Last updated on June 4th, 2026 at 09:08 am
Sarah Thompson grew up watching her parents stress about money. Not in a vague, general way, but in the specific, suffocating way that happens when a coal miner gets injured and the paychecks stop. Every decision in her house ran through the same filter: can we afford it? And the answer, more often than not, was no.
She carried that with her into adulthood. She went to college, got a degree, and built a career in physical therapy. She showed up early, got good performance reviews, and did everything she was supposed to do. And still, at the end of the month, there wasn’t much left over. Sure, her mortgage was paid and her family never went hungry. But vacations were a stretch, and any unexpected expense meant recalculating everything.
And that feeling of never quite getting ahead is what pushed her to go looking for something different. She found it, and a few years later she was making six figures from affiliate marketing, while still working her physical therapy job and raising her two children. This is how she got there.
When Saving Isn’t Enough
For a long time, Sarah’s answer to financial stress was to save more. She read Dave Ramsey, budgeted carefully, and held onto every dollar she could. And it worked, up to a point.
But the longer she kept at it, the more she realized that saving had a ceiling. She could cut expenses down to a certain point and then she’d hit a wall. The cost of living kept moving, and her paycheck stayed the same. A tight budget felt manageable in the short term, but as a long-term plan, it wasn’t going to get her family anywhere new.
And physically, the work was wearing on her. Physical therapy is demanding in ways people don’t always consider: lifting patients, staying on your feet all day, absorbing the emotional weight of people who are in pain and scared. She loved the career, but she couldn’t picture doing it until her mid-sixties.
The hours were long, and by the time she got home, she felt like her job had already taken the best parts of her day. Then her kids and her husband got what was left over.
That’s what pushed her toward a different question. Instead of asking how she could spend less, she started asking how she could make more.
Discovering That Passive Income Existed
Sarah had never heard of passive income until about five years ago. She knew how to work hard and she knew how to save, but the idea that money could come in without trading more hours for it was a brand new concept to her.
When she found it, she wanted to tell everyone. She was so into Rich Dad Poor Dad that she’d wake her husband up at night just to read him passages. It felt almost too good to be true, and the scarcity mindset she’d grown up with made sure she knew it.
But she kept going. She found a $7 training that introduced her to the different ways people make money online, and that eventually led her to a $2,500 coaching program through Legendary Marketer, run by David Sharp. For someone who second-guessed buying a snack at a gas station, $2,500 was a huge leap.
The Investment That Made Her Stomach Hurt
When Sarah approached her husband about the Legendary Marketer program, his reaction surprised her. She was the saver in the relationship, the one who questioned every purchase, so when she said she wanted to spend $2,500 on a business coaching program, he didn’t hesitate. He told her to go for it, that he knew she could do it.
She bought it but immediately felt sick.
Even after clicking confirm, the scarcity mindset was right there with her. She kept thinking: what if I never make that $2,500 back? What if I just spent two months of careful saving on nothing? Her initial goal wasn’t to build a business. It was to make the $2,500 back and just break even. That was the ceiling she set for herself, because it was the only ceiling she could imagine at the time.
She also didn’t tell anyone what she was doing. She didn’t want people raining on her parade before she had a chance to see if it worked. So she stayed quiet, stayed focused, and gave herself 90 days to show some kind of result. Whatever happened inside that window, she wasn’t going to look at what anyone else was doing, and she wasn’t going to quit.
The Dog Offer, the Wrong Emails, and Starting Messy
The Legendary Marketer program came with a training called Decade in a Day, where someone would build out an entire business live on a call every other Friday. Sarah took a day off work to watch the first one. She felt completely lost, so she watched the replay two or three more times until it started to make sense.
Then she picked an offer.
She chose a ClickBank product called Brain Training for Dogs because she didn’t know what she wanted to promote and it was one of the done-for-you options in the program. She started making content, built a funnel around it, and promoted it for about a week and a half before realizing she had absolutely no interest in making dog content. So she pivoted.
She decided to promote what she cared about: passive income. She’d just discovered it, she was blown away by it, and she wanted to talk about it every day. So she created a new social media account and built a new funnel. The only problem was that she forgot to switch the email sequence. People were opting into her new passive income funnel and getting dog training emails.
A follower on TikTok messaged her and said he liked dogs just fine, but he was wondering when she was going to tell him more about passive income. She fixed the workflow, apologized to the five people who’d received the wrong emails, and moved on.
She cried about it for a few minutes, but she knew stopping wasn’t an option. She was inside her 90-day window, she’d spent $2,500, and she wasn’t going to let a wrong email sequence be the reason she quit. What she learned from that mistake ended up being more useful than anything she would have learned from waiting until everything was perfect.
Building an Audience as a Real Person
Sarah built her business on TikTok during what she calls the wild west days of 2021 when the platform was still wide open. She wasn’t doing choreographed videos or following a content strategy. She was just walking around the track at her daughter’s softball practice, holding her phone, and talking about what she’d learned that week.
She told her audience the truth: that she’d thought a funnel was something teenagers used in a cornfield on a Saturday night, that she had no idea any of this existed until recently, and that she was figuring it out one step at a time. And people responded because she wasn’t performing. She was just being herself.
She also knew exactly who she was making content for. She wasn’t chasing the audience that dreamed about Lamborghinis and mansions. She was talking to people who wanted to take a vacation without stressing about the budget, who wanted to get crab legs at dinner without feeling guilty, and who just wanted a little breathing room. That specificity is what made her content connect.
Her followers weren’t just watching because she had results. They were watching because they recognized themselves in her. She’d come out of the same scarcity mindset they were still living in, and she was one chapter ahead of them, not ten years ahead, and not operating from some untouchable level of success.
Just one chapter ahead, sharing what she’d just learned, and honest about the parts she hadn’t figured out yet. And on a Saturday evening in June, that honesty paid off in a way she wasn’t expecting.
The Fireworks Moment
Sarah’s family had gone down to the river to watch the town fireworks show, the kind of small-town tradition that doesn’t have cell service. On the way home, she drove to a spot where her phone connected, opened her email, and checked her commissions the way she’d started doing every time she thought about it.
She’d been getting small ones: $2.80 here, $14 there. Enough to keep her checking her inbox more than she used to. So she opened the latest notification expecting another small number.
It said she’d earned $1,000.
She turned to her husband and asked if he thought it was right. He told her he was pretty sure they hadn’t made a typo. She’d made more money that Saturday, a day she hadn’t worked, a day she’d spent watching fireworks by a river, than she made in a full week at physical therapy after taxes.
Less than a week later, another $1,000 commission came in.
That was the moment the scarcity mindset started to lose its grip. Not because the money was life-changing on its own, but because it was proof. Proof that the system worked, that she wasn’t just lucky, and that the 90-day bet she’d made on herself had been worth it. She’d set a goal of breaking even, and now she was running well past it.
So she kept making content and sending emails. And the commissions kept coming.
Sarah’s 7 Steps for Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing
Sarah didn’t plan to create a framework. She started going live on TikTok, walking people through what she was doing, and over time the same seven steps kept showing up. Eventually she named them.
For anyone starting from scratch, this is the sequence she teaches:
- Pick a product. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Sarah started with a dog training offer she had zero passion for. The point is to start, get moving, and learn what you do and don’t want to promote from the experience of doing it.
- Apply to be an affiliate. Once you have a product, you apply to promote it and get approved. Most platforms make this process straightforward.
- Get your link. Your affiliate link is how the company tracks that a sale came from you. You’ll need it before you can start promoting anything.
- Build your system. This means setting up a funnel that captures email addresses. Affiliate marketing isn’t just posting random links online and hoping people click. It’s getting someone’s email address so you can follow up, build trust, and promote multiple products over time. One funnel is enough to get started, and you don’t need a new one for every product you promote. Once someone is on your email list, you can recommend as many offers as you want.
- Create content online. Pick a platform and show up consistently. Sarah recommends one post a day to start, because consistency will carry you further than volume. And be yourself. Pretending to be an expert you’re not is something audiences can sense immediately.
- Send emails. Your email list is the asset that belongs to you. Social media platforms can lock you out or change their algorithm overnight, but your list goes wherever you go. Emailing your subscribers regularly, sharing what you’re learning, solving problems, recommending products you believe in, is how affiliate marketing compounds over time.
- Earn commissions and repeat. When you make a sale, note what worked and keep doing it. When something doesn’t convert, adjust. The whole process is iteration.
The step where most people get stuck, Sarah says, is step one. They wait for the perfect product, niche, and moment. But there is no perfect product at the beginning. There’s only the product that gets you moving, and everything you learn from promoting it.
What Sarah’s Story Teaches
The money Sarah made in her first year wasn’t the result of a perfect plan. It came from picking an offer before she felt ready, making mistakes and fixing them fast, and showing up every day inside a 90-day window she’d committed to.
And that’s probably the most important thing her story teaches. Most people are waiting for the plan to be perfect before they start, waiting to feel confident, waiting to pick the right product, waiting until the timing makes sense. But Sarah didn’t do any of that. She started with a dog offer she didn’t care about, sent the wrong emails to five people, and kept going anyway. And the reason she kept going had a lot to do with where she started.
The scarcity mindset part of her story is one a lot of people relate to more than they’d expect. If you grew up watching your family stress about money, or if you’ve talked yourself out of investing in yourself because the outcome wasn’t guaranteed, then you know exactly how Sarah felt. It’s a pattern that takes real evidence to break. For her, that evidence came from doing the thing. Each small commission, new follower, and email that got a reply slowly replaced the doubt with something tangible.
If any part of her story sounds familiar, you’re probably closer to starting than you think. You don’t need a background in marketing, a big budget, or a product you created yourself. Affiliate marketing is built for people who want to recommend something they believe in and earn a commission when it sells.
To get started, you really only need two things: a product to promote and a way to capture leads and follow up with them. ClickFunnels is how a lot of people build that second part, including people who had never built anything online before.
You can try it free for 14 days before you spend a dollar on it.