Welcome to the second part of the Champion of Performance Marketing interview with Kyle Kosteczka, where he shares his affiliate marketing strategies.
In Part 1, Kyle shared his unconventional path from Fortune 500 accountant to ClickBank’s senior business development manager, revealing which verticals are crushing it and why your email marketing probably isn’t working anymore.
But we barely scratched the surface of effective affiliate marketing strategies.
Part 2 dives into the advanced affiliate marketing strategies that separate six-figure affiliates from those still struggling to break even.
Kyle delves into ClickBank’s internal operations, demonstrates how top vendors successfully attract elite affiliates through proven affiliate marketing strategies, and offers his controversial perspective on why most people are misusing AI.
You’ll discover the tracking affiliate marketing strategies that matter (and which metrics are just vanity), learn why some offers never make it to the marketplace, and find out exactly what it takes to reach ClickBank’s exclusive Platinum and Diamond levels. Plus, Kyle’s prediction about the future of affiliate marketing strategies might change how you think about building your business.
If Part 1 showed you what’s working now, Part 2 reveals how to scale these affiliate marketing strategies sustainably.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Part One of our interview with Kyle.
Check the episode on Spotify.
Or you can watch it on YouTube here!
Q: How easy is it to try ClickBank as a new affiliate? How simple is it for them to start?
Kyle: If you can get through the signup, it’s actually pretty straightforward. But I’m not going to lie, the signup can be a real pain.
We make it challenging because we’re trying to protect everyone on our platform.
Our offer owners, our affiliates, and all our clients want to work with good people doing legitimate business. That’s what we’re shooting for, even though we can’t hit it perfectly 100% of the time.
So, we’re pretty restrictive about who gets in because we’re trying to keep the bad players out. The problem is, right now our system is kind of like using a hammer when we really need a scalpel. Some really great people who absolutely should have accounts still get denied, and that sucks.
If that happens to you, don’t just give up. Contact our support team. And when you’re filling out that application, be as accurate as humanly possible. Don’t try to be clever or game the system – just be honest about everything.
Once you’re in, though, it’s pretty cool. You can go straight to the marketplace and filter specifically for CPA offers. Our marketplace shows you the top-performing offers for affiliates, which is wonderful for beginners because you know these things actually work. You just need to figure out how to drive traffic and create decent ads.
At least you’re not sitting there wondering if the offer will even convert. That guesswork is totally eliminated.
But here’s what I tell new people: “don’t go straight for the very, very top offer. Go for something that’s like mid-top, maybe a little further down the list“.
What you’re looking for is an offer that’s not getting maximum attention. You want something proven but not oversaturated.
Makes sense, right?
It wouldn’t be ranking high if it didn’t work, but if it’s priced a little lower or getting less traffic, you might have less market saturation to deal with. That gives you a bigger window to find success before everyone else piles in.
Here’s a strategy I really love recommending, especially for new affiliates:
Look for offers that used to be at the top but now they’re maybe on page two or sitting a little lower.
If an offer dropped off after a couple of months, it usually means the big traffic sources stopped promoting it. Maybe they hit saturation, or maybe they found something that converted better and moved their budget there. It doesn’t really matter why. What matters is that offer is still solid.
Those offers are actually incredible.
They convert like crazy. If it’s been sliding for about two months, that’s enough time for people to basically forget about it. You know how short attention spans are in this business.
So you can pick it up and promote it again. I really recommend this, especially for new affiliates. You might see massive success because that offer was so proven and so good; it just hasn’t been on people’s radar for a while. You can really take advantage of that gap.
It’s like everyone moved on to the next shiny object, but you’re sitting there with this proven winner that nobody’s paying attention to anymore. That’s where the real money is.
Q: Are all those campaigns in the marketplace listed by their popularity or the traffic they get? As you scroll down, do you see the campaigns that were previously the most popular?
Kyle: What you probably want to do is go and start looking at the mid ones and then look and see, like, “OK, let’s Google that name.”
If there are just tons of Google reviews, it probably means it was a pretty big offer back in the day or some period of time.
However, if the price is slightly lower again, it indicates an opportunity for you.
This approach would be beneficial. Unfortunately, you can’t look at historic numbers in the marketplace, so it’s live, and it’s on a rolling 30 days. That’s why it might be hard to track.
But the thing you can go back and do is look at our top offers videos that the wonderful Michael Lohman does.
However, review those videos and examine the events from four months ago. Who were the individuals featured in those videos, and what has happened to the offers since then?
If you see a drop-off from something that was a top offer from six to four months ago and no longer is a top offer, that spells opportunity for you, especially if it’s been 60 days or more since that offer was considered a top offer.
Q: Is that true, or did I misunderstand that you have somebody testing the offers before they are placed in the marketplace?
Kyle: We don’t have individuals (media buying team) specifically designated to test the offers.
What I mean is that if a product is available in the marketplace, it has likely been tested and proven effective.
What we actually have is a compliance team that reviews every product and tests its functionality. There should be no non-functional products on the marketplace unless someone has intentionally removed them. We don’t do anything like that.
There is not a media buying team testing the offers on different traffic sources.
Some offers are unproven, like, completely. They’ve never seen traffic before on our marketplace. That totally happens. We do not test for that.
We’re not here to say that it’s working. That’s what our marketplace will tell you with the data. It’ll say what’s getting traffic and what’s working.
Q: Did you see something special for those affiliates that run Meta Ads that they do differently from the others that don’t have success?
Kyle: I think the biggest difference isn’t always as much as, like, they did this type of bid cap or they did this type of strategy and they used this type of buying.
That I’ve actually found is so specific to individuals, and there are a lot of ways to win in Meta. There are a lot of different strategies that can potentially work.
The biggest key to success, though, is that you need to test and test frequently. And commit to your chosen strategy.
Understand why it’s working and why it’s not working.
If you just commit and you test often and you just keep testing, that’s the key difference that I see for success in media buying on Meta.
And because again, you can control your costs; even if you’re only spending $20 a day, if that’s all you have, great, spend 20 bucks a day, get that learning, and get that education until you can spend $40 a day, and then you can spend $100 a day.
And you’ll get there and just keep building and building and building.
But that takes testing, determination and commitment to the strategy to understand how it works or not.
We even had a probably double diamond, huge massive media buyer, very, very successful. Again, I keep mentioning the podcast, but his name was Lee Johnson. But he even talked to me like: “Hey, I always hear a lot of stuff. I’ll start doing it. Finally, I don’t get successful. The one I’m most successful at is when I go back to what I know, what I’ve always been doing, and I just optimize and go through the process.”
What is working, and what is not working? How do I get it working? And when he dials back, that’s when success goes again.
That’s what I would tell you with media buying and Meta, and really any media buying: commit to understanding it, and then just keep testing, testing, testing.
Q: You mentioned a lot of testing; they have to do testing. What do you mean like testing offers, testing angles, headlines, and creatives?
Kyle: All of them, every bit of it.
You should be testing different offers, you should be testing different creatives, and you should be testing pre-sell landing pages if you’re doing that. You should be constantly testing new leads.
The other thing too is don’t just do leads you see.
Study successful ads, but don’t copy them; instead, figure out why they work and replicate that. That’s going to really help you a lot, particularly because of the AI and what these networks seem to be doing and one of our coworkers did a really great mention on this. Her name is Ash, a fantastic affiliate manager. I think she posted it on Facebook or Meta.
Anyway, what she’s really talking about is that AI is looking for these trends. It can spot trends.
As a result, it recognizes when multiple advertisers are using the same type of ads and subsequently deprioritizes those ads. This is where AI can really accelerate performance, not replicate it, but it can accelerate because you can just create more variants more often and put your own creative twist on it. But just testing all the things.
There’s nothing not to test in all reality.
Q: Do you have VSLs for the offers at ClickBank or only direct link offers?
Kyle: We have it all. We have quiz funnels. We have VSLs. We have TSLs. We have the ability to direct links. We have, like I said, performance e-commerce pages. We have short form. We have webinars.
There’s really no form of marketing that we don’t have on our platform. So we cover the whole gamut. I think we even have some e-commerce style product pages, too. There’s really nothing that we don’t have on the platform.
There are things we have more of. We have more VSLs than we do TSLs. VSLs are definitely the largest driver because they’re the most effective in direct response. But that is for now. You know that it could always change.
Q: Did you notice that it’s better to have a direct link to the offer or to have a pre-lander?
Kyle: I think there’s a lot of debate around that. I like pre-landers quite a bit. I think they offer more qualifications, and some of the best media buyers I know love them because they know it and get better conversions.
However, you can use video because it engages audiences much more effectively.
If you create a video for your ads that goes directly to the VSL, it can be very effective.
If that’s your game and you know how to do it, don’t touch a pre-sell lander. I just like them (landing pages) more. I think you can optimize off of it differently. It gives you another place to optimize. And if you get good at that, you can templatize them.
And it helps you test more backend offers more frequently and at a faster rate.
Q: What about tracking? Because every affiliate needs good tracking. What best practices do vendors or affiliates need to implement? Do you have any recommendations for vendors and affiliates to implement effective tracking?
Kyle: I am not the person to ask about what tracking software is best. I can say that I think you need a tracker (like CPV Lab) and just need to understand it.
So understand your tracking numbers. This is kind of a big thing. At the end of the day, are you making sales or are you not making sales? That’s the key.
Keep it simple and go from there.
I would even start as simple as “Are you making sales?”
Even if you’re spending a lot to get sales, at least you’re selling something.
I mentioned Tom Woods: he had a really fantastic thought on this in our podcast.
He’s like: “Listen, if you spend $100 and only make $60, that’s great. You just spent $40 to learn.”
And it’s like, okay, that makes sense. It’s all about the education. You’re getting something from that.
And don’t look at your losses as necessarily losses.
Did I make sales? Awesome.
How can I make more? That’s where your analytics come in.
So take the hypothesis, see what the analytics say, but don’t get too caught up in it.
There are so many different metrics you can look at. Starting out, you’re better off simplifying whatever your metrics are.
And sometimes advanced marketing affiliate strategies optimization is just to know if an offer is going to work early on. It’s great for testing and knowing that you can pump up volume fast or at least commit to making the offer work.
I think it’d be great for anybody, but I would say if you’re not making any sales, don’t buy tracking.
Achieve a certain level of success first, and then consider expanding before proceeding. And that’s why I said keep it down to simple numbers.
Did I sell anything? If you’re unable to close a deal, I’m uncertain if using analytics will be beneficial.
Q: What about the vendors? How can vendors attract high-quality affiliates to launch their product?
Kyle: That’s a great question. Learn how to attract the best affiliates.
The number one thing is to test your offer and make sure that it’s good. Treat it like you’re the affiliate when you’re testing it.
I can’t tell you how many times people do not do this. They don’t think they have to. You should.
They should still do it, even if you have strong relationships with affiliates, because that will erode over time.
And if not, you (the vendor) must prove your offer with your own traffic and spend. If you’re not the media buyer, it might be beneficial to consider hiring an agency.
However, you need to prove that your offer has achieved at least 100 sales and demonstrate that you can confidently say: “Yes, this has some level of success.”
That’s how you really start attracting top affiliates.
You need to demonstrate that you are a serious person capable of performing important tasks, such as testing and optimizing your offer. I don’t mean to sound curt when I say this, but I believe it is necessary. If you’re not doing that, you’re not getting great relationships with the best affiliates.
If you have a successful offer, the next step is to focus on collaboration.
You also don’t need the top affiliate in every single program. Sometimes you can get just as much and have a closer relationship with somebody that might be top-ish, but they’re not the top of the top, and it can still drive a lot of revenue.
From there, it’s finding somebody, building a relationship, finding out what they need, and giving things like exclusivity over optimizations that you guys can make together.
Sometimes there’s complete exclusivity. We did a whole episode on talking specifically about that, so I won’t go too in-depth on the different tactics you can do there.
Merely say, “Test your offers, prove that they work,” and then from there, collaborate with them. Find out what the affiliates need to succeed, and see how that aligns with your own needs for success. And that way, you can structure a deal and a setup where both of you guys win once you’ve identified a fantastic affiliate.
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Q: Is it common practice to maintain a very close vendor-affiliate relationship?
Kyle: In fact, many of the top offers on ClickBank right now are not listed in the marketplace because they are private offers, where the offer owner collaborates closely with a very small group of affiliates and does not list them publicly.
And they don’t even list it in the marketplace. So that’s growing in common.
It is becoming more common for vendors to attract high-quality affiliates in this way. And I am not suggesting that you should avoid listing it on the marketplace; however, I believe there are excellent opportunities to establish closer collaborations with affiliates.
If you’re working with a ClickBank representative like me, we don’t necessarily have to start with the marketplace, but if you’re just coming cold, yes, you need the marketplace just to get some semblance of traffic, but then also find a way to be your own affiliate.
If you aren’t being your own affiliate, you’re probably not going to succeed with the best affiliates, regardless of how good your offer is. It’s just going to be really hard.
I would tell you, most people won’t even know your offer is good if you don’t test it yourself.
Q: What you mentioned earlier about platinum? What are the benefits of being platinum and diamond?
Kyle: There are different levels.
- We have a tier called Platinum, which requires an investment of $250,000 or more on our platform.
- We have Platinum Plus, which is a million over.
- Diamond, which is five million.
- And then Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, and you can do the math on that—10 million above.
So it’s how many diamonds can you collect before you’re Thanos and you have all of the Infinity Stones.
However, the most significant benefit of being a Platinum member is that it grants you access to a direct ClickBank representative.
We have thousands of new signups a day, so we can’t directly white-glove manage every single person on our platform. I’d love to, but it’s unrealistic. Once you get to that level, you get management and that unlocks a lot of stuff for you: more data, more features, more care, more access to affiliates, and all of that stuff starts changing for you.
And then the other thing is with those different levels, not only do we send out awards, which are social proof, which is really exciting, but it also gives you access to our Platinum Summit and other events.
We have our Diamond Summit, which is exclusively for those people. The reason that’s so great is that you have proving grounds to say that if you are X level, you can’t even come to this.
Our Platinum Summit is coming up in October, and it’s around the end of October. And it is an amazing event where we basically lock in 150 of the top marketers in our network, which is really the world, and allow them to not only have some content but also some fun, but most importantly, connect with each other.
That is worth its weight in gold. Powerful networking.
The biggest thing that Platinum gives you, in my opinion, is access to the top end of our network and those opportunities.
We have seen people change their lives and businesses by interacting with the platform. And I’ll tell you what, it’s a lot easier to earn your second 250 and your first million than it is to get to the first part.
If you can go and network and meet those people, all of a sudden, a million is going to feel easy to you.
And that’s what we see through those events that really come to life for a lot of our clients.
Q: Is this classification like platinum, diamond, double diamond and so on, only for affiliates or also for vendors?
Kyle: Anyone on our platform, whether a vendor, an affiliate, or a JV broker, can qualify for diamond status or other classifications if they generate large amounts of revenue through our platform.
We even had someone who doesn’t generate revenue on ClickBank, and we gave him a diamond award with that status. His name’s Chris Reeder with Velocity Profits. It’s because his students have generated an insane amount of money on our platform. And it’s legit; we verified it. They really did that.
So he’s a great contributor. We gave him a diamond award, the highest award we could give him, because he’s a diamond-level contributor to our network. There are always things that we look for and do, and it’s not just necessarily affiliate or vendor, but affiliates can be your fastest route to get there for sure.
Q: How about fraud? In our industry, discussing this topic is common. How is ClickBank working against it?
Kyle: Fraud is a huge piece that we try and protect.
Not only do we use services like Kount and a lot of things to essentially keep fraudulent transactions out of the actual transaction when customers are buying, but we also keep fraudulent transactions out that way.
We also, work and have a whole team that tries to keep fraudulent affiliates out. Now, we’re not perfect. Stuff happens.
We’ve had cases where fraudulent sellers or just essentially fraudulent scams have gotten on the platform, and it stinks. It happens to a lot of us, right? But we’re always looking to clean that stuff up.
We’ve been in business for over 25 years in the online space and the gray hat, wild internet world because of the focus that we put on reducing fraud, reducing risk and reducing bad players.
Q: Looking ahead, what trends in affiliate marketing do you see shaping the world in our space?
Kyle: I think one of the big trends, and we talked a little about this, is how to engage in customization.
I think the world became globalized to where we had access to all the information.
We quickly realized we didn’t want that.
And we are now seeing people contract back to actually less information.
They would like to have a more narrow understanding of what the world looks like for them.
And curation is king.
As an affiliate, I would look at how to be more specific and curated at scale when running traffic and ads. And that’s where I think AI really can come into making that a real thing.
Those are trends that I’m seeing. People who are beginning to succeed in this area are achieving much better results than others.
That’s where I’d tell you to focus on that piece. And I think that’d be a fantastic trend.
The other thing I’m going to put out there is I would really focus on creator traffic.
These are people that represent a lot more authority than they used to.
And I say this: OK, I’m an affiliate. Why would I focus on creator traffic?
Well, guess what creators don’t do well: they struggle to monetize effectively because their primary focus is on creating content.
Maybe your affiliate job isn’t going to buy traffic. It’s facilitating offers and sharing revenue or splitting with creators. Be your own creator agency.
Go get like 50 creators and just cycle through different offers that you can provide them with and split the commissions.
They’re used to Rakuten and RevShare, like ShareASale, if they’re doing any affiliate marketing. And that’s why we’re talking 10%, 5%. They might be using Amazon affiliate stuff. So the percentages are very low.
You come with ClickBank offers, and you come to other network offers that are going to pay really, really high commissions and high CPAs and do the work that people don’t want to do, which is curate and manage a group and a bundle of influencers.
I believe that is another trend worth watching. And If you do that, come and talk to me; I’d love to talk to you about supplying you with some offers that will definitely help those creators.
Q: If you had to give one piece of advice to someone starting now in affiliate marketing, what would that be? Like for somebody starting now.
Kyle: I’m going to steal what Francisco had told me that he did, which is give yourself time to fail and learn.
The biggest mistake I see people make is they just give up too fast. They fail and they’re like: “This is just another scam.”
It’s not, but you’re going to fail.
Good, right? Failure’s good. You should feel excited about your failures as long as you learn from each one.
And if the failure changes, that’s awesome; it means you’re progressing.
But give yourself time; it takes time.
I know a lot of ads and courses want to say it’s quick and easy money.
Sometimes it is, but not most of the time, because you have to know what you’re doing, you have to understand the skills, learn the language, and learn all the mechanics.
But give yourself time to learn; let yourself fail. I would recommend that you commit very strongly for at least one year. Give yourself one year where you’re just going to really throw yourself into affiliate marketing.
And at the end of that year, if you’re like: “This sucks, I hate it, I don’t know why I ever did this,” great, you will not be worse off for committing to something for an entire year that you didn’t like or weren’t excellent at. I guarantee you, you will be a better person, and you will learn more about yourself.
The quote we use, which Dustin Poirier got from somebody else and he’s a great fighter in retirement, he said, is like: what’s more important, the carrot at the end of the goal or the end of the journey or the person that you become on the journey?
That is way more important.
That’s what you need to remember when you do any of this stuff: that you will become something more just for taking the journey.
So give yourself some time to actually do it. And remember, that’s more important than the end goal of whatever that might be at the end of that year.
Q: If you could eliminate one problem in affiliate marketing overnight, what would that be? If you see one problem in our space that you would like to solve.
Kyle: I think the one problem I would love to solve, just to go away, is I think the whole idea of stealing people’s creatives.
If we could just wipe that away, just not exist, right? And I’m not saying being inspired. There’s inspired and then there’s theft, right?
They’re two very different things. Inspiration from other people’s marketing is fantastic. Continue to do that.
Stealing people’s marketing and copying and pasting it—please just stop doing that. Even trying to—just don’t rip people off. Understand, be inspired, but just don’t steal. I hate it.
Q: Where can people get in touch with you, Kyle?
Kyle: I’m not really great on social, so please don’t reach out to me on Facebook. I know I’m on there because I have to be. But the best place to get in contact with me is the affiliated @clickbank.com email distribution. I strongly recommend going there.
And then if you have questions, that gives you not only access to me but also to Thomas as well.
So that’s probably the best distribution to reach out.
And I will tell you, Thomas does read those emails and forwards the ones that address me because I don’t even know where that inbox is, which says a lot about my communication. Also, you can always find me on Telegram too. It is a good place to reach out at Kyle Kostechka. Those are probably the best places to reach me.
And they can watch me at Affiliated Podcast, together with Thomas.
The Affiliated Podcast, which you get wherever you get your podcasts and then also on YouTube. I’m always still helping out with ClickBank stuff. I do Instagram lives like once a month for the social channels, too. So that’s the only way you can get access to me on Instagram. I guess I do have an Instagram account, but I don’t log into it.
CONCLUSION
Kyle’s complete interview reveals why most affiliates plateau at mediocre results while others build million-dollar businesses with the same tools and opportunities.
The difference isn’t luck or connections, but it’s understanding how the system actually works through proven affiliate marketing strategies.
His insights on vendor-affiliate relationships expose why the biggest money isn’t found on public marketplaces.
The real partnerships happen behind closed doors, built on proven results and mutual trust using advanced affiliate marketing strategies. That’s not gatekeeping. It’s business reality.
The tracking advice hits hardest: stop drowning in analytics until you can consistently make sales. Kyle’s “spend $40 to learn” mentality from Tom Woods reframes failures as education investments.
Most affiliates quit before they learn enough to succeed with their affiliate marketing strategies.
Looking ahead, Kyle’s vision of creator-affiliate partnerships opens up massive opportunities. While influencers struggle to monetize their audiences effectively, smart affiliates can provide the missing piece: high-converting offers with real commissions through strategic affiliate marketing strategies. It’s arbitrage at its finest.
The fraud prevention discussion reminds us that ClickBank’s 25-year track record isn’t accidental. They’ve survived because they protect both affiliates and customers from bad actors. In an industry full of fly-by-night operations, that stability matters more than most people realize.
Kyle’s final advice about affiliate marketing strategies echoes throughout both parts: give yourself time to fail and learn.
The person you become during that year of committed effort matters more than any single campaign result.
The affiliate marketing game rewards patience, persistence, and pattern recognition. Kyle’s journey from confused accountant to industry insider proves that fresh perspectives often spot opportunities others miss when implementing effective affiliate marketing strategies.
Ready to apply these advanced affiliate marketing strategies? Start with one insight, test it thoroughly, and build from there. TThe marketplace rewards individuals who take action, not those who merely consume content.
To get the complete picture of Kyle’s advanced affiliate marketing strategies expertise, watch the full video interview on our YouTube channel.
PS: if you liked our interview, don’t forget to subscribe on our Youtube and Spotify channels!
Keep in touch, Julia
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
