Fastest Road to the First Sale in Affiliate Marketing (2024)

Let me show you a shortcut to your first sales in affiliate marketing.

Anyone can do this strategy without a background in affiliate marketing. It’s a great way to get your feet wet while seeing the results quicker!

It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, though. You will still need to work hard. But it can be 2–3 times quicker than traditional methods you see on the internet.

Let’s dive right into it!

Affiliate marketing means placing affiliate links on your blog posts, videos, or Instagram posts.

For example, here’s a blog post that lists the best AI-powered music creators:

The first tool on the list has a link that is a special affiliate link. If someone clicks an affiliate link and buys something, you will earn a reward.

Depending on the products, these can be one-time rewards or even recurring rewards (on monthly subscriptions.)

In some product categories, a reward might be 1–5% of the price of the product.

For instance, this could mean earning $1 every time someone buys a $20 t-shirt from you.

But for example in software, you might earn 30% of a monthly subscription fee for a referred customer. So if you bring in someone who pays $10/mo, you will earn $3/mo as long as the person keeps on using the product.

If it still feels vague, make sure to read this complete post about the topic.

Affiliate marketing is easy to understand. Just write and publish a piece of content with links. It can be a how-to guide or a review post.

Especially now that there’s AI… Anybody can do it, right? Just start a website and publish blog posts on it.

Not so fast! There are two main issues that your affiliate content needs to overcome.

1. Targeting
2. Competition

Let’s break these down before I show you how to overcome them.

#1 Targeting

The reality is that a very tiny fraction of topics make for a good piece of affiliate content.

To build a solid affiliate strategy, your content should answer questions people might have right before buying. It should be the missing link for someone looking for information with credit cards in their hands.

For example, a good affiliate post could be a post that reviews a pair of shoes and convinces someone to purchase them. Then, if your reader purchases through your link, you will earn a reward.

For example, your affiliate post could be something like “Nike Air Force 1 Review”.

On the other hand, a bad topic is something like “How to tie shoelaces”.

Someone searching for that is not interested in buying. Instead, they want to quickly solve a problem and move on.

I’ll give you another good one.

For example, you could make a blog post (or video) that lists the 10 best hotels in Stockholm.

Then you can partner with a company like Booking.com and turn those hotels into affiliate links.

Then, if someone views your content, clicks one of the hotels, and makes a reservation, you’ll be rewarded.

It’s this simple.

But there’s another problem! One that makes 99.9% of affiliate content fail… That’s of course the competition.

#2 Competition

If there’s a way to earn even $100/mo with affiliate content, there will be a boatload of competitors with more experience.

Usually, you will end up competing against big companies with huge teams of experienced writers. For example, there are thousands of pages showcasing the best hotels in Stockholm.

These publishers are usually high authorities in the space that have years of experience and teams of hundreds.

In other words, the 10 best hotels in Stockholm is a good try. But it won’t get any reads—no matter how good content you can produce.

In fact, on Google, a new site has no chance to rank on top of the search results—no matter how good the content is.

And on YouTube, it requires years of video-making skills to pull off.

So we need to find a way to stand out with ease and with beginner-level content. This is where we need to get clever.

Here’s the recipe for successful affiliate marketing:

Write affiliate review posts about trendy products (or product groups) with affiliate programs and low competition.

Let me show you how to do that. Step by step!

1. Starting on an Established Platform

To move fast, instead of starting a WordPress website, sign up to Medium.com and start writing affiliate blog posts there.

Also, if you’re into making videos, you can use this same method for creating YouTube videos about your topic.

These two platforms are awesome because they’re easy to use. There’s no hassle in setting up a website.

Just sign up and start creating!

Also, YouTube and Medium.com tend to rank on Google search results—which is going to be your main traffic source.

This would be way harder on a brand-new website that Google doesn’t trust.

One more thing: You don’t need followers or subscribers to do this! This is because you’re targeting Google Search traffic, which works differently.

Your first video or blog post could get thousands of views even on a channel without followers—assuming your topic is chosen wisely. I’ll show you how to do that in just a bit.

But first I will show you the types of content you should create.

2. The Affiliate Post Recipe

To make money with affiliate marketing, you need to be a mediator between buyers and sellers. In other words, you have to find people looking for specific products and guide them to the right doorsteps.

Thus, you need to become good at identifying topics worth writing about.

Most topics have a ton of competition, though. If you randomly write about something, there’s a 99.9% chance for it to not get noticed because of the competition.

This is where you need to do some topic validation.

3. The Topic Validation Process

Before you write an affiliate post, your product review topic should:

1. Be trendy
2. Have low competition
3. Have an affiliate program
4. Be easy to access for you

This means there are very few topics that are worth writing about.

But here’s a little shortcut.

If your topic is something trendy that has just popped up, there’s not much competition either because people haven’t realized the opportunity yet.

This means that Google and YouTube don’t have a lot of content to choose from. This, in turn, means that it’s easier to stand out even without years of content creation experience.

Imagine if you’re the first one to cover a topic. In that case, there’s no other option for Google but to recommend your post. This is the best and most beginner-friendly affiliate strategy out there.

So you need to find a product that people have just started to talk about. You can use Google Trends to find these products for free.

Tip: I recommend finding products in the Tech niche. Especially the AI products are becoming massive, and every week new popular tools pop up.

For example, if you want to see what AI-related topics have emerged in the past 90 days:

1. Open up Trends.
2. Type in “AI”.
3. Hit “Search”.
4. Choose the “Worldwide” audience.
5. Choose the “Past 90 Days” as the time range.
6. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the related results.
7. These are the rising topics.

Also, you can try a tool like Exploding Topics. This makes it a bit easier than Google Trends.

Try to find products that have a steeply rising curve that has had action for less than 6 months. These are usually topics that have still relatively low competition.

If the topic is something that has been talked about for years, then the competition has already caught up and it’s saturated.

For example, here’s a review I wrote today.

I found this AI product called Vidnoz AI from Google Trends today. The Trends curve shows that the product started to gain momentum just 3–6 months ago.

This means it does not have that many competing pages or videos.

Now, only 9 hours after publishing the review (that only took 2 hours to write), it ranks on Google in the top 5:

This is unheard of if you have a new site or a competitive topic.

Once you’ve found some good products worth reviewing, there’s one more thing. To avoid not working for free, make sure your product has an affiliate program. Most products don’t have one!

So Google for your product followed by “affiliate program”. You can also check the product’s website and look for “affiliates”, “partners”, or “referral program”, etc.

For example, here’s how I found the affiliate program for my product:

Then just join those programs. Some accept you automatically. Some want you to link to your Medium profile or YouTube channel.

Then, it’s time to try those products.

For example, in my review, I’ve extensively tested the software to give an authentic and demonstrative review.

By the way, testing the products is the only way to make it stand out. If you don’t try the products, Google and YouTube will discourage your content.

I highly recommend the Tech niche for this reason. There’s a lot of software with free trials that are super easy to access.

Of course, you can do something else than just tech, but you still need to test the products. It’s just so much easier with software. You can write a thorough review in just a couple of hours!

Tip: Once you’ve reviewed a bunch of products, write a roundup post where you put those products in the order from your favorite to least favorite. For example: “Top 5 AI Music Generators”.

4. Use a Review Template!

Always put together the most comprehensive review about your product on the internet. Otherwise, it won’t rank on Google or perform on YouTube.

In other words, your content should include more useful information about your product than any other resource.

The easiest way to do this is by using a template for your content. Instead of writing 2,000 words in one go, you can split it into 5–10 smaller “sub posts”.

Here’s the template I always use for my affiliate review posts:

• Introduction. Write a couple of sentences that briefly introduce the product.
• Key Features. List 5–10 highlight features or properties of your product.
• My Experience. This is where the magic happens. Write a detailed review of the product based on your experiences. Add a lot of images and use cases. If this part is 1,000+ words in length, that’s awesome!
• Pros. List the best parts about the product you found while testing it. This can be a short list of 5–10 items.
• Cons. List the worst parts about the product you found while testing it. This can be a short list of 3–5 items.
• Pricing. List the pricing of the product. You can promote coupon codes or special offers here.
• Alternatives. If applicable, list some alternatives to this product.
• Bottomline. Tie it all together in 5–10 sentences. Tell the reader why you would/would not recommend the product.

Remember that this is not an exact science. There’s no specific formula that would rank better or worse on Google.

The most important thing is to be authentic and help your audience. That’s what YouTube and Google want to see from your content.

I usually think of these reviews as a long and nicely formatted message I’ve left to my friend about a product.

The goal is to be as useful and helpful as possible. You want to show your friend (i.e. your reader) how you’ve used the product to convince them to buy it too!

Traditionally, if you started affiliate marketing from scratch on a new website, it could easily take months before Google even finds your site. Then it would take some more months before you have enough traffic to start making sales.

You typically need 100–1,000 reads to your review before someone buys and you earn a reward.

This can easily take 6–12 months on a new site.

But this is the hassle you don’t need to worry about if you start affiliate marketing on YouTube or Medium. Google trusts those platforms and usually shows reviews high in the search results relatively quickly.

But if you’re one of the first people to the party, then you have a very good chance to rank and get a nice traffic boost. The fastest sale I’ve made was in just a week after writing a review.

Be prepared to write about 10–20 posts to begin with. And be ready to spend 5–10 hours per post.

If you publish 1–2 posts per week, you might see your first sales in just a month or two. This is way faster than traditional affiliate marketing strategies. Most of the other strategies take months or even years to work.

I love this strategy because it’s beginner-friendly and easy compared to starting a website from scratch. It’s motivating to see the first sales come in faster instead of having to work for years with no results.

But this strategy is not the best one in the long run!

At the end of the day, you should start your own business website and publish the affiliate posts there.

This is because you want to have full control over your content. Also, this way nobody else can use your platform to steal your spot.

Also, the best bet is to not just target those low-competition topics because those are usually short-lived.

• Once the competition catches up, you will start losing ground.
• Also, nobody knows how long a trend will last.

For example, an AI tool called WordAI had a lot of hype for just a couple of months and then it died down.

If you choose an evergreen (but more competitive topic), you might see more “passive income” rather than quick but short-lived revenue.

For example, look at the consistency with which people search for PhotoShop reviews:

This has been going on for years and years. So if you had a well-performing post about this topic, you’d get passive income and traffic for a long time!

But if you wrote a post about WordAI, it would only get traffic (and income) for a couple of weeks.

So the best long-term strategy for affiliate marketing is as follows:

1. Start a WordPress site.
2. Choose a niche.
3. Cover the niche with high-quality content (both affiliate and info content).
4. Monetize with ads, affiliates, and info products.
5. Invest back into your business.

I teach this strategy on my free course, BTW!

By having your site built from scratch, only the sky is the limit. You can hire people and scale it up to a full-blown online marketing business or agency.

On Medium or YouTube, you cannot sell your channel. But if you have your website, you can do whatever you want with it.

But I still think that the strategy I taught today is the best one to get started with. If you find success and have a fun time with it, then it’s time to club up to running your site and doing the longer grind (with more scalable results.)

Thanks for reading!

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