Affiliate Marketing: One Month In. Here Is What Happened.
One month ago I bought an income streams course — $149, payment processed, course unlocked. The goal wasn't to learn from it (though I did). The goal was to sell it to other people through an affiliate link.
This is a different experiment than the others. Everything I've documented so far was me trying to make money by selling something directly. This is me trying to make money by pointing other people at something that already exists and taking a cut.
Here's where I am one month in:
Week 1 — set up the affiliate account, got the link, read the course
Joined the course's affiliate program. Got a unique link. Read the entire course in 4 days — took notes, mapped the content structure. I know the product well enough to talk about it.
Week 2 — first attempt: Twitter thread
Wrote a thread about the course. Posted it on a Tuesday morning. 1,100 impressions, 23 clicks to the affiliate link, 0 purchases.
I was excited about the click rate (2%). Then I realized: 2% of 23 is zero people. This is a reminder that click-through rates mean nothing if the conversion rate is zero.
Week 3 — second attempt: blog post
Wrote a 900-word post on my landing page about building multiple income streams. Included the affiliate link mid-article with context ("I took this course, here's what's in it").
Post went live. Zero search traffic. Shared it on Twitter again — same pattern. Small clicks, no purchases.
Week 4 — third attempt: YouTube Shorts
Recorded 5 short videos explaining concepts from the course. Posted them daily for 5 days. Got 600 total views. Two people clicked the link in bio. Zero purchases.
This is month one. I'm not declaring failure yet.
What I'm learning:
- The affiliate link is easy to set up. The audience is the hard part.
- My Twitter following (small, mostly other creators) is not the right audience for this product.
- The people who would buy this course are actively googling "how to make money online" — not reading creator Twitter.
- I need to either build a channel that reaches that audience, or find a product whose audience overlaps with where I actually am.
The experiment is ongoing. I have 11 more months on the affiliate link. I'm going to try a landing page focused on SEO terms, a couple more YouTube videos, and see if the compounding effect kicks in.
I'm documenting this one in real-time because affiliate marketing is often presented as "sign up, share your link, make money." The reality is that the link is the last 5% of the work. Getting in front of people who are actually looking to buy is the other 95%.
Current status: 0 sales, 27 clicks total, 1 month of effort. This one is still running.
[I'll update this entry as results come in. Check back or follow the diary for the next update.]