You’re Doing Affiliate Marketing Wrong.

Nine out of ten affiliates earn almost nothing. I want to talk about how you end up being the one who doesn't.

Martin had 720 followers when he had his first $4,000 month. Sit with that number for a second — 720. No audience to speak of, no history in affiliate marketing, nothing you'd look at and call an advantage. What he did have was a niche, a product that genuinely solved something, and enough stubbornness to keep posting while absolutely nothing appeared to be happening.

I want to walk through how that happens, and why most people standing in the exact same spot never get anywhere near it.

A lot of people are watching trading content right now thinking: I want to make money off this. Fine. Make money how? Because when I ask that question, most of them can't answer it. What is it you think you're actually doing?

Here's the usual version. Sign up to some random affiliate programme, stick a link in the bio, post twice, hear crickets, decide affiliate marketing doesn't work, quit. And look, I understand the frustration. But you didn't do affiliate marketing. You posted a link twice. That's not a business. That's a Tuesday.

The wrong version of this

You've seen the videos. "How I make ten grand a month from my phone." Villa in the background, laptop balanced on a sunbed, and what's actually for sale is a lifestyle with an affiliate link stapled to it — no product knowledge underneath, no real relationship with the audience. Vibes and a course link.

That's a performance. And the people who copy the performance earn nothing, because they've picked up the talk without doing any of the work sitting behind it.

Then there's the opposite failure. Twelve programmes at once — prop firms, indicators, signals, brokers, supplements, a dropshipping course — all pushed out with the same interchangeable energy. What you've built there is a shopping catalogue. Nobody trusts a catalogue. Nobody buys from one either.

The Connector model — which is what affiliate marketing actually is once you strip the noise off — isn't complicated. You connect an audience to a product. They buy it. You earn a percentage. That's the entire job description.

It only works when three things are true, though. The product has to be genuinely good, good enough that people buy because they actually want it. Your audience has to trust you — and trust is not the same thing as following you; the gap between those two is enormous. And the margin has to be worth your time.

That last one quietly destroys more people than the other two combined.

The average e-commerce affiliate earns around $6 per sale. Six dollars. You spend years building an audience, you put your name behind a product you didn't make, and your reward is six dollars. In trading and fintech, average commission per referral runs $50 to $200 plus. Same effort. Same audience. Same number of posts. Ten to thirty times the commission on each one.

Which is why your niche is the most important decision you'll make as a Connector — and why most people botch it, because they pick products before they've thought for even five minutes about who they're serving.

The reality check nobody gives you

You can't wake up tomorrow, declare yourself a trading affiliate, post a link twice and expect money to show up. Sorry. It doesn't work that way.

Everyone earning serious commission in this niche had a grind phase that nobody saw. They learned the products before they recommended them. They built an audience that genuinely trusted them before they asked anyone to buy a single thing.

Raunit spent months learning the products, networking, putting out useful content — months — before he got to $10k a month in commissions. Felice was in the industry for years, making connections, trying things that went nowhere, before the affiliate operation that now generates millions in sales existed at all. Everyone who's built real income online has a stretch in their history that looked, from the outside, like nothing.

What does the grind phase actually look like here? Posting when nobody's watching. Understanding the products deeply. Earning real trust before you ask for anything.

I started with 400 followers and a bar job in Dublin paying $6 an hour. First commission: $411. Second: $1,356 — and it hovered around that number for six months, which I can tell you feels like a very long time when you're the one living it. But I kept posting, kept paying attention to what my audience responded to, kept building. Twelve months in, the commissions could have replaced three full-time wages. Three years after that it was over $4 million in personal commissions, and the businesses I built in this space had paid out millions more to the affiliates who stuck around.

The early days feel like nothing. The early posts feel pointless. They aren't — they're the most important thing you'll do.

Right now I'm personally sending ten to fifteen DMs a day to set meetings. Me, typing them out (no VA, no clever system). If I'm still doing that at the level I'm at, someone starting from zero can manage one post today.

The volume argument

Volume beats perfection. Every time.

Think about a new chef. Option one: read every cookbook in existence — the Michelin guides, the culinary theory, the nutrition science, all of it. Option two: go and cook four hundred meals. The second chef wins, always, because the four hundredth meal contains mistakes and corrections that no book has ever managed to write down.

I've made over four thousand posts on Instagram. That — honestly, that more than anything — is why I'm here today. Best writer? No. Best camera? Definitely not. I did the volume, and the posts that bombed taught me more than the ones that worked.

Your first hundred posts are going to eat it. Good. That's their job. You're not trying to go viral on post three; you're trying to reach post fifty, because post fifty is always better than post five, and post a hundred is better again.

There's a concept called regression to the mean. Flip a coin and land heads ten times in a row — you're not magic, that's variance. Content behaves the same way. Some posts overperform for no reason you can identify. Some die when you were certain they'd fly. Do it a hundred times and the actual pattern starts to show itself. 365 pieces of feedback is worth more than one perfect post that took a year to make.

And the people earning the most inside this ecosystem right now? They didn't wait until everything was perfect. They started embarrassingly early and just kept going.

The valley of death

This is the most important section of the whole piece.

Map affiliate income across everyone promoting in this space and you get a bell curve shoved hard to the left. Nine out of ten earn almost nothing — coffee money, nothing that changes anyone's life — while the top ten percent take almost everything.

Now the brutal part. Even when you're starting out and doing everything right (posting consistently, building the audience, learning the products), you are still going to hit a stretch where you earn close to nothing. Weeks of it. Possibly months.

That's the valley of death.

Ninety percent of affiliates quit in the valley. Why? Because they had no idea how close they were — not because the model was broken, and certainly not for lack of talent. They couldn't see that the people pulling five figures a month had walked through exactly this same valley and simply kept moving.

Raunit came into our ecosystem with nothing. No affiliate business, no sub-affiliate network. He did the volume, he pushed through the valley, and six months later his network had driven over one million dollars in FunderPro sales. $35,000 in direct commissions, with a thousand a month coming in on top of that.

He isn't exceptional. He did what the model says to do and carried on doing it through the stretch where it felt like nothing was happening.

The curve goes like this: nothing for a while. Close to nothing. Then something shifts — a piece of content breaks through, or the audience that trusts you starts converting — and suddenly the valley becomes $1,000 a month, then $2,000, then a number that genuinely changes your life.

And here's the part almost nobody says out loud. Getting from the ninetieth percentile to the ninety-ninth takes a relatively small extra effort on top of what you're already doing; the distance between okay and exceptional is shorter than the distance between nothing and okay. Most people quit just before the compounding kicks in.

The maths

Let me make it concrete.

An average referral on FunderPro at 20% commission comes out around $50 to $80. Ten referrals a month is $500 to $800. Fifty is $2,500 to $4,000. A hundred is $5,000 to $8,000.

And that's one brand. The LGM ecosystem has seven — FunderPro, TradeLocker, TradesAI, NextTrade, LMB Signals, Hybrid Trader and Bullwaves. One affiliate account. Eight commission opportunities.

NextTrade is our broker. Our team built it — regulated, 150+ assets, spreads from 0.0 — so our affiliates promote it with that context, as something we own rather than a brand we merely partner with.

LMB Signals, Hybrid Trader and Bullwaves pay $1,500 CPA on qualifying sales. One referral. Fifteen hundred dollars.

Martin came into the ecosystem earning $2,000 a month. Ninety days later he was at $4,000, and along the way he'd secured $250,000 in prop firm funding using the system. Same niche as before, same model — he implemented it properly and kept going.

Show me another model where someone with 2,000 followers in the right niche, posting consistently, can realistically build to $3,000 or $4,000 a month within twelve months. With no product to build. Without needing to win a single trade, and without a salary cap. I'll wait.

Where the content actually comes from

The best content in this niche doesn't come out of research. It comes from real people.

Think of three people in your audience right now — people who've messaged you, people who follow you, people you know somewhere around the trading space. Write their names down. Then write down what they're struggling with.

Your best post this week won't be "here's how affiliate marketing works". It'll be something like: I know someone who works a full-time job, trades on the side, never makes consistent money, and has no idea they could be earning from the platform they're already using. That post lands. Why? Because a hundred thousand people are that person.

Your audience's problems are your content. Their frustrations are your hooks, their questions are your titles. Talk about one real person's real problem and you attract everyone who shares it.

One practical thing on research. Go on YouTube, find any creator in this space, open their channel, sort by most popular. What you're looking at is a list of every topic that has already worked for them — validated, for free. Take the format and make it yours, and you end up with a completely different piece of content. (This isn't copying, by the way. A format is not the idea.)

And one line I keep coming back to: build the people, not the subscriber count. A creator with 3,000 followers who genuinely trust them will beat one with 30,000 who don't. Every time. Because a Connector's job was never to accumulate an audience — it's to serve one.

The one thing

The Connector model — building affiliate income in the trading and fintech niche — is the closest thing I've found to a business with a genuinely unlimited ceiling that needs no capital, doesn't require you to win every trade, and compounds the longer you run it.

Over $4 million personally. Millions more paid out to the affiliates in our ecosystem. The brands are live and the commissions are being paid. The model works.

But none of it starts until you post something. Today — not this weekend, not once you've got a few more followers. Today.

Sign up as a free affiliate. Get your link. Post once. That's the only instruction that matters right now.

→ Free affiliate sign-up

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Owen Morton co-founded FunderPro, TradeLocker, TradesAI and NextTrade. Over the last three years he has personally earned over $4 million in affiliate commissions. He runs the Grow More programme — a free system for people building Connector businesses in the trading and fintech space.