How Spencer Mecham Became ClickFunnels #1 Affiliate

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An affiliate marketer’s life is nothing short of a rollercoaster. It has some significant ups and some substantial downs, but once momentum is established, nothing can stop the ball from rolling. Who could better relate to it than the ClickFunnels #1 Affiliate? So, let’s hear it from Spencer Mecham himself!

Guest: Spencer Mecham is the number one click funnels affiliate of all time and one of the world’s best affiliate marketers. He has generated over $3.5 million in affiliate commissions by advertising only one affiliate program and is now sharing his techniques through webinars and training sessions.

[00:50] The podcast dives deeper into the strategy of driving traffic, selecting the best offers, building effective email lists, and overall life as an affiliate marketer.

How did Spencer Mecham make his way to the top in this wicked world of affiliate marketing?

[02:42] What inspired Spencer to dive into the world of affiliate marketing?

  • It was a coworker of mine that worked at a digital marketing agency. And I was literally like the bottom level, just kind of doing the grunt work. And the guy that was a level or two above me, showed me. He showed me this blog he ran and it was a vacuum cleaner review blog.
  • While I made a much better-looking blog than his I spent about a year trying to build up that blog to about $20 a month so I think at the end of the year I was making $20 a month on a good month and that was 1000s of hours lots and lots of money you know tons of time and so that was kind of my intro and my first attempt at it. 
  • It took maybe two and a half years before it before things actually started to move. But it was like, you know, I made like, $1,000 my first year like $5,000 by next year, and then it was like, boom, $900,000 or something like that.

[05:47]  Spencer Mecham shares his trial and errors for  building an audience:

  • I started doing “follow/unfollow” bots. Basically, you have this bot that just goes and follows like a million accounts. And then if they follow me back, and then [I] unfollow them. And then I send them a message like, “Hey, thanks for following me, you should check out..”, and I sent him an affiliate link. Not a great strategy. It was a YouTube video that I watched.

  • Then finally I decided that I’m going to send people for free training. [I sent them a link] to this three video series that teaches them stock market trading, and that has affiliate links in all three of the videos. So I make these videos and I like okay, I’ll throw them up on YouTube. And then I just wait. Within a few weeks of that, two things happened, my account got shut down.

  • I had a good 20,000 followers at that point. And I’ve been working pretty hard at it and then we had the baby too. So a lot less time, a lot less motivation. You know, seeing all this kind of come crumbling down and I kind of quit and it was like it was probably three or four months of that just kind of go back to the job, back to the grind, no longer really trying to stuff because I’ve been trying for a while and then I actually I saw a few commissions come in. 
  • I go to discover that the YouTube videos that I uploaded not really trying to make money on YouTube but trying to send people from Instagram to YouTube one of those had taken off hundreds of 1000s of views and it was a terrible video I will never understand what YouTube was thinking but this video took off and I was getting a bunch of views and a few clicks. I hadn’t actually told him when the video to go click and so I wasn’t getting a ton there but a few people have gone on and clicked my affiliate link and I made some money and for me, that was when I went all in on YouTube.

[09:00] Spencer’s first viral moment: 

  • I started pumping out videos and still, I’m not good at this I make some bad videos but I got lucky again and another video blew up and this one blew up big the video was titled “How to Buy Bitcoin”.

  • Everyone was trying to figure out” how to buy bitcoin?” and my video was just well-timed and came out at the right time. So that video got like 300,000 views and I was referring people to Coinbase. I was making 10 bucks a day or 10 bucks a referral. And I was making anywhere from one to $400 a day.

[11:00] When things go south suddenly:

  • Just a few days after New Year’s I go [and] login, because the greatest thing about affiliate marketing is that you can wake up and check your phone and there’s money, right? It’s like, [the] number one thing. So I go do that, you know, and it’s like, zero and like, and [the] YouTube’s removed it [the video]. You know, it’s just like, that’s gone. So I uploaded it again. And this time, it didn’t take off. And I don’t know what happened. But yeah, that was my realization that just as quickly as things can take off, things can disappear if you don’t build this right. 
  • [Igor]: As soon as I made my first sale, I mentally checked out, like that was the moment. I was just yeah, I’m gonna quit my job, and actually quit my job the next day because they thought that things are going to take off. And in a similar way, my first sale came from social media, it was either from my blog or from my Facebook profile or something. I couldn’t track it, because I wasn’t tracking anything at the time. But it was it came in and I think it was over 100 bucks, which for me at the time was kind of like a few days of actual work. So I was like, I don’t need to take shit for my boss any more. The problem is that for the next eight months, I couldn’t replicate it. So I had to go and beg for my job back eventually. But yeah, it happens. I mean, I know at least a few other people have the exact same story where you get that initial success, you get the taste for it. You really build your hopes up. And then it’s not there anymore.

[13:34] Building a sustainable business model:

  • [I] came across someone who talked about building a list and that I didn’t even know it [building an email list] was a thing at this point which is crazy because I’m a marketer. I’ve been doing digital marketing for companies and stuff but somehow missed that piece of the puzzle.

  • The only thing that will truly build a sustainable business model is having a customer base that you own, [and] that you can have access to at any point, and that no one can take away your access and so that was my lightbulb moment.
  • Literally from that point on till today, my goal has been to build my email list and change up the content of my videos and kind of track it through my channel where I’ll still do the occasional review or kind of like a direct affiliate link. But 90% of my stuff is just trying to attract people to get them into my email list through any means necessary and I’ve got dozens of lead magnets scattered across the Internet now.
  • Either I’m in the content mode, which is basically list-building mode, or I’m in offer mode, which is monetizing the list. And I just go back and forth, and it’s simplified my stuff a lot more. 

[16:00] Affiliate marketing makes you bulletproof:

  • Multiple times we’ve hit this, lower point. I’m like, “Oh, wow, we did not make as much as we thought this month.” And I got things to people to pay, you know, we want to do this, I’m gonna go on vacation this month, or whatever. And it’s been literally as simple as finding a good offer, preparing five emails, and sending them out.

[16:58] Importance of having an effective and engaged email list:

  • As long as you’ve built up the right list, you’ve kept that list warm, and you’ve built up a relationship with that list, and they know you and they like your emails and things. I think it was 40 sales with John, but you can pull in 420,000 to $30,000 overnight.

  • I would say my list still isn’t huge. Like I’m not hundreds of 1000s. My list now probably hits about 30 to 35,000. Across all my niches and stuff.
  • [Igor]: Having a list of 30,000 even if only a portion of these people are active because a lot of times and you can have a really big list, but only a certain number is active and engaging. Still, you are bulletproof. 

[20:02] How to build a relationship with your email list?

  • They [the target audience] follow you on YouTube, they’re on your email list. They’re in a Facebook group where you’re active, right? And it’s like Spencer, ice Spencer every day doing something. Maybe they’re Facebook friends with you. And there, they follow you on Facebook. And so every single day, you’re in their inbox with value, or you’re posting something that helps them relate to you, or something’s happening. So they’re just like building this relationship with you. 
  • There’s the familiarity effect because one of the things that are required for us to trust somebody is we need to be familiar with them, we need to see them a lot. 
  • It creates a one-sided relationship like you said, but, you know, in my experience, it’s very similar to how people have a one-sided relationship with a movie star, or with a TV show host like Oprah. We never met her in person. I never shake her hand. But I like her. I kind of know what she stands for. Right? We’ll like Tony Robbins. I mean, some of us met him. But you know, we kind of like him. Right? We know what he stands for. We like the message. We like, the values of these projecting, and so on.

[27:46] One piece of advice for new affiliates:

  • Pick one single product, pick one single traffic source, and then go to town for six months, become the master of that one traffic source, and swear to yourself that you will give it six months before you ever attempt anything else besides promoting that one product with that one traffic source. And I think that’s the best recipe for faster success.
  • Having a laser focus on one strategy beats trying to spread yourself too thin.

[28:56] Learn more about Spencer Mecham’s Program:

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WHO IS
IGOR KHEIFETS

Igor Kheifets is an amazon best-selling author of the List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire.

He’s also the host of List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to make more money and have more freedom by leveraging the power of an email list

He’s widely referred to as the go-to authority on building large responsive email lists in record time.

Igor’s passionate about showing people how to live the List Building Lifestyle.