How To Make Money in 24 Hours With Affiliate Marketing And Google Ads

A viewer emailed me saying they watched my Google Ads video, followed the steps, and earned $250 on their first day. That email is the entire reason this post exists. I want to walk you through exactly what I showed that person so that you can do the same thing, step by step, from finding the right keyword to publishing a live Google Search campaign.

This is not a “maybe someday” strategy. It is a specific process: find a buyer keyword with almost no ad competition, write an affiliate review article using ChatGPT, post it on your blog, grab your Amazon affiliate links, run a low-cost Google Search ad, and collect commissions when people buy. The method worked in 24 hours for one person. Here is exactly how it works.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A keyword filter method that finds buyer searches with under 50 cents cost-per-click and no existing ads
The exact ChatGPT prompt sequence to build a full affiliate article in under an hour
How to structure your WordPress post so affiliate links appear early and increase click-through rate
How to grab both the text link and product image from Amazon using SiteStripe
The Google Ads settings that keep your cost low: phrase match and exact match only, Display Network off, max CPC cap
How to generate a free AI business logo using Midjourney so your Google Ads account looks professional
The real numbers behind the arbitrage: what you spend versus what you can earn
Not sure which online income method fits your situation? Find out free at finder.platformproof.com

Why This Method Works: Buyer Keywords and Ad Arbitrage

Most people who try to make money with affiliate marketing start by creating content and hoping people find it through SEO. That process can take months. This method skips the wait by running paid search ads directly to your affiliate review article. You pay a small amount per click, and when a visitor buys through your affiliate link you earn a commission. The goal is to spend less per click than you earn per sale.

The reason it works starts with the keywords you target. Phrases that begin with “best” or “top” are called buyer keywords. When someone types in “best walking shoes for women,” they already know what they want. They have identified the problem and the solution. They are close to making a purchase. That intent is exactly what makes these searches valuable for affiliate marketing, and it is also why the conversion rate on buyer keywords tends to run higher than general informational searches.

The arbitrage math is simple. If you pay 20 cents per click and 1 out of every 100 visitors buys a $60 pair of shoes through your Amazon link, you spent $20 in ads and earned roughly $2.40 in commission at Amazon’s 4% footwear rate. That looks like a loss at first. But at higher conversion rates, higher commission categories, or with products that pay 10 to 20 percent per sale, the math flips fast. The strategy that earned $250 in one day was built on finding keywords where almost no one else was running ads, which keeps your cost per click extremely low.

Step 1: Find a Buyer Keyword With No Ad Competition

The first step is finding the right keyword. You need a paid keyword research tool for this. Ahrefs, Semrush, and similar platforms all work. Free tools exist but there is no guarantee you will find usable data. The paid version is worth it when the upside is $250 per day.

Start by searching “top, best” in the keyword tool. Go to matching terms. You will see hundreds of thousands of results. Do not just pick randomly. Apply these filters one at a time.

First, go to SERP Features and exclude keywords that already have top ads and bottom ads in the search results. Also exclude keywords that show shopping results. These filters remove high-competition searches where you would be bidding against established brands with big budgets. You want searches where the results page has no paid ads at all, which means your ad will be the only one people see.

Second, go to More Filters and set the maximum cost per click to 50 cents. You can drop this to 30 or 35 cents and still find plenty of options. This cap ensures that even if your ad runs all day, you are not burning through money fast.

Third, set a minimum monthly search volume of 300. This rules out keywords that nobody is actually searching. You want real traffic. A keyword searched 300 times per month at 20 cents per click costs $60 if every single person clicks your ad, which they will not. Realistically you might pay $5 to $15 to reach that audience, and even one sale covers your cost.

Sort results by cost per click from low to high. Scroll through and look for searches that connect directly to a product you can find on Amazon or another affiliate program. “Best meat for estrogen” appeared in the search results with a cost per click of zero, but there is no clear affiliate product to attach to it. Skip those. “Best vacations in the US” shows 2,900 monthly searches at 5 cents per click and connects cleanly to booking.com or any travel affiliate. “Best walking shoes for women” shows 39,000 monthly searches at 20 cents per click. That is the keyword used in the example that earned $250.

Step 2: Use ChatGPT to Write Your Affiliate Article

Once you have your keyword, the next step is writing the article. Use ChatGPT-4, the paid version. The reason is that ChatGPT-4 can search the internet, which means it can pull current Amazon product listings. The free version, ChatGPT-3.5, cannot do this and will give you outdated or generic product names.

Send this prompt first: “Search Amazon for the best walking shoes for women.” ChatGPT-4 will return a list of real products with names you can verify. This is your product list for the article.

Send this prompt second: “Create an outline for the best walking shoes for women.” You will get a structured outline with an introduction, a quick picks section, individual product reviews, a buying guide, and a conclusion. This outline is your article structure.

Then go through the outline section by section and ask ChatGPT to write each one. Ask for the introduction. Ask for the buying guide. Ask for each individual product review. Copy each section into your WordPress editor as it comes out.

One important note here: do not paste the AI output directly without reading it. Add your own observations, edit for tone, and remove anything that sounds generic or wrong. The AI gives you a framework. Your job is to make it read like a real person wrote it, because real people trust real voices more than they trust obviously machine-generated text.

Step 3: Build the WordPress Post the Right Way

Open your WordPress dashboard, go to Posts, and click Add New. Set the title to your exact keyword: “Best Walking Shoes for Women.” This matters for two reasons. First, it helps your post rank organically over time. Second, when you later enter your blog URL as the destination for your Google Ad, the keyword in the URL slug helps Google understand what the page is about, which can improve your ad quality score and lower your cost per click.

The structure of your post should put the affiliate links as early as possible. Add a “Quick Links to the Best Walking Shoes for Women” section near the top of the article, formatted as a heading. List the top products with their affiliate links directly below it. This way, if a reader lands on the page and immediately wants to buy, they do not have to scroll to find the link. They see it in the first few seconds.

After the quick links section, paste in the full article content from ChatGPT, formatted with H2 headings for each product name and the buying guide sections. Use the product names exactly as they appear on Amazon so that everything lines up correctly when you embed the affiliate images.

Step 4: Grab Your Amazon Affiliate Links With SiteStripe

To get affiliate links from Amazon, you need to be signed up for the Amazon Associates program and have the SiteStripe browser extension installed. SiteStripe adds a toolbar to the top of every Amazon product page that gives you a text link, an image link, or a combined text-and-image link with your affiliate tag already embedded.

Go back to ChatGPT and copy the name of your first product. For example: “Skechers Women’s Go Joy Walking Sneaker.” Paste that into the Amazon search bar and hit enter. The product should appear near the top of the results. Click on it. On the product page, SiteStripe appears at the top. Click the Image option to get an HTML snippet with an affiliate-tagged product image.

In your WordPress post, go to the section for that product. Add a Custom HTML block. Paste the SiteStripe image HTML into it. You will see the product image appear in the post with your affiliate link already attached. When a reader clicks the image, they go to Amazon with your affiliate ID in the URL. If they purchase anything within 24 hours, you earn a commission. Repeat this process for every product in your article.

Also grab the text URL from SiteStripe and use it to hyperlink the product name in your Quick Links section at the top. Now your post has affiliate links at the top, affiliate images with embedded links throughout the body, and a clear path for readers to go directly to Amazon from multiple points in the article.

Step 5: Set Up Your Google Search Campaign

Go to ads.google.com. If you are new to Google Ads, you may see an offer to receive up to $500 in ad credit when you spend $500. You do not have to take that offer right now. Click New Campaign, then click New Campaign again, and select Website Traffic as your campaign goal because you want people to click through to your blog post.

Choose Search as your campaign type. Enter your blog post URL as the website. If your post URL is yoursite.com/best-walking-shoes-for-women, Google will scan the page and suggest relevant keywords automatically, which speeds up the setup. Click Continue, then click Start New.

Under bidding, select Optimize for Clicks and set a Maximum CPC Bid. Set this at 20 cents. This is your hard cap. Your ad will not run for any auction that would cost more than 20 cents per click. You can go lower to 10 cents and still find traffic, but 20 cents gives you a reasonable range of keyword matches while keeping costs low.

Turn off the Display Network. This setting is on by default but you do not want it. Display Network puts your ads on third-party websites and apps, which attract casual browsers rather than active searchers. You want people who are typing your keyword right now, not people scrolling through a recipe blog. Uncheck it.

Set the target location to United States and the language to English. Leave the audience segments alone. The keyword targeting is specific enough that only relevant people will see your ad. You do not need additional audience layers to narrow it further at this stage.

Now add your keywords. Use a free tool called Keyword Toaster to generate variations. Go to keywordtoaster.com, enter your keyword, and it returns three match types: broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Copy the phrase match and exact match versions only. Do not use broad match at first. Broad match will show your ad for loosely related searches, including irrelevant ones, and you will burn your budget on people who are nowhere near ready to buy.

Phrase match means your ad shows when someone types in a phrase that contains your keyword in order, like “best walking shoes for women 2024.” Exact match means your ad only shows when someone types your keyword exactly. Both of these types keep you close to the bottom of the buying funnel where conversion rates are highest.

Add variations too. Enter “best walking shoes for women 2024,” “best walking shoes for women 2023,” “best walking shoes women,” and “top walking shoes for women.” Aim for around 20 total keyword phrases between phrase and exact match versions. That gives Google enough to work with without going broad.

For your ad headlines, write 5 to 10 options. Examples: “Best Walking Shoes for Women,” “Top Women’s Walking Shoes,” “Walking Shoes Women Love.” Google automatically tests all of them and shows the ones that generate the most clicks. You do not need to pick one. You give Google options and it figures out which combinations perform best because Google wants you to succeed, which means more ad spend.

For descriptions, write two or three 90-character options. You can use ChatGPT for this: “Create a 90-character SEO-optimized description for best walking shoes for women, give me three variations.” Use those directly.

For the logo, use Midjourney. Type the command: /imagine logo for women’s walking shoe. Wait for the output, pick one you like, save it, and convert it from WebP to PNG using Canva before uploading it to Google Ads. Google requires PNG, not WebP.

Set your daily budget to $10. Google may suggest a higher amount. Ignore that suggestion. Start at $10 per day, see how the campaign performs for 24 to 48 hours, and adjust. Click Publish. Your campaign will go into review. Within a few hours you will get a notification that it is live, or you will get an error explaining what to fix. Either way, check back the next day, not every few hours. Let it run.

The Actual Numbers Behind This Strategy

Here is what this setup realistically costs to get started. Web hosting and a domain name together run under $100 for the first year. ChatGPT-4 costs $20 per month. A keyword research tool costs roughly $99 per month, though some offer free trials. Google Ads at $10 per day is $300 per month maximum if you run it every day. So your first month cost is somewhere in the range of $130 to $200 depending on which tools you already have.

On the income side, the viewer who emailed me earned $250 on their first day. That is a real number from a real person, not a projection. But it is also not a guarantee. Some days will be higher, some lower. The variables are your keyword choice, the commission rate of your affiliate program, your blog post conversion rate, and your ad click-through rate.

The math that makes this profitable is straightforward. At 20 cents per click, $10 per day buys you 50 clicks. If your article converts 2 out of every 50 visitors into buyers and the average order on Amazon is $50 with a 4% commission rate, you earn $4 per day on a $10 ad budget. That is a loss. But move to a product category with an 8% commission rate, increase your conversion rate with better content, or find keywords with CPC as low as 5 cents, and the math changes significantly. The $250 result came from someone who found a combination that worked. This method is a starting framework, not a fixed outcome.

Not sure which type of affiliate or online income model fits your background and goals?

Answer a few quick questions and get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com. Free, takes about 60 seconds.

Honest Drawbacks You Should Know Before You Start

The keyword research tool is not free in any meaningful way. Free plans on Ahrefs or Semrush give you limited data. You will not be able to apply the exact filters described above without a paid account. If budget is tight, look for free trial offers on these platforms and use your trial period to build your initial keyword list before you have to pay.

Amazon affiliate commission rates are low for most product categories. Footwear pays around 4%. Electronics pay 1 to 3%. Luxury beauty pays 10%. Before you write your article, check Amazon’s current commission schedule and make sure the category you are targeting pays enough to cover your ad costs at realistic conversion rates.

Google Ads does not go live immediately. After you click Publish, the campaign goes into a review process that can take a few hours to a full business day. Plan for this. If you publish your campaign on a Friday afternoon, it may not start running until Monday morning.

Your blog needs to be live and loading correctly before you submit the campaign. Google will check your destination URL during review. If your site is down, loading slowly, or throwing errors, your ad will not be approved. Test your post URL in a private browser window before you submit the campaign.

AI-written content needs human editing. Google’s systems are getting better at identifying thin, generic content, and a post that reads like a machine wrote it may not perform well in organic search over time. Even if you are running paid traffic now, investing time in making the article genuinely useful will help your quality score in Google Ads and may also bring in free organic traffic later.

A Simple Decision Framework: When This Makes Sense for You

This method makes the most sense if you have a small upfront budget (at least $200 to $300 to work with), you are comfortable with basic WordPress or willing to spend an hour learning it, and you want to test affiliate marketing without waiting months for SEO to kick in. It is essentially a paid experiment. You run the ad for a few days, see whether the clicks convert, and either scale up or adjust your keyword and product selection.

It makes less sense if you have zero ad budget, because the paid traffic is what makes the 24-hour timeline possible. Without ads, you are dependent on organic search, which takes months. It also makes less sense if you pick a product category with very low commissions or very high competition for ad space. The filters in Step 1 are specifically designed to avoid that second problem, but commission rates are something you have to check separately.

The core skill being developed here is not just running one campaign. It is learning to identify buyer intent, write content that converts, and read ad performance data. Once you run one campaign successfully, you can repeat the process across multiple keywords and product categories.

Find Your X

Affiliate marketing with Google Ads is one path. But there are dozens of ways to build income online using skills and time you already have. If you are not sure whether this approach is the right fit, or if you want to see what other options match your specific situation, go to finder.platformproof.com. Answer a few questions about your background, schedule, and goals, and get a clear recommendation on where to start. It is free and takes about a minute.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a website to use this method?

Yes. Google Search ads send people to a destination URL, and that URL needs to be a page on your own website. You cannot send Google Ads traffic directly to your Amazon affiliate link. You need a blog post on your own domain with the affiliate links embedded in it. Web hosting and a domain name cost under $100 for the first year on most platforms.

Can I use the free version of ChatGPT instead of the paid version?

You can try, but the free version of ChatGPT does not have real-time internet access. This means it cannot pull current product listings from Amazon. You would have to manually search Amazon for products and then paste the product names into ChatGPT for it to write reviews. The paid version automates that step and also produces higher-quality output in the current models.

How do I sign up for Amazon Associates?

Go to affiliate-program.amazon.com and apply. You will need a website or app that you own where you plan to promote products. Amazon will review your application. Once approved, you get access to SiteStripe and can generate affiliate links for any product on Amazon. Note that Amazon requires you to make at least 3 qualifying sales within 180 days of joining, or they will close your account.

What if my Google Ad does not get approved?

Go back to Google Ads and read the error message. Common rejection reasons include the destination URL not loading properly, ad copy that uses restricted language, or a policy violation on the landing page. Fix the specific issue listed in the rejection notice and resubmit. Most approvals go through within one business day once the issue is corrected.

Is broad match keyword targeting ever a good idea?

Not at the beginning of a campaign. Broad match will show your ad for searches that are only loosely related to your keyword, which means you will spend money on people who were not looking for what you are selling. Start with phrase match and exact match only. Once you have conversion data and know which specific searches are driving sales, you can consider testing broad match with a separate, smaller budget.

How long before I know if my campaign is working?

Give it at least 48 to 72 hours after the campaign goes live. Google’s algorithm needs time to find the best-performing headline and keyword combinations. Checking every hour will not give you useful data. Check the next day and look at click-through rate, cost per click, and whether any conversions appear in your Amazon Associates dashboard. If you get clicks but zero conversions after 100 or more clicks, look at your landing page content and your affiliate link placement.

Does this work with affiliate programs other than Amazon?

Yes. Amazon is used in this example because it is the most familiar platform with the widest product selection. But the same method works with any affiliate program that pays you a commission for referring buyers. Travel affiliate programs (Booking.com, Expedia), software tools, health and wellness brands, and finance products all run affiliate programs. Higher commission rates in some of these categories can make the arbitrage math work better than Amazon’s 1-4% rates in most categories.

What is the minimum budget to try this seriously?

Plan to spend at least $200 to $300 total to give this a real test. That covers web hosting and a domain, one month of a keyword tool (or a free trial), and 10 to 20 days of ad spend at $10 per day. Running for fewer days or with a smaller daily budget does not give you enough data to know whether the strategy is working or whether you just need to adjust your keyword or product selection.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Revealed: How To Make Money in 24 Hours With Affiliate Marketing And Google Ads,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/BqAZ7fkw2mQ
Amazon Associates Program: affiliate-program.amazon.com
Google Ads Help Center: support.google.com/google-ads
Keyword Toaster keyword match type tool: keywordtoaster.com

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