John Crestani On Affiliate Marketing, Making Money Online & Reading Over 1000 Books | DSH #228

me play devil's advocate real quick.

Wouldn't you make more money just selling your own products rather than do affiliate marketing?

You know, you can totally go out and do that.

But the problem with selling your own products is that it's unproven.

I didn't have experience.

I didn't have special connections and that's what it requires to do that.

Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning to you wherever you are in the world.

I'm your host as always, Sean Kelly, and we're back on the digital social hour today.

Today, I have with me a great guest of you guys today, John Cristani.

He's been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, and all over the news.

Over 500K on YouTube, which is hard to believe.

And you're currently making over 500K a month online, I believe.

Can't wait to dive into that without selling any of your own products, right?

It's pretty crazy.

So what he does is called passive commission streams, which we'll dive into.

He claims anyone watching this can make $200 to $300 per day with a simple business model, even if they don't have business experience or technical skills.

John, I'm super excited to have you today.

Welcome to the show.

Super stoked to be here, man.

Can't wait to dive into your story, man.

I mean, 500K a month, that's pretty crazy.

Most people don't even make that in a year.

Yeah, yeah.

It's been a long journey, but it all kind of started with just,

I wanted freedom.

You know, I was in college and

I looked around me.

I was overlooking the student or the faculty parking lot one day, and what I saw was that all the teachers teaching me were driving, you know, Hondas, Hyundai's, Toyotas.

And I thought to myself, why am I spending my time and my money learning from these people?

And I just got out of class and left and started a little bit of a spiritual journey, took a year off, read a lot of spiritual books, the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita.

And what I, you know, eventually I ran out of money.

Then I was like, shoot, I got to figure out this money thing, but I didn't want to get a job because I kind of saw what that did to people.

I saw just people working that traditional nine to five just, you know, hitting their lives, having unhappy marriages, having, you know, 1.5 children or whatever, mortgage, debt, all this sort of stuff.

And, you know, so I knew the job path wasn't for me.

Right.

And

I ended up reading this book called The Four Hour Work Week.

Classic.

Yeah, yeah, total classic.

And it really flipped my mind in two really key ways.

One thing I learned was that, one, is that don't trade time for money.

And that really flipped my world trying to figure out, you know, how can I make money without spending my time doing it?

And the second thing,

the second thing was that

Really, you know, really, you need passive income streams.

You need need money that comes to you

without you having to necessarily even be awake.

And so I went down this path, you know, but the teacher there didn't have any specifics on how to do this.

Was this college or high school?

This is in college.

I took a year off.

And

so I went down this long path of learning how to do this, and it totally, totally changed everything.

So what was that first sort of business model?

Was it dropshipping or how did you start like initially making money?

Yeah, so I tried e-commerce or I learned a lot about it, but what, you know, I quickly learned that it was just working myself into a customer service job.

You know, I needed a business that I could start, that didn't require special connections, didn't require upfront capital, and didn't require you know, experience running that sort of business model.

And, you know, for e-commerce and dropshipping, you need connections with suppliers.

You had to set up a company.

You had to go through these legal loopholes.

And I didn't really know how to do any of that.

And nor did I want to necessarily have a customer service email or phone number.

That just sounded dreadful.

And that's what was required to even start.

So

I looked into

you know, basically that didn't work out for me.

And I just didn't even know, you know, I didn't know how to set up a company or any of that stuff.

So, yeah, that didn't work out.

So what was that next pivot?

Did you get into affiliate marketing from there?

Yeah.

So, you know, I looked into day trading, you know, I, but that also, you know, I lost money really fast that way.

You know, that took.

hundreds, you know, of hours.

I'm brushing over some of the failures here.

Hundreds of hours of like learning like candlesticks and how to look at candlestick charts the right way and you know all these books and you know reading graphs.

And

then I started trading and I lost money faster than any other business model.

Stocks?

Yeah.

I tried drop shipping and

once again, it just looked like I was working my way into a customer service role and shipping and picking and packing and all this stuff.

So what I, you know, and what I realized at this point was, I don't want to run a business.

You know, I don't want to deal with all that BS.

I don't want to be, you know, hiring employees and, you know, warehousing and logistics.

I didn't want any of that.

I just wanted something that could really just make me money and I didn't have to stress about it each day.

And I needed something that didn't require upfront capital.

And that's interesting.

Yeah.

And that's when I found,

you know, like a different business model.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's dive into that model because that sounds tasty, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's actually an interesting story.

So I was in Hollywood at the Roosevelt Hotel.

I was going to one of these like, you know, marketer meetup type of things.

It was actually a Neil Strauss meetup.

Okay.

And

I bumped into this guy in a bar.

He was kind of infamous around LA.

He was known as a rich jerk.

And, you know,

cars and all this stuff, you know, wealth.

And I asked him, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, at my stage would do this.

And, you know, I said,

how do you do it?

You know, how do you, how do you how do you, you know, how do you,

how can somebody with you know no money no experience and you know like like this no no special connections make money on the internet because you did yeah and uh what he told me was you know very simple business model he told me you know do affiliate marketing he says sell you know sell products online he said sell my products online

and uh he said i'll tell you exactly what to do and you'll spend a dollar and make back two wow and it was a big leap of faith you know i actually didn't do anything for months.

I didn't take action for months.

And finally,

because I didn't believe it, it seemed too good to be true.

But I did it, and it worked.

And I ended up being 23 years old, making over $50,000 a month.

And that guy, I think you may know him, Kelly Felix.

Maybe you don't.

I think I've heard of him.

Okay.

Older online marketer.

And yeah, so that's how that whole thing started.

Yeah, affiliate marketing is fascinating, man, because I've personally paid out affiliates six figures a year.

And I'm talking kids in their 20s that had nothing.

Yeah.

So like, how much did you need to get started?

I actually, I actually,

I actually only spent like about a thousand dollars.

And I saw the money come back.

I

did exactly what the guy said.

I generated leads for, it was some sort of investment company and they closed, you know, and I saw the commissions come in.

You know, I spent $1,000, got them like 10 leads.

On Facebook ads, you spent $1,000?

Google.

Google.

And Google search.

And

it returned back

almost tenfold at that time.

Yeah, I was targeting really specific long-tail keyword searches.

And I still teach people, you know, I teach people to do that now, and it works extremely well.

Nice.

So

is it an effective model long-term affiliate marketing?

So the thing is, affiliate marketing, it's easy

to start.

It's cheap, and it doesn't require any experience.

And what I didn't want to do is work myself into a job because that's what a lot of these other things require you to do.

And my whole goal has always been freedom.

Now, the fact of the matter is

changed everything.

Since ⁇ happened, you know, everybody started buying things online.

Everybody started getting fearful.

And even now, you know, crime is on the rise.

And people are moving out of, you know, out of the city centers where lots of the shopping was.

It's chaos.

And the trend is, all the trends are moving towards people are buying more and more and more online instead of going to traditional stores, which is crazy, right?

We're like 20 some years or 30 some years into the internet.

And it's still, the usage of the internet is still increasing.

So, in fact, now is an even better time than ever before to actually get started in this because

just more people are buying products online and it's become so ingrained in our culture and what's happening in the US is not unique to the US.

This is happening in other countries around the world.

We see

Germany struggling with huge crime waves and immigration and all this other stuff.

But this is all becoming online shopping.

That's where it's going.

The world wants to be connected.

The world wants to be connected.

And so all of this directly benefits what we're doing, which is selling products online.

And what's really fascinating is that some of the biggest companies right now in the world actually are just affiliates.

They don't own any inventory.

They don't sell, they don't have any products or services.

You know, Expedia.com.

They don't own any airlines.

You know, the biggest flight booking site,

biggest airline company in the world, right?

You have cars.com, you know, one of the biggest sellers of cars in the world doesn't own any inventory.

Again, just affiliates.

You know, you have, you know, all these sites, hotels.com, even Uber, you know,

doesn't own any cars.

You know, they don't, you know, most of their people are not, you know, all the drivers, you know, they're just really affiliates making a connection and then making a cut.

So, you know, that's where the opportunity is.

The opportunity is not in creating your own product and doing customer service and shipping and all this stuff.

The opportunity is making connections.

And it's increasing faster because of what's happened in the last few years.

Wow, that's interesting.

So if people watching this want to get involved in affiliate marketing, what are some actionable step-by-step things they could do to get involved?

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

So

first off, you know, and I teach this, and I know we don't have too much time right here, but I teach kind of like what I call my three-step system, which is you need to have the right, you have to have people,

place, and product.

You have to have the right people in the right place and sell them the right product.

You know, you're not going to sell ice to an Eskimo, but you might sell ice somewhere out here in Vegas during the day when it's stupid.

100 degrees out.

Yeah, it's 100 degrees out, right?

So, you know, but if

people need ice, but if you sell in the wrong place.

And what we teach is, you know, first off, we say select the right product.

And that's where 80% of people go wrong, is they find a product, you know, they say, oh, I want to sell, you know, dog toys or, you know, like a notebook or something like that, something they're super familiar with but might not pay out.

Big commissions or recurring commissions.

Those are the two things we look for.

We want big commissions.

We want products that will give us at least $100 in commissions.

And we want products.

And I teach this all to my students and

we pick the products for them.

We want recurring commissions.

We don't want that.

We're creating a customer for this company.

Why not get paid?

Why create the customer then, you know, not make any more money?

Do you get monthly commissions?

We want monthly commissions, of course, because

that's our passive income, right?

That's our passive income.

So we're teaching that, and what we do in the program is we set these things up for our students.

So they don't even have the risk of selecting the wrong products or, you know, stuff like that.

We don't want to leave that up to chance.

Now, the second thing is you need the right people, right?

Once again, I'm not going to sell ice to an Eskimo because, you know, they don't need,

they don't have a need for that.

But I want to find the right targeted people.

Now, here's a little thing.

You know, a lot of people will go on, you know, an affiliate network, find maybe a meditation product.

You know, something like, oh, here's, you know, meditate at home.

You know, here's a little course and audio tapes.

And they say, okay, if I want to earn commissions for this product, I'll put this in front of people searching for meditation on Google.

And that's exactly the wrong way to actually do it.

You know, because what you're getting into is you're going to spend more for keywords like that.

And you're going to not get people who want to buy.

And we have a special keyword strategy.

We go after people asking questions on Google, and we find people, you know, and I go over this more in depth in our training, but we find people who are right there ready to buy.

And it's actually cheaper to get these people, you know, and not cheap.

It just makes you money.

So we want every dollar we spend to come back to us twofold.

And that's how we optimize

all of our own advertising and all of our students.

That's so smart.

I never thought of running ads on questions on Google, but that's such a targeted lead.

It makes sense.

That's where the money is.

So how do you find these winning products or things to offer?

Because that's probably a hard part for most people, right?

Yeah, it is, it is.

And you know what?

If you don't mind, I'll actually,

it's easier if I just show you.

Is it okay if I hook this up to the Wi-Fi and actually screen share on my phone?

Yeah.

Okay.

Once you find the products, how do you start getting your affiliate link out there, getting eyeballs on it?

Sure.

So that's the fun part.

And we have software that helps.

with all of this that

does so so that folks can get started with an internet business you know, a tech business without any technical skills, any experience doing marketing whatsoever.

And also, once again, I think it's going to be a little bit easier if I

share my phone screen, if that's cool.

Let's do it.

Okay, okay, okay.

Sorry, give me a second here.

So in terms of running ads on Facebook and Google to your offer link,

what are the best ways to go about doing that?

Sure, sure.

So great question.

And, you know,

some things people say is, what if I don't want to spend money on advertising?

What if I don't have, you know, well, first off, you know, the alternative is you can post on social media for, for years and years and years.

And you're, you're hugely popular on social media yourself, you know, over 10 million.

You know,

you're the biggest digital marketing podcast in the in the world.

But, you know, it took.

It took time to get there.

I mean, yeah, it did.

Six years, six years.

Six years, at least.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's one way.

And you can do that without spending any money.

But to get your links out that the other way is you buy ads.

You work with Google and you work with Facebook and TikTok and these platforms.

And that's what we teach how to do.

Now,

I could actually show a little bit more information.

I'll just share my phone real quick.

Yeah.

Okay, sure.

So in terms of saturation.

Do these affiliate products get saturated as more and more people sell the same product?

Great question.

Great question.

And

the way we actually go about things is we actually find it's surprising.

So we actually try to find the most saturated products, if that sounds weird.

Yeah?

Yeah.

It does sound weird.

Yeah, yeah.

And this throws a lot of people for a trip because a lot of folks try to find the most unproven products that don't actually sell well.

Have you heard of Joe's Burger Shack?

Joe's Burger Shack, no.

Because it's a one-off.

There's only one of them.

Okay.

And you don't want to start it because that guy's not making a lot of money.

But McDonald's, I'm here in Vegas.

I'm seeing McDonald's, multiple McDonald's on the same block.

Why would somebody open up a McDonald's or a Starbucks on the same block that other folks already have a McDonald's or a Starbucks franchise on?

Yeah, they're everywhere.

But why would they own?

Isn't that block saturated with McDonald's already?

There's already one within a couple hundred feet?

Yeah, technically, but they got enough volume that it doesn't matter, right?

Exactly.

And that's why we focus on going after really big niches.

You know, people within, you know, just like McDonald's, there's demand for hamburgers everywhere.

It's never going to run out.

Even with tens of thousands of McDonald's around the world, even multiple on the same block here in Vegas, people are still buying.

hamburgers.

Okay.

And we focus on really big niches.

And that's part of our trick with selecting products.

We focus on items that everybody wants to buy, that pay us big commissions, and people are going to continually buy over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And that's why we're able to earn big commissions.

That's why it doesn't get saturated.

You know, hamburgers have not gotten saturated for hundreds of years.

Skincare has not got, people have been buying skincare since the

Egyptians time.

Skincare, you'd think it would be saturated by now.

You know, weight loss, you know,

muscle-building supplements,

things to help people relate to each other.

You know, these are things that are innate human desires.

that don't get saturated and people continually buy over and over and over again.

And what we do for our students is we show them the best products that will pay them the most amount of money continually so that they can create passive income streams and keep running those over and over and over again to support their life.

That makes sense.

Let me play devil's advocate real quick.

Wouldn't you make more money just selling your own products rather than do affiliate marketing?

That is totally, you know, you can totally go out and do that.

But the problem with selling your own products is that it's unproven.

You have to have

years of marketing experience.

You have to have employees, customer service, support.

Of course you could create your own burger place, but how do you figure, you'd have to figure out the recipe.

You'd have to hire the people.

You'd have to provide customer service.

You'd have to set up a company.

You have to do all of these things.

And when I was getting started,

Like I never wanted to run a business.

I don't want to run a business.

I still don't.

You have to set up a company and legal shenanigans and all this stuff.

I didn't have any money to set all that stuff up.

I didn't have money to hire people.

I didn't have,

you know, of course you can go out and get investors, but, you know, I didn't have experience.

You know, I didn't have special connections.

And that's what it requires to do that.

And

it's not a good place to start.

Of course, some of my students do.

You know, they...

they start making money.

You know, one of my students, Jordan, he started selling pain relief supplements on the internet.

He went through our course, he went through our mentorship program, and started selling pain relief supplements.

And he decided, I want to start a business.

He was making tens of thousands a month, but he wanted more.

And he said, okay, I can just take this in-house and do it myself.

And he actually earns millions of dollars a month now.

Whoa.

And yeah, he lives on like mission, you know, some like huge, like $12 million mansion.

Michigan Marketing?

He started his own products company, and he ended up selling it for a buttload, moved to Puerto Rico,

took all the earnings there in a low-tax environment, moved back to San Diego, and just

set for life.

So the path people go on,

of course you can create your own products, but the place to start

is not with email lists or all this other stuff.

The place to start is making it as simple as possible.

Just put up links online and make money.

You mentioned mentorship earlier.

Did you have a mentor in all this?

And are you mentoring students right now actively?

Yeah, 100%.

So, you know, I went through years of struggle and pain and frustration and loneliness.

And

I mean, just the frustration was immense trying to figure this out on my own.

I spent four years doing this.

I ended up becoming a medical guinea pig because I didn't want to be a job, so I'd take pills from pharmaceutical companies for money while i would work in the hospital on wi-fi you serious yeah yeah yeah what kind of pills are you taking uh you know uh i half the time they were placebos half the time oh okay i didn't i really look at the

i really look at the things i was just like oh it'll pay me ten thousand dollars for like you know three weeks of sitting in a hospital like i'm like chill i have wi-fi and there's like cute nurses okay um yeah you know they have xbox in there you're hanging with a bunch of other guys usually sign me up

And,

but

where was I going with?

Oh, yeah, you said I have a mentorship.

So, you know, I went through all this pain and struggle, and it was awful.

What I ended up doing, you know, until I found a mentor, and I always needed something step by step by step.

I needed to see the computer screen.

And when I met this mentor, the rich jerk, that was my mentor.

And when I followed his advice, I started, I went.

It took four years of nothing, and I started making money within a month or two.

Wow.

So what we do is we teach students.

We have, you know, I wanted to give people back something that I never had, you know, that I want to take that four years of pain and suffering and just really just get rid of that.

And there's, you know, there's really

that four years lost of my life.

I don't wish that on anyone.

That's a lot.

So we want to speed up that process for people.

What we offer in my mentorship program is we have a 14 module video training course.

Each module includes, you know, step by step, we show you where to move your mouse, where to drag, where to drop, where to click,

you know, what to copy, what to paste.

In fact, we, you know, we even have a special program now where we actually set up the passive income stream for you.

We choose the products, we set up your website, we get money, we get checks going into your bank account before you even know what's going on.

And then we teach you how to take over

these passive income streams and manage and grow them yourself.

We also have one-on-one coaching because I remember going through this journey,

I would read these books, but they would never get into those specifics.

And sometimes I had really questions that were, looking back, they were simple answers, but they just didn't go over them in the books.

And so we have one-on-one coaching where you're working with one of my former students who's making over $10,000 a month from affiliate marketing.

So we really, you know, we want to make sure nobody goes through that experience I went through in college where they're,

you know, where they're, you know, learning from people who are idiots and not making money themselves.

You know, they're teaching business and they're, yet they're complaining about how little they earn and they're driving a Hyundai.

You don't like Hyundai's, do you?

Well, nothing wrong with Hyundai.

You Korean?

I used to drive one.

It was my first car in college.

Nothing against Hyundai.

But the point is, if I'm learning how to make money, you know,

I want the person I'm learning from to be successful.

You know,

you can't learn.

You know,

you can't learn.

You shouldn't be working out with a fat trainer.

I agree with that.

You know, so, and yet that is what the school system and that's what the system is

for 99.9% 99.9% of people.

And what we're also doing is we have, we set up your website for you, and we have an incredible community.

It's really cool and supportive, but I'd say video training and one-on-one support.

And we have two to three group training webinars.

They're just what we call office hours every week.

So no matter what,

there's never, you know, nobody's ever.

not given the support.

We're extremely, extremely customer and student driven in terms of helping our students.

And I'm really happy to say we have an over 60% success rate with our program in terms of people

making over their first $1,000.

And that's something we're really excited about because, you know,

if you're coachable,

if you're committed, if you're willing to invest in yourself,

and if you have a little bit of free time that you can dedicate to us, we can work with you.

Yeah, that's impressive because I feel like most courses and programs, I'd say 80% of the students probably fail, if I had to guess.

With info products,

it's about 97%.

97?

Yeah, it's about

around there with info products, even high-ticket ones.

Super.

And with higher-ticket coaching programs, yeah, usually it's around the 10 to 20% range.

Why do you think it's so high?

I mean, 10 to 20%

success.

Yeah.

Why do I think the failure rates are so high in other programs?

I purely believe it's because the people are learning from coaches that are hired and haven't actually been successful in the business themselves.

And they're learning from people who haven't actually done the business themselves in many cases, where you have somebody teaching

e-commerce, but they've never actually created a

highly successful and sustainable e-commerce business.

Whereas I've been doing this for, you know, I've done this myself.

I make tons of money doing this.

I've made, you know, I made my first 10 million doing affiliate marketing.

And,

you know, and I still make like $30,000, $40,000 a month just from passively from these recurring products I've set up.

And many other coaches don't have that sort of, you know, they learn it and then they teach it immediately.

They're not actually

making a living off what they're teaching.

Yeah, and I'd say at the end of the day, it also comes just down to caring about people and being a good person.

And I try, you know, I'm very family-oriented.

And

frankly,

you know, that pain and frustration period, I don't want anybody else to go through that.

You know,

I want to help people.

Yeah, that's awesome.

So we're going to have the editors put a button somewhere on the video, right?

And a link in the description.

You go with that.

Yeah, we have an application process.

You may have seen my website somewhere.

It's a little 60-second application.

If anybody's interested in

working with my mentorship program, we only do small groups.

We're very selective.

We need to make sure, and part of the big reason for our success is in our selection process.

Finding folks who are coachable, committed, willing to invest in themselves and have time, and also are willing to be respectful of us.

respect is a really important thing

we actually

hedge for.

So

make sure if your application gets approved, make sure when you schedule a call with one of the people on my team, make sure you actually, you know, you show up on time, you know, you show up five minutes early to the call.

And

make sure you do all the work that they need to make sure you get in and you learn about the program.

We have a lot of information to help people make the decision if they truly want to embark on this journey with

my coaches and whatnot.

Love it.

Yeah.

Guys, this has been great.

Super insightful episode, John.

You've seen his results.

You've seen his clients' results.

Click that button and apply, guys, if you're interested.

And for John, I mean, it was super cool of you to actually show results.

Most guests talk numbers, but it's hard to actually show proof like you did.

So I really appreciate that.

You showed your proof.

You showed your students proof.

Over $4 million in results, it was pretty impressive.

So, yeah, go ahead and click the button and apply, guys, if you're interested.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Peace.