I’ve recently added a new service to the Evergreen Funnel Club that provides members with five blog post templates each month.
In the video below, I demonstrate exactly how I used one of those templates with my own blog, DavidHurley.net, to create the article you’re about to read.
The interesting part isn’t simply that AI can produce a blog post. The template gives you a starting point, while your own website, writing style, experience and instructions help turn that starting point into something specific to your business.
Here’s the video, followed by the finished article.
The Template Behind the Article
The image below shows the actual blog post template I used for this demonstration. As you can see, it isn’t a finished article waiting to be copied and pasted. It gives you the subject, structure and instructions to work from, and you then add your own website, experience and requirements. In my case, I used DavidHurley.net as the example, along with instructions to write in British English and create an article that fitted the existing content on my blog.
And here is the finished article, with some extra tweaks that I added after I finished the video to make it a good fit for my blog:
20 Years Working From Home: What Affiliate Marketing Actually Looks Like Day To Day
Forget the laptop on the beach.
You’ve probably seen the picture. Someone sitting beside a swimming pool with a laptop, apparently earning passive income while enjoying a cocktail in the sunshine. It’s a popular image of working online, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to my experience.
I’ve been building online businesses from home for more than 20 years, and I’ve never once earned money from a beach. Most of the time, it looks considerably more ordinary than that.
There’s a computer, a desk, a list of things that need doing, and usually another list of things that could be done if there were more hours in the day.
A Realistic Day Doesn’t Look Like Passive Income
Affiliate marketing can produce income from work you did weeks, months or even years ago. A useful blog post can continue attracting visitors. A YouTube video can keep getting views. An email sequence can continue introducing people to an offer long after you originally wrote it.
That part is real.
But it doesn’t mean there is nothing to do.
Most days involve some combination of creating content, maintaining websites, answering emails, checking statistics, promoting offers, looking at what is working and deciding what needs attention next.
Sometimes I’m writing a blog post or recording a video. Sometimes I’m updating something I published years ago. Sometimes I’m fixing a broken link or changing an outdated recommendation. Other days are spent working on funnels, email campaigns or traffic.
None of it looks particularly glamorous.
But these are the things that gradually build an online business.
The Core Tasks You’ll Repeat Every Week
Content creation is a big part of my own routine. That might mean writing a blog post, making a YouTube video, creating an email for subscribers or taking something I have already produced and turning it into another useful piece of content.
Promotion is another part of the job. Publishing something doesn’t automatically mean people will find it, so there is always some work involved in getting content in front of the right audience.
Then there are the numbers.
I don’t spend all day staring at analytics, but I do want to know which pages are getting visitors, which videos are being watched, which emails are being opened and which offers are producing results. Those figures help me decide where to spend my limited time.
There is also a lot of maintenance. Websites need updating. Links stop working. Programs change. Old articles become outdated. New opportunities appear. Some things that seemed important a couple of years ago turn out not to be worth continuing.
That is simply part of running an online business.
The Mindset Shift Nobody Warns You About
One of the biggest differences between working online and having a conventional job is the relationship between the work you do today and the money you eventually make from it.
With a conventional job, you generally get paid for the time you have recently worked.
With affiliate marketing, the connection can be much less direct.
You might spend several hours writing an article and see very little from it initially. A video might get only a handful of views when you publish it. An email campaign might produce nothing particularly exciting the first time around.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the work was wasted.
That article may attract a visitor six months from now. The video may gradually build an audience. Someone may discover several pieces of your content, join your email list and eventually become a customer or affiliate referral.
This is one reason I think it is important to build an online business as a collection of useful assets rather than constantly looking for the next quick opportunity.
One Small Task, Multiplied Over Time
A single blog post isn’t going to transform your business.
Neither is one YouTube video, one email or one social media post.
But if you keep producing useful things over a period of years, the picture starts to change.
One article becomes fifty. Fifty become a hundred. A few videos become a library of videos. A small email list gradually becomes a larger one. A useful funnel can continue working while you are concentrating on something else.
The same principle applies to the less interesting work.
Fix one broken link and it doesn’t make much difference. Fix hundreds of problems over several years and you have a much better-maintained business.
A small improvement today may not seem important. But online business tends to reward accumulated effort.
Consistency Beats Intensity
You don’t need to work eighteen hours a day to build an online business.
In fact, I don’t think that’s a particularly sensible way to approach it.
The more useful question is whether you can keep doing the work for years without becoming completely fed up with it.
I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, and I’m still learning, testing new ideas and finding things that could be improved. The technology has changed enormously during that time, as have the websites, platforms and marketing methods I’ve used.
What hasn’t changed quite so much is the basic process.
Create something useful. Get it in front of people. Build an audience. Recommend relevant products and services. Follow up with people who are interested. Keep improving what you’ve already built.
Then do it again.
Using AI Without Letting It Take Over
This is also where tools such as AI can be useful.
I don’t see AI as a replacement for having something to say. I see it as a way of making some parts of the process easier and faster.
That’s the thinking behind the new Blog Post Templates I’ve added to the Evergreen Funnel Club.
The templates aren’t intended to give everyone the same article. Instead, they give you a starting point. You can add your own website, your own experience, your own instructions and the particular audience you are writing for.
In the demonstration above, I used one of the templates with my own blog. I gave the AI information about DavidHurley.net and asked it to look at the existing content and writing style before producing the article.
The result is the article you’ve just read.
I can then edit it, add my own experience, change anything I don’t like and make sure it says exactly what I want it to say before publishing it.
That’s a much more useful way for me to think about AI-assisted blogging than simply asking a chatbot to “write me an article” and publishing whatever comes back.
What Working From Home Really Looks Like
Working from home as an affiliate marketer isn’t really about the laptop-on-the-beach lifestyle.
Most of the time it’s much more ordinary than that.
You sit down, decide what needs doing, and get on with it. You create something, promote something, improve something or fix something. Sometimes you see an immediate result. Quite often you don’t.
Then you do it again tomorrow.
And over time, those small pieces of work can add up to something quite substantial.
That’s what working from home has looked like for me over the past 20 years, and it’s still pretty much how I approach it today.
If You Want to Try This Yourself
The Blog Post Template service is now part of the Evergreen Funnel Club. Members receive approximately five new templates each month, giving them a regular supply of starting points for creating useful content for their own websites.
If you’d like to see what else is included in the membership, you can find out more at EvergreenFunnelClub.com.
And if you don’t have a WordPress website yet, I recommend taking a look at Wealthy Affiliate – I’ve been a member since 2015, and it provides WordPress hosting, training and tools for building an online business.
Good luck!
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus
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