Staying ahead in digital marketing involves skills and insights from successful performance marketers. The Champions of Performance Marketing series targets this need.
This series is intended as a guide for both new and experienced marketers, focusing on strategies, technologies, and personal stories that define success in performance marketing, with a special focus on affiliate marketing.
Today, we talk with Joey Babineau, a well known name in affiliate marketing. Joey is a top-level marketer whose career highlights dedication, innovation, and education.
Through Powerhouse Affiliate and Day Job Hacks, Joey has not only succeeded in affiliate marketing but is also committed to helping others achieve similar success.
Interview with Joey Babineau from Powerhouse Affiliate
Enjoy this great interview with Joey Babineau, you will learn many things out of it!
Here is the full interview on Spotify:
Q: How did everything start? Can you share a bit about your affiliate marketing journey and what motivated you to leave a secure government job to pursue this full-time?
Well, actually, it started back in 2002, and that’s when I was completely broke. I was a student, I was $40,000 in debt, and I could barely afford rent. I had two jobs, so it’s not a sappy story; it’s just like a typical break from getting out of university.
At the time, I was like, I need to make some money. So, I did some searching online and found out about affiliate marketing. I also met a guy locally in my town, which is very small, but he was into affiliate marketing, and he told me about it. I was like, wow, that’s cool.
Of course, it started out shady, not knowing how to do it properly and losing accounts. This is typical stuff that new guys do. They try to make money fast, and that’s what I was doing.
Eventually, it took me years of trial and error, and then eventually, in 2015, which is 13 years of trial and error, I hit a breakthrough in paid ads and media buying.
I left a corporate job that I was doing, making $60,000 a year, which at the time was a lot of money for me, and I left that job.
Now, I’m a full-time affiliate marketer and mostly do media buying and content generation online. I monetize my business using multiple revenue streams now. So, that’s my story.
Q: How do you approach content creation to maximize engagement and conversion in affiliate marketing? Where do you get inspired from?
Yeah, one thing I learned quickly in building a business online is that you need to have multiple traffic sources or multiple sources of income. You can’t just rely on Facebook, Google, or anything else because everything is changing in this industry.
Knowing that makes this type of industry also extremely great for content creation because it’s constantly changing. So, I decided a few years ago to create content around this business model and monetize that through a YouTube channel and Powerhouse Affiliate, a training platform I manage and operate.
One thing I learned quickly in building a business online is that you need to have multiple traffic sources or multiple sources of income. You can’t just rely on Facebook, Google, or anything else because everything is changing in this industry.
It’s easy to create content when you’re in a trending category, like “making money online” or “affiliate marketing”. It’s constantly changing, so there’s always new content. But over the years, it’s actually become a lot easier to create content because my strategy is to rely more on data.
As you build a channel, for example, I started Day Job Hacks as a project to show people that it’s possible to create a website and a content marketing revenue stream. Day Job Hacks was the first YouTube channel, and I documented how much money it made. It also provided me with a bunch of data on what people respond to.
I could see by looking at my data that people respond to flashy numbers.
Like, “Hey, $1,000 a month.” It’s instant clicks.
Or if you do a topic like “Best traffic source for something,” it’s just vanilla. 🙂
But if you start throwing in numbers, it’s just the way people respond. So, after a while, you start realizing this, and you start to implement this in your content.
So, if I say $1,000 a month, typically, my mentality is, “I want to show people how I’ve been able to make $1,000 a month, and here’s an example.”
And it might not work now, but it’s an idea that gives people inspiration to say, “Well, hey, that worked before,” or, “This is why he failed. Maybe I can do this differently and make it work for myself.”
One of the things I’ve learned when you create content, is that you’re going to get people who are skeptics and haters. And if you don’t, then you’re not doing your job. 😄
You’re more successful when you have people coming and saying, “Man, you’re terrible.” But if you have one or two out of a hundred, then that means, “Okay, you’re successful.” Because I use those comments to help me shape my content better and improve it, any feedback is good feedback, but negative feedback is like a kick in the ass. I like sometimes to have fun with those people 😄
Q: Where do you see affiliate marketing industry going on? We very often hear that “Affiliate Marketing is dead” and it keeps evolving. What is your opinion?
Well, it’s definitely getting harder for people, and the barrier to entry is definitely getting higher. The reason is that it’s constantly changing, and a lot of people are coming in, just like when I first came in.
They have this idea that it’s fast money, that it’s easy, that it’s like: “Oh, I’m just going to go, I’m going to create a landing page, and I’m going to buy some clicks, and people are going to come, and then they’re going to convert, and I’m going to make a sick ton of money.”
That just doesn’t work for people, and a lot of people are using spy tools, and everybody’s doing the same thing. They have no creativity. So, the people who are succeeding are the ones who know that it takes a lot of time, effort, and work, and it’s psychology.
We’re not just building landing pages; we’re not just getting affiliate offers and getting clicks. We’re psychologically marketing to humans that are getting smarter online.
So, you have to become a smarter marketer, and that is what is making the barrier to entry harder because before, you could just set up any stupid picture and get people to go to this landing page, and they’d be clicking. They don’t even know what they’re clicking. But now, people are getting smarter, and you have to be a better marketer.
Q: You specialize in CPA (Cost per Action) within affiliate marketing. Can you explain why you chose this focus and how you approach it differently than other types of affiliate marketing?
CPA marketing is something that I do, and it’s just basically the payment scheme. It’s no different than any other marketing, really. You’re just getting paid per action versus getting paid a commission on the sale, and you’re not getting a rev share.
Sometimes, you get a rev share, but typically, it’s the payment model and the overarching strategy of getting traffic and convincing that traffic that you have the solution to their problem. It isn’t different in CPA or any other model that you’re getting paid, in my opinion, anyway.
The reason why I chose CPA is it goes back actually to 2014, when trials were a big deal. You could get paid, say, $45 to get somebody to sign up for some type of supplement for $4.95.
So, CPA became a model where you would get paid more as an affiliate than the product, which is what the customer actually pays.
Because these companies know the lifetime value of their customer, and they know how much it costs to get that customer.
So, if you can be smarter as a marketer and come in at a lower cost, then you can make money, obviously. It’s like an arbitrage kind of deal. So, I liked that model because there were just so many opportunities.
It’s getting a little harder, don’t get me wrong, but I like the model because it allows you to really test and try different things on a smaller budget because the conversion rates are a little higher, in my opinion. And you can even get paid sometimes for lead generation, so the customer doesn’t even have to break out their credit card. They just need to enter their information.
Q: Looking forward, how do you view the evolving landscape of affiliate marketing, especially with the rise of AI and increasing competition?
Well, it’s getting harder because of the ad platforms.
The AI will definitely be a big deal, depending on where you get your traffic and whether you’re doing SEO or organic traffic.
I’m even using chatGPT to answer a lot of the questions. I used to go to Google and scour through blog posts to try and find the one paragraph that has the answer I need.
Now, everybody’s doing that, right? So, if I’m doing it and you’re doing it, then obviously, at a massive scale, people are doing that.
We even talked to other SEO people, even on the channel. We had an interview with Craig Campbell SEO. He has a great channel as well. We were talking about that and how SEO traffic is starting to go down. Then we see that it’ll be harder for people to do organic in the future.
But I think YouTube will be a big opportunity there. It’s getting harder in paid traffic because the rules of ad platforms are constantly changing. Every time there’s something working at a mass scale, everybody abuses it. That’s why it’s really hard to find methods publicly online through YouTube.
People search YouTube to try and find the next winning thing, but people are very hesitant to share that because as soon as it’s shared massively, people abuse it.
Every time there’s something working at a mass scale, everybody abuses it.
Some affiliates are using celebrities. They’re using any type of angle they can use to try and get that user to click. Not only are people getting smarter at that, but the ad platforms are also getting smarter. So, it’s getting harder, and of course, the cost per click goes up. These are all things that make it more difficult, but it doesn’t mean it’s not something you can work around. You just have to be in the game to know.
Another challenge for me when doing content on YouTube is the mentality there is of skepticism toward the industry.
When you watch somebody explaining a method, it’s immediate for most people to say, “This is not true. This isn’t working. If it’s working so well, why are you telling everybody?”
It’s true in most cases, but for many people, creating content on YouTube is another revenue stream. It’s just a fact of the matter. If you’re building a business online, you should have multiple revenue streams. It doesn’t have to be YouTube or one specific thing, but multiple channels should come together to create a longer-lasting business.
Q: Could you share some insights on creating high-converting landing pages and the common mistakes to avoid? Some cheatsheet to create a new campaign?
So, I’ve tested hundreds, maybe even thousands of different campaigns over the last few years. Like I said, I will be doing a live, not live, but a case study on my YouTube channel over the next six months about creating a sustainable business.
However, the creation of a campaign starts with really understanding the customer.
And we do have a cheat sheet. It’s called the Customer Avatar Worksheet. It’s on Powerhouse Affiliate and comes with instructions on how to use it. But basically, it tells us a lot of things about our potential customers.
We’re using AI to also establish more about the actual problem that we’re trying to solve for these people.
There are multiple different ways to approach it because there are some people who don’t even know they have a problem, and then there are people who do know they have a problem, and they already know what product they want.
So there’s a whole bunch of different phases.
Example:
It could be testing pain relief for the guy who knows he has back pain, he knows it’s sciatic pain, and he needs this product.
So that means your whole scheme of marketing is different than the guy who just wakes up some morning with a pain in his back, and he doesn’t know why. That’s a whole different campaign with different customers.
The cheat sheet here really is that customer avatar sheet, and then deciding how you want to attack this campaign.
Do you want to go after the bottom of the funnel, where he already knows what he wants? He’s going to search for it right now, and he’s going on Google, and he’s going to search for that product, and if you’re there, then he’s going to potentially buy it from you.
Or are you going for the guy that’s searching for pain? At this point, that could be anyone. It’s a very broad topic. Maybe you can go to Facebook to do that. Maybe you go broad and you say, “I’m going to put my ad in front of everybody that potentially is over the age of 40 that has back pain, and let’s rock and roll.”
So, yeah, it really comes down to knowing your customer.
However, the creation of a campaign starts with really understanding the customer.
Q: What strategies do you recommend for driving traffic to affiliate offers, and how do you assess the effectiveness of each source? What are the best niches that you recommend for new affiliates starting out?
For me, I’ve been trying to pick niches for 20 years, and every time I’ve made the most money, it has been in categories that help me get more money.
So, anything that helps people make more money, whether it’s through gambling, saving money, debt relief, or making money online.
Then you’ve got love and relationships. I’ve made a lot of money in that area. People are struggling with their partners or people protecting their families. They think that their kids are up to no good or whatever it is, right? All this love and emotion and safety is big.
Then there’s health, health and wellness. It’s a no-brainer. Everybody is probably, if you go to Affiliate World, probably 70% of the affiliates there are doing something in Nutra or some kind of supplement or pills for whatever.
So those three are basically the money, and anything you think of, the health and wellness and relationships. You think about anything in relationships can fall into, you know, there’s just so many different sub-niches in that. It’s really an endless game, and there are so many opportunities still out there for people to make money.
And for almost every product out there, even if it doesn’t fall into one of those top three niche categories when we do product promotions, we’re using angles.
And every angle is probably going to fall into like, “Your life will be better. You’ll save time” which time is money or whatever it is.
Everything we’re doing is to try and convince people that this is going to be something that’s going to make their lives better.
Well, that’s one thing that’s made it a lot easier for everybody coming into the game, too: AI is now amazing. One thing I’ve been tweaking and testing is the commands you give it.
Example on how to use AI for different angles in affiliate marketing:
But one thing that is kind of funny is, let’s say you have a guy who has sciatic pain in his back. You tell AI to write a day journal about a person who has sciatic pain.
From when he wakes up in the morning to when he goes to bed, give me a journal entry of this guy.
And then it just talks about everything he does throughout the day and all the things that this sciatic pain is causing problems with. And it just gives you, and then you say to AI: “Now give me 20 ad angles that’ll address all these.”
It’s just like, wow! Before you’d have to sit there and think about it and do research. And now it’s just super easy.
And now, with AI, creating content and ads is becoming easier; it’s amazing how it can generate numerous angles on its own, making our jobs less about hard graft and more about smart strategy.
Q: Can you share more about Powerhouse Affiliate and what inspired you to start this platform?
Powerhouse Affiliate started back in 2013. The reason why I started it was because I saw a gap in the market for a training platform that was actually teaching people how to do affiliate marketing properly.
At the time, there were a lot of scams out there, a lot of people promising overnight riches and all that kind of stuff.
I wanted to create a platform that actually taught people the real strategies and the real methods and gave them the tools and resources they needed to succeed. So that’s why I started Powerhouse Affiliate.
And over the years, it’s grown into a really great community of like-minded individuals who are all working towards the same goal of building successful affiliate marketing businesses.
We offer a complete training program that covers everything from beginner to advanced strategies. We have video tutorials, case studies, live webinars, and a supportive community where members can ask questions and get help from experienced affiliates.
So, it’s really a one-stop shop for anyone looking to learn and succeed in affiliate marketing.
It’s been a great journey, and I’m really proud of what we’ve built with Powerhouse Affiliate.
I started Powerhouse Affiliate back in 2013 because I noticed a lack of legitimate training platforms for affiliate marketing. There were plenty of scams promising quick riches, and I wanted to offer something different—real strategies, methods, and essential resources for success.
Conclusion
This concludes the first part of our interview with Joey Babineau from Powerhouse Affiliate.
We’ve covered the foundational story behind Powerhouse Affiliate and the principles that have guided Joey Babineau’s growth into a leading figure in affiliate marketing training.
As we wrap up this segment, we’re excited to continue our discussion in the next installment.
In the second part of our interview with Joey Babineau, we’ll dive into more detailed questions, exploring the advanced strategies that have helped shape successful affiliate marketers and some top tips for affiliates on different stages.
You can get in touch with Joey here:
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/vaultaffiliates/
- Youtube: Joey Babineau – YouTube
- Facebook: facebook.com/powerhouseaffiliate
- Website: powerhouseaffiliate.com
Be sure to join us again as we uncover more invaluable insights and advice for aspiring marketers. Until then, watch this awesome interview with Joey Babineau.
