You’re Doing Affiliate Marketing Wrong.
Why 9 out of 10 affiliates earn almost nothing, and how to be the one that doesn’t.
Martin had 720 followers when he earned his first $4,000 month.
No big audience. No previous affiliate experience. A niche, a product that actually solved a problem, and the consistency to keep going when nothing was happening.
I want to tell you exactly how that happens and why most people in the same position never get close.
A lot of people are watching trading content right now and thinking: I want to make money from this. And my response is always the same. Make money how, exactly? What is it you think you’re doing?
Because here’s what most of them actually do. They sign up to some random affiliate programme. They put a link in their bio. They post twice. Nothing happens. They decide affiliate marketing doesn’t work and they quit.
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
There’s a whole category of content online (you’ve seen it) the “here’s how I make ten thousand a month from my phone” videos. Shot from a villa. Laptop on a sunbed. A lifestyle being sold with an affiliate link attached. No product knowledge. No genuine audience connection. Just vibes and a course link.
That’s not affiliate marketing. That’s a performance. And the reason most people who copy it earn nothing is because they’re talking the talk without doing the work behind it.
Then there’s the other version. People who sign up to twelve different programmes at once; prop firms, indicators, signals, brokers, supplements, a dropshipping course and post about all of them with the same generic energy. Shopping catalogue. Nobody trusts it. Nobody buys.
The Connector model: what actual affiliate marketing is, isn’t complicated in principle. You connect an audience to a product. They buy. You earn a percentage. That’s the whole job.
But it only works when three things are true.
One: the product is actually good. People buy because they genuinely want it. Two: your audience trusts you. Not follows you. Trusts you. There’s a massive difference. Three: the margin is worth your time.
And this is where most people get quietly destroyed.
The average e-commerce affiliate earns around $6 per sale. Six dollars. Promoting a product you didn’t make, to an audience you spent years building, for six dollars. In the trading and fintech space, average commission per referral is $50 to $200 plus. Same effort. Same audience. Same number of posts. Ten to thirty times the commission.
The niche you’re in is the most important decision you’ll make as a Connector. Most people get it completely wrong because they’re picking products before they’ve thought about who they’re serving.
The Reality Check Nobody Gives You
You cannot wake up tomorrow, decide you’re a trading affiliate, post a link twice, and expect to earn anything. That is not how this works.
The people earning serious commission in this niche had a grind phase that most people never see. They understood the products before they recommended them. They built a real audience that genuinely trusted them before they asked anyone to buy anything.
Raunit spent months learning about the products, networking, sharing valuable content, before making $10k per month in commissions. Felice spent years in the industry, making connections, trying different things, before building an affiliate operation that generates millions in sales. Every person who’s built real income online had a period that looked like nothing from the outside.
In this model, your grind phase looks like this: post when nobody’s watching. Understand the products deeply. Build genuine trust before you ask anyone to buy anything.
I started with 400 followers. A bar job in Dublin. $6 an hour. My first commission was $411. My second was $1,356 and it hovered around that number for six months. But I was posting consistently, learning what my audience responded to, building something real. Twelve months later the commissions could have replaced three full-time wages. Three years after that, over $4 million in personal commissions, and the businesses I built in this space paid out millions more to the affiliates who stuck with it.
The early days feel like nothing. The early posts feel pointless. They’re not. They’re the most important thing you’ll do.
Right now, I’m personally sending ten to fifteen DMs a day to set meetings. Not a VA. Not a system. Me. If I’m doing that at the level I’m at, there’s no excuse for someone starting out not to post once today.
The Volume Argument
Volume beats perfection. Every time. Without exception.
Think of it like a new chef. You can read every cookbook in the world … Michelin guides, culinary theory, nutrition science … or you can go and cook four hundred meals. The person who cooked four hundred meals is always a better chef than the person who read four hundred books. Because the mistakes teach you things the books don’t have.
I’ve made over four thousand posts on Instagram. That’s why I’m here today. Not because I’m the best writer. Not because I had the best camera. Because I did the volume. I learned more from the posts that bombed than from the ones that worked.
Your first hundred posts are going to eat it. Good. They’re supposed to. That’s what they’re for. You’re not trying to go viral on post three. You’re trying to get to post fifty. Post fifty is always better than post five. Post a hundred is always better than post fifty.
There’s a concept called regression to the mean. If you flip a coin and it lands heads ten times in a row, that doesn’t mean you’re magic, it’s variance. Same thing with content. Sometimes you’ll overperform. Sometimes you’ll underperform. Do it a hundred times and you start seeing the actual pattern. 365 pieces of feedback is worth more than one perfect post that took a year to make.
The people earning the most inside this ecosystem right now are not the ones who waited until everything was perfect. They’re the ones who started embarrassingly early and just kept going.
The Valley of Death
This is the most important thing in this entire piece.
If you mapped affiliate income across everyone promoting in this space, it would look like a bell curve weighted heavily to the left. The vast majority (nine out of ten) earn almost nothing. Coffee money. Nothing that changes their life. The top ten percent earn almost everything.
Here’s the brutal part. If you’re starting out and doing everything right; posting consistently, building your audience, learning the products, you’re still going to go through a period where you’re earning almost nothing. For weeks. Possibly months.
That’s the valley of death.
The valley is where ninety percent of affiliates quit. Not because the model is broken. Not because they’re not talented enough. Because they didn’t know how close they were. Because they couldn’t see that the people earning five figures a month had gone through exactly the same valley and just kept moving.
Raunit came into our ecosystem with no affiliate business, no sub-affiliate network, nothing. He did the volume. He pushed through the valley. Six months later, his network had driven over one million dollars in FunderPro sales. He earned $35,000 in direct commissions with a thousand a month coming in on top of that.
He’s not exceptional. He did what the model says to do and kept doing it when it felt like nothing was happening.
The curve looks like this: nothing for a while. Close to nothing. Then something shifts, a piece of content breaks through, an audience that trusts you starts converting and you go from the valley to $1,000 a month. Then $2,000. Then something that feels genuinely life-changing.
Going from the ninetieth percentile to the ninety-ninth is a relatively small additional effort on top of what you’re already doing. The incremental distance from okay to exceptional is smaller than the distance from nothing to okay. Most people quit just before the compound effect kicks in.
The Maths
Let me make this concrete.
Average referral on FunderPro at 20% commission: around $50 to $80. Ten referrals a month: $500 to $800. Fifty referrals: $2,500 to $4,000. A hundred: $5,000 to $8,000.
That’s one brand. In the LGM ecosystem there are 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. Not a brand we partner with, it’s ours. Our affiliates promote it with that context.
LMB Signals, Hybrid Trader, Bullwaves: $1,500 CPA on qualifying sales. One referral. Fifteen hundred dollars.
Martin came into the ecosystem earning $2,000 a month. Ninety days later: $4,000. He also secured $250,000 in prop firm funding using the system. Same niche. 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 in twelve months. Without building a product. Without trading. Without a salary cap.
Where the Content Actually Comes From
The best content in this niche doesn’t come from 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 who are in or around the trading space. Write down their names. Write down what they’re struggling with.
Your best post this week isn’t going to be “here’s how affiliate marketing works.” It’s going to be: this person I know works a full-time job, trades on the side, never makes consistent money, and doesn’t realise they could earn from the platform they’re already using. That post lands. Because there are a hundred thousand people who are that person.
Your audience’s problems are your content. Their frustrations are your hooks. Their questions are your titles. When you talk about a real person’s real problem, you attract everyone who has the same problem.
One practical thing on research. Go on YouTube. Find any creator in this space. Click their channel. Sort by most popular. That’s a list of every topic that’s worked for them, already validated. You’re not copying. You’re taking a format that works and making it yours. Completely different piece of content.
And one line I keep coming back to: build the people, not the subscriber count. The creator with 3,000 followers who genuinely trust them will always outperform the one with 30,000 who don’t. A Connector’s job isn’t 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 real unlimited ceiling that doesn’t require capital, doesn’t require you to win every trade, and compounds over time.
Over $4 million personally. Millions more paid out to the affiliates in our ecosystem. The brands are live, the commissions are being paid, the model works.
But none of it starts until you post something today. Not this weekend. Not when you’ve got more followers. Today.
Sign up as a free affiliate. Get your link. Post once today. That’s the only instruction that matters right now.
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.