How Can I Start Affiliate Marketing In 2021 (How To Make Money Online)

Every affiliate marketing tutorial on YouTube will tell you the same thing: go to Clickbank, grab a link to some health supplement or woodworking plan, and blast it everywhere. It works for about five people. For everyone else, it creates noise, burns trust, and earns zero commissions.

What Alston Godbolt does instead is pick a completely random niche, one with actual buyers, actual search volume, and almost no serious competition from other affiliate marketers who are all piled into the same tired categories. In this video he walks through the full process live, landing on hockey as the niche and showing every step from idea to income plan. This post unpacks that process so you can repeat it in any niche you choose.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A method for picking a profitable random niche from 2,000 options
How to use sporting goods retailer sites to generate dozens of content ideas in minutes
How to validate niche demand on YouTube before creating a single video
The exact PureHockey affiliate program terms (8% commissions, 45-day cookie) as a model for finding good programs
The Hook-Story-Offer video structure that moves viewers to click your affiliate link
The landing page formula and bridge page concept that capture the 80% of visitors who are not ready to buy immediately
Not sure which niche or income path fits your existing skills? Find out at finder.platformproof.com

Why Random Niches Beat Health, Wealth, and Relationships

The health, wealth, and relationships categories are where almost every new affiliate marketer starts. The problem is that every experienced affiliate marketer is also there. Competition is brutal, ad costs are high, and the audience has seen every angle so many times they do not even register the pitches anymore.

Random niches operate under completely different conditions. The hockey niche, the home brewing niche, the disc golf niche: these communities have passionate buyers, dedicated retailers with affiliate programs, and almost no one running a strategic content operation targeting them. You can build real authority in a random niche in months instead of years, because you are not fighting against a thousand well-funded competitors.

Alston keeps a list of 2,000 niche ideas available for free in his Facebook group. The point of that list is to remind you that everything is a niche and everything can be bought and sold online. That framing shift changes how you look at the internet. The hardware store, the sports section of a department store, the hobby aisle at a craft shop: every product category is a potential income stream for someone willing to create content around it.

How to Pick Your Niche

Alston’s process is deliberately low-pressure. He opens the 2,000 niche ideas spreadsheet, scrolls randomly, and stops. In this video he lands on options like high cholesterol diet, high protein, hiking, hiking gear, hip pain, historic travel, and hockey. He picks hockey because he has covered basketball, baseball, and tennis before but never hockey, and novelty keeps the content process interesting over the long run.

The selection criteria you should apply are simple: Does the niche involve physical products or digital training? Are there buyers who actively search for this topic? Is there at least one affiliate program? Hockey passes all three. So would dozens of other niches on that list.

If the niche you pick does not excite you at all, pick a different one. You will be creating three to five pieces of content per week in this niche. Low interest in the topic means low follow-through. High interest does not mean passion either; it just means you are curious enough to research and write about it without dreading each session.

Breaking a Niche Into Sub-Niches You Can Actually Win

Hockey is a broad niche. You could spend years creating content on the sport and never cover the same ground twice. That breadth is an opportunity, but it also means you need to narrow your focus to build a coherent audience and a coherent affiliate offer.

Alston identifies several sub-niches within hockey just by thinking through the sport for a few minutes. Kids hockey is one. Kids hockey equipment requires significant spending: skates, sticks, helmets, pads, and bag fees for travel teams. Parents in this sub-niche spend reliably because they have no choice once their child is committed to the sport.

College hockey is another angle. You could build a YouTube channel as a reporter covering college programs, interviewing players, or tracking specific conferences. NHL team-specific content is a third option. Alston mentions creating a Chicago Blackhawks channel, covering games, gear, and stats, then linking viewers to team merchandise. He notes that your videos could surface as recommendations alongside the official team channel, which gives you organic reach without a big subscriber base.

Video game content around titles like NHL 21 or NHL 22 is a fourth direction. The copyright considerations are more complex there, but a franchise mode series where you build a team from scratch consistently attracts long-term viewers who follow episode by episode.

Using Retailer Sites to Generate Content Ideas

One of the more practical techniques in this video involves using retailer product category pages as a content idea engine. Alston goes to Dick’s Sporting Goods, clicks into the hockey section, and finds categories like ice hockey skates, sticks, gloves, and pucks. Each of those categories is a content idea. Each product type within a category is another idea.

The reasoning is straightforward. If a retailer has built out an entire category structure around these products, there is sustained buying demand for them. Those buyers search before they buy. They type things like “best composite hockey sticks 2021” or “hockey pucks for beginners” into search engines and YouTube. Your job is to be the answer those searches find.

He clicks through to pucks as an example. From one product category he generates ideas including best off-ice pucks, best pucks for outdoor use, pucks for cold weather, and comparison reviews of branded pucks. Each of those is a standalone video or blog post. Five minutes on a retailer’s website can produce a 30-video content calendar.

Validating Demand on YouTube Before You Start

Before investing time in a niche or sub-niche, Alston checks YouTube to confirm that real people are already watching content on this topic. He searches for hockey pucks and finds Coach Jeremy’s video titled “Best Off Ice Puck” with 178,000 views in just seven months. Coach Jeremy has 358,000 subscribers. That combination tells you two things: there is an audience for this content, and even a moderately sized channel can generate strong view counts in the hockey space.

He also notes that the presence of pre-roll ads on hockey videos signals advertiser interest, which means the niche has commercial value. If advertisers are spending money to reach that audience, you can monetize the same audience through affiliate links as an additional or primary revenue source.

A second search for hockey tips for beginners surfaces a video with 450,000 views uploaded five years ago. Old videos with strong view counts confirm sustained, not just trending, demand. You are not chasing a wave that has already passed; you are entering a space with consistent, year-over-year interest.

Finding the Right Affiliate Program: PureHockey as a Model

Once demand is confirmed, Alston searches for “hockey affiliate program” and finds several options: Pure Hockey, Hockey Monkey, and the NHL’s own affiliate program. Amazon Associates and Dick’s Sporting Goods round out the options for anyone who wants to promote gear without joining a sport-specific program.

He clicks into the PureHockey affiliate program as a demonstration. The terms are worth noting because they illustrate what to look for when evaluating any affiliate program:

Commission rate: 8% on all sales, which beats Amazon’s typical sporting goods rate of 3%
Cookie window: 45 days, compared to Amazon’s 24-hour window
Wide product selection across skates, sticks, gloves, and accessories

He runs a quick math example on a composite senior hockey stick priced around $101. At 8% commission, a single sale earns approximately $8 to $10. That is not life-changing per transaction, but if a 15-minute video generates 50 purchases in its first month, that is $400 to $500 from one piece of content. Create enough of those pieces and the income becomes meaningful.

He also mentions that you can join multiple programs simultaneously and send buyers to whichever one pays the best on a given product type. Pure Hockey for sticks, NHL directly for team merchandise, and Amazon as a catch-all for anything the specialty programs do not cover.

The Alphabet Soup Method for YouTube Keyword Research

One of the most repeatable keyword research techniques in this video costs nothing and requires no tools. Alston calls it the alphabet soup method. You type your niche plus a space into the YouTube search bar, then go through each letter of the alphabet and note what autocomplete suggestions appear.

For “hockey tips a” you might see hockey tips for adults, hockey tips for attackers. For “hockey tips b” you get hockey tips for beginners, hockey tips for better skating. Each of those autocomplete results is a search term real people are already typing. They are also, by definition, topics that YouTube has confirmed enough users search for to surface as suggestions.

Twenty-six letters, five to seven suggestions each, gives you over 130 video ideas for one niche in under ten minutes. Narrow down to the 30 or 40 that genuinely interest you and that connect naturally to a product or training program you can promote. That is your content calendar for the next two to three months.

Creating 3 to 5 Videos Per Week with Hook-Story-Offer

Content volume matters in the early stages of a channel. Alston recommends creating three to five videos per week when starting out. The more content you produce, the more chances you give the YouTube algorithm to surface your work to new viewers.

Each video follows the same three-part structure:

Hook: Lead with the promise of specific value. Example: “In this video I’ll show you five ways to skate faster on the ice.”
Story: Deliver the content. Walk through the tips, the review, the comparison, or the tutorial you promised in the hook.
Offer: Close with a clear call to action at the beginning and end of the video. Example: “If you want to learn about the best ice skates for hockey, click the link in my description or go to hockeyworld.com/fast.”

That last step sends viewers to a landing page, not directly to the affiliate product page. This distinction is critical and most beginners skip it entirely, which is why most beginners see no results from affiliate marketing.

The Landing Page Formula That Recovers Lost Commissions

Alston’s data point: 80% or more of visitors who land on an affiliate product page do not buy immediately. If you send them directly to the product page with no way to follow up, you lose 80% of your potential commissions permanently. They close the tab, forget about you, and maybe buy from someone else a week later.

A landing page breaks that cycle. Instead of sending viewers directly to a product, you send them to a simple page that collects their name and email address in exchange for a useful free resource. A PDF guide, a short training video, or a checklist all work.

Alston’s landing page formula follows a consistent pattern: How to [achieve result] for [audience] without [obstacle]. Applied to the hockey niche, that might look like “How to Get Better at Hockey Without Spending Money on a Personal Trainer.” Or “How to Skate Faster for Kids Without Expensive Lessons.” The specificity of the without clause is what makes it compelling. It addresses the objection the visitor is already thinking about.

The page itself is simple: a headline using that formula, a name field, an email field, and a submit button. That is the entire page. Nothing else. The simpler the page, the higher the conversion rate.

The Bridge Page: Warming Up Cold Audiences

After someone submits their email, they land on a bridge page. A bridge page is a short page, sometimes just a video, that introduces you, explains what the visitor is about to see, and connects where they came from (your YouTube channel) to where they are going (the affiliate product or offer page).

Alston compares it to a call center warm transfer. When a call center agent hands a caller to a specialist, they do not just blind-transfer the call. They say, “I have John on the line, he’s been with us for three years, he’s interested in upgrading his plan, and he has a question about the pricing.” The specialist picks up informed, and the caller does not have to repeat himself.

The bridge page does the same thing for affiliate marketing. It says: “You just watched my hockey tips video. Here is something that can take everything you just learned even further. I’ve personally reviewed it and here is why I recommend it.” That context turns a cold, skeptical visitor into a warm, ready-to-consider prospect before they ever see the affiliate offer page.

For physical products, the bridge page is less critical but still useful. For digital training programs or courses, it is close to essential. The gap between a YouTube video and a $97 or $297 course is large enough that most buyers need a bridge.

Pinterest, TikTok, and Reddit as Additional Traffic Sources

YouTube is the primary platform in this strategy but not the only one. Alston shares his own Pinterest account stats as a proof point: 1.2 million impressions, 22,000 images saved, and 278 link clicks at the time of the video. Those 278 clicks are people who left Pinterest, went to his landing page, and potentially entered their email address.

He highlights a specific advantage of Pinterest: the platform actively wants users to leave and solve their problems elsewhere. Unlike Instagram or TikTok, which use friction to keep users on the platform, Pinterest is built for discovery with an intent to act. A hockey gear image that links to a “best youth hockey sticks” landing page is exactly the kind of content Pinterest rewards with organic reach.

TikTok and Reddit also carry real traffic potential for the right niches. Short-form hockey tips on TikTok with a link in bio to your landing page can generate email subscribers who have never seen your YouTube channel. Subreddits like r/hockeyplayers allow you to participate in genuine discussions where, over time, you become a known contributor and people naturally find their way to your content.

Not sure which niche or income path actually matches your skills and situation?

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

The Full Step-by-Step System

Here is the complete process Alston walks through in the video, organized as an action sequence you can follow in order:

Step 1: Pick a niche. Use the 2,000 niche ideas list from Alston’s free Facebook group or pick any product category that has obvious buyers. Avoid health, wealth, and relationships until you have experience.
Step 2: Identify sub-niches. Break the broad niche into specific audiences: kids, beginners, competitive players, coaches, parents of players. Each sub-niche is a more targeted audience with more specific needs.
Step 3: Generate content ideas. Browse the product category pages on Dick’s Sporting Goods, Amazon, or any relevant retailer. Every product type is a content idea. Supplement with the alphabet soup method on YouTube search.
Step 4: Validate demand. Search your top content ideas on YouTube. Confirm that real channels are getting real views. Look for pre-roll ads as a signal of advertiser interest and commercial intent.
Step 5: Join affiliate programs. Search “[niche] affiliate program” in Google. Evaluate commission rates and cookie windows. PureHockey’s 8% commission and 45-day cookie is a strong benchmark to compare other programs against. Join Amazon Associates as a universal backup.
Step 6: Set up your landing page. Use the How to X for Y without Z formula. Keep the page simple: headline, name field, email field, submit button. Offer a free resource in exchange for the email address.
Step 7: Build your bridge page. Create a short video or written introduction that connects your YouTube channel to the affiliate offer. Warm the visitor up before they see the product page.
Step 8: Create content consistently. Aim for three to five videos per week. Use the Hook-Story-Offer structure for every video. Include your landing page URL at the beginning and end of each video.
Step 9: Build your email list. Send regular emails to subscribers about new content, relevant products, gear deals, and anything else the audience genuinely cares about. The list is your long-term asset because you own it independent of any platform.
Step 10: Expand to additional platforms. Once YouTube is producing steady traffic, test Pinterest, TikTok, or Reddit to find additional entry points for new subscribers.

Honest Drawbacks

This strategy works, but it requires consistency over a period of months before results become visible. Three to five videos per week for a niche you have never operated in means spending real time researching, scripting, filming, and editing. Most people start strong and slow down around week four or five when the channel has no subscribers and no sales yet.

The 8% commission on a $101 hockey stick is $8. If your first 90 days produce 20 sales total, that is $160. That number grows as the content library grows and as older videos accumulate views, but the early income is modest. The system is built for compounding output over time, not immediate income.

Landing page and bridge page setup requires at least basic technical comfort. Free tools exist, but there is still a learning curve if you have never built either of these before. Factor that setup time into your first-week plan.

Find Your X

The hardest part of this whole system is not the content creation or the affiliate program setup. It is figuring out which niche to pick and which income path fits your actual situation. If you are starting from zero with no audience, no list, and no product experience, the options feel overwhelming.

The Finder at finder.platformproof.com asks you a short set of questions about your skills, your time, and your goals and returns a specific recommendation. Not a list of 20 possibilities. One clear starting point matched to where you actually are right now.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to know anything about hockey to start a hockey affiliate marketing channel?

No. Alston says this directly in the video: you do not need to be an expert. You need to research and present information accurately. The same research skills that would lead you to find the best composite hockey stick on PureHockey.com are the skills you use to create a video comparing the same sticks. You are not coaching players; you are helping buyers make informed decisions.

How do I find the free 2,000 niche ideas list?

Join Alston’s free Facebook group. The list is available there at no cost. It is a spreadsheet with niche ideas organized by category. You can pick randomly as he does in this video or browse categories that interest you until one stands out. The point of the list is to break the assumption that only mainstream categories have buying audiences.

What is a PLR and how does it fit into the landing page?

PLR stands for private label rights content. It is pre-written material (ebooks, guides, short courses) that you can legally edit, brand as your own, and give away. In the context of a landing page, you offer the PLR guide as the free resource visitors receive in exchange for their email address. This gives you a lead magnet without having to write one from scratch.

Why is the 45-day cookie window important?

When someone clicks your affiliate link, a cookie is placed on their browser. If they come back and buy within the cookie window, you get the commission. Amazon’s cookie lasts 24 hours. PureHockey’s cookie lasts 45 days. In practice, someone who watches a hockey gear video on Tuesday might not buy until the following month when they get paid. With Amazon, you miss that sale. With PureHockey, you capture it.

How many affiliate programs should I join at once?

Join two or three to start. A sport-specific or niche-specific program like PureHockey as your primary, Amazon Associates as your universal backup, and optionally a second specialty program for a specific product type. Joining 10 programs before you have content produces confusion and zero benefit. Focus on creating content first and expand programs once you see which product types your audience actually clicks and buys.

What free tools can I use to build a landing page?

Mailchimp has a landing page builder on its free plan. Systeme.io offers a free plan that includes landing pages, email automation, and a basic sales funnel. Both are sufficient for the simple name-and-email page Alston describes. If you want more flexibility, ConvertKit’s free plan also includes landing page creation with basic design options.

Is Pinterest still worth using for affiliate marketing traffic in 2021?

Alston shares his own numbers from the time of this video: 1.2 million impressions, 22,000 saves, and 278 link clicks to his landing page. Pinterest explicitly allows outbound links in a way most platforms resist. If your niche has a visual component, any sporting goods niche qualifies there, Pinterest is worth at least a test. Create images for each video you publish and link them to your landing page rather than directly to an affiliate product.

How long before I start seeing commissions with this method?

Most channels see their first commissions within 60 to 90 days if they are publishing consistently. The first commissions are usually small, single digits in number, because early videos have low view counts. By month four or five, if you have 50 or more videos published, the compound effect of the content library starts to show. Older videos keep accumulating views and clicks. The income is not instant, but it does not reset to zero each month the way freelance or hourly work does.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How Can I Start Affiliate Marketing In 2021 (How To Make Money Online)”, YouTube, youtu.be/OR8S8Qr-_Q0
PureHockey affiliate program terms cited in video: 8% commission, 45-day cookie window
Dick’s Sporting Goods hockey category, dicksportinggoods.com
YouTube search data referenced in video: Coach Jeremy hockey pucks video, 178K views in 7 months; hockey tips for beginners video, 450K views over 5 years