If you’re new to the world of digital marketing and you’ve watched a dozen tutorials but still don’t know where to start, this post is for you.
You’ve probably never taken a marketing class, but maybe you’ve heard of the Four Ps.
Person. Product. Place. Promotion.
This is a little jargony, but stick with me.
The idea is that the best marketing strategy messages to one person about a single product over the same channel for the duration of a particular promotion.
And it works great for large established brands. 💰
But what if you’re starting from nothing?
What if you don’t have a product? Or an audience?
What if all you have is a feeling that you could build something, and no idea where to begin.
Well, let me introduce you to my 5 Ps Framework.
Most tutorials skip straight to the end. Open a Canva account. Start an Instagram. Pick a product.
That’s backwards.
And it’s a big reason so many people stall out before they ever get going.
So I built my own version for people just starting out. My 5 Ps:
- ❤️ Passion
- 🙋♀️ Person
- 🎁 Product
- 💬 Pitch
- 📱 Platform
The order matters.
In this post, I’ll walk you through each one, why it comes where it does, and what changes once you have all five.
(If you’d rather see this explained live, there’s a free masterclass I’ll tell you more about at the end.)
Let’s break it down. 👇
🔢 Why order matters
Notice where Platform lands. Dead last.
That’s on purpose.
Most beginners start with the platform. They open the account, pick the fonts, make the first post…
And only then try to figure out who they’re talking to and what they’re saying.
My 5 Ps flip that.
You decide what you care about, who you’re helping, what you’re offering, and what you’ll say.
Where you say it is the final decision, not the first one.
❤️ P1: Passion
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say passion is everything.
I read an article recently about a woman who tried affiliate marketing after seeing a short tutorial on Instagram.
She followed the steps in the ~7 second video exactly.
She became an Amazon affiliate, picked a cheap eye mask to promote, made a few half-assed Pinterest pins, and thought that was all there was to it.
As the disappointing reality sank in, she finally asked herself one question:
Why would anybody ever buy from me?
That question is the whole point. 🎯
If I could have talked to her, I would have asked her a few questions of my own:
- Why are you promoting this eye mask?
- Why did you like it?
- What did it do for you? How did it help?
- Why would you personally recommend it to someone else?
The why behind it is what matters, not the specific product.
Maybe she has real trouble sleeping. Maybe that eye mask is one of several things that finally helped her get decent rest.
If so, there’s a story there. And that story is what makes her relatable. It’s what builds trust, so that when she recommends the eye mask it doesn’t sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like a recommendation from a trusted friend.
Most tutorials don’t tell you to dig for that. They can’t, really.
An influencer has about 60 seconds to explain a whole business model. So it gets squeezed down to go to Amazon, pick a product.
The why gets cut.
This is why Passion comes first.
People can tell when you genuinely care about something.
It’s also what makes this work feel good. 💛
Sales and marketing are tough. They can drain you.
If you don’t care about what you’re promoting, you will give up when it gets hard.
🙋♀️ P2: Person
There’s a saying I come back to all the time: if you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.
You need to target one specific person you’re trying to help with your recommendations.
This is the P people get stuck on most.
One of the mentors in my digital marketing community talked about this on one of our weekly calls. She got stuck here too.
She was afraid that if she got too specific, she’d alienate someone. So she tried to speak to everyone.
It didn’t work.
A skincare MLM that shall remain unnamed used to like to say anyone could be a customer because “everyone has skin!”
Looking back? 🤦♀️ Terrible advice. Don’t be like them.
How to find your person
It usually comes back to you.
The point of affiliate marketing, in my opinion, is to recommend goods or services that you’ve used firsthand.
If you bought the product yourself, then you were the intended audience. That means you can model your ideal person on yourself.
That’s also how I do it. I draw on my own experience, and on whatever made me part of a target audience in the first place.
Go back to the eye mask. Her person was probably someone a lot like her: someone who struggles to sleep.
Why Person comes second
Nailing down your audience is key to making great content that people will actually want to see or read.
Personally, it gave me more clarity on my own why story. And it made me much clearer on what other people in my audience needed to know.
Everything after this gets easier once you know who you’re talking to.
🎁 P3: Product
What you might ultimately choose to promote or recommend grows out of your passion and your person. It usually comes from your own research and experience.
From there, you can go one of three ways:
1. Recommend what worked for you
Maybe it’s something, or a group of related somethings that solved a problem for you. So much so, you’d recommend every one.
In that case, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can promote those products as an affiliate.
2. Fill a gap
Maybe the thing you needed didn’t exist. So you made it.
Now you want to offer it to other people who need it too.
3. Bring your own angle
Maybe the solution exists and in many versions, but your way of doing it is yours.
For example, there are lots of people who share high-protein recipes right now. But your recipes, and your angle on them, are unique to you.
It’s your own version of the same solution.
Why this P depends on your available time and energy
If you’re building your digital marketing business alongside your very busy life, how much time and energy do you want or have to put into it?
- 📣 As an affiliate, you do the marketing. The person who created the product handles the sales.
- 🛠️ With your own product, you do both the sales and the marketing.
Neither is better. They just ask different things of you.
📖 I chose the affiliate path partly because I didn’t want to be in sales.
💬 P4: Pitch
Once you know who you’re talking to, you can decide what to say.
And to be clear, I call this P pitch, but it’s the furthest thing from a sales pitch.
Your pitch is your hook. It’s your content.
Your content is what attracts and keeps your audience’s attention, but it’s also how you build relationships.
You are a trusted friend offering a vetted solution.
What a pitch actually is
Here’s the good news: if you’ve worked through the first three Ps, you already have your pitch.
A pitch is just the first three Ps said out loud.
- 🙋♀️ Who you were (Person)
- 😩 What you were struggling with
- 🎁 What helped (Product)
- ❤️ Why you care enough to share it (Passion)
I’ll use myself as an example.
I was a working mom near the end of my maternity leave, dreading going back to work. I wanted an off-ramp: income I could build on the side of my full-time job, mostly from my phone, in the cracks of my day.
Affiliate marketing was exactly that. And I know there are other working moms in the same spot who need to know this option exists.
That’s my pitch. No hype. Just who I was, what I needed, and what worked.
Now go back to the eye mask one more time. Her pitch might sound something like this:
“I’ve struggled with sleep for years. This cheap little eye mask is one of the few things that actually helped, so now I tell every tired friend about it.”
Nothing about that sounds like selling. It sounds like a friend.
From there, your content just needs to cover all the reasons you’d recommend that solution to someone facing the same problem or hoping to reach the same goal.
Why Pitch comes before Platform
What you actually want to say is far more important than which marketing channel you open.
A great message can work almost anywhere. A vague message won’t work on any platform.
That’s why Pitch comes fourth, and Platform waits.
📱 P5: Platform
Finally, where will you show up?
There are two sides to weigh.
Side 1: You
- 🧭 Comfort. If you already know a platform well, that’s one less learning curve.
- 🌱 Growth. Maybe you don’t mind leaning into the discomfort and learning something new.
- 🙈 Visibility. If you aren’t comfortable being face-forward, some platforms work much better for faceless content than others.
Side 2: Your person and your product
- 📍 Go where your person already is. Maybe your audience is mostly on LinkedIn, not Instagram.
- 🖼️ Consider how visual your product is. Some products need a visual platform to show them off or to build trust. Others don’t.
For me, a blog and Pinterest made sense. I love to write, and I need to stay faceless while I’m still working my 9-to-5.
Both are very friendly to that.
✨ What changes when you follow the 5 Ps
Here’s what I’ve noticed since I started working this way.
Passion naturally shows up in your content. That helps you build what Google calls E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
More importantly, your audience can feel it. They relate to you, feel seen by you, and want to see more of you.
Your audience gets clear. And when your audience is clear, so is your message.
What to promote fills in naturally. You’re not hunting for something random.
And content gets so much easier. 🙌
You stop staring at a blank screen, because you’re no longer struggling to figure out what to say.
🙋♀️ You might be wondering…
“What if no one shares my passion?”
The world is a big place. You will find other people who share your problems, your goals, or your mistakes.
And if you found something so awesome that gave you your desired outcome, there’s a good chance others out there would be interested in learning about it too. 💛
“What if I don’t have a passion? I just need income.”
I suspect that’s the question that was really behind the eye-mask woman’s “why would anyone buy from me?”
And it goes back to the why.
If the only reason you’re building a digital marketing business is because you think it’ll be easy money, then this ain’t it.
But I’m sure there’s something that lady loves talking about. Something she gives advice on without being asked, or has spent hours and hours researching.
With a little thought, she could find something she cares about enough to help others achieve a better outcome.
And so can you.
💛 Where this leaves you
Most people start building backwards. Platform first, everything else later, if ever.
The 5 Ps give you a better order:
- Passion: find your why.
- Person: pick who you’re helping.
- Product: choose what solves their problem.
- Pitch: decide what you’ll say.
- Platform: choose where you’ll say it.
Get the first two right, and the rest fall into place.
🙌 Where do I start?
Thankfully, I didn’t have to figure all of this out on my own.
I decided to join a digital marketing community. They didn’t teach me the 5 Ps directly. But their training helped me nail down every one of them.
If you want to see how it works, start with this free masterclass.
👉 Save your seat for the free masterclass
It’s about an hour, and covers how affiliate and digital marketing actually work, as well as their community and what it includes.
If you can’t make it live, signing up gets you the replay. And here’s why it fits so neatly with my 5 Ps Framework…
You bring the passion and the product idea. Their program helps with the rest:
- 🙋♀️ Person: a whole section on building your brand, including a brand bible and defining your target audience
- 💬 Pitch: training on how to formulate your pitches
- 📱 Platform: training on creating content for your platform, plus done-for-you content ideas and templates
They even build your business’s backend for you, too. That’s a big part of what made it so valuable to me.
Just a heads up, this post may contain affiliate links. If you click and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products and services I genuinely believe in.