I Hear “Affiliate Strategy” and Go Cold

A confession from the back row of yet another creator monetisation webinar

There’s a moment in every single one of these calls… you know the one… where someone unmutes themselves with the enthusiasm of a man who’s just discovered fire, and says the words “affiliate strategy” like they’re introducing a long-lost sibling to the family.

And something in me just… shuts down. Not dramatically. No fainting. Just a quiet internal power cut, the kind you’d get if someone unplugged the fridge at 3am and you didn’t notice until the milk went off.

I used to think this was a personal failing. A gap in my entrepreneurial spirit, perhaps, or evidence that I’d left the “hustle” gene behind in Hull along with my student overdraft and a paper round I still resent. But I’ve come to a different conclusion, sitting here at the mouth of a cave in rural Spain with a laptop balanced on a rock that has, at various points, also served as a chair, a table, and a doorstop for a door that doesn’t technically exist.

The conclusion is this: “affiliate strategy” is not a strategy. It is a costume that monetisation wears to a party it wasn’t invited to, hoping nobody checks the guest list too closely.

Let me walk you through the seminar, because I have now sat through enough of them to reconstruct one from memory, the way hostages can apparently recall the wallpaper pattern years later.

Slide one: a stock photo of a woman laughing at a salad, because apparently financial freedom tastes like rocket leaves. Slide two: “You already have an audience. Why aren’t you monetising it?” delivered with the faint moral disappointment of a schoolteacher who’s found you eating in the library. Slide three, and this is the one that gets me every time, a diagram. An actual diagram, with arrows, showing how your relationship with your reader can be funnelled through a value chain towards a conversion event.

I’m sorry, a conversion event? I thought that was a corridor at CERN. Turns out it’s just someone buying a kettle because you mentioned you liked it once, eighteen months ago, in a newsletter about grief.

Here’s the bit nobody puts on a slide. The moment you start thinking of your readers as a “funnel,” you’ve already lost the thing that made anyone read you in the first place. People can smell it. They always could. You can dress it up in a nice font and call it “authentic partnership content,” but underneath the branding it’s the same energy as a man at a wedding working out who to sit next to based on their LinkedIn job title.

I’m not against affiliate links, for the record. I’m not some off-grid purist shouting into the void about the sanctity of unmonetised prose while also, somehow, needing to eat. If I genuinely love a coffee grinder, and you buy it because I said so, and I get a small envelope of digital pennies for the trouble, that’s just… commerce. Fine. Normal. Nobody’s dignity was harmed in the making of that transaction.

What I can’t do is the strategy part. The part where you reverse-engineer the affection first, then go looking for products to bolt onto it. That’s not writing with a bit of monetisation attached. That’s monetisation wearing writing as a disguise, and badly, like a dog in a raincoat.

So no, I won’t be attending the advanced masterclass on “high-converting affiliate funnels for authentic creators,” despite the extremely reasonable early bird price. I’ll be here, in the cave, writing the thing I meant to write anyway, and if you happen to buy the kettle, genuinely, thank you. It’s a very good kettle.

I just won’t be drawing you a diagram about it.

Until Next Time