How I Started Affiliate Marketing: My Origin Story

I was sitting alone in a hospital ER room, flipping through the same eight channels on a television no bigger than an iPad, waiting for news I had convinced myself would be bad. My wife had not been feeling well all day. I had pushed her to go to the hospital. Now she was in ultrasound and I was in a plastic chair, running through worst-case scenarios in my head, trying to figure out how I was going to be strong for her when the doctor walked in with whatever he had to say.

Then she came back, crying, and the tech looked at me and said: “You guys know you’re having twins, right?” Every calculation I had been running about our future changed in about four seconds. Double the diapers, two cribs, two car seats, double the daycare, double the college tuition. I went home that night and typed “how to make more money” into Google for the first time. That search is why I am here talking to you now. That is where this whole thing started.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The full origin story of how Alston Godbolt moved from a communications degree and stocking shelves at Walmart to making his first $130 in affiliate marketing
Why the “fast money” methods (surveys, paid-to-watch ads) are time sinks, and what the research actually shows
The Quora and Bluehost experiment that earned $130 in 12 hours and lit the fire for everything that followed
Why email marketing needs to start before you even have a product to sell, and why one coaching client’s two-year email history is the proof
What “spray and pray” looks like and why it destroys trust faster than any competitor can
The one rule that cuts through shiny object syndrome: watch what the gurus actually do, not what they tell you to do
A clear framework for choosing between free content and paid traffic when you are just getting started
Not sure which online business model fits your skills and situation? Take the quiz at finder.platformproof.com to find out in under three minutes

From Communications Degree to Dead Ends

Alston graduated from Marion University in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications around 2006. The recession was building. Press release jobs and PR positions were not returning calls. One interviewer, after reviewing the resume, told him he “spoke really well” and did not offer the job. The implication was clear, even if nothing was said directly.

The first real gig out of school was going door to door selling AT&T service to small and medium-sized businesses in the Milwaukee suburbs. Drive to Wauwatosa by 7 a.m., put on a suit and tie, knock on doors. The problem was that everyone who already liked AT&T already had AT&T, and everyone who hated AT&T wanted to tell you how much they hated AT&T. Over a week and a half of pure grinding, total earnings: $50.26. Total money spent on gas commuting: more than $50.26. Net result: a lesson that commissions-only sales with an undesirable product is not a path to white picket fences.

After moving back home, the next job was third shift at Walmart, one of the first 24-hour locations in southeastern Wisconsin. The work was simple: show up, put cereal boxes on shelves, take an hour lunch, go home. It was honest, it paid, and nobody argued with you. A colleague who also managed at OfficeMax noticed Alston showed up on time and worked without drama. Three weeks in, that colleague offered him a better-paying day job. He took it. The lesson he carries from that: always work at your highest level because you never know who is watching.

The For-Profit University Years and the Moment Something Shifted

After OfficeMax came an operations coordinator role at DeVry University’s Keller Graduate School of Management, working out of Lincolnshire, Illinois, near Lake Forest and Highland Park, one of the wealthier corridors outside Chicago. The role was administrative, but the exposure to driven, successful people planted something. It was not the dream job. It did not feel like the endpoint.

From there, an admissions advisor position at DeVry. It was a sales job dressed in the language of education. Two candidates were hired at the same time; the company planned to keep one. On the first day, Alston’s competition was furiously taking notes and asking questions. He sat quietly. His boss asked why he was not asking anything. His answer: “I don’t know what I don’t know yet. I need to figure that out before I can ask an intelligent question.” He survived the cut-down period by enrolling his then-girlfriend (now wife) and his sister, then building from there.

When federal policy around for-profit universities began to shift, the commission structure at DeVry changed. Alston asked the obvious question out loud in a meeting: if compensation is no longer tied to enrollments, what is the incentive to enroll people? Months later, the company laid off a significant chunk of the admissions team. He had already left. Next stop: Concordia University, where he rose to center director, managing an extended campus location. Good job. Still did not feel like enough.

The Cubicle, the Pine Tree, and the Second Epiphany

The hospital-room moment with the twins kicked off a longer search. Alston enrolled in a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science program at Oregon State, starting after watching free Python 101 courses from an Ivy League school online. He started the degree when the twins were about three months old. Sleep ran two to three hours a night. He failed classes, dropped classes, pushed through. Then, about a year and a half in, he found out a third child was on the way. Three kids under three years old, a center director job two miles from home, a wife who was a nurse working half a mile farther, and an unfinished CS degree.

He finished enough of the degree to land a software developer job at a manufacturing company in Illinois, a 25 to 30 minute commute away. The salary more than doubled what he had been making. For about a week, it felt like the answer. Then the cubicle reality set in. He had one view: a small square cutout in the wall facing a pine tree. He could see just enough sky to know the outside existed. He started pacing. He would skip lunch breaks to leave early. He felt, as he puts it, like someone trapped in a prison. That was epiphany number two: he could not work in a cubicle. He needed out. And that is when the research into making money online got serious.

The $130 That Changed the Direction

The catalyst came from a YouTube video by Franklin Hatchet, a well-known creator in the affiliate marketing space. The video showed how to use Quora and an affiliate link to generate commissions. The product was Bluehost web hosting. The method: sign up as a Bluehost affiliate for free, get your unique tracking link, go to Quora, search for questions about web hosting and building websites, answer those questions, and include the affiliate link in your answers.

Alston did exactly that from his cubicle at work. He found four or five relevant questions in about 20 minutes and posted answers with his link. About two hours later, two emails arrived from Quora: both answers had been removed for violating platform terms. You cannot just drop affiliate links into answers. He went home thinking it was another failed method, another dead end. Then he checked his other email. Bluehost had sent two separate notifications: he had earned affiliate commissions. Total for the day: $130. First attempt at affiliate marketing. Twelve hours from starting to cash in hand.

That $130 commission was not retirement money. But it proved something nothing else had managed to prove in all the surveys, all the paid-to-watch-ads tests, all the dead ends: the money was real and the path was repeatable. That is when he committed to figuring out content creation seriously, even though he had spent months trying every possible approach that did not involve being on camera.

The Side Hustles That Did Not Work (and Why)

Before affiliate marketing clicked, Alston worked through a long list of the methods most commonly promoted in online spaces. Here is his honest accounting of what he tried and what happened:

Online surveys: Total earnings never exceeded $20. Never hit the minimum payout threshold (usually around $50 on most platforms). The money evaporated in the account. Not a real income stream for anyone with actual time value.
Getting paid to watch ads: Complete waste of time. The pay-per-view rates are fractions of a cent. You would need thousands of hours to earn anything worth withdrawing. These models exist to build advertiser data, not to pay viewers a living wage.
Dropshipping: He tried it. The model itself can work, but he could not see the connection between listing a product in an e-commerce store and actually getting targeted buyers to find it. Without understanding traffic, the store is just a website nobody visits.
Etsy digital products: Tried it, actually liked it. Selling digital downloads (templates, graphics, planners) requires no inventory and has solid margins. He recommends it for people who can create reusable digital assets.
Freelance WordPress web design: Liked this one too. He later built a course called “31 Ways You Can Find Web Design Clients” to help others do what he did.
Udemy courses: Did not recommend it. The platform controls pricing, often runs deep discounts that undercut your earnings, and you have no relationship with your students after the sale.
Web hosting company: Started one, liked the recurring revenue model.

His read across all of these: most side hustles do work if you stay with them long enough and understand how to get traffic to them. The question is not “does this work?” but “does this work for me, and am I willing to learn enough about traffic to make it go?” If the answer is no, move on and find a model that genuinely fits your skill set.

Not sure which online business model fits your background?

You do not need to trial-and-error your way through every option on the list. The Platform Proof Finder matches your current skills and situation to the most realistic starting point. Find it at finder.platformproof.com.

The Rules Alston Actually Follows to Build Online Income

After this origin story, the podcast episode pivots into the actionable framework Alston uses and teaches. These are not theories. They are the lessons carved out of the failures above.

Rule 1: Start Email Marketing Before You Think You Need It

This is the number one thing Alston says he would change about his own early years. He delayed building an email list because he did not have a product to sell yet. That was the wrong way to think about it. The email list is not a downstream output of your business. It is the infrastructure that makes everything else more stable over time.

His proof point: a student who joined his coaching program had been on his email list since 2020. He had been receiving emails for two years before he bought anything. Alston asked him: “If that is not proof of why you should be doing email marketing, what is?” Most buyers need between 5 and 12 touchpoints before they trust you enough to pull out a card. A list you built two years ago pays you today. A list you decide to build today pays you two years from now.

You can start collecting emails before you have a product. Before you know what you are going to sell. Ask your early subscribers what problem you can solve for them. Use their answers to build your first offer. You will also build trust in the process, which is the thing that actually converts.

Rule 2: Never Spray and Pray

Spray and pray is the practice of grabbing your affiliate link or product page URL and blasting it to everyone you can reach, usually through Facebook Messenger, DMs, or group chats. You have almost certainly seen this from someone in your contacts in the last 12 months.

It does not work for two reasons. First, most of the people receiving your message have no interest in what you are selling, so the conversion rate is effectively zero. Second, and more damaging, it destroys trust. The old principle still holds: people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Mass blasting says you care more about the transaction than the relationship. That cannot be undone with a follow-up message.

The right approach is to create content that reaches people who are already searching for what you offer. Someone typing “best web hosting for beginners” into Google is already in the market. Someone receiving a cold DM about web hosting on a Saturday afternoon is not. Target intent, not inboxes.

Rule 3: Show Up Consistently Instead of Perfectly

Alston’s third rule is the simplest and the one most people skip because it lacks excitement: just show up every day. Publish. Post. Send the email. Record the video. You will naturally get better by doing it. You will watch what is working for others and test it on your own audience. You will modify what does not land and double down on what does.

He points to an email marketing creator on TikTok who posted a specific email template with the caption “send this email to make more money with your list.” Alston sent that email. It worked. The advice: try what you see, as long as it is legal and it makes sense for your audience. You do not need to invent everything from scratch. You need to apply what you observe and measure what happens.

Rule 4: Do What the Gurus Do, Not What They Say

This is the one that sounds like a riddle until you think about it. If a creator is emailing their list daily, do email marketing. If they are making three videos a week, make three videos a week. The evidence of what works is in their behavior, not in the product they are trying to sell you.

The irony is that a lot of marketing content tells you to skip one channel (email, SEO, YouTube) while the person telling you to skip it is actively using that channel to reach you. That is the tell. Watch the method, not the message.

Rule 5: Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome

Early on, Alston fell into the pattern most beginners fall into: trying everything at once. Email gurus push a new method every week. A new platform launches with promised virality. A course promises you a shortcut. You buy it. You try it for two weeks. The next thing arrives. You chase that.

The result is a scattered resume of half-started experiments with no real traction anywhere. The fix is to pick a model that fits your skill set, study it seriously, and stay with it long enough to learn what actually causes results. Alston chose affiliate marketing because he could see the direct connection between content creation and product recommendation. He could trace the path from “someone has a problem” to “I help them solve it and earn a commission.” That connection felt logical. That logic kept him going when the results were slow.

Rule 6: Free Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

Two levers for getting in front of people: free content (YouTube, podcasts, blogs, TikTok, organic social) and paid ads (YouTube ads, TikTok ads, Facebook ads, solo ads). Neither is universally better. They serve different situations.

If you do not have a tested offer yet, start with free. Create content, build an audience, ask them what they need, and develop the product from that signal. Free content takes longer to produce results but costs you time instead of money, which matters when you are starting out.

If you already have an offer and you can afford to lose money while testing, paid traffic tells you faster whether the offer converts. A poorly converting offer will bleed money quickly on paid channels, which is actually useful data. A winning offer on paid traffic scales faster than any organic channel. Alston specifically does not recommend solo ads for most beginners because the list quality is inconsistent and the traffic is often not truly targeted.

Rule 7: Compare Yourself to Yesterday, Not to the Top 1%

The comparison trap is one of the most reliable ways to quit before you should. You start a YouTube channel and compare it to someone with 500,000 subscribers. You post your first blog article and compare it to a site with ten years of Google authority. The comparison is meaningless because the only variable you can control is your own rate of progress.

The frame Alston uses: if you have zero content today and one piece of content tomorrow, you are already more successful than you were yesterday. That sounds trivially small. It is not. Every large creator started at zero and kept publishing when the numbers were still embarrassing. The ones who stayed past that stage are the ones you are comparing yourself to now.

Find Your X

Alston’s whole reason for starting the Get Off The Wall podcast was to pull people off the sidelines by showing them real stories from people at every stage of building an online business. Not just the success stories. Not just the people who have “made it.” The beginner who is three weeks in and figuring out their first lead magnet has just as much to teach as the person who has been doing this for a decade, maybe more, because the struggle is fresh and specific.

The starting point for most people is not a method. It is a match. Which business model fits how you already think, what you already know, and how much time and money you actually have to commit? If you are still trying to answer that question, the fastest way to get a real answer is at finder.platformproof.com. The quiz walks through your situation and returns a concrete starting point, not a general list of “options to consider.”

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Alston Godbolt make his first money in affiliate marketing?

He signed up as a Bluehost affiliate for free, got his unique tracking link, went to Quora, and answered questions about web hosting and starting websites. He included his affiliate link in four or five answers. Quora removed the answers for violating their terms (no direct affiliate links). But before the removal hit his Bluehost account, two sales had already processed. He earned $130 in commissions within about 12 hours of starting. That first real commission drove him to take content creation seriously.

Do online surveys actually pay real money?

Not in any meaningful sense for most people. Alston tried them and never earned more than $20 total, never reaching the minimum withdrawal threshold on the platforms he used. The pay-per-survey rates are too low relative to the time invested. If your time has any value to you, surveys are almost certainly the worst return on time of any side hustle category. The platforms exist primarily to aggregate consumer data for market research firms, not to pay participants a living wage.

When should I start email marketing?

Before you have a product. Before you even know what you want to sell. Start collecting emails as soon as you have any online presence at all. The list you build in month one pays you in month 24. Research consistently shows that most buyers need between 5 and 12 interactions with a brand before they make a purchase. If you are not emailing, you are relying on someone to come back to your content on their own schedule, which almost never happens. Build the list from day one and use it to learn what your audience actually wants to buy.

What is spray and pray and why is it a problem?

Spray and pray is the practice of copying your affiliate link or product URL and sending it to everyone you can reach through DMs, messenger, group chats, or mass emails. The problem is twofold: you are reaching people who have no interest in what you are selling, so conversion rates stay near zero; and you are actively burning trust with people who might have been real customers later. People buy from those they know, like, and trust. Mass cold outreach signals you value the transaction more than the relationship, which is the opposite of trust-building.

Is dropshipping worth trying?

It depends on whether you understand how to drive traffic. Alston tried it and the model did not click for him because he could not see how an e-commerce store would get found by people who actually wanted to buy. That was a traffic gap, not a model problem. Dropshipping can work if you pair it with paid ads or strong SEO, but it is not a passive or low-effort business. If you choose it, budget for traffic from day one rather than expecting organic sales to find you.

How do you avoid shiny object syndrome when starting an online business?

Pick one model that logically connects to your skills and interests, then commit to it for long enough to learn what actually drives results in that model. The cutoff point most coaches recommend is 90 to 180 days of consistent effort before evaluating whether to stay or pivot. Shiny object syndrome thrives in the early weeks when results are nonexistent and everything else seems more promising. What looks like a better opportunity is almost always just an earlier stage of someone else’s grind, which looks easier from the outside because you cannot see the work behind it.

Should I use paid ads or free content when starting out?

If you do not have a tested offer, start with free content. It takes longer but costs time rather than money, which protects you while you figure out what your audience actually wants. If you have a specific offer and budget you can afford to lose while testing, paid traffic will tell you faster whether your offer converts. Paid channels like YouTube ads and TikTok ads reach people by intent signal, which makes them more efficient than cold outreach, but they can drain budget quickly if your landing page or offer is not ready.

What is the Get Off The Wall podcast about?

It is a podcast Alston started to help people on the sidelines take action on starting an online business, whatever form that takes. The idea behind the name: at any party or event, there are people on the dance floor having fun and people standing against the wall wanting to join but hesitating. The podcast is designed to pull the wall-standers into the action by featuring guests at every stage of building online businesses, from people who started last week to those who have built real income over years. Episode one is Alston’s own origin story.

Sources

Get Off The Wall Podcast, Season 1 Episode 1: Alston Godbolt (YouTube, channel: Platform Proof / Alston Godbolt)
Franklin Hatchet YouTube channel (referenced in episode as source of the Quora + Bluehost affiliate method)
Bluehost affiliate program (referenced as the product that produced the first $130 commission)
Quora platform terms of service (referenced in episode regarding affiliate link removal)
Oregon State University online Computer Science degree program (referenced in episode)