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Building digital assets as an affiliate
John Wright
December 26, 2024
If you’re an affiliate or even a B2B professional, this is my guide for you on how to build digital assets.
Why?
Because your regular affiliate content sites are dead.
I’ve built various types of digital assets over the years with websites that had decent search traffic and 1000s of newsletter subscribers.
Thanks to StatsDrone and FTDx for being newsletter sponsors.
Over the last 3 years, I’ve been actively working on building my own social media channels plus a few to help promote StatsDrone.
Those 3 channels look like this:
LinkedIn personal profile
Podcast
Newsletter
3 years ago, I started putting some work into my LinkedIn account. I’m sure I started off with less than 1000 followers and it’s taken me years to build up my profile.
I know I’ve gained over 3000 followers in the last 6 months so that is the velocity at which my account is currently growing. Currently, my LinkedIn profile is over 11k followers.
2 years ago, I started a podcast with no f’ing idea what I was doing or if it would have been worth it.
I launched the first podcast as the Affiliate Interview Series and later replaced it with the Affiliate BI podcast. As of today, I have over 105 podcasts published.
I have 147 followers (subs) on Spotify, over 155k downloads and 13k listeners according to my CastPlus stats.
I noticed LinkedIn was prioritizing their newsletter and publishing the content via Pulse which is friendly for search engines.
I am over 2250 subscribers and have over 18,000 article views in the past year with over 83,000 impressions.
The key is consistency
This sounds like an obvious statement but most podcasts fail for this reason.
Most newsletters fail also for this reason because they don’t stay consistent.
That is only a few episodes or newsletters or blog posts are created and that is where they die.
Take a look at this newsletter for example.
I decided to commit to a weekly newsletter after hearing from other newsletter pros including Steve Toth .
You can see from my LinkedIn newsletter stats that as soon as I started to post from a random schedule to once a week, everything changed.
I did try to keep the newsletter quality high so I’m putting in similar amounts of time but I’ll admit that once in a while when I need to get a newsletter out, I’ll do one that is about 1000 words long. This post is just over 1000 words btw. The last newsletter I posted was not as long and had just as many views.
As you can see from the graph, the amount of daily views I’m getting on my content has gone up a lot.
I’m even noticing likes and comments happening on my older content that was published many months ago. It tells me it is somehow active and who know if this is SEO value kicking in or something else in the social algorithm.
People as brands
I’ve asked people should you create a brand that is only personal or focus on a company as a brand. I think the answer is it depends but even if you build a brand, it should be powered by people.
Here are a few examples that both support my argument but go against it as well.
Instagram @glazers_mens_basketball
Brian Dean of Backlinko
David Portnoy of Barstool Sports
The @glazers_mens_basketball Instagram account had under 1000 followers over 2 weeks ago and created a campaign to get more followers than the WNBA Mystics team. At the time of writing, this team has 159k followers all built under 2 weeks.
Brian Dean formerly of Backlinko sold to Semrush. The thing is, his YouTube channel currently has 565k subscribers. If he had built all his videos under the Backlinko brand, he might have sold Backlinko for more money but then again he owns his entire personal account as an even more powerful personal asset. Assuming that he still owns it.
Ricardo Gorski is doing YouTube to build up his company profile for Tax.One but his YouTube channel is on fire however his YouTube Shorts channel is on another level.
@RicoGoShorts (YouTube Shorts) - 548k subscribers
@Rico (YouTube) - 18.5k subscribers
@taxone (YouTube) - 3.2k subscribers
What is crazy is the RicoGoShorts page was started March 7, 2023.
David Portnoy is a guy that saved this pizza shop for Christmas, had quite the long journey in content.
I’m using this example to highlight something that Barstool Sports launched in 2003 so it wasn’t an overnight success like the RicoGoShorts channel but I’m trying to prove a point.
Barstool Sports has been consistently creating content for quite some time. I’m not sure the brand itself would have done as well if it wasn’t for David Portnoy being willing to be a media personality to appear on any sports of news show.
On top of that, his social media profiles have been around a long time. His X account shows it was created in 2009 and has 3.3M followers today. The @barstoolsports handle on X does have 6.6M followers but I think the main power is in Dave’s personal account.
So what is it, people or brands?
I think if you look at the brand approach, it can still work but it is filled with people.
Just look through the feeds where you would want to grow a channel and see what works or what grabs your attention.
If you’re looking at newsletters, look at the ones you would subscribe to. Often these can be branded much like a podcast but they still have a persona behind it.
Today just saw this in from Tim Denning who says the trend for personal accounts over brand accounts for more reach.
Digital asset strategy
My advice is advice I’ve heard from numerous others before. Pick one channel and master it. It could be a blog, a forum, a newsletter, a vlog, a YouTube channel, a podcast, or YouTube Shorts.
Whatever you do, try to pick a channel that has potential. I’m going to say blogs are not fully dead but close to it. Blogs are great in theory for SEO but SEO isn’t what it used to be. I mean look at Google releasing another update just before Christmas f******* over affiliate sites just before Christmas. Thanks Google!
Training wheels strategy
Most people spend too much time planning and not enough time doing.
If you can’t think of the perfect podcast cover, the perfect newsletter name or the right YouTube Shorts content then use the training wheels strategy.
I’m giving it this name but it is really advice I got from Tom Hunt of Fame.so who advises people to create a test podcast. That is, create a trial podcast as a means of gaining experience so you can be ready for the podcast that you do want to create.
Content research
Just spend a bit of time thinking if a channel has any saturation or not.
Here is a quick example for a slot affiliate.
Slots blogs and websites are a dime a dozen.
Live streaming: rare
YouTube: frequent
YouTube Shorts: rare enough
Podcast: super rare
Books: super rare
You get the idea.
Done is better than perfect
When it comes to video, newsletters or a podcast, done is still better than perfect.
I had a friend telling me about him wanting to get the perfect setup for his podcast.
I straight up said don’t worry about the quality on episode number 1 and it doesn’t have to even be a banger to launch. It can be a trailer as the first one.
The best time to launch a podcast is right now.
Owned assets
Most of what I talked about are social assets that you do NOT own. LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Instagram, they can all close your account and all the work you did is gone.
This is why people prefer newsletters where you own the email and contact info of some sorts. I think there is a movement towards companies looking to capture more info than just email that can include phone, social media profiles, addresses and other chat apps.
But wait, does this apply to B2B professionals?
You don't need to be an affiliate to consider any of these strategies.
If you have a website, a newsletter, a social media following, this is now an asset you can use to be hired by another company, get a raise within your current company or in some cases, become your own boss.
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