Stupid Simple: How To Use ChatGPT for Affiliate Marketing and Make Money Online

Most people who try affiliate marketing stall out before they ever publish a single piece of content. Not because the model is broken, but because starting from a blank page is genuinely hard. You don’t know who to target, what to say, or how to get approved by the programs you want to promote. ChatGPT fixes most of that friction in under an hour, if you know which questions to ask.

In this breakdown, Alston walks through 13 specific prompts you can copy, paste, and adapt to build an affiliate marketing business from scratch. The example program throughout is Teachable, but every single prompt works with any standalone affiliate program. Follow these in order and you will have a target audience, a content plan, a lead magnet idea, a complete email sequence, a business plan for your affiliate application, and a set of ready-to-film TikTok hooks before you finish your coffee.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A ChatGPT calibration prompt that shapes every answer you get after it
A proven method for identifying your most profitable sub-audience within any affiliate program
10 audience pain points mapped to your product’s solution
Five lead magnet ideas generated in seconds, including a course creation checklist
A 10-day email sequence outline you can refine and send
A business plan formatted to increase your approval odds with affiliate programs
10 TikTok hooks and 10 low-competition keyword ideas ready to deploy
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Prompt 1: Calibrate ChatGPT Before You Ask Anything Else

The single biggest mistake beginners make with ChatGPT is treating every conversation like a fresh start. The quality of every answer you get downstream depends on how you set the table at the beginning. Alston’s first prompt tells ChatGPT exactly what role to play: act as an expert affiliate marketer, social media marketer, and copywriter.

After sending that prompt, follow it immediately with: “Do you understand?” This simple check confirms ChatGPT has accepted the framing and is ready to respond from that expert perspective. Skipping this step means your answers will be generic. Doing it takes ten seconds and changes the quality of everything that follows.

Prompt 2: Verify ChatGPT Knows Your Program

Once ChatGPT is calibrated to the expert role, give it a second calibration prompt that ties it to your specific affiliate program. Ask: “Are you familiar with the Teachable affiliate program?” (Replace Teachable with your program of choice.)

ChatGPT will summarize what it knows. Read through that summary and verify it is accurate. Alston confirms the information in the video looked correct for Teachable. This step matters because if ChatGPT has wrong information about commission rates, cookie windows, or how the product works, every downstream answer will be built on that bad foundation. A quick fact-check here saves time later.

Prompt 3: Find Out Who You Are Actually Talking To

Most affiliate marketers skip audience research entirely and start creating content nobody cares about. This prompt forces you to think before you film or write. Ask: “Who is my target audience for the Teachable affiliate program? Be as specific as possible.”

For Teachable, ChatGPT returned: online course creators, small business owners, bloggers and influencers, affiliate marketers, freelancers and solopreneurs, non-profits and charities, students, educators, and entrepreneurs and startup founders. Alston flagged non-profits specifically because the angle is genuinely underexplored. Non-profits need to host educational content but often can’t afford expensive software and almost no one is creating affiliate content for them in that niche.

After the first list comes back, send a follow-up: “Are there any more?” That second pass often surfaces niche sub-audiences the first answer missed.

Prompt 4: Pull 10 Pain Points and Map Them to Your Solution

Knowing your audience is step one. Knowing what keeps them up at night is what actually drives content that converts. The prompt: “List 10 pain points my target audience is currently experiencing and why Teachable is the solution.”

You can run this two ways. Leave the audience broad and get general pain points, or get specific: “List 10 pain points non-profits and charities are currently experiencing and why Teachable is a solution.” The specific version almost always wins. For non-profits, ChatGPT surfaced: difficulty creating and launching online courses, limited customization options on free platforms, trouble attracting and engaging students in a two-way community, and difficulty managing payments and financials for course revenue.

These pain points become the raw material for every video, blog post, and email you create. Instead of saying “check out Teachable,” you say “if you’ve tried building a course on a free platform and hit a wall with payments, here’s what fixes that.” That’s the difference between content that scrolls past and content that converts.

Prompt 5: Get Five Promotion Methods in Under a Minute

Ask: “As an affiliate, list five ways to promote Teachable.” ChatGPT returned: create a blog, use social media, offer a bonus, create a lead magnet, and collaborate with other influencers. This list is fine as a starting point but Alston makes a key observation here. The most durable route for any affiliate marketer is building an email list, and the fastest way to build an email list is a strong lead magnet. That’s why the next prompt matters more than this one.

Prompt 6: Generate Five Lead Magnet Ideas

Ask: “List five lead magnet ideas to promote Teachable as an affiliate.” The results Alston got: The Ultimate Guide to Creating and Selling Online Courses (a step-by-step workbook or blueprint), Five Ways to Increase Your Online Course Sales, 10 Ideas for Profitable Online Courses, The Teachable Course Creation Checklist, and The Teachable Platform Demo.

The checklist stood out. It is short, actionable, and directly tied to a task the audience is already trying to complete. Someone who downloads a course creation checklist is already planning to create a course, which means they are exactly the kind of person who needs a platform like Teachable. The affiliate link inside that checklist or in the follow-up email sequence closes itself.

One important warning from Alston: don’t hand these ideas directly to ChatGPT and ask it to fully build them out. Use this prompt to pick the best idea, then build the actual lead magnet yourself with your own experiences and examples. ChatGPT helps you choose. You do the real work.

Prompt 7: Build a 10-Day Email Sequence

Once you have a lead magnet, you need a sequence that delivers it, warms the subscriber, and eventually drives them to your affiliate link. Ask: “Create a 10-day email sequence to promote Teachable. Day one should give away the Teachable course creation checklist.”

ChatGPT will generate subject lines and copy for all 10 emails. For day one, it returned: “Your Essential Checklist for Creating a Successful Online Course with Teachable.” For day two: “How to Make Your Online Courses Stand Out with Teachable’s Customization Options.”

Read through the sequence and rewrite the parts that feel generic. Alston notes the day two subject line was serviceable but he would push it further into the pain point angle rather than leading with the product name. The sequence is a scaffold, not a finished draft. Add your own story, your own numbers, and your own voice before you schedule it.

Prompt 8: Refine the Sequence Around Pain Points or Proven Frameworks

If the generic 10-day sequence feels too product-forward, run a variation: “Create a five-day email sequence highlighting the pain points of our target audience and why Teachable is the solution.” You can also specify a copywriting framework: “Create a five-day email sequence using the problem agitate solve method” or “using the AIDA method.”

These framework-specific sequences tend to convert better because the copy follows a proven persuasion structure instead of just describing features. Day one in a pain-point sequence Alston showed was: “Having Trouble Creating and Launching Your Online Course? Teachable Is a Solution.” He would trim the subject line slightly and remove the product name to make it feel less like an ad before the subscriber trusts you.

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Prompt 9: Create a Business Plan for Your Affiliate Application

Getting rejected from affiliate programs is one of the most common ways beginners give up before they start. Most programs ask you to submit an application explaining how you plan to promote their product. Most beginners freeze and submit nothing, or write two sentences that get ignored.

Use ChatGPT to fix this. Ask: “Create a business plan using the answers above to apply to the Teachable affiliate program.” Because you have already given ChatGPT your audience, your pain points, your lead magnet idea, and your promotion strategy, it can pull all of that together into a structured plan.

The more specific you get, the better. Alston refined his prompt to: “Create a business plan for the Teachable affiliate program. Our target audience is non-profit organizations and we will create content on TikTok.” The result included an executive summary, target audience section, marketing strategies, and a financial plan section. Remove the financial plan if it contains invented numbers, but keep everything else. Affiliate managers want to see that you have thought through who you’re reaching and how. This plan shows that clearly.

Prompt 10: Generate Content Ideas for Any Platform

You have your audience, your lead magnet, your email sequence, and your application. Now you need content to actually drive traffic. Ask: “List content ideas to promote Teachable.”

ChatGPT returned: success stories, a Teachable 101 series, expert interviews and webinars, case studies, testimonials, and Teachable tips and tricks. Alston added a tactic that the general list missed: comparison content. Search terms like “Teachable vs. Kajabi” or “Teachable vs. Podia” attract buyers who are already researching and nearly ready to make a decision. They are some of the most valuable clicks in any affiliate program. You can follow up by asking: “List five more like that.” to keep the ideas flowing.

Prompt 11: Write 10 TikTok Hooks for Your Target Audience

TikTok rewards specificity and speed. The first three seconds either stop the scroll or lose the viewer. Ask: “List 10 hooks for my target audience to promote the Teachable affiliate program on TikTok.”

For the non-profit angle, ChatGPT returned hooks including: “Want to raise more funds for your nonprofit? Check out Teachable,” “Create and sell online courses with Teachable, educate your audience on your cause,” and “Maximize your non-profit’s impact with Teachable’s online course creation platform.”

Alston points out these are raw starting points. He would take a hook like “are you a non-profit leader, learn how creating an online course can help you spread your message” and use it to open a video that delivers genuine value about course creation, then mention Teachable as one of the best platforms for the job and point to the link in bio. The hook grabs attention. The video earns the affiliate click.

One note on showing your face: Alston is direct on this. He recommends appearing on camera. You are still watching him, not b-roll. Being on screen builds a stronger connection with your audience and that connection is what drives repeat viewers and buyers. You don’t have to do it forever, but it works.

Prompt 12: Find 10 Low-Competition Keywords

For YouTube and blogging, traffic comes from search. The problem with obvious keywords like “online courses” is that they have massive competition and low buyer intent. The solution is to target bottom-of-funnel keywords where the searcher already knows the product and just needs confirmation.

Ask: “List 10 keywords with low competition and high search to promote the Teachable affiliate program.” The results: teachable online course creation, best online course platforms for beginners, create and sell courses online with teachable, teachable versus udemy, teachable for non-profits and charities, teachable affiliate program for bloggers, and how to make money with teachable.

Alston calls out “how to make money with teachable” and “teachable vs udemy” as strong picks because they pull searchers who already understand the category and want to know which specific product is right for them. Someone searching “teachable vs udemy” is one video away from clicking your affiliate link. That’s a very different buyer from someone who just started researching “what is an online course.”

Prompt 13: Create a YouTube Video Outline Around Your Best Keyword

The final prompt turns a keyword into a video structure you can actually film. Ask: “Create an outline for a YouTube video for the five best online course platforms for beginners. Please include Teachable as one of the five.”

ChatGPT will return a complete video outline. From there, you research the other four platforms on the list, Thinkific, Kajabi, Podia, and Udemy, add your own honest takes on each, and you have a legitimate comparison video. The outline handles structure. You handle depth, accuracy, and authenticity.

This is the last of the 13 prompts and it closes the loop. You started with no audience, no plan, and no content. You now have all three. The only thing left is to execute.

The Honest Limitations of Using ChatGPT This Way

Alston repeats the same warning multiple times throughout the video because it matters: ChatGPT is a tool, not a marketing department. There are specific places where it will give you generic or inaccurate output that you have to catch and correct.

Always verify program-specific details (commission rates, rules, payout terms) against the actual affiliate program documentation
Email sequences need your personal stories and experiences added before they are ready to send
Keyword suggestions require a real tool like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, or TubeBuddy to verify actual search volume and competition
Content ideas will be generic until you add a specific angle, niche audience, or comparison hook
Lead magnets built entirely by ChatGPT without your input will feel hollow to an audience that came to you for your experience

The speed ChatGPT gives you is real. The starting points it generates are genuinely useful. But the work of adding real experience, accurate data, and a distinct voice is still yours to do. The people who treat these 13 prompts as a shortcut to skipping the work will produce the same forgettable content everyone else does. The people who use them as a research accelerator and then go deeper will pull ahead fast.

Find Your X

Affiliate marketing is one of dozens of ways to build income online, and it isn’t the right fit for everyone. If you are still trying to figure out which online business model actually matches your current skills, schedule, and financial goals, take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com. It asks a few targeted questions and points you toward the model most likely to work for where you are right now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this approach work with affiliate programs other than Teachable?

Yes. Alston uses Teachable as the example throughout the video because it is a standalone platform with a well-known affiliate program, which makes the prompts return specific and useful answers. The same 13 prompts work with ClickFunnels, ConvertKit, Kajabi, Bluehost, or any standalone affiliate product. The only programs that get messier are massive marketplaces like Amazon Associates, where the product range is so wide that ChatGPT’s answers become too broad to be useful.

How long does it take to run through all 13 prompts?

Alston runs through them in a single screen-share session. Realistically, if you are reading and editing the outputs rather than just copying them, plan for one to two hours to get through all 13 prompts and have usable material at the end. The email sequence and business plan sections will take the most time to refine.

Do I need a paid ChatGPT plan to use these prompts?

No. Alston doesn’t specify a paid tier in the video and the prompts he uses are standard conversational inputs that work on the free version of ChatGPT. A paid plan can give you faster responses and access to more recent training data, but the prompt strategy itself does not require it.

Will affiliate programs accept a business plan written with ChatGPT?

Affiliate programs review what is in the plan, not how it was written. A detailed, specific plan that explains your target audience, your promotion channels, and your content strategy will get reviewed seriously regardless of whether you used ChatGPT, a ghostwriter, or wrote it yourself. The key is to customize the output with your actual audience, your actual platform, and your actual plan before you submit it.

What is the best platform to start on when doing affiliate marketing with these methods?

Alston recommends showing up on camera and recommends starting where your target audience already spends time. If your audience is on TikTok, start there. If they search YouTube for product comparisons, start on YouTube. The prompts in this video are designed for both: prompt 11 covers TikTok hooks and prompt 13 covers YouTube outlines. Choose one platform first and go deep before splitting your effort.

How do I get approved for a competitive affiliate program if I don’t have an audience yet?

Prompt 9 is specifically built for this situation. The business plan you generate shows the affiliate program you have thought through your audience, your content plan, and your promotion method. Most programs care more about whether you have a clear plan than whether you already have 10,000 followers. Submit a complete, specific plan and your approval odds go up significantly even if you are starting from zero.

Should I build a blog, a TikTok, or a YouTube channel first?

Start with the channel that matches your strengths, not the one you think has the most traffic. If you are comfortable on camera and can commit to short videos, TikTok or YouTube Shorts can drive traffic faster in the early months. If you prefer writing and have SEO knowledge or patience, a blog can build lasting organic search traffic. The lead magnet and email list strategy from prompts 6 through 8 works regardless of which content channel you choose.

Can I use these prompts for multiple affiliate programs at the same time?

Technically yes, but Alston’s implicit advice is to start focused. Running the full 13-prompt workflow for one program gives you enough content, email sequences, and keyword targets to stay busy for months. Adding a second program before you have seen real traction from the first usually spreads your effort too thin to see results from either one. Finish the workflow for one program, get your first affiliate commissions, and then decide whether to expand.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Stupid Simple: How To Use ChatGPT for Affiliate Marketing and Make Money Online,” YouTube, 2023
Teachable Affiliate Program, teachable.com
OpenAI ChatGPT, chatgpt.com