10 Things You Must Do Before Starting Affiliate Marketing (Or You’ll Struggle)

Most people who start affiliate marketing fail in the first 90 days. Not because the model is broken. Not because they picked the wrong niche. They fail because they showed up before they were ready to do what this business actually demands from you.

This video is Alston’s blunt pre-launch list. Ten things you need to handle, build, or drop before you begin, plus a bonus item that might be the most practical one of all. Some of these sound simple. None of them are actually easy. Get them right and you give yourself a real shot at making this work.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A framework for turning what you learn into action the same day you learn it
A method for replacing one existing habit with an affiliate marketing routine
The mindset rules that keep you creating content when nobody is watching yet
The daily habits that compound into a real business over months
An automation roadmap for when your business starts getting real traction
A one-page business plan template you can write in a single afternoon
Clarity on which platform, niche, and affiliate programs fit your situation right now at finder.platformproof.com

1. Learn Something, Then Apply It Before You Move On

Alston calls this application-space education. The rule is simple: as soon as you finish watching a tutorial or reading a post, you do the thing. You do not save it to a course folder or add it to a bookmark list to revisit someday. You do it right now, while the information is still fresh and before the next piece of content steals your attention.

The specific example he gives is YouTube ads. You do not need to run $100 a day to test what you just learned. Run $3 a day. The point is not the budget, it is the contact with reality. The moment you run the actual ad, you start seeing what you did wrong, what you need to fix, and what you need to go back and relearn. That feedback loop is where the real education happens, not in the watching.

There is also a teaching test built into this. If you cannot explain what you just learned to someone else in plain language, you do not actually understand it yet. The fastest way to find the gaps in your understanding is to try to walk someone else through the process. Where you stumble is exactly where you need to go back and study harder.

2. Break a Habit Before You Try to Build a New One

Alston spent his evenings playing video games after the kids went to bed and his wife fell asleep. It was a real habit, one that gave him something to look forward to at the end of a long day. Before he could get consistent with affiliate marketing, with creating blog posts and YouTube videos on a regular schedule, he had to stop the video games. He still thinks about it every day. But the old habit had to go to make room for the new one.

You do not have to eliminate every enjoyable thing from your life. What you have to do is identify the specific block of time your affiliate marketing work needs and figure out what is currently occupying it. Then you swap one for the other in that specific slot.

Lunch is one of the best places to start. If you are currently driving to Applebee’s or Chili’s and taking a full hour away from anything productive, that is 45 minutes you could use to write the outline for a blog post or rough out the structure of a YouTube video. The old habit does not disappear on the first try. But every time you choose the new behavior in that time slot, the old one loses a little ground.

3. Leave Your Emotions at the Door

People are going to ignore your content. People are going to leave nasty comments. People are going to watch three videos and never subscribe. People are going to download your stuff without clicking a single link. And some of those people are going to say things on your channel or your blog that have nothing to do with the quality of your work and everything to do with whatever is going wrong in their own lives.

Alston is direct about this: not every piece of content works for every person, and not every negative reaction is meaningful feedback. Some people are jealous. Some are having a bad day and chose your comment section to vent. Some genuinely do not like what you made. None of that is personal data about whether your business is on the right track.

The trap is letting a single mean comment or a flat video performance push you into emotional decisions about your whole strategy. You read one negative comment and you pull the video. You check the analytics after week one and see 12 views and you shut down the channel. Those are not decisions coming from real information. They are coming from feelings. Leave the emotions out of it, look at the data over a meaningful time window, and make decisions based on patterns, not moments.

4. Sacrifice Is Not Optional

Alston filmed this particular video on a Saturday at 8:15 in the evening. Not at a professional studio on a company schedule. On a Saturday night when his friends were out doing other things. He chose to be in front of a camera instead of being out with them.

That is what sacrifice looks like in practice. You are going to stay up until midnight sometimes when your normal bedtime is 10 p.m. You are going to skip some events. You are going to be the person who says no to things you would normally say yes to, because you are building something that needs the time those things would take.

This does not mean cutting off your friends and family permanently. It means the balance shifts, especially early on when the business is new and fragile and needs your full attention to get established. The people who quit in the first few months are almost always the ones who were not willing to give up anything to make room for this. They tried to add affiliate marketing on top of a life that was already full, without removing anything to make space. That approach does not work.

5. Do Something for the Business Every Single Day

This one gets misread constantly. Working on the business every day does not mean publishing a blog post every day or filming a new video every day. Some days your contribution is research. Some days it is reading a chapter of a relevant book. Some days it is attending a networking event, responding to comments, or auditing the keywords in your content plan.

What matters is that some intentional attention goes to the business every single day without exception. Alston’s reason for this is straightforward and competitive: someone else is working on their affiliate marketing business right now. They might be two steps behind you today. If you take unplanned days off while they stay consistent, they will close that gap. You might feel like you have nothing when you are just getting started, but you have at least one or two steps on someone else right now, and daily consistency is what protects that advantage.

The smallest contribution still counts. The habit of showing up for the business every day matters more than what you produce on any individual day, especially in the first six months.

6. Read, and Start With Think and Grow Rich

Alston holds up his copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill during this video. His personal target is one new book every two weeks. The reason he recommends reading in general, and this book in particular, is that someone else spent years compressing hard-won knowledge into a few hundred pages that you can absorb in a week or two.

Napoleon Hill spent 25 years working on Think and Grow Rich. That 25 years of research and interviews and observation is sitting in roughly 300 pages. Reading it is one of the most efficient things you can do with your early affiliate marketing education because so much of what the book covers, mindset, investing in yourself, building mastermind groups, applies directly to the specific challenges you are going to face building an online business while most people around you do not understand or support what you are doing.

Reading is also how you stay off the plateau. People who stop taking in new information tend to get stuck at the same level for months. New information, applied immediately (see rule number one), is how you keep moving forward even when the metrics are not showing growth yet.

7. Decide That Risk Is Part of the Deal

Every part of affiliate marketing involves risk. Your time is at risk. The money you put into a course or a tool is at risk. Paid traffic is at risk. Putting your face and voice on a YouTube channel where strangers can say anything they want is a risk. The people in your life who have never seen anyone build an online business will look at what you are doing and call the whole thing risky too.

Alston’s take on the camera risk specifically is worth noting. He says that when someone finally leaves a comment telling him it is the worst video they have ever seen, that is actually a sign that he has made it. Because nobody bothers to leave a negative comment on something that nobody watches. The haters arrive with the audience. Getting the hate means the reach is real.

The thing you have to do before you start is make peace with the risk rather than waiting until you can eliminate it. You will never find a version of affiliate marketing that carries zero risk. The people who succeed are not the ones who found the risk-free path. They are the ones who got comfortable walking the risky one anyway.

Not sure which affiliate niche, platform, or program is worth your risk right now?

Answer a few questions and get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

8. Learn to Automate as Soon as You Have Something Worth Automating

Most jobs train you to do everything manually. You log in, follow the steps, complete the task, log out. Affiliate marketing has a very different ceiling. At some point, if you keep doing everything by hand, the business stops growing because you run out of hours before you run out of opportunity.

Automation in this context covers a few different things. It means hiring a virtual assistant to handle tasks that do not require you specifically, like formatting blog posts, managing comments, or uploading content. It means setting up an autoresponder so your email list gets followed up with on a schedule automatically rather than you writing individual emails whenever you remember. It means building repeatable workflows so you are not rebuilding the same process from scratch every single time you sit down to work.

Alston also points to YouTube and blogging as a form of automation that people overlook. If you understand search engine optimization and you create content that gets found organically, that content keeps working for you long after you publish it. Someone can find a post you wrote two years ago, click your affiliate link, and you earn a commission without doing anything new that day. That is the automated version of the business. Paid traffic can be automated too with the right tools, but organic SEO-driven content is where most affiliate marketers see their first truly passive income.

9. Be Honest With Yourself About Where You Actually Stand

This is the one people skip because it is uncomfortable. Alston puts it plainly: the people who struggle most with affiliate marketing are the ones who believe everything they produce is already great. If you are not willing to look at your analytics and acknowledge that the click-through rate is poor, or that people are leaving your video at the 30-second mark, or that your blog post is getting no organic traffic because the keyword targeting is off, you cannot fix any of those things.

One specific pattern Alston calls out is people in Facebook groups who spend their time dropping affiliate links into comment sections and calling it marketing work. It is not work. It is noise that makes someone else’s group worse while producing no measurable result for your business. Being honest with yourself means being able to tell the difference between activity that actually moves a metric and activity that just feels busy.

If you genuinely cannot be objective about your own work, and most people cannot, find someone from a mastermind group who can give you a straight read. Think and Grow Rich has a whole framework for building that kind of group. Use it. Find someone who is further along than you and ask them to be direct about where you are actually weak. The honest feedback will sting. That is how you know it is real.

10. Learn How to Learn

Most people who hit a wall in affiliate marketing do not have a knowledge problem. They have a search problem. They do not know how to ask the question that gets them to the right answer, so they keep hitting dead ends and eventually assume the information is not out there or that the task is too hard.

Alston gives a concrete example. If you type “what are the best keywords for affiliate marketing” into Google, you are going to get a generic answer that does not help your specific niche or topic. But if you use the alphabet soup method, typing your seed keyword followed by the letter A into the search bar and looking at the autocomplete suggestions, then doing the same with B, then C, and so on, you are surfacing phrases that real people have actually searched. That is a completely different level of result from the exact same tool, just because of how the question is framed.

The skill underneath the skill is the ability to ask better questions. Google can answer almost anything. YouTube can teach almost anything. The bottleneck is usually what you type into the search bar and whether you know how to evaluate the results you get back. Once you develop the habit of researching deeply before concluding that something is impossible, you will stop hitting walls and start solving problems.

Bonus: Write a Business Plan Before You Launch Anything

Alston frames this as a bonus but it might actually be the most practical item on the entire list. Not a formal bank-ready document with financial projections and an executive summary. A one-page outline that answers the core questions: what niche am I in, what platform am I using as my primary channel, how am I going to find and target keywords, what content format am I creating, what affiliate programs am I promoting, and am I starting with free organic traffic or paid traffic?

The reason to write this down is not the document itself. It is the anchor the document creates. When you are three months in and you watch a YouTube video where someone claims they made $38 million dollars using some completely different strategy, you have something to go back to. Your plan. The written record of the specific path you chose and the specific reasoning behind that choice.

Without that written anchor, the shiny object problem wins almost every time. You jump from strategy to strategy and never build enough momentum on any single one to see results worth seeing. Alston describes his own plan for one of his early blogs as extremely simple: write a new post every single day, then fan it out to a Facebook group, Facebook itself, and Reddit. That was the whole thing. Pick a niche. Create daily. Distribute to three places. Written down. Executed consistently. That is all a business plan needs to be at the start.

The Honest Drawbacks of This List

Reading this list takes about ten minutes. Executing all eleven items simultaneously is genuinely hard, and Alston does not pretend otherwise in the video.

The sacrifice piece costs you real social capital with the people in your life who do not understand why you are suddenly unavailable on weekends and evenings. Some of those relationships will take a hit. That is a real cost, not a hypothetical one.

The habit-breaking piece takes longer than most productivity content suggests. Habits do not disappear on command. They erode slowly as you replace them with a competing behavior in the same time slot. Expect the old habit to still feel like the right choice for weeks, even after you have consciously chosen the new one repeatedly.

The automation item is also deceptively simple. You cannot automate a workflow that does not exist yet. You have to build the manual version first, run it enough times to understand what the actual steps are, and only then figure out which parts can be handed to a tool or another person. Automating before you understand the process usually means automating the wrong things, which costs time to untangle.

And honesty about your own work is probably the slowest item to develop. Most people need consistent external feedback over time before they can accurately read their own output. The fastest shortcut is finding someone who is already further along and asking them directly. That conversation will sometimes be uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point.

Find Your X

You now have the full list of what Alston says you need in place before you start. But knowing the list does not tell you which niche fits your background, which platform matches how you actually like to work, or which affiliate programs are worth promoting first. That clarity comes from a different kind of question. Get your personalized answer at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to complete all 10 things before I start affiliate marketing?

Not all at once, and not perfectly before you do anything. The value of the list is awareness. If you start without thinking about any of these, you will encounter each one as a surprise problem that derails you at an unpredictable moment. Knowing them in advance means you can address them deliberately rather than reactively.

How long does it take to build the habits Alston describes?

Long enough that most people quit first. The first few weeks of replacing a familiar evening habit with affiliate marketing work will feel wrong. Anchoring the new work to an existing time slot, whether that is lunch, the hour after the kids go to bed, or the commute, makes it significantly easier to sustain than trying to find new time from scratch every day.

What is the alphabet soup keyword method Alston mentions?

A free keyword research technique where you type your seed topic into Google or YouTube, followed by a single letter, and read the autocomplete suggestions. You cycle through the alphabet. Each autocomplete phrase is something real users have actually searched, which means it represents real demand. It often surfaces lower-competition phrases that paid keyword tools miss, and it costs nothing.

How do I know if what I’m doing is actually growing the business?

Track what moves. Organic traffic, email list size, affiliate link clicks, commissions earned. If a week of work produced zero movement in any of those metrics, that week was noise. Alston specifically calls out spamming affiliate links in Facebook groups as a common form of fake work. It feels like marketing activity but it does not produce measurable results. The metrics connected to revenue are your honest signal.

Do I need to spend money to get started with affiliate marketing?

You can start with almost no money using organic platforms like YouTube and blogging. Alston does mention paid traffic as something worth getting comfortable with eventually, and he suggests starting at $3 a day to get real data without meaningful financial risk. Courses and tools are optional early on, though Alston recommends investing in your own education once you have the foundational concepts in place.

What should a simple affiliate marketing business plan actually include?

Based on what Alston describes: your niche, your primary platform, your content format, how you plan to find keywords, the affiliate programs you are going to promote, and whether you are starting with free or paid traffic. That is it. One page, in plain language, written so you can read it back when you are tempted to chase a completely different approach six weeks in.

Is affiliate marketing a real business or just a side income stream?

Alston treats it as a real business throughout this video. He talks about replacing your full-time income with revenue from an online business, investing time and money and effort into it consistently, and building something that compounds over years. It can absolutely start as a side project, but the mindset he recommends from the beginning is that you are building something that operates like a business, because that is what earns business-level results.

When should I start automating my affiliate marketing work?

Once you have a repeatable workflow that you understand thoroughly from having done it manually many times. Trying to automate before you understand the process usually means automating the wrong steps or building systems you cannot diagnose when they break. Alston mentions virtual assistants, autoresponders, and SEO-driven content as the three main forms of automation worth pursuing. Organic SEO is worth prioritizing from the beginning because the compounding effect starts immediately even while you are still doing everything by hand.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “10 Things You MUST Do Before Starting Affiliate Marketing (Or You’ll Struggle!)” on YouTube, https://youtu.be/s7IUnZuhC4s
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937), referenced by Alston as a foundational mindset and mastermind resource
Alston Godbolt, alstongodbolt.com, affiliate marketing strategy and income content