This man aims to build a $1bn affiliate marketing biz. Guess where he finds his 'influencers'?
Anthony Sarandrea finds old people to answer his ads on Craigslist. Now i'll tell you why.
I recently watched an interview of Anthony Sarandrea
Anthony is a master at affiliate marketing and recently sold his company, Pocket Your Dollars, to MediaAlpha (a NYSE company).
His story starts with him working for an affiliate marketing agency, getting good at it, and then venturing out on his own.
But with his own special ingredients. For example he highly recommends talking direct to the client and not just working via an ‘affiliate network’ like Clickbank or CJ Affiliate.
Why? Because you find out much more about the customer’s business and therefore this allows you to do more volume with them.
Plus it gives you the information you need to make the relationship more profitable.
For example.. perhaps through the intermediator a health insurance company is willing to pay $30 CAC for a customer so that is what they put on Clickbank’s marketplace.
But in reality they’re willing to pay $50 and you just needed to talk to them direct to find that out.
This is why Anthony invests time and effort into going as high up as speaking direct to the CEO of his large clients.
Very smart dude.
I love how he is scaling his affiliate marketing business
Anthony explains how he loves to get to know the customers of his clients first hand. For example he once didn’t pay his credit cards off for months to see what happens when collectors come.
So that he could put himself in the shoes of his customer and understand their mindset.
This would then allow him to create ads/content that would resonate with this customer base. Plus he’d know what channels are most effective for reaching them.
Sound a bit similar to the whole startup ‘product market fit’ process? To me it DEFINITELY does.
This approach has enabled him to scale his affiliate marketing biz massively. And his goal is to seen become a $1 billion dollar revenue business.
He will no doubt get there.
He uses old people that he finds on Craigslist to make his content
So I really loved his example that he gave in the interview of how he finds people to become his ‘microinfluencers’ in the content that he pushes out to get traffic.
His aim is to always to use ‘true UGC’. Meaning an actual customer talks about their actual use of the product and how it benefitted them.
He mentioned that often he’ll run a listing on Craigslist for the problem that his client aims to solve for. For example back pain.
He’ll find people that purchased a specific chair for their back pain and who it has helped. This way they can talk authentically about the product benefits.
He’ll ask them to capture themselves talking about it for a few minutes on their own phone, and then his team will edit it. And boom.. they’ll potentially push hundreds of thousands of ad dollars to get that out in front of consumer.
No expensive photo shoots or agencies.
Just real customers with real stories.
If you wanna get good at Affiliate Marketing… you need to watch some of his stuff.