Introduction
Hey everyone, welcome back to another video. In this video, I’ll provide a comprehensive tutorial on how to start affiliate marketing with no existing audience. For those of you who don’t already have a following on any social media platforms, this video is for you. Now, what’s going to make this video super helpful is I’m going to explain things on camera here, but then also on a screen recording on my computer, so you can follow along step by step. So without further ado, let’s get straight into this video. If you are a beginner getting into affiliate marketing, sit back, relax, this is going to be a very helpful video.
Understanding Audience vs. No Audience in Affiliate Marketing
Okay, so now that we are in the computer, let’s first talk about the first concept of an audience versus not having an audience. 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 use.
It’s totally free to partner with those companies. You simply go to their websites and you join their what’s called an affiliate program, and they give you a unique referral link. It’s basically a clickable link that you can share with anyone and put it into your content that you’re posting online. And when anyone comes and sees your content, they click on your referral link, it takes ’em directly to the company’s website, where they can purchase 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.
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?
Introducing the Search Strategy for Affiliate Marketing
What I’m about to show you is what I refer to as the search strategy for affiliate marketing. And 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 YouTube channels 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. 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.
Practical Example: The Fishing Niche
So, for the example of this video, I’m going to pick a kind of random niche, and that’s what we’re going to use to show how all of this works. Now, the niche that I’ll use for this video is fishing, and that’ll allow us to show all of the steps.
Traditional Social Media Approach
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. 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, they have 126,000 followers on Instagram, and they also have a YouTube channel. We’ll open that up just so we can see how many subscribers they have over here, and that’s just about a hundred thousand.
So this is typically how affiliate marketing is going to be done. You have a full audience, you can create any kind of content that you want, and then you can plug in the different products that you use throughout that video with a link in the description.
Now, if you don’t already have a following, how are you supposed to show up in all of these search results for 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. So let me show you what that looks like.
The Power of Google Search Traffic
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. 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. So you’re kind of getting double the traffic just by posting in one place.
How Search Results Work for Affiliate Marketing
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.
No, 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.
Article-Based Affiliate Marketing
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. And I can nearly guarantee you that all of these are going to be affiliate links going to these specific products that they are talking about. Now, this article will continue through here and it will explain each one of these different fishing poles, why it’s good for beginners, who it’s a best fit for, and where you can buy it. However, this is the first example of how to show up in these search results without having a built-up audience on social media platforms.
The AI Competition Problem
Now I have been in affiliate marketing for several years, 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 of seconds by telling an AI tool to write it for you.
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 pole 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.
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. They are getting overwhelmed with people coming in and just creating these AI-written articles and basically flooding Google with them.
The Million-Dollar Video Strategy
So that brings us to the other way that you can use this 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. 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.
YouTube and Google Integration
Since Google and YouTube are owned by the same company, YouTube videos also appear in Google search results. When people search for fishing-related topics, they see both articles and videos. Many prefer watching videos over reading articles. Clicking on these videos redirects them to YouTube.
These videos are essentially video versions of what the articles would say, but recorded on camera. The affiliate links for the mentioned products go in the video description. It’s a simple business model: create videos instead of text articles, post on YouTube, and include affiliate links in the description.
Why You Don’t Need an Existing Following
While some YouTubers in search results have large audiences (like 600,000 subscribers), you don’t need any existing following to start affiliate marketing with this method. Using the search strategy means your traffic comes from people searching for topics your videos cover, not from your built-up audience. Your traffic flows organically from daily Google and YouTube searches.
The Long-Term Value of YouTube Content
YouTube videos stay in search results for years, unlike Instagram or Facebook, where posts become irrelevant after hours or days. The top search result for “best fishing pole for beginners” was posted four years ago, and others were posted one or two years ago. YouTube and Google don’t care about content age as long as it’s good quality.
Why This Strategy is “Right Place, Right Time”
Google is actively fighting AI-generated content flooding its platform. They’re rolling out updates to eliminate low-value AI content that anyone can copy-paste. However, real people creating real videos sharing genuine experiences represent high-value, user-generated content that Google and YouTube want on their platforms.
This includes faceless videos, too. You don’t need to be on camera – you can film products and explain with your voice. This still counts as user-generated content that both platforms crave.
Conclusion
I’m putting my money where my mouth is by spending my time growing niche affiliate YouTube channels using this strategy. This represents a real opportunity you can start putting time and effort into as well.
