How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2024 (#1 Free Course on YouTube)

0:00 so my goal when I started this video was to create the most in-depth affiliate marketing course on YouTube that's ever existed so something that's better than people's paid courses so how do we create a real business strategy with dead simple content and a strategy that will actually make us money not just for a day but month after month year after year so in this free course I'm going to cover a lot of different things but in a different way so things that it took me like five years to learn and things that you wouldn't even think might help you kind of like an affiliate marketing MBA video on steroids so we'll cover why do Brands even do affiliate Marketing in the first place we'll cover the fundamentals of affiliate marketing how to build your audience from zero to make your first affiliate sale how and when to join affiliate programs and get approved how to create a simple content plan to generate affiliate income consistently and finally I'll tie it all together and tell you exactly what I

0:45 would do step by step starting from zero to make my first $10,000 a month so I've made over $2 million from affiliate marketing from a single blog without spending any money on ads and before launching my blog I was an affiliate manager for a software company so my job job was to manage the Affiliates commissions sign up new Affiliates help other bloggers to promote our software so I've seen both sides of this I've seen not so good advice put out on YouTube as well so I wanted to create something different now before I dive in if you want to learn how we're scaling blogging businesses today make sure to click the link in the description below and uh watch that totally free video so before I dive in I want to tell you a quick story and if you hate stories just go to the next chapter but this is interesting and it will actually help frame affiliate marketing for you so it was way back in 2017 and I was working

1:32 at a small office in Commerce Township Michigan totally random okay so I was an e-commerce marketing specialist I basically did marketing simple stuff for some headphone and massager Brands vibrating things for your back vibrating things for your back so my manager at the time mentioned we should do affiliate marketing right for our brand and that was the actual first time in my life I had ever heard that word you know Neil Patel Pat Flynn smart passive income those guys guys probably knew you know and first heard that word like 15 years before then but not for me you know I'm a little special took me six years to graduate college after getting booted out for not going to class and if you actually look at my college transcripts here from Michigan State you can see I did take insects I passed that

2:18 I passed wheelchair basketball but unfortunately I got a 0.0 in language and Society so for a blogger it wasn't looking too good for me but anyways my manager kind of showed me a few things we set up an account for our brand on Commission Junction so I created some little ads for Brands and I created this affiliate contract 8% commission rate 10% if I like you maybe and it was e-commerce so it was mostly finding like coupon sites like honey Retail Me Not stuff like that basically working with the affiliate vultures you know the ones that you know you're already going to buy something it's in your shopping cart but then you go to Google you search something like Wayfair coupon codes you put the code in then they get affiliate commissions on that so things like that but fast forward a few months and I just didn't really like my job you know it was just a weird quiet office there were

3:03 bright overhead lights shining on my head all the time it was quiet it was winter in Michigan and I had to get out of there so I went to a sensory deprivation tank you know one of those pitch black tanks full of body temperature water basically to help you meditate because it kills all your five senses so you can't see your ears can't hear you know you're in water you can't feel anything you get the drill so after about 30 minutes of this hearing weird noises seeing things that didn't exist but it's a great tool for ideas and introspection so I realized I'd been living in Michigan for 30 years by my family you know in the suburbs I was 30 years old I decided I needed a big change so I started applying for jobs all over the country you know New York La Florida Texas I honestly didn't care I ultimately randomly applied for a job

3:49 in Austin Texas uh and the job was an affiliate marketing manager so sure I've officially had two months of experience doing affiliate marketing but I am a good bullshitter so why not right so it paid 92k which was beating my current salary of 70k so they called me back I almost didn't do it you know I had five interviews on Zoom uh then they gave me an assignment so I went to bed I'm like I don't think I'm going to do this assignment I didn't want to do the assignment now I had to create PDFs a slide presentation I had to create an annual affiliate marketing plan for the company I actually still have that thing here with these basic slides I gave an overview with a bunch of fancy words start with the end in mind low tier I don't know what this even means but anyways they seem to like it now I'm tell you this if you're still with me here because this story would not exist my YouTube channel the affiliate

4:34 marketing knowledge my blog would not exist if I did not do that one assignment and get that job because after moving to Texas and taking that job I was completely out of my elements of start but I started understanding how this world of affiliate marketing actually worked so I saw the other side I saw individual Affiliates I remember there was one affiliate who was a site called e-commerce platforms this guy and you know there was that s side and others they were making five figures every single month from just just one affiliate program so I was like holy like I'm making decent money here like a little over $6,000 a month after taxes or something like that but there's Affiliates a single article here is sitting there and making like 10 times what I'm making in my salary so that's when the uh the first light bulb went off and you know I dreamed of that life

5:19 but I really never thought it would happen so over the course of my time at that job you know I worked closely with a guy that I became a really good friend uh with his name is Kevin he's the SEO manager for the company so this guy was SEO genius I'm basically The Cutting Edge of SEO how to rank content on Google back in 2019 and after realizing how much my 9 to-5 job was stressing me out you know I decided to take this knowledge both of affiliate marketing and SEO and create my own website now I didn't think it would work so I created the website at my name.com and I was just going to use it as a digital resume so something maybe I could help me get a job or you know something like that maybe write a few articles I don't I didn't know what I was doing so I wrote a few articles on a affiliate marketing SEO some random motivational stuff I actually started to get a little bit of traffic so I'm talking like a couple

6:06 dozen hits a day nothing crazy right so I wrote a few affiliate marketing articles this is the first time I did January is of 2019 so I wrote some on like the best email marketing software e-commerce platforms web hosting the obvious stuff and then I found a random one on the SEO tool HRS and that was podcast hosting to my surprise the article on podcast hosting started getting a lot of traffic so I kept updating it making it better doing guest posts sending links to it and over time you know it shot up the charts and within about 6 months I was ranking number one for the keyword best podcast hosting so like whatever dude who cares no big deal right but let me show you what happened so if I look here April of 2019 is when it started making money and it was $14 110 270 and the revenue kept

6:52 going up to thousands of dollars peaking at around 6,000 a month and it just continues going up and that's 2023 right so that was a big change it was actually life-changing because it gave me the confidence to both write more articles and also to leave my full-time job for good so I left my job although I did throw an epic Game of Thrones meeting for the whole marketing team knowing that I was leaving Zachary you've always been a lady it's time for you to become a sir are you ready this is a real sword be careful don't move your head I've had a lot of wine so I started the blog in January of 2019 by July I quit my job for good then some crazy stuff started happening so I found a few other uh opportunities at the time with HRS uh

7:39 best webinar software best online course platforms and a number of others because I knew the exact onpage SEO strategy I knew how to rank this content on Google and become number one now between these articles I was making over $50,000 a month and it was just going into my PayPal account and I wasn't spending a dime on ads it was just all organic traffic and we can see here this is one one affiliate dashboard just for partner stack 1.1 million started joining in 2020 and then you can see it's just a consistently about $30,000 every single month now what happened next in this affiliate marketing world was interesting so I ranked these articles between number one and number two on Google for three and a half years and the commissions are all recurring so as long as the customers remained customers and paid through my links money would keep coming in now what was interesting is how all this played out and I couldn't really have predicted what

8:25 happened next so in 2022 I was getting kind of paranoid you know there was so much income right WR on these few articles and these Google rankings so I had so much money coming in and I had to diversify so that's when I talked to my buddy Colin ship and we started he's not my business partner we decided to start this YouTube channel so affiliate marketing was my first Revenue stream to build all the other ones and now we have you know this YouTube channel um to over $100,000 a month the blog's running and all these different opportunities and income streams but the unfortunate thing that happened is the competition on blogging kind of caught up with me I was in a super competitive Niche so I was writing about software right I was writing about blogging affiliate marketing uh and all of the software so like CRM ai ai tools all types of project management software all that and

9:10 at its peak my blog was making over $100,000 a month just from this one blog ranking content right so then we started writing about all kinds of stuff Finance crypto crypto wallets nft stuff and we were making affiliate commissions Galore we were ranking for a lot of different stuff and it worked kind of until it didn't so what happened was Google helpful content update I was focusing on YouTube I got pushed down the rankings to like page two for some of these super competitive software terms because the software companies themselves actually started writing these articles so Google podcast hosting now and you'll see it's pretty much all authoritative Brands actually selling podcast hosting like software companies so instead of ranking number one there's like buzz Sprout others and I got pushed down the list a little bit so they didn't go away they just got pushed down a little bit now and it makes sense you know when you think about it should Adam andy.com be

9:57 outranking Forbes or Shopify for e-commerce platforms or like HubSpot for CRM software probably doesn't make sense in affiliate marketing so basically I rent really wide on my content strategy software crypto finance and Google updates didn't really understand what my site was about right so and all of my old backlinks that I had acquired to build my Dr they didn't really matter as much so although I did build the fastest affiliate marketing blog out there to revenue I came back down to earth a little bit which I think is fine I went a little bit wide on my content I made a mistake I didn't really see that mistake coming and it was partly my fault because I took my eye off the ball a little bit and build this YouTube channel doing all these things and we're helping a ton of students also succeed and we're not just teaching old stuff that I did were teaching kind of the newest latest greatest stuff so eyes back on the prize you know I jumped back

10:42 into the blog just a few months ago and traffic's already rebounding however with all of this said because of the recurring affiliate commissions my blog still made me over $1.1 million in 2023 and it's still generating over $50,000 a month like clockwork so a lot of people preach traffic is the end all Beall but I can confidently say you know I make about 10 times more with less traffic so we have a new team new website now new emphasis on what actually works in 2024 which is why I'm creating this video too because this is different so a good thing about consistently teaching this is the strategies that we teach our students are not what I did so don't go into software probably it's really competitive right don't go too wide on your content find your affiliate marketing physical product Niche build topical Authority and dominate so when I think about it affiliate marketing it allowed me to scale this YouTube channel

11:27 hire editors build a combined $300,000 a month business multiple businesses but with all that said affiliate marketing was the most important thing that I learned in my entire life and I want to condense all of those years it took me to learn this down into one video so now if you actually listened to all of that and made it through the story I hope I didn't bore you to death but let's get into the actual strategy first in this free course we're covering affiliate marketing fundamentals so that is why do Affiliates exist in the first place how it works and we'll show examples and how you to start thinking about this business model so first let's go to Google and I typed in best hiking polls random thing right any type of product search including the word best signifies buyer intent because we see Google has sponsored products here and there's blogs gear laab clever hiker the New

12:13 York Times outdoor life travel and Leisure reddits and some others right so what's interesting is affiliate marketing works by basically ranking on Google for certain keywords related to products so as a blogger as an affiliate marketer you're living between a search and a purchase so somebody thinks of something comparatively by best hiking poles best laptops best credit cards you're appearing in Google search for that with the comparative content so a site like this has it they L uh rank the content and then they have this affiliate link right here $230 on Amazon when I click that link a custom URL like a tracking code goes into the URL which stores a cookie on my computer that makes it known that this website sent me to Amazon so if I buy this they will get a credit for that sale based on the commission rate set by the brand so how

12:59 this works is every brand has slightly different commission rates they set it themselves so for example you can see here REI has an affiliate program Dick Sporting Goods has an affiliate program most all pretty much all major online retailers have affiliate programs so the question is why does affiliate marketing even exist in the first place what's in it for Brands and what's in it for us as affiliate marketers well when you think about it Brands need Affiliates because if you're REI and you want to get traffic for hiking boots or something like that you can pretty much only rank for that once maybe twice if you have like an article in a product page but the other8 to nine results in the top 10 of Google are going to be other sites right so how can you dominate the top 10 you need other people to be talking about you and you can't just ask them to do it you need to monetarily incentivize other sites to do it so there's this

13:45 world of Brands REI Dick Sporting Goods Best Buy Walmart Amazon and there's Affiliates the Publishers Publishers are considered blogs media sites like Forbes New York Times any small blog is a publisher so affiliate marketing Mar is usually the best and biggest driver of sales for any brand as far as the marketing efforts go there's PPC Facebook ads affiliate marketing is usually the one that dominates also because they can control the return on investment so when a brand pays Google PPC at the top right they're paying for clicks and they're not guaranteed any sales so a good return on investment for a brand is like three to one so they spend uh $100 on Google ads or Facebook ads and they get $300 in return that's a good return because they have ad cost marketing team all of that stuff however

14:31 with affiliate marketing it's usually more like 10 to one return on investment for the brand because they dictate the commission rate right you have to make a sale for them so if you make a sale through an affiliate link and get 10% they're only paying you know on a $100 pair of hiking boots they just paid $10 to the affiliate for that right so it's a much higher Roi investment for the brand it's also really a way for an individual like yourself uh as an affiliate marketer to take some of your power back in the marketplace you find keywords you rank for it you can compete with other brands and other bloggers ranking for this stuff getting clicks and generating sales so you're kind of siphoning profits so to speak from these big Brands by outranking them so for example I was outranking you know a lot of these sites for podcast hosting online courses they're main terms and when you can outrank brands for their own thing you're going to be siphoning a

15:17 lot of the people searching for that and getting commissions on it so when we think about affiliate links again they're adding tracking IDs and parameters to a URL and that is custom to you so they also have a cookie duration so that means when they store the cookie on the reader's computer that could credit you for the sale anywhere from 24 hours 7 days 30 days 60 days and Beyond most common I would say is 30 days so if somebody searches for that best hiking boots they click on it they go to REI they don't buy that cookie is still stored on their computer and they you could get credit for that affiliate sale like 29 days later right if it's 30-day cookie duration so it's not just they don't have to buy right away Amazon's pretty much right away or check you know keep keep things in the cart keep the browser open kind of stuff I don't know exactly but there's a cookie duration as well which is interesting

16:03 another distinction here is affiliate programs versus affiliate networks so affiliate programs and networks it's kind of the same thing but just different so Brands can create their own affiliate program or they can join an affiliate Network so for example somebody like you know Nike could have their own affiliate program they could use their own software like refersion or one of these other ones to have their own login experience somewhere at nike.com the Affiliates login to nike.com they see their clicks commissions sales they put in their PayPal account they see all that data somewhere in you know one area from Nike right if Nike joins an affiliate Network now they're in this big Marketplace so an affiliate network is like a marketplace where all brands are in so it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds because if you have an affiliate Network

16:48 like impact for example you could have Nike in there maybe and you see them Affiliates can see them in the marketplace join the program add their links grab all that stuff and it's easier to manage for the affiliate manager so I had like big Commerce we were in impact and it was pretty simple you would just approve and deny Affiliates in there look at their site see if it's good approve deny put money in fund the account uh add ads for them text links and all of that stuff but it's very easy so to join the program it's really simple you either like Google it find it and it's either going to be in an affiliate Network or just in their own thing and you fill out the form you need to it's a numbers game here so over time we will be joining a lot of different affiliate programs this isn't some hack to join click bank and do some medical device offer with Facebook ads to make money in 5 minutes that's not what this is we need

17:34 diversification we need revenue for a long time so become familiar with what affiliate networks and affiliate programs are specifically now the main components of an affiliate program are going to be you log in and there's different things so there's a spot to grab your links so you can take the link that's unique to you and copy it and paste it into any type of content right a social media post a YouTube description a blog post all of that so you get your links you put your links into your content and then in the affiliate software you can also Track Performance so you see clicks and commissions and then there's going to be a payment methods area where you just add a PayPal account or you know a bank account and usually as PayPal you don't need a business necessarily you can be a sole proprietor but you do need to pay taxes if you make over $600 so affiliate marketing the business model is super simple you're promoting brands with a

18:19 link sending traffic and getting paid commissions so average Commissions in general are dictated by the brand itself and the type of product it is so for example if it's a television that's like $5,000 electronic brands are usually lower like maybe 3 to 4% even 2% uh if it's clothing maybe it's 10% 8 to 10% if it's Outdoor Products 8 to 10% pretty standard stuff if it's software that could be recurring affiliate commission so that could mean somebody signs up for a monthly subscription right because software is monthly you pay every month uh you get every single you get paid every single month for that person that one person you sent through that link so that's the power of the buz Sprout example I showed you typical for that is like 20% starting recurring commission

19:05 so for example you know if a software is $99 a month your commission is 20% recurring you'll probably make around $1 19999 $20 a month every single month for that one customer so it can really stack and add up over time and a lot of people ask about the Amazon affiliate program so yes the Amazon affiliate commissions suck it's a good first thing to join because they have like every possible niche in there and you can add affiliate links in and then swap it out for the actual brand themselves because you might be able to go from like 3% to 8% and the truth about affiliate marketing is like anyone can do it anyone can join an affiliate program there's not some Overlord saying no you can't join right usually though you know the top 20 10 to 20% of Affiliates make the most money for a brand so it's really spe you know important when you're thinking about a niche and affiliate marketing to really think through this we'll go through that specifically but first we have to cover

19:52 so the affiliate marketing business model is simple it's the audience generation the consistent clicks on affiliate links say the difficult part right because again you can just try to blast a Facebook ad or something but good luck optimizing that and spending your own money to do it and doing it consistently right the key is ongoing and consistent clicks on affiliate links because it's a numbers game so let's cover that so to build your affiliate marketing audience we first have to decide what type of content are we actually going to create so first we have to think about well how do people actually use the internet right in 2024 there's all kinds of ways people use it but there's like a handful of sites that most people are using us think Facebook Instagram Tik Tok Pinterest YouTube Google you I probably missed some Twitter LinkedIn whatever but for our example we think about how do people use the internet well there's search

20:38 platforms like Google YouTube is a social media plus a search platform there's social media Facebook Instagram so it's really like when we're thinking about affiliate marketing and how it fits into the marketing funnel where does it work best so typically we have to think about passive scrolling versus inbound marketing or what I call inbound marketing versus interruption marketing so when we think about inbound marketing this is people that are actively searching for products and services because when we think about the billions of people using the internet affiliate marketing is easiest when we actually know who that person is and what they're searching so for a bad example is somebody just passively scrolling on Instagram they see your account are they going to buy through an affiliate link probably not as much as a person actively searching on a platform like Google for a product like best laptops

21:25 under $1,000 right so that's an important distinction is inbound marketing works a lot better for affiliate because they're actively the person out of all the billions of people online are actively actually searching for the product and the type of content that you're you know recommending that's why Instagram is kind of tough for affiliate marketing because people are scrolling through then they might have to find you and even if you have an affiliate link on Instagram they got to click your bio click the little link tree or whatever thing click that little affiliate link thing get to the company page check out click that there's like 17 clicks along the way right versus what I showed you in the example of best hiking polls you Google it you get to this thing you go to Amazon you buy it so it's a lot faster of a process when we think about search driven platforms uh to run an affiliate marketing business on we think about like Facebook

22:12 or Tik Tok it's kind of the same thing so Tik Tok affiliate links Tik tok's entire goal is to keep you on Tik Tok and not click links to get off of Tik Tok right so for our purposes the main affiliate marketing channels that we will be using would be Google and YouTube and guess what they're both both owned by alphabet and if I would bet on you know one company to to maintain market share 90 plus% for search or whatever it is and even when they're you know creating this new AI search and all these things like they're going to be around for a long time and YouTube That's where so many people are on you know uh there's something like 999,000 Google searches every second 8.5 billion uh a day right and 7% of them every day are new so that's like 600 million searches every day that are brand new that have never been searched for before so there isn't really saturation there's

22:58 when we think about affiliate marketing it's like a everything's saturated and I can't believe it it's this scarcity mindset when really when you think about it 600 million new searches that have never been done before every day come on there's got to be some opportunity there so to confirm the answer to affiliate marketing and finding an audience is YouTube or Google because they are both search engines people will be searching for products and they will be the ones likely to actually buy through an affiliate link so to generate an audience we have to kind of see first how the affiliate links work so on YouTube you search for something or you get recommended a video so I search like how to build a shed and we can see in an kind of a broader topic right there's a ton of different affiliate links here for different products you might need to build a shed so these are just put in the YouTube description that's where affiliate links Live on YouTube so it's helpful content in the form of informational content which can be broader like how to build a shed you

23:43 might need 10 different things because when we think about that we go back to search intent search intent drives affiliate sales so things that are broad how to build a shed I don't know if they need a I don't know if they already have a chalk wheel A rafter square or pocket tape measure right like you know so you have to cover your bases here with that whereas if it was something like the best pole saws of 2024 you probably just have one or two affiliate links because you know what they want but they both work and then again with affiliate marketing and blogging here's like my article on uh best online course platforms we have affiliate links through buttons so text based links with a button or just simple text is going to be the main driver of affiliate sales for a Blog so you click on that button you get to the you know actual page you start your free trial and then you purchase just that's how software ones

24:28 work so with a Blog it is ranking for something text links going right to the product with YouTube it's being seen for something either with search or being recommended the video with uh YouTube or affiliate links in the YouTube description so when we're thinking about these search platforms and how people search for things online it can get pretty confusing right everyone's brain works differently everybody searches differently so what do we actually what type of content do we create as affiliate marketers to get consistent Revenue well we actually can simplify this because there's really only two types of content that you ever would need to create as an affiliate marketer howto or informational content and transactional content that's the only thing that exists so if we think about it that way it's really simple for example if you're on YouTube or you have a Blog and you want to get into the

25:14 fishing Niche well the only two types of Articles you'd ever need to write for the blog would be how to do stuff so how to cast a line how to put a worm on how to tie this type of knot right all the different types of informational content the best uh you know fishing areas in Florida whatever it is informational content right and then on the other hand you have all the products so the best fishing lures the best rot and re combos the best whatever right and there's so many different options there if you're a golf blogger how to swing how to chip how to putt all that informational content the best golf courses in Michigan whatever then you have the products so you have how to do stuff and the products to do that stuff you have best golf drivers irons Putters sand wedges all all of that so we know that to get affiliate link clicks and sales

26:01 we need an audience but we also need to know how to do keyword research to actually find things that people are searching for so to do that I like the tool HRS there's plenty of other things like Google Trends Google Keyword Planner other things like that but we could put in the keyword Explorer again let's do the golf example I've used it before but it's a really simple one just to Showcase this real quick we'll go to some others I can put in best golf now that doesn't really make sense people don't search that way but if I go to matching terms I can see all the different things that include best Golf Plus other words so right here there's 34,000 potential articles I could write on golf right like the best shoes balls bags clubs and all of it and we can see this is the different metrics that we're looking at to understand the opportunity and can we actually rank for that you

26:46 know this is for blogs and Google specifically there's other YouTube ones we show you as well but for this this is keyword difficulty so this is a number from 0 to 100 based on how difficult it is to rank so if this is you know a 70 80 it's going to be red uh low numbers are good in the green volume is monthly search volume so the estimated number of monthly searches on Google for that keyword then we have over here what's interesting is TP which is traffic potential and you can see that sometimes this traffic potential number is actually higher than volume so if you're ranking for best golf shoes for example we can click into that one not too difficult we can see who's ranking for it there's actually a dr10 site a non-authoritative Blog ranking for this getting about 3,200 visits a month groovy golf.com that's really good

27:32 showing that there's opportunities everywhere but what's interesting is you can see that how it works with keywords too is he's actually ranking not just for best golf shoes but for 308 keywords for this article because Google's really good at understanding a topic so the keyword is best golf shoes but look it like no one searches when we're thinking about the psychology of search I don't search the same way as my mom or my grandma or my brother or my neighbor right we all search a little bit differently typing things in into Google so not just go best golf shoes but it's also ranking you know number two for best men's golf shoes golf shoes 2023 cool spikeless top rated so Google's compiling this into one search so search volume is one thing but just take all these numbers with a grain of salt any SEO tool will give you General numbers and although it might not be 100% accurate a lot of the time they might

28:17 overestimate or underestimate you got to start somewhere to kind of understand what type of affiliate content we want to create so one thing you can do is drop the keyword difficulty down to like two like if you're just starting a new site we want to find the easiest possible stuff to rank for so for example best golf shoes for walking is a lot easier than even just golf shoes but we can see waterproof disc golf shoes walking golf shoes all of that so we can find that opportunity we can even do lowest Dr so I want to see um for any of these keyword opportunities to rank affiliate content I want to see in the top five results there's a low Authority less than 30dr site that's another thing you can add to it makes it even easier so like something like best women's golf shoes if we click on that one we can see the volume is600 searches a month the

29:03 difficulty is easy yes there's going to be some tough sites in there but then you can see and this is what we're looking for the low Authority sites that are ranking for that affiliate keyword like golf hq.com of 31 and duad del. us with 25 let's look at a tough one like best software and we can see all the different types of software now we can see the difficult stuff right antivirus software tax software you think about like does does your keyword pass the Forbes test if forb writes about it like uh software business finance technology gadgets all that stuff it's going to probably be harder because a lot of media sites will be writing this and the more time passes the more competition goes up so we can see some of these are hard but there's still even in software there's opportunities so let's drop it down to five and see what we can find so

29:48 things like best free video editing software again probably cheaper because if people are looking for free stuff they're less likely to buy something right but uh best CRM software for hotels that's an interesting one right so again it's all about spotting these best opportunities best is the seed Frid best plus your Niche spot uh signifies buyer intent because best is a comparative term we can do all kinds of different niches in here best fishing tons of different opportunities 27,000 here best kayak you know you can do all of these different ones to just showcase how easy a lot of these are best fish finder for kayak it's just like when you start looking at this if you don't know how to do this and you you think affiliate marketing is too hard you just don't know how many searches are actively done on the internet every year

30:34 right so there's so many different things in every Niche like you can take something like even um best credit cards like something super competitive and then you can probably spot something even with a difficulty of like three right like something easier would be best credit card for young adults right best credit cards for teens best credit cards for couples so every single Niche has affiliate opportun unities it's just knowing how to find them and sometimes it can be a little bit more difficult to know what the seed phrase is so for example if you're in Fitness you could put in something like best gym right or best fitness and it might be like Fitness track or fitness watches or like home gym things like that but you might not know what it is you might have to put in something like best ab machine or best machine and find it that way right and find different keywords or like if

31:19 you're doing power tools you can't like just put in best power tools because that's you're not going to get most of the opportunities but you have to know uh what the product is best Chainsaw for example now you have dozens of Articles you could write specific to cordless battery powered a sharpener mini electric and all of it so you can find these and these are articles that you can write now the important distinction here when we're creating a YouTube channel or a Blog is that unfortunately we can't only create these best posts right then we would look kind of like a shady affiliate site only hey they're only recommending products they don't have any other information on their Channel or their website right so unfortunately you can't really do that anymore you might have been able to get away with it five or eight years ago but it doesn't work so to do that we need informational content to prop up our

32:05 affiliate posts so to build a real business around this we need a Content strategy and like I showed you before this is really simple to find seed phrases for that informational content informational content besides affiliate marketing it's not going to convert as well so for example I have posts on the best web hosting people are looking for web hosting they know I know that they are if they landed on that they're much more likely to buy one of those through one of those affiliate links I tried uh I tried a different way so I have had an article on the best web uh business ideas so for best business ideas I don't know what type of business they want to start they could want to start a website they could want to start a babysitting company or a pets sitting or anything lawn care right so I tried adding number one business idea start a blog start a website blue host affiliate links all of that doesn't really convert the same way

32:51 because the search intent is not there so the informational Stuff how to do stuff ideas posts things in Fitness would be like exercises and workouts if it's food it's recipes right they're not going to buy something through a recipe they search for chicken soup recipe they're not going to click an affiliate link to buy a can of Campbell Soup or a piece of raw chicken sent through the mail which could be an interesting thing they're just not going to do it so search intent matters so the informational stuff though the how-to stuff is an important part of the content strategy because it's actually going to make up the bulk of your content strategy and it gets more traffic it can make you add revenue and it can build your email list looking like an expert in an area right you put exit intent popups in your blog or you get a ton of YouTube views and subscribers and you uh put a link in the description for your email list and you

33:36 send helpful content so it really positions you as an expert not just a shady affiliate marketing site but to find these seed phrases it's really simple too so instead of using the word best we just use a different variation so golf I would just put how to plus Golf and then it's like how to swing a golf club how to hold a golf club grip calculate again so many different things here or if we're doing this it could be you know um how to knit something like that right how to knit a blanket scarf hat finger knit sweater all of that like look at how easy a lot of this stuff is a beanie right now there's how to plus your Niche can help you find this there's also some Niche dependent ones so for example ideas posts ideas that's what people

34:22 look for in the marketing funnel so when we think about it I'll cover the marketing funnel but ideas is kind of the top the marketing funnel I'm just looking for some general ideas I don't want to buy anything but that's where a lot of traffic look at how many searches there are for like dinner ideas 422,000 a month right a lot higher than something like best chicken soup recipe or something like that so drawing tattoo so we put in ideas and if you're doing uh let's just say design blog or an outdoor backyard thing you do patio ideas patio cover ideas concrete patio ideas stone patio ideas cheap patio paver ideas so ideas posts get a lot of traffic build up your email list if you're a blogger you just put an exit intent popup with the tool like convert kit boom they're in your email list give them a lead magnet but they're really good so other ones like you know

35:07 workouts now again when we think about how the world work works of search things that are popular and wellknown are going to be more competitive so like shoulder workouts probably more competitive back workouts like everyone knows about it it's probably bodybuilding.com some Fitness sites all of that but again if we drop the difficulty down to three or something low we find the random things that we would never know to even look for cable shoulder workouts CrossFit open workouts baseball workouts for pitchers right you just start niching down and finding these different things you can even get a little creative I mean just think about like a seed phrase that would generate a lot of searches so if you're in the music Niche you want to create music content you could write about the best electric guitars acoustic guitars all of that you could also do I put one in like how to play on guitar so you know

35:54 they're going to fill it in with other things so how to play Sweet Home Alabama on guitar how to play Stairway To Heaven on guitar how to play Fast Car on guitar a little Tracy Chapman for you you got a fast car there's another tool for YouTube vid IQ so vid IQ you can do kind of the same thing it just looks a little different but you put in like best plus your Niche click the matching terms and you can find them also like best camping tents gear all of these different things you just put in it's a little bit better to go broader on YouTube because you can really talk about anything um winter camping solo camping so camping this is pretty competitive but you can see the same kind of concept it's just for YouTube so you look for bass you look for howto you look for all of that now YouTube's a little bit of a different strategy but you know they do have a search engine so there are a lot of keywords you can find there so the goal here is to find a niche that you like and we'll cover exactly how to find the

36:40 niche personalized to you but this is one step of it finding what people actually search for online finding things that have affiliate marketing potential and the math behind it right so we'll figure that out but get a simple Google sheet put some ideas in there copy and paste some keywords in there put the difficulty the volume stack rank it based on on what you think's interesting and do a ratio of like 80% informational to 20% transactional if you're blogging for YouTube Just create a bunch of video ideas and put that in a spreadsheet so you'll notice I didn't cover like Pinterest or Twitter or random stuff like that or Tik Tok right or Instagram because affiliate marketing at its core is the search driven thing so that's what we're going to cover is finding keywords that people search for to make us money organically so we don't have to spend our own money on ads to actually not that we won't cover that shortly but uh that's the best way to do it so let's

37:25 talk now about cre creating your affiliate marketing content so actually creating the content for YouTube or for Google well we live in this world of algorithms right the Google algorithm recommending you know the search ranking factors and all of that the YouTube algorithm how it's recommending videos and thumbnails and titles and all of that stuff so unfortunately the world we live in the best content isn't always rewarded it has to be the best content that's also optimized for the algorithm so for example if you had like a really amazing YouTube video uh that had the best information in a niche but the thumbnail sucked and no one clicked on it it wouldn't work unfortunately it just wouldn't work same is true of a blog post you wrote the best possible most in-depth guide related to something doesn't matter right you need to know

38:11 what Google likes to see in order to rank that content and for people to see it so we live in this world of algorithms which are getting smarter like Google's getting smarter when it comes to well maybe not ranking stuff sometimes but at least understanding language processing and the words on the page and all of that but we have to cover the algorithm so the YouTube algorithm is really simple right it's title and thumbnail to get people to click so the clickthrough rate how many people if they see it on their homepage are actually going to click on that video and video retention so how long they actually stay so when we think about YouTube it's an ad driven platform right longer the video the more ads that play the more you get people to stay on YouTube and watch your video longer the more um it might get recommended because more people are watching more ads for your video more than others so those are the two components of YouTube It's Main

38:56 mainly click-through rate and retention right so that's the thumbnail and title and the video itself so there's ways you can optimize that but Google's different so there's onpage SEO so where you're putting where are you putting that keyword in the URL in the title throughout the content how many times where how right plus different things like is it helpful to human readers do people actually like it or is it just a really crappy article now again we don't have to be good writers to be affiliate marketers because we're assembling content really in the exact same way every single time and a simple away and we have plenty of AI tools we can use too but ultimately for Google the main ranking Factor here is ending the search Journey what that means is they click on your article on the topic they don't go back and then click another one so they click yours they're done they do a different search or they leave Google

39:41 completely that's the ultimate ranking factor and we can figure out ways to help with that but first I want to introduce you to the content assembly line so an assembly line process for this affiliate marketing machine is the best way to go we can't just create one article or one YouTube video and hope that it goes viral viral right virality is not a business strategy I've never made a single viral YouTube video or viral blog post or anything like that I'm not the crazy Rich Persona that you see some young 25-year-old with a million views on YouTube however I can say that I probably make a lot more money than them because we have backend systems strategies and we actually do real teaching so anyways the blogging content assembly line consists of keyword research so you just did that right you can do that do keyword research find what you're actually going to write

40:26 um then you create a minimum viable post so you can't really do this as much on YouTube because you have to create the best possible YouTube video um you can create a minimum viable Studio like a setup where you just turn the lights on turn the camera on and you're good to go right you script something and you can shoot it so that's really important there but for Content we have to have consistent and ongoing content to get consistent and ongoing attention and affiliate link clicks the good news with Google and YouTube is you build this backlog so if it becomes passive over time now I don't like the word passive income but it can become passive over time because on Google if you're ranking for something you're ranking for it right for a while and it just sits there and it gets clicks every single month now it's not totally passive you do have to update it sometimes but with YouTube

41:13 it's similar it's not like you just create a YouTube video and it dies off if it's a keyword-based YouTube video it could be found in YouTube search for years so we get like between 350 and 500,000 views on our YouTube channel every month mostly just from old stuff that people people are finally finding right so YouTube views actually they don't go like this it looks just more steady so you're getting this backlog of content which means you need a lot of it which means you need a system to create a lot of it in a simple way that's kind of appeasing the algorithm while making it easy on your life that's really the simplest way to look at it so when we think about what content is well it's kind of simple honestly whether it's blogging YouTube in informational content transactional you're going to make a list so the world loves lists I go through my day and I look at a list what do I have to do today right I check

41:59 things off a list well all content online is pretty much lists even this very video I'm going through a Google doc that you can't see I'm kind of looking and framing what do I have to talk about in this order in these main sections right to tell this in the right order in the right way so that it's most understandable and helpful to someone who actually sits through it um blog poster lists seven best CRM software um even a how-to guide how to start a blog step one step two step three those are lists YouTube videos are lists blog posts are lists so you just think in simple lists and the truth is people's attention spans are so short that list items often should be pretty short too so you're not writing some crazy Hemingway ask long Poetic thing about like the perfect way to do something it's simple to the point content and

42:44 there's AI tools to help you so again we're doing this because we want to make the most progress in the least amount of time when we think about it it's like if I have 10 hours 20 hours a week I can spend on this business on the side of my job and all my family all the other responsibilities how do I make the most effective use of that time well I'm not going to spend all 20 hours writing the perfect blog post right you could do it but it just won't lead to revenue which is the entire goal of a business instead you create a system to create a Content assembly line is replicatable you can do it over and over again so I know this video is about affiliate marketing and we haven't talked about how to make money with it yet necessarily but you can't yet because you have to publish the content index it and move on you notice we haven't talked about adding affiliate links into any anything yet it's because we need to get the content to get views and consistency before we

43:30 have to worry about adding the links in the good thing is we're not losing out on Revenue we're just waiting for it to get traffic then we can add the links in so when it comes to a Content assembly line method we let's talk about blog post first so we have a Target keyword let's just say it's best webinar software something that I wrote years ago um this one made a lot of money because it was ranking right when covid hit and like Zoom was taking off it was making thousands of dollar like some days it was making over $1,000 doll a day but it's died down no one really cares as much about this word anymore so much like keywords search volume changes niches change things come and go right Zoom super competitive and interesting now but maybe it won't be in 10 years anyways so when we're thinking about the target keyword in our content assembly line it's a really simple process we edit the keyword put goes in the URL it goes in the title in the form of this

44:15 right you adding words into the title is always a good thing you have the number the target keyword and then what I call search intent trigger words these are extra words you add to the and not clickbait but making it more interesting um so you have an introduction you have an H2 heading so an H1 heading is the title and H2 heading is the first thing and this is what Google likes to see they like the H2 in the form of a question because if you think about it if you just wrote an article and it was all paragraph text and it was all just this size Google wouldn't know what to prioritize or what to show or how to show it in the search results of featured Snippets and all that but when you do it in the right way with H2 H3 headings and paragraph text it makes it a lot Google's life a lot easier so H2

45:01 what is the plus your target keyword and then you you can do this bulleted list or not it really doesn't matter so much but then I have my list number one is an H3 heading that's because um your your question is an H2 the list items are h3s then I have this fancy looking box here you don't really need that there's an affiliate link here then you just have your main content so you have it pictures features user experience I've got some price say what I like this like and a button but you'll notice number one is the same as number two which is the same as number three which is the same as number four so once you have your format then the products are all the same so it's going to be intro your list of products conclusion it's really that simple now yes you can to affiliate articles optimize them to all hell right

45:46 we can add crazy boxes Pros cons tables we can add things you know underneath the main list like other pictures and whatever are the benefits of using this thing and and other things but you know that stuff you can do it later you don't have to worry about it in the content assembly line process we don't need to focus on that too much so with onpage SEO we're optimizing the article for this keyword so we have it in the title and the headings right a couple headings what is the best and then maybe what is it very simple headings but then where else do we put it well we use a tool like surf for SEO so here's one on learning management systems that I created just as an example um you can see gives you exactly what to do so when we're optimizing an affiliate article like this it tells us all these semantically related keywords so Surfer

46:32 SEO gives you 80 semantic keyword ideas to add into the article what it does is it scans the top 20 30 40 I'm not quite sure articles that are ranking on Google and it compiles the information into what Google's rewarding because if Google's rewarding it it's probably a good thing you should look for that as the competition so this one's pretty long it's an inev thing um number of headings number of parag paragraphs all of that and then with this semantic keywords are interesting when it comes to affiliate marketing it's really important because Google's natural language processing is getting smarter they're better to understand words that should be in an article that makes sense and is robust and they use Ai and they're like okay and you just can't really think of these keywords on your own without a tool like this so for example in this one on Learning Management Systems you know I wouldn't

47:20 think about like LMS implementation or partner training or academic learning or these things that can make the article interesting but you'll see the term Learning Management Systems typically used 24 to 68 times in an article that is roughly 5700 to 6600 words so if let's just say the article is on average of 6,000 words and we divide that by somewhere between 24 and 68 I like to stay on like the lower and I don't want to over optimize this you know every 200 words you're using the target keyword that's roughly what people are doing um you definitely want to include it in the introduction somewhere your target keyword should be there and you don't want to over optimize you don't want to get like a 90 here necessarily that actually did work like 3 four years ago with affiliate marketing but now it's

48:05 like don't over optimize keep it simple right some of the best um content out there that ranks for really competitive stuff in my testing does not have 90 it might be in the 70s um so they're not over optimizing with these tools they're using them as guides to see how long should it generally be what are some of these random keywords I should add so the content L it's kind of like building a muscle right I recommend you do this yourself you don't use like chat GPT to write an article and edit everything because it just gets too complicated like Surfer SEO does have an AI credits feature where you can like make them it just writes it automatically in like five minutes for you but again we just want to Future proof our affiliate marketing content to not be penalized in the future I'm not saying it ever will but I'd rather just have you build the muscle of writing things yourself first right because that's basically how our

48:51 daily lives are we work we send emails we Tech we read books we read things online we the average person reads more now than they ever have in history because we're actually on the internet all the time right so text there's two types of content text right and video those are the main two right now there's also audio podcasting we're not covering that but when it comes to writing you don't have to be a good writer but I recommend you kind of build this muscle because you want to go from that blog post took me four hours to now it took me two to now it took me one and just keep making it faster and faster so typically it works by like starting in the middle then the intro at the at the end maybe right so it's just it's really what's helpful to you I also recommend you use a tool like grammarly so grammarly is an interesting one and I'll cover that real quick here's a random one in grammarly you paste it in or you

49:37 can use the Chrome extension and it just tells you like what errors are there are there spelling punctuation weird things that don't make sense is it are the sentence some of the sentences too long things that actually will really help you if you're just starting out writing can't barely put a sentence together again I failed language class in college okay so we can give you a good score here I actually recommend you don't get it to 99 it's almost too optimized again you know I've I've done some research and looked at some of the top hard health related affiliate marketing articles that are ranking for things around Best Fitness things and things that affect your health they're usually like in the 80s here and they actually do have some issues and errors because actually that makes it almost seem more human when you have a few errors which is weird but that's the world we live in so that was blogging let's talk about the YouTube content assembly line so first step of that again is keyword and

50:24 Niche research and uh video ideation so for me like YouTube video ideas are pretty they come all the time I don't like sit down and just this is my hour to come up with ideas they kind of flow as you're moving through life and thinking about different things it's easier though when it's like affiliate marketing videos because you're just doing this based on keyword research you could use vid IQ and then you're finding best so and so in your Niche and what's the interesting part about YouTube is there are actually a lot more affiliate opportunities in really really competitive stuff according to Google so for example to rank a article on Google for best credit cards you it'll never happen there's NerdWallet Chase probably big Financial sites a random blog's not gonna be able to do it there's too much Authority and expertise needed when you think about the content that can rank on Google it's things that aren't as risky

51:09 right if you're just starting a blog you're not going to rank for things that can affect a person's money or health or life so like if you want to rank for like how to get over covid-19 right like that's all going to be Health Healthline government sites CDC probably not an individual blogger same with like knee pain or back pain or medications or supplements or money things related to open a business credit card or things like like things that affect people's finances or money or health more difficult to rank for however on YouTube you can make videos on the best credit cards of 2024 and there is literally way less competition which is interesting I've seen videos where it's like the top five you know cashback credit cards of 2024 100,000 views on the video a couple affiliate links in the description I don't know how those do specifically but

51:56 it looks like a really promising idea so YouTube's interesting there's a little bit more opportunity in just randomly everything whereas blogging you have to be a little bit more strategic in your keywords so with YouTube though the content assembly line is really getting the ideas down putting them in a spreadsheet and then there's really the stages of creating a video are scripting shooting editing so the longest and most

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