From $16.75 to $182: What Changed

For almost three years, my total earnings from affiliate marketing were $16.75.

Two or three customers. One small commission. That’s it.

I’ve written about this before — the daily TikTok videos, the weekly emails, the SEO I was counting on to eventually bring traffic. Nearly three years of consistent effort, and $16.75 to show for it.

Then, in the middle of a 60-day sprint I’d built around a completely different offer, something happened that I didn’t plan for.

The sale I didn’t see coming

Someone found this blog. Not a TikTok video. Not an email. This blog, which I’d mostly stopped updating while I focused my time on daily video content and a three-times-a-week email campaign.

They clicked through, and they joined the Internet Profits Academy — the full membership, not the $7.96 entry-point book I’d spent two months trying to convince people to buy.

My commission: $182.

I didn’t chase that sale. I wasn’t even actively promoting the blog when it happened. It just sat there, doing its job, while my attention was elsewhere.

Why this surprised me

For two months, I ran a deliberate campaign built around a $7.96 book as the lowest-risk entry point I could offer. The logic was sound: reduce the price barrier, build trust incrementally, let people ascend to bigger purchases over time.

Sixty days. Forty-four clicks on that book’s affiliate link. Zero purchases.

Meanwhile, one person read a blog post, made a decision on their own timeline, and went straight to the full membership — no book, no upsell sequence, no five-email nurture campaign from me.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about funnels the way I think about circuits: trace the signal, find where it drops, fix the mismatch. This sale doesn’t fit neatly into that model, and I want to be honest about that rather than force an explanation that isn’t there yet.

What I think actually happened

My best guess, and it is a guess: the blog reaches people at a different point in their decision-making than TikTok or a cold email does. Someone searching for information and landing on a blog post has usually already decided they’re looking for something. They’re not being interrupted mid-scroll. They’re reading with intent.

That’s a fundamentally different kind of attention than a 30-second video gets, even a good one.

It doesn’t mean TikTok or email don’t work. It means they might be doing a different job in the funnel than I assumed — building familiarity and trust over time, while a channel like the blog is where the actual decision gets made once that trust exists.

What changes now

Dean Holland recently opened a free tier of the Internet Profits Academy — no cost to join, no card required. That changes the math on all of this.

If the barrier was never really the $7.96, but the friction of asking someone to make any financial decision before they trusted me, then removing the price entirely should tell me something important. I’m running a 21-day test right now to find out: does a free entry point convert differently than a low-cost one did?

I’m also doing something I probably should have kept doing all along: giving this blog real attention again, instead of treating it as a weekend afterthought.

I’ll share what the test shows, numbers included, whether the picture is good or not. That’s been the whole point of building this in public since day one.

If you want to see what the free tier actually looks like, start here.