Affiliate Marketing with AI in 2024 (FULL Beginner’s Guide)

I'm really excited about what we did today with this free affiliate marketing course you know a lot of people create videos on affiliate marketing maybe they're 10 minutes maybe they're 30 minutes so they're kind of scratching the surface I hardly scratch the surface but I wanted to do something truly different and create a completely free course on making money with affiliate marketing even if you're a beginner even if you have no audience and even if you don't want to spend a bunch of money to get started so this course is hours of content teaching you

every single thing I've learned about making money with affiliate marketing over the last 7 years both as an affiliate manager back in 201 18 working for a big tech company as well as starting my own affiliate marketing business and making over a million dollars for the last three years in a row from a single website so within this course there's going to be five main sections so we're going to cover everything from the initial Niche selection getting started finding new and emerging product categories keywords that are low competition optimizing your affiliate links to track more

sales negotiating with affiliate managers building media kits making money immediately with agency work uh basically building a media Empire for yourself starting from zero as an individual person I'm also going to show you how to use custom AI prompts to find uh New Opportunities speed up your entire process now if you're interested in getting those prompts and my free AI Master Class to go along with it make sure to click the link in the description and top comment below and I'll get you access to all my free resources all right I've chatted enough let's get

into part one part one we're going to cover affiliate marketing 101 the state of affiliate marketing currently today and affiliate marketing with AI so let's get into it so first of all we have to cover what is affiliate marketing why do Brands even do it in the first place well think about it first from the Brand's perspective because this is really important if you're a brand like REI and you sell camping gear and hiking boots you want to rank for all of your product categories like best hiking boots now when you do that on Google

you really only have real estate for like one spot maybe two if you're lucky and you're really good at SEO or an ad but what about the other seven eight or nine spots on that first page of results that's where Affiliates come in that's where you want to work with other companies and Publishers like yourself like me individual blogs and websites to actually scale your uh visibility so that's what you're doing you can nine to 10 times 20 times your visibility as a brand and if you're a brand most brands have affiliate programs and typically

a big portion of their sales come through that when I was working in the tech world like 30% of our uh sales for our software company were through Affiliates specifically so it's an important it's like a third party sales engine through links that get people to promote you so we're thinking from that perspective because we're Affiliates we want to kind of know both sides of the equation so there's some main components of affiliate marketing right there's programs that you can join that is dictated by the brand itself they create the affiliate program rules the commission

rates and all of that there's also affiliate networks where they can a brand like Dick Sporting Goods can join CJ or Shar sale or impact and it's like a Marketplace to find them grab the links join the programs and all of that now affiliate links are interesting they are tracked uh using cookies on a person's browser and they're really you know if you're an affiliate they are specific to you so for example example if you join impact radius you'll get a specific affiliate link that has like a bunch of numbers on it right there's the

publisher ID the ad ID the brand ID all these things that are then tracked back to you so it's a way to attribute sales to an individual website YouTuber Creator in an easy way and it stores a cookie on their computer that can be 30 days 60 days or 90 days so often times you know Amazon has a pretty low window 24 hours or when somebody adds something to their card it extends it but if you get somebody to click on your affiliate link oftentimes even if they purchase something 29 days later you can still

get credit for that sale it's usually last click attribution meaning if you're the last affiliate to get that click you get credit there's also affiliate dashboards that I'll show you so that's where you track your sales track your commissions you get paid via usually PayPal or bank account and then there's commissions and insertion ORD so insertion orders are the actual contracts that you as an affiliate sign with the brand they're pretty automated you just click a few things sometimes they're kind of really automated in an affiliate network but they're individ visualized so for example if

you wanted to join the REI affiliate program and you saw it in a network maybe the base insertion order IO is set at 5% commission or something like that now that is to say you can't get you can get higher than that because brands are willing to negotiate and that's just the public insertion order right if you're actually generating sales you can get a lot higher so that is dictated each individual affiliate could have their own contract that's completely different than all the others so just something uh things to keep in mind so let's look

at a few examples of dashboard s so this is my partner stack affiliate dashboard you can see this is the homepage this shows all the companies that I'm already in affiliate for so you can see thinkific here I've made $932,000 from their affiliate program 148,000 from learn worlds livestorm 84 and then if you click in the individual program itself it'll take you to the actual company so you can see the uh individual data here and all the individual stuff you can grab links if you need to uh there's always a place in dashboard for links

for stats and how to get paid basically click commissions you can get paid also like impact radius there's a reporting dashboard it shows you okay made $597 teachable Stellar WP all that stuff you can see that there's content which is like your links your assets which is where you grab your affiliate links uh the reports and then the brands themselves so if I wanted to find a new brands I would click this and it would show me all the different brands uh this is my brand so I could find All Brands there's 5700 Brands I

could look up so I could see service areas United States wherever you are in the world uh you can kind of categorize it that way but every single dashboard looks a little bit different and that those are affiliate networks uh sometimes individual companies use platforms like reversion or some others that they can run their own affiliate Network within their own product so for example kajabi they run their own internal affiliate program so it looks like this so you can see I've made $156,000 from them here's the links you can see and that's pretty much it

it's actually really simple this one here's your affiliate link so all you need is a dashboard to see how much money you made how many clicks you're generating and grab your affiliate link I have another video on my Channel about how I joined 287 affiliate programs you can see that I've like bookmarked a lot of them they all look very different so you just have to get comfortable logging in and viewing the data now when we talk about affiliate marketing we have to discuss the role of the brand or Merchant and the affiliate manager so

there's two sides of the affiliate equation there's the brand or the merchant that's how what it's called typically that's the e-commerce company the software company the actual brand that creates the affiliate program to sell the products now the affiliate manager on that side their entire goal there's usually one affiliate manager per company or it could be someone at the marketing team or if it's a really big company they might have like three to five affiliate managers but usually there's just one and what they do is their entire goal is to make money with the affiliate

program so they find new Affiliates they work with existing Affiliates and they try to increase sales through Affiliates based on relationships now their entire goal is revenue so they get into marketing meetings and they say how's the affiliate program doing right and they want to actually show that it's growing and then there's the affiliate or publisher that's us so that is considered a publisher which is the person that's actually publishing the affiliate content dropping in the affiliate links and promoting the brands themselves so it's a win-win Partnership if you can do it right Brands get

more visibility Affiliates make money and it's a real negotiation kind of strategic play uh the brands dictate the rules they create the insertion orders themselves the contracts brands do have flexibility in their affiliate terms though like I said it could be you know 5% affiliate commission to everybody but you generate a couple sales you talk to the affiliate manager and they increase it to 10% there was individual single like emails I sent that have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring commissions you know going from 20% recurring commission up to 30 and then

40% recurring commission which changes you know the amount of money you're making over years substantially so it's very important to do that but it's a win-win relationship so it's really about living between a search and a purchase so when you think about people using the internet psychologically they're thinking thoughts in their head products they want they type it in to Google other search engines and then they want comparative content so for example what we're doing with affiliate marketing is we are living in between the algorithms and the revenue so for example I have Google here

that's a little bit bigger but you can see somebody thinks of something they type it in like best ATVs best ice fishing reels best fishing gear they signify buyer intent and they're not ready to go right to the product page yet they want a comparative content that is where Affiliates win they compare and contrast the different brands and then they promote affiliate links you're just living between a search and a purchase you're the middle man or middle woman that is providing the information to help help uh buyers make buying decisions it's really that simple and

the state of affiliate marketing is really growing so we can see e-commerce as a total percentage of retail sales so all retail sales you know in the entire uh United States is consistently going up you can see a big spike when covid happened came back down but you can see the line kind of elevated a little bit but you can see that uh 16% around there of all sales in the United States are through websites used to be lower and it just keeps growing so e-commerce people buying stuff online is growing meaning more people are

searching for things online which is growing and Affiliates Drive 16% of all online orders all online orders so e-commerce is worth $ 1.1 trillion do a year meaning that affiliate marketing drives $176 billion of sales per year there's the statistics here from statista to back it up so it's growing we think that oh it's just the same thing no it is growing over time and there's $176 billion doll of sales that are generated proc through affiliate links so it's a huge uh huge business so it drives a significant portion the the biggest platforms are search

driven Google and YouTube now when we think about affiliate marketing we we think we have to find people that want to buy something we have to find people that are interested in clicking on a link and then purchasing now we know 176 billion dollars are generated through that some people say oh it's I don't buy that way well most people do uh but they have to be search driven because the alternative to search driven is kind of like soci social media so Instagram or Tik Tok or things like that now we'll cover a little bit

of that in this but search driven allows people to know who your audiences so for example if somebody types in best laptops and they find your article they're much more likely to buy a laptop than if they're just passively scrolling on Instagram and they see you're promoting a laptop you don't know who that person is on Tik Tok or Instagram you don't know what they want you don't know their you don't know anything search allows us to know that they're actually interested in buying something and that is key most affiliate sales are driven say most

vast majority through Google and YouTube primarily Google and affiliate marketing is a numbers game Based on data I'll show you examples of that so it's conversion rates it's getting clicks right it's all Based on data how much traffic do you get how many clicks do you send to the affiliate Brands how do they convert on their site how much money you making what are the commission rates right so I'll cover the math behind that but really consistent content publishing is what wins so it's not like a lot of videos that you might see on YouTube

tell you to join ClickBank promote some supplement in a Facebook ad and make 20 bucks it's like that's such a shortsighted way to think about affiliate marketing it's a scammy way to think about it and it's not a scammy business for the most part some of it is but a lot of it is not it's a huge business that big media sites do and it's really about finding new and emerging Trends and keywords today long gone are the days of just trying to create some random content drop it in and hope to God that you

rank right that stuff's getting harder you can't create old content so what we mean by that is if you are thinking about a Content strategy which we'll cover it makes a lot more sense to talk about new and emerging products that are less competitive than something that's been around for 20 years for example would you want would you be able to rank and promote affiliate links on something like best web hosting which has been around since basically the internet started articles were written 20 years ago on it or something newer you know best AI project

management software something that's new that not as many people have written about yet that has uptrending search volume that more people are interested in because like I said as a numbers game this is more about if we want to make affiliate Revenue to actually change our life and make real consistent income then we can't just have a flash in the pan strategy where one month we do really well and then the next month it goes to zero we want to at least have consistent publish and to do that we want to rank content over time

via Google or via getting you uh YouTube views over the course of time this isn't about doing one post trying to go viral making 50 bucks and then moving on and trying to go viral viral viral that's kind of the Tik Tock shop affiliate strategy we'll cover that too but really this is about finding new things to talk about that are less competitive so let's look at a few examples of different sites uh that are doing affiliate marketing just to show you a couple things so I Googled some different stuff just to look at examples

so I search like best ATV plows put a plow on your ATV here's an article from th drive.com and it's got you know the top three you can see it these are affiliate links here to Amazon Walmart you can see that it's really simple content the the beauty of a Blog affiliate marketing is that you don't need some very Advanced content like a YouTube video might need to show all the products have them show them use them compare them whereas a blog post people are skimming for information so people's attention spans are a lot shorter

so they if I see this my eyes go right to the title it goes to these images I might just click on one of these immediately that's why they're up here because people just click on and once the once I click this link the uh cookie is stored in my browser and I am now if I made this purchase this site would get credit for that sale even probably I don't know the Walmart terms but later on you can see through a website there's a simple intro people just skim this stuff so intro okay let's

see best overall this one boom click it best second best best big blade I'll cover how to you know create the content in a way where you're kind of covering your bases covering different categories of products but it's really simple this is a lot easier to create than some long YouTube video on all of these that you have to show every single product and this is what people want when it comes to a Blog they just want to see what are the best different options how are they you know different this a big option small

option best for beginners best for advanced people so it's a really simple content strategy uh here's another one I'm ranking for like best AI SEO tools that was a newer one number one for that so using that promoting like you know not a ton of affiliate links in there Surfer chat GPT Claude other programs here's another one ice fishing this is I searched U best ice fishing reel and this was ranking on page one this article from Joel Nelson outdoors from 2019 2019 ice re review so you can see there's still like opportunities in a

lot of categories you could create a newer guide probably do a lot better so he's got these are just simple affiliate links this looks kind of like an old post but hey it's ranking on Google on page one and there's affiliate links in it another example is outside of Google there's YouTube so with YouTube it's the same kind of strategy we're just putting the links in different places so for YouTube that is in the description so here's one for best travel credit cards of 2024 and YouTube's great for really competitive niches like Finance business software

where it's like okay I'm not going to rank on Google for best vpns best credit cards but I probably would get views on YouTube for that it's a lot easier so you can see the affiliate links are in the description so he's got them in here so you talk about them you mention them in the video make sure to click the link in the description below to get access to the best you know mile value travel credit cards so you mentioned it in the video put the link in the description and a ton of sales

are generated through YouTube as well there are individual channels like VPN channels making hundreds of thousands even millions of dollars a month promoting vpns on YouTube so the opportunity is huge then if we look at Tik Tok here's a good example of that strategy so this is Justice buys he got 1.2 million followers and he creates Amazon interesting Amazon uh kind of viral trending videos so he does a ton of see this strategy that it works but he it also requires a lot of work right cuz look at the how good this video is he's

shooting it a lot he had a dog go up and down and do an SUV he's shooting water on himself and the dog he's covering a lot of dog products so like a video like this could take a full day to create Le hours right so you create the videos like this and then you'll see there's not like a great place to have the affiliate link so Justice buys.com you go to his page you click on this AI products and the videos and then he has this little website where he has all of his buys

right this dog stare and these are all Amazon affiliate links so you the Tik Tok strategies you kind of have to go viral you have to create a lot of content you can see how many vide he's created with all of these products and he bought all the products he has photos and videos of all the products so you can see this is like the monetization path the the main monetization paths somebody Google something they get to a website and they click a link somebody searches something on YouTube or gets recommended a video on YouTube

they watch it they click affiliate links in the description they watch a Tik Tok video they go to the profile they buy something or they can buy it through Tik Tok shop but that's the main kind of Str strategy now much like we can think about affiliate marketing from the Brand's perspective to better understand it we can really understand it when we look at big media sites and what they do they have unlimited budgets tons of people working for them what do they do for affiliate marketing because we have to think like media sites too

we have to realize that there is hidden money behind everything on the internet everything so everything is based on relationships and business so if we're a publisher if an affiliate marketing person such as ourselves is a publisher of content how do we monze ize content we have to know this so we monetize content just like any other publisher based business whether it's news print digital magazine a website whatever it is we monetize it by promoting Brands and the brands pay us it's really that simple and when we look at it there's hidden money behind everything

so if you look at like PC mag for example they have all kinds of like best laptops routers software this thing that thing they have tons of different content so best smart home devices of 2024 are they really just putting the best product in there are they really doing a full review and putting the very best product in there out of the kindness of their heart no they're putting the products in there that make them the most money it's really that simple and a Big Brand like PC mag might not even do affiliate marketing they're

doing custom deals or they're getting paid a cost per click by these Brands so if I were to click this I bet you you can see at the very bottom cor left corner there's a custom link here and it's very tiny but it says CC p uh cc. pcmag.com V1 this is tracking a bunch of data and it's probably using a click tracking software and simply sa is paying PC mag by The Click every time somebody clicks on this and this is going to be based on how much money they're making so the ratings the

reviews the internet is basically just who is getting paid the most so it's it's an unfortunate state of you know how everything works but we have to know that we can't just ignore that let PCM run wild Tom's guide tech radar CNET Forbes these huge media sites if they're doing something then we need to learn from them even if it's you know unethical sometimes now the truth is when it comes to ethics of this uh this says deals are selected by our Commerce team okay sure so whatever that means there's a little asteris there now

what's interesting is um this is Tiny so it says there's an affiliate disclosure here they select and review products independently their mission statement if you buy through affiliate links we may earn commissions with help support our testing now I would even argue that this this language and the placement of this is not good enough from a disclosure standpoint this should be bigger this should be closer to the links and it shouldn't say may if you buy through our affiliate links we earn commissions we do right it's not may you do so really you know it's

a brand relationship so we have to think like a media site now we have to think about our future like a publisher so if we are going to become an affiliate that means we're going to be a publisher that means we need to know how the publisher business works so we need to know how do we monetize overall and we can actually it's really strong a a really strong strategy when you're thinking about we getting into building your actual website but when you think about that way affiliate marketing is one really good Revenue path out

of many so when you're thinking about yourself as a publisher what you can think about is yes I'm going to create content join affiliate programs but what else could I offer in the future what could I do to generate sponsorship Revenue sponsored articles newsletter Revenue other agency Revenue so it's kind of interesting when you just start a website you could you could have affiliate marketing dictate some of your initial content strategy we'll cover that but also think about when you're teaching in a niche you are providing helpful content to an audience but also yeah yes

there's two there's two kind of interesting things here let's say you have a Blog about ATVs well yes your best ATVs how to use an ATV how to drive an ATV that's all helping a consumer audience that wants ATVs but also your site is mainly being monetized via the brands themselves B2B the actual ATV companies so any Niche that you're in there's multiple Paths of Revenue so there's think about it through not just your audience because the audience will eventually make you money by like purchasing through like joining your email list and buying a product

or things like that they might click your affiliate links all of that but the main monetization of a publisher is through the brands themselves so how can you monetize through the brands themselves outside of just affiliate links you do that by creating a media kit which we will cover that can offer different things and you can have two options two main paths ways that you will promote the brand so you can say I'll add you to articles I will add you to my newsletter as a sponsor I will add you to my YouTube channel as

a sponsor right I can promote you directly but also this is an interesting distinction if you want to make more money faster what you could also offer is hey I also offer I can promote you but I also offer done for you Services things like I will create I will do some of your content strategy I will create PPC campaigns for you I will create content for you so you almost think about it like there's the affiliate promotional route where you're promoting the brand yourself through your own content and then there's kind of you can

also build if you wanted to the agency model to make money faster where you're saying there's also done for you services that I can do so we'll cover both but it's an interesting distinction so for example a site like gear junkie has a Media Kit and it's like what is a big out your media site do well they have you have a website social video podcast newsletter and events those are their main publishing channels we will start with just a website but they have all this different content they can offer a lot of different things

display media which we probably won't do because you need a ton of traffic for that that doesn't make sense but you can see what do they offer they offer sponsored articles sponsored videos podcasts distribution interaction and media so you can see big sites like this they monetize in a number of different ways not just affiliate marketing so we have to kind of realize that what do they do so the main thing to think about is we start with affiliate marketing first because we don't have we're starting from zero we just drop affiliate links and we

can do that but over the course of time if we're in the right Niche we're teaching the right things we can monetize through affiliate marketing ads sponsors agency services that we offer sponsored newsletters content and all of that all right with all that said we have to figure out what we're actually going to create content on we have to figure out what Niche are we going to get into what are we going to make money in so AI is a powerful tool for this AI is probably the best way to figure out what Niche you

actually want to be in so you can find keywords you can create outlines you can do all of it I'm going to show you a prompt a system prompt that I created you can paste in to Claude which is my favorite AI tool better than chat GPT in my opinion but you can use this AI framework to come up with an affiliate keyword strategy just an overall Niche strategy to start with so you can get my AI Niche Hunter prompt the link is in the description and top comment below if you want that you put

your email in you'll get it through an email in your first email just please understand that everyone's asking me where's the promp where's the PRP it's like it's just in the description in the pin comment if you join your email you'll get all five of my favorite prompts now with that said looks a little bit like this it's Google doc you copy this long drawn out thing and you paste it into Claude now what you can do there is it's going to ask you please pick a niche that you're interested in so I'm going to

go with ATVs I've been using it in this video there's I've used so many different Niche examples right so what this will do is just you want to figure figure out what type of content you're going to create so it's going to give you five sub Niche ideas so when we're a publisher we have to have categories of content we have to know like hey if I have a blog or if I have a YouTube channel what are the main categories I'm going to cover I need I can't just talk about the same thing every

time I can't always just talk about the products only I can't just always talk about one aspect of things so we have to cover the differences so if you were going to start an at affiliate ATV affiliate marketing website or YouTube channel the main things you would talk about could be equipment trails and destinations performance and modifications racing and competitions and then lifestyle and community and then it says within that which subn would you like to focus on I'm going to go with uh since it's for affiliate Revenue I'm going to say ATV equipment not

safety but just ATV equipment now within that what this will do is it'll give you 20 keyword ideas for both affiliate revenue and potentially some other informational articles so this is a really interesting one I train this so it'll give you some good information so you can see a lot of them here best ATV helmets winches tires GPS gloves snow plows safety equipment loading ramps battery care winches all of that so it says start with the pillar post the ultimate ATV accessories buying guide for 2024 I kind of trained it just today actually at the

time of this recording to give you pillar post ideas that you need when you're first starting so the ultimate ATV accessories buying guide and how to choose the right ATV for your needs The Beginner's Guide these are comprehensive pillar post resources to help you establish Authority in your Niche and then over time you would expand because you need more informational content in order to rank all of these affiliate articles too you can't just be an affiliate site anymore that's another distinction now whereas you don't want to only write best affil best of affiliate articles because

then you just look like an affiliate site we want to build a real brand around what we're talking about so you just have there's only two types of content you'll ever write how to do stuff so informational articles and then the best transactional articles for affiliate Revenue so I'll say how to install winch and then ATV battery maintenance tips for longer reliability intersperse the transactional affiliate posts in there so we really want to have like two main pillar posts one could be informational one can be transactional and then over time you just add in all

of these different affiliate and informational posts all right let's do another Niche we're going to do this again just to show you so what's the niche how about smart home devices that's a new thing smart thermostats lights fancy stuff so what could it be well there's security systems lighting thermostats and HVAC hubs and assistance kitchen appliances I'm going to go with I like smart kitchen appliances that sounds interesting smart kitchen appliances and again you sign up for Claude um it's free to do you'll get cut off after you use it like five or 10 times

in a day so you can use it five or 10 times in a day and then it's $20 a month if you want to just use it unlimited but I like resources that are free to get started not some very expensive tools like HRS or something like that when you're just starting out so you can see a lot of good content you can create here this is like giving you your entire affiliate marketing Niche strategy so that's what we need first step one what Niche am I going to get into what content am I going

to create so we can see here the pillar post would be like The Ultimate Guide to Smart kitchen appliances and then there's a number of stuff so um another pillar post smart cooking from beginner to Pro so we have this gives you uh a lot of you stuff that you would never really think of new and emerging categories of stuff and you can straight up ask it hey give me like the newest products that are coming out that are low competition also you can just keep chatting with it but this is a really good starting

point it'll show you okay all these different things that I don't even know existed right smart multi cooker features best smart kitchen scales faucets smart blenders and you just keep going over and over and over again so when we're thinking about affiliate marketing we want to create content that compares different products in the niche to get people to click the links to buy things from us to make affiliate commissions to do that it requires a Content strategy a good content strategy not like again like a flash in the pan I'm just going to spam content

strategy so to do that we need to be building a brand in that Niche to create informational and transactional content to help a single audience make buying decisions so we'll cover exactly how to get started with these keywords what to do but let's get into part two that is getting started so getting started with affiliate marketing joining Pro programs and what to look for when you join them so again affiliate marketing is a great first Revenue stream for anybody we don't have a product to sell yet we don't have an audience yet we're not going

to wait on ad Revenue which takes forever or sponsors that we need an audience for affiliate marketing is good at the beginning because any business any brand whether you're an e-commerce brand a software company even Nike needs to create content so if we are individual bloggers we're creating content with affiliate links which can make a lot of money faster than just banner ads or other revenue streams so it's the best first Revenue stream however if you don't have traffic ad it could be hard to get approved into affiliate programs so a lot of people want

to join affiliate programs immediately when they don't have any traffic yet they don't even have a YouTube channel or a Blog and I would say be patient and wait this isn't a quick immediate monetization strategy this is one where you're creating a Content plan and the content plan is the most important thing as a publisher creating good content is the number one priority affiliate marketing is one Revenue stream that you can generate through that once you're already getting some traction so what do you do you have to begin your affiliate content strategy so we go

back to the trusty AI tool we come up with the keyword right and we have to think the keyword comes first then the affiliate program so what I mean by that is you don't the best strategy is to find content that you can get eyeballs and attention on and traffic for and then find the affiliate program some people try to do it the reverse and they say I want to promote Blu host so I'm going to create content around this brand to promote them it doesn't really work that way that you're going to just you're

pigeon ho holding yourself to one company you're not dictating your content strategy for yourself you're letting the brand like dictate what content you create you have to do it from a keyword first approach so we can use the AI to look for different opportunities like we showed you and then we start ranking the content and we start doing it over the course of time so there's what I consider affiliate marketing research and it's pretty simple research it's kind of like back of the napkin math there's two ways of doing it so you think about how

much money can you make so what is the price of the product what is the commission rate of the company so if I'm promoting a $200 pair of hiking boots and the commission rate is 10% I'll make $20 for every sale if I'm promoting a $5 fidget spinner $2 fidget spinner whatever they cost I don't know I have no idea for three 3% commission right I might be making like a doar or 30 and there's a wide range you're promoting anything from an expensive golf simulator to an expensive laptop or watches or luxury goods then

you're going to make more money than a pair of socks so we have to realize that in the internet things that get searched for a lot and can make a lot of money are going to be the most competitive that just makes sense for example best credit cards you Google that you got nerd wallet at the top raking in money and a bunch of big Finance sites it's not worth pursuing but we can find Opportunities and then rank for them and I often get the question like what if there isn't an affiliate program in a

category what if I did ATVs and like there isn't none of the brands have affiliate programs that's the case a lot of times especially with sometimes new and emerging products like AI software AI companies you still create the content anyway if it's a good keyword you create the content you get the traffic and you worry about the other stuff later we have to move with speed and precision we can't be checking every single art and make sure there's an affiliate program for every every single brand if I did that there's probably thousands of brands on

my blog I can't like research and review um every affiliate program for them we just create a Content plan we stick to it and you can monetize that in other ways if you're ranking on page one for best ATVs or ATV accessories the brands will probably reach out to you and want to be put number one in that article and you just do a sponsorship deal it's really that simple but what you want to do is in your Niche so you use the AI tool you find a niche that you're interested in you're like hey

this actually looks like 's a lot of good opportunity and then we uh try to find the top three affiliate programs within a given product category so what are the main most popular brands in your Niche those are usually the ones that do the best when it comes to affiliate marketing not the Obscure expensive Brands those don't convert because again we all we can do is control getting traffic and then clicks on the affiliate link once the reader clicks the affiliate link then it's out of our hands the brand it's on the brand to convert

and often times the brands that convert the best are are just popular mid-price Point products so we create these product category posts to do that now basically what you do is you publish your article with just regular links in it so you'll create content we'll show you that publish the article on your website which will also show you how to do and then you just don't worry about affiliate Links at the beginning you just link to the product link to the homepage whatever that is you focus on acquiring traffic with all of your effort don't

join the affiliate program too early doesn't make sense we don't want to scrape pennies off the floor when we can when $100 bills are in the future because if you think about it if you're on page two on Google for something or you're just starting your YouTube channel and you have like a couple 100 views on a video it's not worth pursuing affiliate marketing at that time you get better return on investment focusing all your effort on the content so that you can 10 or 100x your views and visibility which will 10 or 100x your

affiliate Revenue um but what you do is you focus on a you know don't join the programs too early publish your article with regular links check your Google analytics check your YouTube Studio to see how much traffic or views you're getting and once it's getting over 100 sessions a month on Google there's begin your affiliate marketing strategy that's when you can start joining affiliate programs and it's actually each article is kind of like a mini business for example if you have an article on the um best ATVs that has four or five companies in it

each of that's making money it's ranking on its own then you have another one on like the best UTV accessories that has a bunch of products in it it's ranking on its own it's making its own money so each piece of content is kind of like a little investment in yourself for the future to sit and make uh income over time and it's a good way to kind of diversify now the goal here though is just to publish 20 articles in one subn so one specific area we go deep on content rather than staying up

too high in this surface level stuff 15 informational posts five affiliate posts and then we revisit this each month to adjust so we base this on data we say am I getting any traction yet is this working can I go deeper in this Niche should I pivot to another sub Niche if I'm in ATVs and I did 20 articles on ATV should I do UTV should I do uh motorcycle stuff should I pivot a little bit if it's working how many articles are needed in that Niche so this is where topical Authority comes in so

when you think about it topical Authority is going deeper on topics than anyone else this this this is how we actually win uh compared to media sites and make a lot of affiliate Revenue so topical Authority is important so when you think about it that way if we're in a niche like for example uh technology laptops for example if we were just to you know stay Broad and stay at the top we would just create a post on best laptops right here now the problem with this post is that it's old and very competitive it's

one of the main ones you're going to have sites like CNET uh forb New York Times probably and all these big sites making money on this top searched term right here so but we want to have topical Authority related to laptops doesn't mean we'll never write it but what we do the way that we win is that we go deep we go deeper than any of these sites would ever go they have teams and they can just rank easy content they rank all kinds of stuff for affiliate revenue and they're making millions of dollars but

what if we created you know instead of best laptops it's like best gaming laptops if I can spell if you can even read my words under $500 or you know best VR headsets for Sim racing or something like you know you just go really deep and you start teaching about things related to like best drones for Real Estate so these are considered right longtail keywords right that's obvious we're going longer tail we're going deeper and the thing is this is you know we going up here in technology best drones best La uh best um VR

headsets best drones we're staying too high we need to go deep so if we go into one sub Niche like let's say the subich that we find with AI is VR headsets for Sim racing then we could write 20 articles on VR headsets for Sim racing and then like there's not Forbes Cen at Tech these big media sites they're not writing that many articles related to sim R and you do that you're going to be probably the number one Authority for because there's just not a lot of people doing it there might be one other

site that's doing it so we go deep and then topical Authority is really about how many articles do you have so if you're talking about VR Sim racing and that's your Niche right that's all your content how many articles do you have 20 50 100 like how many does it take every nich is a little bit different when it comes to this so you might only need 10 articles on VR Sim racing to do well however if you're in something like you know vpns and you want to rank for that you might need like a

thousand articles on VPN to rank that much topical Authority because that's what the competition says so we're looking for things that are lower competition and then we're going deep on topics things that media sites don't do so how do we find these new and emerging product categories before other people do if it's competitive uh there's four main methods so the AI one we covered the AI method with Claude using a system prompt that I created to find all the kind of content creating a Content plan around it that's my favorite one that's the best right

now that's pretty new another one is the HRS method so for for example if we go to the keyword Explorer we can put in best plus a niche like best ATV we go to the matching terms tool and we can spot all these opportunities based on the competition scores and the search volume so you can see ATVs are not competitive the keyword difficulty is one out of 100 which is zero is the lowest ATVs of 2023 and it gives us a lot of ideas matching terms just means that you know it has the word best

n ATV in it with other words as well so we have tires battery best ATV for the money 2024 for kids side by side helmet so you think about all right if I'm talking about ATVs what are the main affiliate posts there going to be best ATVs and then what are the main um other types of ATVs there's kid ATVs there is sporting ATVs like racing ATVs there's like farming utility ATVs and then there's best utvs utility vehicles and then there's the accessories so the helmets the gloves winches snow plows all of that gun racks

and you can see speakers it just goes on and on and on best ATV for hunting the main thing you want to see here is that there's low competition and there's a lot of things you can write about because you don't want to go too narrow on your Niche I have another video on my Channel about picking your Niche with AI it goes way deeper on that specifically but we don't want to go so narrow that our entire Niche is just about ATV winches right like you can only create probably one article on that so

we want in our subn to at least have the opportunity to write at least 20 articles on it now this is the simplest old school keyword research approach for affiliate marketing you use HRS you put in best plus the niche and you find it there you can look for more competitive ones like if I put in best laptops you're going to see it's a lot more competitive keywords that are in the 70s zoom in a little 70s a little bit lower competition on like something like best laptops for college but we can drop the difficulty

down to like five we want things that are under a five difficulty and we can see best laptops for coding best working from home best for music production best for writers Architects data science under 600 teachers cyber security CAD Sim 4 $400 so there's a lot people search the internet for a lot of different things 500 keywords that are lower competition in laptops so HF is a good way to find affiliate keywords you can see when you click on one like best laptops for coding you can see the search volume every month so that's how

many searches per month you can see the the keyword difficulty score and then you can just see what are the top 10 ranking sites so you can see just josh. Tech has a domain rating of zero and he's on page one so he has no really Authority or links or anything like that but he's on page one for best laptops for programming the main thing you want to look for on H is is there a low Dr site on the first page that means that you probably can be there too I would say if there's

one under like 40 or 50 look for that if there's one or two on the first page that's a good thing and we can see you know this has a lot of data in here a lot of the AI ones that we figured out like okay best smart refrigerators you can take one of these if you wanted to and validate it here so you could put it in here and you can see what happens it's like okay now what you're going to see what I actually like to see is there's pretty low search volume on

this best smart refrigerators that the problem with HRS is that often times this is just pulling data from the internet and it's not always accurate in fact it's unac inaccurate a lot of the times so often times if a keyword is already in in here and it's already saying hundreds or thousands of clicks it might already start being too competitive because everyone's using a tool like this to find Opportunities so using an AI tool can actually give us things a little bit ahead of time that might even just say zero in hrfs it might just

say zero it might not even exist and that's actually not a bad thing because we know that I've seen it happen where atrs tells me it says 20 here but then I actually publish it and I get like a th visits a month so this is just a broad estimate for this one keyword if we look at the parent topic of best smart refrigerator we can look at these actual companies here that are ranking on the top 10 for this if it will load and we can actually see that they're ranking for a lot more

keywords than just that one so there's get actually it says 20 but they're actually getting more so like Albert lee. Biz dr39 low Dr site ranking number two for best smart refrigerator he's actually ranking for 85 keywords that add up to hundreds here probably more like a thousand clicks a month and you can see cu people search differently best smart fridge smart refrigerator smart fridges it's just slight variations of this exact same topic and Google knows this is one topic and the same articles are going to rank for every single variation all these 100 keywords

it's going to the same article so HFS is a really interesting tool to use for keyword research you could even just put in the site Explorer like just a website to look at and do competitive research so you can put a website in to see what are their affiliate articles they're ranking for so he's got the LG ice plus how to clean and electric stove top doing really well actually this just small site let me see what he's got here so he's got he gets 18 20,000 visits a month again numbers aren't always accurate but

you can view competitor top pages you can see front load versus topl load washer cleaning an electric stove top how to remove white patches on clothes after washing so lots of interesting information here so how do we find new and emerging keywords in at well we would put in something like best AI software something newer and then we would you know uh look for things so we see like best AI writing software is 29 how it works is they they start low right a keyword exists it just gets thought of it's a new product category

for affiliate Revenue the difficulty is then zero because no one has known about it it just came out Publishers then rais to publish the content on that article and then over time the competition scores get higher because there's just more people that created it and it's good to get in early because there's really two phases of this there's What's called the data collection phase that's what I call it and then there's what I would consider like basically the solidified stage I guess so we can see like a new keyword comes out for example AI accounting

software is 4 or like this one I'm ranked for right best AI SEO software the keyword comes out it's like all right it's a new thing people started writing the articles in like 20 2023 okay so it's newer what happens is the search results are then newer search results are newer so so there's like a new site here ranking on Google this is Google new site here new site here new site here now what happens is Google has no data on these sites ranking yet we don't know what's going on there's not enough there's not

much click data it's very low so there's much more volatility in the search rankings until it's more solidified then like two years from now you might look back at this keyword and the rankings are kind of solidified because this one has already gotten like 10,000 visits this one has 5,000 this one has 3,000 000 and now Google actually has data on these sites and the rankings are going to change less a little bit just because it's a a little bit more Consolidated Google is looking for providing the best information and they do it based on

safe data so a new site trying to get in if the keyword difficulty is already over you know 30 it might be more difficult because this brand new site's trying to get in here with zero traffic to it yet why would they show that over these sites who already have data they probably won't so it's a little bit harder so timing is a crucial component of affiliate marketing that not a lot of people talk about so with HFS we would just drop the difficulty down to like 10 whoops to like 10 or so hit apply

and then we can see which ones are lower competition and like I said sometimes you know if they're already in here it might be too late sometimes if it's already a 10 AI recruiting software people have already written this so that's where AI can come in and help you you use AI to kind of as a framework thinking what are the pillar posts what are the main products that I can write about what are the new and emerging products I can write about so another way to do it outside of HF that's like the old

school way is finding using these Trend tools so something like Glimpse which is an extension of Google Trends now these are all paid HRS is expensive um Glimpse is also expensive but you can just use Google trends for free it kind of lives on top of Google Trends but you can see like if I click on one of these niches it'll give me some idea of what's new and trending so what's growth year-over year what does it look like you can see AC cleaning it goes up and down probably um certain time of year right

this is a fiveyear graph so every summer probably I don't know it probably be better then High income business so you can see uh the search result growth charts you can try to spot new keywords with this if I go to like diets I can see what are people searching for in diets lately what other the fads weight loss injections weight loss gummies semag Glu tiddes pills for weight loss so we can kind of view what's new and trending there's also EXP in topics which shows you the similar thing I think in a clean cleaner

format this one's also expensive but you can do a 14-day trial I believe for free but be careful because if you don't cancel your plan they will charge you annually and it's like $1,100 or something like that or something that's a lot but it'll show you like okay this is AI logo generator uptrending search volume 450k volume 92 100% growth automatic curtain openers interesting one pet so we find like cold plunge tubs quad Rob Rob quad robics quad robics some type of exercise prompt engineering Li's main supplements sea moss gummies I love eating sea moss

you know you eat that delicious sea moss I just lick it off of boats usually it's just tasty dat out Lakehouse right Sonic that's an AI tool sour so bitters look at that chart that looks like GameStop stock or something like that that's amazing so you can just view it that way and it's like this is sometimes where Niche expertise comes in if you know a little bit more about your Niche like you don't want to go in completely blind that's another thing that a lot of people ask me what's the most profitable affiliate Niche

that I can do it's like well that's like asking me what woman should I marry like I don't know about you right like I don't know what uh you're interested in what you know a little bit about what you could create content on for a couple years not just a week or two uh it's really important to kind of have a little bit of knowledge or at least have an interest because everyone you might not have any expertise in in the niche but often times it's interesting to see the perspective of somebody who is kind

of a beginner learning it so if you're starting to do beekeeping for example you don't need to be an expert beekeeper and have like the bee Whisperer where like you just stand there and like 5,000 bees land on you and you're just like I'm the expert you just need a little bit more experience than maybe the ultra beginner because the internet is full of beginners that's all the internet is when people search for stuff they don't know about it yet right like they're looking for random information most people are complete beginners on the internet so

if you have a little bit more experience it can be actually more interesting than if you're some expert I'd rather follow the average golfer blog than a Tiger Woods one because I can actually relate more to somebody who's a little bit more at my level but all of that said it's kind of important just to know a little bit about your Niche or have an interest in it or maybe it's a hobby that you have or really passionate about you're interested in it because that will help you like know and spot the timing component and

new affiliate keywords before other people do if I'm just going in blind and I'm like I'm going to start a uh accounting Financial Services affiliate website I don't know anything about it I'm not going to know or even be able to find what these keywords are because often times the keywords aren't always you can't just put best plus a thing in there and find them they're going to be random sometimes so that's sometimes where Niche expertise comes in so we did the AI method the atrips method the trend method let's do review hacking this is

an interesting one so you could go to a site like appsumo and you can find new software that's pretty small not that competitive and just came out so you can like see what's the latest software that just came out propose realcraft AI animation AI animation software realcraft so I would what I would do is I would look up realcraft it's probably not even in here I don't even know real craft okay yeah zero difficult y 1.3k searches a month so if I'm looking at that realcraft is mainly just going to show it doesn't like Google

doesn't know what this is yet right cuz realcraft Industries that's another site about hoses cords and cable reels then we have the realcraft actual that Brand's website with a Dr of five right they're just starting out then we have something on Amazon then we have a hose Express so there's two different uh realcraft companies here which is interesting what you would do since this is so new is all that you do is you create a post on this and you just do real craft review so review hacking is finding new and emerging software tools or

new companies that exist and then just creating a review on them before other people do and then you can be solidified ranking number one for that review and do really well that way that's something that some of our students have done you're just finding like these super random there's so many software companies out there especially AI ones AI it's like an arms race kind of like the doom boom where there's just a bunch of new software companies popping up for AI most of them probably won't survive but while they do survive you might as well

make some money off of them all right so what we have to do is we develop a Content plan for affiliate marketing we can use a number of different methods I like the AI one the best because it gives you a b smarter of a Content strategy when we think about affiliate marketing and topical Authority and being an expert and teaching people AI will give us the right categories because if I go in blind and I'm like I'm going to create an ice fishing website for affiliate Revenue I don't really know what the content would

even be like what categories if I had a Blog what categories would be in there I don't really know like uh probably the products probably the locations like good spots to do it but I just don't know as a human it's kind of like the semantic keyword tools they give you natural language processing when we're writing I'll cover that in a little bit we need to use natural language processing in the right words and the right places to rank content it's kind of the same thing with picking the niche at the beginning because topical Authority

for SEO isn't just what you put on the page it's not just like oh I said you know I cover uh this content and I write for my Human Experience automatically I'm going to rank no it's more like if each article of yours each affiliate article is like a chapter in a book you have to have the right chapters you have to have the right organization topical clustering internal linking and um AI really helps you do that so let's get into actually optimizing creating the content so you have a keyword now what do you actually

do okay so I have my 20 keywords 15 informational five affiliate what do we actually do now well we can use AI again to speed up this process so I have another AI prompt the content generator prompt again link is in the description if you click that you'll get it in the email so let me show you how to do this so let's pick a keyword from this list of smart home devices actually let's do a yeah let's do the smart home devices so we'll try let's just try um best smart blenders it's an affiliate

keyword now we're going to uh start a new chat actually I'm going to do this so I need the content generator so I'm going to copy this paste this here this is one I trained as well just to create an optimized affiliate outline so it says understood what's the keyword so right we have 20 keywords now what's the keyword I'm going to say best smart blenders now what this will do is it will create uh an optimize content that we can copy and paste so it has the optimized title best uh smart blenders for your

Hightech Kitchen in 2024 full meta description for you to copy and paste a written introduction that's kind of written like a human uh with Statistics with interesting information and then it has the main H2 headings so there's ways that we format this content the way that Google likes with the addition of H2 questions in the form of um a qu H2 headings in the form of a question so we have the middle content okay and then we have the conclusion so conclusion is written and then we have semantic keywords so this is often what also

what uh Surfer SEO does like they give you hey uh how Google works is they have natural language processing so they understand if an article's about smart blenders they should probably have words like intelligent motor control and preset programs and voice command stuff and all those different keywords to make it feel like okay they've covered their bases this is a robust article that's one of the ranking factors is semantic LSI keywords it's called what we would do is we would take this paste it into WordPress which I'll show you the site build in a second

and we can either do one of two things we can fill in the middle content which I do recommend you do because you know Human Experience is what wins out when it comes to content or we can have the AI write the individual sections for us so with this I have a paragraph generator I'm going to use this one and I'm going to say let's do top top 10 let's do um let's do this one smart blenders versus traditional blenders of comparison so I'm going to paste this paragraph generator in and I'm going to say

what's and then it'll ask me what's the heading that I'm going to create the content on I'm going to use a casual first person narrative that incorporates personal anecdotes practical tips and mixing of sentence structure to make it seem human smart blenders versus traditional blenders so what we're doing here is we're just speeding up our process now I don't always recommend you just use written content like it kind of writes like a human right like the first blender it was like trying to pulverize rocks with a plastic spoon my smoothies were more like fruit trunks

swimming in Juice I'd end up chewing my breakfast instead of drinking it talk about a mood killer so that's kind of interesting right I trained it a little bit to write like a human but uh so it's all written here and then you just copy this paste that Under The Heading and then you're good to go so it can write individual sections as well so we can see then we would add in some of the semantic keywords and hit publish so what we do here is we write the middle sections with our own info this

is more important right this is actually what's going to help we're not going to copy and paste all the content into we're not really doing anything at that point if it's too good to be true and it's too easy it probably is so we want to review each company in the list now this is the part that would take time so you have to add sections for each company just like you know this article I have one on the best AI content scheduling software so I have an intro it's very simple intro I added ads

to my site uh for these ones that aren't ranking yet you'll see I don't have any affiliate links in here yet this one was just published AI content scheduling software it's not that fancy it's a minimum viable post to see if it'll rank over time so then first H1 what are the best AI content scheduling software number one ooya I don't know how to say it um has some information now we have features Pros cons that's it features Pros cons that's it so this is just a starting point if I start seeing this get traction

then it's updated again and we'll you add more content user experience all of that kind of stuff now when you're reviewing so it's really simple when you have an affiliate article you're creating different uh there's different things you have to create the intro is one thing the main product uh reviews in a list is the other and then any other information as we saw here when we have the article on Smart blenders it's giving us really good other you know additional pieces of context to write in the article like what makes a blender smart top

features to look for then the list then extra information smart versus just traditional how to choose the right one creative ways to use it maintenance tips conclusion that would be a super good article on Smart blenders now you'll see these are really easy to write this is just writing simple content the one that takes longer is the actual products themselves now I wouldn't start with 10 I would start with five because it's a lot easier to start an article with five you don't need 10 or 15 or 20 that just takes too long and actually

it's can hinder you a little bit sometimes people just need five or seven max if you give them 20 sometimes it's just too much information now you'll see here it's like detailed reviews pros and cons of each and the price range so what's interesting is depending on your Niche that dictates what features you need to talk about in the product so if you're talking about kayaks you're probably talking about the weight the distribution comfort those types of things like so what are the attributes that your products have if I'm talking about software it's more about

user experience pricing features so the things that you talk about is dictated by the niche that you're in if it's about a golf club it's the grip strength the flexibility the I don't know whatever it is right but each product category has slightly different things that you should talk about now the good thing is like with with affiliate marketing we're just reviewing each company your list with the same formatting taking a step back these we're doing this because the best plus product category posts make all the revenue on Google yes there's reviews there's versus posts

yes you can add affiliate links into howto an informational content but we know that vast majority of affiliate revenue is made for Best Plus product category that's the most important thing now this is really all about ending the search journey and covering your bases let me give you an example of this so if somebody searches for something online we don't know who they are we don't know their age their gender their financial situation what they're looking for in the products we don't know anything so we want to cover our bases with affiliate content that is

done through individual statements next to each brand best for beginners best for advanced people best for this best for that for example if I had an article on let me hit record I almost forgot to record the the iPad if I had an article on for example the best e-commerce platforms like Shopify big Commerce Wix those types of things I would probably let's see best Ecommerce platforms think about in the top five how do I cover the bases cuz we don't know what people who these people are so I would probably have Shopify best for

Drop Shipping because there's going to be people that just want to do that big Commerce best for uh medium-sized business right I could say what's another one um there's that one 3D cart best for SEO and then I can think all right what else would we have so this is kind of like Drop shipping is like we can say Drop Shipping and beginners beginners I need to write the whole thing you know you get the point we have to cover the bases so if I had another one on like the best golf drivers that's a

golf driver it's a musical note it's a golf driver got the nice thing here little things it's a nice grip strength we would want to have categorize it with the number one product is the mid price point most popular product cuz that will convert the best and then this is going to say best for best overall and then number two might say we to cover the bases we might say like best for advanced players I'm just going to scribble because you get the point best for I'm going to even make it worse best for lefties

righties what's the other way uh what's it where you can use your left hand your right hand ambidextrous right so you get the point you have to cover the basis because what we're doing here is we need to end the search Journey with affiliate marketing Google knows if somebody clicks your article then they go back they hit the back button they go back to the Google search results they click another article and then they end the search Journey on that article that means that article is better than yours because it ended the search Journey that's

the ultimate ranking factor a lot of people like to over complicate this thing and say you don't talk about uh like the most advanced SEO things like schema and all these different things which we'll cover really it's because lately Google has been telling us stop doing SEO so intensely stop over optimizing your articles make them helpful for human beings so with that said we just need to write decent content in the form of an article that's from your own experience and cover your bases for affiliate Revenue it's really that simple now we want to add

internal links into the intro to other articles of yours um there's different formats of doing that as well let's actually show you real quick I might as well just what you know we're just going with it today all right so internal linking pillars posts all of that let's use the the ATV example again cuz it's really simple so your main pillar post I don't like that that's too thin very thin can't even see it best ATVs this is an article now we might have one like best ATVs for kids that's an article uh best sport

ATVs that's an article and then we just have like other ones here right so these are all articles this is the pillar article up here so how do we internal link all of this together well all of these are going to be linking to this so in the intro for best ATVs for kids it's going to say say you know it's going to say uh in our guide to the you know you check out our full guide on the best ATVs and the anchor text is best ATVs and going up to this all of the

article feed the main one they all go up because we're trying to prop this one up with all the supporting content we can have like uh Polaris review the Polaris uh five Sportsman 570 review that one is also linking up in you know in my Polaris Sportsman is one of the best ATVs best ATVs wrting so bad best ATVs all of them link up now this could link down a few times it could link down if you're looking for kids if you're looking for my review But ultimately we want to have more links up to

the main content than down we want to have more up than down and that shows that this is the most important one so a little note on internal linking there all let's talk about actually joining the affiliate programs so if we've created content publish it I'll show you the website stuff soon we have to find affiliate programs first so let's say you have a spreadsheet you add 20 keywords into it in one tab you can take your AI keywords put them in one tab in another tab let's try to find affiliate programs so what you

can do is you just Google the product category plus affiliate program fishing affiliate program laog lawyer affiliate program whatever your Niche is so you put in the product category your Niche plus affiliate program that's a good way to find them or the company um you know REI affiliate program you'll find it that way so that you just search for it on Google you can also find it sometimes in the footer of the website so a lot of companies will have a link to join their affiliate program in the footer you also want to search for

Brands within an affiliate Network so for example if you're an impact like I showed you earlier you just search for brands in there so you join a network and then you search for brands that way um but really there's some prerequisites like you need to have a website or a YouTube channel you need to have a source of content and I would say you should at least aim to get at least a thousand sessions a month or like 10,000 views a month on YouTube before you join any affiliate programs because it's good to you know

how it works is you're sending an application in it's a form that you fill out here it is so the information you need to fill out form put in your name your company name if you don't have a company yet just put in the name of your website or just your own name it's fine an email address now with the email address you want to probably have like a Google Workspace Email where it's a domain or a domain name email so it's better than just a random Gmail because what happens is individual affiliate managers will

review these applications and they'll either approve or deny them I've been denied plenty of times even recently for affiliate programs because I was like Auto rejected or they just didn't they didn't look at it right or something so it is a follow-up process so affiliate managers they get to their computer they're like all right let me check the network today let me check all the applications that came in oh there's 50 of them I got to scroll through and look at all these they might make mistakes they might reject you and a lot of the

times this is a human to human element type of business we can't just we don't always just get approved automatically most of the time you probably will especially if you're getting some traffic but sometimes even if you have like let's say you have a th visits to your site you get denied well the the the affiliate manager has no context at that point so what I would do is you find their email address you reach out to them you can usually find the email address within the network but or the the dashboard like for example

in Impact you can usually see an email address near the brand information if you don't have that or you can't find it you just go to LinkedIn you search for the company and you search for affiliate you can find the affiliate manager sometimes it's not affiliate it's Partnerships or it's digital marketing team it's usually an affiliate Affiliates usually in their job title and then you just send them a message on LinkedIn and an email followup say hey I just tried to join your affiliate program I know I got denied I have you know a thousand

visits a month on my site however you know I've just started I'm getting a lot of traction I want to create blah blah blah a couple more articles on you do you think you could review my application can I reapply and they will usually say yes what they're really rejecting outright is just scammy Spam sites because there's a lot of fraud with affiliate marketing I remember there would be sites when I was an affiliate manager that would I'd be like there's like 10 sales here that's not right there were just like Bots and random crappy

looking sites that uh you just have to look out for fraud so that's what affiliate managers do they're not going to reject somebody outright that is trying to create good content about their brand that would be stupid so but it does require some followup sometimes sometimes outside of just a form you're filling out you might have if you get denied then you just send an email now what you want to look for when you're joining affiliate programs is popular brands in the niche plus good commission rates now when we talk about affiliate commission rates there's

a wide range of different rates Amazon is probably the lowest they have anything from 1 to 3% to 5 to 8% if we're talking about expensive Electronics like $4,000 4K TV 8K TV it's probably like 1 to 2% commission rate on expensive Goods on Amazon if we're talking about clothing and fashion it might be more like 8 to 10% commission rate on the product so or luxury watch like it's a luxury watch maybe it's 5% so You' sell a Rolex $20,000 Rolex 5% of that is 1,000 bucks I think uh so you're looking for good

commission rates in popular brands like I said before popular brands are what convert and conversion rate is what matters most besides getting clicks and sending traffic to Brands they need to actually make the sale and you'll be amazed some Brands can't make a sale to save their life I had this example once when I was doing my article on the best web hosting blue host was paying me like $1100 or $7 or $100 a sale and this company came to me they said put us number one in the article we'll give you $85 a sale

I'm like oo that sounds good that's like one two and a half times the amount of money I'm making with blue host I'll try that I'll add you up I'll add you up higher I sent them like 500 clicks and didn't get a single sale because they were just an obscure company they people didn't know them they're they weren't optimized once you got to the site to convert users so a lot of it's on the brand so you pick the popular well-known ones if you have a golf blog you're talking about like Callaway and some

of the big Brands not some obscure brand now commission rates it's going to be dictated by the niche like you can't really do a whole lot you can't change the electronic category from 1 to 3% up to 10 that's really not going to happen what you can do though is just look for decent commission rates so in software they can be one time or recurring so with recurring that is every single month they remain a customer you get paid so for example if you if someone signs up for a $99 a month plan make it

100 for the Simplicity of math and you get a 20% recurring commission you make $20 every month as long as that person is a customer that is my favorite method because um it's very stable and consistent I'm still making money from people that signed up in 2020 for random articles of mine and however it's more competitive software is more competitive then there's also like really high ticket affiliate programs so something like retirement plans you might get a percentage of the entire funded retirement account so that's what we did with like gold IRAs and some of

the people PC strategies we have if somebody signs up for a $500,000 uh Ira individual retirement account we make 10% of that $50,000 commission we made one of those uh last year so that's high ticket that's also very competitive the main ones we're looking at like physical products anything you can buy on Amazon any product category for mainly physical products is going to be less competitive than software or financial products in affiliate marketing good commission rates then are dictated by like getting to the brand themselves so you can start with Amazon because it's just easier

if you're writing a bunch of content you start with Amazon Walmart that's really easy and then you want to join the individual companies themselves so maybe on Amazon you're only making 1 to 2% 3% but then you join the individual affiliate program you're still in the basketball hoop on Amazon you might make 2 3% maybe you join um Dick Sporting Goods affiliate program and make five so the brands are usually better than Amazon that's what you're looking for now the truth is you're not going to know how good a company's affiliate program is until you

start sending them traffic there's been plenty of times where I thought one was going to be really good I'm like o I'm ranking for one was like best streaming software I'm ranking for best streaming software this is going to crush I had one on on my podcast hosting one crushed streaming software everyone's using that and then I did it with multiple categories tried different products tried different affiliate programs like the most popular ones it just didn't convert it didn't no one was actually buying these products through that so I was like that's kind of a

bummer but then there's some where I thought it was going to do nothing and it did really well something as random as best OCR software I didn't know what it was I I did it and it was like Adobe products and it started converting so you just don't know how good a company's affiliate program is until you start sending them traffic because we don't know what their conversion rates are we just don't know so remember this is how it works we we need a website a website is Central to this process and we get traffic

from algorithms from Google you YouTube LinkedIn Pinterest whatever it is to the website to then get traffic get people to click the affiliate links and get paid now once you're in an affiliate program you can use uh thirsty Affiliates to organize your affiliate links which will cover how to do that it's a thing called affiliate link cloaking so how that works is you're when you get an affiliate link within an affiliate Network it's going to have a random string of letters and numbers and look really weird affiliate link cloaking is a tool that you can

use to organize and categorize your affiliate links so thirsty Affiliates will organize them all in one place so that time every time you edit like you can have a you can have your affiliate link like 20 times on your website and then you go to a central spot if you need to change it and then it will change it all 20 times rather than having to go article by article and changing it individually it also has some reporting within WordPress which is good link cloaking is redirection so instead of bluehost.com xyz123 for it'll be adamin

for.com reccommend blost it looks cleaner it looks nicer to click on and that's a cloaked affiliate link people can't just copy it either they don't know what it is now I would say getting your first dollar in the door if your article is getting over 100 visits a month that's when you can join affiliate programs and swap out the normal links that you added for affiliate links for example if this one best content scheduling software it's if it started ranking really well what I and it was making you know getting good traffic I would start

doing more research I would be like okay is this the best one is like I'm going to add this this in swap a link to the homepage like this for an affiliate link and then I would add a button in add a button here get started add the affiliate links in for the top three brands so I don't need all of them just the top three is fine that gets the vast majority of the clicks to get started you add the button you collect data you get your first sale so you just need consistent clicks

on your affiliate links to make real affiliate Revenue we're going to get into launching your website next but first let's cover the numbers here so the numbers behind affiliate marketing let's say you're getting 10,000 visits to an affiliate article well not every single person is going to click an affiliate link there's going to be let's say there's five companies in your list number one the number one article will get like 30% of clicks so 3,000 number two might get like 20% 2,000 number three might get 10% 1,000 um and then this equals 6,000 affiliate link

clicks that's a little bit High I think usually it's more like 40 to 50% total of traffic is how many affiliate link clicks you get so let's just assume though so you know the higher numbers are getting more clicks let's assume that on 10,000 visits to an individual article or even this can work in an example of YouTube that for let's say even below estimate 3,000 people click an affiliate link affiliate link clicks now of that how many people are going to convert well it's usually 2% conversion rate for e-commerce is standard if it's software

it's usually around 1% 1 to two cuz it's like a trial first 10% click to trial conversion rate 10% trial to sale conversion rate but 2% of 3,000 is 660 60 I think my math is Right 1,00 2% is 20 yeah 60 sales now let's say so this is you made 10,000 visits you got 3,000 affiliate link clicks 2% conversion rate when they click the affiliate link you made 66 sales let's say the product is $100 and you get a 10% commission rate so that's every sale you get 10 bucks you times that by 60

you've made $600 right there so 10,000 visits equals $600 in this equation of a $100 product with an average commission rate it's not bad it's not amazing it's a if we divide by 10 to get what's what are we making for th000 visits it's a $60 RPM Revenue per thousand Impressions or V uh visits which is decent it's better than ads ads usually are anywhere from like 3 to 20 20 is like if you're a financial site in a me in an ad Network that's really good can be 30 or more but usually it's lower

so yes we're making more money with affiliate marketing in this example but it's not like life-changing different I would just keep ads running too on this article so I could make even more but let's say instead all this data is the same but the product is now $11,000 let's even say the commission rate drops to or the uh the sales rate drops to 1% because it's a little bit more expensive so that would equal 30 sales at $1,000 let's say the commission rate again is 10% so 30 uh a th000 Time 10% is $100 time

30 now youve just made $3,000 instead of 60 or 600 so that's five times the amount of money just for a little bit more expensive product half the like that's just a 1% conversion rate so it could be a lot higher than that but making $3,000 on 10,000 visits is a $300 RPM which could be generally if you're in a you know um average Niche it's probably going to be more like 60 whoops 60 times what you'd make on ads so there is power in affiliate marketing it just requires a big number schem here right

if you're getting a 100 visits you might get 30 affiliate link clicks you might not even make a sale because you might need a 100 clicks to get one sale or two sales so it's a numbers game just doesn't make sense in this equation you need decent traffic and you need it consistently over time all right let's get into part three out of five launching your website with AI this is about setting up your domain and hosting WordPress 101 and then designing and launching your site so why do you need a website in the first

place well you do need a website I don't care what anyone says uh you could possibly do it with just YouTube but where are you going to you can send traffic to affiliate links but I think it's it's always good to have a website because a website it's like the sun in the solar system it's Central to everything and you have all of your traffic sources all of the different ways that you're monetizing publisher as a publisher through a website no matter what kind of brand you are if you're an e-commerce brand uh an agency

a software company every single a local business you just need a website if you're trying to start a business without a website I don't know what you're doing so you need a website it's Central to everything Google is not the only path to affiliate Revenue it's one of many things there could be LinkedIn traffic you're getting there could be Pinterest Instagram Tik Tok YouTube it's all going centrally to your website so the website is Central it's like the sun in the system and the planets are all the individual secondary platforms that we don't own you

own a website you own the hosting you own it yourself you own it outright you own your email list you don't own LinkedIn content you don't own uh YouTube content technically if YouTube goes down which it won't but if it did you wouldn't own it right so the website is Central to everything now to do that you need to actually build a website so I always recommend you use WordPress it's the best one for affiliate marketing and SEO and I recommend you do a personal brand because personal branding gives you the ultimate flexibility freedom to

Pivot the best chances of success for a beginner ultimately is what it's about if you go too narrow and you try to say I'm the smart home devices guy you go smarthome devices.com smart home devices guy.com what happens if that content doesn't start working what happens if you go too narrow in your name the name of your brand you'll quit that's usually what happens with a small Niche site with the nich site model you will quit because it takes a little bit the time to get this traction going and if it's not attached to you

all of the effort that you put in will be wasted when it is attached to you and you just call it your name.com the domain name doesn't matter for SEO when you call it that you attach it to your identity now every effort that you put in cannot be wasted because we all want to you know spend time building a business we're not we have work ethic we're not we know like passive income is kind of a pipe dream sometimes you're willing to put the work in but you want to know that if you put

the work in it's actually going to lead to something it's not just going to be a bunch of waste time and effort with a personal brand no effort is wasted because you can use this website for any number of different things I first started my site as a personal brand because I just wanted to build a resume for my career I started doing affiliate Revenue stuff and it actually worked and took off and I quit my job right so personal branding and then it opens up the door too for like a YouTube channel all of

your social media accounts are just under your name people buy from people people trust people it's the simplest way it's the best chance of success which is what it's ultimately about because you can pivot you can change the content you can talk about anything people want to pick the perfect Niche at the beginning the truth is there isn't one niches come and go they fizzle out and die there's been articles in mine that got tons of traffic because the niche also was just huge so something like webinar platforms during covid was just booming now people

aren't searching for it quite as much as they were um so there's lots of different things that change over time search volume changes your interests are going to change like I was talking about you know different four years ago than I am now right so your interest will change just pick your name just put your name in.com if it doesn't exist or someone's already taken it then just use a variation middle initial some other broad thing and just go from there pseudonym if you're worried about privacy doesn't really matter now I recommend you get your

domain name and web hosting with wpx um let's walk through the process so wpx in my opinion is the best one because they have um really fast support and really good SE if we look at their WordPress plans like some of the some companies they don't have the best support it's like it takes a couple days for them to get back to you if you have an issue wpx has chat support um and they get back to you right away so really I just go with the cheapest one it's 20 a month um 25 if

you do it monthly now if you're looking for like the cheapest web hosting just to get started just use blue host uh there they have a summer sale going on it's $1.99 a month with my affiliate link dropped in the description below um um that one is way cheaper you basically click get started you pick the basic 1999 a month plan you put in a new domain see if it exists hit next and then you put in your info you do 12 months at 199 a month it's $23 you put a payment in you check

out it's 23 bucks or you do this one it's 24.99 a month you do it you click it again you put in if you already have a website you put it in if you're launching a new website you search for it put it in here search that one doesn't exist and then you hit continue and you'll see you choose your location I'm going to say North America and then you see okay it's monthly plus they charge for the domain right so it's $38 for one month versus you could do also uh $23 for a year

so it's up to you I like wpx has better support better it's faster a little bit better it's just a little more pricier than blue host so either one is good so for example then you get in once you sign up you'll get uh into your dashboard and you can see like you go to hosting you go to manage websites and then you'll see like your website domain is here you click manage WP and it will get you into WordPress all right so we're in WordPress this is a test site that we have here we

can see different things so get familiarized with the platform it's actually a lot simpler than you'd think posts is where all your blog post go pages are like contact page about page things like that service Pages whatever you have Medias where all your images go you upload it to the media library and then the main thing we're looking at first to get started you go to appearance themes now what you do is you add a new theme and you search for Cadence Cadence is the best one in my opinion so you search for it you

click it you select it and then you click activate and then it becomes activated and then what you do is you go to plugins add new and you search for Cadence again and then you're going to find the uh AI powered starter templates by Cadence WP so that's what I like because you can build your site with AI so what you do is then you go to it'll show up in the menu so you go to Cadence starter templates and then it's really simple process where I have another video going through this whole thing for

like an hour uh on my channel and what you do is it'll show you the exact thing so this will start blank and then it's just like what's your site about you give it a title and name write a paragraph about your site next here's some images it gives you a bunch of images already done next and then it comes to this page and it gives you this is what it can look like so I'm like okay I like all these let's do you know this one and then you can change the color schemes the

fonts the style all of that kind of stuff what you know um what it looks like it'll say what plugins might you need here you don't have to do anything there you click uh you just click finish and launch and then you have a fully functioning website with a theme which can look like this a nice coffeee blog it's got about contact blog page it shows in some you know there's some sample posts in here but you'll have a featured image you'll have this and then it's just laid out in an easy to understand way

so then what you would do is you go to post you would click add a new post pretty simple you could then take this stuff the intro everything paste this over copy this over here you paste it in you know you can change the headings back to H2S and then you just go from there you fill it in you fill in the information and if you can use a word editor you can use WordPress you add links like this you click it here you can add any Link in if you want to add an affiliate

link for thirsty Affiliates which I'll show you you would do it here so You' say like get started with company and then you would do instead of joining adding the link with this you add it with ta and then you search for the link here and you just click add and then it'll add that affiliate Link in for you so it's really easy to create content with WordPress now there's some other settings to be aware of when you're creating your affiliate content so we look at the menu here we can see settings General this is

where you would dictate like the name of your site a tagline URLs all of that kind of stuff you can just go one by one and look down at these examples reading when you're ready to publish your site you would uncheck this box so it starts check discourage search engines from indexing you uncheck that hit save and it'll allow search engines to index it you can go to Perma links and you can say all right we want plain links or a custom structure you want it to just be basic with post name you can do

this like like this is the right one because you just want the most basic URL structure for your affiliate link so it's website.com SL and then just the target keyword here so if you had an article called like the top 10 smart blenders of 20124 the URL would not be top-10 dm- blenders D of d224 that would be the title you would just use the keyword it would be website.com smart best dm- blenders so you're just putting in the URL the keyword into the URL so appearance is where you choose your theme like we showed

you with cadence you can also dictate the menu here so when you look at the top menu navigation of your site you can see uh there's homepage about page this is where you would add it so everything over here is not added into the menu yet but you would add it over here so if you had like a contact page let's say this was the contact page you just click add to menu and then it's there boom you click save now it's up there and you also have like a left main menu you have a

mobile menu that's different so you would select that and you can edit the mobile menu so you'll see that'll just appear so WordPress has like different things there's posts and pages are like the think of it like the square rectangular content that's just that section the menu is appearance menus there's also things like widgets which is under appearance widgets this is like blocks of content the footer of your site the sidebar areas like that that you can change so for example footer one you would change the text here You' add all kinds of things there

so it's basically post Pages all live within it then there's menu at the top and the bottom then widgets are kind of like custom content sections now we also have our plugins so plugins we can see the installed plugins on this site we can then add new plugins and search for them so we just search for them here we would click install now and activate to get them live these are the ones that I like you know Gutenberg blocks by with AI is a good one for like creating custom content blocks so like affiliate buttons

and procon tables and comparisons and things like that the AI powered starter templates which I showed you which will just create theme for you and then for SEO I like rank math or yo rank math is good it's probably the best one they this one it just allows uh it's an easy way to create like your meta descriptions for SEO it allows uh you to add your Google search console information so Google can index you your robot.txt file all of those individual things for Sight speed I like WP rocket um they optimize like your they

do lazy loading on images so like when a site loads we want it to load fast it's like lazy loading images deferring Java script files making it load quickly and optimize the right ways with WP rocket the affiliate link cloaking is thirsty Affiliates which we covered uh I'm going to show you that now so for example if we go to Thirsty Affiliates this Blu host test Link in here but you could say like add new affiliate link what you would do is you would copy a link from your affiliate Network You' put it into the

destination URL so it could be like something crazy right and then you add a title to it so if it's you know let's just say it's a Jasper that's the Jasper affiliate link then you would categorize it you could say it's a AI writing tool categorization is just really for reporting within here it's just you can pull a category report no other really use for that and then you would say no follow this link yes open and L window yes those are the two that you would change and you hit save and now it's saved

now you can also edit the settings I would just change it to um let's see you go to link appearance so you can change what it looks like like I have recommends I like that one you can just say go link your website.com slgo whatever I like go is good too you change it to that all the other settings are good you could I would do this no follow on links yes open links in new window yes now it just does that automatically for all of them you hit save you're good to go and then

back to the list um I like uh image compression short pixel so when we have images on our blog we want them to just be load fast as well short pixel when you add in image it will just automatically compress it down to a small file size so these are the main plugins you need so overall the main things that we would be paying for is just web hosting number one so that could be wpx for $24.99 a month it could be blue host for $1.99 a month um Cadence the AI theme itself is free

to use some of the more advanced features it's $149 that's it not like monthly or anything like that um yearly and then these are free the only one like WP rockets for $49 a year overall thirsty Affiliates is free short pixel can be free uh they do if you're adding a ton of images you pay by you buy a bulk of images for like 10 bucks for like thousand images or something to add so overall though we've figured out a way it's like if you're using Blu host you can get it up for really cheap

under $20 a month total and then if you're using wpx we can get it for like 30 or 440 or $50 a month total let's talk about site design real quick because this can be important so you want to just have a decent looking website that's designed right so you can use a site like this colors. Co coolers however you want to pronounce it and it's kind of cool you can use a generator and you can just see like what different uh color schemes do you want to use and you can just see like oh

I like this aquamarine thing or like um you press space bar and it just changes it's like I like what's the brand oh I like that one before but how do I go back I don't know just keep going I like you know let's say I like this one or this one and it's like you can just copy these hex codes into your design and you have a nice cohesive you know color palette for your site now the most important thing for affiliate articles is actually very simple it's readability of the content of the text

on the page so with that for headings we want bold eye-catching sand serif black font white background very simple and easy to read for paragraph Tex we want bigger font 18 to 20 at least maybe even more some sites have like 22 size font black with good line height we don't want it to be spaced together too much now when we're writing for the web for affiliate marketing we only want one to three sentences per paragraph Max we don't want really long blocked paragraphs like you might see in a book or something like that people's

attention spans again are really short they're used to skimming they're used to like one sentence per paragraph sometimes or two or three three max you want to also break up the text make it easy on the eye with bold text bullet points images buttons things like that so when you scan the article of yours for Affiliates is it easy to is it easy on the eye is it like too much going on is it too dense in one area so you just want to think about that as you design your content and then we want

to create a logo right so you need a logo for your site I created the crappiest logo ever back in 2019 this was before any AI tools I found this random software and I didn't even pay for it I like kind of screenshotted this tiny little area and then I used that thing for like two years and it was horrible uh it doesn't really matter but like something with chat GPT you can create really good logos now so like they have a GPT called the logo creator so I'm going to use that I'm going to

say let's do the logo creator and I'm going to say I need a logo for my blog um it's about cooking healthy food you know whatever it is you say that it'll then say I'd love to help you you know first will your logo to be vibrant serious I'm going to say serious sometimes they just get too wild with these logos sometimes I'm going to say one extremely clean and simple the default is three and then what color scheme do you like so you can customize the custom palette you can say I want these hex

codes from this I want EC this I want A8 B7 a just different hex codes in there and then I'm I'm for this example I'm just going to say B blue and white and then it'll say do you want one or nine I'm going to say I just want one I want a and then it'll do the logo so it's going to say okay here's a logo now what I've seen it creates decent logos and then sometimes usually on the first try it's not going to be very good you can say make it simpler make

it better make it more uh remove this thing or often times there's a lot of spelling errors in here too so it's like look at this this is way too complicated right so you say this is way too complicated looking I give it a one on simple right just to just you know be mean to the thing it's way too complicated looking then it'll do it again so you just hone in over time it might take five or 10 times until it's something that you're happy with and the more you feed it the better information

you give it I just gave it really broad stuff like this isn't bad I would take this like not all this I would crop this part maybe you know and then it's a little spoon it's a leaf so this is like a vegetarian one I'd probably make it green you would crop this part out out and then remove the background so it's a PNG file add your own text and then you're good to go so logo creation is something you can do really simply don't overthink it just get it done now to finalize getting your

site live what we would do is we want to QA test your website on desktop and mobile so look at your site you know preview the pages preview the blog posts see what they look like on desktop you can zoom in your screen a lot of the page Builders too you can just click a mobile button and it'll show you what it looks like on mobile you want to make sure that it's looks good on mobile really like the main thing that you're looking for on mobile is just the spacing so if you're designing a

page you don't have to really worry about this with blog post because the blog template will be fine but for your pages your desktop page it might look great but then if you look at it on mobile the layout and spacing is all off because it's porting over the same spacing options from desktop and sometimes if you're like if you have 50 pixels of padding on each side of something and then you do that on mobile it's like this tiny little thing so you can edit the mobile version it's mainly just changing the spacing and

spacing between things but you just want to make sure it looks good on both then finalize your WordPress settings like I said the unchecking that discouraged search engines box you want to install Google anex Google analytics and Google search console you go to the website for Google search console you put in your domain you validate it and verify it it's really simple Google analytics you can install either with putting the uh tracking code in your header or there's just plugins you just download Google analytics plugins that add it for you so you take the ua-

number and you just paste that into your site that way you can you tell Google your site exists so you submit your site map to Google search console and you have Google analytics installed so you can start seeing when traffic comes in so in part four here in a second we're going to get into uh creating your you know affiliate content strategy optimizing your affiliate content first let's get into some more advanced website strategies so in this course I want to cover more so you know yes we have YouTube yes we have Tik Tok and

other avenues for affiliate Revenue but we want to go deeper on this Google website thing so number one schema markup and structured data this is a way to help Google understand different context around your site there's everything from author schema to understand your biography there's like FAQ schema that wraps around content blocks on your site that then shows questions and answers within the Google search results there's all kinds of different schema you can use not to over complicate it one I like is author schema so to do that you can use chat GPT this is

a GPT called bio to schema and it's really simple you turn your autho buyer into personalized schema to communicate e to search engines and improve your SEO how do I get started so it'll guide you through the whole process it's really simple so you create an author bio you paste the author bio in then it will ask you other questions you know are there any sources that you've been featured in so I added like my link from Forbes Business Insider entrepreneur and things like that and then it'll ask you a little bit more information context

and then it gives you basically a file schema markup you take that and you copy and paste it into like the functions.php file of your website I believe it's really you just go to appearance code editor something like that you paste it into the functions file underneath so it's actually not that complicated but you can create an author bio and that can help your SEO another thing you can do is just think about content pruning over time so that's something to discuss this is more advanced if you're going you know in the future like let's

say you had 100 articles and you're figuring out your Niche well what's the time when do you delete articles is there a strategy for that at one point I deleted like maybe three to 400 articles from my site because I was just too broad I was talking about everything from business software Finance crypto was ranking credit card stuff was ranking gold Ira stuff was ranking it was just too broad and then when Google made the major algorithm updates it was kind of like this doesn't make sense so I deleted a lot of those articles and

it's kind of like thinking about it like if the article's not serving your site if it's in a niche that doesn't match what you're currently talking about it's not getting any traffic it's kind of wasting resources then you can think about deleting it this is based on Google analytics analysis so just looking at month-over-month traffic looking at different things like does this article help my if it doesn't help your audience as you're pivoting your Niche and figuring it out then it can be deleted but I don't want you to over complicate it and worry about

deleting stuff right now we're just talking about building your site the the answer that helped me out was just publishing more so publishing more you don't have to worry about the old stuff now site speed and core web vitals is important so wpr rocket can help you with that uh there's also plugin called a autoptimize or something like that autoptimize and really it's a lot of settings just within that you can use a site like GT metrics you can put in like a website example like best let's just say online course platforms and what it'll

do is it'll test the site speed there's also the Google light box something tester so you can test your site speed in a number of different ways to see how it's doing this will also show a waterfall effect of like what's taking the longest the main things that slow down a website are going to be third party resources so things like Google fonts or sometimes tracking scripts like Google analytics scripts can slow it down things where it has to pull data from an external source is usually what slows down sites the most yeah Lighthouse is

the one so you can look at different sight speed things and you can sometimes it can help now it's not you know you don't have to get it perfect like if we see this it's an a it's all good the website vitals are good on this page if you look at the waterfall um you have to log in with a free account I don't want to do that it'll show you what takes the longest amount of time so you can kind of just get a picture of what you know what's taking long is it this

random plugin that you have it's maybe it's not worth it if it's adding like a half second of load time to your site so you want to look at that from a site speed perspective you also want to showcase eat expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness there's like two e on it sometimes whatever but let me show you an example so this is garage J reviews.com their article on best pre-workout it was ranking really well it's like this is a blog right and they're out competing huge media sites for pretty competitive Fitness and like medical stuff now

you'll see this is like the best example of expertise Authority authoritativeness and trustworthiness I've seen because what we have here it's written by Dr Christy Kendall and then verified by Nicole Davis now what a lot of sites do is they have somebody on here now is this really being reviewed probably but a lot of sites they just plop a doctor on here and they say hey I'll pay you like $2,000 a month or something just be our doctor on on staff right check out the Articles from time to time but that can help so we're

showcasing expertise and then it's like we test and review Fitness Products based on Independent multi-point methodology uh commission statement but really you know uh this is the what you're adding into the beginning of your content is like your expertise your authoritativeness something whatever sounds impressive whatever makes the most sense so this one for example on staff we have cied personal trainers nutrition coaches weightlifting coaches d da da tested more than 100 pre-workouts of various types of training they detail their hands-on experience and I use my PhD and exercise physiology to assess which ones work fesive

worth the money medical disclaimer this is like really important for medical stuff medical your money your life topics are really hard to rank for because you need like go against like WebMD and huge uh sites Google doesn't want to put a random blog up there when it's related to like how to survive covid right they want to have WebMD the CDC and sites like that um so it's not as important if you're in like really easy niches things like outdoor products and goods but you should you should still uh showcase your expertise I remember I

was reading an article on like the best night vision goggle headsets right it's like this guy was like as an Army Ranger with eight years of combat experience I know the I'm like oh this guy knows what he's talking about right now we might not have that uh when we're just starting out but it's something to keep in mind for the future again we're going deep in this course video and you can see from an expertise standpoint and just a helpful human content standpoint what is going on here it's an interesting thumbnail um so they

have best overall and then you'll see there's a lot of individual pictures of people using stuff so this is something as an affiliate strategy if you are talking about products like let's say you're talking about hot tubs and saunas that's your Niche well you're not going to go out and buy 20 saunas and 20 hot tubs and put them all around your house unless you're a maniac that loves hot water and you have an unlimited budget then that would be pretty cool jumping from hot tub to hot tub I mean it would be crazy but

what you could do is you go to a showroom and you just take pictures of yourself with random stuff like this like this is someone's using this and then you if we scroll we're just looking through Custom Image Custom Image Custom Image just people scooping the freaking pre-workouts this guy this girl this hand this finger drinking this one so it's like they're they did this on purpose this is the most advanced longest article they don't worry about getting this complicated what they also do is they have external links and sources improved exercise performance tons of

Articles from PubMed ncbi.nlm the National Institute of Health National Library of Medicine sorry so they're linking tons of times to that you go down to the bottom and we can see all the references and sources I'm losing my voice a little bit I'm only like an hour and something in um okay so yeah so this is like the ultimate you know Authority play to rank they're doing the eat perfectly well we don't have to get this complicated unless you're going into health things but for when you're just starting out think about how can you in

the just really taking a step back how can you like link to a really highly reputable good source in the intro make a statement about why you should trust your reviews in the intro and your experience and then try if you can take some custom images of yourself using different products because sometimes like Google can see like if this image doesn't exist anywhere else on the internet then it's original you can actually trick it too with this a plug-in like awesome screenshot so if I was reviewing um so let's just say I was reviewing Shopify

and I wanted to review them what I would do is I would go awesome screenshot Chrome extension I would click visible part of the page let's do that or actually let's do a different example let me go back so let's say I was talking about their pricing page what I would do is I want an image for that so I'm going to go down here and let's just say zoom out a little doesn't quite fit whatever let's just say I want to like this what I would actually it doesn't matter yeah I'll do it this

way okay you can do awesome screen shot click it visible part you can do the whole full page and crop it if you wanted to or selected area I'll just do selected area so I can crop it now but then what I would do is you do this whoops holy this oh all right hold on there that's easier okay capture it takes you here and then you can actually add things to it so what we're trying to do here is actually make it unique so I don't know why I added this but whatever you would

add add an arrow to it and be like or a square and be like this and say the color is green you're talking about this plan you do this the act of just doing that has now made this a unique image that has does not exist anywhere else so what you can do is you're creating custom images for your affiliate content with awesome screenshot by just adding random stuff in there and then you go and you're done you hit done you hit download and then you're good to go all right so we did that I

think I missed a KNE there but what ever and eat uh or te what I don't know how they spell it uh content Gap analysis so this is an interesting thing you can look at to another form of competitive research for affiliate marketing I'll put in garage gym reviews here as an example you can look at their top pages to see what they're ranking for cold plunge tub best home gym pre-workout number two like we just showed you protein powder all of that stuff and what you can do is if if this was you or

a competitor you can say who are their competitors let's take a look and see who their competitors are and then what we do is we can see what keywords the competitor has which ones they're missing and that's considered a Content Gap so we can see competitors keywords of like barb. comom they have 143,000 there's an overlap of 251,000 and there's um 328 on garage gim reviews.com you can go to content Gap in the left hand sidebar as well take it a step further and you can see show keywords that the target below ranks for so

you put in three competitors you can say like uh three competitor sites and then but this one doesn't rank four so what were they there was um treadmillreviews.net let's do Boflex and barbend dcom so we'll do that so we'll say Boflex Barb ben.com and then at least one of the targets should rank in the top 10 sure show keywords and this is showing you like this would be your site here eventually and you can see all right what do they rank for that we don't rank for so barbend ranks for and then it goes by

volume so I would want to have an article on like dumbbell shoulder press if it's an informational article could be a good one Mr Olympia is a lot of content uh they write more about barbend it makes sense they're writing about like competitive weightlifting sounds like if you're bending a bar you're probably pretty strong but you can see this is just a good way of looking at what keywords are the is the competition ranking for and not me and am I missing out on a lot is there an area that I need to really focus

in on it's a good way to do it and then we have topic clustering and internal linking so I kind of showed you that example on the iPad but we want to realize that like it's not so much about like choosing the perfect Niche for affiliate marketing like I'm going to cover fitness too broad I'm going to cover you know chest exercises only well you do that like you start with that sub Niche you write about it it doesn't mean that you that's it's like you're not locked into a niche Google is smart right they

understand the contextual relationships between topics so if you wrote 20 articles on chest exercises and then you pivoted in a month and you wrote articles on shoulder exercises that exercises is the link between the two and you have a much better chance of ranking in the future for shoulder exercises with that content over here so everything has like these one to one like six degrees of separation it's like a one degree of separation between things for example if I'm writing about red wine I could probably rank better for coffee stuff than a random site that's

talking about tennis because red wine has doesn't have to do with coffee but it is something that people drink and enjoy it's liquid that's literally how it like there's a connection there even though it doesn't seem like it so red wine is closely connected to white wine which is connected to alcohol which is also connected to like coffee which is also technically wine is kind of connected to like wine of fish unad dining it's connected to parties and events so like niches are like kind of these bubbles of content they're not like these solidified things

that you have to stay so rigid around where you can never change like you can know that there's a contextual like relationship between a lot of different topics over time but we want to have clusters we don't want to go too broad we don't want to if you're starting a fitness site you don't want to have an article about treadmills and then an article about ellipticals an article about chest workouts and then like Fitness and Nutrition stuff too broad you're going to get dominated by big Fitness sites and media sites you need to go deep

on one area 20 articles about chest exercises and then it's that helping an audience what are what are you helping them about building a bigger chest getting in shape in a certain way what what are they interested in shoulder exercise then you move to that other affiliate opportunities different products so just know that like you can cluster it together though in one area and the AI tool that I showed you helps do that so you want to have like one to two main pillar posts maybe even a little bit more and then you have all

the supporting content for example if I was doing a Blog on chest exercises I would have you know the affiliate articles about the best products and then I would have big pillar posts on how to build a bigger chest and then the best checks chest exercises it's a big one too and then the best likee products and then everything underneath all the ancillary secondary accessories and products as well and that all fits in one cluster linking up to the top main two to three articles and keeping it within the silo so for example you wouldn't

want to start then linking all of your chest exercise articles to the shoulder ones like as the same amount a few can link over doesn't really matter a few can if it's helpful but you don't want to just have a uh too much linking back and forth there's no organization to it so it has to stay organized you have to keep it in a silo and then start another Silo that's related linking in between a little bit but not just all over the place so and then with internal links also there's um you don't have

to you can beam a little bit more exact match with the keywords so you just want like if people click that link they should know what they're getting all right another one is making your site look like a brand with products so a lot of people have seen since the March 24 Google update some of the helpful content updates that affiliate content sites aren't ranking as well as like brands are so one way to try to trick Google is to make your site look like an actual brand now there's two ways to do that one

is with products and another is with services so I have here I have my products AI income blueprint income University AI income blueprint was is a replacement for blog growth engine I had a link to there before but you have products in the main navigation I have products I have my own products that I'm selling that is a little bit better than just not having any products right I actually have a brand and also the main reason I started ranking well for certain things is just cuz there's like people searching my name so it's like

my name plus blogging or plus other things so brand searches help which that will take a lot of time to do so I wouldn't worry about that one too much but if you're just starting an affiliate site one little trick or hack could be adding a service page adding a product page adding something there to make it look like you're not just an affiliate site like you have your own products and services that's a way to make your site kind of Rise Above just being an affiliate publisher so again don't be an affiliate site help

an audience teach in a niche which opens up all revenue streams once you teach you're not just entertaining or creating random content you're teaching about a certain topic affiliate products that people would use and how to do things when you think about how to do things usually you need products to do those things right unless we're just doing jumping jacks and cartwheels usually people use products now we want to teach in the niche which opens up all the revenue streams there's affiliate Revenue ad Revenue obviously but then on those informational posts we can also add

exit intent popups that appear when you're about when someone's about to leave they appear you can join the email that way for example if you go to my site and you go to leave you're going like okay I'm this is interesting whatever I'm going to leave boom exit intent popup get me access to this thing and then you can see get the email address so what you're doing is you are increasing the chances of monetization in the future because someone's going to visit your informational article but they might never buy anything or anything like that

so you want to make ad revenue for that but also build your email list so teaching opens up all the revenue streams because then you can sell your own course all right let's get into part four and that is making your first sale so we're going to cover now how to add affiliate links to your content optimizing that affiliate content with the links you know putting it in the right places and then making your first sale so let's look at you know examples of blog posts and exactly where to add affiliate links into your articles

so first transactional posts where you can add it three to four times per company section and then we'll get into informational and this is how I like to do it so you can see this is my article on online course platforms you have an introduction you have the first H2 in the form of a question you have here are my top picks now the bullet point list it's just a jump link so you don't need this it just can kind of looks good it can help a little bit now this is an H3 heading this

is an affiliate link right here so the first link can just be on the name of the company itself now I have a little custom Adams take Section here this is not really needed but I have affiliate links here as well so these are some you can ignore that pretend that doesn't exist if you're just starting out another link you would have is the first mention through text so taking a step back really most affiliate links uh clicks are going to be on just text links so that's there's different types of affiliate links there's like

text links Banner ad links all these different things you're mainly just going for text links so this is my thirsty affiliate link here so I have it in the first heading of the company the first mention where I like to put it in the very first sentence then then you go through the different things I have another one here it's not really needed but then I have a few more so like three to five then I have what I like this like some key features user interface some stuff within the dashboard I get through all

the features and stuff product yeah yeah and then what you need here is a button and then a call to action area so right before the button you can add anything like hey if you're ready to get started with this company or this product and then some type of call to action it could be like right the thinkig link has a one month free trial it could be a 14-day free trial this is software or it could be you know get 10% off at this link so a lot of um affiliate programs will give you

you know a discount code or promotions that you can use to entice people to click so that's where you would add it in here you would add like some type of bold call to action sentence to get people to see it and then a button like if this didn't exist and it just ended right here it would be a lot harder to get people to click affiliate links so the main ones they click are going to be the button and then really just the first mention of it or like the something like this so it's

pretty simple and then you'll see like in number two it's the exact same way the exact same format so once you have a format you like you just stick with it keep it simple but really there's like three to four affiliate links per company section and that's about it the most important ones are just going to be the button and then the top the first mention now you'll see a lot of people have comparison chart s like things that go across full width five columns I did that for a while uh it can help a

little bit but I don't think it's really necessary when you're just starting out you can see a lot of people lay this out in different ways so like PC mag has an intro and then they have like this chart feature with all of it you can see like CNET has another kind of chart feature you might see it left to right up or down uh the the concept here is that if you can get all a lot of the affiliate links above the fold and just like right here when people see them immediately and they

can click on them you'll probably get more affiliate link clicks that's probably the case uh but you know you don't want to overdo it where you're just forcing people to click cuz they're not going to buy if people are interested in buying they're going to read your stuff and buy then we also have informational articles so most affiliate Revenue will come through transactional content for best products but you can provide affiliate links into how to informational content too because I have one like here like how to start a blog if you're going to start a

blog you need web hosting somehow two guides work better than others for affiliate revenue for example if I'm going to start a blog I really just need one thing that's web hosting if I'm going to learn how to build a shed I might need seven or eight different things I might need a framing nailer a tape measur all kinds of stuff and I'm not quite sure what they need but you can add those affiliate links in as you're explaining how to do things and this is how I would lay out affiliate links in a howto

post so you have my intro welcome to the blogging guide what about me number one step get your blog online and then this guy guides you through the exact process you need web hosting this the special deal on Blu host you can get this Blu host link here so there's a link right here and then it Guides Through the process exactly how to actually sign up so this is good for software it's not you don't need it as complicated if it's just like a hammer something for a DIY blog but you can see number one

once you click a blue host link you get to their homepage you'll see this oh my my internet's actually really slow right now but you'll see pictures you'll see the plan information it kind of guides people through the process my internet's actually out right now so I'm trying to show some stuff and hope hoping that it comes back while I do that um so you see once your payment is processed your purchase was successful you go through all there and that's pretty much it you're putting when you're doing informational content you are putting the links

as part of the teaching as part of the how-to guide step one get your blog online and here's how to do it so you add affiliate links that way in informational content what doesn't work as well as like abruptly adding it into random information content I tried that with some other articles I had one on business ideas I was like business idea one start a blog here's a blue host thing the search intent isn't there because this affiliate Revenue all comes back to search intent if someone's looking to start a blog they might need web

hosting yes if they're looking to have business ideas I don't know if they want to start a landscaping business a babysitting business a Blog an e-commerce brand so search intent really drives affiliate Revenue but for informational posts like this you can still monetize you just add affiliate links as steps in the howto guide now for YouTube videos you do it just a little bit differently you add links into the description so instead of adding them in an article you add them in the description and it's pretty simple you have to mention them in the video

at certain points you try if you're going to try to really maximize affiliate sales in a YouTube video you'd want to mention it in the first couple minutes like hey by the way if you're interested in getting started click this link for my click my affiliate link below you want to say affiliate link when you're saying it you want to disclose it as well so this is important too we want to disclose affiliate link when we're putting them into content so you can see I have an affiliate disclosure for YouTube above the links most people

don't do that most people put it hidden at the very very bottom and that's technically not right you're supposed to have a clear disclosure above your affiliate links on YouTube but you can see I have a couple here these are actually more like sponsored links but it's the same concept you have a product you have a company you have an arrow you have a link now what you would do is I would add it uh I think this could actually look better I would have the little finger finger thingy like this and then I would

have the call to action quick short call to action like get 30% off wpx here right get 80% off here and then you just link to it that way so the key is that you have to mention it in the actual video or people people aren't just going to out of the kindness of their heart click the video description and find the link and click on it you have to mention it you have to give a clear reason to do it a good offer a discount something that they get rather than just how they can

just get it normally here's another example best home insurance something super competitive on Google do it on YouTube he said get your free quote boom right here drop the affiliate link bitly you can shorten your YouTube affiliate links with just bit.ly you don't need thirsty Affiliates if you you can use it uh if you have a website and a YouTube channel but if you're just YouTube you could use bitly or a link shortener just to make it look a little better but you can see that this is uh getting a life insurance quote or another

one here on the best private student loan refinance companies you can see a number of options so if you're doing a transactional best of Roundup YouTube video you would put the companies that you talk about in the actual YouTube video and you put them in order so he's got Sofi here Sofi medical Earnest Splash and leny these are all different affiliate links and you want to put them up early so you'll notice like I didn't put them up early because I have my own products and services and email list and things that I promote uh

I have them here but if you're doing it just affiliate marketing on YouTube you definitely want to have them near the top now another example if you're doing a two video on YouTube and you don't know what they want that's true of a lot of physical product informational YouTube videos how to build a shed you'll see a copy paste version that YouTubers use of all of their affiliate links like seven to 10 of them kind of covering the basis of everything someone might need when they're doing that thing so again how to build a shed

you might need seven different tools we don't know based on the search or someone finding that video we don't know what they have we don't know if they own six of these tools none of the tools so you just give them all the options on YouTube in the informational type of video so really a really important thing is picking the best landing page so if you're an affiliate in an affiliate Network or an affiliate program sometimes there's just one link you can choose from it's just their main link that you know you send traffic to

sometimes they can create optimized links for you like actual landing pages that convert well uh because sometimes in software specifically too the affiliate manager will give you different links to choose from and I say hey what's the best the highest converting page you want to just send traffic to the best converting page it's really that simple you just ask the affiliate manager for that if there's only one Link in there I wouldn't worry about it just use that you can also create your own custom links sometimes with like impact you can go to a page

link to that specific page but really it's not that complicated when you're just starting out just like link to the product it's pretty simple uh you want to always add call to action text call to action statements on YouTube with discounts promotions anything that you can do if you want to get really fancy with it you would um have the affiliate manager create a custom landing page for you with your face or name on it like they've there's been some affiliate brands that uh some brands that have done that for me where it's like Adam

says use this get this discount and it's just on the landing page it can help conversion a little bit sometimes it's often just best to have their highest converting landing page and use that and then again call to action buttons are important for each company in a blog post differentiation so differentiation is really one of the weird keys to affiliate marketing if people feel like they have figured everything out if you cover your basis and cover all the main points they'll have a better feeling that they have an answer to what product they need if

you miss out on certain categories or types of products you're missing some of the main options they might not feel like they have what they need and they're going to go look at another affiliate site or compare things in another way so really differentiating the products and brands in your list best overall best for this best for that is going to be really important to clearly helping people understand what they're looking for and what to click on so then once we start getting click and sales you want to keep tabs on your affiliate dashboard so

your article is getting some traffic you're adding affiliate Link in check back on your dashboard but don't overcheck it you know I over checked it a lot when I first started out when I started getting money I was like o I was checking it like every day all the time all the all the dashboards and I was sometimes checking the dashboards more than I was actually working on creating the content CU I was so excited about it but sometimes it's important to decide when to actually make a change so uh we'll cover this too but

like when would you you send a brand 100 clicks and you make no sales do you just keep them in there do you go longer we'll figure that out so again this is a numbers game it requires a good amount of clicks we need to see that there's some level of Engagement in sales happening if you send you know 30 clicks and you haven't made a sale well that's pretty normal if you send 100 clicks and there's still not a sale that can still be normal you know again a 1 to 2% conversion rate for

an affiliate sale is normal now if you send 500 clicks to a brand and they haven't converted at all there's a real problem there you know even like 300 clicks with nothing there's probably there's some type of problem there so what we want to do is we'll cover how do we negotiate how do we start working with Brands how do we organize this and categorize brands in the right way to make the most money now this all starts with with consistent publishing just getting stuff out there but then we have to think all right I'm

starting to get some traction how do I really scale this all right this is part five scaling and negotiations the fancy business stuff so we're going to cover how to make the most money with affiliate marketing negotiation tactics and scaling let's get into it so first again we have to realize money drives this business it's that simple this isn't about creating fun little content and maybe making a dollar or two serious millions of dollars can be made with affiliate marketing from large Brands it's not typical for a beginner to do that but just know that

this is a serious business and most brands most larger Brands need optimize posts content videos anything based on earnings per click so earnings per click is hey I send a brand I I send a click to blue host I send a click to uh REI any company how much am I making how much am I actually making for that click this is the main metric that you want to track and understand now EPC earnings per click is actually technically earnings per 100 clicks is how the math works and a lot of when you're looking at

it but I just like earnings per click if I send a brand a click uh what am I making it's really that simple of a math equation so that's what we want to look for so when do we decide to move Brands up and down the the list because when we think about it if we have the top five fishing kayaks number one has has got 300 clicks it's not made any money number three is down here it's only gotten 30 clicks but it's made you some good money wouldn't it make sense to move number

three to number one is that unethical are you promoting a brand just because you're making money that's kind of the the interesting distinction here is you have to do this based on business if you're a publisher and you're not doing that then you're not doing what all the big sites are doing making millions of dollars so if you have if you're like too moral too ethical you never want to change the order then don't change the order I'm not telling you to do that but I'm saying if you want to make the most money you

have to be aware of this data to understand what's performing well so first you want to find the top three High performing affiliate brands in your Niche now it takes time it takes data like I found with online courses it's like oh think kic with web hosting blue host there's a reason why all bloggers recommend blue host on their blogs because it converts well it's welln um every Niche has these whether it's a certain type of uh canoe or kayak a certain type of golf club um a certain brand of power drill there's always going

to be like two to three main players in every category simar to the Auto industry right is like the consolidation in America is like 4 GM and Chevy now there's others too but like everything kind of consolidates where if I'm in that Niche if I'm in ATVs it's probably Polaris or Yamaha Kawasaki like those are like the main ones so you need to just figure that out for your own categories find the top three High performing affiliate brands in your Niche that's going to be key you do that by publishing a lot of content on

the niche and then adding affiliate links in to individual articles for the top three and then just seeing what happens so now let's talk about negotiation so once you've made a sale what do you do you could just do nothing right you could just keep making sales that's fine but you could also reach out to the affiliate manager and talk to them right I say ask for a commission increase and they can be powerful I wouldn't say like the first sentence out of your mouth is hey pay me more money but what you want to

do is reach out to the affiliate manager and you're saying hey you can get their contact information through the affiliate network of the affiliate program usually if it's not there again go to LinkedIn search for the company plus affiliate you'll find a person connect with them email them message them and just try to get a hold of them now it's actually somewhat easy to get a hold of affiliate managers because it's almost like customer support if you're one of their affiliates and you reach out to that sometimes it's an affiliate email like Affiliates bluehost.com or

one of those it's kind of their job to answer you it's almost like customer support in a way if you're an affiliate so if they're not answering you you just keep following up until they do but it's time if you've if you're making sales now it's time to start negotiating maybe you can ask for a commission increase so here's how you start a negotiation first you have to think about what can I offer a brand and what can they offer me in return cuz that's going to be really important so here's what you can offer

a Brand number one Higher placement in an affiliate article you have an article like the best SEO tools they're number seven I'll move you up to number one increase my commission rate or add them into an affiliate article so you have that SEO tools article you're not even in it yet I'll add you into it that's another option you can do or create new content about them I'll write reviews on you I'll write informational and helpful content and I will promote you with affiliate links those are the three High placement in an article they're already

in add them to an affiliate article they're not in create new content about them basically you're giving them more visibility that's all that they want the simple equation is an affiliate manager wants to engage with Affiliates to get more clicks and sales so if you can say hey I'm going to do this this and this for you to get you more visibility clicks and sales they should be able to increase your commission rate that's what you can offer them more visibility now you can get creative too in the future you can say I can do

email sends I can do other types of sponsored promotions maybe they'll pay you to be a sponsor and a lot of different things but those are the three main ones you want to think about now what they can offer you in return is a number of things first hire commissions so hire commissions are really good because they can increase your future earnings over the Long Haul substantially so if you go from a 5% to a 10% commission rate all of your sales you're making more money on from a single email or a single conversation they

could do a sponsorship deal they could say you know we you know that's kind of the commission rate but we would be open if you could add us number one in this article we'll pay you this much every month we actually did that with some different companies in the LMS space where we ranking for LMS software we got some companies to pay like 60,000 a year onetime payment just to be put in an article um they could send you back links that's another helpful thing you know if you're you know affiliate it kind of gives

you this negotiating leverage because really you like the affiliate's kind of in the power position in this relationship if you are ranking number one like I was ranking number one for like brand terms best podcast hosting best online course platforms things like that um that's the main brand like that's the Brand's main term they want to rank for if you're ranking for that then how you rank people in that article is really important to them a Brand's number one priority an affiliate manager's number one priority is to one you know the brand should be ranking

for that term themselves somewhere so they should be there but then any affiliate that's on first page should also have them as the number one option that's the best possible scenario for a brand they rank for it and every affiliate that mentions them on the first page of Google they are the number one recommendation that's the ultimate thing they want so backlinks can be helpful too though because if you think about it you can just say hey like I'm doing all this content this is great like could you maybe link to me that would really

help I think it would help my article rank more too now I wouldn't want them to link their directly to the exact affiliate article they're in cuz that's kind of too one to one direct I would just have them linked to any article that's how I scaled traffic to my online course platforms article made a ton of money is I got links from thinkific and teachable and learn worlds and kabi all of them and they were to random Artic they weren't linking to that article but Google knew like oh these online course platforms are linking

to his helpful informational content he must know about online courses so that helped for a while um so backlinks you can get other Partnerships something random I worked with thinkific on a course I worked with Jasper on a course uh you can get all kinds of things but the main one here is higher commissions you just want higher commissions now some companies like Blu host they they have really set direct rules about this you know if you're making zero to 10 sales a month you get this if you're making 10 to 20 you get this

if you're making 25 whatever you get this so it's kind of like you can't really negotiate there because it is what it is like this is what they pay so you might be able to get some of the other stuff though you could say hey I'll you know um I'll write a new a couple new articles on you blue host versus uh Coast Gator you know and put you in a positive light there and I'll talk about you here and maybe you could send me a backlink or you could pay like a couple hundred bucks

for the Articles whatever it is there's still ways around that I would say most companies don't have that strict of uh tiers like some have teers like that most don't most will just say hey here's into commissioning increase so you can offer them more visibility they can offer you more money it's really that simple so really to scale your affiliate commissions you want to publish more affiliate content so you're building topical Authority for more products so again it takes time right if you're in that ATV Niche you have best ATVs best sport ones and then

you go all the accessories snowplows helmets trailers all that different stuff and you just keep publishing uh you can use AI to deepen your topical Authority keep coming up with more cont content to write and then you can begin tracking commissions by brand in a spreadsheet another thing you can do is just organize your affiliate programs with bookmarks and folders too so like get to the login page of the affiliate platform or network hit the start bookmark it create folders for individual categories and it's really simple I did that for a long time you can

also use a tool like we and track so this is more advanced affiliate marketing like if you're spending money on PPC or something like that you can get it all in one place a little bit there's still a lot of issues uh cuz not every affiliate program is going to be in here like you go to data sources affiliate networks and you can pull in data from all these different affiliate networks and there's a lot of them there's quite a few share sale impact the big ones but then if a company has like an individual

affiliate program it's a little bit harder but it's actually not too bad you can you can pull a lot of stuff in here just uh sometimes you won't be able to get every single affiliate program you're in into this now this is uh this will we'll talk about the little bit more advanced stuff here in a second but this is uh good for like things like postback URLs Google AdWords tracking uh just data you know affiliate tracking in one place now that brings us to another interesting area and that is PPC affiliate marketing so Google

AdWords Bing ads PPC Arbitrage this is a huge business and it is a completely different business model than blogging or content um so we have to kind of cover this because I think it it makes sense to cover it I don't really recommend it too much for beginners because I don't want anyone spending a ton of money on ads to do this you know cuz it takes time you have to add negative keywords in make sure that bidding is working get the post back URLs optimized for conversions all of that so PVC arbitr is interesting

so there's Brands like for example consumer voice.org or consumers Advocate or top 10 this top 10 that and they bid on uh keywords on Google so instead of being the organic search results they pay for ads now what they do is they send traffic to Pages like this this is compar chart PPC best student loans so if you search for like student loans I'll just search for it right best student loans consumer's Advocate consumer rating then you go down there's probably more ads at the bottom top 10 student lender so you're going to see they

all look the same right it's like it's optimized to get people to click these affiliate links and quickly buy stuff so for example sorry cons ADV I I clicked that before so I don't think I they charged for that cuz that was probably like $40 $30 click or something um but uh it's a different strategy right so you're paying money to get traffic to then hope that people click and buy on the back end and make affiliate Revenue so there's an interesting different distinction with this you'll see there's a lot of different categories if we

go to the top pages of someone like Consumer Voice you can see they talk about um let's see if we go by traffic they random stuff best safe green uh Ty's review boost infinite review linday review these are kind of interesting a lot of these are kind of different so like if we went to even Forbes has bids on PPC it's going it might take a while to load because oh that was actually organic so let me go to paid pages so you can see what Forbes is bidding on they're spending a lot of money

getting traffic to things like high yield savings accounts so you look at their page what does it look like kind of customized affiliate links like that um so there's like the big categories like insurance right high yield savings accounts Insurance moving companies truck accident attorneys like it's kind of crazy that Forbes is running huge amount of paid ads to things like meal delivery services they're just showing up for everything now it sounds enticing it sounds cool you create a page you send traffic to it you get them to click it you get them to buy

through affiliate links you hope that you make more money on the back end than you did spending on ads so what what the problem is though is you need a like a person behind this and real relationships with these Brands because you have to you have to negotiate for higher commission rates this math breaks on standard affiliate commissions it does not work you have to get really really high commission rates a lot higher than the normal Custom Contract the io that anyone can get I'm talking like not twice as high like five to 10 times

as high or a CPL deal which is cost per lead so that's the most scalable form of PPC affiliate marketing is if it's cost per lead so for example if I put in best high yield savings account I'll see compare account accounts.com add and I can open account with next bank if I click on this what I would do to open a bank account with this is probably you can see this an impact radius affiliate link and okay what do I have to do so if I go here I click save now I guess it's

kind of a strange conversion path but I fill in this information in an account so sometimes if it's a high priced retirement account or a very large loan or insurance plan you can get paid on the back end a high a good high ticket amount or a cost per lead so they might just pay you per lead so let's say the clicks cost like five or 10 bucks but they're going to pay you $200 a lead then you just got to make the money in the middle now let's look at AdWords for a second like

let me know if you're interested in this type of stuff cuz I can create more specific videos on like PPC accounts and AdWords and Bing ads and all of that because it's a whole different strategy but you can see here like in AdWords there's a campaign it's like gold IRAs uh a couple hundred a day you can see that um how expensive this category is seven clicks average cost per click 2435 super competitive category um paying for retirement plans on the back end so it's a risky one I'm I'm testing it out again we did

it in the past and we found math that made it work but you can see you know I click in you have campaigns you have ad groups you have ads and inside of your uh ad groups you have keywords and then you have negative keywords so your keywords are going to be exact match which is the exact keyword phrase match kind of like we do in HRS where we can add other words to it broad match and then you have a list of negative keywords too that you make sure that the ad will never show

up for you have different settings you so you have your ad which is made of different headlines different descriptions different links that you're sending people to you have uh your location so you can choose specifically where you're targeting United States Canada wherever you can Target globally your schedule do you want to run it Monday through Friday 9 to5 24/7 you can have advanced bid adjustments for like things like um devices where to show your ads uh Mobile versus desktop like you can drop the bid down on mobile or all kinds of different settings you can

create audiences you can create goals there's a lot to it now the question is how the heck do you optimize a Google PPC campaign for conversions if the conversion is occurring on the affiliate site not your own site so with AdWords usually you can just track all these conversion events if somebody if you're an e-commerce brand and somebody buys your product you can then have a tracking script that's on the page or a thank you page after the checkout where like okay I know when somebody bought something and I'm going to optimize my AdWords campaign

for conversions so you can have it get more people to actually buy stuff instead of website traffic you can say I want sales you know you can have that you can you would say instead of bidding strategy maximized clicks you would say you start out again there's a lot to this so you can focus on conversions and you can even set a cost per action so you say I I'm willing to spend $30 on a conversion usually when you start a PPC account you start optimizing for clicks just to get a lot of data in

just to get a lot of data in and then over time once you have conversions in the account you change it to optimize for conversions leave it like that run it like that and then over time if you're really good you can possibly get it to Target CPA which says I'll pay this much for an actual conversion so these are different bidding strategies PPC is a auction system it's how Google makes all of its money most of its money pretty much all of its money uh the question though is the advanced stuff we're getting a

little Advanced how do I actually track conversions to optimize my campaign for conversions if the conversion event is occurring on a different site that I don't own the answer to that is apis and postback URLs so with we can track for example if we look at um something you can click on a network here like for example if I just did like partner stack I clicked on it I could see that you add it in here and there's an API key so in the API key you can take this API key from partner stack you

take the partner stack login you take the API key you paste it right into here into we can track now it's going to be tracking or if you do postback url postback url is another strategy that you can use and how that works is you grab a postback URL from the affiliate Network and then you paste it in here now a postback URL is one that allows you to track sales so for example if you got a sale for Blu host again you got a blue host sale now the postback URL will ping back to

week track saying that there's a sale and then we can track we'll ping it back to Google ads and it will appear on all of a sudden in the conversion column this is just today's data in the conversion column it'll appear here so the adver can actually do it so you need a tracking solution if you're doing PPC you need one to get post back URLs and apis and then connect it back to Google AdWords and optimize it for conversions because if you're not optimizing for conversions you're optimizing for clicks and you're not going to

get as many affiliate sales Now Bing ads is Microsoft ads is another one um that one you can get a lot cheaper clicks on however there's a lot more click Bots and fraud and stuff in there they have to be aware of so the the clicks are cheaper the quality is a lot lower and Microsoft has now made it harder to run ads just on Bing so like if you want Bing search they AO automatically include all their search Partners so like Yahoo MSN people in their email random crappier traffic and you can only cancel

that if you actually call somebody on the phone so it's kind of a pain in the ass but Microsoft uh Bing ads it's those are the main two AdWords and Microsoft or B ads and they kind of run similarly you can um import you can run a schedule import of getting all your Google ads campaigns into being so that the campaigns are similar uh same settings for the most part it just looks a little bit different so there's a lot to it I'm going to learn you know talk about it more I did it a

lot in my career and now kind of doing it more through my affiliate plan as well um but that's kind of PPC affiliate marketing in a nutshell you need the math to work and you need to make really high commission rates for it to work so overall if you're just looking to get started here is what I would do in a nutshell to start affiliate marketing this year number one use the uh AI Niche Hunter tool the framework again linked down in the description to find your sub Niche find the five of them and then

pick one so you pick one you develop a Content plan for 20 keywords inside of that you want to have 15 informational articles five affiliate articles and you want also to have a couple pillar posts so big ones so for example like we discussed if we're doing herb gardening then the pillar post would be um The Ultimate Guide to Herb gardening number one and then number two affiliate pillar post would be like the best indoor herb gardening kits so we want to have the main you know don't worry much about the perfect SEO report or

the perfect data like we just want the main stuff in there that's going to be helpful and then we have the remaining 18 keywords and articles that we go after from the AI tool so put 20 in a spreadsheet then we use the AI content generator for outlines so we can paste in the keyword into that tool we can then get it to where it you know it needs to be fill in the missing information use the paragraph generator one if you want to or just fill with personal experience Optimizer for SEO you know add

some keywords in there make sure the URL is correct right the title is optimized all that stuff uh publish rinse and repeat it's really that simple so I hope you found this video helpful I don't know how long we went but I'm losing my voice um so I lost internet one once or twice throughout here um but I think that's a pretty comprehensive overview I think that uh it can definitely get you started if you have any questions on affiliate marketing uh let me know in the comments I'll do my best to answer answer them

and let me know what you think you know is this uh something you want to do are you interested in like the PPC aspect Maybe YouTube aspect of it blogging all of those different ideas so again if you want to get the uh AI prompts make sure to click the link in the description and top comment below enter your info and we'll send them to you in the first email usually takes like 10 minutes to get the first email people sometimes freak out like where's the prompts it's like just wait a minute they'll come um

and then yeah like you know I got a lot a lot of other videos on the channel and check them out subscribe to the channel sorry I didn't get much sleep last night I have a baby at the house again I'm using that as an excuse but I think I'm on 5 hours of sleep and I talked for a while so as I'm losing my voice I will see you in another video I hope you really enjoyed it I hope you learned something today I'll talk to you soon