One strategy I’m about to start testing with some of our affiliate management clients is using the top converting SEO pages with AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude, analyze the client’s pages, and do a gap and audience analysis. By taking the topics that are converting on the client’s own site and tweaking them for a third party that makes recommendations. If it works, the client will have a data based way to help the affiliates drive sales in a way that adds incremental value to the company.
The goal is to overtake the top positions in Google, Bing, YouTube, and Yahoo, and have your partners showing in AI overviews and LLM answers along with your own website. This way your brand gets more of the traffic and sales.
It’s a fairly easy 6 step process.
- Pull your top ten content pages from your website.
- Look to make sure the products and conversions are commissionable.
- Now check the traffic sources and referral data.
- Cross reference with PPC and paid social data.
- Build a content outline for YouTube, SEO, and AIO/GEO (this is the most important step, read this one).
- Distribute to the correct partners.
Get Your Top Revenue Generating Pages
First is to find the top revenue driving pages from your blog and landing pages that drive revenue. Comparisons, reviews, and product releases do not count. These work for you and for mid-funnel touchpoints, but not for attracting new customers and top-funnel traffic for affiliates.
Look for how-to guides, strategies, content about the uses for products and services, category pages themselves, and other topics that provide solutions. The LLMs will be able to dissect these and come up with topics in later steps. You’re looking for the ten with the most visitors from SEO, paid social, and PPC that have the highest # and $ in sales.
Make Sure It’s Commissionable Actions
Not every action or conversion is commissionable in the affiliate space. Some programs only commission on new customers. If the content is something that most customers would already have and the conversions are coming from upsells, this won’t make the affiliate money. If they don’t make money from your idea, there’s no reason to trust you or pay attention to future emails from you.
Other times specific SKUs or services are not commissionable. Some times of the year they may have reduced commissions as well. This is especially true with large brands and the busy seasons. By making sure the partners will get paid and paid the full amount or more, you can now make a strong case when pitching the idea to them.
Check the Traffic Sources
If your date range is only one to three months, something that went viral on social media and phased out can skew your data. Same with an email or SMS campaign as this was your own customers and people already in your funnel. Your affiliates will not be able to replicate this, so you have to make sure the traffic is coming from the same places that they can reach.
SEO, YouTube, organic social media, and other platforms affiliates use are the data sources you want to use.
Cross Reference with PPC and Paid Social
This step is optional, but will likely help. If you can find the keywords if PPC, and topics or audience matches for paid social, you can get the AOV of the orders and the potential volumes for demand. This lets you make a case as to how much the affiliate has the potential to earn.
If the AOV is $100 and the program pays a 10% commission, combine that with the conversion rate (we’ll use 5%), and now you have the potential gain on 100 clicks which is $50. If the total volume of likely achievable traffic is 1,000 clicks per month, this is an extra $6,000 in commissions annually.
With this data you can give the partners a potential monthly and annual earnings if they can get the traffic to their content and links. That is a much stronger case than only saying “here’s a topic to try.”
Build the Content Outlines
The most important thing (after making sure the topics make money) is to ensure it is relevant to the individual affiliates and their platforms. The affiliates’ audiences are going to vary in demographics and needs. So are the styles of outlines they need.
YouTube outlines and topics are very different from blog posts, and time and content is limited for organic reach and referrals on social media. The research process is roughly the same.
- Load the topics to your favorite AI system.
- Upload the URL to the category or channel of the affiliate that is relevant to your company.
- Prompt the LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, etc…) to:
- See which topics are relevant to that specific audience (you’ll need to add the audience demographics for both your company and the partner).
- Look for any topic that has already been covered, and ask it to remove it from the list.
- Recommend which topics are a natural fit with the reasons why.
One of the most important parts of the prompt is to include what you know about the partner’s audience. This way the LLM can use the data it has on what makes that audience take action combined with that makes people on your website convert. The LLMs can also scan for topics they haven’t covered much more quickly than you can, and then the AI system can include the selling points that matter to their audience and your brand.
Pro-tip: Talk to the company’s SEO, influencer, and/or video person and have them share tips to help the affiliates rank in the top positions of Google, YouTube, and AI.
While AI is good and getting better, it cannot optimize by platforms and for audiences. Your SEO, video, and social media teams can. They know what matters for rankings based on the platform and they can help outline the topic based on the partner’s channels once the AI system is done.
Match it to Correct Partner and Distribute
The last step is to approach each partner individually or in niche groups. Do not send these topics program wide as the topics do not apply to everyone. The prompts are for specific affiliates or affiliate groups (if you do an advanced version of the above).
By making sure the topic and outline is customized for the specific partners and emailing it to them directly, you are showing you took the time and effort to help them specifically. That goes a long way as affiliate marketing is a relationship based channel.
Customize the email to the partner by sharing why it matches their audience’s needs, emphasizing it hasn’t been covered, and share the potential money they can earn in a best case scenario.
I have some more advanced versions of this strategy that I’ll be testing out with some of our clients if they want to try this, but this one is the basis of it. I hope it helps you with your programs, and if you’re an affiliate, I hope it helps you make money if your favorite affiliate managers finds this guide.
