I Tried It: How To Earn $285 Per Hour INSTANTLY (My Honest Results After 3 Days)

A YouTube video promised $285 per hour by following eight simple steps. Alston tried it for three days straight. The result: zero views, zero reads, zero dollars, and a very useful education in why most “make money online” tutorials set you up to fail before you even start.

This is not a hit piece on the original creator. Alston has tried that creator’s methods before and actually made money from them. This is an honest breakdown of what the method is, why the math does not hold up for most people, what actually happened when Alston ran the experiment, and what works better if you want real affiliate income without burning your time and possibly your email account.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A step-by-step breakdown of the full 8-step method and how it is supposed to work
Seven specific reasons the method fails for most people who try it
Alston’s real numbers after three days: views, reads, clicks, commissions
The CAN-SPAM problem almost no one in these tutorials mentions
Why YouTube caps email scraping at 10 per day and what that means for your timeline
The attract-vs-chase framework that actually converts in affiliate marketing
A smarter path using keyword research and content creation that vidIQ’s own ranking proves works
How to find the online business model that fits your existing skills at finder.platformproof.com

The 8-Step Method That Claims $285 Per Hour

The original video lays out a specific eight-step process. Here is every step exactly as it was described, so you can evaluate it clearly before deciding whether to try it.

Step 1: Find small-to-medium YouTube channels. You are looking for channels with fewer than 5,000 subscribers that are actively trying to grow. The idea is that these creators are hungry for tools that help them and may be more likely to sign up for something you recommend.

Step 2: Scrape their email addresses from their About sections. Many small YouTubers list a contact email publicly on their channel. You collect these emails and paste them into a Google Sheet for later use. YouTube does allow you to view these emails, but it turns out there is a hard limit of 10 per day before you hit an error that stops you cold.

Step 3: Use ChatGPT to write a blog post. The method does not provide specific prompts. You are told to use ChatGPT to generate an article that will be helpful to YouTubers, ideally covering topics like how to grow a channel or get more views.

Step 4: Post the blog on Medium. Medium is a free publishing platform. You paste your ChatGPT-generated article there. Medium automatically handles formatting and lets you insert images by searching keywords inside the editor, so you do not need to source them elsewhere.

Step 5: Embed your affiliate links inside the blog post. The specific affiliate program recommended here is vidIQ, a YouTube analytics and keyword research tool. vidIQ has a free tier, so readers can sign up without spending money. The commission comes when they later upgrade to a paid plan.

Step 6: Email all the scraped YouTubers. You send an unsolicited email to every address in your spreadsheet. The email points them to your Medium blog post. The logic is that creators who want to grow their channels will read the article, find it helpful, and click your vidIQ affiliate link.

Step 7: BCC recipients so they cannot see you are blasting the same email to many people. This is mentioned as a tip to avoid people realizing it is a mass email campaign.

Step 8: Collect commissions as people sign up for vidIQ through your link. When a free user eventually upgrades to a paid plan, you earn a commission. That is the full funnel: scrape, write, publish, email, wait for upgrades.

Seven Reasons This Probably Will Not Work for You

Alston calls this the “spray and pray” method. That label is not just catchy. It describes a fundamental problem with how the funnel is built. Here are the specific issues he identified before and after testing.

Reason 1: You are chasing, not attracting. The most reliable way to get affiliate clicks is to attract people who already want what you are offering. When you cold-email strangers, you are the one doing the chasing, and chasing is expensive in time, goodwill, and conversion rate. In affiliate marketing, people click links and buy when you have solved a real problem for them first. A cold email from a stranger you have never helped before does not set up that trust.

Reason 2: Unsolicited emails may violate CAN-SPAM. The CAN-SPAM Act governs commercial email in the United States. Sending a bulk promotional email to people who did not ask for it, without a clear opt-out mechanism and a valid physical address in the footer, creates legal exposure. The original tutorial does not mention this. If you are running this as a real business, you need to understand that risk before you send a single email.

Reason 3: Your email account can get shut down. Email providers watch for accounts that suddenly start sending the same message to dozens of unrelated recipients. If enough of those recipients mark your email as spam (which is the default behavior when you receive an email you did not ask for), your sending account gets flagged or suspended. Alston recommends using a throwaway email address if you test this, specifically because the risk to a primary email account is real.

Reason 4: The ChatGPT output without good prompts is surface-level content. The original video does not give prompts. It does not tell you to instruct ChatGPT to write as an expert in buyer psychology, or as someone with deep channel growth experience. Without explicit role instructions and detailed context, ChatGPT produces generic, regurgitated information. Information that has already been published hundreds of thousands of times on the internet does not help readers solve a problem they could not already solve with a basic search. People who are not helped do not click affiliate links.

Reason 5: Medium is already flooded with the same post. The original video had about 44,000 views before Alston watched it. Every person who followed the tutorial likely wrote an article about the same topic with the same angle, the same structure, and the same affiliate link embedded in similar positions. Medium readers who search for YouTube growth tips are not going to find your article standing out from a wall of nearly identical posts. Market saturation on a platform where you have no existing audience is a serious problem.

Reason 6: The conversion funnel has too many steps. Alston walks through the math here clearly. For someone to generate a commission, the following chain of events all has to happen: your email lands in the inbox and not spam, the recipient opens it, they click through to your Medium article, they read enough of it to trust you, they click your vidIQ affiliate link, they sign up (possibly starting with the free plan), and then at some later date (possibly three to nine months later) they upgrade to paid. You lose a percentage of potential customers at every single one of those steps. The compounding dropout rate means your actual commission rate on the original email list is extremely small.

Reason 7: YouTube hard-limits you to 10 email views per day. Once you click to view 10 email addresses from YouTube channel About sections in a single day, YouTube throws an error and stops you. That means you are capped at 10 cold emails per day regardless of how much time you put in. To build a list of even 300 contacts, you need 30 days of daily effort. At a very optimistic 1% conversion rate on cold email, 300 contacts produces three clicks. If those three people start on the free plan, you may wait months before any of them upgrades to paid. The math does not reach $285 per hour by any reasonable calculation.

My Actual Results After 3 Days

Alston ran the experiment. He searched YouTube for channels in the “can dogs eat” niche, specifically because those creators tend to be small (many with under 2,000 subscribers), actively trying to grow, and genuinely trying to help an audience. He opened as many as he could find and collected emails until he hit the 10-per-day cap.

He then used ChatGPT to write a blog post. The title he landed on: “The Secret Formula to Get Monetized on YouTube in 2024.” The post was published on Medium with underlined text wherever his vidIQ affiliate links appeared.

After three days, here are the actual numbers:

Medium views on the article: 0
Medium reads: 0
vidIQ affiliate clicks: 0
vidIQ signups through his link: 0
Commissions earned: $0

To be fair, Alston acknowledges that running this for six months, sending 10 emails per day every day, would likely generate some clicks and maybe some conversions. The question is whether the payoff is worth the consistent daily effort and the legal and account risks. His honest assessment: probably not, for most people.

He also checked his vidIQ affiliate stats. Those stats did show clicks and signups, but from his existing promotion of TubeBuddy and Morning Fame through his regular content. Not from this experiment. The contrast is instructive: content he made to attract people who wanted help produced affiliate results. The cold email spray-and-pray produced nothing.

Not sure which online business model actually fits your skills and situation?

Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com and get a personalized recommendation in under two minutes.

What Spray-and-Pray Affiliate Marketing Actually Costs You

The clearest way to understand the cost of this method is to count the steps in the funnel and estimate the dropout rate at each one. Here is a realistic breakdown based on what Alston observed and the data behind cold email in general.

Start with 100 emails sent over 10 days at YouTube’s 10-per-day cap. Cold email open rates in promotional categories typically run between 5% and 15% on a good day. Assume 10%, which is optimistic for unsolicited mail. That gives you 10 people who open your email.

Of those 10, how many click through to your Medium article? Cold click-through rates on unsolicited email are often below 2%. Say 1 person clicks. Now you have one reader on your Medium article. That person has to read enough to trust you, find your affiliate link, click it, create a vidIQ account, start on the free plan, and later upgrade to paid. If 1 in 5 readers clicks your affiliate link, you have a 0.2% conversion from email to affiliate click across 100 emails sent.

vidIQ’s free-to-paid upgrade rate among new users is not publicly disclosed, but most freemium tools see upgrade rates in the 2% to 5% range, and often only after weeks or months of use. That means for every 100 emails you send, you might eventually see a fraction of one commission, and that commission could take three to nine months to arrive.

$285 per hour requires real volume, fast conversion, and a warm audience. This method produces none of those three things.

The Better Path: Attract Instead of Chase

Alston’s core recommendation is a structural shift from chasing cold contacts to creating content that attracts warm ones. He demonstrates this live in the video using vidIQ’s own situation as the example.

The keyword “how to get more views on YouTube” is competitive. But searching with a space bar trick in YouTube reveals long-tail variations: “how to get more views on YouTube gaming channel,” “how to get more views on YouTube shorts,” “how to get more views on YouTube 2024 without subscribers.” These are less competitive and still get meaningful search traffic.

He points to a real example from his search: a channel with 1,900 subscribers whose video titled “How to Beat the New YouTube Algorithm in 4 Minutes” had accumulated 78,000 views over two months. That creator used keyword research combined with a strong title and thumbnail. Their vidIQ affiliate link was in the description. With 78,000 viewers who had self-selected into the topic of beating the YouTube algorithm, the conversion math on a vidIQ recommendation looks completely different from the cold email math.

Attract enough people who already want what you are recommending, and a fraction of them will click and buy without you chasing anyone.

Honest Drawbacks of the Content Creation Alternative

The attract-via-content approach is genuinely better than cold email spray-and-pray. But it is not fast or guaranteed, and Alston does not pretend otherwise.

It takes longer to start. A cold email can go out today. A YouTube video or Medium article built on real keyword research and genuine depth takes time to research, write, record, and edit. You will not see affiliate income in the first three days.

YouTube is also competitive. The channel with 1,900 subscribers and 78,000 views is the success story. For every creator who hits a video that climbs, many more produce content that gets 200 views and stalls. Keyword research improves your odds, but it does not guarantee results.

Affiliate commissions on freemium tools are delayed. Even if someone clicks your vidIQ link from a well-performing video, they may use the free plan for months before upgrading. Your income from content created today might not show up for six months.

You need to show results or genuine expertise. Alston suggests two honest angles that work: show your actual results if you have them, or run a transparent challenge (like a 30-day growth experiment) that brings people along on the journey. Both require real work and real transparency, not AI-generated surface content.

vidIQ has a lot of existing users already. Many YouTubers, especially the ones most likely to be searching for growth tools, already use vidIQ. Your affiliate commission requires a new signup, which means you are targeting creators who have not yet adopted it. That narrows your pool further.

A Side-by-Side Decision Framework

If you are deciding between the cold-email affiliate method and the content-creation affiliate approach, here is how the two compare across the things that actually matter.

Time to first result: Cold email is faster to start (same day). Content creation takes weeks to months before it gains traction.
Conversion quality: Cold email produces low-trust, low-intent traffic. Content creation produces self-selected, high-intent readers who already want what you are recommending.
Scalability: Cold email is capped at 10 contacts per day by YouTube’s hard limit. Content scales without a ceiling once it ranks or gets shared.
Legal risk: Cold email carries CAN-SPAM exposure and account suspension risk. Content creation carries neither.
Compounding value: Cold emails are one-and-done. A well-ranked video or article keeps generating affiliate clicks for months or years without additional effort.
Skill building: Cold email teaches you how to scrape and blast. Content creation teaches keyword research, scripting, audience building, and genuine problem-solving, all skills that transfer to every business you build after this one.

Find Your X

The core lesson from this experiment is not that affiliate marketing does not work. It is that affiliate marketing works best when you stop trying to force people into a funnel and start building something worth finding. The right method for you depends on your existing skills, your schedule, and what you are genuinely able to help people with.

If you are not sure where to start, the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com will match you to the model that fits your actual situation. It takes about two minutes and gives you a specific direction instead of a list of methods to try and abandon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the $285 per hour claim have any basis in reality?

Not for most people starting this from scratch. The number assumes a high volume of affiliate commissions arriving quickly, which requires either a very large warm audience or an extremely high conversion funnel. Cold email to strangers does not produce either of those conditions. Alston’s three-day experiment produced zero dollars, and even a six-month version of the method would likely produce very little given the 10-email-per-day cap and the multi-step dropout in the funnel.

Is this method illegal?

It is not automatically illegal, but it does carry real legal risk. The CAN-SPAM Act requires that commercial emails include a clear opt-out mechanism, a valid physical postal address, and honest subject lines. Bulk promotional emails to people who never requested them, especially when sent from a personal email account without these elements, can violate the law. If you are in the European Union, GDPR creates additional exposure. The original tutorial does not address any of this.

What is vidIQ and why is it the affiliate product here?

vidIQ is a YouTube analytics and keyword research tool that helps creators find video topics, track performance, and understand their audience. It has a free plan that anyone can sign up for, which makes it easy to recommend because there is no upfront cost for the person you are referring. The commission comes only when a user upgrades to a paid plan, which typically runs in the range of $7.50 to $39 per month depending on the tier.

Why does YouTube limit email views to 10 per day?

YouTube does not publicly explain the reason for this specific cap, but it is almost certainly an anti-scraping measure. Requiring a reCAPTCHA solve and capping the number of views per session discourages bulk automated collection of creator contact information. It is a platform protection for creators, which means working around it or hitting the cap repeatedly may flag your account for review.

What would a better ChatGPT prompt look like for this kind of content?

Alston’s rule for ChatGPT is to always assign a specific role and give explicit context. For affiliate content targeting small YouTubers, a better starting point would be something like: “Act as an expert in YouTube channel growth with five years of hands-on experience helping creators under 10,000 subscribers. Write a blog post that teaches a specific, actionable technique for getting more impressions on a new channel, written for someone who posts once a week and has no marketing budget. Use concrete examples and avoid generic advice.” That kind of prompt produces output that actually helps readers, which is the only way affiliate content converts.

How much does it actually cost to get started with content-based affiliate marketing?

The core tools are free or very low cost. YouTube is free to publish on. vidIQ has a free tier for keyword research. A basic microphone for decent audio runs $30 to $60 on Amazon. A phone camera shoots well enough for most YouTube content at the start. The main cost is time, specifically the time it takes to learn what keywords people are searching, create content that genuinely helps them, and build a pattern of publishing consistently enough that the algorithm starts to surface your videos to new people.

Is Medium a good platform for affiliate content?

Medium can work for affiliate content, but it has its own dynamics to understand. Medium’s built-in audience tends to favor thought pieces, personal essays, and technology writing. Affiliate content that reads like a product pitch gets ignored. The approach that can work on Medium is writing genuinely helpful, experience-based content where the affiliate link appears as a natural recommendation inside something useful, not as the point of the article. The spray-and-pray tutorial’s approach of using AI to write generic content and then cold-emailing people to find it skips every element that actually makes Medium work.

What should I do if I want to promote vidIQ as an affiliate without cold email?

Create content that attracts YouTube creators who are already trying to solve the problem vidIQ addresses. Keyword research is the starting point: use YouTube’s search bar to find long-tail queries in the channel-growth space with real search volume and manageable competition. Build a video or article around each one. Put your vidIQ affiliate link in the description or naturally inside the content. Focus on topics where you can show real results, run a real experiment, or share genuine experience, not generic tips that someone can find anywhere. Once a piece of content ranks, it generates affiliate clicks without any additional effort from you.

Sources

Original YouTube video tested: https://youtu.be/lmuvCdqnFuQ
vidIQ affiliate program and pricing: vidiq.com
CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide: FTC.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
Medium publishing platform: medium.com
Alston’s side hustle results referenced in the video: $200,000 across multiple side hustles over the prior year

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.