I’m not talking about the compelling copy that gets you to click. I’m talking about the actual structure of the email – the bones, the anatomy of an email. 

People often think that emails are just blocks of text that happen to feature images, but I’m here to tell you that there’s WAY more to them than just that!

Emails are made up of multiple components, each working together to create one successful campaign. 

These components are located within three “stages” of a sent email:

1. Inbox: Helps a reader determine if they want to open the email
2. Body: Communicates the main message and hopes to drive the reader to act
3. Footer: Contains important legal compliance and cross-channel promotion

Each one serves to captivate, inform, and inspire the reader to take action. 

Understanding how these components work will determine whether or not your email program will see results. Let’s break them down!

The 17 Parts of an Email

Here is the basic structure that most marketing emails fall into:

While the components you see above form the basic “template” of a marketing email, you might not include all of them in every email you write.

That’s because the structure of an email will vary wildly depending on the purpose behind that email: what message you want to send and what goal you want to achieve. 

A newsletter may rely heavily on images and body copy to showcase different stories, while a welcome email might instead focus more on a main headline and CTA to convey a welcome message. 

If you’re writing a marketing email, you could use plain text and let your words speak for you, or you could let your images do most of the talking. 

Splitting your email into columns might help it read better, but sometimes it’s better to keep everything in a line.

Emails are highly customizable depending on what you want to do with them, but with that being said, most emails will have the majority of the sections shown off in the graphic above.

Let’s get into them.

Email Inbox

Before your recipient opens your email, they’ll be exposed to certain elements in their inbox. These elements are the main factors determining whether your email gets opened or read.

1) Sender Identification

When you receive an email, the first thing that will likely catch your eye is a little circle of color with an initial inside. This is a Sender Icon, a visual representation that helps a subscriber quickly identify the sender of an email. 

While these typically look like off-brand M&Ms, a new email standard called BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) now allows brands to display a logo inside the icon. 

Brands that adopt BIMI will see their logo showing up alongside their email message in many different inbox providers, like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and AOL. Unfortunately, Outlook and Office 365 have yet to adopt BIMI, so your emails will still get the M&M treatment. 

BIMI emails not only improve engagement metrics by helping your message stand out in a sea of other messages, but they also help build trust with your audience. BIMI has multiple compliance checks in place to ensure that you are who you say you are, and audiences really appreciate that.

BIMI takes quite a bit to set up, but it’s not the only identifying feature that will be shown to your subscribers. All emails come with both a “From Name” and a sender email address that will also help your viewers recognize who the email is coming from. 

Like a sender icon, a “from name” plays a huge role in building trust, familiarity, and humanizing your email. Yours should allow your audience to immediately recognize who the email is coming from. You can do that by using:

• Your personal name: Lauren Britton
• The name of your brand or company: ClickBank
• The name of your department or role at your company: Marketing Team
• The name of the product or service that the recipient has subscribed to: Spark Education
• A combination of two of the above: Lauren at ClickBank

Whatever you choose needs to match your identity. If you are an affiliate promoting a pet product, you can use your name, the title of your affiliate business, or the product’s name as your “from name.” You cannot claim to be PetSmart just to get a click. 

When you choose an identity, stick to it. If you’re consistently swapping names or icons, the mailbox providers will flag you as potential spam.

2) Subject Line

After looking at who sent the email in the first place, a subscriber will move on to reading the subject line. Subject lines are bold sentences that appear directly next to or under the “from name” and act as the headline for the entire email. 

At around only 4-7 words, subject lines may be short, but they pack a powerful punch. They’re actually the main determining factor in whether an email will get opened.

That’s because subject lines catch subscribers’ attention, tell them what they should expect from the message, and encourage them to learn more by opening the email. If a subject line doesn’t pique a reader’s interest, they’ll just scroll away or delete the message. You’ve really got to capture their attention if you want to earn their click. 

A subject line should always be true to the email, accurate, informative, and inviting. It should also avoid spammy, scammy, and clickbait tactics. 

Try to avoid using words or phrases that can trigger spam filters, like:

• Purchase
• Free
• NEVER
• Cures
• Reverses
• Guaranteed 
• Buy here
• Double your income
• As seen on
• Moneymoneymoney
• Lowest price ever!
• No investment needed
• Join millions

Instead, try to use words or phrases like:

• Invitation
• You 
• [The recipient’s name]
• News
• [Month]
• [Year]
• Event
• Quick question about
• Did you find what you were looking for?
• Ready to help
• Tips for [pain point]
• Here’s what I promised you

3) Preview Text

Just below the subject line will be another, non-bolded, line of text. That’s called preview text, which helps add more context to the subject line. Its main goal is to function as a teaser of sorts for the email itself – building a reader’s curiosity and enticing them to open the email.

Preview text is quite odd, unlike every other part of an email. That’s because you can choose whether or not you’d like to customize your preview text. 

By default, preview text will be the first two lines of your email. However, most email service providers allow you to choose precisely what you want to say in your preview text.

This allows you to give additional information, highlight key benefits, or reinforce an upcoming CTA to help increase your chances of your recipients engaging with your message!

Email Body

If the components in the inbox portion of your email do their job, your recipient will open your email! That’s where they’ll be introduced to the next portion of the email: the body.

An email’s body contains the main meat of your message, communicated using a mix of copy and images (more on those later). Email body content is meant to provide value to the reader and follow through on exactly what the subject line promised. The body should be kept concise, engaging, and aligned with your reader’s expectations.

The body of an email can be divided into two subsections: above the fold and below the fold.

Above the Fold

This part of the email body gets its name from a popular strategy in the newspaper industry. Because of their size, newspapers are typically folded in half and placed on a display stand. Newspaper companies want to capture people’s attention as they walk by, so they place the most important or eye-catching information at the very top of the page.

This can be applied to email marketing as well. Depending on the size of your reader’s screen, some, if not most, of your email will end up getting cut off. You want to stop your reader in their tracks to ensure they read your email, so you should follow the same guidelines as a newspaper. 

Put your most important and eye-catching information up at the top using the following elements:

4) Logo

Your logo will sit at the very top of your email, ready to help your viewers recognize your brand. I like to say that a logo should be Goldilocks-sized—not too small, not too big, but just right so that it’s visible but doesn’t take over the entire screen. 

While the logo helps improve brand recall in the email itself, it also helps make the customer journey feel more seamless. If your reader clicks a link in your email and sees your logo on the landing page they were taken to, they know that they’re in the right place and that you are who you said you were.

5) Headline / Email Headers

Located directly underneath that logo in big, bold letters is your headline. Its job is to state the main message or point of your email, as well as to reiterate why the reader opened the email in the first place. To do that, your headline may actually be rephrased or extended from the subject line of your email.

Let’s say that my subject line reads “Profit = The Right Product.” My reader will automatically assume that I’ll be teaching them how the two correlate and what they need to do to pick the right product within my email. I’ve implied that unless they pick the right product, they won’t be able to profit as affiliates.

My headline restates the information from my subject line, “The Product You Promote Helps Determine What You’ll Make as an Affiliate.” This not only corroborates the information they got from my subject line but also segways into a solution to the problem I originally implied. 

Essentially, your headline should reiterate why your reader opened the email, provide additional information that further piques their interest, and then compel them to keep reading to learn more.

Main CTA (Call to Action)

You write emails because you want people to do something. Whether that’s reading a blog, watching a video, or visiting a sales page, your CTA gives your reader a clear pathway to complete that desired action, instead of just hoping they end up searching the internet to do what you want. 

If you’re an affiliate, the CTAs in your email are where you’ll end up placing your hoplink or affiliate link. This will help you track how well each email that you send performs, as well as get credit for any sales made from your email.

You’ll likely have multiple CTA buttons, images, or hyperlinks within your email, with the most important being your main CTA. This should show up “above the fold” so people can be directed to what you want them to do without the need to scroll. 

This main CTA should tie directly into your headline and can act like an “answer” to the question that may present itself within the reader’s mind. If we use the example above, my reader will probably ask themselves, “How do I find a product that will allow me to make money as an affiliate?” A CTA like “Find Your Winning Product Here” answers that question by giving them an actionable step to complete. 

CTAs should ALWAYS contain some actionable instruction for the reader, but we’ll get into that later.

6) Hero Image

Sometimes, words alone cannot convey exactly what you want to say. In that case, your headline may be accompanied by a hero image. Serving the same purpose as the headline, a hero image is meant to draw people’s eyes and help communicate the email’s core message. 

Hero images add visual excitement to an email and can draw the eye better than just a headline alone. But that’s not to say that hero images must be in every email you make. 

Keep in mind that sometimes, the headline will perform just fine by itself, and you won’t need that additional image. You might also be writing a plain-text email, as is the case with many affiliate emails, and won’t need to use images practically at all.

7) Affiliate Email Exceptions

Now, all of the parts of an email we just went over can be found in some way, shape, or form in almost every email style out there. But if you’re looking at an affiliate email, it might seem a bit… weird.

On a first look, affiliate emails might not seem to follow any of those “above the fold” guidelines that we just went over. Forget headlines, main CTAs, and hero images; affiliate emails tend to jump directly into the body copy after a personalized hello. 

That’s because affiliate emails tend to be what’s called a “Plain Text” style of email, characterised by no flashy design work, little to no images, and the use of embedded hyperlinks instead of buttons. They look like they were sent from the average person’s inbox, rather than a professional Email Service Provider’s platform. 

While plain text emails lack those main parts of an email “above the fold,” that doesn’t mean the purpose behind them is lost. There might not be a headline, but that email’s most important information will surely live right at the top. The CTA’s might not stand out without a button backdrop, but hyperlinks seamlessly blend into the text, answering questions immediately once people ask.

The concepts are all still there, even if the visuals aren’t. So, whether you’re creating an affiliate email or just wanting to try something new, be sure to follow the “above the fold” principles.

Main Body/Below the Fold

A reader may have to scroll to this part of the email, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important than what’s “above the fold.” This is where you get to explain things, drive your message home, and really showcase what makes your email worth the read. 

Think about it like this. Everything “above the fold” is just an introduction to what you’ll write in your email’s main body. If it does its job, people will want to read your email fully. So take some time and make the body of your email shine.

8) Email Body Copy

This is a fancy term for the bulk of the writing you’ll find within an email. The amount and type of body copy you’ll use heavily depends on what you’re writing and the message you’re trying to show off. 

Promoting a sale might only require a few words, instead relying on images and bolded headlines to showcase the product and sales details. 

Newsletter emails will have multiple sections containing whole paragraphs of copy to fully convey their message. 

Plain text or affiliate emails will also have loads of copy, but may be broken down into short sentences or bullet points to keep a reader’s visual interest. 

It is a good rule of thumb to avoid being too wordy when writing your copy. People hate reading large blocks of text, and will often exit an email if they’re greeted with multiple paragraphs. That’s not to say avoid writing lots of words altogether; you just need to reconsider how you write those words.

• Have each “paragraph” be only 1-2 sentences long
• Use bullets instead of commas
• Write in clear, conversational language
• Avoid fluff by addressing the reader’s real pain points
• Make use of color and bolding to emphasize certain information
• Demonstrate the value of the email by sharing insights, tips, case studies, or stories
• Writing informative, but enjoyable copy

Remember to use only as much copy as you need to fully get your message across. No rule says you must have it, so use as much (or as little) as your email needs.

9) Images

An image is worth a thousand words; nowhere does that hold more true than in email marketing. Showcasing everything from best-selling products and top-notch deals to thumbnails of your latest content or visual representations of data, images have tons of jobs in the email world. 

We already covered the purpose of hero images, but regular images can also:

• Add visual excitement to an email
• Act as CTAs
• Allow you to cut out words or break up blocks of text
• Draw people’s eyes to bits of information
• Keep people engaged in reading
• Help you clearly explain complex concepts involving time or numbers
• Give your readers a visual break

Copy and images are powerful tools in email marketers’ arsenals to get their point across. If used properly, they can truly be the difference between a visit to your landing page and an unsubscribe. 

Don’t use too many images, and don’t use too much copy. You need to strike a balance between information and aesthetics for every email you write. Be sure to keep that in mind.

10) General CTAs

In the main CTA section, we mentioned that you’d likely have multiple CTAs within one email, and these are those CTAs. 

Like the main CTA, every single CTA within an email gives a reader something to do. You want to be as clear, compelling, and actionable as possible when writing a CTA so your audience isn’t left guessing at what they need to do next. You can theoretically have as many CTAs as you’d like within an email, as long as the asks within them are the same. 

Your CTA needs to fall within the same “theme” as the subject line, email headline, and landing page that you’ll be sending the reader to. It should feel like one part of a whole, which helps contribute to creating a natural “path” for the reader to follow.

Let’s say you’ve written an email announcing that a product you promote is currently on sale. You’ve got four CTAs in the email, each asking something different:

• A headline that reads “Buy this product 50% Off”
• An image showing off your blog
• A hyperlink to check out a completely different product
• A button advertising your latest YouTube video

Your audience is faced with four completely different tasks that you’re asking them to choose from. That can only lead to confusion, decision paralysis, or a complete exit from the email.

Now, let’s take that same hypothetical email and make those four CTAs all ask the same thing:

• A hyperlinked headline that says “Get 50% Off”
• An image showcasing the product
• A hyperlink on the words “get more info here!”
• A button that says “Shop the sale”

This new email uses buttons, images, and hyperlinks to encourage the reader to check out the sale. Every CTA drives home one message, and all four of them only ask the reader to do one thing. There is no confusion, no decision paralysis, just a clear, actionable task to consider.

Try using these actionable words in your CTAs:

• Click 
• Subscribe
• ____ Here
• Sign Up
• Learn More
• Buy Now
• Download 
• Contact Us
• Watch
• Save my spot
• Book now

The general rule of “one ask per email” holds true for almost every type of email, with the most notable exception being Newsletter emails. Newsletters are meant to showcase multiple things, so they need multiple CTAs leading to multiple places. 

If you want to avoid decision paralysis when writing a newsletter, clearly divide your emails into sections using dividers, color blocks, or other formatting. Each story, blog, video, or podcast should be in its own section.

11) Closing / Email Signature

A closing is simply the send-off to your email that sits right under your CTA and right above your footer. It’s typically a short farewell message followed by either your name or the name of your business. You can also include your title, personal social media links, contact details, and a headshot or logo in your closing if you’d like.

You can change how you write a closing message based on how you define your brand identity. If you want to convey a more professional tone, we suggest using something like:

• To your success
• Best regards
• Sincerely

If your brand identity is more approachable, you can use a more casual goodbye like:

• Cheers
• Talk to you soon
• See you there

These goodbyes can help humanize your brand and show that the email your recipient just read came from an actual person. 

Closings aren’t necessary in every email, but they help tie the whole thing together if you’re writing plain text or an affiliate email.

12) Postscript

If you have more information you’d like to tell your reader that couldn’t fit into the main email, you can put it in the postscript! It’s a brief note at the very end of an email, sitting below the closing email signature.

Postscripts (P.S.) serve to:

• Include extra information
• Add a personal touch
• Emphasise an offer 
• Act as another CTA
• Serve as a reminder
• Function as a preview for a future email

Email Footer

You’ve had your fun designing and writing the first part of the email, but the footer is where you need to put your creativity to rest. This is the end of the email, and it’s chock full of important information that needs to be clearly laid out. 

I’m talking about information that not only adds credibility to your email but also protects you from potential legal issues. 

13) Social Media Links

Have you heard the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket?” That holds true for marketing platforms as well!

If you’re an email marketer, don’t rely solely on email to complete the job. Try branching out to social media as well!

Your social media links will likely be the first thing in your footer. These links create a pathway between your marketing channels, allowing subscribers to check out and subscribe to you on other platforms. As an added benefit, people who click these links will see more of your marketing messaging.

14) Physical Address

If you’re sending emails to recipients in the United States, you must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. Part of this act states that you must include a physical address within your email footer, but the following are also acceptable:

• PO box
• A virtual mailbox service
• UPS Store 
• A commercial mail receiving service
• Main address supplied by a third-party business provider (they must be willing to receive your mail)

If you choose to use an alternative address from this list, first make sure that you can receive mail there and that the location meets CAN-SPAM Act requirements. Other countries have similar laws and acts, so please research their compliance requirements as well.

Having your address in your email footer helps to demonstrate that you are a legitimate business to both the email recipient and the email giants (Google, Apple, Yahoo). Some email inbox services have content filters that will block any emails that do not contain an address, so it’s in your best interest to get this set up.

15) One-Click Unsubscribe

A one-click unsubscribe is precisely what it sounds like: a simple button that lets your subscribers exit your list if they ever change their mind about wanting your emails. 

This might sound scary at first. Why would you ever want to shrink an email list that you spent so long building? But think about it for a moment. If someone who doesn’t want to get your emails receives one, will they open it? Will they read it and follow through on your CTAs? 

No! They’re going to delete, ignore, or report it as spam – all ways to ruin your deliverability and engagement metrics. 

So, why not give those people a way out? They’ll get away from the emails they don’t want, and you won’t be harmed by their actions. It’s a win-win. 

One-click unsubscribes also keep you in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act and other international marketing laws, just in case you needed another push to add one to your footer. 

There are a few guidelines that you must follow when making your one-click unsubscribe links.

1. They must truly be one-click links. You cannot make your email subscribers jump through hoops to get off your list. 
2. They need to be clear and conspicuous, and cannot be hidden by making the text the same color as the background. 
3. You must promptly honor the request. Ideally, you should remove the subscriber from your list in two days.
4. All bulk marketing emails (5,000+ a day) must include a one-click unsubscribe link.

If you don’t follow these guidelines or if you don’t include this link, you run the risk of getting branded as a scammer or spammer.

That could result in you being suspended from the ability to send any emails at all!

16) Manage Preferences

Sometimes people are interested in some, but not all of your emails. This is where a “manage preferences” link comes in handy. 

Instead of unsubscribing from everything, a “manage preferences” option allows people to choose what kind of emails they’d like to receive from you. 

For example, if someone is interested in newsletters and event content but not marketing promotions, preferences allow them to receive only the emails they actively want to receive. 

This gives you happy subscribers and a healthy email list.

17) Legal Information

If you have any legal information, such as disclaimers, confidentiality notices, company notices, or privacy policies, you should include them in your footer as well. Their inclusion will help protect you from potential liability or misuse of information. 

If you’re acting as an affiliate, please disclose that to your recipients here.

Affiliate Email Structure Wrap-Up

Every single little bit of space on an email is precious real estate. Everything you use, every line, image, CTA, word, even the punctuation and spacing, needs to be strategically placed if you want your audience to do exactly what you want them to do. 

Why? Because each and every element of an email has a purpose. 

Your sender information introduces who you are. Your email subject line introduces the concept behind the email. The headline expands on that concept. Copy and images bring the idea to life. The CTA invites your reader to explore the concept. Then the footer brings everything together.

Full mastery of each of these sections is absolutely necessary if you want your email program to perform at its best. 

So, re-read this blog, take all of the information to heart, and then, when you’re ready, get out there and write that email.

This evolution is changing how marketers and brands must think about their visibility online.

If you want your content to show up in these AI-generated responses, it’s time to go beyond traditional SEO. Now, you need to optimize content for LLMs (large language models) and AI search, whether the content is on your website, your social media, or in third-party mentions from influencers, websites, and podcasts.

Read on to find out how LLMs work, how they decide what to cite, and how to position your content for AI-powered discovery. This guide will show you exactly how it’s done in 25 tips!

Let’s dive in!

What Is LLM Optimization?

LLM optimization is the practice of creating and structuring content in a way that makes it more likely to be selected, synthesized, and cited by AI tools powered by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

This is a proactive approach to digital content strategy and marketing, whether you’re a brand, offer owner, affiliate marketer, or content creator.

LLMs don’t “crawl” websites like traditional search engines do. Instead, they are trained on huge datasets. These datasets may include publicly available web pages, forums, books, and licensed sources. They use this training to generate human-like responses to user queries.

Some LLMs can also access real-time web content via plugins, APIs, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Optimizing for LLMs means understanding how they source and generate responses. It also means making your content more “machine-readable,” reliable, and contextually useful to those models. This specialized form of optimization ensures your information is ready for the new AI frontier!

Why Brands Should Optimize Content for LLMs

The digital landscape is changing at a rapid pace.

Traditional SEO still plays a crucial role, but LLM optimization adds another layer. Ignoring it could mean your brand loses relevance and eventually becomes completely invisible online – and nobody wants that!

Here’s why LLM optimization matters:

• Visibility is shifting from blue links to AI answers. Users are increasingly satisfied with AI-generated summaries, so they may not click through to source websites as often. This makes a direct citation or mention by an LLM incredibly valuable.
• Attribution is scarce, so being cited or mentioned matters more than ever. When an LLM provides a direct answer, it may only cite one or two sources (if it cites any at all). Being one of the chosen sources means your brand gets direct exposure.
• Trust signals like authority, clarity, and structure now influence whether your content is selected for summarization. LLMs are designed to provide accurate and helpful responses. They favor content that exhibits strong trust and credibility.
• Voice search and conversational interfaces are growing, and they rely heavily on LLM-generated outputs. People are using voice assistants more for quick facts and comprehensive answers. Your content needs to be ready for these conversational queries.
• Enhanced brand authority and reputation. When an authoritative AI tool references your brand, it inherently boosts your perceived expertise. This can lead to increased trust among your target audience.
• Future-proofing your content strategy. AI technology is here to stay. Investing in LLM optimization now positions your brand for long-term success in the evolving search landscape.
• Meeting users where they are. Users are adopting AI tools quickly for their informational needs, so if you want to remain relevant, your content must be accessible through these new channels.

In short, if you want your brand to show up in AI responses, your content must speak the language of large language models, while still effectively speaking to humans and traditional search engines too.

This holistic approach is key if you want visibility for your content and brand today!

How LLMs Find and Use Your Content

To optimize your content for LLMs, it’s important to understand how they process and retrieve information.

Here’s a simplified breakdown covering 3 common ways LLMs will source your content:

1) Pretraining and Fine-Tuning

LLMs are first trained on massive datasets. These datasets contain books, articles, websites, and other text.

This step helps them develop a general understanding of language, facts, and relationships between concepts. An initial training phase builds the core intelligence of the model.

Some LLMs are later fine-tuned using specific data or user feedback. This fine-tuning helps them become more specialized. It can also improve their ability to follow instructions or generate particular types of responses (for example, a medical LLM might be fine-tuned on medical journals).

2) Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

When LLMs are connected to external sources, they use retrieval systems.

These systems fetch the most relevant documents in real time. This is common with tools like Bing, Perplexity, or through real-time APIs. The fetched documents are then summarized and cited in responses. This process helps LLMs provide up-to-date information and attribute sources.

If your content is accessible, authoritative, and well-structured, it’s more likely to be pulled into these answers. This is a critical aspect of LLM optimization. It means your content needs to be discoverable and highly relevant to the user’s query.

3) Citation and Recommendation

Some LLMs, like Perplexity and ChatGPT with Browse, will cite or reference specific sources. Others, like Google’s AI Overviews, synthesize information from multiple websites.

Either way, content that is clear, concise, well-categorized, and semantically rich is more likely to be selected.

The goal is to be the authoritative source for a particular piece of information. When your content is chosen, it significantly boosts your brand’s visibility. This direct attribution is a powerful endorsement from the AI itself!

Understanding Different LLM Behaviors

Not all LLMs behave identically. Their training data, fine-tuning, and access to real-time information can vary.

Here are the different types you should know about:

• Closed-source models: Models like ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Gemini (Google) have proprietary training sets. Their specific mechanisms for source selection are not fully transparent.
• Open-source models: Models like Llama 2 (Meta) allow more insight into their architecture. This can help developers understand how they process information.
• Search-integrated models: Tools like Perplexity.ai and Google’s AI Overviews are designed to browse and summarize. They often prioritize content that traditional SEO also favors. This includes well-ranking pages and authoritative sources.
• Conversational AI: Assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant are focused on delivering quick, concise responses. Your content needs to be easily digestible for these platforms.

Tailoring your content for these different behaviors enhances your overall LLM optimization strategy. With that, let’s look at the 25 essential tips that will help you optimize your content for LLMs and AI tools!

The 25 Best LLM Optimization Tips

Tip 1: Use Your Brand Name in Context

Many websites speak in the first person. They use phrases like “we recommend this” or “we’ve found that.”

Often, they do so without ever naming who “we” is. AI models don’t always connect these dots.

So, you need to be explicit: Use your brand name consistently and naturally throughout your content, especially when you’re talking about topics you want your brand associated with.

For example:

• “At BrandMoth, we’ve seen that early-stage startups benefit most from two-part names with metaphorical relevance.”
• “According to the latest research by TechSolutions Inc., renewable energy adoption is accelerating.”
• “Our team at GreenLeaf Organics developed this recipe to maximize nutrient absorption.”

This careful phrasing might seem a little unnecessary, but being explicit helps AI tools associate your brand with your ideas and insights.

It’s especially important when the LLM is summarizing multiple sources, because brand mentions add credibility and context. By consistently naming your brand within your content, you’re reinforcing your brand as a recognized entity in your niche and boosting your overall visibility!

Tip 2: Earn Quality Backlinks (and Rankings)

While LLMs don’t rely on PageRank in the traditional SEO sense, they still use trust signals to determine authority. Pages with strong backlinks tend to rank higher in SERPs. LLMs like ChatGPT (with Browse) and Perplexity often prefer highly ranked sources.

Many AI tools have a preference for content that already performs well in Google. If you’re ranking for relevant queries, you’re more likely to be included in AI-generated summaries. High-quality backlinks signal to both search engines and LLMs that your content is valuable and trustworthy.

So, what should you do?

Like with traditional SEO practices, you should invest in digital PR, guest blogging, thought leadership, and partnerships with other organizations to earn high-authority backlinks.

Prioritize links from trusted domains in your niche. Think about reputable .edu, .gov, or well-known industry sites. These links demonstrate your site’s authority and improve your visibility in the eyes of AI.

Tip 3: Target Questions Instead of Just Keywords

Traditional SEO often focused on short-tail keywords. But LLMs respond best to complete questions. They are designed to understand natural language queries.

So…

• Instead of optimizing for “aligner benefits,” try answering “What are the advantages of clear aligners over traditional braces?”
• Instead of “best running shoes,” address “Which running shoes are best for long-distance training?”
• Instead of “website speed,” answer “How does website speed affect user experience and SEO?”

Write FAQ-style content that directly answers user questions in clear, natural language. Use tools like AnswerThePublic or AlsoAsked to discover real user questions.

These tools provide data-backed insights into what people are actually asking!

Example: A dental practice might add a section titled “Are clear aligners safe for teens?” and provide a short, structured answer. This query has a much better chance of being cited in an LLM-generated response than vague or keyword-stuffed content, and you want the information you publish to be highly accessible to LLMs.

Tip 4: Use Structured Data and Schema Markup

Structured data helps machines understand your content better. Specifically, Schema markup can clarify what your content is about, who wrote it, and what entities are involved. It provides explicit clues to LLMs about the meaning of your information.

Some of the most helpful schema types for LLM optimization include:

• FAQPage: For question and answer sections.
• HowTo: For step-by-step guides.
• Article: For general articles, blog posts, and news.
• Organization: To identify your brand and its official name.
• Author: To attribute content to specific individuals.
• Product: For detailed product information.
• Recipe: For cooking instructions and ingredients.
• Review: For user or editorial reviews of products or services.

Adding schema doesn’t guarantee you’ll be cited, but it significantly increases your chances. It makes your content more machine-readable and easy to reference, which provides a clear framework for LLMs to process your information efficiently.

Pro tip: Validate your schema using Google’s Rich Results Test. Regularly audit it for errors. Errors can prevent your structured data from being used effectively.

Tip 5: Use Lists, Tables, and Semantic Keywords

LLMs love structure. We’re talking about bulleted or numbered lists, comparison tables, and well-organized sections that help AI models quickly extract and summarize your content.

Clear formatting in your content aids in rapid information retrieval!

Use Lists to Make Content Skimmable and Scannable

For example, instead of writing a paragraph about the benefits of clear aligners, structure it like this:

Benefits of Clear Aligners:

• Nearly invisible
• Removable for meals and cleaning
• More comfortable than metal braces
• Require fewer dental visits
• Often result in shorter treatment times
• Easier to maintain oral hygiene

This format makes it easier for LLMs to pick up and include your points in responses, especially when users ask for a quick rundown or comparison. It enhances the discoverability of key facts.

Include Semantic Keywords and Related Concepts

Semantic keywords are conceptually related terms that provide context. For instance, if you’re writing about electric cars, include terms like:

• EV
• Charging station
• Range anxiety
• Battery life
• Tesla, Nissan Leaf, Ford Mustang Mach-E, etc.
• Sustainable transportation
• Emissions-free driving
• Public charging infrastructure

This helps LLMs build a deeper understanding of the topic. It increases your chances of appearing in long-form, nuanced answers. Semantic density signals comprehensive coverage to AI.

Tools to find semantic keywords:

• Google’s “People Also Ask” and “Related Searches” sections
• SurferSEO
• Clearscope
• SEMrush or Ahrefs keyword tools
• Google Keyword Planner (for related terms)
• Topic clusters generated by AI content tools

Tip 6: Optimize for Entities, Not Just Keywords

LLMs are trained to understand entities. These are real-world objects, people, organizations, and concepts – not just strings of text.

Understanding entities allows LLMs to grasp context and relationships. If you want to be seen as an authority on a topic, make sure to:

• Clearly identify people and companies (e.g., “Dr. Mark Green, a Chicago-based dentist specializing in root canals, has over 20 years of experience.”).
• Link out to credible sources when referencing major entities (e.g., linking to Wikipedia or official company pages).
• Use consistent naming conventions throughout your content. Avoid variations that could confuse the AI.
• Provide attributes for entities (e.g., “Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla,” or “The Eiffel Tower, a landmark in Paris, France”).

Also, consider building out your own entity with the following steps:

• Create or claim your Google Knowledge Graph. This is a crucial practice for brand recognition.
• Get listed on Wikipedia or Wikidata if your brand meets their notability criteria.
• Encourage coverage on reputable third-party websites. This builds external validation.
• Ensure your social media profiles are consistent and clearly linked.

When your brand or name becomes an entity that LLMs recognize, you’re more likely to be cited directly. This will directly contribute to your brand’s visibility and authority!

Tip 7: Publish Authoritative, Long-Form Content

LLMs prioritize depth, clarity, and usefulness over fluff. One of the best ways to get cited is to publish comprehensive, long-form content. In the parlance of traditional SEO, you might call this type of content “link bait.”

But ultimately, this type of content involves answering complex questions better than anyone else and demonstrating true expertise!

What makes content authoritative for LLMs?

• Written by subject-matter experts with verifiable credentials.
• Includes firsthand insights, proprietary data, original research, or detailed case studies.
• Has a clear structure with headings, lists, and examples.
• Is frequently updated to remain current and reflect the latest information.
• Offers multiple perspectives or delves into the nuances of a topic.
• Provides actionable advice or practical solutions.

Example: Instead of writing a 500-word blog post titled “Why Branding Matters,” write a 2,000+ word guide called “How Branding Impacts Business Growth: A Comprehensive Guide for Series A Startups.” This comprehensive and detailed approach will satisfy the LLM’s need for in-depth information.

Tip 8: Improve E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

Although originally a Google concept, the same E-E-A-T principles will help content stand out to LLMs too. That’s because AI models are trained to favor content that reflects credibility and expert knowledge and avoid misinformation.

Here are a few ways to build E-E-A-T:

• Include author bios with credentials, experience, and links to other works.
• Link to reputable external sources for data and claims.
• Add client testimonials, case studies, or success stories.
• Use HTTPS and secure hosting for your website.
• Make your site easy to navigate and free from spammy ads.
• Clearly display contact information and About Us pages.
• Showcase awards, certifications, or industry affiliations.
• Implement a clear editorial process for content creation and review.

Pro tip: Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines still influence what appears as output in AI overviews and SERP-adjacent answers. LLMs often use those same content types in training data. Adhering to E-E-A-T builds a strong foundation for LLM optimization and overall visibility.

Tip 9: Answer Questions in a Standalone Format

LLMs look for short, clear passages that directly answer user questions.

A good rule of thumb: Write answers that could be read aloud by a voice assistant. This makes the information highly accessible.

Bad example:

“We think there are many reasons people choose our aligners. One of the main reasons is comfort, though there are others like appearance, and the ability to take them out for meals. Our patients often tell us how much they appreciate these aspects.”

Good example:

“Clear aligners are popular because they’re comfortable, discreet, and removable. Most patients also appreciate that treatment times are often shorter than with traditional braces, and they make oral hygiene easier.”

Even better if this appears directly under an H2 or H3 subheading like the following example:

Why Are Clear Aligners So Popular?

These mini, standalone answers are ideal candidates for AI tools to grab and summarize. They provide concise, direct responses that LLMs can easily process and present, which greatly improves your chances of direct citation and sourcing.

Tip 10: Use Author Markup and Content Attribution

When possible, include metadata that clearly attributes content to a real author or organization.

This helps both search engines and AI tools know who to credit. Attribution is key for establishing trust and visibility!

Every time you publish a piece of content, be sure to add:

• Author name, title, and bio on the page, ideally with a link to their professional profile.
• <meta name=”author” content=”Dr. Mark Green”> in the HTML head.
• Schema.org’s author and publisher properties.
• Link to social media profiles (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter) of the author.

LLMs may not always show citations, but they often “remember” which brands produce high-quality content.

Attribution helps reinforce that memory. This is part of building your entity reputation and improving your chances of mentions in future responses.

Tip 11: Update Old Content for AI Relevance

Like traditional search engines, LLMs and Google’s AI Overviews usually prioritize content that is:

• Recently published or updated.
• Dated to reflect its relevance (e.g., “2025 Guide to Digital Marketing”).
• Structured to match modern search intent and AI query patterns.

If you already have top-performing articles, go update them to:

• Include your brand name in the intro and throughout the content.
• Add structured data and lists where appropriate.
• Target question-based headings and provide direct answers.
• Link to fresh, credible sources, and remove outdated ones.
• Ensure all data and statistics are current.
• Add new sections covering recent developments in the topic.
• Improve overall readability and user experience.

You don’t always need to create new content. Sometimes, updating older assets is the fastest path to AI visibility.

This optimization technique leverages your existing authority and is a good practice for traditional search as well!

Tip 12: Test Your Content in AI Tools

Just like you check rankings in Google, you can easily test whether your content is cited in:

• ChatGPT (Plus) using the Browse tool. Ask specific questions that your content aims to answer.
• Perplexity.ai. See which sources it pulls and how it summarizes your information.
• Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode (if available in your country). Observe whether your site is listed as a source.
• You.com or Claude.ai. These LLMs also process information differently.
• Bing Chat (Microsoft Copilot). If you’re optimized for organic search in Bing, you have a good chance of appearing in Copilot too.

Ask questions your content should answer and see if it appears and how it’s represented. For example, with ClickBank, we might ask ChatGPT about the best affiliate networks for beginners. And ClickBank does appear in the response, as of the time of this writing:

Now, if your content or brand isn’t showing up, consider whether your page:

• Uses enough semantically related terms.
• Answers the question directly and comprehensively.
• Has enough authority (links, brand signals, E-E-A-T, etc.).
• Is technically accessible and well-structured for machine parsing.
• Offers unique value or a unique perspective.

Use these insights to refine how your content is structured and presented. This iterative testing is crucial for effective LLM optimization!

Tip 13: Build a Clear Site Architecture

A well-organized website isn’t just good for human visitors – it also helps LLMs and AI-powered crawlers understand how your content fits together.

A logical structure aids in information discovery and contextual understanding. So, here’s what you need to know.

Keep Your Content Hierarchical and Logical

Structure your site like a knowledge tree:

• Homepage ➝ Service Overview ➝ Detailed Pages ➝ Blog Posts.
• Use descriptive URLs (e.g., /dental/clear-aligners/ instead of /page-id-52).
• Make sure each topic lives in a logical section of your site, forming topic clusters with interlinking resources or a hub-and-spoke model.
• Categorize and tag content consistently to aid navigation and understanding.
• Avoid orphan pages that are not linked to from anywhere on your site.

Use Internal Linking Thoughtfully

You should link related pages together using contextual anchor text, for example:

• “Learn more about how clear aligners compare to traditional braces in our detailed guide.”
• “See what Dr. Mark Green recommends for teenage dental care in his latest article.”
• “Explore our range of eco-friendly cleaning products for a sustainable home.”

Internal links with relevant anchor text are a strong signal to AI and search engines which pages are semantically related to each other and which ones are most important overall.

Good internal linking helps distribute authority and guide the LLMs through your data architecture.

Tip 14: Build a Reputation Outside Your Own Site

LLMs don’t just rely on your website to judge your authority. In fact, some anecdotal analysis I’ve seen from SEO experts on LinkedIn suggest that a lot of the answers will pull from popular sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube – as well as other authorititative websites and publications.

In a nutshell, LLMs “read” the rest of the internet to form a comprehensive view of your brand, products, and . This external validation is vital for LLM optimization.

You want you and your brand to be:

• Quoted in reputable media outlets and industry publications.
• Listed in authoritative business directories (e.g., Crunchbase, Healthgrades, Clutch, industry-specific directories).
• Cited on reputable forums like Reddit or Quora (in relevant, positive contexts).
• Reviewed on third-party platforms (e.g., Google Reviews, Yelp, industry review sites).
• Mentioned in academic papers or research reports.
• Featured in podcasts or webinars.

Do these things and you’re more likely to be recognized and referenced. This creates a robust digital footprint for your brand!

Pro Tip: Use Digital PR to Your Advantage

Reach out directly to journalists or bloggers or use Help a Reporter Out (HARO), offer your quotes as a subject-matter expert, and participate in podcast interviews or webinars.

The more visibility you earn across the web, the more LLMs will associate your brand with your area of expertise. This strategic approach builds holistic authority!

Example: If Perplexity.ai sees that “BrandMoth” is cited in naming guides, startup resources, and branding Q&A threads, it will be more likely to feature the brand in AI answers about naming strategies. This demonstrates the power of cross-platform visibility.

Tip 15: Improve Page Speed and Accessibility

Some AI models access real-time content using retrieval tools. If your site loads slowly or is hard to parse, it may be ignored.

Like with traditional search, a fast, accessible site signals quality and ease of information extraction for AI tools to pull from.

Here’s a quick page speed checklist to run through for your site:

• Use a fast, secure web hosting service.
• Optimize images for quick loading (compress files and use modern formats like WebP).
• Implement lazy loading for images and videos.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for faster delivery to global users.
• Ensure mobile-friendliness and keyboard accessibility.
• Use semantic HTML tags (<article>, <section>, <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, <main>). These tags provide inherent structure that LLMs can understand.
• Provide alt text for all images and transcripts for audio/video content.

Pro tip: Use tools like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse to find and fix performance and accessibility issues. These tools offer specific, actionable recommendations for site optimization.

Tip 16: Publish Content in Multiple Formats

LLMs can pull from a variety of content types, not just traditional text articles, blog posts, and web pages.

By diversifying your content types and ensuring they’re published with accessible metadata, you increase the ways AI tools can “see” your content and extract relevant information.

LLMs can pull from:

• Text articles and blog posts.
• PDFs and whitepapers (ensure text is selectable and not just images).
• FAQ sections.
• Videos (via transcripts, captions, or well-described metadata).
• Podcasts (via summaries, show notes, or automatically generated transcripts).
• Infographics (if accompanied by descriptive text).
• Webinars and online courses (with summaries and key takeaways).

Thankfully, it’s easy to leverage AI itself to take an initial piece of content and repurpose it in several different formats.

Example: Turn a long-form blog post into:

• A short video with subtitles for platforms like YouTube or TikTok.
• A downloadable checklist or infographic.
• A series of FAQ questions published on a dedicated page.
• A podcast episode or audio summary available on streaming platforms.
• A concise social media thread highlighting key points.

All of this content reinforces your authority and expands your presence across different AI-accessible formats. A multi-format approach will boost your visibility much more than sticking with a single content format.

Tip 17: Use AI Tools to Analyze and Refine Your Content

To optimize for AI, use AI!

There are tools out there that simulate LLM behavior. They evaluate content for clarity, authority, and completeness. This approach can give you a significant edge in your optimization efforts, because you’re speaking AI’s language from the very beginning of your content creation process.

Here are a handful of excellent AI tools to consider:

• SurferSEO – for semantic keywords, topic clusters, and structure suggestions. It analyzes top-ranking content for gaps.
• Clearscope – helps ensure content covers topics comprehensively and uses relevant terms.
• Content at Scale AI Detector – while not perfect, it can give an indication of machine-like tone versus human writing.
• ChatGPT (or Claude) – to simulate what an AI might generate from your content or identify gaps. Ask it to summarize your article or identify key arguments.
• Yoast or RankMath – for readability, SEO best practices, and structured data analysis within WordPress.
• Grammarly Business – for enhancing clarity, conciseness, and overall writing quality.
• AI summarization tools – paste your content into one and see what it picks up. Does it capture your main points accurately?

Exercise: Paste your article into ChatGPT and ask:

• “What are the five most important takeaways from this article?”
• “Summarize this article for someone who has five minutes.”
• “What questions does this article answer, and are the answers clear?”
• “What is the main topic, and what are the sub-topics discussed?”

If the key points you intended don’t show up, your structure or clarity might need improvement. This iterative testing helps you refine your content for optimal LLM understanding!

Tip 18: Track Mentions and Citations in AI Tools

While traditional analytics show traffic and rankings, LLM optimization calls for a new kind of tracking. You need to monitor how your brand and content appear in AI responses.

How do you do it?

Try this:

• Run a Google search for your brand name alongside the kinds of questions you want to rank for (e.g., “BrandMoth startup naming guide”). Look for AI Overviews in Google search and see what comes up.
• Search your domain in tools like Perplexity.ai and see how it’s cited and summarized.
• Set up alerts using Google Alerts or Mention for brand mentions across the web.
• Use ChatGPT to simulate user prompts like:
  • “What’s a good brand naming agency for startups?”
  • “Who is Dr. Mark Green?”
  • “Tell me about the benefits of clear aligners.”
• Monitor AI news feeds and industry publications that discuss AI sourcing.
• Check specific AI tools and platforms that are gaining traction as a way to track AI mentions. At the time of this writing, Ahrefs’ Brand Radar is looking interesting.

Seeing where and how your brand or name appears can guide future content and positioning. This feedback loop is essential for continuous optimization and improving your visibility!

Tip 19: Include Clear CTAs (Calls to Action)

It’s easy to focus solely on citations or mentions and forget your actual business goals.

Even if you’re cited in an AI result, this doesn’t automatically mean someone will click through or convert. You need to give them a compelling reason.

Consider the following CTA tips:

• Place a clear, benefit-driven CTA at the end of every major content section.
• Make the CTA relevant to the question answered or the information provided.
• Include options like “Speak to an Expert,” “Download the Guide,” “Explore Our Services,” “Get a Free Quote,” or “Sign Up for Our Newsletter.”
• Use concise and actionable language.
• Ensure CTAs are visually distinct and easy to find.

CTA Example:

• Want to learn more about clear aligner treatment in Chicago? Book a consultation with Dr. Mark Green today and achieve your perfect smile.
• Ready to streamline your content strategy for LLMs? Download our comprehensive guide to LLM optimization now!

These CTAs are helpful to human users. LLMs may even include them in summaries if phrased clearly and are highly relevant to the context. This links your visibility directly to business outcomes.

Tip 20: Focus on Trust, Not Just Traffic

The ultimate goal of LLM optimization isn’t just to be mentioned – it’s to be trusted.

If a user sees your brand cited in an AI tool, they’re more likely to view you as a reliable expert. In fact, a lot of users who get referred to brands through tools like ChatGPT are highly engaged and warm prospects, because it felt like they found you through their own efforts, rather than you trying to sell them.

That all-important trust can lead to:

• Higher engagement rates with your content.
• More qualified conversions and leads.
• Invitations to partnerships and collaborations.
• Better customer loyalty and repeat business.
• Increased brand equity and perception.
• A stronger reputation in your industry.

Visibility is undoubtedly important. But being seen as helpful, credible, and trustworthy is what truly drives real-world results and sustainable growth.

This holistic approach to LLM optimization transcends mere rankings.

Tip 21: Address Conflicting Information and Nuance

LLMs often struggle with conflicting information or highly nuanced topics. Your content can stand out by addressing these complexities directly and transparently.

Here’s how to approach it:

• Acknowledge differing viewpoints: “While some sources suggest X, our research indicates Y due to [reason].”
• Present pros and cons: For a given solution or approach, clearly outline its advantages and disadvantages.
• Quantify statements: Instead of “many people,” use “over 70% of respondents” or “a significant portion.”
• Specify conditions: “This solution is effective for small businesses, but larger enterprises may require a different approach.”
• Provide citations for data: Back up claims with links to studies, reports, or expert opinions.
• Explain “why”: Don’t just state facts; explain the underlying reasons or mechanisms.

By providing balanced, well-reasoned, and transparent information, you become a more reliable source for LLMs.

They are less likely to “hallucinate” or present incorrect facts if your content offers a clear, authoritative overview of complex topics. Ultimately, your content is most valuable for AI responses if it’s objective, specific, and helpful.

Tip 22: Create Content for Different Stages of the User Journey

Users interact with LLMs at various points in their information-gathering process. Optimizing for these stages can increase your chances of being cited.

• Awareness Stage (Broad questions): Create high-level content answering general “what is” or “why is” questions. For example: “What are the best ways to fix crooked teeth?”
• Consideration Stage (Comparative questions): Develop content that compares options or explores “how to” scenarios. Example: “How do clear aligners compare to traditional braces?”
• Decision Stage (Specific, actionable questions): Focus on content that helps users make a choice or take action. Example: “Which dental practice offers the best clear aligner treatment in Chicago?”

By mapping your content to these stages, you provide relevant information at the precise moment an LLM user needs it.

This multi-faceted content strategy can lead to your brand being cited across a broader range of AI responses.

Tip 23: Leverage Data and Statistics

Original data, surveys, or unique statistics can make your content highly valuable to LLMs. They are always seeking authoritative and fresh data.

Tips for using data:

• Conduct your own surveys: Publish your findings with clear methodologies.
• Analyze existing public data: Provide unique insights.
• Cite sources for all data: Link directly to the original study or report.
• Present data clearly: Use tables, charts, and bullet points to make data digestible.
• Interpret the data: Don’t just present numbers; explain what they mean for your audience.

When LLMs encounter original, well-cited data, it significantly increases the likelihood of your content being chosen as an authoritative source!

Tip 24: Stay Current with AI Developments

The field of AI and LLMs is evolving rapidly. What works today might be refined or replaced tomorrow. Staying informed is key for success with long-term LLM optimization.

Here are some tips on how to stay up-to-date with AI:

• Follow leading AI researchers and companies: Keep up with announcements from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, etc. You can sign up for their email newsletters or follow their accounts on social media.
• Read industry publications: Pay attention to SEO and AI news sites for updates on search and AI integration.
• Experiment with new AI tools: Continuously test and get to know how new models are being built and how they interact with data.
• Participate in relevant communities: Engage with other marketers and webmasters discussing AI trends.

Being proactive and adaptable will ensure your content strategy remains effective. This ongoing optimization effort is crucial for maintaining your brand’s visibility in the AI-powered future.

Tip 25: Understand the Role of Feedback Mechanisms

While not directly controllable by webmasters, LLMs learn from user feedback.

When users positively interact with AI-generated responses derived from your content, this indirectly reinforces your content’s value.

• Focus on accuracy: Ensure your content is factually correct.
• Be comprehensive: Answer questions thoroughly.
• Prioritize user satisfaction: Create content that truly helps and satisfies user intent.

By consistently providing high-quality, helpful information, you contribute to a positive feedback loop. This encourages LLMs to continue selecting your content for future responses.

AI Search and LLM Optimization Wrap-up

Large Language Models have fundamentally changed the digital landscape. Content strategy must evolve in response.

To recap, optimizing for LLMs and AI search requires a comprehensive mix of:

• Strategic Branding: Consistently using your brand name in context to build entity recognition.
• Technical Clarity: Implementing structured data/schema and ensuring excellent site speed and accessibility.
• Semantic Richness: Leveraging related keywords for a deeper contextual understanding.
• User Focus: Directly answering real user questions and crafting content for various stages of the user journey.
• Authority Building: Earning high-quality backlinks, adhering to E-E-A-T principles, and building an external reputation through digital PR efforts.
• AI Testing: Regularly checking how your content performs in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools.
• Content Versatility: Publishing information in multiple accessible formats to broaden reach.
• Continuous Optimization: Staying current with AI developments and adapting your strategy.
• Trust and Nuance: Addressing complexities and building an unquestionable level of trustworthiness.

Above all, your content must be genuinely useful. When your content solves real problems and speaks directly to your audience’s needs – in a way LLMs can easily interpret – then you dramatically increase your chances of being featured, cited, and remembered.

It’s no longer enough to rank on page 1 of Google search results. Today, the brands that win are the ones who speak clearly to both people and machines.

Embracing LLM optimization isn’t just about adapting to a new technology – it’s about securing your brand’s future visibility and influence in the evolving digital age. The journey into AI search is ongoing, and your proactive approach will define your success!

To learn more about AI for affiliate marketing, check out:

• Our guide to affiliate marketing with ChatGPT
• This article on the pros and cons of AI for marketing
• And our resource on strategies for automating your affiliate business

We also have in-depth courses on how best to use AI inside of Spark by ClickBank, the official affiliate marketing education platform from ClickBank. Check it out, and happy AI-ing!

1. Introduce you to the overlapping – but distinct – worlds of organic traffic and paid traffic.
2. Help you decide which route you should take first in your affiliate marketing business.

NOTE: Both types of traffic are valuable and important, so I don’t want you to think that there’s only ONE choice here. But you have to start somewhere, right?

Now, as someone with a professional background in organic traffic and SEO, I will share my own thoughts on organic traffic – but for paid traffic, I asked for some insights from ClickBank’s resident paid traffic expert, Knute Fosso!

Also, this article comes on the heels of our article on the different types of affiliates, so you can check that out for a more detailed breakdown some of these choices in your affiliate marketing business.

Now, are you ready to see which comes out ahead in the eternal battle of organic traffic vs. paid traffic? Read on!

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic refers to all of the unpaid (“free”) traffic channels where people can organically discover your company or brand.

Organic traffic is usually subdivided into organic search (pages found through search engines like Google) and organic social (posts or videos displayed on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok).

Your main considerations with organic traffic are competitiveness, engagement, and search volume or reach.

NOTE: Some people may refer to organic traffic as “free traffic,” but this doesn’t mean it’s 100% no-cost. As we’ll touch on later, you make up for a much lower financial investment by investing more of your time, effort, and expertise – and in some cases, you may still choose to pay to create organic content.

What is Paid Traffic?

Paid traffic refers to all of the digital traffic channels where users can be served paid digital advertisements (including text, banner, video, native, and more).

You’ll most often hear people in the affiliate marketing industry talk about Facebook Ads, native ads, YouTube Ads, and Google Ads, but there’s a large and growing list of more than 20 paid traffic sources you can look at for your paid marketing campaigns.

Your main considerations with paid traffic are audience targeting, cost per click, and conversion rate.

NOTE: Paid traffic is also known as pay-per-click (PPC), because advertisers will generally pay for each of the clicks they get on their ads. It’s also possible to pay per 1000 impressions or per lead, but PPC is the standard for most paid advertising platforms and media buyer affiliates.

Organic vs Paid: A Quick Comparison

So, how do organic and paid compare when it comes to affiliate marketing – and how do you decide which one is right for you?

In the past, we’ve compared organic traffic to a reliable old Toyota Corolla, which is sure to get you where you want to go, but might take a while to get there. And for paid traffic, we likened it to a Ferrari that can get you where you want to go much faster, but costs a HECK of a lot more!

Of course, there’s more to the two than that. Here is a quick comparison chart that shows how the two types of traffic stack up:

Overall, organic is better for building brand authority and trust with your customers over the long term. Paid is better for testing your funnel and getting sales now.

But let’s take a deeper dive into each option.

The Case for Organic Traffic

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, I would absolutely start with organic as your traffic source – either by building your own affiliate website, social media account, YouTube channel, or podcast.

Whether you go the blogging route, the social influencer route, or a hybrid approach through sites like YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, there’s a LOT of value in building an organic presence somewhere online!

Here are a few of the reasons why organic traffic is the right place to start as an affiliate.

1) Organic is a long-term, compounding investment.

My favorite benefit of organic traffic is that it compounds over time. If you think of SEO or social media as an investment, you can capitalize on your old work for months or even years after you’ve created it!

While very few investments are truly passive, all of those old videos, podcast episodes, blog posts, or social posts you created are still working for you in the background, getting surfaced through search or social media algorithms, growing your email list, and earning you commissions when new visitors click through your affiliate tracking links and make a purchase.

All content has a shelf life, but would you rather create content that only benefits you for several weeks when it could benefit you for several months or even years?

2) Organic lends your brand credibility.

When you create organic content, you’re putting something out there that represents your brand. If you can infuse your content with value and authenticity, it communicates that your company is trustworthy – and possibly even a thought leader in the marketplace.

The way the internet is going post-iOS 14 update, affiliates are seeing a lot more success when they put themselves out there and focus on building a brand. And there’s no better way to prove your worth than with quality organic videos, podcast episodes, blog posts, or social posts that deliver real value.

Plus, there’s another HUGE benefit of organic content, which is the ability for new people to discover your brand organically on an evergreen basis. Anyone can pay for an ad, but at least in theory, organic content is a meritocracy where the best content rises to the top.

So, if you create engaging content that appears at the top of Google search, as a source in ChatGPT, or in people’s feeds on social sites like LinkedIn and Instagram, that’s a thumbs up from these platforms and their other users that you’re worth listening to!

3) Organic provides your business an economic moat.

Allow me to briefly channel Warren Buffett and say that your best way to find sustainable business success is through economic moats (i.e. competitive advantages that protect your business from would-be competitors).

Even as an affiliate, you know that your business is at risk if anyone can come along and just copy what you’re doing to find success. With paid ads, even successful affiliates face challenges from people who just copy their ad copy and creative.

But if you’ve built up a successful website, YouTube channel, or blog, you know this isn’t something that happens overnight. The amount of effort you’ve put into building your organic content will pay off in protecting you from competitors who want to piggyback off of your success!

The Case for Paid Traffic

Now that we’ve looked at the advantages of organic traffic, I’ll let Knute share his thoughts on paid traffic for affiliates, and when it makes sense to go that route.

Knute says if he were brand new to digital marketing/affiliate marketing, he would go straight to paid media. This is the traffic channel where you pay for digital ads to get placed in front of your audience on popular online platforms.

When it comes to recommended traffic sources, most of them work just fine, but here are the most common:

• Facebook Ads
• YouTube Ads
• Google Search Ads
• Native Ads
• TikTok Ads (up and coming)

Here are a few of Knute’s top reasons why paid traffic is the best place to start for new affiliates.

1) Paid gets you results faster.

Organic is great, but if you’re a beginner, Knute recommends that you save up some money to spend on ads and go the paid media route at first.

The reason? You’ll get more satisfaction and faster results out of paid ads compared to organic.

He’s not wrong – it personally took me over a year to get my first sale on ClickBank from the affiliate website I built. By comparison, in his 7-Day Challenge course inside of Spark, Ben Harris started from scratch and got a ClickBank sale in less than seven days!

It’s incredibly valuable to see those quick wins early on, both for your own morale and to validate that you’ve found a winning combination of offer, audience, and messaging. (But the big caveat here is that paid ads require you to warm up cold traffic quickly, which isn’t always easy to do.)

2) Paid shortens the feedback loop.

In any business, you need to make sure there’s a product-market fit. For affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about the heavy lifting of offer creation to make sales, but you do need to make sure you’re getting a solid offer in front of the right people.

Along the way, you’ll have to ask yourself: Are your efforts working? Is the content resonating with your audience? Did you choose the right offer to promote?

All of these are important questions to answer. With organic traffic, it may be months before you generate enough traffic to adequately answer all of those questions (think 10,000 visitors over 6 months instead of 6 weeks). In other words, you have a long feedback loop to slog through before you can see if your work is paying off.

But with paid traffic, you skip the line. With a much shorter feedback loop of just days and weeks instead of months and years, you can test your assumptions and answer these questions quickly.

3) Paid is a tester’s paradise.

There’s nothing quite like paid ads as a tester’s playground. What’s a hook that will resonate with your audience? What’s a message that people really respond to?

As an affiliate, you have a golden opportunity to understand your audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey, carefully curating a funnel from paid ad to landing page to sales page. Here’s one example of a funnel below:

By tweaking your copy and creative at the ad level and on the interstitial landing page, you can find out what matters to your audience.

Of course, even the platform you choose can have an impact, so don’t be afraid to test the same kinds of ads in different places, from YouTube to TikTok to native!

Types of Content to Create

When you think about organic traffic, you’ll primarily be creating educational and informational content featuring:

• How-to guides and tutorials
• Listicles
• Buying guides
• Product reviews and comparisons
• Interviews

The point is to answer the questions of information-seeking prospects and give them buying recommendations so they’re moved to make a purchase.

For paid traffic, your content is usually centered around curiosity or persuasion. You’re creating some kind of text, banner, or video ad that teases or hooks a potential buyer and makes them want to engage more with the rest of the content in your funnel.

From your initial ad, you might point them to an affiliate bridge page featuring:

• A video
• A quiz
• A downloadable lead magnet
• A calculator
• A blog post or advertorial

The point is to quickly move the user from curiosity to the sales page so they can make a purchase.

How to Start With Organic Traffic

The way to approach organic traffic is to think about who your audience is and why they’d come to you for content.

As an example, a pure affiliate website is all about helping readers who are ready to make a buying decision. It’s pretty clear that if you publish a buying guide blog post or YouTube video about the best training methods for dogs, you’re speaking to pet owners who are ready to buy.

And ultimately, that’s your job – affiliates make their money by promoting products!

But you still get to decide where and how you do that. Personally, I prefer getting organic traffic through SEO content on a blog or website, but it’s perfectly valid to attract an audience with a podcast, social profile, or YouTube channel.

Just be sure to pick one and give it some time before you start trying to do too much all at once.

Measuring Your Organic Content

In the world of organic content, there isn’t really a single metric that matters.

However, I can tell you which ones I care about in my role:

• Total pageviews or sessions. How many times did a piece of content get viewed on my site?
• Total pageviews from search. How many times was the content found via organic search (primarily through Google) or referral traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
• Average time on page. How long did people spend reading and engaging with the content I’ve published?
• Total blog subscribers. How many people are opted in to receive weekly emails about new blog content?
• Rankings in Google. How many target search terms do I have ranking in positions 1-3 in Google? And how are the most important and relevant pieces of content ranking?

These are a great overview of the numbers that show whether your organic campaign is effective. But naturally, those are more specific to SEO content.

For organic social, you’ll care about your total follower count, your reach/impressions, and engagement indicators like total likes, comments, and shares.

For YouTube, you’ll care about total subscribers, average watch time, views per video, and engagement indicators such as total likes and comments. I would also keep an eye on the number of users watching your videos each month – if that number’s going up, it means your videos are getting more and more traction over time.

In addition to these high-level numbers for your chosen organic traffic source, you’ll ALSO want to see growing affiliate revenue – isn’t that what all this was for in the first place?

One metric that might help with gauging your performance is earnings per click. You might also care about the conversion rate for individual landing pages or bridge pages, especially if a few of them are driving most of your sales.

In the end, you’ll have to decide which numbers will help you figure out how successful your organic content is.

How to Start With Paid Traffic

The way to approach paid traffic is to think about how users are most likely to engage with ads on your chosen platform.

Knute’s biggest suggestion is to pick one ad platform and stick with it! Do research on the front end to understand what advertising on these platforms looks like, as well as the state of mind of your potential buyers – and then run with your chosen platform for a full campaign.

With Facebook, for example, users are often mindlessly scrolling through their feed, so you need to put something in front of them that catches their attention, makes them stop scrolling and consume your content, and then leaves them feeling compelled to leave the platform and go to your landing page.

Below is an example of one of our own Facebook Ads promoting Spark by ClickBank, our affiliate training.

With Google Search Ads, on the other hand, it’s about meeting your buyers where they’re at. Often, they are already actively looking for “x” and your job is to create an ad that appears as relevant as possible to help them solve “x.”

With that said, if you are brand new to marketing, just pick one traffic source and stick to it. Don’t fall victim to the shiny object syndrome and hop around from traffic source to traffic source.

Learning how multiple ad platforms work from a technical perspective while you are ALSO learning how to market as a whole AND getting familiar with the direct response space is surely a recipe for failure.

Success involves testing and optimizing one variable at a time. When in doubt, start with Facebook.

Measuring Your Ads 

There isn’t a baseline across the board for what makes a “successful” ad campaign.

But if there were… it would be return on ad spend (ROAS). Most ad platforms have ROAS built in, but it’s calculated like this:

Note that you’re not counting total sales generated when you calculate ROAS – you only count what’s coming into your pocket at the end of the day. (In other words, if you get a 50% commission on a $100 product that you promote as an affiliate, your return on ad spend isn’t $100/ad costs – it’s measured from the $50 you get to keep.)

If you make the ROAS calculation and you get a number above 1, then congrats – you are profitable!

If you do the calculation and you get a number lower than 1, then you need to make some adjustments somewhere in your funnel or try again with a new combination of offer, audience, and messaging.

Most of the time, poor results come from lack of testing creative. This isn’t always the case, but as Knute can attest, testing is the most important aspect of digital advertising. If you are getting started with Facebook, this is definitely the case.

Facebook’s AI gets better and better every year, so from a targeting perspective, that means there’s more wiggle room for you to not be as specific in your audience upfront. In fact, most of the campaigns we run at ClickBank are completely broad with absolutely no targeting whatsoever or adsets with very large broad interests in them.

Overall, a truly successful campaign will have a ROAS of at least 2:1 or 3:1.

Combining Organic and Paid Traffic Strategies

So, you’ve got the idea that organic and paid are separate routes to affiliate success.

And when you’re new to this industry, it truly does make a ton of sense to focus on just one thing at a time!

But as you grow more experienced – and especially if you can hire additional help to help you out – then things get really interesting! You start to have the possibilities of combining strategies!

How?

Well, at ClickBank, we conceptualize our marketing as a series of orbits which correspond to the buyer’s journey. Within the outer orbit, you have things like LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and live events where people can discover us.

At the outer orbit level, people are more problem-aware. As potential customers get more familiar with ClickBank, they move inward and start engaging more with our organic content, including our podcast, YouTube channel, blog, and LinkedIn content.

This allows us to educate them on affiliate marketing AND ClickBank, nudging them to solution-aware and product-aware. And hopefully, all of this content helps them to know, like, and trust ClickBank so that they choose to start working with us!

Obviously, selling ClickBank’s services isn’t the same as promoting a dog training program, health supplement, or text-to-speech software offer – but the same principle applies!

Rather than think of organic and paid traffic each as distinct silos, look at where every piece of paid and organic content is reaching people in the buyer’s journey, and figure out the ONE thing that each piece of content must do to keep people moving forward towards a purchase.

Here are a few specific examples of how paid and organic content can work together to help your business grow.

Tactic 1: Pointing Paid Traffic to a Successful Blog Post

You’ve put the finishing touches on an amazing piece of content on your blog. In a few weeks, it’s ranking at the top of Google and gets a massive average time on page of more than 7:00.

People are clearly loving it!

You now have the opportunity to turn this blog post into a pivotal piece of your funnel, driving paid search and social ad traffic to a proven page that your target audience is excited about.

And if it isn’t already, you can monetize the post by creating an opt-in to grow your email list or some calls-to-action that point visitors to your chosen affiliate offer.

Tactic 2: Picking Organic Content Topics Based on Your Best Paid Ads

You’ve tested 10 different hooks for the health and fitness offer you’re promoting, and you see one that’s outperforming all the rest.

Now that you know this message is getting a lot of attention from your target audience, what if you expanded on that idea and turned it into a long-form blog post or YouTube video?

Your paid ads have already done the hard part: determining which topic or topics is the most engaging to your target audience.

With that knowledge in mind, you can move forward on a quality piece of organic content that you’re certain your ideal customers will appreciate!

Tactic 3: Retargeting Potential Buyers with Ads

Sometimes, prospects get exposure to a potential solution and don’t buy, so one sophisticated strategy that media buyers will use to maximize their sales is to retarget all of those warm leads with ads specific to them. You can do this by flagging anyone who visited one of your content pieces or landing pages.

Now, we actually DON’T recommend this strategy in most cases, because it’s challenging enough just to dial in your main campaign – and honestly, most ClickBank offers are designed to convert on a single touch point, so the juice may not be worth the squeeze in trying to sway people who didn’t buy the first time.

But every funnel or campaign is different, so I wanted to mention retargeting as one possibility. Also, this approach may be more effective if you’re running native ads, because Facebook and YouTube algorithms both tend to be a bit “smarter” when it comes to targeting.

If you DO decide to experiment with retargeting for a paid campaign as an affiliate, the rule of thumb here is to spend roughly 5-10% of the ad spend for your main campaign on your retargeting campaign. So if you’re spending $50 per day on a campaign, you’d allocate $5 per day to a retargeting campaign for leads who visited and didn’t convert!

Conclusion

Phew! I know this was a LOT of detailed information, but we have all kinds of content on this blog and on our YouTube channel that covers the ins and outs of specific affiliate marketing tactics.

It was my hope that this post on organic traffic vs paid traffic would provide a solid overview of the different routes you can take to build a successful affiliate marketing business.

Unfortunately, there’s no way I could cover ALL the steps of organic or paid traffic in a single blog post, but hopefully this has helped you decide which one to start with!

If you’re looking for additional training on generating traffic, I highly recommend checking out ClickBank’s official affiliate marketing education platform, Spark by ClickBank. You can take my course on SEO blogging or one of our courses on paid traffic (including YouTube Ads or Meta Ads). You can also read my overview of Spark By ClickBank here.

And if you’re looking for a tool to help you build landing pages specifically for affiliate marketing, I recommend learning more about ClickBank’s all-in-one funnel builder tool, ClickBank Accelerator.

Whether you choose organic or paid as your starting traffic source, I wish you the best of luck on your affiliate journey!

Of course, ClickBank supports a lot of dietary supplement sellers, and you may be among them. If you haven’t felt a pinch yet with your margins or cost of goods sold (COGs), you’re probably at least bracing for a possible impact from tariffs. 

No one can predict with 100% certainty what’s going to happen, even the seasoned entrepreneurs and product owners on ClickBank – but many are watching for rising raw material costs, increased manufacturing expenses, or general supply chain disruption.

So, in this quick update, we want to put your mind at ease and share a few words of wisdom to help you weather whatever’s ahead. 

1) Resilience Is in Our DNA

ClickBank is one of the only constants in a constantly-changing industry.

For more than 25 years, ClickBank has supported sellers in not just economic booms, but challenging times as well – most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve persevered through supply chain headaches, tightening consumer spending, and all kinds of market ups and downs.

In all of that time, our marketplace has continued to thrive – and so have the sellers who call ClickBank home.

We’re proud of that resilience, but even more than that, we’re committed to being a true partner for our vendors. That means offering tools, insights, and support that’ll help you handle whatever may come at you – and emerge stronger on the other side.

2) The CPA Commission Calculator 

Let’s be real: Tariff hikes and rising COGs can squeeze your margins quickly. If you’re selling physical products like supplements, you’re likely already thinking about making changes or coming up with contingency plans for your pricing and logistics.

Well, that’s why we wanted to remind you about ClickBank’s CPA Commission Calculator.

Many of our top sellers offer cost-per-action (CPA) commissions to their affiliates, which means knowing exactly how much you can afford to pay per sale without putting your profit margins at risk. 

The CPA Calculator helps you do just that by factoring in not just your COGs, but also your refund rates and historical performance to generate the optimal CPA rate for your product (both overall and per affiliate).

Here’s what you should know about the ClickBank CPA Calculator:

• You must have an established ClickBank account to use the calculator, as it pulls from your historic performance data to recommend an optimal CPA rate.
  
• If you’re selling a physical product, make sure to include your COGs when setting up your product. Without this info, the calculator can’t show you accurate profitability metrics.
  
• CPA affiliates aren’t debited for refunds or chargebacks – so your account absorbs those costs. The calculator helps you plan for that.
  
• You must maintain a positive account balance to offer CPA commissions. If your account dips below zero, your CPA setup reverts to standard revenue share.

So, what’s the key takeaway? 

ClickBank’s CPA Calculator is a crucial tool to keep you profitable when working with affiliates – even as your costs fluctuate. It’s designed to keep you informed and protect your bottom line while continuing to attract high-quality affiliate traffic and sales.

Want to learn more? Check out our article on the ClickBank CPA Calculator and get thorough answers to all of your CPA questions!

3) No Plans to Raise Fees – Period

We know the last thing you want during times of economic pressure is a surprise fee hike. That’s why we want to be clear: ClickBank has no plans to increase our prices or platform fees in response to these market conditions.

Our goal is to be the most vendor-friendly partner in the space, which means making sure our platform continues to be affordable and profitable for you. 

Let’s Tackle This Together

You may be riding high in your business right now or you may be tightening your belt. Either way, we’re here to support your journey as a supplement seller on ClickBank. 

If you haven’t already, we recommend you take a few minutes to review your COGs, product setup, payouts, and overall affiliate strategy. You should also consider whether a CPA model could offer you a more stable approach in this shifting economic climate.

Do you have any questions? As always, our account managers are here to help you navigate the path forward.

ClickBank has your back. Thank you for partnering with us!

Of course, nothing is truly 100% passive – but thanks to recent technological advancements in the realm of AI and automation, we’re getting a whole lot closer to that point! If you’re not using these tools in your workflow, you’re at risk of falling behind.

So, how does automating an affiliate business work?

Using a combination of generative AI and modern software with automation features, you can turn most of your repetitive business processes into automated workflows, from marketing to data tracking to hiring. In this comprehensive guide, I’ll show you real-world ideas on how to automate your affiliate marketing business!

I’m going to illustrate these concepts with Eat Stop Eat, a popular intermittent fasting program on ClickBank – but these business process automation (BPA) strategies can apply to any affiliate product or service you’re promoting anywhere online.

Sound interesting? Read on for our top 4 affiliate marketing automation tips!

The Challenge of Manual Affiliate Marketing

Before we dive into any specific affiliate automation hacks, I want to cover why a “manual” affiliate marketing business is becoming unsustainable in an era dominated by AI.

Here’s what a typical day promoting Eat Stop Eat might have looked like back in 2019:

• Researching intermittent fasting trends or topics
• Writing product review articles from scratch
• Crafting social media posts or testing new paid ad creatives on your own
• Tracking a range of business metrics across different platforms
• Generating a set of affiliate links with unique parameters or tracking IDs per traffic source
• Analyzing sales data to figure out what’s working

These are all tasks that you used to have to do manually and painstakingly – or hire someone you trust to do them for you at a pretty penny. In every case, you’re dealing with a lot of tedious work that might be valuable, but not very efficient!

And sometimes, if you don’t have enough bandwidth for everything yourself or the budget to hire out help, then a lot of this important work just doesn’t get done at all.

A manual approach can easily lead to major bottlenecks:

• Content creation and distribution become inconsistent
• Performance tracking lags behind real-time opportunities
• Metric analysis becomes superficial
• Scale becomes impossible without hiring a team

There’s also the opportunity cost: while you’re mired in a bunch of routine tasks, you’re totally missing out on high-impact opportunities to optimize your campaigns, explore new traffic sources, or develop strategic partnerships.

Worst of all, you may be forced to devote a major chunk of your margins on this work, undermining profits and destroying any chance of work-life balance as an affiliate.

So, how are things different now? It’s like night and day.

Here are my 4 favorite strategies you can deploy to automate these crucial processes in your affiliate business!

1) Using Marketing Software Workflows

Many popular email service providers (ESPs) and all-in-one marketing platforms come with a great deal of automation capabilities right out of the box that can significantly improve your affiliate marketing results.

The reason I’m starting with this strategy is because it’s the quickest win – you probably already use tools like this for email marketing, funnel building, or customer relationship management. So, as a good initial step in automating your business processes, you should start by making sure you’re using these tools to the fullest.

With Eat Stop Eat as our example affiliate product, say you’re growing your email list in Hubspot, and you’re finding that a few different intermittent fitness angles/hooks seem to resonate with your audience.

One way to employ automation is to create segments based on how your potential customers find you and opt in to your list. For example, you could set up initial segmentation based on:

• Goals: weight loss versus improved cognitive function
• Experience level: beginner versus experienced with intermittent fasting
• Content preference: academic research versus practical tips

I’ll briefly show you what an automated sequence for this might look like, but first, I want to explain why setting these automations up is so valuable.

If you were to drop everyone on your email list into an identical automated sequence or to receive the exact same weekly broadcast emails, your deliverability and engagement rate would suffer because people aren’t joining your list for the same reasons.

So if we segmented this list based on goal, we could say that everyone who joins is routed either to a weight loss branch or a cognitive function branch. Then, we could set up an automated email sequence with messaging that appeals to each audience segment, including educational content, social proof/success stories, production promotion, and further upsell/cross-sell opportunities – all delivered based on interest!

Automations allow you to tailor messaging to each audience segment you can identify for your business.

All of this work to segment and automate email messages to your different customers may seem like a lot of effort, but think about how much more effective your business will be when you’re delivering the exact right message at the right time to the right audience to encourage people to go buy your product!

2) Creating Custom AI Agents for Automation

Custom GPTs or agents represent a new frontier in affiliate marketing automation.

Unlike high-level AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude with a very general system prompt, specialized AI agents can be trained to handle specific aspects of your affiliate business, exactly the way you tell them to!

For example, you could create a custom GPT in ChatGPT to:

• Research and summarize the latest intermittent fasting studies to refer to for your weekly email newsletter
• Generate organic social content to stay active on social media
• Analyze competitor campaigns and identifying gaps you can target
• Handle common customer inquiries about your product through a customer support chatbot

There are so many use cases for agents, but one effective application for affiliates is creating a content generation GPT. You can train this agent to understand the nuances of intermittent fasting, your target audience’s pain points, and Eat Stop Eat’s unique selling propositions.

Then, it can automatically generate content ideas, outlines, and even draft articles that align with your content strategy.

You can build your own or find a custom GPT that someone else already built, such as the following “Fully SEO Optimized Article” GPT found in ChatGPT:

This was the simple prompt I entered in this GPT that’s built specifically for SEO content:

I want to promote the affiliate product Eat Stop Eat on ClickBank. Can you generate an outline for me on the topic of “intermittent fasting vs omad” as the basis of an SEO blog article? 

And here’s what it came up with:

Now, if I did this in the general ChatGPT with a ChatGPT 4o chat, what would I get?

The output is similar, content-wise, but the custom GPT feels more tailored to an SEO blog with the individual headings, points, and subpoints.

At any rate, if you have personalized preferences about how you want to interact with generative AI, building a custom GPT or AI agent allows you to bake all of those requests in at the system level, rather than requiring you to include them in your user prompt every single time.

Plus, it expands your capabilities by setting up multiple agents to work together on a team, a phenomenon known as an “agentic framework.” As an example, one agent could focus on research, another could focus on generating the content itself, and the last could focus on editing or quality assurance for your output.

The key to success with custom GPTs is learning how they work and providing crystal-clear instruction sets. The more specific you are about your needs, goals, and constraints, the more valuable this type of automation will be!

3) Building No-Code Automations

Custom AI agents are one way to build our an automated workflow, but they tend to be more siloed within a specific AI tool.

If you want your automation to extend across your entire ecosystem of software and tools, using a platform like N8n or Make.com (formerly Integromat) offers you some incredibly powerful no-code automation capabilities that can supercharge your affiliate marketing workflow!

These automations connect all the various tools and platforms you already use every day, so you can build out seamless workflows that run without any involvement on your part.

Let’s talk about a practical example of a Make.com scenario for promoting Eat Stop Eat by capturing trending topics to turn into content:

1. Set up a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and include URLs linked out to research studies about intermittment fasting.
2. Set it up to scrape these pages using an HTTP module.
3. Extract the data from the pages using a text parser module.
4. Summarize the content in a few paragraphs using an AI module like ChatGPT.
5. Drop the results in a Google doc to use for your campaigns.

Here’s what this Make.com automation would look like:

You can also easily change it to work not on an on-demand basis, but by checking at specific intervals like every Monday morning to see if you’ve updated your spreadsheet with more URLs.

The beauty of a platform like Make.com lies in its visual interface and its versatility. You can start with simple automations to do a very specific task in one of your workflows or processes, and gradually build more complex scenarios as your needs evolve – all connected by integrations to an absurd number of tools, from Hubspot to Outlook to Slack to Pinterest.

Here are some key tips for effective no-code automations:

• Map out a single, well-defined workflow to build off of
• Test your automation thoroughly before scaling it
• Monitor automation performance regularly
• Include error handling and notifications
• Document your scenarios for future reference

Note that every time you run a scenario in Make, you use operations. These aren’t free, and it’s moderately more expensive on top of that if you’re tapping into an AI tool like ChatGPT using their API tokens – but overall, this is an extremely affordable way to automate a lot of routine tasks associated with your affiliate business!

4) Writing Python Solutions for Advanced Affiliate Marketing

While AI agents or no-code solutions cover many automation needs, Python opens up possibilities for even more sophisticated automation – and with a lot less money spent than either of those options.

For affiliate marketers wanting to promote a product like Eat Stop Eat, custom Python scripts can provide deeper insights and more precise control over your campaigns.

One helpful example is pulling data from an affiliate network like ClickBank using their API so you can analyze key metrics like clicks, conversions, conversion rates, and even your general ROI using Python libraries like Pandas and NumPy.

Here’s a practical example of how Python can automate affiliate marketing tasks, with a sample Python code snippet for monitoring sales analytics for a product you’re promoting within a specified range without having to log into your ClickBank account:

def get_sales_analytics(self, start_date=None, end_date=None):
        """
        Retrieve sales analytics for a specified date range.
        
        Args:
            start_date (str): Start date in YYYY-MM-DD format (defaults to 30 days ago)
            end_date (str): End date in YYYY-MM-DD format (defaults to today)
            
        Returns:
            dict: Sales analytics data
        """
        # Set default date range if not provided (last 30 days)
        if not end_date:
            end_date = datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
        if not start_date:
            start_date = (datetime.now() - timedelta(days=30)).strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
        
        # Endpoint for analytics

This simple script is an example of a system that can:

• Monitor real-time sales performance
• Track commission rates across different traffic sources
• Generate automated performance reports
• Alert you to significant changes in conversion rates
• Aggregate competitor pricing data

The key advantage of custom Python is its ability to handle complex logic and integrate with multiple APIs.

For instance, you could create a system that automatically adjusts your ad spend based on real-time conversion data or rotates through different versions of your affiliate links based on tracking ID.

It’s far beyond the scope of this article to get in the weeds on automation using Python or other coding languages, but it’s certainly a powerful option for those with the skills and who want to tap into it.

How to Integrate These Strategies

The true power of affiliate marketing automation happens when you combine multiple automation strategies into one super-automation.

Here’s an example of how these tools can work together:

1. A custom GPT generates an optimized intermittent fasting video script for you
2. Make.com distributes this content across all major social platforms
3. Python scripts track your performance metrics
4. Marketing platform automations nurture leads

This integrated approach creates a comprehensive automation system that handles everything from content creation to conversion optimization.

It’s all powered by strong AI prompting skills. Be sure to check out our killer list of 109 ChatGPT prompts to get started!

Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing Automation

So, if you’re interested in setting up more affiliate marketing automation strategies in your business, here are some tips:

1) Assess your current processes

Before you start using automation in your affiliate marketing, look at what you’re doing every day. Find the tasks that take too much time, like sending emails by hand or updating links on your website. Write down all the steps you take to do these jobs. This will help you see where you need help the most.

Also, make a list of all the tools you use that need to work together. Think about your website, email system, social media, and affiliate networks. See where these tools don’t connect well. This will help you pick the right automation tools later.

2) Start small

When you begin with automation, don’t try to change everything at once. Pick just one task to automate first. Maybe you could set up automatic emails to new subscribers, or use a tool that updates all your affiliate links at once.

After you set up your first automation, keep an eye on how it’s working. Compare your results to what you were getting before when you handled this same task manually, and watch for ways to make it better. Once this first automation is working well, you can slowly expand on it or add totally new ones.

3) Monitor and adjust

To make your automation work optimally, you need to keep an eye on it. Track important numbers like total sales, clicks, and time saved. Build out a simple chart using a tool like LucidChart or Figma so you can map out how the process works and see how each step is going.

Ask your team, customers, and vendors what they think about your new system. They’ll likely be honest with you about any steps in the process that are breaking down. After you have it working, that doesn’t mean you’re done. Set a reminder to check in every few months and make changes.

Believe it or not, automation isn’t something you set up and forget – you need to keep improving it to get the best results!

Automate Your Affiliate Marketing Business Wrap-up

Automation is no longer optional in affiliate marketing – it’s a necessity for staying competitive and scaling your business, while saving your manual effort for only the highest-impact work.

By implementing these five strategies across a variety of important but repetitive processes, you can create a more efficient, profitable affiliate marketing operation that runs smoothly with less manual work or expensive labor costs.

In the end, remember that automation should enhance – not replace – your strategic thinking and creativity. The most successful affiliate marketers use automation to handle routine tasks while focusing their energy on key work like strategy, relationship building, and identifying new opportunities.

I hope this guide has been helpful! I packed a lot of ideas into a single article, so if you’re interested in learning more about any of them, here are some additional suggested resources you can check out:

• The Make.com tutorial library
• Python for marketers courses (I’m enjoying SoloLearn’s Python for Beginners course)
• Email marketing automation guides (can’t go wrong with Hubspot!)
• Community forums for affiliate marketers

Ultimately, start with one automation strategy that aligns with your immediate needs, iterate on it until it runs like clockwork, and gradually build your automation stack as your affiliate business grows.

The time and effort invested in setting up these systems will pay dividends in increased efficiency and scalability down the road!

Well, I have good news! In this guide, I’ll explain at a high level the different ways you can make money with ClickBank, whether you’re an affiliate, a seller, or a little bit of both!

Are you ready to unlock the earning potential of the internet’s most trusted affiliate marketing platform? Read to the end for a crystal-clear roadmap on how to make money with ClickBank and scale your efforts for long-term success. Let’s dive in!

How to Make Money with ClickBank

ClickBank is the leading platform for affiliate marketers and sellers who want to grow their revenue online. However, the exact approach you take will differ depending on which side of that coin you fall on.

Also, if you’re still new to the world of direct response and affiliate marketing, I strongly recommend you focus on just ONE path at first so you can learn it thoroughly and get some traction. Once you’re doing well as either an affiliate marketer or a product owner, it’s always possible to add on the other track.

Fortunately, I structured this guide to cover both affiliate strategies and seller opportunities for ClickBank customers. Read on to see some money-making strategies for affiliates, or feel free to skip ahead to check out what the path looks like for sellers growing an affiliate program on ClickBank!

How Affiliates Earn Commissions with ClickBank

We’ve touched on the various ways that affiliates can make money in other articles on ClickBank’s blog, as well as in our free Getting Started with ClickBank affiliate course – so I won’t dive into this too in-depth here. But at a high level, we say that an affiliate is going to “promote” someone else’s products in order to get paid a commission.

Let’s imagine there’s a really helpful exercise program that you think people in your audience would want to own. In order to succeed as an affiliate, you simply need a way to get just some of that audience to click on a special tracking link for your chosen product.

Every time someone clicks your link and goes on to buy the program, you make a commission. And if you get a 50% commission on a product that costs $80, that’s $40 in your pocket for just one sale! 

That’s a good overview of what the money-making process looks like for affiliates, but let’s walk through each of the four main steps affiliates need to follow to earn money with ClickBank:

1. Choose a Profitable Affiliate Product
2. Grab Your Custom Tracking Link
3. Promote the Link Online
4. Make Commissions on Every Sale

1. Choose a Profitable Affiliate Product

Selecting the right product is the one of the most important parts of affiliate success on ClickBank.

With thousands of different products available for you to promote in ClickBank’s marketplace, it’s really important for you to focus on products that fit your audience and also offer strong earning potential.

Here’s how to make an informed choice:

Understand Key Metrics in the Marketplace

ClickBank provides detailed metrics for every product in its marketplace. Familiarize yourself with these to identify the most promising offers:

• Gravity Score: The ClickBank Gravity Score metric indicates how many affiliates have made sales recently. A higher gravity score often means the product is popular, but extremely high scores might indicate heavy competition. Look for products with a moderate gravity (e.g., 20–100) for a balance of demand and opportunity.
• Commission Rate: Products on ClickBank offer affiliates like you a commission percentage ranging from 10% to 75% or more – or you may be able to guarantee yourself a flat commission amount that you earn for every sale. Aim for offers with higher average payouts to maximize your total earnings.
• Rebill Options: Some products include recurring commissions, meaning you earn every time a customer renews their subscription. These can provide long-term passive income.
• Average Dollar Per Conversion (Avg $/Conversion): This shows the average earnings affiliates make per sale (sometimes called average payout value, or APV), which is a combination of upfront and recurring revenue.

A few other important tips to keep in mind:

1. Evaluate a product’s sales page.

A high-converting sales page (a.k.a. pitch page) should have a clear headline and value proposition, feature top-tier sales copy, and include plenty of testimonials and proof of results.

The page itself should be mobile-friendly and fast-loading – and in our experience, for most top products on ClickBank, a highly-produced video sales letter (VSL) will typically see the best conversions, so you should make sure the product at least has a VSL option to choose from.

Ultimately, if the sales page looks unprofessional or doesn’t align with your brand as an affiliate, then it may not convert well with your audience, even if the product itself is excellent.

Similarly, it’s worth looking at their affiliate tools page to see if they have any swipe files, demographic data, or other resources to help you find more success with the product, more quickly.

2. Research the Seller’s Reputation

ClickBank sellers and their products may vary in terms of conversions, payouts, and responsiveness. It’s a good idea to look for sellers with:

• A history of positive affiliate feedback.
• Consistently high gravity scores across their products.
• Active support channels, so you can ask questions or resolve issues quickly.

A lot of this information will come from attending industry events and networking with fellow affiliates.

By carefully selecting the right products and the companies behind them, you can build a sustainable income stream while providing value to your audience!

2) Grab Your Custom Tracking Link

Once you’ve chosen a product to promote, your next step is to generate a unique affiliate tracking link (also known as a “hoplink” on ClickBank). This special link is how ClickBank will give you credit for every sale you earn through your marketing campaigns.

Here’s how it works:

1. Log Into ClickBank: Head to the ClickBank Marketplace and find the product you’ve selected to promote.

2. Click “Promote”: On the product listing, click the “Promote” button. A window will pop up asking you to input your affiliate nickname (the one you set up when creating your ClickBank account).

Some ClickBank products require you to be approved by the seller before you can create a tracking link and start promoting, but most products are ready to promote right away. 

3. Generate Your HopLink: Click the “Generate HopLink” button. This will produce your custom tracking link that’s tied to your affiliate account.

Your HopLink is unique to you, so whenever someone clicks it and makes a purchase, ClickBank automatically tracks the transaction and ensures you receive your commission for every sale!

3) Promote Your Link Online

Now that you have your custom tracking link, it’s time to start driving traffic to it!

This step right here is where affiliates spend the bulk of their time and effort, because promoting the link effectively is what will allow you to get clicks (and turn them into commissions).

Here are 5 of the most popular ways affiliates promote their tracking links:

• Content Publisher – These affiliates primarily use blogs or websites to drive traffic through SEO and content marketing. By publishing helpful and informative content, they attract visitors who may click on affiliate links to make a purchase. This model has a low barrier to entry, minimal costs, and can generate passive income over time, but it requires patience and consistent effort to see results.
• PPC/Media Buyer – These affiliates use paid ads on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Google to drive immediate traffic to affiliate offers. While this method can produce fast results and scale quickly, it comes with high costs and the risk of losing money if ad campaigns aren’t optimized correctly.
• Email Marketer – Email affiliates build and nurture a list of email subscribers, sending targeted promotions to a highly engaged audience. Owning an email list gives them control over their traffic, reducing reliance on external platforms. However, managing an email list requires investment in email marketing tools and a careful balance between providing value and promoting offers.
• Social Influencer – Influencers leverage popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube to promote affiliate products to their following. They benefit from “free” traffic but need a large, engaged audience in order to make significant earnings. They must also maintain their brand credibility by avoiding excessive promotion and by sharing relevant products.
• Community Manager – These affiliates build and manage online communities on platforms like Facebook Groups, Discord servers, or forums. They influence members by curating and enabling valuable discussions while sharing product recommendations. However, growing and maintaining an active community takes time, and self-serving promotions can be frowned upon if not handled correctly.

This is just barely scratching the surface of these different methods of promoting affiliate products. Click to learn more about the different types of affiliates. 

4) Make Commissions on Every Sale

This is the most exciting part of affiliate marketing: earning commissions!

Whenever someone clicks your hoplink, they’re taken to a product’s sales page (also known as a pitch page). If the visitor goes on to make a purchase, then you earn part of the sale as a commission.

The good news is, ClickBank handles all of the heavy lifting for you:

• Tracking Sales: ClickBank’s tracking system ensures that your affiliate ID is credited for the sale.
• Payouts: Once your commissions meet the minimum payment threshold (as low as $10), ClickBank pays you weekly or biweekly via direct deposit, check, or Payoneer.

Even better, if you’ve promoted a product with a subscription or rebill model, then you can continue earning commissions every time the customer you referred renews their subscription or pays again.

Of course, the more clicks you get, the better your odds of getting a sale. If your typical conversion rate is 2%, that means it takes on average 100 clicks for you to get 2 sales!

Want to learn more about this commission-earning step? I share my own in-depth experience about how to make your first sale on ClickBank.

Next Steps for Affiliates

And that’s it: the 4 simple steps you can take to make money on ClickBank as an affiliate! 

Obviously, there’s not enough time to cover every single detail or nuance of every one of these steps, but hopefully you found it a helpful overview of what it actually looks like to be a successful ClickBank affiliate.

If you want to learn more about any of these steps, this ClickBank for Beginners guide is a great next resource for you to dive into… or our Affiliate Marketing 101 guide!

And for even more step-by-step help, consider checking out our affiliate marketing education program, Spark by ClickBank. You’ll learn everything you need for affiliate marketing success on both free and paid traffic opportunities.

How Sellers Grow an Affiliate Program with ClickBank

When people think of ClickBank, it’s often from the affiliate’s POV: finding a product in the marketplace, grabbing their own tracking link, and promoting it to their audience to generate commissions.

But ClickBank isn’t just for affiliates – ClickBank is also a robust platform for sellers who have a product and want to grow their businesses with an affiliate program.

After all, somebody is creating these popular products for affiliates to promote… Why not YOU?

Here’s what making money with ClickBank looks like for our many successful sellers:

1. Create a Compelling Affiliate Product
2. Optimize Your Affiliate Tools
3. Attract Top Affiliates
4. Scale Your Sales

1) Create a Compelling Affiliate Product

It’s difficult to define exactly what a great product is for top affiliates, because it depends on factors like niche and unique selling proposition – but the really bottom line is the bottom line.

In other words, if affiliates think your product will convert and make them more money than they spend to promote it, you’ll be in good shape to attract top affiliates.

This is why it’s crucial for you to get to know the biggest stats a high-level affiliate will care about when looking at a product they may want to promote:

• Conversion rate (CR): Sometimes known as the hop conversion rate on ClickBank, this number refers to how many people go on to buy the product after clicking an affiliate’s tracking link and landing on the seller’s pitch page. Conversion rate will vary from affiliate to affiliate promoting the product, but usually, a higher average conversion rate overall should mean that both you and your top affiliates will see more conversions as well.
• Average Payout Value (APV): This number is simply the amount of money an affiliate will earn per sale of a given ClickBank product on average. Since many ClickBank products feature upsell flows that help boost the overall cart value, your average payout depends on how well-optimized a product’s sales pages and funnel are.
• Earnings Per Click (EPC): One way to figure out the money-making potential of different affiliate products and compare apples to apples is with the earnings per click (EPC) metric. Essentially, an affiliate is dividing their total earnings generated per total clicks in a given timeframe. So, if they have earnings of $1,000 across 2000 clicks, you’d have an EPC of $0.50.

This number is helpful for affiliates because they can easily compare the earnings they make “per click” with the cost per click they’re spending on ad networks like Facebook Ads to make sure they’re profitable. And it eliminates the need to worry about factors like conversion rate and average payout when they’re comparing one affiliate product to the next.

Ultimately, it’s a good way to “bottom line” a product’s performance. If an affiliate’s EPC is higher on one product compared to another one, then that first product is more profitable for them – period. 

Lowering Your Refund Rate

Every product you create is going to have refunds (and possibly chargebacks). That’s just the nature of business. But a product with too many refunds (>10-12% of total sales) is going to hurt your performance with affiliates.

On ClickBank, you’ll typically pay out a percentage of each sale to an affiliate, so if there’s a refund on one of their sales, the affiliate will actually lose some of the money they already earned. But even if you move on to a cost-per-action (CPA) or flat payout basis with certain top affiliates, a higher refund rate means that you won’t be able to pay out as much per sale on average, since you’re the one covering those refunds.

Either way, refunds are deadly for an affiliate program, and you should aim to keep yours as low as possible by making realistic promises in your pitch page/sales letter, delivering a quality product, and handling fulfillment efficiently (for physical products).

You should also consider whether you want to create a physical or digital product. Often, a physical product has a higher perceived value since it’s a tangible item, but it may also be more difficult to sell. As a rule of thumb, physical products (especially consumables like dietary supplements) will have a lower conversion rate, but a higher average payout that hopefully makes up for it.

Conversely, digital products like ebooks, online courses, and software tend to convert at a higher rate on ClickBank, because they’re priced lower – but they could also have a higher refund rate, because it’s easier to return a digital product than a physical one.

You should also think about which niche is likely to have the best affiliates. At least on ClickBank, we can connect them to our 10 top affiliate niches, based on which have the most sales by gross dollars or unit count. It’s hard to go wrong if your product falls within one of the top 10 niches.

Ultimately, regardless of the product type and niche you choose, the most important thing is ensuring your product solves a specific problem for a specific audience and delivers tremendous value!

2) Optimize Your Affiliate Tools

Once you’ve created and onboarded your physical or digital product onto ClickBank, it’s time to optimize your affiliate tools page and create any resources that affiliates may benefit from to more effectively promote your product.

What we call the “affiliate tools page” or “affiliate resources” can be found on virtually every top offers listed on ClickBank’s marketplace.

You can see the tools page for yourself in an individual marketplace listing by clicking the “Affiliate Page” button at the bottom right corner.

These pages will typically include email swipes (with copy that’s already been tested and proven to convert), maybe some demographic data for media buyers on Facebook Ads, and sometimes product or banner images for bloggers.

You might also have a hoplink generator or a way for affiliates to choose the landing page they want to point their traffic to, broken up either by format (video sales letter vs. text sales letter), audience segment, or funnel type.

Here’s what a quality affiliate tools page looks like:

You don’t need to overthink this. The most important thing is making sure that it’s as easy as possible for affiliates to come in and start promoting your product.

It’s sort of like you’re outsourcing your marketing to a third party, but the more resources you provide, the more likely it is to reflect on your brand.

3) Attract Top Affiliates

Attracting top-tier affiliates isn’t just about having a good product – it’s about proving your offer’s potential through hard data.

As we mentioned earlier, the best affiliates on ClickBank are sophisticated marketers who tend to make decisions based on key performance metrics:

• Conversion Rate (CR): Demonstrate a consistently high hop conversion rate that proves your sales funnel is optimized from pitch page to order form.
• Earnings Per Click (EPC): Show compelling EPC numbers of at least $1-2 that prove the profitability of your offer.
• Average Payout Value (APV): Highlight the total revenue potential per sale. You’ll start to get attention for supplements in the $130+ APV range, or for lower-ticket digital products with an APV of $50+. 

Think of it this way: affiliates are business owners looking for the best return on their investment, whether that’s buying ads or using up real estate on their emails or blog posts to promote affiliate products. They want assurances that if they promote your product, there’s a reasonable chance that it’ll pay off.

That’s why it’s so important to test your own offer on cold traffic across platforms, from Facebook to native to third-party email lists and publisher sites. That way, when you ask an affiliate to promote your product, you’ll have cold hard data to prove it’s worth their time.

Of course, beyond the numbers, this is very much a relationship-oriented industry. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. So if people don’t know you and you don’t know people, you’re going to have a difficult time getting the best affiliates. 

Remember, your network matters just as much as your numbers. Build relationships within your niche, attend industry events, and be active in ClickBank affiliate communities, especially at our roadshows and any invite-only Platinum or Diamond Summit events you qualify for.

Top affiliates are always looking for the next breakout offer, and personal connections will definitely set you apart.

4) Scale Your Sales

Scaling your sales on ClickBank isn’t just about attracting affiliates – it’s about creating an ecosystem that keeps top performers excited and motivated to promote your product.

ClickBank offers powerful tools to help you manage and incentivize your affiliate network.

Custom Commission Groups

Our platform allows you to create tailored commission structures that reward your top performers. Simply by migrating high-performing affiliates from the revenue share RevShare commission structure to our flat-rate cost-per-action (CPA) model, you eliminate the affiliates’ risk from refunds.

You can also build out tiered commission structures that motivate affiliates to drive more sales in exchange for a higher tier of commission payouts!

Affiliate Whitelisting

Take control of your affiliate base by:

• Approving specific affiliates who align with your brand
• Screening out potentially low-quality or off-brand promoters
• Building a curated network of high-quality affiliate marketers

ClickBank provides a full suite of resources to help you decide how to manage the affiliates you work with.

Joint-Venture (JV) Partnerships

Get creative with how you split sales and collaborate with top affiliates and business partners, opening up new revenue opportunities and marketing channels. You can even sometimes do second-tier affiliate (or affiliate referral) contracts, motivating top affiliates to bring on even more affiliates!

Ongoing Funnel Optimization

There’s a lot of flexibility in how you work with affiliates on ClickBank’s platform, but the true key to long-term scaling is simply relentless improvement:

• Experiment with different upsells and downsells in your funnel
• Test new angles and hooks for your text or video sales letters
• Prioritize product fulfillment, especially for physical products, to ensure satisfied customers and a low refund rate
• Continuously gather and implement customer feedback

By focusing on these strategies, you’ll create a win-win scenario: affiliates earn more reliable commissions from your products, customers receive better products, and your brand enjoys sustained and consistent sales growth.

For a whole lot more detail on how to find success as a seller on ClickBank, be sure to check out our scalable affiliate program guide.

Why ClickBank Affiliate Marketing Works for Everyone

In the end, ClickBank is more than just a marketplace – it’s an entire ecosystem that empowers business owners on all sides of the affiliate marketing equation.

Benefits for Affiliates:

• Zero Financial Barrier to Entry: Unlike many business models, becoming a ClickBank affiliate requires no upfront investment. You can start promoting products immediately, with no inventory to purchase, no product development costs, and no complex setup.
• Unprecedented Product Diversity: Our marketplace offers thousands of products across multiple niches.
• Rock-Solid Payment Reliability: We’ve paid out more than $6.7 billion in commissions over the past 26+ years in business, with no missed payments.

Benefits for Sellers:

• Instant Access to a Global Affiliate Network: Our platform connects you with thousands of motivated marketers eager to promote high-quality products, which means access to world-class performance affiliates as soon as you sign up.
• Simplified Financial and Technical Infrastructure: ClickBank handles the complex backend of affiliate marketing, including automated commission tracking, secure payment processing, fraud prevention, and robust reporting and analytics.
• Advanced Marketing and Optimization Tools: Our platform provides sellers with sophisticated resources, like marketplace metrics, conversion tracking, affiliate management, and custom commission structures.

The ClickBank Advantage: Flexibility and Growth

Whether you’re an affiliate looking to monetize your audience or a seller seeking to expand your reach, ClickBank provides a robust, user-friendly platform that adapts to your unique business needs. Our ecosystem is designed to minimize barriers and maximize earning potential, making online marketing accessible to entrepreneurs at every level.

From digital product creators to social media influencers, from niche bloggers to established brands, ClickBank offers the tools, network, and support to turn your online marketing ambitions into reality.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to make money with ClickBank for free?

You can always start a social media account, blog, or podcast with very little money and build up a following that way.

Of course, nothing is truly “free” – if you’re not going to spend much money, you’ll have to put in a lot of time and effort to see results through organic traffic. But there are many ways to promote affiliate products without a large upfront financial cost. 

How to make money with ClickBank without a website?

As an affiliate, you may be able to get away with just a landing page, if you’re focusing on paid ads, organic social, or even a community to manage. The key is having a domain that you own.

With that said, websites don’t have to be expensive – web hosting is usually just $5-10 per month. Depending on your strategy, it may still be worth looking into running a simple website for your affiliate campaigns.

On the seller side, you may be able to get by with just your pitch page and a tools page for your affiliates, which is still much more manageable than building an entire website.

What are the most common mistakes for new affiliates?

The biggest mistake is choosing a niche you don’t understand deeply. Success in affiliate marketing requires:

• Intimate knowledge of your target audience
• An understanding their specific pain points
• An ability to communicate solutions effectively
• Patience and persistent learning

It’s difficult to achieve that level of expertise and mastery in a subject you’re not interested in. 

How long does it take to make money with ClickBank?

Our internal data tells us that, on average, it takes 570 days from ClickBank account creation to receiving your first paycheck (as an affiliate).

This timeline reflects the learning curve and the time required to develop marketing strategies that work, but it’s only an average – your results will depend on your own knowledge and effort.

However, experienced affiliates who have an established audience or know how to run ads can start generating commissions almost immediately!

Get Started with ClickBank

Whether you’re ready to earn commissions as an affiliate or looking to scale your product sales as a seller, ClickBank is a proven platform for business growth.

With thousands of high-converting digital and physical products to choose from, affiliates can earn commissions by simply sharing their unique tracking links with the right audience. Meanwhile, sellers can tap into a vast network of affiliates eager to promote quality offers, helping drive more sales and scale their businesses faster than ever.

No matter which path you take, ClickBank provides the tools, support, and marketplace visibility to help you succeed. With built-in tracking, analytics, and seamless payouts, you can focus on what matters most—growing your online income.

Sign up for ClickBank today and take the first step toward generating passive income, expanding your reach, and building a thriving online business. The opportunities are waiting – now’s the perfect time to take action!

Obviously, affiliate marketing is more competitive than ever, and breaking through the noise on social media channels can feel like an uphill battle. Whether you’re leveraging free organic traffic or running paid ads on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, you’ll always need compelling, high-converting content to get results!

Enter Ember AI, ClickBank’s brand-new AI-powered tool designed specifically for affiliate marketers. With Ember, you can generate high-performing ad creatives, social media posts, and video scripts in just a few clicks – without spending hours writing or testing copy.

And from there, you can even create AI-powered images or videos that are perfect for sharing to social or using in your ads.

Sound interesting? Let’s dive into how Ember can revolutionize your affiliate marketing strategy!

What is Ember AI?

Ember AI is a cutting-edge content generation tool built for affiliates promoting ClickBank products.

There are two things right off the bat that make Ember unique in the AI landscape:

1. Ember is designed to generate content for an affiliate marketing use case
2. Ember is trained on the marketing materials for top-performing ClickBank products

All of this means Ember understands the language, angles, and persuasive tactics that actually drive conversions.

With Ember, you can:

• Come up with high-converting ad copy for paid campaigns
• Craft compelling scripts for short-form videos
• Create engaging organic posts tailored for specific offers
• Generate AI-powered videos in just a few clicks

To get started, you just choose whether you want to focus on paid traffic or social traffic with this little toggle in the bottom left corner.

For this overview, we’ll stay in Paid Traffic mode.

Now, let’s talk about how all of this actually works in practice by diving into Ember’s UI and taking it for a test drive!

How to Use Ember AI for Affiliate Marketing

Step 1: Select a ClickBank Offer

Once you log into Ember, you’ll see a list of top-performing ClickBank products ready for promotion.

No matter which top affiliate marketing niche you choose – from health and wellness to survival to biz opp to DIY – you’ll find plenty of products that are proven to convert and ready to promote inside Ember.

Notice how many of these same products show up in the top results on ClickBank’s marketplace (all at the time of this writing).

So, let’s take Ted’s Woodworking as an example.

This is a classic ClickBank offer with strong conversions that shows up all the time in our rankings of ClickBank top offers. What we can do is go through a few simple steps to generate ideas for angles, written copy, and even finished images or videos for this classic affiliate product.

Step 2: Choose a Call-to-Action

Once we set Ted’s Woodworking as the ClickBank product we want to promote, we can jump to the next step, which is choosing a call-to-action (CTA).

Ember gives you multiple pre-optimized CTAs to choose from, all designed to encourage engagement and drive traffic to your affiliate link.

Whether it’s “DM me” or “Click link,” Ember ensures you always have some kind of CTA so that your social posts or ads are getting clicks.

In this case, I’ll choose “Click link to watch video.” Now, we’re on to picking our angle!

Step 3: Pick a Winning Marketing Angle

This is where Ember really shines. Great marketing is all about angles, or capturing the perspectives that will resonate with an audience and encouraging them to take the next step.

Ember has six different angle types built right into the tool, including:

• Value: Show off what makes your chosen product an incredible deal.
• Fear: Tap into your audience’s pain points, especially around potential loss or struggle with if they don’t take action.
• Story: Share a compelling narrative, ideally one with an inspirational transformation story.
• Comparison: Demonstrate how this product or solution stacks up to competitors or traditional alternatives.
• Benefit: Talk about the direct advantages of this product or solution for your audience.
• Question: Spark curiosity with a thought-provoking question or series of questions.

These 6 specific angles have been proven to connect with audiences across thousands of video sales letters and ad creatives!

For this example, let’s choose Story Angle and see what Ember generates.

With a click, Ember instantly produces conversion-optimized post ideas based on real marketing materials from the ClickBank product Ted’s Woodworking.

No more second-guessing your messaging and copywriting – Ember just gives you exactly what works! Here are a few of the ideas it generated for us:

Each of these angle ideas builds on the concept of a “story angle” for Ted’s Woodworking, weaving a compelling story to draw your audience in and get them to engage with the product.

Step 4: Transform Content into High-Converting Creatives

Once you’ve selected an angle, Ember allows you to instantly convert it into different content formats, including:

• Video scripts for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts
• Social media posts optimized for engagement
• Long-form captions for Facebook and LinkedIn

And with Ember’s built-in AI editing tools, you can tweak copy on the fly by clicking in the box and editing yourself, or ask Ember to refine it further using the Copilot chatbot function.

When you’re happy with your content, just hit the share button and then “Publish” to post directly to your social media accounts – no extra steps required!

For our Ted’s Woodworking content, I took one of the scripts from these angle ideas and turned it into an AI-generated video that I can easily publish as short-form content straight to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or a rich pin on Pinterest.

All I had to do was hit the “Use This Angle” button and then wait for Ember to generate an Edit of the idea, then hit the “Create…” button, and then “Generate AI Story/Reel.”

This is a powerful and intuitive way to turn written copy into great videos for all the socials on both organic and paid!

3 Advanced Features: Ember’s AI Copilot & Personalization

I’ve touched on the most fundamental use case for Ember, which is coming up with the kinds of angles and hooks that can power successful organic content and paid media campaigns.

But there’s a lot more to explore here. I’ve picked 3 of my favorite advanced Ember features to highlight next!

1) Ember’s AI Copilot

If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, you’ll feel right at home with Ember’s AI chatbot, which is mysteriously named “The Copilot.” (Sounds like the start of a good sci-fi thriller to me!)

This built-in assistant provides real-time marketing insights, suggests improvements to your content, and helps optimize your campaigns for better results.

For example, I prompted Copilot with the following:

“I want to share some of Ember’s capabilities with the ClickBank audience. Can you summarize its best features?”

Boom… INSTANT talking points I can use for an article just like this one!

Best of all, you can easily chat back and forth with The Copilot in Ember to ensure you get the exact output you’re looking for.

2) Personalized AI Writing

So, why not just use the free version of an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude for your affiliate marketing efforts?

Well, you CAN, of course! I’ve used them both.

But the fact is, these massive AI tools are designed to do everything for everyone. Ember isn’t just another generic AI – it’s deliberately built to learn your tone of voice and personality, and then create content with it for marketing purposes.

If you fill out a quick onboarding questionnaire, Ember will adapt its copywriting output to sound more like you, which means your content feels genuine and authentic, even when it’s powered by AI.

3) AI Image and Video Generation

In addition to generating compelling written sales copy, Ember does a great job of generating images and videos for your chosen affiliate product – or a product of your own – with the ultimate goal of distribution on social media.

It’s possible to use other image generation tools instead of, or in addition to, Ember. But the quality here is very good and streamlines your workflow, which is everything for a fast-paced space like affiliate marketing.

As for video content, I’ve messed around with AI video tools like Sora before, and while they are definitely impressive, they’re too expensive for creating videos for social media – especially at the volume you’re going to need to stay competitive!

Beyond that, you have to add a lot of steps to your workflow, filling in the AI on context about what you’re trying to do, which affiliate product you’re promoting, what its unique selling proposition or hooks are, and why you need the content it’s producing.

Ember is up to speed on all of it from Day One. It’s going to get you where you want to go much faster and more efficiently than trying to piece it all together with several separate tools.

NOTE: In this Ember overview, I wanted to emphasize the strength of Ember’s AI features, because AI is obviously flashy and exciting right now. But I want to point out that you maintain FULL control over how much AI you actually use in your content with Ember.

If you want the tool to generate some ideas that you then write a script from yourself, great! And you can always upload your own images or use the teleprompter feature to record yourself delivering the script. With Ember, you’re in control!

Why Every Affiliate Needs Ember AI

I’m impressed to say that I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Ember. I just wanted to provide a good overview of what’s possible here for affiliate marketers and product owners.

And honestly, these are REALLY cool features!

I’m a long-time professional content marketer (I’d rather not share HOW long…) – and it’s uncanny how effective Ember is at coming up with compellingh ideas for content or ads, executing on those ideas with text generation, and ultimately, turning that copy into multimedia assets.

But here’s the potentially million-dollar question:

Here’s the reality: Your affiliate success comes down to you publishing quality content at scale. Whether that’s for testing dozens of paid ad creatives until you find a winning combination for your affiliate offer, or just building your own organic following, your business will live and die on both the quality and quantity of your content output.

The good news is, Ember makes this easier than ever! Whether you’re focused on free traffic or paid ads, Ember empowers you to:

• Save time generating high-quality content
• Eliminate writer’s block with AI-driven angles and ideas
• Test and refine messaging to improve conversions
• Stay ahead of the competition with cutting-edge AI

Make no mistake, your competition IS using AI right now to promote their affiliate program of choice. But because Ember is a brand-new tool, they may not be using it yet!

So here’s your chance to grab a huge advantage and leverage AI’s features to help your business scale faster than ever before. This is the perfect time to start leveraging AI to help you find more success promoting the highest-converting affiliate products on ClickBank.

Stay tuned for more information on how to get started with AI + ClickBank!

The term is a little slangy, but I’ve heard it out there in the wild long enough to know it’s an important issue worth talking about.

My definition of a wantrepreneur is:

An aspiring entrepreneur who dreams about starting or growing a business, but doesn’t ever get around to actually doing it.

Now, this isn’t in any way meant to be a dig at anyone who’s guilty of being a wantpreneur. I get it – because I was one too! (And I still am sometimes, because old habits die hard.)

But it might be a necessary dose of tough love for the dreamers out there watching YouTube videos, buying courses, and reading articles or books about entrepreneurship… without any actual business to show for it.

In this post, I want to talk about what it takes to get past the “dream” stage of entrepreneurship and into the “doer” stage where success actually happens. If you read to the end, you’ll take away some concrete ideas on how to turn your potential business into actual profits. Let’s dive in!

Hi, I’m a Wantrepreneur

In case you don’t know me, my name is Daniel Thrasher, and I’m Senior Content Manager here at ClickBank. In my earlier article about how to make your first ClickBank sale, I shared a few details from my own entrepreneurial background:

I graduated college in 2010 and launched a freelance business writing content for some clients. As a copywriter of SEO blog posts, webpages, emails, social posts, and other digital content, I had a firsthand look at a lot of the tactics people were using to make a successful business online.

And yet, I didn’t even seriously attempt my own online business until 2019 – and my first affiliate sale wasn’t until 2021.

I go on to point out that the real reason things started to happen for me as an entrepreneur is because I FINALLY started a specific business (the Improve Songwriting brand) around a specific topic (the music niche) on a specific traffic channel (SEO blog) for a specific affiliate offer (Piano For All) and practiced doing that one thing well, instead of endlessly bouncing between the countless different options under the sun.

Obviously, picking a business to start is the biggest prerequisite to success, but a LOT of people don’t make it past this stage… so let’s start there.

Why You Can’t Choose Which Business to Start

The opportunities out there seem endless. And in many ways, they are!

I grew up in a connected world where the internet was already allowing everyday people to blog, post, and sell products or services online for a fraction of the cost traditionally required to start a business – back when “starting a business” usually meant a brick-and-mortar store, restaurant, or professional practice.

But now that the internet has brought down the cost of starting a business, almost every business model is on the table. And that might actually be a bad thing.

Too Many Options, Too Little Time

The low barrier-to-entry is a huge blessing of the modern business landscape, but it’s also a curse. As I explained in my post about 17 ways to make money online, there are a TON of different ways you can make extra cash on the internet – and any ONE of these can become a full-fledged business in their own right!

At the risk of sounding too academic, there’s a term for this phenomenon, popularized in a book and TED talk of the same name: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

Schwartz argues that the freedom to choose – and the sheer number of potential options – is actually making people more anxious, dissatisfied, and ultimately paralyzed. This is apparent in the realm of online business, where people can pursue a dizzying range of business models or moneymaking ideas, including:

• Dropshipping
• Digital products
• Online arbitrage
• Coaching
• Consulting
• Freelancing
• Investing
• Content creation
• Social media influencing
• Software
• Ecommerce
• Affiliate marketing

And that barely scratches the surface!

No wonder someone who’s new to the world of business and online marketing would get stuck in analysis paralysis with such a big list of potential opportunities.

Scarcity of Resources

Here’s the other reason why you’re probably not committing to a specific business path and instead stuck in “wantrepreneur” mode: you don’t want to waste your time and money on something that doesn’t end up working out.

Not using your limited resources is a perfectly valid reason NOT to start a business – but the thing is, if you actually WANT to start one, then you’ll NEED to part with some amount of time and money to actually do it!

I think the sticking point is that all of us want a guarantee that the thing we’re doing will get the results we want, whether that’s passive income, time and location freedom, or just more money than we’re making now. An entrepreneur knows that failure is a part of the process – but a wantrepreneur wants all the benefits of the online business without putting the time and money in to build one unless they’re guaranteed a payoff later.

Here’s the good news: the actual financial cost of starting most online businesses nowadays is so trivial that you can usually bootstrap with savings or income from your job, instead of taking out a loan or home equity line of credit to get started. But it isn’t ZERO dollars, either, even with so-called “free traffic” approaches like social media influencing or SEO blogging.

The mental shift you need to graduate from a Dreamer to a Doer is to think of these early steps as paying your dues, getting valuable experience, and discovering what doesn’t work so you can hit upon what does. Almost no one starts with success right out of the gate, so the sooner you get started and intelligently invest your resources into a business of your choice, the closer you’ll be to the results you want.

Tip 1: Follow a Proven Playbook

By now, we’ve established that most wantrepreneurs are paralyzed by choice and a fear of wasting time and money.

But there’s an antidote to both of those problems: following a proven playbook by someone who’s already done what you want to do!

Deep down, you probably already have an idea of which type of business is interesting to you. Maybe you’re drawn to affiliate marketing, or selling your own digital product, or becoming a coach. Regardless of which one it is, someone out there has already done it successfully – and if you follow the steps they did and put in the work, you’ll be able to see similar results.

So, if you’ve been stumbling around looking for answers in books, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and so on without success, then it might be time to invest in a single program that’ll teach you what you need to know. These can be pricey, sometimes in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars, but it’s the closest you can get to “guaranteeing” success, because the playbook is proven. That’s what makes it worth paying for.

And guess what? That’s exactly what I did.

As an SEO blogger, I followed a combination of Income School’s “Project 24” and Authority Hacker’s “Authority Site System” back in the day to learn more about affiliate blogging and apply their lessons to my own site. As a result, my blog grew and I started making money from display ads and affiliate sales.

This initial step is going to require some research and soul-searching on your part. What type of business do you actually want to build? What can you stick with for the next 3-5 years?

Choose Your Business Model

At ClickBank, we firmly believe that affiliate marketing is one of the very best business models anyone can follow, because you don’t have to create your own product and you can benefit from the sales skills of the world’s best marketers and copywriters. Basically, if you can master a single traffic source, from running YouTube Ads to becoming an Instagram influencer, then you can make money as an affiliate.

I put together a list of the best affiliate marketing courses, if that’s helpful to you – but I also want to specifically recommend Spark by ClickBank, where real experts provide the exact roadmap they used to become Platinum clients on ClickBank (making more than $250K in sales per year).

And the best part is, we have the data to prove it, because all of their product sales are processed through our platform. We can validate that these are experts who know what they’re talking about and aren’t just another “guru.”

But whichever route you choose, I highly recommend you decide on a business model and find one expert with a playbook you can follow to the letter. That will eliminate the analysis paralysis and give you the confidence that investing time and money into this business can pay off later!

Tip 2: Set Constraints

There’s a famous saying attributed to Julius Caesar during a campaign to invade Britain in 55 BC. After they reached the shore, Caesar supposedly ordered the burning of his own boats to demonstrate to his men that there was no turning back.

“If you want to take the island, burn the boats!”

I know, that’s an extreme step – but that’s literally the point!

You know what this has to do with building a business. Most people who think they want to start a business are making it an infamous “side hustle” outside of their full-time working hours, or maybe just a thing they do off and on when inspiration strikes.

Even for people who are all-in on their business full-time, they may still have a Plan B, and a Plan C, and so on, for what happens if the business doesn’t succeed. I’m not necessarily saying you should toss all caution to the wind, but if you know you can get back on the boats and sail back home if your next campaign flops, there’s a lot less urgency to actually get results.

And so, people don’t.

Again, I’m guilty of this too! I’ve been fortunate to work at ClickBank for many years, so I don’t have the same pressure to scale my business ideas to a full-time income as someone without a career path. But I know that and acknowledge it, while a lot of other aspiring business owners do not.

Ultimately, you need to be honest with yourself about whether you’re willing to go all-in to make your dream a reality.

Goals Are Dreams With Deadlines

Every time I go to the gym, I see this phrase plastered on the wall while I’m jogging on the treadmill:

Goals are dreams with deadlines.

It’s cheesy, but it’s true.

Aimlessly working on your business with the vague hope of seeing success someday isn’t a recipe for success. That’s why I highly recommend setting a concrete deadline with a goal wrapped up in it.

A few years ago, I interviewed one of ClickBank’s most successful affiliates, Francisco Valenzuela, who’s extremely disciplined with his goal setting. I was impressed at his system of writing down the next goal and using post-it notes and a physical journal to actually record them.

We can learn a lot from his example. Instead of vaguely saying I’m going to build my blog, I should say, “I’ll publish 100 articles around these categories in the next 6 months.”

To make this possible, I want to suggest adopting a practice called “just-in-time learning.” For us wantrepreneurs, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of endlessly learning about different tactics or practices that we’re not even implementing.

My challenge to you is to completely stop reading and watching education about anything you’re not about to deploy next in your business. For example, if I have a blog and I think a lead magnet funnel is the next most impactful thing for me to work on, I’m allowed to read about how to create a lead magnet, the best landing page builders, or setting up an opt-in form – as long as I follow that up by actually building a lead magnet funnel.

What I can’t do is think I should build a lead magnet funnel, but spend a lot of time learning about how to create and publish bulk pins on Pinterest using AI. That is, unless I decide to do that next instead. The rule is to learn something just in time to put it into practice – and following this rule will help you stay focused and making progress on the most impactful things!

Tip 3: Scale Your Most Profitable Inputs

My last tip is to periodically take stock of where revenue actually comes from in your business, and then double-down on the activities that generate it. Here’s what I mean.

Every business has inputs that generate the majority of the output (following the 80/20 rule). The rest of what you do day-to-day may contribute to revenue growth, but it’s a mistake to put too much time into the 20% tasks instead of the 80% ones.

If I continue with my blog example, here are some of the many activities I can do to grow my business:

• Write and publish blog posts
• Find a new affiliate product to promote
• Tweak my site settings
• Optimize my site speed
• Improve my brand look and feel
• Research web hosts
• Build a new opt-in form
• Do keyword research

Now, these are all activities that sound productive. And they all are, to an extent.

But as an SEO blogger, there’s one thing above all others that will truly make me more money: publishing more content.

Every time I hit publish on a new article, there’s a new opportunity to rank and be discoverable in search, a new piece of content to promote to my email subscribers and drive them back to my site, and one tiny new plot of digital real estate to host my affiliate tracking links and display ads.

Do the other tasks help? Of course. There are certainly times when I should do keyword research or make my site faster. But only one thing – publishing new content containing affiliate links and ads – will give me more chances to get clicks and sales.

If all I ever did was publish content, I would continue making more money – but the same isn’t true for any other item on that list. Not even hunting for new affiliate products.

That’s the difference.

Your Revenue-Generating Tasks

So, what are the biggest revenue-generating tasks for other entrepreneurs and business models?

• For an influencer, maybe it’s going live with a sponsor.
• For a SaaS company, maybe outbound sales or attending industry conferences.
• For a media buyer affiliate, maybe testing new creatives and optimizing their paid campaigns.

Every business is different, even two within the same industry or business model. But the fastest way to go from “wantrepreneur” to entrepreneur is to figure out which activities are driving more revenue…

And then do those at scale.

At first, maybe just you.

Then later, by reinvesting revenue back into those revenue-generating inputs.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy. Are you in?

Don’t Be a Wantrepreneur Wrap-up

I hope this post was encouraging! I don’t want to be a downer at all – I just want to give advice to anyone struggling to realize their business dreams like I did.

Growing up, I was a total perfectionist, so my mom would often tell me, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.”

It’s not easy to go from an academic environment where a B+ felt like a moral failing, to a business environment where you’re not only allowed to keep trying and failing at things, but encouraged to.

That’s definitely how marketing works, and that’s how business works too. To take the leap to actual entrepreneurship, you just need to do a bunch of things, figure out what works, and then do more of those things that are working.

Hopefully, ClickBank can support you in your path to entrepreneurial success! But no matter what you decide to do, I can tell you that the journey is absolutely worth it.

Did you know that your brand can reach new audiences and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI) without creating and publishing new content from scratch? 

All you need to do is refresh, update, and republish high-quality, relevant content that you already have. In fact, 42% of marketers have seen successful results from a content repurposing approach, so it’s time for your brand to get started!

With this in mind, we’ve created a guide on how to use content repurposing to double your following and shared some of the best examples of content repurposing in action.

What Is Content Repurposing?

Content repurposing is the process of turning a single piece of content into multiple pieces for other platforms. 

Repurposing can involve taking entire pieces of content and reusing them for another social channel or simply recycling snippets and images. Using this approach, you only have to come up with one killer content idea, saving your marketing team (or yourself) a ton of time and effort.

For example, you might use clips from a long-form YouTube video to create a short-form reel on Instagram. In addition, you could use quotes from the YouTube video to publish as text on X (formerly Twitter). 

When done right, content repurposing has many benefits for your brand, including:

• Boosting your online presence. When you repurpose content for a new platform, you are reaching a whole new audience who favours that platform. This will boost your online presence. 
• Enhancing SEO performance. To rank highly for a specific keyword on search engine results pages (SERPs), you must post a lot of content targeting that word – among other things. Repurposing content is a fresh and exciting way to create lots of content around one keyword without boring your readers.
• Meeting content demand. Repurposing content allows you to create and publish more content without burning out or overusing resources. This will help you meet content demand. 
• Expanding content reach. Not everyone enjoys consuming the same content format. Creating written, audio, and video content will expand the reach of your content as more people can consume it in their chosen format. In fact, repurposed blog posts can generate up to 106% more views. 

(Image Source: Marketing Experts Hub)

Remember, each platform has its own set of requirements, so when you repurpose content, make sure you adhere to them.

How To Double Your Following With Content Repurposing 

Repurposing your content could be the key to doubling your following. If you publish a piece of content on TikTok, for example, that goes viral in a matter of minutes, repurposing this content on Instagram could see your engagement triple on that platform, too.

With this in mind, here are five valuable ways to double your following by repurposing content:

Create Evergreen Content 

If you don’t already know, evergreen content is SEO-optimised content that is not time-sensitive and remains relevant and fresh to readers over a long period of time. 

For example, evergreen content would be a generalised ‘how-to’ article rather than an article that is specific to a time of year, event, or news story. 

If you have been publishing evergreen content on your blog for some time, consider repurposing the posts into a different format, such as publishing small snippets on X or using the pictures for an Instagram post. This will convince your audience to follow you on other platforms.

Update and Republish Content On Multiple Platforms

Before spending time, money, and resources creating new content, look at the content you have already published. Republishing old content can increase organic traffic by 260.7%. 

If your old content is still relevant, you can update and republish it. It may not need much editing; just make some updates based on platform requirements what is relevant to your audience on each channel.

(Image Source: Buffer)

In addition, if one of your blog posts is still ranking well on search engines, then don’t republish it. Instead, update the content but keep the same URL, as this will promote it again and boost your following for different platforms.

Leverage The Right Tools 

When you are equipped with the right tools, content repurposing can be easy and efficient.

Firstly, try using keyword research tools to better understand which keywords are ranking well and repurpose any of your content that includes these keywords.

In addition, use tools to monitor your content analytics. This will help you better understand which content is already ranking well in search engines so you can update it and promote it again. 

Keep an Eye on High-Performance Content

Lots of your content will be great for repurposing, but you ideally want to spend your time and effort on content that is already performing well, as there is a higher chance the repurposed version will also gain a lot of traffic.

It helps to create a list of high-performing pieces. To do so, you will need to measure specific metrics such as organic traffic, backlinks, shares, comments, or bounce rate. 

You should also conduct SEO audits to ensure that this content is performing well on search engines. Readers who find your content at the top of the SERPs page are more likely to follow your social media accounts.

Use Multiple Platforms

Publishing your content on different platforms is the key to boosting your online presence, social media following, and conversions. 

(Image Source: Gary Vaynerchuk)

Here are some platforms you can use: 

• Social media channels such as Instagram and X: Share snippets or highlights from your blog posts, podcasts, or videos on your social media feed. Remember to include visuals, captions, and targeted hashtags to grab attention.
• Email: Include highlights from or links to recent blogs in your newsletters to keep email subscribers informed about new content and drive traffic toward your website.
• Presentation sharing sites such as SlideShare: Turn key points from an article into an informative presentation.
• Video and podcast sites such as YouTube or Spotify: Republish written content as video or audio formats for a better and broader impact. 

Remember to analyse which platforms perform best for each content format so you can optimise future repurposing efforts. For example, if repurposed blog posts work well on Instagram but not on X, focus more time and resources on creating visually appealing Instagram posts.

3 Examples Of Successful Repurposed Content 

There are many exciting ways to repurpose content, but you have to ensure it remains engaging to viewers by optimising the content for each platform. 

Here are some of the best examples of successful repurposing strategies.

Turn long-form videos into blog posts

Not only are long-form videos one of the most effective types of content, but they are also the most effective piece of content to repurpose.

Your marketing team can easily turn a long-form video into an SEO-optimised blog post. They just need to transcribe the video, do keyword research and find places where keywords can fit naturally, and format the transcription – as the way we talk doesn’t always work in a written format. Finally, add headings, subheadings, bullet points, and images. 

Better still, why not embed a piece of video content within the blog post itself?

(Image Source: Hostinger)

Hostinger is a brilliant example of a brand that knows how to repurpose its video content. In their tutorials section, they feature ‘video tutorials’, which include a blog post centred around an embedded YouTube tutorial created by their team of web-building experts.

Turn long-form videos into short clips

Your long-form videos can be repurposed into several short clips that you can turn into Instagram Reels, TikToks, and even paid ads.

Remember, you should always resize them so they’re optimised for each platform and include links from each channel to the original long-form video for those who want more information. 

Take this great example from the SavingGrace Podcast, for instance. While long-form videos of each podcast episode are uploaded on SavingGrace’s Youtube channel and audio can be accessed on Spotify, the creator chooses to repurpose small snippets from each episode and share them on TikTok as a small teaser for the newest episode.

(Image Source: Saving Grace: TikTok)

This works effectively as it uses TikTok’s short-form format to target GK Barry’s young demographic and build a following for the podcast on numerous social channels.

Turning blog posts into social media posts

Blog posts are full of information and, hopefully, images. So, aim to repurpose your blog post into at least five social media posts.

Use snippets from your blog posts, such as quotes or data, to create social media posts. In addition, use the information to create infographics. These are a great content format for those who prefer visual learning and an effective way to summarise your post.

(Image Source: Buffer)

For example, this content repurposing attempt from Buffer shows just how easy it is to create a short-form infographic version of a long-form blog post.

Here, creators turned 50 AI prompts for better social posts into a simple swipe carousel on Instagram. Can you see here how each format appeals to the target channel demographic? 

For Instagram followers, 50 prompts are likely to lose engagement quickly. Switching this up into a short-form snippet of the best AI prompts repurposes with specific platform targets in mind.

Post Perfomance Tracking With Keyhole

In order to select the best content to repurpose, ensure that you regularly track the performance of your campaigns and highlight the content that drives the most engagement.

Using Keyhole’s social media analytics tool, post performance tracking has never been so easy. Using in depth sentiment analytics, you can gauge how people are responding to a piece of content and decide whether it is worth repurposing on multiple channels.

Keyhole’s built in Machine-Learning Prediction feature also allows you to anticpitate your content’s performance before it even goes live all the way up to 30 days post being live based on real-time data.

Measure your anticipated performance on each channel before you repurpose your content and use this as a guide as to which channel will drive the most engagement for your repurposed content.

Ready To Double Your Following?

Now that you know everything about repurposing content, it is time to add it to your content marketing strategy. Your marketing team doesn’t need to burn themselves out by constantly thinking of new topics and ideas.

Remember to repurpose content to the formats and for the platforms your target audience is most likely to engage with. When done right, you can make the most of any piece of content you create!

Today, we’re gonna talk about Twitch affiliate marketing, becoming a streaming content creator, and making money through your streams. 

What Is Twitch Affiliate Marketing? 

Now, you may be thinking, “What does this girl know about streamers…?”

To which I will tell you that I’ve learned everything I know through hard-earned research – and ALSO being forced to watch Jynxzi clips with my boyfriend for HOURS. I mean, literally HOURS. My gaming skills may be sub-par at best, my hand-eye coordination may be trash, but as far as research on this topic goes, let me tell ya, I’ve basically got a Master’s in understanding streamers and the world of gaming. 

Additionally, I’ve been on the internet and in the world of content creation since it really took off like 10 years ago. I am what some might call a “nano-influencer” and have gotten a couple brand deals here and there. With that knowledge, combined with my chronically online-ness, I think we can tackle this topic together. 

So, if you’re a gamer, or you just REALLY enjoy a video game session, AND you wanna make money online to combine your passion with an income stream, keep reading! 

The idea of being a streamer and making money from gaming is not a new one. In fact, as I’m sure you know if you’re still here reading, streamers have been, well, streaming for probably over 15 years at this point. However, it’s still not too late to get into the world of gaming, streaming, and content creation and earn a bit of money from it! Not only can streaming alone make you money, but Twitch has its own official affiliate program that can help you earn money from streaming as well. 

Twitch Affiliate Requirements

Now, if you’re looking to become an affiliate through Twitch specifically, there are a few requirements. If you’re entirely new to streaming on Twitch, there are some things you have to do first. Get your account set-up, including getting your profile created and starting your first stream. From there, it’s time to start doing the fun part – creating streaming content! It may take you a while, but keep streaming as much as you can! If you’re gaming most days anyways, you may as well stream it to help support your page! 

After a while, you can join the Twitch Affiliate Program. They do have some requirements that they look at within a 30-day window. First, you have to reach at minimum, 50 followers. From there, you’ve got to have at least 8 streaming hours logged, and stream on at least 7 different days. Finally, you have to have at least 3 viewers consistently on your streams. Once you’ve achieved those goals within a 30-day window, you’re eligible for their affiliate program! 

If you’re feeling like this feels impossible, don’t worry! You don’t need to crash out just yet. There’s a ton of great ways to get started making content and bringing people onto your stream. As a social media person myself, I would recommend a lot of cross-posting across social media channels, including, but not limited to, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. I have a video where I talk about how to make video content for social media, which is an s-tier video, in my opinion. You can watch that here and use it as a guide for how to get started to reach those requirements!

Affiliate Programs for Streamers

Once you’ve gotten your Twitch set up, and you’re ready to create content on a number of platforms, there’s quite a few ways you can monetize your content! Think of some of your favorite gamers or streamers. Where are they posting and more importantly, WHAT are they posting? For instance, if you look at a lot of really successful streamers, you’ll be able to take note that they post across platforms as well. A lot of times, they’ll post their full streams on Twitch and YouTube, and then take small cuts from their streams and re-post them on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. Once you’ve got a good, steady backlog of content across platforms, that’s when your audience really starts to grow. Once you’ve reached an audience size that feels s-tier at minimum, god-like at maximum, then it’s time to really double down on being able to monetize on your audience! 

Like I mentioned before, there’s Twitch’s affiliate program, which is a great place to start for monetizing on your audience. You can read more about their official affiliate program HERE.

Additionally, a great way to monetize your growing audience is going to be to become an affiliate through other affiliate channels. Essentially, you’re gonna start promoting other products through the content you create. 

Before we go any further, I think it’s helpful for you to know what an affiliate is and what that means for you as a content creator. If reading isn’t your vibe, you can check out my video on what the heck affiliate marketing is!

With affiliate marketing, there are three key players in the game. 

1. There’s a product owner or brand: a business looking for more people to promote their products online. 
2. You’ve got the consumer: the person who will buy those products. 
3. Then, you’ve got the affiliate, or YOU if you so choose. 

As an affiliate, you promote the brand’s products, and the consumer buys those products. You, the affiliate, receive a percentage of each sale on the product, which is how you earn money, and the business gets more people to keep purchasing their products. The money you earn as an affiliate all comes from the commissions earned when you get a sale through your own special tracking link.

Let’s say Paul owns an energy drink company. Paul’s energy drink company has been doing pretty well on its own, but they’re not seeing the continued growth they were hoping for. Paul’s energy drink company decides they want to budget for an affiliate program to get affiliates to help with their marketing efforts. So, the company reaches out to a few affiliate networks, and they finally find the right one for them. Next, Paul’s chosen affiliate network helps onboard Paul’s supplements onto their marketplace. They work with Paul to decide what kind of commission rate they’d like to offer to affiliates who promote their supplements, and they iron out a few more details.
From there, the affiliate marketer – or YOU in this case – comes along, and you decide it’s time for you to jump into the world of affiliate marketing. 

As an affiliate, once you’ve chosen your niche, your affiliate program or programs, and the products you’re going to promote, you’re nearly there. In this case, your niche is going to be the gaming industry, and your audience is going to be fellow gamers, and people that are into streaming, getting better at certain games, and learning from fellow gamers. Infinite aura fr fr. 

As an affiliate, there’s a lot that goes into the preparation of becoming an online marketer. Understanding what affiliate marketing is and how to get started is the best base for the beginning of your journey. 

Okay, there’s one more key player here in the affiliate marketing world: the consumer (aka the customer or buyer). This is the third party who is purchasing the products that you, the affiliate, are promoting! The buyer is a person within your niche that you’re trying to reach, likely through one of your many cross-posting efforts on YouTube, Twitch, IG, TikTok, or somewhere else that I don’t know about. 

So you’ve got the brand, like Paul’s energy drink company, who is looking to get their products promoted to new audiences; you have the affiliate, or YOU, who is going to promote Paul’s products; and you have the consumer, or the person in your niche who is going to make a purchase on the product you’re promoting. Once they’ve taken that action, Paul’s business receives money from the sale, and you earn a commission on that sale, and BAM – you’ve earned your first dollars from affiliate marketing! 

So, now with a better understanding of affiliate marketing, I’ll give you a few platforms that are great to get started on for a beginner affiliate, like yourself. If you’re looking for the best affiliate programs for streaming, look no further. These are the s-tier ones I’ve found in my time as a content creator, but there may be others, so make sure to continue to do your research! 

If you’re looking to promote physical products, Amazon Associates has a pretty good affiliate program. Their commission rates are pretty small to start out, but once you get a few good products and a large enough audience, that can really pay off for you! The main requirement for an Amazon Affiliate is that you must have an active blog, website, app, or YouTube. As a streamer, you’ll likely qualify with having a YouTube and social media presence, so you should be good to go. 

Obviously I also have to tell you about ClickBank, since they are the ones that employ me. But trust me when I say I wouldn’t tell you to use the platform if I didn’t genuinely think it would be helpful for your audience monetization. I’m not trying to have those negative aura points. ClickBank is super easy to get started on, and they have a ton of physical and digital products to promote. They’ve been in the affiliate game for a long time and they cover a ton of different niches. Not to mention, the commission rates on the products are some of the highest amongst affiliate programs and there’s no minimum rate for a payout like some other affiliate programs. You can click HERE to get started on ClickBank, if you want! 

There’s also TikTok Shop, which is really helpful if you’re posting a lot on TikTok. TikTok Shop is super easy to get set-up and they have a TON of products on their marketplace that you can link to straight from the app itself, and get paid out through the app as well. The sign-up process is super easy and since they have so many products, it’s fairly easy to get a few products to promote in your niche. I can’t speak to the commission rates on there, since it varies based on the products, but I do know that engagement rates on TikTok are sometimes up to 95%, which can make making a sale pretty easy on there. 

Affiliate Marketing for Gamers

Gaming is a HUGE niche for live-streamers, no matter the platform you’re on, but particularly on Twitch. Once you’ve got your audience set, it’s really easy to start making money from that. Not only from your streams themselves, but also from product promotions. 

Some of the products I’ve seen do really well are energy drinks, supplements, and anything gaming-related. Think mouses, mouse pads, controllers, accessories, that kind of thing. Trust me, the more you expand your mind into different things you could promote to your audience, the more you’ll be able to make off your content! No cap. 

Niches Beyond Gaming

If you’re thinking of possibly expanding outside the world of gaming, that’s cool too! Fortunately, Twitch has opened up a HUGE world of content live-streaming outside of just gaming. You can even stream content in the lifestyle, fitness, and cooking niches. Fortunately, if you choose to expand your niche and audience by additionally streaming other forms of content like this, we’ve got you covered at ClickBank with more products to monetize your growing audience. This isn’t just a sales pitch, I’m just letting you know! Between more physical products like health supplements, cooking supplies, and dope lifestyle products, you can monetize as you expand as well! 

How Much Money Does a Twitch Affiliate Make?

So, how much money does a Twitch affiliate make? There’s a lot of factors that play into this statistic!

Streamers that average around 50 viewers a month can make anywhere from $500-$750 per month. Streamers with a larger viewer-ship count can average around $5,000 per month. This also depends on hours streamed, however. There’s a lot of conflicting data around how much streamers can earn on the platform, but the gist of it is, that if you stream enough and have a dedicated enough following, you could probably make enough money for your car payment or for some extra cash on the side for whatever you want. 

Once you add in the money you could earn as a gaming affiliate, though, that changes in a big way. Let’s say you’re gonna promote something off of ClickBank, just for the ease of things. There’s a supplement product on the marketplace with an average payout of $45. That means that with every consumer who purchases from your affiliate link, you earn $45.

Math-wise, if you can get just three people per day to buy your affiliate product, then you’ve earned $4,050 in a single month. Add that onto the money you earn solely from streaming and you’re golden!

(And that’s just with a single product. Imagine how much you could earn if you promoted two or three affiliate products. The possibilities are endless!)

Becoming an Affiliate Marketer on Twitch

Okay, so the next, natural question is: HOW do I become an affiliate marketer on Twitch?

Let me outline some steps for you and help you find the right niche, audience, and ways to monetize your streaming! 

Step 1: Choose a Niche

If you’ve heard this before, but you’re a bit confused on what a “niche” is, don’t crash out, let me explain. I know when I first started in the world of affiliate marketing, I was so confused on what it meant to pick a niche! But it’s actually really simple and it’s probably one of the overall best guidelines to use when it comes to being successful as a streamer and content creator. 

Picking a niche simply means deciding on who you want to talk to as an affiliate, and what types of products you want to promote. 

So, how do you do this? 

For me, the best and easiest way to pick a niche was to sit down and look at the kind of marketing I wanted to do, what kind of audience I wanted to target, and what kind of products I wanted to promote. 

For you, if you’re looking into streaming, this will be relatively easy for you. There’s a few common niches people in the streaming industry lean toward. Decide what kind of content you want to stream, and from there, decide what your niche will be. Will you be streaming lifestyle content? If so, your niche will likely be geared toward home/lifestyle/cooking. If you’re gonna be gaming as a streamer, your niche will be geared toward the gaming industry as a whole. 

Your niche is essentially what drives you and the products you’re promoting online as an affiliate marketer. For me, the journey to choosing my niche was simple, but it was truly the guiding light for me as I began my affiliate marketing business. I simply dug in and took a look at what my hobbies and lifestyle already were. Use these factors to help drive what your niche will be. 

From there, I was able to really double down on monetizing my content. That’s why having a niche is so important! It’s a big help with the research and content creation as an affiliate, and gives you clear guidelines for the audience you’re targeting with your marketing efforts. When you choose a niche, it’s MUCH easier for you to be able to properly target and reach an audience that is actually interested in the products you’re promoting, so your return on investment is that much higher! 

Picking a niche is really that simple. Just determine how you want your content to go out, decide on the audience you want to talk to, and choose the types of products that that audience will connect with. Once you’ve narrowed those things down, your niche is there for you and it’s time to start earning money online! 

Step 2: Grow Your Audience

The next step in becoming an affiliate marketer on Twitch is to grow your audience. We’ve talked about this a bit already, but I have a few guidelines that will help to expand your audience as a streamer!

First, make sure you’re promoting valuable content to viewers in your niche. If it isn’t valuable, you’ll lose your audience. I always say you should create content for PEOPLE, not for an algorithm. You can try following the AIDA principle:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action.

With AIDA as a framework, you’ll produce content that first grabs the audience’s attention, then piques their interest, then makes them desire YOUR solution, and lastly, gives them an action to take, like heading to your affiliate link or sharing your content with others. 

Next, make sure the platform you’re using is the best one for YOUR niche and audience. If you use a shotgun technique, posting everywhere hoping to hit your target audience, you’ll miss out. Become an expert on how your audience engages with you on each channel and really format your content to take full advantage of that specific channel! 

Next, we’ll talk about monetizing your audience, which will make your content creation valuable for YOU. You’re working on becoming a streamer, yes, but to continue to monetize as an affiliate as well, that’s the challenge.

As an affiliate, your job is NOT to “sell” any product or convince your audience to buy anything. Your only goal is to make people aware of the solution you’re offering and help them make the right decisions for themselves. And if they choose to buy, you’ll get a piece of the sale for bringing the product to their attention!

Step 3: Monetize Your Live Streams

Finally, we get to the money! In order to make any income from your streaming content, you’re going to have to monetize it somehow. And honestly, in my mind, the best way to do this is through affiliate marketing (although there are a few other areas of monetization I’ll touch on as well). 

One of the ways to start monetizing your streaming and content is through affiliate marketing. There are thousands upon thousands of companies and brands that are looking for regular people like me and you to help market their brand, and they’ll pay you a good commission for it! This is probably my personal favorite when it comes to monetizing on social media and Twitch. Honestly, it’s easy, it’s free, and it’s low risk. Affiliate marketing is such a great way to get started with monetizing your content. I don’t have a HUGE following, but I have enough of a loyal following within my niche that I earn commissions each month just by sharing affiliate links and products. The commission payout from affiliate marketing is definitely the most sizable compared to other programs too, which is awesome. 

Another great way to earn money from your streaming is with ambassadorships. I’ve dabbled in this one a lot too and really enjoy it. The commissions are good, and it’s easy to get people to convert. It’s a great and easy way to monetize your audience. It’s usually pretty easy to promote, too. Usually you’re just promoting a link through your link in bio or in your stream, and when people click your link and make a purchase, you earn commission through that. 

The next way to monetize your audience is through sponsored posts and videos. This is when a brand pays you a small fee to talk about their brand or product in a post on your stream or on social media.

While these are all super lucrative for earning money from your streaming audience and through content creation, my truly unbiased favorite is affiliate marketing. It’s great because you never have to sign a contract, you only promote what aligns with you as a creator and with your niche, and the commissions are the most sizable compared to other monetization strategies. There’s a ton of great affiliate programs out there, as I’ve mentioned, but I truly like the commission rates and products from ClickBank, and the user interface makes promoting and earning money literally SO easy. Trust me, ops wanna see you fail, but I wanna see you succeed. 

It’s super easy to start earning money with affiliate marketing with $0. You can learn how to in my super chill how-to.

How to Promote Links on Twitch (Without Being Spammy)

Okay, so, you know how when you’re watching a YouTube video and you can’t even get through the video because there’s like a million ads and they start the video with a promo and a sponsor and a million other spammy things that by the time you get to the actual content, you don’t even wanna watch anymore? 

We aren’t gonna do that. 

There’s a really good way to promote products without coming across as spammy, because, frankly, if you come across as spammy, your product promotions won’t land. 

There’s a few different ways that you can promote links on Twitch without coming across as spammy. First, you can add a few links into the description of your stream! Super easy. If you upload streams onto YouTube, you can also add links into the description on YouTube! 

Additionally, you can add links into the live chat with a chat-bot or manually if you want! Finally, you can also add a link into the “about” section of your profile! If you have multiple links you want to share, you can create a sort of “link in bio” to add across social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and even Facebook. 

Pros and Cons of Twitch Affiliate Marketing

I’ve talked to you a lot about how much of a W it would be to be an affiliate on Twitch. But let’s be fr right now. There’s always cons to anything, so let me lay out for you a few pros and cons  of Twitch affiliate marketing. 

• Pro: The gaming community on Twitch is STRONG! If you play your cards right, you could have a dedicated audience that helps contribute to your monetary gain as a twitch affiliate. 
• Con: There is a time commitment to streaming. Obviously, you have to take the time to create your content, spend time on Twitch, and interact with and build your audience. That can take a lot of time and effort before you see any monetary gain from it. 

• Pro: Twitch has a ton of really useful tools made specifically for streamers. As far as creating content goes, they make it really easy! 
• Con: There can be a limited reach outside of gaming. While there are other ways to stream, gaming is really the biggest niche on there, so finding success in other niches may be difficult, but not impossible. 

• Pro: It’s a great place to drop affiliate links, both in the chat and other areas of your profile; to help earn money as a streamer. 
• Con: There are also some technical requirements for streaming. While anyone can do it, really making sure your stream is high-quality may take a bit of work up front. 

All in all, Twitch is still obviously an amazing place to earn money as an affiliate and monetize your audience as a content creator. Like I mentioned, the most important thing is to not devote so much time to JUST one platform, when you can post across platforms and increase your potential for monetization and audience growth. 

If you’re looking for great ways to make content online, you can check out my video on making content here! 

FAQs

How Do I Create Twitch Content? 

This is easy! As long as you’ve got a Twitch profile, a stable internet connection, and a video encoder (like your gaming system), you’re good to go! Once you’ve created your Twitch profile, you can simply start your stream on Twitch and start gaming and chatting to your audience! 

How Do I Start as a Twitch Affiliate? 

To get started, you have to build up your stream, channel, and audience. There are a few requirements as I mentioned above, including a certain number of streaming hours, consistent audience size, and follower count that are required to get started. Start streaming and creating content and you’re halfway there! 

What Is the Difference Between a Twitch Affiliate and a Twitch Partner?

A Twitch affiliate is anyone who promotes Twitch and monetizes their audience. The Twitch Partner program is typically more exclusive, with a larger barrier to entry. The overall barrier to entry for affiliate marketing is much lower, meaning people like you and me can make money as a streamer! 

What Percentage of Twitch Streamers Are Affiliates?

According to the internet, there are roughly 2-million Twitch streamers that are also affiliates. There are over 7.3 million total streamers monthly on Twitch. You could be one of the 27% that decide to monetize their audience! 

How Do I Become An Affiliate Marketer? 

Becoming an affiliate is easy! Find your niche, your audience, and what you’re wanting to promote, and then find an affiliate program or programs that align with that!

There are a lot of different affiliate networks out there, so it’s important to do your research to find programs that work for you and your goals. I have a video on how to start affiliate marketing with $0 that really helps to guide you through the steps of becoming an affiliate without having to break the bank! 

The Wrap-Up

There’s a super lucrative world out there filled with affiliate marketing for streamers and Twitch affiliate marketing! If you have the time, patience, and dedication to continue to create content as a streamer, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to make money online with streaming.

And if you want to include ClickBank affiliate products in your Twitch affiliate plans, be sure to sign up for a ClickBank account to get started! You’ve got this!