Before You Start

Before diving into affiliate marketing and JV partnerships, you need a solid foundation. Skipping this step leads to frustration — promoting products to an empty room or trying to recruit affiliates when your course isn’t ready for prime time.

What You Need to Be an Affiliate

An Audience (Even a Small One)

You don’t need millions of followers. You need people who trust you and pay attention to what you say.

• 200+ email subscribers is often enough to start seeing affiliate income
• An engaged social media following works too — engagement matters more than follower count
• Even a small blog with consistent traffic can generate affiliate revenue

The key word is “engaged.” A list of 500 subscribers who open 40% of your emails and click your links will outperform a list of 5,000 who open 5%.

A Content Platform

You need somewhere to publish content that includes your affiliate recommendations:

• A blog or website
• An email newsletter
• A YouTube channel
• A podcast with show notes
• Active social media presence

The best platform depends on your existing strengths. If you’re already emailing your list weekly, start there. If you have a blog with traffic, leverage that. Don’t build a new platform from scratch — use what’s already working.

Basic Understanding of Your Audience’s Needs

You should know what problems your audience is trying to solve and what tools they need. This comes from listening — reading their questions, survey responses, and support tickets.

What You Need to Have Affiliates

At Least One Published Course

This seems obvious, but some creators try to recruit affiliates for a course that doesn’t exist yet. Affiliates need something concrete to promote — a sales page they can review, testimonials they can reference, results they can point to.

A Working Checkout System

Your purchase process must be smooth. Affiliates hate sending traffic that doesn’t convert because of technical problems. Whether you use GoHighLevel, Thrivecart, Teachable, or another platform, test everything repeatedly.

An Email Marketing System

When affiliates send you traffic, you need to capture leads and follow up. Your email sequences will convert a significant portion of people who don’t buy immediately. If you need help building these sequences, our Email Marketing course covers this in detail.

A Proven Sales Page

Your sales page needs to convert cold traffic at a reasonable rate. Affiliates will test your page with their audience. If it doesn’t convert, they’ll stop promoting and move to other programs. Our Write Your Sales Page course walks through creating pages that convert.

Readiness Checklist

Requirement	For Being an Affiliate	For Having Affiliates
Audience	200+ engaged subscribers/followers	Not required
Content Platform	Blog, email, YouTube, or social	Sales page + thank you pages
Published Product	Not required	At least one live course
Checkout System	Not required	Working, tested checkout
Email System	Recommended for follow-up	Required for lead capture
Sales Page That Converts	Not required	Essential
Affiliate Tracking Software	Not required	Required

If You’re Not Ready Yet

Don’t worry if you’re missing pieces. This course will be here when you’re ready.

If you need to build your course first, check out our Product Suite course. If you need to grow your audience, focus on consistent content creation — whether that’s through YouTube, blogging, or email list building.

The most common mistake is trying to do everything at once. Pick one side first. For most creators, that’s being an affiliate — it’s faster to implement and generates income while you build other pieces of your business.