Summary
- I made $1 million from a single affiliate program by writing one article about online course platforms in 2018. My strategy relied on low-competition keywords that were rising in trend.
- The article gained traction over a few months, moving from Google's page two to page one, which resulted in high traffic and significant earnings over five years.
- Today, replicating this strategy is more challenging, but there are still opportunities to use AI and emerging product trends to find low-competition, high-paying affiliate programs.
- Creating effective affiliate content involves using a consistent format with several links and call-to-action buttons. My simple, straightforward article structure helped drive substantial affiliate sales.
- To find profitable opportunities now, use SEO tools to identify new and trending keywords with low competition and particularly valuable CPCs, and consider emerging niches like AI recruiting software.
- Building a successful affiliate site requires creating a content cluster with multiple articles that establish authority in a niche, rather than relying on a single article.
- Choose recurring affiliate programs for stable income and focus on creating a significant number of articles within a niche, ideally 50 to 100, to drive consistent traffic and scale revenue.
- Utilize AI tools to generate article outlines efficiently, but ensure your content includes personal insights and expertise to increase value and trust with readers.
- Images in articles should match your content—use screenshots for software topics and personal photos for physical products to enhance authenticity and engagement.
- Affiliate marketing should be part of a broader strategy that includes building a brand and engaging across multiple platforms like a blog, YouTube channel, or podcast.
- Don't rely solely on affiliate marketing; explore other revenue streams like ads, sponsorships, and eventually selling your own products as you develop your brand.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by focusing on low-competition keywords that are becoming popular. This involves using SEO tools to find these keywords that relate to new trends or products, especially in emerging fields. It's like hunting for hidden treasures on the internet that can lead to high-paying affiliate programs.
A good way of doing this is by using AI tools to help craft article outlines quickly. Just ensure you include your personal insights and a touch of your expertise in each article, so they don't seem generic or computer-generated. This builds trust with your readers and makes them more likely to click your affiliate links.
I’d recommend building a content cluster around a specific niche to establish authority. This means writing several articles, ideally 50 to 100, about different aspects of a niche. By doing this, Google sees you as an expert in that topic, which can lead to better rankings and more traffic to your site.
Using clear call-to-action buttons and links within your content is crucial. Keep the article format consistent. For instance, include a few affiliate links and make sure each article's layout is user-friendly and easy to read.
I would also encourage diversifying your revenue streams as you build your brand. Don't just rely on affiliate marketing. Consider including ads, sponsorships, and even developing your own products or services down the line.
Lastly, consider supporting your blog with other platforms, like a YouTube channel or podcast, to widen your audience reach and reinforce your brand's presence.
Quotes by Author
"What worked in 2019 will not work today"
"You need to build a true brand eventually"
"Provide their experience and they're making money with affiliate marketing"
"Affiliate marketing should be one monetization stream in one platform"
"If you're homesteading there's like gardening, preserving, canning, outdoor stuff, cooking"
Full Transcript
so I made $1 million from a single affiliate program that is one product one article here's how so I wrote an article called the seven best online course platforms and I published it late in the night of Christmas Eve 2018 it was a low competition keyword on Google at the time within a few months I was on page two then page one and I have ranked for that term for 5 years making the brand to the number one spot $2.7 million while making myself a million dollar in the process so how and can we replicate this strategy today well it's not as easy can we still find new and emerging products that are trending up low competition keywords that have high paying affiliate programs well in this video I'm going to show you how because what worked in 2019 will not work today but there are still keywords still affiliate programs and opportunities out there especially with AI you just have to do it a little bit differently so I'm going to share some AI prompts with you some system prompts and Frameworks if you want all of them that I'm using in this video make sure to click the link in the description and pinned comment and I'll send you my 10 favorite AI prompts Plus my AI master class so you can enter your email join me there and let's get into it all right so as you can see this is my partner stack affiliate Network dashboard we can see all the money I've made through here there's a million dollar officially in paid commissions through thinkific I've made them $2.8 million in Revenue slightly higher than I just said and then I get this about every month so pending is like the next month so you can see I've made some others learn rolls 162 so that article has made more than just that one I was just talking about that one affiliate program so as you can see there's a lot of money here I sent them 92,000 clicks over the last 5 years for 7,288 free trials and hundreds of customers I made it from this not very goodlooking article right it's just a simple article there's no fancy formatting really it's just what of the best platforms number one's thinkific I have my take I have a button here to click and that is what people buy through they buy based on search intent searching for things on Google and then clicking text based links you can see it's very simple I just have some pict feur I have key features user interface stuff the pricing what I like and dislike any updates and then a button all that you do is you format this the exact same way every single time and then product two kajabi I've made over 100 something thousand through them uh same thing same format so you want to use the same format every time basically you put three to four affiliate links in this where I'm his an affiliate link this is an affiliate link this button just kind of a call to action bold sentence saying what they actually get right it's a one month fre trial so you click that and that is literally it it's that simple now creating the affiliate content is simple it's the actual strategy and the process to find this opportunity rank this content get a lot of clicks on it that's the difficult part now I made a lot of money with inic is it's a recurring affiliate program so if a customer signs up through my affiliate link I get a percentage on every single monthly payment as long as they're a customer right so that's the distinction there now to find these opportunities if I wanted to do this today I would use an SEO tool something like HS and it's like I'd put in something like best AI I software so something new right you have to find new and emerging stuff not old things that have been written about 20 years ago but new things then I'd go to the matching terms tool and I'd see like all right what's the new AI stuff around here best AI stock trading software best AI translation software photo editing accounting what if I wanted to just drop the difficulty down to like five show just the easiest Things based on AI software so AI credit repair software recruiting dubbing upscaling lots of like audio engineering stuff that's a little bit less competition so finding these types of keywords when people are searching for this is the best angle and look at this best AI recruiting software looks to be the most valuable because the cost per click is like $35 so if you have a Blog about if you're a recruiter and you want to talk about HR Human Resources recruiting then you would write an article like this you would put some of the best AI recruiting software at the top and you would start making affiliate commissions that way now what's interesting here is this says search volume is 70 so only 70 searches a month I know for a fact that these numbers are very far off I showed in a previous video how something said 0 to 10 but I was actually getting 3,000 visits a month from that so just take it as a grain of salt once keywords are in a tool like this sometimes they are starting to get competitive so I just kind of disregard the search volume the higher the better of course but I would try to find things with a difficulty of like under five so that means there's not a lot of competition yet not a ton of people have written it and it's not as hard to rank as something with a much higher competition cuz over time the competition gets more and more intense speaking of making money money with your website today's video is brought to you by wpx so if you're a blogger or you plan to sell digital products online you're going to need a good shopping cart so wpx has created custom hosting plans specifically for websites that use the WordPress woocommerce shopping cart and they have three new plans to choose from so those are power store superstore and Hyper store now they're all boosted with all the needed resources for a faster better performing and super secure online store and these are all custom managed woocommerce hosting plans boosted with more resources for better performance so you can sleep easy knowing your site will stay up when you get that spike in traffic plus wpx support is literally the best in the business with a 30 second average response rate so really fast now make sure to click the wpx link in the description for more information on wpx hosting so we pick a keyword but we need like a Content cluster and a strategy around it so we can't just write one random article and expect to rank that has no topical Authority Google if you're driving it through Google like they're just going to think oh have one article on recruiting software that doesn't make sense so you have to build up a real brand honestly over time now you have to have not just one article on recruiting but you should have like 50 or 60 or more articles on recruiting with links with all of these things built in structured in the right way in the right content silos so for example uh I have an article on online course platforms it's not ranking that well today it was somewhat recently but you know whatever it is what it is blogging as we know goes up and down and fluctuates a lot but what we can see here is like I don't just have one article on this I also have other ones and you can prop up these individual affiliate articles with other reviews and versus posts so for example I like school versus thinkific so looking at these or School versus kajabi so you have a bunch of other ones online course platforms online learning platforms this versus that full thinkific review teachable review teachable versus that so you want to have a cluster of verses reviews and other articles that are all linked up to that main best product category article so you link all of them up now you can link some down but you want to have more links going up up to that main article so you're kind of using all of these to just prop up the main article and then you format in the same way every single time so you see like the target keyword is in the URL it's early in the title it's in the introduction somewhere I imagine maybe not but it's like early on best online course platforms and then this is an H2 heading so you have an H2 in the form of a question what are the plus your target keyword so that's an H2 H1 is the title H2 is there and then these are h3s so H3 headings for the actual answers to the question this is just the format that Google likes now you don't need a fancy box like this I had my developer put this in but uh you don't really need it this is just then paragraph text this is an affiliate link so the first mention that I have of the brand I usually just add an affiliate Link in the first time I mention them that first sentence and then the main thing the main one they're going to click on is just the button they're going to click on the first one and the button so they're going up here they're like o think kic basically with affiliate marketing you want them to just get off your article and click that link as quickly as possible so you click the link you get to the page and you just want them to okay now they can start reading and researching and looking at it here the cookie is now stored on their computer so if they convert in the next 30 days 60 days whatever the cookie duration is then you'll get credit for that sale but the idea is give them a teaser through a Blog and just get them off the site and get them to click that affiliate link there's also ways to find some of these supporting articles that we talked about like if you just put the brand in like I have thinkific you'll see NH HF like thinkific versus teachable thinkific versus kajabi thinkific reviews so you'll find them just by putting them in or you can put in the Brand Plus versus and you'll see like some of the main ones so thinkific versus teachable that's very high intent traffic but from my experience the versus posts make nowhere near as much money even though it's more High intent nowhere near as much as the main product category so let's say we wanted to do this article on the best AI recruiting software well how would we start that like what would be the process how would we even know if it's a good affiliate article most of the times like honestly new stuff like this is not even going to have affiliate programs yet or like old recruiting software would have it but maybe there's not a bunch of fancy new AI ones I would still write the Articles it should be affiliate marketing needs to be a small part of your overall brand of your overall content strategy it shouldn't be you're creating an article based on some number this is the old way of teaching Niche sites you base it on some number in a report you see this is a good article I'm going to write this best AI recruiting software and then I'm going to write this other one on the best AI stock trading software and I'm going to write all these different articles but it's like where is your brand where is the foundation of your website today what you would do is like if you want to have a recruiting brand then just do this preliminary research to decide if you want to write this article at all or if you want to go into this Niche and you need 50 articles you need to be known as a personal brand you should have a website and you should have potentially a YouTube channel or a LinkedIn account that's you know doing updated posts or an X account so however if we find an article that we like like best AI recruiting software what can we do well we could look at this data we could also be like all right I'm going to go into partner stack and I'm going to search for recruiting to see if there are affiliate programs so we can see like next net checks has HR payroll software top eselon is a recruiting software it's a applicant tracking uh you earn 20% recurring which is good on one year which isn't good uh One-Stop solution so virtual agent I'll earn $1,000 for every new client earn 20% for the first 12 months so some people try to cut it off after a year two years 3 years so you can see like Breezy HR there's some options here that you could join and they're actually are affiliate programs in this area all right so let's talk about uh actually creating this article with AI outlining it getting it ready so I have this uh AI content generator it's one of like 10 plus uh prompts you can get if you click the link in the description below so you can get this you can see people are using it right now but you copy this whole thing you paste it into either chat GPT or Claude I like Claude for some of the more creative stuff chat GP is better for research and it says what's the target keyword or topic you want me to create an outline for I'm going to say best AI recruiting software and you go from there so it'll give you the the H1 title the top of 2024 meta description it writes the full introduction and then it has main headings for you to think about and the conclusion all the semantic keywords so you can take that you can even add in more information like hey I want to add make sure these five companies with the top five you want to get it to a basic outline that you can then copy paste have it in a usable format if you take it to the another level if you sign up for the AI master class plus the training and you want to work with us on this we give you the full make.com automation to have you go from keyword all the way into WordPress as a published post how to use machine. a to do this so you're just basically doing a click and it's already done and published for you but this is the free way to do it cuz I always like teaching people freeways yes every freeway requires a little bit more work but it's free right so you can do this and then again like this is an outline so you have an outline done and then you start giving your own unique take on each individual product because again we want to make this our own not some random AI BS especially if you're talking about products and recommending people buy something now you don't necessarily need to buy every single product that you review that would be impossible there's plenty of blogs that have thousands of products that haven't bought them yet but you should have a good understanding that's why you need to pick a niche when you're doing affiliate marketing something that you are at least interested in now when you're starting you you write the article you want to provide the different features and benefits that someone needs to know now if you're writing about cameras for example you'd want features related to the equality the pixel whatever the hell those are shutter speed uh Dimensions 1080p you know whatever that stuff is I see TV affiliate websites that have like everything from the black levels and like all kinds of different charts and interesting stuff if it's software then you talk about like the pricing the features the trial experience and like normal stuff like that what it's best for if it's physical products like a kayak maybe the features that you need if you look up the best kayaks it's going to be about the weight the length what it's for right so just those little individual things you need to create in the article and then you should add images in so if it's the images are based on what kind of content it is so if it's for example a AI recruiting software the images in the article are just going to be screenshots of your computer showing stuff whereas if it's a kayak you should show pictures of kayaks and yourself using kayaks so if I always say this if it's software or business related it's mainly going to be screenshots on the online if it's hobbies and physical products you should have pictures of yourself using these products now I'm not saying you go to a buy 30 hot tubs Lay Them All Out strategically and take pictures of yourself around the house like no but there's ways to do it like you could go to Dick Sporting Goods for a kayak take a picture yourself next to the thing or find different pictures online or if you're a gardener you just go one day and take a 100 pictures of yourself doing everything around the garden so you can add them in when needed one example of just an article I like from just a niche brand what they writing their experience perspective is homesteading family they have I search best freeze dryer so you can freeze dry your food it's a couple thousand dolls for a freeze dryer take it it freeze dries it you put it in bags and it stores it for like 30 years so they have a review and it makes sense they're the homesteading family they have classes on homesteading they have a podcast they have a Blog right talking about this stuff they have pictures of themselves if you're thinking about getting a freeze dryer read this review first I'm giving my honest feedback after a full year of preserving all kinds of food so it's like that's how you write you write from a firstperson perspective based on your experience using the thing and then they get into it right so they they have recipes related to it but there's a picture of her actually using it I've had it for over a year now I like this I didn't like this it's really a way to talk about it in a casual tone and what's really cool about this form of blogging is that yes it requires work yes they have a podcast yes they have a Blog but it all starts from one like it starts from zero and you just start creating content what's good about SEO now is yes it can be more difficult to rank for affiliate keywords but also you don't have to do like the old days a year ago where you're like optimizing it's only optimization it's only I I liked that kind of stuff where it's just like all you have to do is optimize it and serf for SEO with the right words in the right places in the right format and the right thing and the right links and it ranks that's kind of gone now it's more like is this a brand is this trustworthy like is this are these real people are they saying things that are helpful what are the user signals of people interacting with this content all of that stuff so it gives you a little bit more freedom to write however you want you can make mistakes and typos and Google doesn't care as much as maybe they used to so you can create this content based on your own experience which is more fun to write than like every single little detail and SEO and semantic keywords and adding things in you can just do it in a more fun way but I like this example from a affiliate perspective because it's written from the first person perspective from they're ranking well for it it's a profitable keyword and it's a you know yes there's ads yes there's different things on here it looks kind of busy but hey they're ranking for it they're providing their experience and they're making money with affiliate marketing so what you do is you create the content you write the article you don't have to add affiliate links in or join the programs or anything like that yet what you do is you just add homepage links if you're writing about the freeze dryer you just link to it normally don't worry about it then what you do is you wait over time are you ranking are you on page three are you on page two once you get to like page two then it's like all right I'm going to update this article I'm going to make sure it's as good as possible maybe I'll rewrite the intro and then I'll look at joining affiliate programs so then you join the programs I have full videos on that I'm not going to go into the in-depth weeds of joining affiliate programs here but you fill out the form you join common misconception is beginners can't don't get accepted you usually have to email the actual affiliate manager not just fill out the form if you just fill out the form they're going to skim through it they might look at your site they might reject you just email them say hey I'm on page two for the I'm on page three I'm a new blogger I'm just starting I'm trying to do this can you let me join your affiliate program if you do that they will typically let you join then you have the links in like I said first mention in a button throughout the content don't overthink it people just click Text links and buttons and then you sit and wait you create the supporting content around it you try to prop it up you create informational content in your nich you just keep scaling your content efforts so this is not a get-rich quick scheme this is not as easy as it was 5 years ago this is a numbers game that requires consistent traffic affiliate marketing should be one monetization stream in one platform that you have your business should be bigger as a whole you should be trying to build your true personal brand across a website plus another social Channel with affiliate marketing being one of four revenue streams which also include overtime ads like banner ads on a website YouTube Partner program ads sponsors potentially in your content that are paying to be put in your articles or your videos and then selling your own product selling your own product is ultimately the best thing that you can do it takes about a year to two years to actually get to that point where you're creating enough content you've built an audience to then sell something to an email list but again this is all needed this you the days of just gaming the affiliate marketing system writing a couple articles and ranking are over you need to build a true brand eventually go multiplatform either Blog plus podcast Blog plus YouTube channel Blog plus social media we have the AI and automation tools to do it let me just show you one more before we go here so this is what I call the AI Niche Hunter this is version two you scroll down if you once you get this click link description it's at the bottom of email one you'll see all of these linked in the bottom of email one a lot of people ask me that so if you get down to page four this is the affiliate version of the niche Hunter so you just put this copy it paste it into Claude or chat GPT and it'll give you like ideas for a niche to get started in the sub niches that you should be in Niche nich I don't care anymore I hate the word whatever um the sub niches you should get in so because like if you're a blogger you should have you know five categories of content like you saw the homesteading family if you're homesteading there's like gardening preserving canning outdoor stuff cooking Home Defense even there's a lot of different things you can talk about as a brand so let's see what's a what's a niche of Interest I could put in recruiting and HR and then it has sub niches so if you if you have a blog or a Channel of some kind about HR and recruiting you'd probably talk about hiring and onboarding employee retention the technology and automation diversity and Equity inclusion in the workplace if you want to talk about that I guess you can uh it's being eliminated now in a lot of places I believe in you know picking the best person not necessarily judging people based on identity politics that's just me though and then remote and hybrid work so what this will do then you can put in one of the niches so I'm going to say HR technology pick one and then it's going to give me 20 affiliate keyword ideas so what's interesting is you think of okay maybe AI recruiting software is like the only one but then you can look at things like and when you start to really unravel a niche you can realize how deep every Niche goes so like 10 hris systems applicant tracking systems is another keyword HR chatbots people analytics remote work Tech Stacks employee experience platforms and the can write about Ai and HR performance management software remote work security software there's a lot of different affiliate articles you could write now these specifically in recruiting they're going to be more B2B type of articles that don't get a ton of traffic but probably could be good for sponsors or having things like that that's just my take after looking at it but you can put just use again click the link in the description below get the nich hunter you start brainstorming just start thinking are there affiliate opportunities can I make money doing this are they recurring programs that's great that means you can make money every single month is there enough because think about your Niche your Niche you should be able to write 50 100 articles in your Niche at least uh you need your Niche needs a product category I've had a lot of students that ask like my Niche is uh journaling for men over 60 and I'm like that's not a niche that's like one article your Niche needs to be able to have 50 to 100 articles it should also have a product category think camping or hiking or basketball or gardening cooking Fitness right so think of it that way but that's a way to just start brainstorming in your Niche because again like I said things are different today you can't just write single affiliate articles you need a full brand strategy around it if this is the whole brand affiliate marketing is one Revenue stream and one platform just one tiny part of a bigger hole so you need the full picture and I hope to give you that full picture over the course of time check out other videos on my Channel please like the video subscribe to the channel hit the notification Bell check out other videos and I will see you in the next video
