Affiliate marketing is often seen as the underworld of marketing.

This unusual form of marketing involves selling products or services you don’t fulfill in return for a commission ranging between 20%–50% of the sale price. I was a non-believer of affiliate marketing for a long time. Why?

• Affiliate marketing feels dirty.
• Instagramers use affiliate links and so all their photos become silent ads.
• Affiliate links are often not disclosed. Dishonest.
• Websites that show up high in google are often good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and pretend to be the provider of the goods/service. Many of these sites are simply built to sell affiliate products. The lack of transparency cuts deep.

It’s great to be open-minded and challenge your dislikes. Recently, affiliate marketing and I have come back from a prolonged divorce and fallen in love again. The unconventional approach I’m about to share is the reason why.

The Kickass Guide to Honest Affiliate Marketing

1. Take a course or read a book

Selling other people’s products you’ve actually used reinvents the old broken model of affiliate marketing. The easiest to sell are educational products like books or courses. Read the book or take the course before deciding to become an affiliate seller.

2. If the product is good then affiliate it

The biggest mistake people make is they sell stuff they’ve never used. The second biggest mistake is they sell products that gave them mediocre results. If you buy a product and it sucks, then don’t become an affiliate for it. Nope.

Find another product that is amazing and affiliate that instead. Approach the owner of the product via email and ask if you can be an affiliate.

3. The bizarre strategy most people have no idea about

Twitter is where I found a new approach to affiliate marketing.

Most people who try affiliate marketing simply plonk links all over the internet and pray. Social media platforms don’t reward you for taking their users and sending them to your deliciously lucrative affiliate links. You’ve got to be smarter than that.

Here’s how it works:

• Write down the lessons from the book or online course you purchased.
• Turn the lessons into a Twitter Thread. Each tweet is a succinct lesson from the product that sounds like a blog post, not a sales cringefest.
• Make the last tweet an affiliate link to the product and explain that’s where you learned all these insights from.

Here’s an example of a Twitter Thread by writer Nicolas Cole with a digital product for sale in the last tweet.

4. Honest affiliate products to sell are found here

Nearly all affiliate products sold on Twitter are found on Gumroad.

Gumroad is a simple platform for creators to sell their digital products without the need for a website and payment system. Gumroad created this new trend in affiliate marketing. They created an entirely different category by focusing on products users of Twitter could sell through tweets.

Why This Works

Old forms of affiliate marketing relied solely on testimonials. Dishonest schmucks would email their friends and get them to write fake testimonials. Or they’d pay money to well-known people in return for a fake testimonial.

This approach is different. Using Twitter Threads to explain lessons and teach people what you learned from an educational product demonstrates real learning and live social proof. You can’t fake a good Twitter Thread with hundreds of likes and retweets.

Sell your own products using this technique

Every now and then I publish a tweet thread about writing. Instead of using an affiliate link, I simply place a link in the last tweet to my website where my eBook can be purchased for $20.

There’s zero set up required if you sell products already. The trick is to do it sparingly and only on your tweets that perform better than the average one you publish.

Overuse of placing links in tweets destroys many writer’s dreams by pissing their audience off who then unfollow.

Twitter Threads combined with Gumroad have revived the seedy underworld of affiliate marketing and turned it into something beautiful.

Buy a book/course. Choose one you loved. Contact the owner. Become an affiliate. Post what you learned as a Twitter Thread. Make the last tweet an affiliate link to the product. Then make another income stream that helps you earn money, so you can live with less stress and buy back your time.

Buy a book/course. Choose one you loved. Contact the owner. Become an affiliate. Post what you learned as a Twitter Thread. Make the last tweet an affiliate link to the product. Then make another income stream that helps you earn money, so you can live with less stress and buy back your time.