SPI 888: What’s Working in Affiliate Marketing Right Now

SPI 888: What’s Working in Affiliate Marketing Right Now

Pat Flynn: Here’s something kind of crazy. Nearly 50% of my overall revenue ever since I started online business in 2008 has come from affiliate marketing. By connecting the audiences that I’ve built to products and services that are meant to help those people. And that’s always gonna be the golden rule, right?

Whenever you have an audience in mind or a target market, you wanna know what is helpful. And what will be a solution for their problems, something that would make their life more convenient. That’s the golden rule of affiliate marketing. Don’t promote something that doesn’t actually help the target audience that you have, right?

If you do that, you are breaking that rule. You’re going to break the trust that you’ve earned or are trying to earn with that audience always come from a place of service. However, let me just say this times have changed a little bit. We are now in 2025, and if you’re still trying to build a following first, trying to build a massive social media subscribership or YouTube subscribership before you start affiliate marketing, you’re doing it backwards.

If you’re gonna wait until you have thousands of subs to make your first dollar, you’re missing out on money that you can be banking right now. And if you think affiliate marketing is all about just throwing as many links out there as possible, hoping people will buy, well, that’s exactly why most people who attempt affiliate marketing fail.

Not just today, but that’s always been why they fail because you don’t have the strategies. But today we’re gonna talk about the strategies that are working right now, not the theory that you’re gonna find online and on in other YouTube videos and podcasts. The real tactics that are generating results right now for people who are just starting out, and for those who’ve perhaps hit a plateau and can’t seem to break through, maybe that’s you.

I’m gonna show you why you don’t have to wait to start making affiliate commissions. How to generate revenue even with zero followers. That is possible. And the content strategy that’s working better than anything I’ve seen in my 15 plus years of online business. So whether you’re brand new to affiliate marketing or you’ve been stuck at the same income level for months, by the end of this episode, hopefully you’ll have a clear roadmap to start generating affiliate income or finally break through that ceiling that you’ve been hitting.

So let’s dive in. We’re gonna take this in five parts, and in the first part here we’re gonna talk about the two path strategy. And the fact that you don’t have to wait, because the big myth is that you have to build a following first. You have to gain an audience. And yes, of course, things are great when you have an audience.

You don’t wanna not build an audience. If you have an audience, great. You can survey them, you can understand them. You could serve them with products and recommendations. You probably already have access to them. Great. But you don’t need to wait for that to happen to generate revenue. You can start making money while you’re building your audience.

You don’t need 10 K followers. You don’t have to build your audience first, then monetize. Nobody will trust your recommendations without a big following. These are all old limiting beliefs. The reality is you can build your audience and generate affiliate revenue simultaneously. Here is the analogy I like to use.

When you find a product or service that can help people, imagine you have just a small audience of five people, let’s say even you just have one and metaphorically, they’re drowning in whatever ocean of inconvenience that they might be in, right? Metaphorically. You know, they might be overweight, they might be unproductive and running into procrastination.

They might have puppies that pee all over the house. Whatever their version of drowning is, you have an opportunity to throw them a life ring. Now, what you say to that person who’s drowning in the ocean of whatever it is, I’m sorry, there’s not enough people here for me to throw this at you. So I’m just gonna wait till there’s more of you drowning before I send this off.

Of course not. You would throw it out there in an instant. If this was somebody you knew in real life that you could see there, well guess what? Those people are there and you don’t have to have any sort of following to be able to serve people. That’s sort of big lesson number one. Yes, building an audience.

It is important for long-term success, but you don’t have to wait to start generating revenue. So here’s path number one, the audience building strategy, right? This is long-term wealth. Here’s why. Building a loyal following can create a sustainable, scalable income. First of all, there are higher conversion rates from people who know and trust you.

We know this. They know, like, and trust you. So therefore, those recommendations matter more. You have an ability to launch your own products later as well with an audience that you build. You can generate multiple revenue streams of income beyond just affiliate marketing. And these things can compound over time, especially if you focus on serving those superfans.

They’ll bring new people in, they’ll make those recommendations on your behalf, and you’ll just continue to exponentially grow from there. But it can take six to 12 months to build a meaningful audience. 12 to 24 for significant affiliate income. Keyword significant from an audience that you’ve built.

It’s more sustainable. It’s exactly what has kept a lot of my businesses afloat over the years is that continuation of those relationships that I built with many of you. But that is the audience building strategy, the one that we all kind of know already. But what about the search first strategy? What this really means is you are now targeting people actively looking to buy right now, whether they are followers or not.

Hopefully they do buy and then become a follower. Great. But this is why this works more immediately and why you can get revenue sooner than later. You’re targeting buyer intent, not building awareness. People are already on the hunt for something and you can get in front of them in different ways, and we’ll talk about those in just a minute so that your recommendations show up and they can take those recommendations, right?

People are already in that shopping mode. There’s no need to convince them that they have a problem. They know they have the problem, and you can start generating revenue sometimes within a month if you do this correctly. And the best part is these two paths both compliment each other, right? Search content can help build your audience.

Audiences can amplify your search content. You’re not choosing one or the other, you’re doing both. So here is the golden platform for doing this. Where to focus your efforts for maximum ROI. When it comes to affiliate marketing, the Golden platform, you guessed it, is YouTube. It serves both strategies perfectly.

You can build your audience and following with a subscribership on there. However, the way that you can get found is through these recommendations that you offer. And over the years, I’ve created several videos, individual videos that have continued to provide income for years, some in the five to six figure range, not in ad revenue, although ad revenue is sort of a YouTube bonus after you unlock monetization, that’s just extra dollars, but through commissions.

I shared relatively recently a success story of a video that I created for a product called Descript. Descript, if you don’t know, is a podcast and video editing tool. It has built in ai. It can clone your voice. If you kind of miss parts, you can just type it in. It goes in there and it automatically transcribes your podcast.

You can create little clips from it. It’s, it’s wonderful. And I shared a video talking about the tool and how useful and how much time you could save with it. And that video when it was published, saw several tens of thousands of views and people started clicking on the link, the affiliate link, and then I started getting a commission from that.

It started to work so well that I created a second video. A cool rule of thumb on YouTube is if a video is working about a particular theme, keep doing more of that. So this video about Descript was doing well, and so I decided to hone in on a very specific tool that I knew was going to get a lot of engagement because it’s somewhat controversial.

It’s the idea of cloning your voice and the idea that you can sort of upload your voice to Descript and then use it to create a podcast. And I just showed some different examples and I also opened up the discussion in the comments section about whether or not people thought this was a good thing or a bad thing, whatever your opinion is on ai.

I just opened up that conversation and that video saw over 1 million views within six months. It kind of piggybacked off the success of the first video. Both videos sort of support each other, but that one took off. It had a really good title and thumbnail. The tool is called Overdub, in fact, and again, I demonstrate it on that video, and thousands of people have clicked to check out Descript as a result of seeing it in action and wanting to get access to it themselves.

I have seen over six figures in income just from these two videos alone, thanks to the commissions coming in from Descript. And they continue to work for me every single day. ’cause YouTube, once they see a video do well, they wanna share it with more people because I’m keeping people on the platform, and so not only am I getting affiliate revenue, I’m also getting ad revenue and I’m gaining subscribers at the same time.

People are either searching for information about this tool or about the problem that they have, and tools that could potentially solve that problem. I’m building an audience. I’m getting ad revenue, I’m getting commissions, and I’m building trust and this long form content. Yes, this can work for short form content as well, but long form content, especially for bigger tools and recommendations, you’re gonna need to really show this thing in action.

A lot of times, short form videos are just going too fast to really convince somebody to then spend some money. Versus long form, people are looking for answers. They want depth and they want reality. They want to see an example, a demo video. And that’s what’s really cool about YouTube. So definitely if you have tools that you recommend anywhere else on your podcast, on your blog, in your email newsletter, why haven’t you created a video about those?

You don’t have to go through every single piece of that particular product or tool or software or program. You just have to talk about how easy it is to use. That’s really important, and perhaps one or two of your favorite things about it and show off the transformation that you’ve been able to gain from it or that your students have been able to gain from it, or other people.

You need to show this thing as actually having helped people. People wanna see what they’re gonna get before they get it, and if they come across your video. Well, then you get some commission. It’s very similar to Amazon. Amazon came on to the scene with videos after people started noticing that they could make money with YouTube.

If you go to Amazon, you’ll often see a lot of videos inside of a product page of people promoting that product. Why? Because Amazon caught on to the fact that people want to see this thing that they’re potentially going to purchase in action. You can be the person to step up for your particular audience, for your particular market, to show all the different options they have and what works and what doesn’t to help them make a decision.

You become the expert curator, and by becoming the expert curator, that is the value that you’re adding to the community and the niche and the market that you’re in. You’re helping save people time. You’re helping save people from the frustration of decision fatigue. You’re helping to make the decision for them.

YouTube is the golden platform, and we’re not gonna go over specific YouTube strategies here, although I will say that the title and thumbnail are very important. And again, create multiple videos about the things that are working. I don’t know how many Kit videos I have, but there are quite a few, and the more that I create, the more that they can each feed into each other and the more commissions I earn over time.

Now, YouTube is not the only platform. There are other platforms that can help you with affiliate marketing that have proven to work really well. Pinterest is a great search-based affiliate content platform. I am not an expert at Pinterest. Not at all. It’s one of those platforms that I know works, but just have opted out of.

I’ve chosen to focus my time and effort elsewhere. However, Pinterest is, if you wanna dive into it more, a place that can work for you for affiliate marketing. Your email list of course, is a great place. If you have people who are starting to follow you, you can go and start to build a deeper relationship with them and promote things through your email list too. Yes, blogging can work. SEO is on the downhill run right now with, I mean, if you search anything on Google, you’ll see an AI based answer first and then maybe some ads, and then probably Reddit and other forums before any sort of specific search result that is of a regular person like us. But it can still work.

It depends on the topic that you have. And if that topic is maybe not as spoken about or written about as others, then maybe you have a chance. And then social media. Social media can be great too, and especially yes, with short form videos. Like I said earlier, long form on YouTube is king for affiliate marketing.

But short form can work too to help people understand quickly what different things are. And I think if you’re gonna do affiliate marketing on a platform, especially for physical products, yes, Amazon works and you can put Amazon links across many different platforms. But TikTok shop, and its built in affiliate program is quite amazing.

It’s probably the best one that’s out there in terms of an all-in-one platform that allows you to sell other people’s products, promote them through the videos on the same platform, and earn a commission very easily. I myself have purchased many physical products on TikTok. Grandpa’s Weeder is one of them a little gardener tool, Grandpa’s Weeder. It’s not a drug related thing, although who knows what grandpa’s getting into. Anyway, I purchased that off of somebody else’s video who had earned a commission from me because he showed me exactly how this thing worked in his garden, and it just kind of worked in an instant.

And I was like, I need that because we have weeds growing in our garden. And I got it, and it came immediately. I literally clicked the buy button on that person’s video. This is again in the TikTok shop. Man, I clicked one button, double clicked for Apple Pay, and boom, it was at my door a week later. It’s insane.

Now, we’re not talking about affiliate marketing in the sense of selling, but if you are selling a physical product, yes, TikTok would be a great place to have your product in its catalog for others to then promote and serve their audience with. They earn a commission, they’re making money, and you are making money as well.

Let’s move on to the content strategy that is absolutely rocking it right now, right? So this is structuring the way that you create content for high converting affiliate offers. So it’s a three part structure. This is the framework, right? Again, we’re going deeper here. A lot of people who do affiliate marketing take the easy route and see easy route results. That is not very many or not very much. The easy route is let me get an affiliate link for a product and let me just share it a couple times and that’s it. I’m not gonna do any thinking about how I promote this, how I set this up, how I create a campaign around it.

You would do that with your own product, but for whatever reason, when we choose to promote another person’s product and share it with our audience in the same way, we just don’t put any effort behind it. So here’s the three part structure. First problem, we need to identify a specific and painful problem that your audience faces.

If you don’t know any of the problems that your audience has right now, then what are you doing? That’s literally the first step you need to make this problem emotional and relatable. So for example, if you wanted to set this up in a video, in a blog post, in an email newsletter. You might say something like, if you’re struggling with specific problem, you’re not alone, then you can dive into your story as well and make it relatable.

Share the things that you literally felt yourself. And yes, affiliate marketing is always easier when you’re promoting things that you yourself have used because you get to demonstrate it, yes, but then you get to speak to it honestly to your audience and identify with who it is that you’re serving and make this thing relatable in some way, shape, or form.

So the first thing. You need to know what the problem is. That’s part one. The second part of this framework is the solution. So this is the middle, 70% of the content. If the problem was the first 30 seconds, the solution is the middle, 70% of content, right? This is where you present the solution, the product or the surface as the solution.

Not one of the solutions, but the solution. If you promote it as one of the solutions. For example, you’re doing a video and you’re like, Hey, here are five different ways to solve this problem. Five different tools, five different pieces of equipment, five different services. You’re just making it more confusing for your audience.

You’re just showing them more options that they’re gonna need help choosing. Why don’t you do them a service curate that really go into figuring out which one is best, and then own that, focus on the benefits of the product, the one single solution, not the features, and show the transformation, not just the tool.

Here’s this button and here’s what it does. If I’m showing off a podcasting product. Yes, it has a ton of features on it. Cool. It does all these things. It makes my voice sound good. Great. But let’s take a listen. Here is what my podcast episode sounded like before. Now here’s what it sounds like after.

Hey, everybody, Pat Flynn here. Thank you so much.

I just clicked a button, but you know what I mean. Having a significant change as a result of using the tool, will demonstrate the tool for you, and that transformation is what people want. They see that in themselves. I want that too. I want that to happen to me. I want my voice to sound like that too.

Now, hopefully you don’t publish podcast episodes with voices like this, but I’m just having fun clicking some buttons over here on this side using my Rodecaster Pro 2. You see what I did there? Showed you some tools and then I dropped the solution. If you’re looking to add some, some spice, your podcast, maybe you wanna make the voice sound like this, well then you need the right tools to do it.

Check out the  Rodecaster Pro 2 by Rode. I’m doing affiliate marketing right now, although I’m not giving you a link ’cause I’m not here to promote that to you. Okay, we talked about the problem Next, the solution. Finally, this is most important, the proof, your personal experience with the product specific results.

The more specific you can get, the better, the more general you get. The worst. ’cause everybody’s talking general, people want specificity. They want real life stuff. And then finally, with the proof, the whole point of the proof is to prove people wrong when they start wondering, is this even real? Is this not a waste of money or is this just fake?

No, you need the proof and address those common objections, right? Address the common objection. For example, if I am promoting. Riverside as a tool, you might say, well, you know, you don’t need Riverside. You could use something like Zoom to record your podcasts remotely. Well, that is an objection, right? And that is a story people will tell themselves to then talk themselves out of purchasing Riverside, if that’s something that I would promote, which I do use Riverside now to record remote interviews.

And I’d say no, because Zoom will compress your audio and it’s gonna sound terrible. And in the world of podcasting right now, your audio needs to sound great, or else you’re gonna be left behind. And so that’s a rebuttal. There are several for that particular argument, but I just wanted to give you an example.

Now let’s go for another strategy. So we talked about the problem solution proof framework. Now let’s talk about the comparison trap. This is how to dominate the best of sort of comparison searches. People want to know the best of things, and so when you search for a product, oftentimes you are searching about a product in its competitor.

When you’re trying to buy something, Dyson versus Shark, which one is better? If you go on TikTok, you’ll see a lot of people who are promoting things will show you two different versions of something. Here are the, the one that’s going around lately. The pitch is like, you know that your back camera on your phone is better than your front facing camera, the selfie camera.

So there’s this tool that you can connect to your mag safe on your apple that Bluetooth connects so that when you’re facing. The back camera and you can’t see your screen. It provides you a new screen for it, essentially. And you’ll see like, Hey, other people are talking about this product, but this is the new one on the block that everybody’s using.

It’s much cheaper and the higher quality audio or video is better. So the comparisons are working really well. This isn’t really a new strategy, it’s just we have new tools and we have new ways to frame it. We’ve always seen comparisons but not, Hey, this one is better if you’re this and this one’s better.

If you’re that. It’s no, this is the better choice against this other popular choice. There’s lower competition than generic product reviews. When people are searching for these comparisons, there’s higher conversion rates because people are often, when they’re finding these things in a buying mode already, and it works again for both search strategy and audience building.

if you can bring some personality into the comparison, even better. So here are some frameworks for titles that you can use in emails or YouTube videos just to give you an example. X versus Y, which is better for blank Shark or Dyson, which is better for a clean home. I tried five product category. Here’s the winner.

I tried five microphones for podcasters. Well, here’s the winner. Product review, 30 days later. Rodecaster Pro 2, 30 days later. Rodecaster Pro 2 review 30 days later. Or the Stream Deck by Elgato Review, 30 days later. People wanna see that you’ve done something and that you’ve used this product.

Right? Why I switch from AWeber to ConvertKit? That’s literally a title of a blog post I used that went crazy for commissions back when ConvertKit was named ConvertKit. Now it’s named Kit, but I did in fact switch from AWeber to Kit, and it was the best decision that I ever made. So again, make sure you pick a clear winner when it comes to these comparisons, right?

Don’t be wishy-washy. You wanna be very clear and you wanna explain why it’s better for specific situations. And if you know the specific situations that your target audience is going through, even better, you can connect it to that. And you can include both pros and cons if you say everything is perfect about this product.

I recently purchased the Sony FX3 digital camera. To film even more cinematically, and it’s not perfect, and I watched a lot of reviews about that. I compared it to the FX 30, to some Nikon cameras, to even some Canon cameras, and I was originally a Canon user. I still use the Canon EOSR, but I decided on the Sony FX3.

I went through somebody’s affiliate commission on YouTube, and it was a very honest review. He said there were certain things about it that he wish were better. Those were made up for with these other features that were features that I actually wanted. So again, I’m not gonna get into the details of exactly what those things are, but I’m just using this as an example.

Another framework you can use for content that crushes with affiliate marketing is the Beginner’s Journey Content series. So what does this mean? This means documenting your learning process. And taking people along for the ride. This provides maximum authenticity. This also is a great one that, as a bonus, helps you build more of an audience.

’cause people want to subscribe to follow the journey. You’re not just doing it all in one video, although you could, your journey to becoming a pro podcaster. And then within that journey, sharing some of the tools that you’re using, some of the courses that maybe you’ve taken, like Power Up Podcasting inside of the SPI Community, all these things.

You have a reason to take action on these things you have because you’re sharing your journey, a reason to learn from these resources, a reason to make these decisions, and people seeing that in real time will be so relatable. It builds trust through vulnerability, and that is important when it comes to eventually these recommendations that you make.

So here are some content ideas. Title wise, 30 days with blank. Here’s what happened. 30 days with Elgato’s brand new Stream Deck. Here’s what happened. Beginner’s Guide to blank. What I wish I knew. Beginner’s Guide to watercolor painting. What I wish I knew. Then you take people through a journey when you started, the tools that you use, the cheapo items that you got from the art store versus what now you use because you’ve upped your game and you can see it in action with the video that you’ve created.

My Biggest Mistakes with Blank people wanna know what mistakes to avoid and when you show up and share the mistakes that you’ve made, makes you more trustworthy week one versus week four with product week one versus week four with the Sony FX3 How cinematic have my videos become? Okay, that’s a lot of great content that you can use.

Even one of those ideas could be something that could turn into additional revenue down the road for you. So let’s move on to the next part of this podcast episode. Let’s talk monetization strategies that work now. We’ve gotten specific with some of the different types of content. We’ve talked about the approach for affiliate marketing that works so that you can go deeper and build real relationships and even build an audience at the same time.

But how you don’t have to wait and you shouldn’t because you have these things that can be helpful. There’s specific rules and strategies that you should implore so that you can maximize your opportunity for conversions. So first of all, this is gonna be kind of obvious to many of you, but it is the immediate value approach.

We need to share some immediate value when it comes to helping people and helping them understand what we have to offer them. If they’re gonna know that they’re gonna have to go through hoops or wait a long time, then it’s never gonna happen. They’re never gonna convert. So when it comes to creating content, when it comes to sharing things online, I like to follow the 80 20 rule, Pareto’s Rule, 80% valuable actionable content, 20% affiliate promotion.

Never start with the affiliate promotion. Hey guys, I got a great tool for you and it’s gonna help you do this. And so here’s the offer and now let me show you how I use it. Let me show you what it can do for you. That’s a hundred percent sale right there versus, Hey everybody, I’ve had this problem for a very long time.

I know many of you have had it too, and here’s what I’ve tried to do to fix it and it never worked. However, I did find one thing finally that seemed to work and look at where I am now. And in this blog post, in this video, in this podcast episode, I’m gonna tell you about this product. I’m gonna show you how exactly I use it, what to look out for if you choose to use it yourself.

And ultimately, I’m gonna help you figure this out because this is a pain for all of us. So I lead it with a story. Valuable, actionable content. Relatable. Always important. A lot of people ask me, Pat, when it comes to giving away your content and information for free, how much of that do you do? I give all of my best stuff away for free.

You should. First of all, information, people couldn’t find any information about anything from anybody, anywhere. So if you’re holding your best stuff back, you’re only making it so obvious for people that there are other people that can help them better. So give away your best tips for free. Also show people how to solve problems without buying anything.

So case in point, back in 2010 when I was sharing information about how to build niche websites, I had built a security guard training website, and you might remember this, it was called the Niche Site Dual. ’cause I was building a website alongside somebody else and we were competing to see who could make their first dollar and who can make the most revenue from it. I ended up winning that because my security guard training website hit number one in Google for the term security guard training in just 73 days, and I had generated tens of thousands of dollars from that website, even though I knew nothing about security guard training, but I knew everything about collating and curating information to then put it on the web to make it easy for people to do anything, and in that case, it was to become a security guard.

Anyway, there came a point in that process of teaching, which again, I taught everything for free. I showed people all the steps, and through those steps, of course, I shared different tools, the hosting company for the website, the tools that I used to help write content and hire assistants for creating content.

And in this case of the example I’m gonna share with you here more specifically, the keyword research tool I used. I used the keyword research tool to discover that security guard training was an underutilized keyword that had a high revenue potential from ads. So that’s what I built my website about because I used this keyword research tool and then I held a webinar and I said, you know what?

I wanna show you how I did all this keyword research. And so come live with me. I’m gonna go live, I think it was like on Ustream or something like that. It was before any of these webinar tools ever existed. And I said, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna show you how to do keyword research and the principles that matter, and you won’t have to pay for anything to do it.

I’m just gonna show you for free. And everybody’s mind was blown. I showed them how to do it for free. I took ’em through a 30 minute process. To dive into Google AdWords, which was a free tool people could get access to, to then discover the keywords, to see the search volume, how then I went into Google with those keywords and found other things that can help me understand whether or not there was a lot of volume related to that search, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

30 minutes people had everything they needed to get the end result. And then I said, you know, this can take a lot of time, especially if you’re going through a lot of keywords. I found a tool that can do everything I just showed you in 10 seconds. So let me show you this tool. It was a tool that no longer exists.

It’s called Long Tail Pro. No, and actually it was Market Samurai at first, and then Long Tail Pro came along, which was better. But I ran this webinar a few times ’cause it was so successful. But. I then shared the tool, and after people saw just exactly how long it took to do it manually, it became so clear for them how valuable this tool was.

I showed people how to solve the problem first without buying anything, and then they said, oh my gosh, now I want that because it’s gonna save me so much time. Right? The product is the accelerator or the upgrade. It worked like crazy. I later coined this phrase to talk about this strategy, and it’s called the free way versus the headache-free way.

People will pay to get rid of a headache, so help them get rid of this headache, and then in return you can get paid commission. Now, of course you could promote your own products too. If those things can, of course, reduce that headache for people, make things more convenient for them. But when it comes to affiliate marketing, the  free way versus the headache-free way. comparison works so well.

So well finally, when it comes to more principles, there’s two other things I wanna quickly talk about. The multiple touchpoint strategy. So you don’t wanna just rely on one piece of content to make. A sale. This is very underwhelming when you just share one link and just kind of hope for the best. You wanna create different kinds of content that promote the same tool in many different kinds of ways.

Most people need seven or more exposures before buying something. So you wanna create a content series, not one-off reviews, and you can cross promote them between platforms as well, which is something we have available now that we didn’t have available before. You can take that same piece of content, you can turn it into different formats.

Audio, video, long form, short form, social media, Facebook, TikTok, Reels, Instagram, Pinterest, all these things can work, but it’s not just taking one piece and repurposing it. It’s again, creating a series. So it might look like, first an introduction to the topic to create awareness, introduction to audience building to create awareness about the different ways to build an audience.

Number two, common mistakes in audience building. Relying on just SEO and writing, and you know, sometimes people need a little bit more to hear your voice, and this is where real connections happen, et cetera. Number three, my experience with podcasting and how I grew my audience and built trust through podcasting.

Amazing. Here’s how to get started with podcasting. Here are the minimum tools that you need to get started. Here’s my recommended microphone, the Samson Q2 U. Here is my recommended software for recording podcasts remotely, Riverside now. How to get started with generating revenue on your podcast? Here’s an email list.

Here’s how to get it started. Here’s using Kit. Here are my 30 day results with starting a podcast. Day one compared to day 30. Here’s how many more subscribers I have. Here’s how much more business I have. Is podcasting worth it? My final recommendation for those of you getting started, so that’s just a made up sequence of pieces of content, each of which could be repurposed and broken down and distributed elsewhere.

But creating a series worked. And when I think back to what worked best, even back in 2010. That Niche Site Dual was a series that I created. The first part was, what the heck even is this? And how do I build a website from scratch? And this is the ultimate goal. Follow along. Again, I’m building my audience.

Number two, how to choose the right topic using keyword research. Boom, insert that. Tool number three, how to build a website around that topic. Boom, insert hosting program and WordPress theme. Number four, how to write content so that you’ll get found on search engines. Number five, here are my 10 day results.

Here’s how much traffic I’ve already gotten. Day 20, here are my results. Again, just creating a reason for people to continue to follow along the sequence or series is the secret sauce.

And then there’s the bonus stack method. That is you can differentiate your offer amongst others if you offer something in addition to the product that you’re recommending. You might have a quick start guide for something that may be a little bit more complicated that you’re promoting. Great. A quick start guide. I want it in order to get it, you gotta go through my link and send me your receipt and I’ll send this quick start guide for you on how to use Descript. Again, I’m just using that as an example.

You can use it as something that enhances that product, makes it even easier to use. Maybe you have some software knowledge, and this software actually works in conjunction with this thing that you’re offering and recommending that is from another company. And this is where a lot of people who are developers have thrived. They’ll create little tools and add-ons that go with other products. For example, different Shopify plugins. Shopify’s the base product that sells things online for people. But there’s a lot of third party companies that have created tools that can then inject itself into Shopify to make it easy for you to do all kinds of things from making your content on your website for Shopify more dynamic to creating an affiliate program right on top of your Shopify account, et cetera, to connect with ShipStation and other tools, right?

If you can create those kinds of things and have those as bonuses, if people go through, for example, your Shopify link or whatever the case may be. Then it could be great tutorials, guides, one-on-one consultation calls for higher end products, right? Don’t do that for everything because people are gonna hit you up all the time.

But if there’s a product that you earn hundreds, if not thousands of dollars commission on, maybe you can offer a bonus call. And that is what pushes people over the edge to get that product. ’cause they’re also getting a little bit of you with it. Be careful with how much you offer yourself though in that kind of regard.

Templates, checklists, worksheets, you know, all those kinds of things work really well. Have a dedicated landing page for this product with those bonuses mentioned in. Mention the bonus in all of your content that involved this product that you’re promoting, and of course, again, make them relevant to the product that you’re promoting itself.

So let’s talk about some tools, different tools that work and systems for success for you, the affiliate marketer. This is sort of the fourth part of this five part program here today. We’re going a little deeper into this. Affiliate marketing has been huge for me. And I love where it’s going. It’s being more honest.

It’s being more proof-based and this is what you have to do. The old ways aren’t working anymore, so some tools, screen recording, you can use something like CapCut, especially if it’s on your phone or just Loom. I use ScreenFlow, whatever you need. Even QuickTime can help you record stuff on your screen.

But that’s a great thing, especially if you’re just, again, showing people and you’re gonna be putting those videos onto YouTube. Your phone is an amazing tool for promoting physical products. You can take slow motion video of the thing that you’re using. You could show people your progress with it. You can actually speak into the camera so you can be relatable as if a person’s in the room with you while you’re using this product, while you’re talking about the product, whatever it might be.

You have most of these tools already. Now if you’re creating graphics and things like that, especially for landing pages and whatnot, using something like Canva can work. I use Canva for YouTube thumbnails, social media graphics, those kinds of things. Now links. Links are key. Obviously you need an affiliate link from these different companies.

If you’re promoting on Amazon, Amazon gives you an affiliate link. If you’re promoting a specific program that an influencer maybe has, they have their own affiliate program. Many of them are different. I promote, I think 50 different things right now from all different kinds of people, products, services, physical, digital.

It might sound like a lot, but they’re all sprinkled in the right places on the website across thousands of things. So it’s not like I’m always promoting 50 things at the same time, although 50 things, in fact, are being available at the same time across the website, and it’s the links that matter. So when you get these long links from these different places, they’re usually gonna be filled with huge character strings and question marks, and equal signs and numbers and letters that make no sense at all.

Those are just essentially affiliate cookies to connect you and anybody who purchases through your link to you and the commissions that you’ll eventually earn. If you promote those long links on a podcast and you say those letters, it’s never gonna work. Same thing with a YouTube video. You want to shorten those links and make them prettier.

Hence, a tool for those of you who are on WordPress called Pretty Links. Pretty Links is a wonderful free WordPress plugin that you can pop in any long string character link and you can basically have whatever other link you want, right? So if you go to, for example, Smart PassiveIncome.com/kit, it will then forward through and then end up on that really long string that is my unique affiliate link or kit. So that every time I purchase a, a purchase happens through that link, I get credited for that and get a commission 30 days or 60 days later, whatever the agreement is. Bitly is another one. If you don’t have WordPress, B-I-T-L-Y for creating short links, it’s not the best. However, you could also create a domain for an affiliate link and have it just forward through. I used to have a tool that I promoted, I think it was like BestPodcastMic.com.

I don’t have that anymore, but I would just say, Hey, if you want the best podcast mic, just go to best podcast mike.com and grab your Samsung Q2 U, and people would go through that and it would just forward through that longer affiliate link that credited me, and it was just so easy to remember. I even remember the domain name now.

I just made the mistake of. Letting that domain inspire, or I think that was the exact domain name or something close to that. So yeah, YouTube Analytics very important as a part of your system, if you, again, are using the golden platform of YouTube, you wanna know what’s working and what’s not. Really focus in on your impressions and click-through rates.

That is an understanding of whether your, your titles and thumbnails are working. You can use the thumbnail split tester to split test variations of different thumbnails to make sure more people are clicking, and if your videos aren’t getting a lot of views, you can continue over time to try to hone in on a thumbnail that works and you can potentially see spikes and growth after that, so it’s not just a one and done kind of thing.

Most important on YouTube, however, is your retention graph. You wanna pay attention in all of your videos, not just your review videos and comparison videos and all those kinds of things. In all of your videos, where are people dropping off and what might you be able to do to stop that from happening, and where are people sticking around and how might you incorporate more of that?

It’s a very simple thing, but when you think about it and you start looking at your graphs a day or two after your video is published, you quickly begin to understand how to hone in on what is working and what is not, and then take action on that. Of course, with email marketing as you build your audience, that’s a quick way to get in front of a lot of people in their inbox to then promote other items.

Kit is the place to go to for sure, and if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit, there you go. You’ll be able to get access to that. You can get access to their creator network as well, and begin to start growing your email list quite shortly too, and you can start building your list on day one.

And as you start to hone in on your affiliate marketing opportunities, really start to hone in on the systems that you use to promote these things. Start to rinse and repeat with new products. Pay attention to what worked and what didn’t, and just do more of what did and less of what didn’t work. Right? You can use spreadsheets to track. Unfortunately, a lot of these affiliate products are across a multiple different platforms, so you’re gonna need.

Some home base or place to be able to keep track of your links and where things exist. ’cause it can definitely get outta hand if you don’t, or you can lose out on affiliate commissions that you’ll have to redeem if they don’t get automatically placed into your bank account. Especially with content repurposing and creation.

Think of the system so that you can get them more refined over time and you can get some of that time back. Systems is the answer for getting your time back and then it’s people. Hiring people, operators, help assistants, virtual assistants, whatever the case may be, to do these things that you now have in a system that are repeatable, and then removing yourself from the process and making this as passive as possible.

The final thing I’ll say here is just a gentle reminder. It’s the fifth thing, but I wanted to repeat it. What’s already been said, make sure that at all times you are genuinely promoting these things because you know that they can help people. As a result and a byproduct of that, that is how you generate revenue.

As I always say, your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience. So just a quick final note there for you to make sure you keep that principle in mind. Because I’ve fallen into traps before where I’ve promoted things that had a very high commission because the dollar signs, right? I had the dollar signs kind of like bursting outta my eyeballs, like in the cartoons.

That is a sign that I was doing it for the wrong reasons and number one, I didn’t see great results with those, and I saw a lot of angry people for promoting things that didn’t really make sense, and I lost trust with certain segments of my audience because of that. And I learned those lessons and I wanted to pass those lessons on to you.

So hopefully these affiliate marketing lessons have been inspirational. Actionable today for you. So make sure to re-listen to this if you need to. Maybe you’ve taken notes, maybe you put this particular podcast episode into Poppy AI, which is another tool that we’ve been more recently promoting as an affiliate, and many people have been enjoying it.

You might remember the episode not too long ago with the founders of  Poppy AI but you can take this podcast episode or the webpage that this podcast episode exists, which is, what episode is this? Episode 888. That’s great. And so. Go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session888. By the way, that’s using a pretty link to make that happen.

 SmartPassiveIncome.com/session888, and you could take that link, pop it into Poppy AI to dissect this episode, to then connect to the audience that you’ve trained your AI on, or what prompts you give it to then create a affiliate marketing plan for you. And by the way, if you wanna check out Poppy, ’cause I use it almost every day now, SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy, and you’ll get a discount code for that purchase if you choose to check it out. Can’t rave about it enough right at this point. So thank you so much for listening in. I appreciate you. This is a little bit longer than usual, but I had a lot to say about affiliate marketing ’cause it is definitely a huge opportunity for all of you.

And if you take these strategies and implement them, this is what’s working today and hopefully it will work for you too. Thank you so much. Hit that subscribe button. We got another what’s working today, episode coming your way very soon. You are not gonna wanna miss out on it. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.