How To Start Affiliate Marketing With A Blog 2022 ($130K/Mo. Blogging)

Blogging is still one of the most reliable ways to earn affiliate income online. While everyone chases the next short-form trend, blog posts keep ranking on Google for years, sending buyers to affiliate links around the clock without any additional work from you. Alston has been running affiliate blogs promoting everything from stand mixers and soundbars to web hosting and online courses, and in this breakdown he walks through the exact process he uses to find keyword opportunities and turn them into commissions.

The strategy comes down to two paths: you either start with a product and find the right keywords, or you start with a keyword and find the right product. Both approaches use the same research tools and the same writing method. By the end of this post you will know exactly how to pick your target, build a list of low-competition keywords, write posts that rank, and add affiliate links in the four most effective ways, including the one method that pays off the longest.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear two-path framework for choosing between product-first and keyword-first blog strategies
A step-by-step method for using Ahrefs to scrape competitor pages for low-KD keyword lists
The real math behind a $130,000-per-month affiliate income estimate using a single keyword niche
Four concrete ways to embed affiliate links inside blog posts, from text links to image banners
A 10-to-15-minute brainstorming exercise that makes writing faster and posts rank higher
The email-collection method that lets you follow up with readers who did not buy on the first visit
A free tool you can use to find affiliate programs beyond ClickBank, including programs that pay $4 to $10 per signup
Not sure which niche fits your skills? The Platform Proof Finder matches you to the path that fits what you already know.

Two Ways to Approach an Affiliate Blog

Before you write a single word, you need to make one decision: do you already know what product you want to promote, or are you still searching for a niche? That answer determines which direction your research flows.

If you know the product, you work backwards. You find that product’s name on Google, look at all the pages that already rank for it, and reverse-engineer the exact keywords those pages are winning. If you do not know the product yet, you work forwards. You pick a keyword or broad category that people search for, find low-competition phrases inside it, and then locate an affiliate program that matches the buyer intent behind those searches.

Both methods use the same tools. The order of operations is just flipped. What follows walks through each path with the real examples Alston demonstrated live on screen.

Path 1: Start With the Product and Work Backwards

Alston’s live example was a product called Xpear, pulled straight from ClickBank’s top offers list. ClickBank is a free affiliate marketplace where you can browse products in dozens of categories: business, games, health and fitness, and more. When you find a product you want to promote, click through to its affiliate page. Most programs there include pre-built banners, promotional images, and email swipe files you can use without designing anything yourself.

Once you have the product, go to Google and type the product name. You will see blog posts and review pages that are already getting traffic on that topic. Copy the URLs of several of those pages, because these become your research targets. Now you need a keyword research tool to see exactly what those competitor pages are ranking for. Alston uses Ahrefs for this step, though free alternatives exist for bloggers on a tighter budget.

The goal is not to copy the competitors. The goal is to find the low-competition keywords hiding inside their traffic so that you can write posts specifically targeting those gaps before anyone else does.

How to Pull Keywords From Competitor Pages With Ahrefs

Paste a competitor URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer and open the Organic Keywords report. You will see every keyword that page currently ranks for, along with two numbers that matter: search volume (how many people search for it each month) and keyword difficulty (KD), which runs from 0 to 100.

The closer to 100, the harder it is to rank. As a new or small blog, you want KD 10 or less. Alston’s live search on the Xpear-related competitor page surfaced a keyword called “17 Day Kickstart Diet” with 3,600 searches per month and a keyword difficulty of exactly zero. That is a free ranking waiting to happen for any blogger willing to write a thorough post targeting it.

A second search of another competitor page for an Xpear review pulled up a keyword with 4,900 searches per month and zero keyword difficulty. When those two numbers appear together on the same keyword, that is not a coincidence to skip. That is exactly the kind of opportunity a new site can win within weeks of publishing, before larger sites notice the gap.

Alston’s recommended process: repeat this for two or three competitor pages, hit Export on each, and pull down the first 1,000 rows. Combine them into a single spreadsheet sorted by KD ascending. Your goal is a list of roughly 50 keywords with real search volume and difficulty at or near zero. That list becomes your editorial calendar for the next several months.

Path 2: Start With a Keyword and Work Forward to the Product

If you do not have a specific product in mind, open Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and start typing broad category phrases. Alston’s demonstration used “how to cancel” as the seed keyword. By itself that phrase is far too competitive. But when you filter keyword difficulty to 10 or less and sort by search volume, you get a long list of specific, low-competition targets: “how to cancel Paramount Plus,” “how to cancel DoorDash,” “how to cancel ESPN Plus.” According to the data Alston pulled on screen, that seed phrase generates over 2.5 million searches per month across 244,000 keyword variations. Most of those specific phrases sit unclaimed by any serious blog.

Now you need a product that helps people who are trying to cancel things. Alston went to Truebill, a subscription-cancellation service, and found their affiliate program through the Impact network. Truebill pays between $4 and $10 for every new signup you send them. The affiliate application is available directly on Truebill’s website under their Affiliates page, and they route new partners through Impact to track commissions.

To validate the opportunity further, Alston pasted Truebill’s domain into Ahrefs Site Explorer. The results: Truebill gets over 1.6 million searches per month, their organic traffic value is more than $438,000 per month (meaning that is what it would cost to buy the same traffic via paid ads), and they rank for 1.3 million keywords in total. That is the size of the prize in the “how to cancel” niche.

The Real Math Behind $130,000 a Month

Alston ran the numbers on screen so you can see exactly where the title figure comes from. Take the 1.3 million keywords Truebill ranks for. Assume you capture just one percent of that total keyword volume, which works out to 13,000 visitors a month. Multiply 13,000 visitors by the $10 commission Truebill pays per new signup and you land at $130,000 per month. That is the $130K figure.

Two honest caveats before you run with that number. First, Alston explicitly states on screen that a site’s traffic value does not equal its actual revenue. Traffic value shows what the traffic is worth to advertisers, not what you would earn in affiliate commissions. Conversion rates, bounce rates, and the friction in the actual signup process all reduce the final payout substantially. Second, capturing one percent of any established domain’s total keyword footprint as a new site would take years of consistent publishing and serious domain authority building.

Turn the math down by a factor of ten. One-tenth of one percent of Truebill’s keyword volume is 1,300 visitors a month, and at $10 per signup that is $13,000 per month if your conversion rate held steady. Layer two or three additional subscription-management affiliate programs from OfferVault that pay similar rates and you are looking at a business that compounds over time without requiring you to produce new content every week forever. The mechanism is real. The scale is variable. You have control over both.

The Brainstorming Exercise That Makes Posts Rank

Alston’s writing process starts before a single word goes into WordPress. He spends 10 to 15 minutes on a brainstorming session using the journalist questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. Applied to the keyword “17 Day Kickstart Diet,” those questions become specific prompts: Who is this diet for? Who is it not for? What is included in it? What does day one look like? When should someone start? Where can they find more information? Why does this work when other diets fail? How do you get started?

Each question becomes a heading or subheading in the finished post. The answers fill the paragraphs underneath. The result is a post that covers the topic from multiple reader angles, which is precisely what Google looks for when deciding which page earns the top spot. A post that anticipates and answers every realistic follow-up question outranks a shorter post that only covers the surface level, even if the shorter post has more backlinks.

Skipping the brainstorm produces posts that drift, miss important angles, and feel thin to readers and algorithms alike. Alston estimates this 10-to-15-minute exercise saves hours of time on the back end because once the outline exists in bullet form, the writing becomes filling in blanks rather than staring at a cursor waiting for structure to appear.

Post length varies by competition. Alston has ranked posts at 1,500 words and 4,500 words. The number that matters is not word count in isolation. It is thoroughness relative to the competing pages. If the top three results are 800-word listicles and you write 2,000 words of genuine depth, you win. If the top three are already comprehensive deep dives, your lighter post will not beat them regardless of how many keywords you pack in.

Four Ways to Add Affiliate Links to Your Blog Posts

Once the draft is done, you need to embed the affiliate links. Alston walked through four distinct methods live inside the WordPress block editor. Each method serves a different reader behavior.

Method 1: Text link in a paragraph. Write a sentence that contextually references the product and hyperlink a phrase like “click here” or “try it free” to your affiliate hop link. Always set the link to open in a new tab so readers do not lose your post. This is the most common method. It blends into the surrounding content, which means it feels less like an ad, but it can also get overlooked by readers who are skimming.

Method 2: Button block. Add a WordPress button with a call to action like “Click Here To Learn More” and attach your affiliate link. Buttons are visually distinct and catch the eye of readers who are not reading every word. They tend to outperform plain text links for raw click rate, especially on mobile where a large tap target makes a real difference in how often someone actually acts.

Method 3: Image banner. Download the promotional banner from the affiliate product’s resource page, upload it as an image block in WordPress, and make the image itself a clickable link pointing to your hop link. ClickBank products typically include several banner sizes in their affiliate dashboard. A well-placed banner mid-post interrupts the reading experience in a productive way, reminding visitors there is an actual product to consider buying. Alston walked through this live by downloading a banner for the ClickBank product, dragging it into WordPress, and linking it to the generated hop link with a new tab setting.

Method 4: Email collection form. This is the method Alston calls the best long-term strategy. Instead of sending every visitor directly to the affiliate offer, you offer something free in exchange for their email address. Readers enter their name and email inside the blog post itself, which feeds into an autoresponder like AWeber. The autoresponder sends a pre-written email sequence. Many affiliate programs on ClickBank provide these sequences as “email swipes” you can import directly. The ClickBank product Xpear includes a ready-made five-day email sequence that any affiliate can use.

Not sure which niche matches your skills and situation?

The Platform Proof Finder asks five questions and shows you the specific income path that fits what you already know. Visit finder.platformproof.com to find yours in under two minutes.

Why Email Collection Beats Every Other Method Over Time

Most people who read a blog post do not buy on the first visit. They get distracted, they want to think it over, they open three other tabs, or they simply close the browser. If your only conversion path is a text link they scrolled past, that reader is permanently gone the moment they leave your site. If you collected their email before they left, they are not gone. They are in your follow-up sequence and you can keep reaching them.

Day one of the sequence promotes the original product. Days two through five continue with different angles, address objections, and share additional context about why the product is worth trying. If the reader still has not bought by day five, the sequence pivots to a different but related product. ClickBank has dozens of competing offers in any niche, so if someone is not convinced by the first product, you can introduce them to a second one without them ever realizing the transition happened. It all arrives as helpful email from someone they voluntarily opted in to hear from.

Alston specifically mentioned the ability to follow up with a TBurn offer after someone did not buy on an Xpear sequence. Both products are in the health niche on ClickBank. Both have their own email swipes. You can run the second sequence immediately after the first with no additional writing. The entire follow-up system operates on autopilot once it is configured in AWeber or a similar platform.

The email list is also your most durable business asset. A blog post might lose its Google ranking in two years when the algorithm updates. The email list you built from that post still exists. Those readers are still reachable. You can promote new products, link them to new blog posts, and launch new offers to the same audience for as long as they stay subscribed. The blog generates the list. The list generates income independent of the blog’s rankings.

Honest Drawbacks of Blog Affiliate Marketing

This method works, but there are real friction points worth understanding before you start.

Time to ranking. Google does not rank new sites quickly. A brand new domain typically takes three to six months before posts start appearing in search results, and another three to six months before those rankings stabilize. That means potentially six to twelve months of publishing without significant organic traffic arriving. You can shorten this by targeting only zero-to-low KD keywords from the start, but you cannot eliminate the waiting period entirely. Consistency during that invisible stretch is what separates blogs that eventually earn from blogs that get abandoned.

Ahrefs is a paid tool. Ahrefs plans start at around $99 per month. The competitor URL scraping workflow Alston demonstrated is significantly faster with Ahrefs than with free alternatives. If you are starting out and the monthly cost feels steep before you have seen any commissions, free tools like Ubersuggest, Google’s free Keyword Planner, or AnswerThePublic can get you moving. They surface less data per query, so your keyword list will be smaller, but the process still works.

Consistent writing is harder than it looks. Building a list of 50 keyword opportunities takes one good afternoon. Writing 50 posts that each thoroughly answer a different question is months of sustained work. Most people who fail at affiliate blogging stopped publishing before Google had enough content to evaluate their site seriously. The keyword list is easy. The publishing discipline is the actual test.

Affiliate programs change without warning. Truebill can close its affiliate program, reduce commissions, or migrate to a different network at any time. Any blog built around a single program is fragile. Alston’s approach spans multiple programs across multiple niches, which is why OfferVault is worth bookmarking. Type any niche term into OfferVault and compare payout rates across the affiliate networks that carry competing programs. Spreading your posts across three or four programs in the same niche gives you resilience when one program changes its terms.

Step-by-Step Plan for Starting Your Affiliate Blog

Here is the sequence that comes directly from the video demonstration:

Decide which path fits your starting point: product-first (work backwards from ClickBank) or keyword-first (work forwards from Ahrefs)
If product-first: go to ClickBank, pick a product from Top Offers, open its affiliate page, then search the product name on Google to find competitor pages to analyze
If keyword-first: open Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, type a broad category phrase, filter KD to 10 or less, and pull 50 keyword targets
For each competitor page, paste the URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer, open Organic Keywords, and export the first 1,000 rows
Combine all exports into one spreadsheet, sort by KD ascending, and select your first 5 to 10 writing targets
Before writing each post, run the 10-to-15-minute brainstorm using who, what, when, where, why, and how applied specifically to that keyword
Write the post in WordPress with the exact keyword as the title, converting each brainstorm bullet into a section heading
Embed affiliate links using at minimum a text link, a button, and an email opt-in form; set up your autoresponder with the affiliate’s email swipe sequence
Search OfferVault for additional affiliate programs in the same niche to add backup commission sources to your follow-up email sequences
Publish, request Google indexing through Search Console, and repeat for the next keyword; revisit rankings at 90 days

Find Your X

Affiliate blog marketing works. But the specific product, niche, and keyword approach that works best for you depends on what you already know, what you can write about consistently, and what audience you already have some credibility with. If you are still working through that question, the Platform Proof Finder is a five-question tool that maps your skills and situation to a specific online income path. Visit finder.platformproof.com and get your result in under two minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a lot of website traffic to make money with affiliate blog marketing?

No. A blog with 1,000 monthly visitors can generate real commissions if the traffic comes from buyers with clear purchase intent. A post targeting “Truebill review” or “best app to cancel subscriptions” will convert at a much higher rate than a broad informational post with no buying intent behind it. Quality of traffic matters more than quantity, especially early on when your total volume is still low. Targeting buyer-intent keywords from the start keeps your conversion rate high even on a small audience.

Is ClickBank still a legitimate place to find affiliate products?

ClickBank is still active and processes billions in affiliate commissions each year. Product quality varies significantly across the marketplace, so you need to review what you are promoting before you link to it. Look at the sales page, read public reviews, and ideally test the product yourself if the price is reasonable. The affiliate tools ClickBank provides, including email swipes, banner ads, and hop link tracking IDs, are genuinely useful and reduce setup time considerably for new bloggers who do not want to build their own creative assets from scratch.

Can I do this without paying for Ahrefs?

You can, but the research process is slower. Free tools like Ubersuggest, Moz’s free tier, or Google’s Keyword Planner provide some volume and difficulty data, though with fewer results per query and lower precision. The competitor URL scraping workflow Alston demonstrated is an Ahrefs-specific feature without a direct free equivalent. Google Search Console becomes useful once your site already has traffic, and AnswerThePublic surfaces question-based keywords that are worth targeting. You will find fewer zero-KD opportunities per hour of research with free tools, but the underlying process is the same.

What autoresponder should I use to collect emails from my blog?

Alston mentioned AWeber and ClickFunnels as two options for email collection and automated sequences. AWeber is a standalone email service provider with WordPress plugins that make opt-in forms easy to add to any post. ClickFunnels is a broader funnel-building platform that includes email but costs significantly more per month. For bloggers just starting out, AWeber or a free-tier alternative like MailerLite is sufficient to run the affiliate email swipe sequences that most ClickBank products include. The autoresponder is what turns a one-time blog visit into a multi-day promotional sequence without any manual work on your part.

How long should a blog post be to rank on Google?

There is no fixed answer. Alston has ranked posts at 1,500 words and posts at 4,500 words. The length that works depends on what is already ranking for that specific keyword. Open the top five Google results, assess how thoroughly they each cover the topic, and match or exceed that level of depth. A post that answers every realistic reader question in 2,000 words will outperform a 4,000-word post padded with repetition. Thoroughness is the target. Word count is a side effect of being thorough, not a goal in itself.

How many posts do I need before I start seeing affiliate income from a blog?

Most new bloggers start seeing their first organic traffic after 10 to 20 published posts, assuming each one targets a low-KD keyword with real search volume. The first affiliate commission typically arrives somewhere between months two and six. These timelines vary based on niche competition, domain age, and how consistently you publish. Blogs that produce one well-researched post per week generally reach meaningful income within twelve months. Blogs that publish sporadically tend to plateau before accumulating enough content to rank across multiple terms at once.

What is keyword difficulty and why does it matter for new bloggers?

Keyword difficulty (KD) is a score from 0 to 100 that estimates how hard it is to reach page one of Google for a given search term. The score is based primarily on the number and quality of backlinks pointing to the pages that already rank. A score near zero means those ranking pages have few authoritative backlinks, so a new site with good content has a realistic shot at ranking. A score above 30 typically requires an established domain with years of accumulated authority to compete. New blogs should target KD 10 or less almost exclusively until their domain has demonstrated consistent publishing and earned some natural backlinks.

Can I run an affiliate blog in any niche, or are some niches better than others?

You can technically blog in any niche, but some produce higher affiliate commissions than others. High-paying niches usually involve products with recurring subscriptions, high price points, or genuine urgency in the buying decision. Software tools like web hosting and autoresponders, financial services like budgeting apps and credit cards, and health and fitness products on ClickBank tend to pay well per conversion. What matters most is that you can find affiliate programs with real payout rates in the niche AND that the niche has enough low-KD search volume to actually rank. The keyword research process Alston showed works the same way regardless of which niche you choose.

Sources

ClickBank affiliate marketplace: clickbank.com
Ahrefs SEO toolset: ahrefs.com
Truebill affiliate program (now Rocket Money): available through the Impact affiliate network at impact.com
OfferVault affiliate program directory: offervault.com
AWeber email marketing platform: aweber.com
ClickFunnels funnel and email platform: clickfunnels.com
Impact affiliate network: impact.com