Exposed: How To Promote Affiliate Links | Make Money Online

Most people are being taught to promote affiliate links the wrong way. The method you keep hearing about is called spray and pray: grab your link, paste it everywhere, and hope someone clicks. It sounds simple. It is also why the vast majority of people who try affiliate marketing quit within a few months and tell everyone it does not work.

The truth Alston Godbolt lays out in this video is different. Every major platform, from Pinterest to TikTok to LinkedIn, can produce affiliate commissions. The platform is not the problem. The method is. This post walks through every platform covered in the video, shows you the real numbers from each one, and ends with the single strategy that separates people who earn commissions from people who keep refreshing an empty dashboard.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear breakdown of nine platforms where affiliate links actually convert
The specific tactic Alston used on Quora to earn his very first affiliate commission
The PS5 restock alert strategy on Twitter that shows creative promotion working in any niche
Real audience numbers from LinkedIn groups across multiple niches
The 5-to-12 touchpoint rule that explains why spray and pray always fails
Why sending traffic to a landing page beats dropping affiliate links directly into posts
How GetResponse lets you start building an email list for free, up to 500 contacts
Not sure which niche or offer matches your skills? Start at finder.platformproof.com

The Spray-and-Pray Method That Keeps People Broke

Here is what most affiliate marketing courses tell you to do. Sign up for an affiliate program, copy your link, and paste it on Quora, TikTok, YouTube comments, Facebook groups, and anywhere else that will accept text. Repeat until money appears.

This does not work, and the reason is straightforward. There are literally millions of people on every major platform. They all have wants, dreams, and goals. They are also bombarded with hundreds of affiliate links every single day. A naked link, dropped with no context and no relationship behind it, gets ignored or reported. The people who build real income with affiliate marketing are not posting links. They are posting answers, building trust, and routing their audience through a system built for conversion.

Before anything else: the platform you choose is almost irrelevant. What matters is whether you are doing it correctly. The video covers nine platforms, and every single one of them has produced real commissions for real people. Let’s go through each one.

Pinterest: 162,000 Monthly Views and Growing

Pinterest is a search engine that runs on images. People come to Pinterest actively looking for ideas, solutions, and products. That intent makes it incredibly valuable for affiliate marketing. At the time of this video, Alston’s Pinterest account was pulling in 162,000 monthly views. That is not a typo. That is the kind of passive reach you can build over time by creating content that matches what your target audience is already searching for.

The way this works is straightforward. You create pins that speak directly to a specific interest or problem, and you link those pins to a landing page or a blog post that contains your affiliate link. Pinterest’s audience is heavily product-oriented, which means users are much closer to making a purchase decision than someone scrolling a social feed. That intent gap is exactly why Pinterest consistently outperforms platforms with much larger total audiences.

Facebook: Four Separate Traffic Channels in One App

Facebook is not one thing. Most people think of it as a single feed and conclude it is oversaturated. What they are missing is that Facebook contains at least four distinct traffic channels, and each one can send targeted people toward your affiliate offers.

The first is your Facebook business page, which gives you a professional home base for your content. The second is a personal profile, where you can build relationships and share value with people who already know you. The third is Facebook Reels, which is growing fast right now and rewards short video content with organic reach similar to what TikTok offered a few years ago. The fourth is Facebook Groups, where niche communities gather around specific topics and actively ask questions that your affiliate recommendations can answer.

All four work. The key in every case is to lead with value: answer a question, solve a problem, share a demonstration. The affiliate link is the next step after trust is established, not the opening move.

Reddit: Problem-Seekers Who Are Ready to Buy

Reddit is underrated for affiliate marketing, partly because most people do not understand why it works. Users come to Reddit specifically because they have a problem they cannot solve on their own. They are not passively scrolling. They are actively searching for someone to answer their question.

That intent makes Reddit extremely valuable. If someone is asking which web hosting provider is most reliable for a beginner, and you have a thoughtful, genuine answer followed by an affiliate recommendation, you are doing them a service. That is the opposite of spam. That is exactly what affiliate marketing is supposed to look like.

One important note from the video: a lot of Reddit content is not safe for work. Choose subreddits carefully and stick to communities that align with your niche. Dropping links in the wrong context is the fastest way to get banned and burned on a platform that could otherwise generate consistent traffic.

Twitter: The PS5 Restock Alert That Changes How You See Promotion

Twitter works for affiliate marketing if you use it with some creative thinking. The example Alston shares in this video is one of the most memorable illustrations of this entire topic. During the PS5 shortage, some marketers set up bots that tracked PlayStation 5 restock availability and automatically tweeted out alerts the moment units went live. Inside those tweets were Amazon affiliate links.

Think about what that required: no large following, no viral content, no paid ads. Just a useful service for people who were desperate to buy a PS5, paired with an affiliate link that sent them directly to the purchase page. The results speak for themselves. You do not need a bot to replicate this concept. The principle is to identify what your audience is urgently trying to find or buy and then put yourself in the path between their need and the product.

Twitter has millions of active users across every conceivable niche. The same approach that worked for PS5 alerts can work for any product in any category where people have a strong, timely desire to buy.

Quora: Where Alston Made His Very First Commission

This one is personal. Alston shares that his first affiliate marketing commissions came from Quora. He searched for “web hosting,” found people asking questions about it, and wrote genuine answers. Inside those answers, he included his affiliate link for a web hosting service. It worked.

Quora is a question-and-answer platform where the best answers rise to the top and stay there for years. Unlike social media posts that disappear in hours, a well-written Quora answer can generate clicks and commissions for months after you write it. That compounding nature makes it one of the highest-return time investments available to affiliate marketers who are just getting started.

The approach is simple. Go to the search bar, type a keyword related to your affiliate product or niche, and look for questions with existing views and engagement. Write the most helpful, honest answer you can. Your affiliate link belongs at the end, only if it genuinely solves the person’s problem. This is not a strategy that rewards shortcuts. It rewards expertise and clarity.

LinkedIn: The Underrated Giant Gary Vee Keeps Mentioning

LinkedIn does not get nearly enough credit in affiliate marketing conversations. According to Alston, Gary Vaynerchuk has been one of the loudest voices pushing people toward LinkedIn, and the numbers in this video explain why.

When Alston types “weight loss” into LinkedIn groups, he finds a group with 14,000 members, another with 4,200 members, and another with 3,500. That is just for weight loss. He then types in “woodworking” and finds a group with 20,000 members and another with 3,600. These are targeted, niche-specific communities full of people who have organized themselves around a shared interest.

You can find a LinkedIn group for nearly any niche you want to enter. Once you are in those groups, you can create content that speaks directly to that audience, answer questions, start conversations, and build the kind of credibility that turns followers into buyers. LinkedIn’s audience also tends to have higher purchasing power than many other platforms, which can translate into stronger conversion rates for the right affiliate offers.

Instagram: 21 Million Reasons Hashtags Still Work

Instagram continues to be a powerful channel for affiliate marketing, and the numbers make this clear. When Alston types in the hashtag #woodworking, he finds over 21 million posts dedicated to that single topic. That is 21 million pieces of content showing active, passionate interest in one niche.

The opportunity here is in the audience that already exists around these hashtags, not in flooding the space with more content. You can use Instagram to build a niche account, post valuable content consistently, and drive your audience toward a landing page in your bio link. That landing page collects email addresses, and the email list is where the actual affiliate revenue comes from. We will come back to that in a moment.

Instagram Reels also provides a real organic reach advantage for video content right now. Short, helpful videos in any niche can reach users who have never heard of you, and that discovery-first nature makes it one of the stronger options for building an affiliate audience from scratch.

TikTok: Massive but Not the Only Option

TikTok gets the most hype in affiliate marketing circles right now, and the reach numbers are genuinely impressive. When Alston searches “woodworking projects” on TikTok, the top results show 29 million views, 2.2 million views, and 2.9 million views on individual videos. That kind of reach is real, and TikTok’s algorithm is more likely than any other platform to show your content to new audiences even when you have zero followers.

But here is what the video makes very clear: TikTok is not uniquely better than every other platform. It is one channel among many that all have millions of active users. The reason people insist TikTok is the only place to promote affiliate links is usually because they heard it from someone who only tested TikTok. Every platform in this post can produce commissions. TikTok’s reach advantage comes with its own limitation, which we will cover below.

YouTube: The Deepest Trust You Can Build With an Audience

YouTube is where this video lives, and Alston is direct about why it works so well for affiliate marketing. YouTube videos rank in search results. They build trust through long-form content. Viewers who watch eight to fifteen minutes of you explaining a topic come away with a fundamentally different level of trust than someone who saw a thirty-second clip.

That trust translates into higher conversion rates when you include affiliate links in your video descriptions. YouTube also has the compounding quality that Quora has: a well-made video can continue attracting clicks years after you upload it. For people willing to invest in creating useful video content, YouTube is one of the highest-return platforms available.

Not sure which platform or offer matches what you already know?

Answer a few questions and find out at finder.platformproof.com.

The Real Secret: Landing Pages and Email Marketing

Here is where the video shifts from listing platforms to revealing the strategy that actually makes all of them work. Alston saves this for last because it is the most important thing in the entire video.

Do not drop your affiliate link directly into your posts, comments, or videos. Send people to a landing page first. Collect their email address. Then follow up with email marketing.

The tool Alston recommends is GetResponse. At the time of this video, GetResponse offered a free plan that includes up to 500 contacts per month, unlimited newsletters, one landing page, and a website builder with domain connection. You can set up your entire email marketing foundation without spending a dollar. There is no reasonable excuse not to start.

The 5-to-12 Touch Point Rule

This is the most important piece of data in the entire affiliate marketing conversation, and most tutorials skip over it entirely. Ninety percent of your buyers will not purchase the first time they encounter your recommendation. It takes between five and twelve touchpoints before a person who is interested in a product actually becomes a person who buys it.

Think about what that means for the spray-and-pray approach. Someone sees your affiliate link in a Reddit comment. They are mildly interested. They do not click. You will never see that person again. You just used up one touchpoint with no way to follow up on the remaining four to eleven that you need before they buy.

Now think about what happens when you send that same person to a landing page. They enter their email address. They receive a welcome email. Three days later they get a follow-up email with more context. A week later they get a comparison guide. Two weeks in they get a testimonial or case study. By touchpoint five or six, a meaningful percentage of your list buys. Not because you pushed them, but because you showed up consistently and built the trust that buying requires.

This is not a theory. This is how every successful affiliate marketer actually operates. The list is the business. The platform is just the traffic source.

Why Email Beats Every Social Platform for Follow-Up

Alston uses a specific example in the video that makes this point better than any abstract explanation could. He names a fictional user “Janice” who consumes content on TikTok. You create a great video. Janice watches it, likes it, and moves on. Tomorrow, there is absolutely no guarantee that TikTok’s algorithm shows Janice your next video. You might create ten more videos before the algorithm puts you back in front of her. You might never reach her again. That is the fundamental weakness of every platform-based approach to affiliate marketing.

Email is different. When Janice gives you her email address, you can put yourself directly in her inbox anytime you want. You are not competing with an algorithm. You are not dependent on a platform’s mood. You reach her on your schedule, with the message you choose, at the moment you decide.

Email also lets you promote multiple products over time without starting over. If Janice is in the woodworking space, you can send her the best miter saw recommendation this week, Ted’s Woodworking Plans next week, and a different saw or finishing product the week after. Every email is a new revenue opportunity to the same audience you already built. Compare that to TikTok or Instagram, where you are essentially starting from zero each time you post.

The Honest Drawbacks Worth Knowing

Every strategy has limits, and this one is no different. Here is what the video acknowledges and what you should plan for going in.

Reddit will get you banned if you are careless. Many subreddits have strict rules about self-promotion and affiliate links. Dropping a link in the wrong community is a fast way to lose the account. You need to contribute genuinely for an extended period before promoting anything.

GetResponse’s free tier has a ceiling. Five hundred contacts is a real starting point, but once you grow beyond that you will need to upgrade to a paid plan. That is not a criticism; it is just the math. Budget for it before you hit the limit.

The email list takes time to build. Landing pages convert a percentage of your visitors into subscribers, not all of them. If you are driving 100 visitors to a landing page each month, even a strong 30% conversion rate gives you 30 new subscribers. Building a list to the point where commissions become consistent takes months of steady effort. There is no version of this that works overnight.

Platform rules change. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok all update their policies regularly. What is permitted today may require adjustment next year. The email list is the asset that survives every platform change because you own it.

The Step-by-Step System

Here is the complete flow in order, based on everything covered in the video.

Pick one platform from this post that matches your strengths and the niche you want to serve
Create an account on GetResponse and set up a free landing page with an email opt-in
Write a welcome sequence of five to seven emails that deliver value and build trust around your niche topic
Begin creating content on your chosen platform, every piece of which points toward the landing page, not the affiliate link directly
Answer questions, solve problems, and demonstrate expertise consistently for at least 60 to 90 days before judging whether the approach is working
As your list grows, introduce additional affiliate offers that genuinely serve your subscribers
Once you see what converts, expand to a second platform and route that traffic into the same landing page and email system

Find Your X

Before you pick a platform or affiliate program, you need to know what you are promoting and why anyone would trust your recommendation over someone else’s. That clarity comes from understanding what you know, what problems you can solve, and which audiences are already looking for your specific kind of help.

If you are still working that out, finder.platformproof.com is the fastest way to get an honest answer. It takes a few minutes and points you toward the income stream that matches your actual situation, not a generic template.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the spray-and-pray method and why does it fail?

Spray and pray means copying your affiliate link and pasting it into comments, posts, and threads across as many platforms as possible, hoping someone clicks. It fails because there is no trust, no relationship, and no follow-up system. With 90% of buyers needing five to twelve touchpoints before purchasing, a single link drop almost never converts. The person moves on, and you have no way to reach them again.

Which platform is actually the best for affiliate marketing?

According to this video, none of them is uniquely best. Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube all have millions of active users and can all produce commissions. The variable that matters is not which platform you choose but whether you are routing your traffic through a landing page and email sequence. Pick the platform where you are most comfortable creating content and start there.

How did Alston make his first affiliate commissions?

He went to Quora, searched for “web hosting,” found people asking questions about web hosting options, and wrote genuine answers that included his affiliate link. That simple process of finding a real question and providing a real answer with a useful recommendation produced his first commissions. It required no followers, no website, and no paid advertising.

What is GetResponse and why does Alston recommend it?

GetResponse is an email marketing and landing page platform. Alston recommends it because it offers a free plan that includes up to 500 contacts per month, unlimited newsletters, one landing page, and a website builder that connects to your domain. For someone just starting to build an email list, the free tier removes the cost barrier entirely. You can build your entire foundation before spending anything.

How many touchpoints does it take before someone buys?

The video cites research showing that 90% of buyers do not purchase on their first exposure to a product. It typically takes between five and twelve touchpoints before a viewer becomes a buyer. This is why email marketing is so central to the strategy: it lets you deliver touchpoints two through twelve without depending on an algorithm to show your content to the same person repeatedly.

Can LinkedIn really work for affiliate marketing?

Yes, and the video shows real group sizes to prove it. Searching “weight loss” in LinkedIn groups surfaces a group with 14,000 members and others with thousands more. Searching “woodworking” shows a group with 20,000 members. LinkedIn’s audience trends professional and tends to have higher purchasing power than average social media users. It is an underused channel that Gary Vaynerchuk has been publicly advocating for.

What was the PS5 restock alert strategy on Twitter?

During the PS5 shortage, some marketers built or used bots that monitored PlayStation 5 inventory and automatically posted to Twitter the moment units became available, with an Amazon affiliate link in the tweet. People desperate to buy a PS5 were actively searching for exactly this information. The affiliate link met them at the point of maximum purchase intent. You do not need a bot to use this principle. Identify what your audience urgently wants to buy and put a useful alert or guide in front of them with your link.

Do I need a large following to make money with affiliate marketing?

No. The video makes this clear repeatedly. At the time it was recorded, Alston had 162,000 monthly views on Pinterest, which he built over time, but his early commissions on Quora came with no following at all. What you need is a relevant answer to a real question and a system for capturing and following up with the people who engage with you. A small, well-targeted email list converts far better than a large, unfocused social following.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Exposed: How To Promote Affiliate Links | Make Money Online,” YouTube
GetResponse free plan details (as referenced in the video): up to 500 contacts, unlimited newsletters, one landing page
Platform audience data cited in the video: Pinterest 162,000 monthly views; LinkedIn woodworking group 20,000 members; Instagram #woodworking 21 million posts; TikTok woodworking projects top video 29 million views
Buyer touchpoint research cited: 90% of buyers require 5-12 touchpoints before purchasing