Introduction: Starting Affiliate Marketing Without a Following
Hey everyone, I’m going to be giving you a full tutorial on how to start affiliate marketing with no audience. So for those of you who do not already have a following built up on any social media platforms, this is going to be the article for you. Now, what’s going to make this article super helpful is that I’m going to explain things here.
Understanding the Basics of Affiliate Marketing
So without further ado, let’s get straight into this article. If you are a beginner getting into affiliate marketing, sit back, relax, this is going to be a very helpful article. Okay, so, let’s first talk about the first concept of an audience versus not having an audience.
The Concept of Affiliate Marketing
So when most people talk about how to do affiliate marketing, which if you don’t know what affiliate marketing is, the very simplified version of it is you as a creator of creating some kind of content on the internet, you partner with different companies that sell different products that you know and you use. It’s totally free to partner with those companies. You simply go to their websites and you join their what’s called affiliate program, and they give you a unique referral link. It’s basically a clickable link that you can go share with anyone and basically put it into your content that you’re posting online.
How Affiliate Marketing Works
When anyone comes and sees your content, they click on your referral link, it takes them directly to the company’s website where they can make a purchase of any of the products you were talking about. And if they do make a purchase, you get paid a commission for sending that buyer to the company.
The Challenge: Starting Without an Audience
Now, traditionally, the way that affiliate marketing is done and the way that most people teach it, is by you already having an audience or a following. However, for 99% of people out there who are getting into affiliate marketing, they don’t already have an audience or a following built up. So what are you supposed to do? What I’m about to show you is what I refer to as the search strategy for affiliate marketing.
Introducing the Search Strategy
Before I get into this, let me first just preface this by saying, this is the strategy for affiliate marketing that I personally do. I have multiple other websites that are specific to different niches that I create affiliate content on. This is something that most people do not know about my business, but this is where I’m spending a lot of time creating content and posting it online to do affiliate marketing.
Using a Niche Example: Fishing
Now, I’ll show you what all of that looks like, but first I wanna walk you through the whole sequence here just so all this comes together nicely for you. So for the example of this video, I’m going to pick kind of a random niche, and that’s what we’re going to use to show how all of this works.
Finding Opportunities on Social Media
Now, the niche that I’ll use for this video is fishing, and that’ll allow us to show all of the steps. So first things first, to show what this typically looks like. If you went over to Instagram, just a popular social media platform and you typed in fishing, you’re going to see all of these posts that have a great opportunity to do affiliate marketing.
Challenges with Established Creators
So if you click on any of these posts, you’re going to see that these creators have a following already. That’s just how they’re ranking on Instagram, and that’s why they have an audience waiting for them. That’s how they can easily do affiliate marketing. So looking at this creator.
The Search Strategy for Success
Now, if you don’t already have a following, how are you supposed to show up in all of these search results of fishing? Just because there are so many other big creators that are just going to overpower your content. Well, that’s where this search strategy comes in.
Leveraging Google for Affiliate Marketing
So over on Google, what so many people don’t realize is that there’s something like 100,000 searches going through Google every single second. So just in the few seconds it took me to explain that, there’s been almost a million searches on Google To put that into context, that is so much more organic traffic than is flowing on Instagram or on Facebook.
Google and YouTube Integration
Now, the reason that this is so helpful for affiliate marketing is that you do not need a following to create content that ranks on Google. Now, a very important side note that we will get into in a second here is that Google and YouTube are both owned by the same company. And again, what a lot of people don’t realize is that what you post on YouTube will also show up on Google.
Optimizing for Search Results
So to show how all of this starts to come together for this fishing example, there are people coming in here every day searching for fishing products. So just a baseline search here, best fishing poll for beginners. We’ll give that a search and just see what comes up.
Analyzing Search Results
Now up top here, you’re going to have your sponsored kind of products. This is what we are going to disregard. However, what shows up in these results here is what we wanna pay attention to. So this very first result here is an article. So if we click this, it’s by a website called Outdoor Life. This is going to be an article explaining what the top fishing pole recommendations are for beginners based on this website’s opinion.
The Role of AI Tools in Content Creation
Now I have been in affiliate marketing for several years now, so I can actually give you some kind of insider information on this from my own data. I have several of these affiliate marketing niche websites, not in fishing, but I have them in other niches. And overall I can say that the competition has kind of skyrocketed over the last year as artificial intelligence tools have kind of come to the forefront and allow you to write these massive articles for affiliate marketing in just a couple seconds by telling an AI tool to write it for you.
Using AI Tools Like ChatGPT
So to show you what that looks like, one of the free AI tools is called ChatGPT. And basically anyone can use this totally for free. Just say, “Write me a blog post about the best fishing poll for beginners.” You hit enter and literally you just wait and watch this, write the entire blog post for you, and then all you have to do is sub in affiliate links or different products.
Adapting to Increased Competition
You can even tell this to mention three different fishing poles and have links to those poles. This tool just makes it way too easy to create these blog style articles. So the competition on this specific way of doing the search strategy has just grown exponentially and my personal websites have taken a decline.
Exploring an Effective Search Strategy
So that brings us into the other way that you can use these search strategy. This is the strategy that I am personally doing myself. I have been doing this one for just about five years now, kind of tinkering with it in the beginning, getting more into it, and in the last three years I’ve made about a million dollars in profit total.
The Power of YouTube and Google Integration
So with that being said, the strategy that I’m about to show you is hands down the right place at the right time. When you talk to people who have made a lot of money in a short amount of time, they will tell you that they were at the right place at the right time. So with that being said, I’m excited to show you what this strategy is.
Creating Video Content for Better Results
So as I was mentioning before, both Google and YouTube are owned by the same company. So whatever is posted on YouTube will also show up on Google. So for those people who came in here and they were searching for something related to fishing, you’re going to have the articles that show up here. But then as you keep scrolling, you’re going to have videos show up.
Benefits of Video Content
These are videos that are pulled directly from YouTube. So for all the people that are coming to Google and they would rather watch a video instead of reading an article which is becoming more and more, you click in on any of these videos and it automatically redirects you directly to YouTube. Now, all this video is is a video version of what that article would’ve said.
Creating Engaging and Evergreen Content
It’s just taking the extra step to record it on video. And then when you scroll down here, you’re going to find all of the affiliate links for the products that are mentioned in that video. This is such a simple business model, and all you’re basically doing is instead of writing text articles, you’re creating a video and posting it on YouTube and you’re putting your affiliate links to whatever products you talked about down in the description of the video.
Why You Don’t Need a Large Audience
Now, a couple really important things to note here is that this YouTuber specifically does have a large audience, almost 600,000 subscribers. However, if you are getting into affiliate marketing, when you are creating these videos for whatever niche you are going into, you do not need to have any existing following.
The Advantages of Long-Term Video Visibility
Since you are using the search strategy, showing up in search results on Google and showing up in search results on YouTube, your traffic is simply going to come from people searching for those topics that your videos are created on. They’re not coming from your actual built up audience, like the traditional way of doing affiliate marketing. That is the key thing to understand here is that your traffic flow is organically going to come from people regularly coming in every day and searching for things on Google and on YouTube. Now, speaking of that, that’s actually the really cool part to this as well. So I just showed you how people are going to organically find this video from Google, but the same thing happens on YouTube. So if you search that same best fishing poll for beginners, you’re going to find the videos in these search results on YouTube. And again, your videos will show up here even if you don’t have a following. And what I love about YouTube is that your videos stay in the search results for years to come. It’s not like Instagram or Facebook where you post something and then after a couple hours or a couple days, it’s pretty much irrelevant because it’s all the way down in the feed. People aren’t finding it organically. This is totally different. So this number one search result for best fishing pole for beginners was four years ago when that was posted. The next video was posted one year ago, two years ago. YouTube and Google don’t mind how old the content is as long as it is good content. So this is where this entire strategy comes full circle, and what I’m about to explain hopefully makes this whole thing click for you. And then you’re going to see in your mind why this is the right place at the right time. So what I just showed you is that people are using artificial intelligence to just create text-based articles and flooding that onto Google is really hurting Google. Google has made this known publicly, and you can see it with all the updates they’re rolling out on their search results that they are trying to get rid of all of the artificial intelligence created content. They do not want this fluff kind of content that anyone can come in and create and just copy and paste onto their website. They don’t want that on their platform because it’s not considered high value or value added content. However, when you come over and look at a video, that is high value, value-added content. A real person is creating a real video, sharing their real experience with something. This is the type of user generated content that Google and YouTube are looking for. They want that on their platform instead of the artificial intelligence generated content. Now, this goes for faceless videos as well. So you don’t actually have to be on camera like this guy is. You can have your camera facing forward and showing different products and how you use different products, and just have your voice explaining what’s going on in that video. That is still considered user-generated content, and that is what both Google and YouTube are craving right now. Again, I am putting my money where my mouth is.
