So my goal when I started this video was to create the most in-depth affiliate marketing course on YouTube that's ever existed. So something that's better than people's paid courses. So how do we create a real business strategy with dead simple content and a strategy that will actually make us money, not just for a day, but month after month, year after year?

So in this free course, I'm going to cover a lot of different things, but in a different way. So things that it took me like five years to learn, and things that you wouldn't even think might help you. Kind of like an affiliate marketing MBA video on steroids. So we'll cover why do brands even do affiliate marketing in the first place. We'll cover the fundamentals of affiliate marketing, how to build your audience from zero to make your first affiliate sale, how and when to join affiliate programs and get approved, how to create a simple content plan to generate affiliate income consistently. And finally, I'll tie it all together and tell you exactly what I would do step by step, starting from zero to make my first $10,000 a month.

So I've made over $2 million from affiliate marketing from a single blog without spending any money on ads. And before launching my blog, I was an affiliate manager for a software company. So my job, job was to manage the affiliates, commissions, sign up new affiliates, help other bloggers to promote our software. So I've seen both sides of this. I've seen not so good advice put out on YouTube as well. So I wanted to create something different.

Now, before I dive in, if you want to learn how we're scaling blogging businesses today, make sure to click the link in the description below and uh, watch that totally free video.

So before I dive in, I want to tell you a quick story. And if you hate stories, just go to the next chapter. But this is interesting and it will actually help frame affiliate marketing for you. So it was way back in 2017, and I was working at a small office in Commerce Township, Michigan. Totally random, okay? So I was an e-commerce marketing specialist. I basically did marketing, simple stuff for some headphone and massager brands. Vibrating things for your back, vibrating things for your back.

So my manager at the time mentioned we should do affiliate marketing, right, for our brand. And that was the actual first time in my life I had ever heard that word. You know, Neil Patel, Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income, those guys, guys probably knew, you know, and first heard that word like 15 years before then. But not for me, you know? I'm a little special. Took me six years to graduate college after getting booted out for not going to class. And if you actually look at my college transcripts here from Michigan State, you can see I did take insects, I passed that. I passed wheelchair basketball. But unfortunately, I got a 0.0 in language and society. So for a blogger, it wasn't looking too good for me.

But anyways, my manager kind of showed me a few things. We set up an account for our brand on Commission Junction. So I created some little ads for brands, and I created this affiliate contract. 8% commission rate, 10% if I like you, maybe. And it was e-commerce, so it was mostly finding like coupon sites, like Honey, RetailMeNot, stuff like that. Basically working with the affiliate vultures, you know, the ones that, you know, you're already going to buy something, it's in your shopping cart, but then you go to Google, you search something like Wayfair coupon codes, you put the code in, then they get affiliate commissions on that. So things like that.

But fast forward a few months, and I just didn't really like my job, you know? It was just a weird, quiet office. There were bright overhead lights shining on my head all the time. It was quiet. It was winter in Michigan, and I had to get out of there. So I went to a sensory deprivation tank, you know, one of those pitch black tanks full of body temperature water, basically to help you meditate because it kills all your five senses. So you can't see, your ears can't hear, you know, you're in water, you can't feel anything. You get the drill. So after about 30 minutes of this, hearing weird noises, seeing things that didn't exist, but it's a great tool for ideas and introspection. So I realized I'd been living in Michigan for 30 years, by my family, you know, in the suburbs. I was 30 years old. I decided I needed a big change. So I started applying for jobs all over the country, you know, New York, LA, Florida, Texas. I honestly didn't care. Ultimately, randomly applied for a job in Austin, Texas, uh, and the job was an affiliate marketing manager. So sure, I've officially had two months of experience doing affiliate marketing, but I am a good bullshitter, so why not, right? So it paid 92k, which was beating my current salary of 70k.

So they called me back. I almost didn't do it, you know? I had five interviews on Zoom. Uh, then they gave me an assignment. So I went to bed. I'm like, I don't think I'm going to do this assignment. I didn't want to do the assignment. Now I had to create PDFs, a slide presentation. I had to create an annual affiliate marketing plan for the company. I actually still have that thing here with these basic slides. I gave an overview with a bunch of fancy words. Start with the end in mind. Low tier. I don't know what this even means. But anyways, they seem to like it.

Now, I'll tell you this, if you're still with me here, because this story would not exist, my YouTube channel, the affiliate marketing knowledge, my blog would not exist if I did not do that one assignment and get that job. Because after moving to Texas and taking that job, I was completely out of my element. But I started understanding how this world of affiliate marketing actually worked. So I saw the other side. I saw individual affiliates. I remember there was one affiliate who was a site called E-commerce Platforms. This guy, and you know, there was that S side and others. They were making five figures every single month from just, just one affiliate program. So I was like, holy, like, I'm making decent money here, like a little over $6,000 a month after taxes or something like that. But there's affiliates, a single article here is sitting there and making like 10 times what I'm making in my salary. So that's when the, uh, the first light bulb went off. And you know, I dreamed of that life, but I really never thought it would happen.

So over the course of my time at that job, you know, I worked closely with a guy that I became a really good friend, uh, with. His name is Kevin. He's the SEO manager for the company. So this guy was an SEO genius. I'm basically the cutting edge of SEO, how to rank content on Google back in 2019. And after realizing how much my 9-to-5 job was stressing me out, you know, I decided to take this knowledge, both of affiliate marketing and SEO, and create my own website. Now, I didn't think it would work. So I created the website at my name.com, and I was just going to use it as a digital resume. So something maybe I could help me get a job or, you know, something like that. Maybe write a few articles. I don't, I didn't know what I was doing.

So I wrote a few articles on affiliate marketing, SEO, some random motivational stuff. I actually started to get a little bit of traffic. So I'm talking like a couple dozen hits a day, nothing crazy, right? So I wrote a few affiliate marketing articles. This is the first time I did January is of 2019. So I wrote some on like the best email marketing software, e-commerce platforms, web hosting, the obvious stuff. And then I found a random one on the SEO tool Ahrefs, and that was podcast hosting. To my surprise, the article on podcast hosting started getting a lot of traffic. So I kept updating it, making it better, doing guest posts, sending links to it. And over time, you know, it shot up the charts. And within about six months, I was ranking number one for the keyword best podcast hosting. So like, whatever, dude, who cares? No big deal, right? But let me show you what happened.

So if I look here, April of 2019 is when it started making money. And it was $14, $110, $270. And the revenue kept going up to thousands of dollars, peaking at around $6,000 a month. And it just continues going up. And that's 2023, right? So that was a big change. It was actually life-changing because it gave me the confidence to both write more articles and also to leave my full-time job for good. So I left my job, although I did throw an epic Game of Thrones meeting for the whole marketing team, knowing that I was leaving. Zachary, you've always been a lady. It's time for you to become a sir. Are you ready? This is a real sword. Be careful. Don't move your head. I've had a lot of wine.

So I started the blog in January of 2019. By July, I quit my job for good. Then some crazy stuff started happening. So I found a few other, uh, opportunities at the time with Ahrefs, best webinar software, best online course platforms, and a number of others because I knew the exact on-page SEO strategy. I knew how to rank this content on Google and become number one. Now, between these articles, I was making over $50,000 a month. And it was just going into my PayPal account. And I wasn't spending a dime on ads. It was just all organic traffic. And we can see here, this is one, one affiliate dashboard, just for PartnerStack, 1.1 million started joining in 2020. And then you can see it's just consistently about $30,000 every single month.

Now, what happened next in this affiliate marketing world was interesting. So I ranked these articles between number one and number two on Google for three and a half years. And the commissions are all recurring. So as long as the customers remained customers and paid through my links, money would keep coming in. Now, what was interesting is how all this played out, and I couldn't really have predicted what happened next. So in 2022, I was getting kind of paranoid, you know, there was so much income right on these few articles and these Google rankings. So I had so much money coming in, and I had to diversify. So that's when I talked to my buddy Colin Ship, and we started, he's not my business partner, we decided to start this YouTube channel. So affiliate marketing was my first revenue stream to build all the other ones. And now we have, you know, this YouTube channel, uh, to over $100,000 a month. The blog's running, and all these different opportunities and income streams.

But the unfortunate thing that happened is the competition on blogging kind of caught up with me. I was in a super competitive niche. So I was writing about software, right? I was writing about blogging, affiliate marketing, uh, and all of the software. So like CRM, AI, AI tools, all types of project management software, all that. And at its peak, my blog was making over $100,000 a month, just from this one blog ranking content, right? So then we started writing about all kinds of stuff, finance, crypto, crypto wallets, NFT stuff, and we were making affiliate commissions galore. We were ranking for a lot of different stuff, and it worked, kind of, until it didn't.

What happened was Google's helpful content update. I was focusing on YouTube. I got pushed down the rankings to like page two for some of these super competitive software terms because the software companies themselves actually started writing these articles. So Google podcast hosting now, and you'll see it's pretty much all authoritative brands actually selling podcast hosting, like software companies. So instead of ranking number one, there's like Buzzsprout, others, and I got pushed down the list a little bit. So they didn't go away, they just got pushed down a little bit now. And it makes sense, you know, when you think about it. Should AdamEnvy.com be outranking Forbes or Shopify for e-commerce platforms, or like HubSpot for CRM software? Probably doesn't make sense in affiliate marketing.

So basically, I ran really wide on my content strategy, software, crypto, finance, and Google updates didn't really understand what my site was about, right? And all of my old backlinks that I had acquired to build my DR, they didn't really matter as much. So although I did build the fastest affiliate marketing blog out there to revenue, I came back down to earth a little bit, which I think is fine. I went a little bit wide on my content. I made a mistake. I didn't really see that mistake coming, and it was partly my fault because I took my eye off the ball a little bit and built this YouTube channel doing all these things. And we're helping a ton of students also succeed. And we're not just teaching old stuff that I did, we're teaching kind of the newest, latest, greatest stuff.

So eyes back on the prize, you know? I jumped back into the blog just a few months ago, and traffic's already rebounding. However, with all of this said, because of the recurring affiliate commissions, my blog still made me over $1.1 million in 2023, and it's still generating over $50,000 a month like clockwork. So a lot of people preach traffic is the end all be all, but I can confidently say, you know, I make about 10 times more with less traffic. So we have a new team, new website now, new emphasis on what actually works in 2024, which is why I'm creating this video too, because this is different. So a good thing about consistently teaching this is the strategies that we teach our students are not what I did. So don't go into software, probably. It's really competitive, right? Don't go too wide on your content. Find your affiliate marketing physical product niche, build topical authority, and dominate.

So when I think about it, affiliate marketing allowed me to scale this YouTube channel, hire editors, build a combined $300,000 a month business, multiple businesses. But with all that said, affiliate marketing was the most important thing that I learned in my entire life. And I want to condense all of those years it took me to learn this down into one video.

Now, if you actually listened to all of that and made it through the story, I hope I didn't bore you to death. But let's get into the actual strategy. First, in this free course, we're covering affiliate marketing fundamentals. So that is why do affiliates exist in the first place, how it works, and we'll show examples and how you to start thinking about this business model.

First, let's go to Google and I typed in best hiking poles. Random thing, right? Any type of product search including the word best signifies buyer intent because we see Google has sponsored products here, and there's blogs, Gear Lab, Clever Hiker, The New York Times, Outdoor Life, Travel + Leisure, Reddit, and some others, right? So what's interesting is affiliate marketing works by basically ranking on Google for certain keywords related to products. So as a blogger, as an affiliate marketer, you're living between a search and a purchase. So somebody thinks of something, comparatively buys best hiking poles, best laptops, best credit cards. You're appearing in Google search for that with the comparative content. So a site like this has it. They rank the content, and then they have this affiliate link right here, $230 on Amazon. When I click that link, a custom URL like a tracking code goes into the URL, which stores a cookie on my computer that makes it known that this website sent me to Amazon. So if I buy this, they will get a credit for that sale based on the commission rate set by the brand.

So how this works is every brand has slightly different commission rates. They set it themselves. So for example, you can see here, REI has an affiliate program, Dick's Sporting Goods has an affiliate program. Most all, pretty much all major online retailers have affiliate programs. So the question is, why does affiliate marketing even exist in the first place? What's in it for brands, and what's in it for us as affiliate marketers? Well, when you think about it, brands need affiliates because if you're REI and you want to get traffic for hiking boots or something like that, you can pretty much only rank for that once, maybe twice, if you have like an article and a product page. But the other eight to nine results in the top 10 of Google are going to be other sites, right? So how can you dominate the top 10? You need other people to be talking about you, and you can't just ask them to do it. You need to monetarily incentivize other sites to do it.

So there's this world of brands: REI, Dick's Sporting Goods, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon. And there's affiliates, the publishers. Publishers are considered blogs, media sites, like Forbes, New York Times, any small blog is a publisher. So affiliate marketing is usually the best and biggest driver of sales for any brand as far as the marketing efforts go. There's PPC, Facebook ads, affiliate marketing is usually the one that dominates. Also, because they can control the return on investment. So when a brand pays Google PPC at the top right, they're paying for clicks, and they're not guaranteed any sales. So a good return on investment for a brand is like three to one. So they spend, uh, $100 on Google ads or Facebook ads and they get $300 in return. That's a good return because they have ad cost, marketing team, all of that stuff. However, with affiliate marketing, it's usually more like 10 to one return on investment for the brand because they dictate the commission rate, right? You have to make a sale for them. So if you make a sale through an affiliate link and get 10%, they're only paying, you know, on a $100 pair of hiking boots, they just paid $10 to the affiliate for that, right? So it's a much higher ROI investment for the brand.

It's also really a way for an individual like yourself, uh, as an affiliate marketer, to take some of your power back in the marketplace. You find keywords, you rank for it, you can compete with other brands and other bloggers ranking for this stuff, getting clicks, and generating sales. So you're kind of siphoning profits, so to speak, from these big brands by outranking them. So for example, I was outranking, you know, a lot of these sites for podcast hosting, online courses, their main terms. And when you can outrank brands for their own thing, you're going to be siphoning a lot of the people searching for that and getting commissions on it.

So when we think about affiliate links again, they're adding tracking IDs and parameters to a URL, and that is custom to you. So they also have a cookie duration. So that means when they store the cookie on the reader's computer, that could credit you for the sale anywhere from 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 60 days, and beyond. Most common, I would say, is 30 days. So if somebody searches for that best hiking boots, they click on it, they go to REI, they don't buy, that cookie is still stored on their computer, and you could get credit for that affiliate sale like 29 days later, right? If it's a 30-day cookie duration. So it's not just they don't have to buy right away. Amazon's pretty much right away, or check, you know, keep, keep things in the cart, keep the browser open, kind of stuff. I don't know exactly, but there's a cookie duration as well, which is interesting.

Another distinction here is affiliate programs versus affiliate networks. So affiliate programs and networks, it's kind of the same thing, but just different. So brands can create their own affiliate program, or they can join an affiliate network. So for example, somebody like, you know, Nike could have their own affiliate program. They could use their own software like Refersion or one of these other ones to have their own login experience somewhere at Nike.com. The affiliates log in to Nike.com, they see their clicks, commissions, sales, they put in their PayPal account, they see all that data somewhere in, you know, one area from Nike, right? If Nike joins an affiliate network, now they're in this big marketplace. So an affiliate network is like a marketplace where all brands are in. So it's kind of the best of both worlds because if you have an affiliate network like Impact, for example, you could have Nike in there, maybe, and you see them. Affiliates can see them in the marketplace, join the program, add their links, grab all that stuff, and it's easier to manage for the affiliate manager. So I had like BigCommerce, we were in Impact, and it was pretty simple. You would just approve and deny affiliates in there, look at their site, see if it's good, approve, deny, put money in, fund the account, add ads for them, text links, and all of that stuff. But it's very easy.

So to join the program, it's really simple. You either like Google it, find it, and it's either going to be in an affiliate network or just in their own thing, and you fill out the form you need to. It's a numbers game here. So over time, we will be joining a lot of different affiliate programs. This isn't some hack to join ClickBank and do some medical device offer with Facebook ads to make money in five minutes. That's not what this is. We need diversification. We need revenue for a long time. So become familiar with what affiliate networks and affiliate programs are, specifically.

Now, the main components of an affiliate program are going to be: you log in, and there's different things. There's a spot to grab your links. So you can take the link that's unique to you and copy it and paste it into any type of content, right? A social media post, a YouTube description, a blog post, all of that. So you get your links, you put your links into your content, and then in the affiliate software, you can also track performance. So you see clicks and commissions. And then there's going to be a payment methods area where you just add a PayPal account or, you know, a bank account. And usually, as PayPal, you don't need a business necessarily. You can be a sole proprietor, but you do need to pay taxes if you make over $600.

So affiliate marketing, the business model is super simple. You're promoting brands with a link, sending traffic, and getting paid commissions. So average commissions in general are dictated by the brand itself and the type of product it is. So for example, if it's a television that's like $5,000, electronic brands are usually lower, like maybe 3% to 4%, even 2%. Uh, if it's clothing, maybe it's 10%, 8% to 10%. If it's outdoor products, 8% to 10%, pretty standard stuff. If it's software, that could be recurring affiliate commission. So that could mean somebody signs up for a monthly subscription, right? Because software is monthly, you pay every month. Uh, you get every single, you get paid every single month for that person, that one person you sent through that link. So that's the power of the Buzzsprout example I showed you. Typical for that is like 20% starting recurring commission. So for example, you know, if a software is $99 a month, your commission is 20% recurring, you'll probably make around $19.99, $20 a month every single month for that one customer. So it can really stack and add up over time.

And a lot of people ask about the Amazon affiliate program. So yes, the Amazon affiliate commissions suck. It's a good first thing to join because they have like every possible niche in there, and you can add affiliate links in and then swap it out for the actual brand themselves because you might be able to go from like 3% to 8%. And the truth about affiliate marketing is like anyone can do it. Anyone can join an affiliate program. There's not some overlord saying, no, you can't join, right? Usually though, you know, the top 20, 10 to 20% of affiliates make the most money for a brand. So it's really specific, you know, important when you're thinking about a niche and affiliate marketing to really think through this. We'll go through that specifically.

But first, we have to cover. So the affiliate marketing business model is simple. It's the audience generation, the consistent clicks on affiliate links. Say the difficult part, right? Because again, you can just try to blast a Facebook ad or something, but good luck optimizing that and spending your own money to do it and doing it consistently, right? The key is ongoing and consistent clicks on affiliate links because it's a numbers game. So let's cover that.

So to build your affiliate marketing audience, we first have to decide what type of content are we actually going to create. So first, we have to think about, well, how do people actually use the internet, right? In 2024, there's all kinds of ways people use it, but there's like a handful of sites that most people are using. Us think Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Google. You, I probably missed some, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever. But for our example, think about how do people use the internet? Well, there's search platforms like Google. YouTube is a social media plus a search platform. There's social media, Facebook, Instagram. So it's really like, when we're thinking about affiliate marketing and how it fits into the marketing funnel, where does it work best? So typically, we have to think about passive scrolling versus inbound marketing, or what I call inbound marketing versus interruption marketing.

So when we think about inbound marketing, this is people that are actively searching for products and services. Because when we think about the billions of people using the internet, affiliate marketing is easiest when we actually know who that person is and what they're searching. So for a bad example is somebody just passively scrolling on Instagram. They see your account. Are they going to buy through an affiliate link? Probably not as much as a person actively searching on a platform like Google for a product like best laptops under $1,000, right? So that's an important distinction. Inbound marketing works a lot better for affiliate because they're actively, the person out of all the billions of people online are actively actually searching for the product and the type of content that you're, you know, recommending. That's why Instagram is kind of tough for affiliate marketing because people are scrolling through, then they might have to find you, and even if you have an affiliate link on Instagram, they got to click your bio, click the little Linktree or whatever thing, click that little affiliate link thing, get to the company page, check out, click that. There's like 17 clicks along the way, right? Versus what I showed you in the example of best hiking poles. You Google it, you get to this thing, you go to Amazon, you buy it. So it's a lot faster of a process.

When we think about search-driven platforms, uh, to run an affiliate marketing business on, we think about like Facebook or TikTok. It's kind of the same thing. So TikTok affiliate links. TikTok's entire goal is to keep you on TikTok and not click links to get off of TikTok, right? So for our purposes, the main affiliate marketing channels that we will be using would be Google and YouTube. And guess what? They're both, both owned by Alphabet. And if I would bet on, you know, one company to to maintain market share, 90% plus for search or whatever it is, and even when they're, you know, creating this new AI search and all these things, like they're going to be around for a long time. And YouTube, that's where so many people are on. You know, uh, there's something like 999,000 Google searches every second, 8.5 billion, uh, a day, right? And 7% of them every day are new. So that's like 600 million searches every day that are brand new that have never been searched for before. So there isn't really saturation. There's, when we think about affiliate marketing, it's like, everything's saturated and I can't believe it. It's this scarcity mindset, when really, when you think about it, 600 million new searches that have never been done before every day. Come on, there's got to be some opportunity there.

So to confirm, the answer to affiliate marketing and finding an audience is YouTube or Google because they are both search engines. People will be searching for products and they will be the ones likely to actually buy through an affiliate link. So to generate an audience, we have to kind of see first how the affiliate links work. So on YouTube, you search for something or you get recommended a video. So I search like how to build a shed, and we can see in a kind of a broader topic, right? There's a ton of different affiliate links here for different products you might need to build a shed. So these are just put in the YouTube description. That's where affiliate links live on YouTube. So it's helpful content in the form of informational content, which can be broader, like how to build a shed. You might need 10 different things because when we think about that, we go back to search intent. Search intent drives affiliate sales. Things that are broad, how to build a shed. I don't know if they need a, I don't know if they already have a chalk wheel, a rafter square, or pocket tape measure, right? Like, you know, so you have to cover your bases here with that. Whereas if it was something like the best pole saws of 2024, you probably just have one or two affiliate links because you know what they want. But they both work.

And again, with affiliate marketing and blogging, here's like my article on, uh, best online course platforms. We have affiliate links through buttons. So text-based links with a button or just simple text is going to be the main driver of affiliate sales for a blog. So you click on that button, you get to the, you know, actual page, you start your free trial, and then you purchase. Just, that's how software ones work. So with a blog, it is ranking for something, text links going right to the product. With YouTube, it's being seen for something either with search or being recommended the video with, uh, YouTube, or affiliate links in the YouTube description.

So when we're thinking about these search platforms and how people search for things online, it can get pretty confusing, right? Everyone's brain works differently. Everybody searches differently. So what do we actually, what type of content do we create as affiliate marketers to get consistent revenue? Well, we actually can simplify this because there's really only two types of content that you ever would need to create as an affiliate marketer: how-to or informational content, and transactional content. That's the only thing that exists.

So if we think about it that way, it's really simple. For example, if you're on YouTube or you have a blog and you want to get into the fishing niche, well, the only two types of articles you'd ever need to write for the blog would be how to do stuff. So how to cast a line, how to put a worm on, how to tie this type of knot, right? All the different types of informational content. The best, uh, you know, fishing areas in Florida, whatever it is, informational content, right? And then on the other hand, you have all the products. So the best fishing lures, the best rod and reel combos, the best, whatever, right? And there's so many different options there. If you're a golf blogger, how to swing, how to chip, how to putt, all that informational content. The best golf courses in Michigan, whatever. Then you have the products. So you have how to do stuff and the products to do that stuff. You have best golf drivers, irons, putters, sand wedges, all, all of that.

So we know that to get affiliate link clicks and sales, we need an audience. But we also need to know how to do keyword research to actually find things that people are searching for. So to do that, I like the tool Ahrefs. There's plenty of other things like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, other things like that. But we could put in the keyword explorer. Again, let's do the golf example. I've used it before, but it's a really simple one just to showcase this real quick. We'll go to some others. I can put in best golf. Now, that doesn't really make sense. People don't search that way. But if I go to matching terms, I can see all the different things that include best golf plus other words. So right here, there's 34,000 potential articles I could write on golf, right? Like the best shoes, balls, bags, clubs, and all of it. And we can see this is the different metrics that we're looking at to understand the opportunity and can we actually rank for that? You know, this is for blogs and Google specifically. There's other YouTube ones we show you as well. But for this, this is keyword difficulty. So this is a number from 0 to 100 based on how difficult it is to rank. So if this is, you know, a 70, 80, it's going to be red. Low numbers are good in the green. Volume is monthly search volume, so the estimated number of monthly searches on Google for that keyword. Then we have over here, what's interesting is TP, which is traffic potential. And you can see that sometimes this traffic potential number is actually higher than volume. So if you're ranking for best golf shoes, for example, we can click into that one. Not too difficult. We can see who's ranking for it. There's actually a DR 10 site, a non-authoritative blog ranking for this, getting about 3,200 visits a month. GroovyGolf.com. That's really good, showing that there's opportunities everywhere.

But what's interesting is you can see that how it works with keywords too is he's actually ranking not just for best golf shoes, but for 308 keywords for this article because Google's really good at understanding a topic. So the keyword is best golf shoes, but look, like no one searches. When we're thinking about the psychology of search, I don't search the same way as my mom or my grandma or my brother or my neighbor, right? We all search a little bit differently typing things in into Google. So not just go best golf shoes, but it's also ranking, you know, number two for best men's golf shoes, golf shoes 2023, cool spikeless, top rated. So Google's compiling this into one search. So search volume is one thing, but just take all these numbers with a grain of salt. Any SEO tool will give you general numbers. And although it might not be 100% accurate a lot of the time, they might overestimate or underestimate. You got to start somewhere to kind of understand what type of affiliate content we want to create.

So one thing you can do is drop the keyword difficulty down to like two. Like if you're just starting a new site, we want to find the easiest possible stuff to rank for. So for example, best golf shoes for walking is a lot easier than even just golf shoes. But we can see waterproof, disc golf shoes, walking golf shoes, all of that. So we can find that opportunity. We can even do lowest DR. So I want to see, um, for any of these keyword opportunities to rank affiliate content, I want to see in the top five results, there's a low authority, less than 30 DR site. That's another thing you can add to it, makes it even easier. So like something like best women's golf shoes. If we click on that one, we can see the volume is 600 searches a month, the difficulty is easy. Yes, there's going to be some tough sites in there, but then you can see, and this is what we're looking for, the low authority sites that are ranking for that affiliate keyword, like Golf HQ.com of 31 and DuadDel.us with 25.

Let's look at a tough one like best software. And we can see all the different types of software. Now we can see the difficult stuff, right? Antivirus software, tax software. You think about like, does, does your keyword pass the Forbes test? If Forbes writes about it, like, uh, software, business, finance, technology, gadgets, all that stuff, it's going to probably be harder because a lot of media sites will be writing this. And the more time passes, the more competition goes up. So we can see some of these are hard, but there's still even in software, there's opportunities. So let's drop it down to five and see what we can find. So things like best free video editing software. Again, probably cheaper because if people are looking for free stuff, they're less likely to buy something. But, uh, best CRM software for hotels. That's an interesting one, right? So again, it's all about spotting these best opportunities. Best is the seed phrase. Best plus your niche, spot, uh, signifies buyer intent because best is a comparative term. We can do all kinds of different niches in here. Best fishing, tons of different opportunities, 27,000 here. Best kayak, you know, you can do all of these different ones to just showcase how easy a lot of these are. Best fish finder for kayak. It's just like, when you start looking at this, if you don't know how to do this and you, you think affiliate marketing is too hard, you just don't know how many searches are actively done on the internet every year, right? So there's so many different things in every niche. Like you can take something like even, um, best credit cards. Like something super competitive, and then you can probably spot something even with a difficulty of like three, right? Like something easier would be best credit card for young adults, right? Best credit cards for teens, best credit cards for couples. So every single niche has affiliate opportunities. It's just knowing how to find them. And sometimes it can be a little bit more difficult to know what the seed phrase is. So for example, if you're in fitness, you could put in something like best gym, right? Or best fitness, and it might be like fitness tracker, or fitness watches, or like home gym things like that. But you might not know what it is. You might have to put in something like best ab machine, or best machine, and find it that way, right? And find different keywords. Or like, if you're doing power tools, you can't like just put in best power tools because that's, you're not going to get most of the opportunities. But you have to know, uh, what the product is. Best chainsaw, for example. Now you have dozens of articles you could write specific to cordless, battery powered, a sharpener, mini electric, and all of it. So you can find these, and these are articles that you can write.

Now, the important distinction here, when we're creating a YouTube channel or a blog, is that unfortunately, we can't only create these best posts, right? Then we would look kind of like a shady affiliate site, only, hey, they're only recommending products. They don't have any other information on their channel or their website, right? So unfortunately, you can't really do that anymore. You might have been able to get away with it five or eight years ago, but it doesn't work. So to do that, we need informational content to prop up our affiliate posts. So to build a real business around this, we need a content strategy. And like I showed you before, this is really simple to find seed phrases for that informational content. Informational content, besides affiliate marketing, it's not going to convert as well. So for example, I have posts on the best web hosting. People are looking for web hosting. They know I know that they are. If they landed on that, they're much more likely to buy one of those through one of those affiliate links. I tried, uh, I tried a different way. So I have had an article on the best web, uh, business ideas. So for best business ideas, I don't know what type of business they want to start. They could want to start a website, they could want to start a babysitting company, or a pet sitting, or anything, lawn care, right? So I tried adding number one business idea, start a blog, start a website, Bluehost affiliate links, all of that. Doesn't really convert the same way because the search intent is not there.

So the informational stuff, how to do stuff, ideas posts, things in fitness would be like exercises and workouts. If it's food, it's recipes, right? They're not going to buy something through a recipe. They search for chicken soup recipe, they're not going to click an affiliate link to buy a can of Campbell's soup or a piece of raw chicken sent through the mail, which could be an interesting thing. They're just not going to do it. So search intent matters. So the informational stuff, though, the how-to stuff, is an important part of the content strategy because it's actually going to make up the bulk of your content strategy and it gets more traffic. It can make you ad revenue and it can build your email list, looking like an expert in an area, right? You put exit-intent popups on your blog, or you get a ton of YouTube views and subscribers, and you, uh, put a link in the description for your email list, and you send helpful content. So it really positions you as an expert, not just a shady affiliate marketing site.

But to find these seed phrases, it's really simple too. So instead of using the word best, we just use a different variation. So golf, I would just put how to plus golf, and then it's like how to swing a golf club, how to hold a golf club grip, calculate. Again, so many different things here. Or if we're doing this, it could be, you know, um, how to knit something like that, right? How to knit a blanket, scarf, hat, finger knit sweater, all of that. Like, look at how easy a lot of this stuff is. A beanie, right? Now, there's how to plus your niche can help you find this. There's also some niche-dependent ones. So for example, ideas posts. Ideas, that's what people look for in the marketing funnel. So when we think about it, I'll cover the marketing funnel, but ideas is kind of the top of the marketing funnel. I'm just looking for some general ideas. I don't want to buy anything. But that's where a lot of traffic. Look at how many searches there are for like dinner ideas, 422,000 a month, right? A lot higher than something like best chicken soup recipe or something like that. So drawing, tattoo. So we put in ideas. And if you're doing, uh, let's just say design blog or an outdoor backyard thing, you do patio ideas, patio cover ideas, concrete patio ideas, stone patio ideas, cheap patio paver ideas. So ideas posts get a lot of traffic, build up your email list. If you're a blogger, you just put an exit-intent popup with the tool like ConvertKit, boom, they're in your email list. Give them a lead magnet. But they're really good.

So other ones like, you know, workouts. Now, again, when we think about how the world works of search, things that are popular and well-known are going to be more competitive. So like shoulder workouts, probably more competitive. Back workouts, like everyone knows about it, it's probably bodybuilding.com, some fitness sites, all of that. But again, if we drop the difficulty down to three or something low, we find the random things that we would never know to even look for. Cable shoulder workouts, CrossFit open workouts, baseball workouts for pitchers, right? You just start niching down and finding these different things. You can even get a little creative. I mean, just think about like a seed phrase that would generate a lot of searches. So if you're in the music niche, you want to create music content, you could write about the best electric guitars, acoustic guitars, all of that. You could also do, I put one in like how to play on guitar. So you know they're going to fill it in with other things. How to play Sweet Home Alabama on guitar, how to play Stairway to Heaven on guitar, how to play Fast Car on guitar. A little Tracy Chapman for you. You got a fast car.

There's another tool for YouTube, VidIQ. You can do kind of the same thing. It just looks a little different. But you put in like best plus your niche, click the matching terms, and you can find them. Also, like best camping tents, gear, all of these different things. You just put in. It's a little bit better to go broader on YouTube because you can really talk about anything. Uh, winter camping, solo camping. So camping, this is pretty competitive, but you can see the same kind of concept. It's just for YouTube. So you look for best, you look for how-to, you look for all of that. Now, YouTube's a little bit of a different strategy, but, you know, they do have a search engine, so there are a lot of keywords you can find there.

So the goal here is to find a niche that you like. And we'll cover exactly how to find the niche personalized to you. But this is one step of it: finding what people actually search for online, finding things that have affiliate marketing potential, and the math behind it, right? We'll figure that out. But get a simple Google Sheet. Put

Some ideas in there. Copy and paste some keywords in there. Put the difficulty, the volume, stack rank it based on on what you think's interesting, and do a ratio of like 80% informational to 20% transactional.

If you're blogging for YouTube, just create a bunch of video ideas and put that in a spreadsheet. So you'll notice I didn't cover like Pinterest or Twitter or random stuff like that, or TikTok, right? Or Instagram because affiliate marketing at its core is the search-driven thing. So that's what we're going to cover: finding keywords that people search for to make us money organically, so we don't have to spend our own money on ads. To actually, not that we won't cover that shortly, but uh, that's the best way to do it.

So let's talk now about creating your affiliate marketing content. So actually creating the content for YouTube or for Google. Well, we live in this world of algorithms, right? The Google algorithm recommending, you know, the search ranking factors and all of that. The YouTube algorithm, how it's recommending videos and thumbnails and titles and all of that stuff. So unfortunately, the world we live in, the best content isn't always rewarded. It has to be the best content that's also optimized for the algorithm. So for example, if you had like a really amazing YouTube video, uh, that had the best information in a niche, but the thumbnail sucked and no one clicked on it, it wouldn't work. Unfortunately, it just wouldn't work. Same is true of a blog post. You wrote the best possible, most in-depth guide related to something. Doesn't matter, right? You need to know what Google likes to see in order to rank that content and for people to see it.

So we live in this world of algorithms, which are getting smarter. Like Google's getting smarter when it comes to, well, maybe not ranking stuff sometimes, but at least understanding language processing and the words on the page and all of that. But we have to cover the algorithm. So the YouTube algorithm is really simple, right? It's title and thumbnail to get people to click. So the click-through rate, how many people, if they see it on their homepage, are actually going to click on that video. And video retention, so how long they actually stay. So when we think about YouTube, it's an ad-driven platform, right? Longer the video, the more ads that play. The more you get people to stay on YouTube and watch your video longer, the more, um, it might get recommended because more people are watching more ads for your video more than others. So those are the two components of YouTube. It's mainly click-through rate and retention, right? So that's the thumbnail and title and the video itself. So there's ways you can optimize that.

But Google's different. So there's on-page SEO. So where you're putting, where are you putting that keyword in the URL, in the title, throughout the content, how many times, where, how, right? Plus different things like, is it helpful to human readers? Do people actually like it, or is it just a really crappy article? Now, again, we don't have to be good writers to be affiliate marketers because we're assembling content really in the exact same way every single time, and a simple way. And we have plenty of AI tools we can use too. But ultimately for Google, the main ranking factor here is ending the search journey. What that means is they click on your article on the topic, they don't go back and then click another one. So they click yours, they're done. They do a different search or they leave Google completely. That's the ultimate ranking factor. And we can figure out ways to help with that.

But first, I want to introduce you to the content assembly line. So an assembly line process for this affiliate marketing machine is the best way to go. We can't just create one article or one YouTube video and hope that it goes viral. Viral, right? Virality is not a business strategy. I've never made a single viral YouTube video or viral blog post or anything like that. I'm not the crazy rich persona that you see, some young 25-year-old with a million views on YouTube. However, I can say that I probably make a lot more money than them because we have backend systems, strategies, and we actually do real teaching.

So anyways, the blogging content assembly line consists of keyword research. So you just did that, right? You can do that. Do keyword research, find what you're actually going to write. Um, then you create a minimum viable post. So you can't really do this as much on YouTube because you have to create the best possible YouTube video. Um, you can create a minimum viable studio, like a setup where you just turn the lights on, turn the camera on, and you're good to go, right? You script something and you can shoot it. So that's really important there. But for content, we have to have consistent and ongoing content to get consistent and ongoing attention and affiliate link clicks.

The good news with Google and YouTube is you build this backlog. So if it becomes passive over time. Now, I don't like the word passive income, but it can become passive over time because on Google, if you're ranking for something, you're ranking for it, right? For a while, and it just sits there and it gets clicks every single month. Now, it's not totally passive. You do have to update it sometimes. But with YouTube, it's similar. It's not like you just create a YouTube video and it dies off. If it's a keyword-based YouTube video, it could be found in YouTube search for years. So we get like between 350 and 500,000 views on our YouTube channel every month, mostly just from old stuff that people, people are finally finding, right? So YouTube views actually, they don't go like this, it looks just more steady. So you're getting this backlog of content, which means you need a lot of it, which means you need a system to create a lot of it in a simple way that's kind of appeasing the algorithm while making it easy on your life. That's really the simplest way to look at it.

So when we think about what content is, well, it's kind of simple, honestly. Whether it's blogging, YouTube, in informational content, transactional, you're going to make a list. So the world loves lists. I go through my day and I look at a list, what do I have to do today, right? I check things off a list. Well, all content online is pretty much lists. Even this very video, I'm going through a Google Doc that you can't see. I'm kind of looking and framing what do I have to talk about in this order, in these main sections, right? To tell this in the right order, in the right way, so that it's most understandable and helpful to someone who actually sits through it. Um, blog posts are lists. Seven best CRM software. Um, even a how-to guide, how to start a blog, step one, step two, step three. Those are lists. YouTube videos are lists. Blog posts are lists. So you just think in simple lists. And the truth is, people's attention spans are so short that list items often should be pretty short too. So you're not writing some crazy Hemingway-ask long poetic thing about like the perfect way to do something. It's simple, to the point content. And there's AI tools to help you.

So again, we're doing this because we want to make the most progress in the least amount of time. When we think about it, it's like, if I have 10 hours, 20 hours a week, I can spend on this business on the side of my job and all my family, all the other responsibilities, how do I make the most effective use of that time? Well, I'm not going to spend all 20 hours writing the perfect blog post, right? You could do it, but it just won't lead to revenue, which is the entire goal of a business. Instead, you create a system. To create a content assembly line is replicable. You can do it over and over again.

So I know this video is about affiliate marketing and we haven't talked about how to make money with it yet necessarily, but you can't yet because you have to publish the content, index it, and move on. You notice we haven't talked about adding affiliate links into anything yet. It's because we need to get the content to get views and consistency before we have to worry about adding the links in. The good thing is, we're not losing out on revenue, we're just waiting for it to get traffic, then we can add the links in.

So when it comes to a content assembly line method, let's talk about blog posts first. So we have a target keyword. Let's just say it's best webinar software, something that I wrote years ago. Um, this one made a lot of money because it was ranking right when COVID hit and like Zoom was taking off. It was making thousands of dollars, like some days it was making over $1,000 a day. But it's died down. No one really cares as much about this word anymore. So much like keywords, search volume changes, niches change, things come and go, right? Zoom, super competitive and interesting now, but maybe it won't be in 10 years. Anyways.

So when we're thinking about the target keyword in our content assembly line, it's a really simple process. We edit the keyword. Put it goes in the URL, it goes in the title in the form of this, right? You adding words into the title is always a good thing. You have the number, the target keyword, and then what I call search intent trigger words. These are extra words you add to the, and not clickbait, but making it more interesting. Um, so you have an introduction. You have an H2 heading. So an H1 heading is the title, and H2 heading is the first thing. And this is what Google likes to see. They like the H2 in the form of a question. Because if you think about it, if you just wrote an article and it was all paragraph text and it was all just this size, Google wouldn't know what to prioritize or what to show or how to show it in the search results of featured snippets and all that. But when you do it in the right way with H2, H3 headings and paragraph text, it makes it a lot, Google's life a lot easier.

So H2, what is the plus your target keyword. And then you, you can do this bulleted list or not. It really doesn't matter so much. But then I have my list. Number one is an H3 heading. That's because, um, your, your question is an H2. The list items are H3s. Then I have this fancy-looking box here. You don't really need that. There's an affiliate link here. Then you just have your main content. So you have it, features, user experience, I've got some price, say what I like, this like, and a button. But you'll notice number one is the same as number two, which is the same as number three, which is the same as number four. So once you have your format, then the products are all the same. So it's going to be intro, your list of products, conclusion. It's really that simple.

Now, yes, you can, to affiliate articles, optimize them to all hell, right? We can add crazy boxes, pros, cons, tables, we can add things, you know, underneath the main list, like other pictures and whatever are the benefits of using this thing and, and other things. But, you know, that stuff, you can do it later. You don't have to worry about it in the content assembly line process. We don't need to focus on that too much.

So with on-page SEO, we're optimizing the article for this keyword. So we have it in the title and the headings, right? A couple of headings, what is the best, and then maybe what is it? Very simple headings. But then where else do we put it? Well, we use a tool like Surfer SEO. So here's one on learning management systems that I created just as an example. Um, you can see it gives you exactly what to do. So when we're optimizing an affiliate article like this, it tells us all these semantically related keywords. So Surfer SEO gives you 80 semantic keyword ideas to add into the article. What it does is it scans the top 20, 30, 40, I'm not quite sure, articles that are ranking on Google, and it compiles the information into what Google's rewarding. Because if Google's rewarding it, it's probably a good thing. You should look for that as the competition.

This one's pretty long. It's an everything, um, number of headings, number of paragraphs, all of that. And then with these semantic keywords, are interesting when it comes to affiliate marketing. It's really important because Google's natural language processing is getting smarter. They're better to understand words that should be in an article that makes sense and is robust. And they use AI and they're like, okay, and you just can't really think of these keywords on your own without a tool like this. For example, in this one on Learning Management Systems, you know, I wouldn't think about like LMS implementation or partner training or academic learning or these things that can make the article interesting. But you'll see the term Learning Management Systems typically used 24 to 68 times in an article that is roughly 5,700 to 6,600 words. So if, let's just say the article is on average of 6,000 words, and we divide that by somewhere between 24 and 68, I like to stay on like the lower end. And I don't want to over-optimize this. You know, every 200 words you're using the target keyword. That's roughly what people are doing. Um, you definitely want to include it in the introduction somewhere. Your target keyword should be there. And you don't want to over-optimize. You don't want to get like a 90 here necessarily. That actually did work like three, four years ago with affiliate marketing, but now it's like, don't over-optimize. Keep it simple, right? Some of the best, um, content out there that ranks for really competitive stuff in my testing does not have 90. It might be in the 70s. Um, so they're not over-optimizing. With these tools, they're using them as guides to see how long should it generally be, what are some of these random keywords I should add?

So the content L, it's kind of like building a muscle, right? I recommend you do this yourself. You don't use like ChatGPT to write an article and edit everything because it just gets too complicated. Like Surfer SEO does have an AI credits feature where you can like make them, it just writes it automatically in like five minutes for you. But again, we just want to future-proof our affiliate marketing content to not be penalized in the future. I'm not saying it ever will, but I'd rather just have you build the muscle of writing things yourself first, right? Because that's basically how our daily lives are. We work, we send emails, we text, we read books, we read things online. We, the average person reads more now than they ever have in history because we're actually on the internet all the time, right? So text, there's two types of content, text, right? And video. Those are the main two right now. There's also audio, podcasting. We're not covering that. But when it comes to writing, you don't have to be a good writer, but I recommend you kind of build this muscle because you want to go from that blog post took me four hours to now it took me two, to now it took me one, and just keep making it faster and faster. So typically it works by like starting in the middle, then the intro, at the end, maybe, right? So it's just, it's really what's helpful to you.

I also recommend you use a tool like Grammarly. So Grammarly is an interesting one, and I'll cover that real quick. Here's a random one in Grammarly. You paste it in, or you can use the Chrome extension, and it just tells you like what errors are there. Are there spelling, punctuation, weird things that don't make sense? Is it, are the sentences, some of the sentences too long? Things that actually will really help you if you're just starting out writing, can't barely put a sentence together. Again, I failed language class in college. Okay? So we can give you a good score here. I actually recommend you don't get it to 99. It's almost too optimized. Again, you know, I've, I've done some research and looked at some of the top hard health-related affiliate marketing articles that are ranking for things around best fitness things and things that affect your health. They're usually like in the 80s here, and they actually do have some issues and errors because actually that makes it almost seem more human when you have a few errors, which is weird, but that's the world we live in.

So that was blogging. Let's talk about the YouTube content assembly line. So first step of that, again, is keyword and niche research and, uh, video ideation. So for me, like YouTube video ideas are pretty, they come all the time. I don't like sit down and just, this is my hour to come up with ideas. They kind of flow as you're moving through life and thinking about different things. It's easier though when it's like affiliate marketing videos because you're just doing this based on keyword research. You could use VidIQ, and then you're finding best so-and-so in your niche.

And what's the interesting part about YouTube is there are actually a lot more affiliate opportunities in really, really competitive stuff according to Google. So for example, to rank an article on Google for best credit cards, you, it'll never happen. There's NerdWallet, Chase, probably big financial sites. A random blog's not gonna be able to do it. There's too much authority and expertise needed. When you think about the content that can rank on Google, it's things that aren't as risky, right? If you're just starting a blog, you're not going to rank for things that can affect a person's money or health or life. So like, if you want to rank for like, how to get over COVID-19, right? Like that's all going to be Health, Healthline, government sites, CDC, probably not an individual blogger. Same with like knee pain or back pain or medications or supplements or money things related to open a business credit card or things like, like things that affect people's finances or money or health, more difficult to rank for.

However, on YouTube, you can make videos on the best credit cards of 2024, and there is literally way less competition, which is interesting. I've seen videos where it's like the top five, you know, cashback credit cards of 2024, 100,000 views on the video, a couple affiliate links in the description. I don't know how those do specifically, but it looks like a really promising idea. So YouTube's interesting. There's a little bit more opportunity in just randomly everything, whereas blogging, you have to be a little bit more strategic in your keywords.

So with YouTube, though, the content assembly line is really getting the ideas down, putting them in a spreadsheet, and then there's really the stages of creating a video are scripting, shooting, editing. So the longest and most time-consuming part of blogging is the writing. The longest and most time-consuming part of YouTube is can be the editing. However, we're now on this world where it's actually kind of easier because people are sick of flashy, crazy edited videos. They actually like more just real stuff, talking longer, less editing. So, but there's three phases: pre-production of scripting, shooting the video, and editing the video.

So to speed that process up, what I would try to do is like, I have a Google Doc for my scripts. That probably takes a lot of time because it's like, you're planning the video, like planning this video. I have it in Google Doc. I don't want to show it to you because you're going to get spoiler alerts, but it's like 11 pages of stuff, right? Full, full written pages of just ideas and notes. So that took me, I did it, yeah, yesterday. So I mean, a couple hours, it wasn't too bad, but I've done this for a while now. So, uh, that's part of it. Shooting the video is actually easy. You just take it, shoot it. However long the video is, you know, if it's a 15-minute video and you're not used to being on camera, it might take longer. But then you get it to editing. So you can have an editor or someone else do it. But it's just really like blogging and YouTube from the content perspective, it's a little bit of a different discipline. Blogging, you can just sit at your computer, chill, be anywhere and do it. YouTube, you're more like in one location, batching your time.

So how I would prefer to do it is like, I do YouTube four days out of the month. That's be ideal, and then I'm done, right? And then I spend all my other time blogging. That's because I do both, but it's a different kind of discipline. You can batch your YouTube videos, send it off to an editor if you can hire one, or just batch your time on YouTube. And then blogging is more like just whenever I'm free, I'll work on this content assembly line. So it's a little bit different.

Now, when we're actually creating the YouTube content, we need to kind of think about how do we retain people? How do we make it interesting? Well, you either make the video just a lot longer, or you really focus on like the most interesting possible stuff. You always want to frontload the interesting stuff, keep people engaged throughout the content. It's kind of tough. We want to teach stuff, right? Because if we're teaching, we can talk about the best products, we can teach about how to do stuff. So it's a really important distinction on YouTube that you want to teach, not entertain. Not only entertain, hopefully I can entertain a little bit, but it's more on the value of the teaching.

So when it comes to the content assembly line, we covered blogging, YouTube. I want to do a quick little aside, a fun little aside that you might not have thought of or know about, and that is PPC affiliate marketing. So Google pay-per-click affiliate marketing. This form of advertising, which is an entirely different business model. I actually ran into this when I was an affiliate manager in Austin, Texas. There was a company that was generating a ton of sales for the company by doing these PPC comparison charts. They would bid on keywords on Google. It was, they were bidding on like best e-commerce platforms, website builder stuff, and they would send it to a simple landing page, comparison chart of the top five, and they were all affiliate links. It wasn't a long blog post, it was just a chart. And it's an interesting business model. It's a completely different one. It's one I don't really recommend you start with because it can be very expensive. You're going to be spending a lot of money on your own, uh, ads to rank for this stuff. Um, but I want to show you an example.

So an interesting site that we worked with too was Consumers Advocate. So they have all kinds of stuff here. Consumers Advocate dot org. Here's one on like life insurance. So this is all the traffic they got from paid ads. So they, you know, this is an estimate. I'm not going to say they did this, but probably $300,000 on life insurance. So when I search for best life insurance, there's ads, sponsored, right? State Farm, Ethos, Policygenius, best money. I did find, find Consumer Advocate. They're down a little bit because it's probably pretty competitive, right? Life insurance. But then you get here. I'm not going to click on it because that would cost money. I'm, I'm going to be kind to them and I'm going to click on it here. But it shows you how old am I? Oh man, I'm in this one. It's not too bad. Um, my computer always thinks I'm in Chicago. But anyways, and then you can see the simple comparison chart, right? So it's not a full blog post, it's just this. So they're bidding. It's kind of arbitrage where they're bidding on the keyword to rank really high, sending it to a chart, sending it, uh, getting affiliate link clicks that way.

Now, it can work. However, you need to be an insane negotiator for higher rates. I'm talking, you need to talk to the affiliate managers and get them to pay you like five to 10 times what the normal commission rates are because that's the only way it works. The only way it works is if you send a high amount of volume of clicks to them because that's what they want. They don't want to increase commission rates for somebody that's just barely bidding on keywords and making a few sales. They'll increase your commission rates to a much higher number, but you have to talk to them and then you have to generate a lot of sales. So it's an interesting business model, but it's not one that I recommend for beginners because I don't want you out there spending a ton of your own money on ads on a strategy that's tough, unlike maybe some other YouTube channels that recommend you just plop some ad up on Facebook.

All right, so we covered a lot so far. We covered finding opportunities and keywords, creating the content. Let's cover joining affiliate programs and making the first sale. So you have your article, you have your YouTube video, you put it, you post it out to the world. You have a standard procedure for creating content. If you can create one to two blog posts a week, that's pretty much the minimum to enter the game. I recommend you do as many as you can and just learn the process. YouTube, if you can publish one video a week, you're in the game. So start with that. And then this is what we're going to cover.

So joining affiliate programs is really simple. You Google the program, you fill out a form, and they approve you or not. Now, there's usually is a manual person approving these, a human being on the other end saying yes or no. Some are automatic, but not much. I've joined like 300 plus. Mostly they're going to review you. So you put in your name, your email address, your website, maybe a sentence or two about what your site's about or what your YouTube channel is about. So you can kind of let yourself shine a little bit and be honest. You could say, you know, I'm a brand new blogger. I started this website. I'm actually seeing some early traction in your niche related to these keywords. Um, would love to join you. If not, I'd love to talk, blah, blah, blah. So you can make it a little bit more personal that way. Definitely use a domain name email address, not like a Gmail, but like use Google Workspace or something. To, if you have a website at a dot com, create it at that dot com website with Google Workspace. It's like $12 a month to create that, I believe. I'm not totally sure, but you fill this form out, right? You get approved or not.

Then once you're in there, you can take your link. And if you're a blogger, what you would do is you could take it. And if you're, I recommend WordPress, right? I always recommend WordPress as the content management system. You download a plugin called Thirsty Affiliates. It's the one I use. There's also one called Pretty Links. Uh, I like Thirsty Affiliates because you, you click add a new link in the plugin, you paste in that long random string of things, you give it a title. Title, so it'll just be that, only you hit save. You can no-follow the link because affiliate links should be no-follow, and you make sure they open in a new tab. In that plugin, what it does is anytime that you're in the WordPress editor, and right next to where you would insert a link, it adds a little tab button. You click that, you search for the link, it plops it in for you. So it kind of makes it look pretty. It's not going to be like website.com/xq479, all that random stuff. It's more like website.com/go or /recommends, and then slash Bluehost or whatever the company is.

Now, you can always use this for YouTube too. Like I have a, I have a website with Thirsty Affiliates, and I just add the same Thirsty Affiliates link into the YouTube description. So you just add the link into the YouTube description. One interesting thing on YouTube, when we can talk about optimizing them, but like, you could add in a little thing like, "Get 30% off this plan now for Bluehost," then the link, right? So you can add little calls to action in there too.

So when we think about it, affiliate marketing is just a big numbers game, right? So, so we have to know, what are the numbers that we're thinking about here when we're planning our affiliate strategy? Well, there's traffic, there's affiliate link clicks, how many people actually click your affiliate links, and how many people purchase, right? Let's do a quick example here. Let's do an average example. Let's say you have a blog post, it gets 10,000 visits, um, in a month. So of those visitors, about 30% of people will click an affiliate link. Not 100% of your visitors are going to click on one of your affiliate links, unfortunately, right? But we could say 30% is a decently low estimate, a safe estimate. Uh, so that'll be 3,000 affiliate link clicks you just generated. So they clicked your affiliate link, 3,000 people landed on that product page. A good e-commerce conversion rate is 2%. So 60 sales were generated through that affiliate link. 10,000 visits, 60 sales. If the product price is $100, then you got 60 sales times 100 bucks, that's $6,000 in total sales to the brand. 10% commission rate, let's say you make 10% of 6,000, $600 you just made. So $600 from 10,000 visits. I mean, it's not that bad. It's not good though, right? It's like slightly higher than like what you just make with banner ads, maybe double or triple what you'd make with ads, but it's not that great.

But if you had a higher priced product, you can do a lot better. So you can do the same math. 10,000 visitors to an article, uh, 30% clicking affiliate link, 3,000 affiliate link clicks, 2% convert to 60 sales that you generated through your affiliate link. But now, if the product price is $1,000, now you made $60,000 in sales, and you take home $6,000 for that traffic. So now you're making $6,000 on 10,000 visits. Now we're talking here. You're making like 60 cents a reader. These are both possible. So the thing is, it depends on your niche selection, the keywords you're targeting, what you're actually going after, right? The good news about a blog, about a website, and with YouTube is you can have both. You can have kind of the lower quality how-to informational content, and you can have the higher converting affiliate posts.

So when it comes to to the math equation, it's pretty simple. You want to just do some basic back-of-the-napkin math to think about, all right, what's the commission rate for the company and how much do their products cost, right? That's pretty simple. If it's a golf simulator for $5,000, that's going to be worth more than a pair of golf gloves, right? So you do the math. Golf gloves, let's say really nice ones, $50. 10% commission rate, I'd make $5 per sale on golf gloves. Golf simulator, let's say it's $5,000 simulator, 5% commission, you're making $250 a sale. I don't know the math, maybe it's $250. I don't know, I think that's right. $250 a sale. So a big difference, right? A 50 times difference, as a matter of fact. God, I'm good at math. Notice I didn't fail that one in college. But I don't think I took any math classes in college, to be honest. But anyways, um, so the math equation is just broad. Just think about it, you know.

And the things that are more competitive are going to be the things that are searched a lot, are priced a lot, and are popular, right? So there's pockets of opportunity to find. It's going to be mainly for things that are new and emerging, new products, new categories that aren't quite as competitive because timing is that crucial component. Things that are, you know, mid-price point and popular in the niche.

So to optimize the affiliate links, again, YouTube, you can have multiple in the description. So something like this video on the best credit cards. Um, we have here, he has a number of different links to the different Capital One, Chase Sapphire, right? So a lot of different links can be optimized. And then with a blog, you know, you might see a lot of fancy stuff in a blog like perfect, uh, you know, tables and formats and crazy tables and stuff like that. But really, what converts is just like getting the right people, showing some human experience. Like look at this one, the best baby carriers. It's a picture, it's a really cool baby with sunglasses, and then honestly, just like text links to the product. These are just Amazon shortened links, right? So that's what converts too. It's just that, or something simple like, look at this, I found this one on like the best plant-based meal delivery. It's got text, images, number one, Purple Carrot. It's a button, right? So you don't need anything fancy. The key is readability. The key is text size that's readable, line spacing that's readable, images that are helpful, more than this crazily optimized five-column thing with pros and cons. And everyone likes to talk about that nerdy SEO WordPress stuff, but really, it's more about the, the keywords you're targeting, the search intent, and just creating really good human-based content.

So again, the things that convert well in affiliate marketing in these types of articles are the popular, mid-priced products. For example, they're known well, and they just convert better. So as an affiliate, you control the amount of traffic you can get and the amount of affiliate link clicks, and then it stops. And then the brand is then in control of actually converting those affiliate link clicks into customers. You don't really have any say in that. There's little things you can do, you know, adding a call to action sentence before the button, you know, "Click the link below, get 30% off," or whatever the current deal is. Like you can do those things, but it's on the brand to convert. And what tends to convert the best is not the most expensive random thing, but the most popular product.

So for example, if you had an article on the best golf drivers, you wouldn't want to put like the $5,000 one number one, right? It seems like, oh, the math equation, it's a numbers game, right? These are the nuances we have to know. That's why this video is so damn long and I'm losing my voice. But no, the, um, those are the nuances. You put a $5,000 product number one, that's not that well known. It's like, okay, yeah, well the math would work out, I get this traffic, I put that one number one. But what tends to be the case is that super expensive one is not going to convert. Conversion rate is going to be like zero, and you're not going to make any money. So you want to put the popular, mid-price point, entry-level, typically product in the number one position in your affiliate article. So the most well-known brand with the mid-price point product. Because like golf drivers, they can go anywhere from low end to high end, right? So what's in the middle? What's the most popular brand? Those are typically, and that can be the one you like the best, which usually that actually works out when it comes to like making money. It doesn't have to be, oh, only the one that makes me the most money. Well, it's typically the ones that are the most popular and are for beginners and do convert the best are usually the best, and they have affiliate programs because their business is actually running correctly, and you know, they know what they're doing.

So the key though in these articles is covering your bases. So you want to think about every single potential person who could be reading this and make a recommendation for them. So if your article is on, again, this is such an easy example, in this case, the best golf drivers, you would have number one, best overall golf driver, mid-price point, you know, best one. Number two, best luxury or like best advanced, whatever it is, you put an expensive one there. Um, best for lefties, best for beginners, you know, best on a budget. So that could be all the different variations. And then when someone reads that, you've probably ended their search journey because they're not going to go back and search for another one. They feel that you have given them what they wanted, and you have ended it for them. So you covered the bases.

So the goal here is to find the top five most popular brands in your niche and eventually join those programs because the top companies will convert the best. I made this mistake before, for web hosting. I had Bluehost number one, you know, they were converting really well. And then this other brand came in, they said, "We'll pay you three times more per sale." In an article, I like, "Oh, I'll try to put you up in the article." Didn't convert at all. So again, conversion rates are a factor outside of the affiliate's control. And what tends to work best there is the popular products.

We've covered a lot so far. We covered finding opportunities and keywords, creating the content. Now it's time to get into running your actual affiliate marketing business. So running an online business is a little bit different than brick and mortar, right? We don't have inventory, rent, tons of, uh, employees necessarily, right? Or all those fixed hard costs. We pretty much have, if it's YouTube, literally maybe your equipment. If it's blog web hosting, maybe Surfer SEO or Ahrefs or something like that. So a couple pieces of software.

Now, running an online business though, does require, you know, you to know some basic business things: revenue, expenses, profit, and profit margin, right? So revenue is the total amount of cash collected for the entire business. Expenses, um, obviously what you spent, so that web hosting and all of that. Profit is what you take home, or like net operating income. And then profit margin, so what is the percentage of profit to revenue?

So when you think about running this type of business, you know, it's pretty simple. You have, you don't have to have, and again, this is not legal advice or financial advice, this is just for entertainment. I'm not giving you any legal advice, but I'm just saying, like, you can run an affiliate business as a sole proprietor. I'm talking about the US mainly, but, you know, you just have to pay taxes on income that you get. So it should all be going to one bank account, typically. I made that mistake in my first year of mixing personal and then starting a business account in October of the year, and then it was just like reconciling different stuff tax-wise. So what's really easy is just like using QuickBooks, and you have, um, one bank account, and then you just categorize the expenses, and you're done. It's really simple. But you want to track those things. You know, you want to make sure you're making more money than you're than you're spending, which is why I'm saying this organic version of content business is way less risky than spending a bunch of money on ads and going in the negative potentially.

So, but the good thing about affiliate marketing business is you can have really high profit margins. So like 90 plus percent. I was running with my blog when I had one writer, and we were making a ton of money, right? So it's really interesting. But then when we're running the business, we have to think about the three types of affiliate categories, right? So the three ones that I consider are like high ticket, software, and then volume games, so lower ticket. So high ticket is you're making more money for every affiliate sale. So think something, yeah, like luxury watches or golf simulators, so like over $100 in commissions for every sale you get. Um, so again, like $10,000 golf simulator, 5% commission, you're making $500 a sale. Now you only need to get like a handful of these to rank to make some significant money, right? But they're a little bit more competitive, usually. So you got to kind of think about it.

Then there's the volume game, which I'm saying is, you know, most the bulk of physical product sales fall in here. So this is like, you're averaging $50 or less per sale. So think like pet products, dog and cat stuff, like it's not all that expensive for the most part. Outdoor gear, camping, hiking things that are generally $100 to $500. Um, an outdoor site would talk about hiking boots, hiking poles, winter gear, snowboard, like a lot of different stuff, right? So these require a lot of different articles ranking to make up the revenue. So if you're ranking number one for best organic dog food, affiliate wise, I'd probably want to have a sponsor there actually more than, you know, affiliate commissions. It might be kind of low, but it could be a lot of traffic, right? So you're making up for it in volume of traffic and volume of articles in that niche that you're ranking. So that's one. For this to work, you need a volume of articles. Makes sense.

The other one is recurring. So software, right? You get paid every single month that they remain a customer. The revenue starts off lower, but it cre, it compounds over time and is more stable. But however, it's a lot more competitive. So ultimately, you have to look at it. And the good news is, like mostly it'll be a volume game. So mostly you'll have, uh, a number of articles, building a brand around a thing. So if you're in kayaking or fishing, outdoor gear, you're ranking, you want to rank a lot of different articles: best inflatable kayak, fishing kayak, kayak for beginners, standing kayak, top down, whatever they are, right? Ranking a lot of those. And the good thing is, like every niche has some high ticket opportunities. Like gardening, for example, like, okay, well, seeds are cheap, gloves are cheap, the hoe is cheap, whatever. Even, you know, some of the more expensive stuff would be like raised garden beds or greenhouses or UTVs or tractors, right? So every niche has high ticket opportunities. But you want to, like, make up most of it with informational content, volume-based articles you can rank, and then throw in some of those high ticket ones too.

Now, what's interesting is commission rates are not fixed when it comes to affiliate marketing. So let's talk about affiliate marketing negotiations because I dealt with this a lot in my job as an affiliate manager, and also I've done it a lot as a blogger. So remember that commission rates are liquid. They can change, they can evolve and adapt. Usually, every brand has like a base commission they give to everyone. The public IO, it's called an IO or insertion order. It's basically this automated, automated contract that everyone signs as an affiliate saying, "Here's our commission rates, here's what you agree to do and not do." Don't like, you know, bid on our brand terms, typically, don't talk, you know, don't defame us. Like, it's a very simple contract. That always happens for every affiliate relationship. It's so automated, you don't even think about it. Um, but there's usually the public IO, which is the public offer to everyone. Anyone joins in the marketplace or finds the affiliate program and joins it, they get that offer. But then there is custom offers. So, you know, it could be the base public offer is 6% commissions, but if you generate some sales, then you get 10%. Or like what Bluehost does is it's, I don't know, something like, you get $70 a sale, but if you get more than 10 in a month, you get 85, then 90, then 100, then 125. So it's usually performance-based. The more you, the more sales you make, the higher your commission can be.

So the relationship between an affiliate manager and the company and the affiliate blogger, the publisher, is really important. It's a win-win relationship. So I promote you more, you pay me more, right? I get you more leads and sales, you pay me more per lead and sale, right? That's how it usually works. Knowing that, usually a 10% commission, I mean, that's only they're getting a 10 to one return on that investment. That's really high. Pay me more, right? So there's ways that you can start negotiating over time. Once you have content, you're publishing, you have your schedule, you're not stopping that, right? You put your affiliate links in. Now it's time to start optimizing. So what you can do is, this is more advanced, but it's like first showing your worth. So you can't just negotiate from zero. I have no traffic, I have no views on YouTube, but I want a higher commission rate. Could happen, honestly, if you promise to promote them. I'm not saying it couldn't, but it's usually good to come with something of value first. So you start with the base commission, you just join the program, right? You start generating a sale or two, right? Um, you want to make sure you're getting some traffic to this thing and generating some sales before reaching out to the affiliate.

manager, but you reach out to them. Usually, their email address is visible in the affiliate network of the software that they're using, in the affiliate dashboard. So, this is where you begin negotiating. So, you want to start with a power position, start negotiating, and, you know, start with a major improvement for them. So, you want to start the negotiation off right.

For example, what you wouldn't want to do is be ranking number one for, you know, "best chainsaw of 2024," whatever. I don't know. That's chainsaw. You reach out to the chainsaw brand and you're like, "I want to become an affiliate, increase my commission rate." Well, you already put them at number one in the article. There's really nothing, and you have the article. There's nothing for them to gain other than swapping a link in. And now they're paying you. Doesn't really make sense from a negotiation standpoint.

What you do want is, you know, maybe I have an article on the best CRM software, and I have this brand number six or number five in the article. And, you know, if they want to be promoted more, I could say, "Okay, if you could increase my commission rate, instead of 20% recurring, I want 30% recurring, I'll move you up the list and I'll create another article, a review article on you." This is how the game works in the affiliate marketing business space. Like, it's the unfortunate reality that a lot of the time, it's not based on the individual review and, and who's actually, you know, which product is their favorite. It's which product is making them the most money. It's unfortunate, but true. And everything is a business online. Think of these big media sites, Forbes, Tech Radar, CNET. They're not putting their editors' favorite product number one. They're putting the one that converts the best and makes them and gets them the highest commission rate. It's really that simple. It's unfortunate, but what is the case, like I said, is usually the popular brands with money that are the best end up being the ones that pay the most anyways. So, it actually works out for everybody.

But what you can do is reach out to the affiliate manager, get in a real conversation with them, and then give them something to offer. So, what you could offer as a blogger is a number of different things. You could say, "I'll increase your position in the article. Instead of number five, I'll put you number two or number one." "I'll add you to this post, you're not in yet." So, maybe you don't even have them on your site yet at all. That's a good thing too. Like, "I haven't put you in here. I'll put you number three in this article." And then you could also offer, "I'll do a full review on you," or "I'll do a your company versus this one based on this keyword and try to rank for that." So, usually, it's, "I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back" kind of thing.

So, then in return, what you're asking for is an increased commission rate. And there's usually always wiggle room there. They're not going to be like, if you want to go from 8% to 12% on e-commerce sales, you know, it's not, you're not asking that much. If you want to go from 20 to 30%, you're not asking that much. They do it pretty frequently, so it's not a big deal. This is the give and take of an affiliate manager to the affiliate blogger relationship, publisher, and the brand. And it's a win-win situation. You promote them more, they pay you more. It's really that simple.

Another thing that's really good about this is just you just want to start building relationships with these affiliate managers anyways. They're typically entry to mid-level employees. They usually stay at the job for just a few years, two to three years. It's kind of a strange role, the affiliate manager. It's on the marketing team, but it's not like a senior-level role. You're getting people usually in their mid to late 20s to early 30s in the role. They have goals to grow affiliate revenue. They have wiggle room with their commission rates. And knowing that psychology, like you can kind of usually ask for more from what more from them than what you think. And, you know, I've gone through some companies where like, I'm an affiliate for them. They've, I've run through three different affiliate managers. I've talked to three different ones and kind of start negotiating with each one as a new one comes on because they're looking for growth goals. So, as a blogger, you actually get to outlive most of these people in the relationships that start. So, it's good to, you know, make sure that you do have a good relationship with these people because they can, there can be advantages that you can get. You know, you can ask for things. You can say, "Hey, you know, this affiliate thing is working well, but would you want to sponsor this?" Maybe they could, you could put them in an article as a sponsor instead, and now you're just guaranteed a flat rate, right? I did that with podcast hosting in the first few months where I would have made only, you know, maybe $200, $200, $800, between two and $800. I can't remember the month for Buzzsprout, but they're like, "We'll pay you $5,000 a month." And once your recurring commission hit that, then we will, you know, you'll exceed that like normal. So, it probably made me an extra $60,000 a year or a year and a half that I wouldn't have made by having one conversation. So, that's the power of negotiation. You can make a lot of money with one conversation. And you are in the power position as an affiliate. Don't forget that. Like, if you have traffic and you have a brand in your article, they want to be promoted. They want, they want this traffic. You don't, they wouldn't want you to delete them or move them down, right?

And this is often times where brands play against each other over time. Some of the top ones, it gets cutthroat. If you're like, you know, some of these big media sites, if you have like a Tech Radar in there ranking you number one of like a VPN or an antivirus software or something, and you move down to position two, or these PPC affiliates move you from position one to two, that could be thousands of dollars of lost revenue. So, the relationship is really important. Negotiating can get intense, but for us as individuals, it's just really simple to have a conversation with the affiliate manager because they could do anything. They could increase your commission, right? They could introduce you to the sponsorship team. They could even send links to your website, right? Be like, "Hey, do you think you could send a link to this article or that article?" Right? So, it's good to just start the conversation with these people.

So, when it comes to sponsorships, which are kind of related to affiliate marketing, if you're asking for money for to be put in an article, it's a really simple math equation there. So, think about it this way: brands are paying for PPC, right? They're paying to be put in the top of Google results. And the cost per click, they're paying is how much they're paying per click. So, like, for example, if they're ranking, if they want to rank for project management software, and they're bidding on that keyword, it could be like $20 or $40 a click, right? So, what is the value of getting one click through your affiliate link to them? Think about that for a second. What if you're ranking on page one for project management software, and you're sending traffic to a pro, one of those tools like Monday.com? What's the value of that sponsored position at number one? What is the true value of this business position? What's the value of being number one in that article? Well, it's a really easy math equation. It's, you take the cost per click of that keyword, and then you see how many affiliate link clicks are there. So, if the cost per click is $40 for project management software, that's what they're bidding to be put at the top of Google, and you're ranking for it, and you're sending them third-party validated traffic, which I would argue is better than pay-per-click traffic, and you're getting a thousand clicks to that article a month, well, then that sponsored placement number one in your article on project management software should be worth $40,000 to them, technically. Now, you could drop it in half and say, "I'm a good guy, I'll do $20,000." It's still half the price of your pay-per-click ads, right? Now, that's an extremely high example, but you could think about your own niche. If you're like ranking number one for something random like, "the best freeze dryers," right? Freeze dry food. I'm getting a, let's say, 500 affiliate link clicks. Oh God, this math is going to be hard. And the cost per click is, it's easy, one $10 per click. Maybe you do the math. You say, cost per click, $10 times 500 clicks, $5,000. I'll charge you. I'll be reasonable, $2,000 for the sponsored placement. So, you do that math equation based on the value of the keyword, how much traffic you're getting, and then you give them a deal. And that's the monthly cost. Now, this can fluctuate because rankings fluctuate, but I've had individual deals where we made, you know, $60,000 for one sponsorship for the year, one payment, $60 grand, boom, one article that wasn't even on page one most of the time. So, it's kind of interesting.

And then when it comes to YouTube sponsorships, that's a little bit different, right? You have to have somewhat of a following. That's typically 5 cents to like 25 cents per view, depending on the company you're working with, how relevant they are to you. You can find really relevant ones and they'll pay you more. So, that's a little bit of a different strategy.

Running an affiliate marketing business is interesting, right? You create content, you put it out in the world, you optimize your affiliate links, you just keep publishing stuff. And you hopefully can free up your time to do some of this negotiating and commission rates and just bump up revenue and make these little tweaks, which typically requires you to scale your affiliate marketing business. So, we're going to cover how to scale.

So, scaling a blog is really simple: hire one writer, right? So, get some traffic, make a little bit of money, and put that money into one writer. That will free up the most of your time to do these other things. Join the programs, talk to the affiliate managers. Then that's the beauty of blogging rather than YouTube is like, you don't have to be on camera. You can just outsource this writing. Train someone really good on how to write these articles. Give them the exact framework, the exact Surfer scores. Make it numerical and make it really simple for them. But then you get some of your time back to focus on that other stuff.

So, when you want to hire a writer, I hired one on the ProBlogger job board. So, I just posted a job. I said, "This is my niche, this is what I'm looking for, this many articles a month." I got like 50 applications, went through them, I gave three a test. So, I said, "Write this article, here's some guidelines." And then I picked one based on speed and quality. So, like, if they took two weeks to write it, I'm like, "H, it's probably not the best idea." A lot of these are freelance people doing a lot of work. But yeah, there's no perfect formula for hiring a writer. But you want to pay them fairly. You know, this is a real job. You don't want to, you know, in the world of AI and all this stuff, you don't want to shortchange people. I see some people like, "Oh, bragging about how little they pay their writers." And it's like, "Dude, that's insane." Like, don't, don't brag about that. You know, we pay the writers pretty well. You know, at least $300 minimum an article, simple ones, short ones. So, again, that's a pretty fair price. You could probably do $200 an article, 10 cents a word. You know, it just really depends. Just do some research there.

So, scaling is hiring one writer. If you want to scale your blog further, you can hire an assistant, do all your outreach, guest posting, all that stuff. I have other videos on that. Scaling a YouTube channel is one editor, right? So, freeing up your editing time would be huge. So, you're just planning a video, shooting a video, then you're done. They edit it, they upload it, they add all the links in, they do everything, right? So, that's how you scale. You just find the thing that takes the longest in your affiliate marketing business, the most, the task that takes the longest amount of time, and that's what you get rid of. And usually, that's doing some of the grunt work of the content. So, a writer would do that, and a video editor would do that. This frees up your time to join the affiliate programs, add links in, manage your business, do the, you never want to give up the strategy, the keyword research. You always do. You always run the strategy of your affiliate business. You can meet with the affiliate managers, get sponsors, plan a better content strategy.

So, when it comes to this, I usually like monthly, we look and pivot and adapt what the keywords are. So, if we're publishing a certain amount of articles every month, I'll take a look at analytics, I'll take a look at what's going on. I'll see what new articles are doing well, and then we pivot the strategy on a monthly basis, right? This frees your time to do the real stuff, though, because then you can start building courses, building offers, building sales funnels, running an actual build business, hiring a sales team. You can grow this thing really big. And affiliate marketing is really just the entry point of all of that.

Another question I get asked a lot is, can you scale with AI? So, yes, but maybe not how you think. So, no, you don't want to write everything with AI, like an affiliate article, like ChatGPT. Hack, hey ChatGPT, write this thing. You can even go in-depth with prompts, write this article in this format, with this tone, that passes plagiarism, that's written in a funny thing, and really try to tweak it. Now, maybe in a couple of years, that'll be more of an option, and it'll be better, and it'll, but it's not really right now. It doesn't work well from a ranking perspective on Google. It's just not helpful. It's not based on human experience. ChatGPT is only updated 2022. I'm not saying that it'll be like this forever, but AI is a tool. AI is an interesting tool. You can use ChatGPT to find really good affiliate opportunities. So, for example, you can ask ChatGPT stuff like, "Give me 10 affiliate marketing article ideas in the telescope niche, right? Luxury telescopes, high-end telescopes, beyond binoculars." So, it'll give you, it gives you some general ideas and it gives you good ideas and outlines like, "Expand my topical authority with five article ideas on this thing," or "What are some other keyword ideas here?" But to write the actual content with AI, I do not recommend at this time. Same thing is true of like AI and YouTube. Like, and I know we're like a year or two out from crazy, crazy amounts of like AI video content and all kinds of AI tools. There's already some around scriptwriting and different things like that. And I'll probably have enough content on the internet of myself and my voice to just make some fake version of me somewhere. But for now, it's really not that way. So, ultimately, AI is a tool. But you, as a content creator, as an affiliate marketer, is, you know, human experience wins out every single time.

All right, and as I'm actually losing my voice because this video is so long and I'm shooting it all, here's how I would exactly get started, step by step, starting from zero with affiliate marketing. All right, so first, you have to choose your niche. You have to choose your niche for affiliate marketing. And don't be one of those people that just bases it only off of an SEO report and asks, "What's the most profitable one?" That doesn't usually work, right? You have to base this thing on your life and something that you can build in the background of your life for a while. So, in Blog Growth Engine, we have a system called The Authority Flywheel, which is a brainstorming exercise to help you choose your niche. And that's based on you, your expertise, the market, and advantages. Those four things and a flywheel. So, a flywheel is one of those things that every input affects the entire system. First, there's you. You are only you. You are a unique person. No one else is like you. There's billions of people on Earth, but only you are you. What can you say? What message do you want to share? What niche do you actually want to be in? Then we have your experience. So, do you have any professional experience, hobby experience, interests? Anything? You don't have to be an expert in anything, but if you have somewhat of an interest, that can be helpful too. Maybe you're a beginner beekeeper, interesting to learn about as you learn, right? So, it's all about honesty, being where you are, but think about your experience, right? Next, you think about the market. So, that's where you do the keyword research to find, hey, how big is this niche? Maybe it's too small. A lot of the times it comes down to people, do I pick my professional experience or my hobby? It's like, one's like, "I'm a software developer," or "I'm a, you know, I'm a marketer," or "I'm an HR." But I also do CrossFit, or I do knitting, or I do like underwater basket weaving, who knows? The answer usually is, what is your pain tolerance for ranking this stuff, and how long do you want to, you know, try stuff with it failing? Because there's a lot of niches that are easy, there's a lot of niches that are more difficult, but you just have to know how to find the opportunity. Usually, the ones that are based on hobbies and things that are interesting to you are going to be easier than things that are like professional experience, business software stuff. It's just really hard. But the hobby stuff is really interesting, and it's easier to rank for. You can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing, ads, courses, all of it. And then the final thing is advantages. So, what advantages might you have, right? Do you have a brother that's the president of the United States? That'd be cool, right? You might be old though, if it's Joe Biden, I don't know. But do you have a bunch of equipment that you already have, right? A bunch of photography gear that that would help? Or do you, do you work at a company where you could leverage it to get referrals for writers or an agency or anything, right? So, everyone has different starting points in life, starting lines. So, think about that too. And we have to remember, the key to all of this is you don't have to be perfect at the beginning because what we want to do is we want to build a personal brand around you because a personal brand can pivot and adapt when it gets difficult. A personal brand can pivot to YouTube, it can pivot with social media, it can pivot its content strategy because a domain name can be broad, right? Mine was at my name. But if I pigeonholed myself into something really small, tiny niche site, and I tried this strategy based on an SEO report, I would have failed. And it wasn't because I didn't have the right SEO strategy or the right keyword research or the content strategy. It's because we, there are unknown variables when it comes to this algorithmic-based business. We can think based on an SEO report we're going to rank. We can think that this keyword, it's good. We can think that this niche is good. The truth is, we just don't know until we start publishing stuff. There's plenty of articles I thought were going to make money that didn't. There's ones that I thought would make no money that did. So, the key is publishing. The key is giving ourselves the freedom to pivot in business, and that's really important too. Like, if I just called my website "The E-commerce Guy" and I only focused on e-commerce platforms, my experience, and BigCommerce, Shopify, how to build, you know, dropshipping, how to build an e-commerce store, all that stuff, it would have maybe worked. But it also would have gotten really competitive, and I would have been blown out of the competition. My site would have lost a lot of traffic, probably to bigger sites picking just that niche. The traffic might have dropped, right? Certain niches come and go, search volume goes up and down. So, choosing your name as the website name is key because then you can just pivot anything. You can just change the strategy until you find out what works.

So, with this Authority Flywheel, you kind of write everything down in a document, all your ideas, your likes, your hobbies, your professional experience, any advantages you have. And then you just come up with doing keyword research is kind of the step to look at finding what actually could work for you. So, it's like, you know, long term, it's not, "Oh, these two affiliate keywords could be good." It's like, "No, you need to spot the seed phrase for your informational content that you can say, identify, here's 50 or 100 articles that are easy to rank for that I can create, and here's 20 plus affiliate articles that are easy and I can create." Right? So, this comes to niche experience. Like, you don't have to be passionate about the thing that you're writing about when it comes to affiliate marketing, but you do need to know a little bit about it, I think, because it can help you spot those new and emerging trends. And when you build a blog, it's like you're writing a wave. So, you're publishing content, publishing content, affiliate content, info content, you're getting domain rating up, you're getting topical authority. So, that by the time that next product comes out a year from now, the thing that actually is new and emerging, and you hit it, and you hit that timing, it's almost like you're jumping on the surfboard, and you are riding that wave in the number one position for years to come. So, everything you do, what I like about this is, every piece of content on YouTube and blogging, none of it's lost. It's almost like little investments in your future. With a blog, especially, and a YouTube channel, every piece, it's setting you up for the next piece of content and the next piece of content to have more success. Because with a blog, you'll have more topical authority, you might have more links, it'll be easier in the future. With the YouTube channel, you're getting more and more subscribers, more and more the algorithm understands your channel, right? So, it's, it's really playing the long game. So, that's important too, is basing it on yourself, playing the long game, and thinking about, what do I want to talk about for the next possibly five years? Because the truth is, even in this YouTube channel, I'm talking about blogging and affiliate marketing, and there's only so many angles I can take on it because the audience is very interested in blogging. I would love to talk more about YouTube stuff that we're doing, how we're making these videos, how we're selling stuff on the videos, affiliate marketing in the videos. But when I make them, they don't get clicked on, and they don't get in the algorithm because people that are typically subscribers of my channel currently are more interested in affiliate marketing and blogging. So, I come up with a lot of new angles and a lot of new things based on the year because everything's always changing and evolving. But, you know, based on my name, five years from now, I probably won't be talking about blogging. Maybe I'd be talking about blogging and a few other things, right? So, you want to give yourself that freedom. You want to be able to build a business that will stand the test of time. And I know it's not the flashiest, fanciest thing to talk about in a video like this, but it makes the most sense.

All right, before I lose my voice, we're going to continue on. All right, so you, you pick your niche, put it at your name, don't perfect it, don't go too narrow either, where it's like, "I'm going to go after vegan hot tubs." It's not a thing, but sounds cool. You know, you can kind of start broader and be like, "I want to go after typical spa, sauna, hot tub, pool type stuff." I don't know exactly, but I'm going to find it, right? You don't have to choose the perfect thing, but you don't want to go too wide where it's like, "I'm going to be an affiliate about gardening and basketball." Two completely unrelated things. You could do gardening and homesteading, but just keep it a little bit broader at first because you can pigeonhole this and not pigeonhole this, figure this out based on data over time and what articles are getting traffic, what videos are working. So, next, you do your keyword research and you come up with first 30 content ideas, your first keyword. So, again, 80% informational, 20% transactional. Put them in a spreadsheet, put the search volume in a column, the difficulty in a column, and then just kind of stack rank it based on what you think will do good, moving ones up that you want to do first.

Next, create a WordPress website. So, not Wix, not Squarespace. Those don't really get traffic. WordPress is the best CMS for that. WordPress.org, not .com. I recommend you get started with WPX. That's what I use for hosting. I think they're the best one. A lot of hosting, like, that's the good thing about affiliate marketing through a blog is you own the website. It's not like a YouTube channel or an Instagram account where it could just go away if the company does. Not that they would, but you never know. So, WPX is good just because like they, they get back to you really fast. They have chat support which gets back to you quickly, whereas other hosts might take 24 to 48 hours to answer a question. But anyways, most hosts are pretty good. Shared hosting plan, don't overthink it. Just get it. All you really need for a website is like a homepage that maybe has your face on it, maybe it doesn't, but you don't need to perfect what it even says, right? You'll figure that out over time. You'll have blog posts, maybe an about page with your story, something kind of vulnerable and unique to you, whatever you want to say, and a contact page if you want. You don't even need that. The key is just starting the website, publishing the blog posts, you know, hitting that publish button, and creating a Google Search Console account to index your site in Google. Set up Google Analytics so you can track your traffic too. That's really easy to do. There's plugins like Rank Math that can help you with Google Search Console setting it up, analytics plugins, things that are easy.

So, after you do that, you just start publishing content, right? Publish those articles. Doesn't matter how long it takes, just do it, right? Put your name on the site, publish content, publish affiliate articles and the informational ones. If you're doing just a YouTube channel and not a blog, start the YouTube channel, start creating videos. You can look back on anyone's videos, my own included, and how bad they were. I'm not saying they're good now, but I'm just saying everything is an improvement. The content you create is always improving. Blog posts should always be improving. The videos will get better. It might feel really awkward at first to do any of it, right? That's why impostor syndrome can be so difficult in these types of businesses because you're like, "Why would anyone read my blog? Why would anyone watch my channel?" I'm an introverted person. That's why I started a blog and did affiliate marketing. I didn't want to necessarily start this YouTube channel, but I saw the opportunity and I wanted to teach. So, that's what people say, "If your blog's making all that money, why are you doing YouTube?" Because you can make more money, right? And you can expand your, you can help people. Once you start making $50,000 a month, to be honest, it doesn't feel like that much, and you want more. It's not a great thing, but it's just the reality of the situation. And YouTube expands the audience, teaches people stuff. Like, yes, we have coaching programs and a team behind it, but if you never want to interact with me and you never want to work with me, then just watch the YouTube content, right? But the pay for coaching because it's a step-by-step system and process, right? So, it's just a little bit different. But yeah, you'll have impostor syndrome at first. I did. I still do sometimes. Like, there's some days where I get in front of a video and I'm like, "I do not want, I don't even know how to talk to this camera." You know, today I'm kind of rambling a bit, but some days are easier than others. Some days you'll have writer's block and it's like, "Ah, I don't want to create this content at all." But you just do it anyways. And the more that you do it, and the more that you do it, the better you get. It's almost like not just creating these little habits in your day, like, you know, setting aside time in your day, going into a room that you work in. And I would say, reward yourself after. Either eat dinner, read a book, do something you like when you're done. And you just start doing that every single day, and you will change. But it's also about becoming someone new. It's not just incremental habits. It's more like becoming this person that is successful. So, imagine a persona that you look up to, and just pretend you're them, and keep acting like you're them, and start making those habit changes, and doing that night after night, working on stuff. Because really, like, what else are we doing? Yes, we're doing important stuff. Yes, spend time with your family. If you have kids, don't go hide and work on a blog and not take care of your kids. I'm not saying that. But maybe you could stop scrolling on Instagram and like build a YouTube channel. Maybe you stop going on TikTok videos or watching, you know, "Making a Murderer" for the 18th time, like I am, or some, you know, true crime series again, because I like it so much, and you can actually, you know, start building something for yourself.

So, after you have all that set up and analytics and are writing content and are publishing, that's the key. It's like the publishing, just getting stuff out there, right? And the thing, it's almost like an 80/20 rule. Not every single thing is going to rank. Not every piece of content is going to work. But you don't need it all to. You know, the top 10% of your articles will make you most of your money, right? But it's about hitting singles, keep swinging the bat, and you'll eventually find success.

So, once you do that, you join, find the top popular affiliate programs, join them, add those links in. So, really, I look at like, if the article's getting some traffic, or you see it in analytics, and you're looking at the landing pages by monthly traffic, and you see, "Oh, this one's getting some traffic," or "Oh, this one's on page two," that's a good indication of maybe I should join the affiliate program now, right? It's getting some impressions, and then it's getting some clicks. Then, once it's getting over like 50 clicks, you're like, "Oh, okay, I'm going to now I'm going to join the affiliate program." And I would say, in the actual form when you fill it out, say, "Hey, I'm a new blogger, I'm a new YouTube person, I just started creating content, but I'm seeing, you know, a lot of new clicks to this article on your category, right?" That's more interesting than they look at you and they're like, "Oh, you only have 50 visits." But if they know you're new, and it's like, "Oh, it's growing, okay," right? They just don't want people, scammy people promoting them, which you're not.

All right, so you add your affiliate links in, you optimize them how we discussed, you track your performance in the affiliate dashboards. You just bookmark them all. Just create bookmarks for each one. You can organize them in folders, like I have just folders for them. Sign up for a PayPal account if you can, if you're in a country that has that. That's the easiest way to get paid through affiliate marketing. If not, there's some workarounds, or try to add your bank account or different things. Reach out to the affiliate manager, they'll give you the info.

Now, once you start making some money, you do have a business, and you will look to scale this business, which would be hiring a single person that will free up the most of your time. But don't go in the negative, right? Don't spend more on expenses than you do in revenue. Then you can start talking to affiliate managers, negotiating, building this true affiliate marketing business. And really, this content game, it does not end. So, there is this myth of passive income, and I just want to make active income a good thing again. Because I had passive income, like I said, you know, in the beginning, I made the blog work. I got it to $50, then $100,000 a month with one writer and one assistant, and I wasn't really doing anything. It was great. I was 30, 31 years old at the time. I was living alone in a rented five-bedroom house, and I was working on my blog 5 to 10 hours a week, kind of just checking in on stuff. And I did that. I traveled around, I did it. And then I got really, really, really bored, honestly. And I wanted to do something for myself, right? I wanted to build something different, something better, right? Because, I mean, yeah, sound passive income sounds cool. Sipping my ties on a beach is cool for like three months, and then you're like, "All right, I got to like grow." Growth is the most important thing. And that's, you know, going back to the raw, rambling nature of this video, growth, I think, is the most important thing. If you have things you're striving towards, your mindset will change, right? When you think about your future, right? You only, you want to live in the moment, but you want to have a future you're looking forward to. Think about when you go on vacation. Before the vacation, night before, a couple nights before, you're pumped. You're like, "I'm ready to go on vacation. This is going to be awesome." Then think about the last night of your vacation. You're physically on the vacation, but you're thinking about, "I have to go home tomorrow." Right? You're actually there, but you're not enjoying it as much as you were anticipating it the night before. It's interesting. And that's kind of a simple metaphor for all of life. Like, if you can build something for yourself, do it. You know, if you're, if you don't want to, and you love your job, then do that. You know, just do what makes you happy. But I found that like having growth in certain areas of life is something like constantly just looking for self-improvement, not being too hard on yourself, and always looking for the future. But this type of business is cool because you learn a lot when you do it. Whether it's a blog or a YouTube channel, you can see your own improvements, right? You can see your old videos, your old blog posts, you can see the traffic growing. And it's kind of like the game of life, right? You're playing this game of life where you're sitting at a computer, or I'm sitting here in my home in Michigan, and I just made like a two-hour video and I lost my voice. But some people are going to see it. Some people might like it, you know, and some people might find value in it. And that's pretty cool. And I'm introverted, and I don't always like reading all the YouTube comments, but most of them are pretty good. So, what I'm saying here is, passive income's overrated. Real income is important because it gives you time freedom. I never cared too much for being rich, I just wanted the freedom to spend my time how I wanted to. So, this content game never ends, though. So, I hope you enjoy it. So, find if either if it's blogging or YouTube, whatever way you're doing affiliate marketing, make it enjoyable because you can turn it into a real business. But a year later, when it is your real business, hopefully you enjoy it.

So, again, affiliate marketing, this is a course, right? We covered a lot. We covered why it exists, all that stuff, the fundamentals, adding links, creating the content, keyword research, running the business, negotiating, pretty much everything I could think of in creating a script for affiliate marketing. But I like it, you know, it's, it's a weird word that I learned back in 20, whatever, 17 or so. Never heard it before, thought it sounded weird. But it's one of those revenue streams that can be the first of many. It can give you a content plan, a strategy. It can give you your power back. It can siphon some revenue into your website or YouTube channel from other brands' products. And it works by putting some simple content out there on the internet. So, you don't have to create your own product. You don't need an audience to get started. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme like many videos might tell you. It is not a way to post Facebook ads to your grandmother from ClickBank and then look at a dashboard of some guy like this on YouTube. So, I'm not going to promise you overnight success. I think the main thing is just building. I don't care what kind of business it is, just building something for yourself and no one else. It can be a lawn care business, it can be anything. But I just look at, you know, the way it is in America today, and it's just inflation, things are getting tougher. So, yes, there's careers. Yes, I was in the golden handcuffs of making just over six figures a year, but working 50-plus hour weeks and being stressed out and driving in traffic, doing things I didn't like. I would rather have like $40 grand a year doing my blog or a YouTube channel, doing something that I control, right? So, it's possible. It's just, you know, you get the shiny object syndrome. You see a thing, you get excited about it, you watch this video, you say, "I'm going to do it." And then you start doing it, you realize, "Oh, I don't know how to do this part of it," or "It's hard." And then you fall into that pit of stopping to do it, and then you find a different thing you want to do, and then it keeps going up and down. Whereas I like this version because you don't know what roadblocks you're going to hit. You don't know what you're going to get stuck on, and you will get stuck on a number of different things. Now, I did, but when you push through that roadblock, this is the best model because you can afford to make the mistakes. When it's YouTube and blogging, you delete the blog post, you pivot the content, you change the strategy, you mess with the thumbnails, right? Like, so that's a long-winded way of saying this thing takes real work. But, you know, hopefully, you can make an impact with it, and you're not just looking at some get-rich-quick thing for affiliate sales. You're more or less trying to build a real business. That's the type of people we want to work with. So, if you're interested in learning more, make sure to click the link in the description below to see how we are building these types of businesses in the 2020s. I think you'll find it quite interesting. Yeah, I think that's it. I think I've gone long enough. I think I'm going to, my water's gone. Yeah, it's gone. My throat's very dry. And so, yeah, that was the video. I hope you like this. If you're still watching, I mean, that's crazy. I really appreciate it. And, you know, it means a lot. You know, I think sometimes the, the world of course creation can be, you know, in coaching and YouTube, it can be quite, not negative, but like, sometimes it gets a little bit hard to just be on that content hamster wheel of YouTube all the time. And I appreciate everybody that watches. So, hopefully, you know, you found at least one useful tip in here. I think that's probably would be the case, at least one thing. So, I have a lot of other videos on my channel on all kinds of ways to make money, blogging, affiliate marketing. It all comes down to like getting the time freedom back. So, if you made it this far, you know, comment with a random word. Maybe we'll do, let's do a pigeonhole this time because I pigeonholed myself in YouTube to creating affiliate marketing course videos, but you don't want to pigeonhole yourself when it comes to creating affiliate marketing content. So, with that said, please like the video, comment if you've made it this far because I just want to see if anyone actually watched this whole thing. It's like a science experiment for me. Check out other videos on the channel, subscribe if you want, if not, that's fine too. But I'll see you in another video.

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How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2026 (#1 Free Course on YouTube)

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