the different elements of our funnel together. We will be connecting the opt-in page with the email autoresponder service and the thank you page. We will also be connecting the thank you page to the affiliate offer.

And that’s it.

We have successfully created a simple affiliate marketing funnel that’s ready to welcome visitors and turn them into customers.

You can have a look at our affiliate marketing funnel example from here. It has been created using LeadPages and Thrive Architect.

How to Get Traffic?

Building the affiliate marketing sales funnel is the easier part, getting the traffic to that funnel is the difficult one (if you don’t have money to spend). As you are aware, there are two kinds of traffic. Free and paid.

If you don’t have enough money to spend on advertisements, you need to choose the ‘free traffic’ methods. Free traffic methods can be really effective and can get thousands of visitors to your pages per day. Also, the search traffic converts great.

But for a free traffic method to be effective, it can take a very long time. More so, at present. If you are ready to wait for months or even a year or two to get results, start building your free traffic channels now. But remember that you need to have patience.

If you are not ready to wait for months, want to get instant results, and if you have enough money to spend on advertisements, paid traffic methods should be the way to go. With paid methods, you can have traffic on demand.

Solo Ad traffic may be a great way to get started with paid ads. If you want to try solo ads this is what we recommend. Other popular paid traffic methods are Google ads, FaceBook ads, YouTube ads, Bing ads, Pinterest ads, and other native ad channels.