Over the last few years I've tried a lot of different side hustles, from mining bitcoin, to importing products from China to sell on Amazon, and now with running affiliate websites.

But the side hustle that has the best potential and requires the least work (kinda sorta passive income) is starting an affiliate website.

In this guide I'll take you through all the steps you need to get an idea for a website all the way through getting it up and running, finding your first 100 articles to write, and making money within 1-2 months. Let's go.

An affiliate site is any website that makes money by getting website visitors to click on a link and purchase something form the site they're referred to.

A good example of this would be the Wirecutter. They have all sorts of review articles like this one titled Best Laptops for Students. They review a bunch of different laptops, pick the best one, and include a link to Amazon.

If someone clicks on that link to Amazon and buys anything from Amazon in the next 24 hours, the Wirecutter will get a commission of 2-5% of the total order value. 

If you ever click on a link to Amazon on a website and look at the URL in your browser, you'll probably see a code like this that ends with "-20"; that means it's an affiliate links. Here's an example from the laptop article I referenced above.

The nice thing about Amazon's affiliate program is that you earn a commission on anything the person buys within the next 24 hours.

In the last month I've had someone click on article of mine from Google, click a link to Amazon to buy a $7 item, then they ended up buying a laptop for $1,699 that earned me a $50 commission.

But Amazon isn't the only game in town. There are a ton of other affiliate sites out there like Clickbank and ShareASale that have offers from all sorts of websites and niches. For instance, if you wanted to make an affiliate site in the weight loss niche, you'd probably be better off with an affiliate that sells informational products (like guides or meal plans) so Amazon wouldn't make sense as an affiliate.

Think about what happens when you're shopping for something new that's worth a decent amount of money. I like backpacking so I'll think about when I'm shopping for a tent.

The first step is to do general research. I'd probably go to Google and search for these types of things:

• what is a lightweight tent
• 1 person tent vs 2 person tent
• Kelty tents vs Big Agnes tents

After some initial research I might narrow my selection down. Now I know that I want to buy the Big Agnes HV UL 2 (this is my actual backpacking tent). So then I'll go to Google and search more specifically for terms like:

• Big Agnes HV UL 2 review
• Big Agnes HV UL 2 price
• Big Agnes HV UL 2 for sale

These keywords are called buyer intent keywords. They're things people search for when they're in the last phase of their research and they're ready to click "buy" when they land on a website with the product they want.

If you get 10k people per month to read an article about "what is a tent", you might make $10. If you get 10k people per month to read an article called "Big Agnes HV UL 2 Review" you'll probably be making $500-$1,500 per month.

Buyer intent is super important and it's what will make up the majority of your earnings on affiliate site.

Just to give you an idea of what some really successful (like millions of dollars per year level of success) look like, here's a post with a bunch of examples and I'm going to highlight 3 of them here.

The Wirecutter is one of the most famous affiliate sites out there. It was purchased by the New York Times for $30,000,000 and it makes millions of dollars per year in commissions from Amazon.

They built their brand around providing real, honest reviews that go super in depth with hands on testing.

I've modeled some of my affiliate sites after The Wirecutter. I've shamelessly copied the "Why You Should Trust Me" section to give a little blurb about myself and why I'm qualified to give advice on the product. It works well and builds confidence in your site.

I love to go backpacking and OutdoorGearLab.com is my go to source when I'm trying to research a piece of gear I'm thinking about buying.

They have a similar setup to the Wirecutter where they do hands on reviews. They usually compare 5-10 items at once and choose the best one. They don't spend as much time on doing individual product reviews but their format works and if I had to guess, I'd say they are making north of $100k per month easily.

Thisiswhyimbroke.com is a unique kind of affiliate site. Instead of writing a ton of content and doing in depth reviews, they just find cool stuff online and write 1-2 sentences about it. Here's what the homepage looks like:

This site was one of the first of its kind and it's had a billion copy cats since then. But don't let that stop you. There are still variations of this that would work today. Curating unique products for people will always be in demand and it makes life a lot easier when you don't have to write 2,000 word articles for every product you cover.

The hard part here is getting the brand recognition high enough that people come to your site by name. You won't get a lot of search traffic because there isn't a lot of content on the site so you'll have to get creative and find visitors through other methods like social media.

The Amazon affiliate program is one of the most popular affiliate programs in the world and for good reason. Let's run through some of the pros and cons of using the Amazon affiliate program.

Amazon's commissions are much lower than other websites like Clickbank. It's not unusual to find products offering a 50-75% commission on those sites. Contrast that with Amazon where it caps out at 10% and most items are in the 5% range.

This commission structure also means that the niche you choose will have a huge impact on how much money your site can earn. Here's a real example.

If you have a website that reviews video games, you're going to make 1% of any purchase people make. Most video games cost $60 so every time you get a sale you'll make 60 cents.

Contrast that with home improvement or lawn and garden. If you have a lawnmower review site you'll be making 8% commission and the products usually cost around $300 so every sale will earn you $24.

Take the example I just gave of a lawnmower review site. How excited would you be to write 100 articles about lawnmower reviews or creating informational articles about "how to change the oil on your lawnmower"? 

This is one of the reasons affiliate websites fail. People get bored of writing this kind of content and give up. The people who can find a niche they're interested in and can create content with a unique angle will last the longest and will see the rewards.

This isn't something unique to Amazon affiliate sites. Any niche can be boring but just be aware that the niche you choose might box you in to something that you end up hating after writing 500,000 words for your website.

It will pull up all of the different images on the listing and you can choose what size you want to use. It's WAY faster and easier to use than going through Amazon's affiliate page to get the links every time.

The other Amazon related plugin I use is called AAWP. It stands for Amazon Affiliate WordPress or something like that. Not a great name but the plugin is FANTASTIC. It has 2 awesome features I use on almost every article, here's what they look like.

The first is being able to create custom tables and insert custom attributes or pull directly from Amazon. They look gorgeous.

One of the stickiest parts of being an Amazon affiliate is you aren't allowed to show the price of a product unless it's pulled via API and updated every 24 hours. So  you'll see affiliate sites that just list the price as "$$$$" for expensive products and "$" for cheap products. I think it looks bad and I much prefer to have the real price shown.

The other feature I use is called a product box.  All you have to do is type [amazon box="B10JFH23"] where the numbers/letters in the quotation are the ASIN of the Amazon product and AAWP will automatically build a beautiful box that looks like this:

You can customize every single part of this box too. You can change the title, bullet points, even the star rating. I had a product yesterday I was reviewing on my affiliate site that had 1 review on Amazon and it was only 3 stars for a really dumb reason. I know this product is way higher quality and I'd personally rate it as 5 stars. So all I had to do was add "rating="5"" to my AAWP code and boom, 5 star rating.

If you want to see another use of AAWP, look at my sidebar (or the bottom of the page on mobile). You can put links to any products on Amazon in your sidebar and they look good and can generate some commissions from Amazon with almost no effort.

This plugin is free and it helps you optimize your on page SEO. Yoast can check to make sure you've got your keyword in the title, H1 headings, first paragraph, etc so you can make sure you've got everything optimized.

Yoast is free and can be found through the WordPress plugins section of your site, similar to how you'd find free themes.

Yoast has a tendency to over-optimize so don't worry too much if it gives you a red or yellow light meaning your page isn't optimized. It's a good starting point when you don't know anything about SEO and it will help you learn the ropes.

This is another free plugin that builds a cache of your website. I won't claim to know all the technical details of how cache plugins work but basically they make your website load faster. Page load time is something that Google uses as a ranking factor in their search results so it's important that your site loads fast.

Cache plugins are easy to use and can speed your site up so there's no reason not to use them.

After your site is up and running with a good theme and at least those 4 essential plugins installed, it's time to start creating content.

But before you start writing articles for your affiliate site you need to do some keyword research.

Keyword research is a way to figure out what topics you should write about. I gave examples earlier about finding keywords that show buyer intent and targeting those, but there's more to it. If you try to write articles about "how to lose weight" or "vizio TV review" you'll never get any traffic. The sites that are ranking on the first page of Google for these keywords have thousands of backlinks which is the #1 signal that Google uses to figure out if your website is trustworthy.

To get started you need to target keywords with lower competition. These are keywords that big sites aren't going after or don't have any links built to them so it's much easier to rank on the first page.

There are a lot of different methods to find these keywords but most of them involve paid tools. The keyword method I've been using with a lot of success lately is totally free and finds FANTASTIC low competition keywords. It's called KGR and stands for the Keyword Golden Ratio. Doug Cunnington from Niche Site Project came up with it and it's genius. Here's a video that explains it:

The KGR is just the number of search results that have the entire phrase in their title (find this using allintitle: before the search term) divided by the monthly search volume from the plugin Keywords Everywhere. If this number is less than .25, then it's a good keyword to target.

So an example would be if you find a keyword that has 100 monthly searches in Keywords Everywhere, then you want to see fewer than 25 articles that are targeting the exact search phrase in their title.

This method takes a little bit of practice and grit to do. There's no shortcut and no software that will do it for you. You just have to put in the time.

I spent about 45 minutes doing this method and I was able to find 30 articles I could write. You'll also find some keywords that have even better ratios than .25. Here's my spreadsheet tracking these keywords. You can see some with really low ratios like 0.1 where I only found a few articles targeting the keyword. This means you'll rank higher more quickly and start getting traffic.

For these keywords I'm obviously targeting search terms with a really high buyer intent. People looking for the best X under $200 are probably pretty close to pulling the trigger. They've narrowed down their selection and price range and they just need a final recommendation before making the purchase.

You don't have to target buyer intent keywords with the KGR. You can use it for any type of keyword like informational articles or "how to" guides. It's just a method to find keywords that are easy to rank for. Keywords that aren't focused on buyer intent are usually easier to rank for because most sites are looking to make money, not just get traffic.

One final piece of advice on the KGR method; if you see a keyword with search volume of 0, don't rule it out. This might seem counter intuitive. If something is getting 0 searches, then why would you try to get visitors from that keyword?

The truth is none of these keyword tools are all that accurate. In fact, one of my best articles shows a monthly volume of 0 searches. I actually get about 5 visitors per day which is 150 people per month and I don't even rank #1.

There are 2 broad types of content. Informational and affiliate. Informational content is usually a guide or a list type post that's fun to read and has no monetization. Maybe you put a few ads on it but you don't have any affiliate links or obvious ways to make money on the page. These types of pages are really good for getting search traffic and ranking in Google. You can also use them to get links from other websites much easier since it's not just a money grab article.

For the affiliate articles that you are going to link over to Amazon, there are a couple different formats I like to use to vary things and target some longer tail keywords.

This is one of my favorite types of affiliate articles to write. The competition for these keywords is usually pretty low and the buyer intent is really high. They're also easy to create since most products don't have many differences between them.

As an example, lets say you run a photography website. There are a million different kinds of cameras out there and for every possible camera, it could be compared against another one. That means you'll have thousands of possible topics to write about.

I like to use Keywords Everywhere to just search for X vs Y topics and see what other suggestions pop up. Look for X vs Y searches that fit the KGR criteria (protip, almost all of them will) and add them to your list of topics to cover.

Similar to X vs Y, the Best X for Y article usually recommends a specific product for a certain activity/person/field. Sticking with the camera example, here are some sample keywords that would fit this pattern and be possible topics depending on if they fit the KGR criteria:

• Best digital camera for kids
• Best DSLR camera under $300
• Best camera for photographing sports

You get the idea.

It doesn't have to be 10, but doing the top 5 or top 10 of a specific item is a nice way to cover a lot of different products. When people read a top 10 article they aren't looking for a mega in depth review. They just want to know some of the pros and cons to each choice and some basic facts about the item. These types of posts are easy to put together and have catchy titles that can get people to click when they see it in the search results or on social media.

This is your standard bread and butter review article. Sticking with cameras again, this would be something like "Nikon D3400 Review". You'll end up writing a ton of these articles on your site. It's best if you can actually get your hands on the physical product since your review will look much more authentic but in the early stages that's not possible.

The best way to write a review on a product you haven't actually used is to do a ton of research. Read every review you can find on Reddit, see what the reviews on Amazon say and try to spend a few hours sucking up every bit of information you can find.

Once you've done that you'll know more about the product than 99.99% of the population and you'll be in a pretty good place to write a review that will help people figure out if the product is a good fit for them.

Remember to always be honest. If every review you write has a 5 star rating and you're always telling people to buy, buy buy, they'll lose faith in you. The Wirecutter has done so well because they're trustworthy. If something sucks, they tell you. Just look at their Kuerig review :).

Take action. Nothing happens without putting in the time and effort. Practice just in time learning which means you take action and do as much as you can until you hit a roadblock. Then go do some reading/watching Youtube videos and figure out how to solve that problem, then get back to work. Don't try to learn 100% of the process or you'll never actually get started.