case study affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing Case Studies: 15 Examples for Success

Please enable JavaScript

How would you like to read the best affiliate marketing case studies ever published?

More importantly, how would you like to copy the top practices in affiliate marketing that are based on real-world examples and not just theory to earn money online?

Below, you’ll find a list of the top 15 affiliate marketing case studies along with the results and key findings from each example. By studying these affiliate marketing case study examples and applying the lessons learned on your own website, you can hopefully achieve similar results to increase your commissions as an affiliate marketer.

Table of Contents

Affiliate Marketing Case Studies

Going from zero to $10k in monthly revenue – contentellect affiliate marketing case study.

Follow the steps Contentellect is taking to grow an affiliate marketing website from $0 to $10k a month in under 24 months. Includes a breakdown of the monthly costs, income, and traffic.

Helping Choose Wheels Grow 124% – Intergrowth Affiliate Marketing Case Study

This website had been hit with a Google penalty and traffic was down 80%. See how Intergrowth helped the site recover and grow 124% in 6 months. Bounce rate improved by 15% and average session duration increased by 40%all the while goal conversions increased by 526%.

Zero to $20k/month In a Year – Side Hustle Nation Affiliate Marketing Case Study

In this case study, you’ll learn how the owners of Finvsfin.com scaled their affiliate marketing website from $0 to $20,0000 per month in one year. Includes strategies on keyword research, how to structure content, ways to attract backlinks, optimization tactics to grow their traffic, and more.

How I Made $16,433 With One Product – BloggersPassion Affiliate Marketing Case Study

This case study explains how the site owner made $16,433 from a single affiliate product. The information and steps revealed in this guide can be applied to any affiliate marketing niche.

Amazon Niche Site Project 4: Own The Yard – Niche Pursuits Affiliate Marketing Case Study

If you haven’t seen this Amazon affiliate marketing case study yet, then you should set aside some time to dive into it. Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits documented the entire journey of building an affiliate site called “Own The Yard” that covered topics like yard games, animals, yard tools, gardening, and backyard gear. Check it out to get the entire timeline of the site build and major milestone achievements.

Amazon Site Earns $2,000/month with 100 Articles – Fat Stacks Blog Affiliate Marketing Case Study

Here’s another Amazon affiliate marketing case study worth reading in depth. Dom Wells from Human Proof Designs posted this case study on Fat Stacks Blog with a detailed focus on content types, content timelines, link types, and link timelines to help other affiliate marketers improve their sites to make more money.

How We Sold An 18-Month-Old Site For Mid 6 Figures – Authority Hackers Affiliate Marketing Case Study

Authority Hackers has a popular blog, podcast, and course on affiliate marketing. Many affiliate marketers consider AH to be the best in the business for teaching aspiring entrepreneurs how to create profitable affiliate sites from scratch. In this case study, you’ll learn everything AH did to grow and sell a niche website for 6 figures in 18 months. It’s literally an entire blueprint from concept to final sale.

Amazon Site 10Beasts Grows from $0 to $4500+ In 4 Months – NichePie Affiliate Marketing Case Study

In this case study, you’ll learn how NichePie took the famous website affiliate marketing website 10Beasts.com to $4,500 in monthly earnings in just 4 months. The site then went on to make $40,000 by month 8 and kept growing. Luqman Khan, the owner, eventually sold the affiliate site for over half-a-million dollars. Inside this case study, you’ll get important insights into the keyword research process, site structure, content structure, SEO, and link building. The article also includes lots of screenshots to help you follow along with the journey.

Zero to 21K Visitors and $2000/month In 9 Months – Web Asset Builders Affiliate Marketing Case Study

This case study covers the journey of a client who bought a Done-For-You Amazon affiliate website from Web Asset Builders, and how the site went from zero traffic to reaching 21,000 visitors and $2000 per month in 9 months.

Project Cashflow: How to Build a Niche Site from Day One – Diggity Marketing Affiliate Marketing Case Study

This affiliate marketing case study was published by one of the most respected affiliate marketers in the industry: Matt Diggity. In this first installment of the Project Cashflow case study, you’ll learn about Matt’s approach to choosing a niche, the pros and cons of buying an existing website, finding the right site to purchase, basic affiliate site valuation and negotiation, and more. You can then follow along with the journey as he publishes new blog posts each month with site updates.

How I Took An Affiliate Marketing Website from $0 to $95,134.05 Using SEO – Stupid Simple SEO Case Study

Mike, a six-figure blogger takes you through the entire process of how he created a brand new affiliate marketing website and grew it to $95,134.05 with over 1,000,000 unique pageviews in just its second year. The site pretty much runs on auto-pilot now with no posting to social media, no emails to a mailing list, and the income is 95% passive.

Flipping an Affiliate Website for $136K In 16 Months – Empire Flippers Case Study

Empire Flippers, a curated marketplace for buying and selling established and profitable online businesses, has many affiliate marketing case studies on its blog. However, this case study in particular is quite valuable for you to read because it explains how one client bought a site for $52,256 and flipped it for $136,773. You’ll learn evaluation metrics this seller looked for when buying a website to flip as well as the growth plan he put into place to scale this site to such high profitability.

How I Got 2 Conversions In 48 Hours – H-Educate Affiliate Marketing Case Study

While the title of this affiliate marketing case study may not sound too impressive, the fact is can help a lot of new affiliate marketers get quick results from their websites. Inside, Hasan Aboul Hassan explains the process for how to make more conversions instantly after publishing a new blog post. Hassan is also a master at Quora SEO and Quora link building , so you may want to check out those articles as well and look for his profile on Quora to follow his strategies for getting more referral traffic from that online platform.

How We Generated an Extra $15,048 In Monthly Revenue In 34 Days – Convertica Affiliate Marketing Case Study

Convertica is a done-for-you conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist that helps you to maximize revenue from every visitor that lands on your website. And there’s really no other service provider like this in the industry for affiliate marketers. In this case study, you’ll learn the exact CRO techniques Convertica used to increase one of its client’s monthly income by over $15,048. There are also more affiliate marketing case studies on the site’s blog. So make sure to check them out for even more CRO strategies.

$3000 Per Month Using AI and Blogger – Adsterra Affiliate Marketing Case Study

In this case study, you’ll learn how Saif Khan used AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney along with a Blogger blog and videos to earn $3,000 per month. Saif explains all aspects of the case study so you can use it for inspiration.

What Is an Affiliate Marketing Case Study?

An affiliate marketing case study is an in-depth study of affiliate marketing in a real-world context. It can focus on one affiliate tactic or a group of affiliate strategies to find out what works in affiliate marketing to improve conversions and traffic.

Are Case Studies Good for Affiliate Marketing?

Case studies are good for affiliate marketing because you can learn about how to do affiliate marketing in an effective way. Instead of just studying the theory of affiliate marketing, you can learn from real examples that applied specific methods to achieve success.

Read More Case Studies

In addition to affiliate marketing case studies, you may also be interested in these other examples of digital marketing success stories.

• SEO case studies
• Content marketing case studies
• Digital marketing case studies
• Email marketing case studies
• Social media case studies
• PPC case studies

Affiliate Marketing Case Study Examples Summary

I hope you enjoyed this list of the best affiliate marketing case studies that are based on real-world results and not just theory.

As you discovered, the affiliate marketing case study examples above demonstrated many different ways to improve conversions, gain more website traffic, and earn more money as an affiliate marketer. By studying the key findings from these examples, and applying the methods learned to your own site, you can hopefully achieve the same positive outcomes.

New affiliate marketing success case studies are being published every month and I’ll continue to update this list as they become available. So keep checking back to read the current sources of information on affiliate marketing.

• Blog Writing
• Product Descriptions
• Link Building
• Haro Outreach
• White Label Content
• White Label Links
• Case Studies
• Place Order

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Going From Zero To $10K In Monthly Revenue

Affiliate Content Site Case Study

Follow the steps we are taking to grow a content site from $0 to $10k a month in under 24 months.

Summary Stats

• Site Launched: June 2020
• Investment to date: $10,296.68
• Income to date: $17,603.39
• Estimated site value: $35,000
• ROI to date: 410%

We stopped updating this case study in May 2022 (24 months after we launched). Although we didn't achieve our goal of getting the site to $10k a month, we have managed to average over $1000 a month since June 2021. Google's May 2022 algorithm update also negatively affected the site (we're down 30% in traffic), so it's unlikely we'll see significant growth going forward. We're undecided whether we will sell this website or just keep it for cash flow. I hope you enjoy the case study - you can read more like this one here .

2020 Numbers

2021 Numbers

2022 Numbers

Costs to date

• Domain: $29.17 (aged domain from Godaddy auctions ) + $18.17 renewal + $20.17 renewal.
• Hosting: $250 (WPX) + $250 renewal.
• Content cost: $7,243 (250,000 words. Bought using our content writing service ).
• Links: $1850 (we’ve bought 15 link insertions and 7 guest posts. Acquired via our link building service ).
• Citations: $20 + $29 (from SEOButler)
• Social Profiles: $7 ( Fiverr )
• VA for posting: $450 (used our virtual assistant service )
• Web services: $89.99 (keyword research tool)
• Total Cost: $10,296.68

Income to date

We only added affiliate links in late September 2020.

• October 2020: $167
• November 2020: $715.30 (Black Friday went well!)
• December 2020: $215
• January 2021: $523.44
• February 2021: $367.18
• March 2021: $900.15
• April 2021: $811.05
• May 2021: $954.67
• June 2021: $1,190.40
• July 2021: $1,031.71
• August 2021: $701.93
• September 2021: $916.26
• October 2021: $1,148.64
• November 2021: $1,260.74
• December 2021: $1,077.05
• January 2022: $1,063.55
• February 2022: $937.70
• March 2022: $1,073.17
• April 2022: $1,402.75
• May 2022: $1,145.70
• Total Income: $17,603.39

Traffic to date

• July 2020: 217 sessions
• August 2020: 755 sessions
• September 2020: 2,467 sessions
• October 2020: 7,034 sessions
• November 2020: 10,097 sessions
• December 2020: 10,254 session
• January 2021: 11,558 sessions
• February 2021: 12,643 sessions
• March 2021: 19,458 sessions
• April 2021: 18,711 sessions
• May 2021: 19,663 sessions
• June 2021: 21,137 sessions
• July 2021: 19,820 sessions
• August 2021: 20,927 sessions
• September 2021: 19,212 sessions
• October 2021: 22,143 sessions
• November 2021: 21,792 sessions
• December 2021: 25,804 session
• January 2022: 25,047 sessions
• February 2022: 21,093 sessions
• March 2022: 27,961 sessions
• April 2022: 32,882 sessions
• May 2022: 31,546 sessions

Timeline and Learnings

• We launched this affiliate marketing website in June 2020.
• For the first week we researched niches. Niche choice is critical – for us the criteria was not Amazon, average sale price $100+, 30+ day cookie, high converting affiliate partner (checked using Commission Junction stats), and decent commission 8%+
• Once we decided on a niche we got to work sourcing an aged domain. Many people look for a powerful backlink profile when trying to get an aged domain. These are great, but they can be very hard to find and costly. For us, we focused on relevance to our niche, a clean history and age. We managed to find a super relevant domain that was 15 years old on Godaddy auctions. We checked it's history using archive.org and it was squeaky clean. We managed to secure the domain for under $30. Winning!
• We then created a detailed content plan for 80-100 articles (100,000 words). This took a solid few days, although KeyClusters (a  keyword grouping tool ), sped this up massively (see how we use keyword clustering ). We knew from the get go that if this site takes off we would need a scalable structure, so we thought long and hard about our content plan and the silos we would use. See how we do keyword research .
• With the domain bought and launched, we used Fiverr to create social profiles.
• Our content team got to work writing the 100k words (see our article writing service ).
• We also bought citations using SEO Butler.
• About 75% of the content was written and published in July.

August 2020

• By early August all content was published.
• To our surprise, Google starting indexing and ranking our content out the gates. This is very unusual for a brand new site, so the aged domain clearly made a huge difference.
• With the site already starting to rank and pull in organic traffic we decided to invest in some links. We bought 10 high quality link insertions and 5 guest posts from our link building service . 80% of these we pointed to the homepage using branded anchors and naked URLs, and the rest we pointed to internal silo pages.

Key Learning

If your domain is aged and good, your content solid, and your site structure silo’ed and interlinked correctly, you don’t need a lot of links to rank. Although Ahrefs shows 516 referring domains, most of these are citations and coupon sites. Hence our DR is 1.3!!

September 2020

• We did nothing. Just sat on our hands to see what Google would think. Good news, the G-Dawg likes us!
• I say nothing, we did get one of our VAs to add affiliate links. We partnered with three eCommerce companies in the niche, two on Commission Junction and one on Rakuten. 

October 2020

• With positive signs all-round we decided to double down on content and created another content plan for another 50k words of commercial content.

November and December 2020

• Our content team completed the next batch of articles and our VA published all content.
• By December it was clear that one affiliate partner was outperforming the other two by a mile. For example, see the screenshot below of Affiliate Partner A vs Affiliate Partner B. As you can see Partner A has driven 14x more commission than B, despite B sending 1/3 as much traffic as A. 

January 2021

• Due to the poor performance of Affiliate Partner B and C, we've switched them out for Amazon. The switch was completed mid January 2021 and the results are promising.
• We also added in a new affiliate partner from Commission Junction.

February and March 2021

• We decide to power things up a little with some strategic tier 2 PBN links from IM Powerhouse. These have moved the dial in terms of traffic and revenue, and in March we saw our highest traffic and revenue month.
• We also decided to invest in more content, another 100k words. But this time we are doing 100% informational content. Up to this point we have only had commercial content on the site (Best of round ups, individual reviews, X vs Y comparisons). We used KeyClusters to create an informational content plan and will be getting our content team to start writing in April / May.
• We also installed advertising via Setupad . Setupad use a metric called Effective Cost per Mille (eCPM), which similar to RPM. We are currently achieving around $2 per 1000 impressions, which isn't too shabby. I know you can get higher on Mediavine and AdThrive, but our traffic isn't quite there yet. 

April and May 2021

• Our content team were rammed with client work in April and May so we had to delay the roll-out of the 100k words we planned in March. Work has now begun and we expect to publish most of this content in June and July.

Here's what the site looked like on Ahrefs as of early 2021

June-September 2021

• Traffic and income has plateaued so hopefully we will see explosive growth as soon as the new content goes lives.
• Time to rethink strategy - will keep you updated!

October-May 2022

• The site has definitely plateaued. Traffic is stable at around 20-30k monthly sessions and so is income at around $1000 a month.
• We invested in a few more link insertions and guests posts, but have yet to see a significant uptick.

And here's what the site looks like on Ahrefs as of May 2022

Current Valuation 

As we're averaging around $1000 per month, we would estimate this site is worth: $35k (35-40x multiple).

Multiple justification is based on going market multiples for content sites with multiple income streams (Amazon, 3rd party affiliates, advertising), and 6-12 months of stable traffic and income.

Jason Smit is the CEO of Contentellect and believes that marketing success lies at the intersection of great content and quality links. With 15 years spent in agency environments, including Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis Media and Performics, his experience is distilled into Contentellect's service offering. He holds a B.Com Marketing from the University of Cape Town and a PGDip. in Entrepreneurship.

You may also like

How we’re scaling our business to $1,000,000+ in annual revenue, keyword clustering: from 0 to 50,000 monthly visitors in 6 months, tasket va services merges with contentellect (yay), content + links: it's that simple.

Let's talk about how we can scale your content and link building efforts

Affiliate marketing case studies: examples for success

Affiliate Case Study

Affiliate marketing is an area in which you need to constantly develop and learn something new in order to keep up with your competitors. Some people prefer to learn only theory and slowly master new knowledge, while others go straight to practice, risking losing their investments.

In the realm of affiliate marketing, a distinctive form of training emerges, seamlessly blending theoretical understanding with hands-on practice simultaneously, and this distinctive approach is encapsulated in the form of case studies. In this article, we will discuss what case studies are, why they are so good in affiliate marketing, what other types of case studies exist and give some examples of successful marketing cases. 

What is an affiliate marketing case study?

A case study involves an in-depth examination of an actual instance of a marketing campaign, encompassing a detailed analysis of each stage and a comprehensive depiction of all the actions undertaken by the webmaster.

A case study can be about one campaign or several, it can be an in-depth study of a specific marketing bundle or several affiliate marketing ideas at once. Usually affiliate marketing examples are studied by webmasters who have conducted a marketing campaign themselves, but sometimes they are made by a whole team of arbitrageurs or third-party people who have seen stories of successful affiliate marketing stories on the forum.

The main task of affiliate marketing examples is to show what actions should be taken to increase the conversion rate of an offer and earn good money on traffic arbitrage. In other words, affiliate marketing examples are a way to share with fellow webmasters working schemes that can be used both in their original form and supplemented with your own affiliate marketing ideas. 

Are case studies useful for affiliate marketing?

With the help of case studies, beginners in this affiliate business model can gain useful knowledge that clearly demonstrates the practice of getting conversions, and professionals in this affiliate business model can learn new effective bundles. Additional case studies help the webmaster community create new effective affiliate marketing ideas by modifying and improving the bundles from the affiliate marketing examples.

More case studies

In addition to affiliate marketing case studies, there are other cases such as SEO optimization cases, PPC cases, content marketing cases, SMM and email marketing cases and so on. Researching cases from these areas of marketing also allows webmasters to learn new ways to effectively attract traffic.

Affiliate marketing case study examples summary

Making a successful marketing case study is not an easy task. You need to do some serious preparation before you start exploring a new marketing bundle. In addition to preparing a budget, accounts, and paying for all the necessary services, it is very important to choose the right affiliate websites examples.

Without an affiliate program with good terms and conditions, any successful affiliate marketing stories study is doomed to failure. So here are a few best affiliate programs to create your own successful case study.

Amazon Associates 

Amazon Associates is considered one of the largest and most well-known best affiliate programs as it holds 50% of the affiliate marketing market share. This affiliate program requires arbitrageurs to promote Amazon products from different categories.

Also, the popularity of these best affiliate programs is ensured by the availability of a large number of tools that help webmasters to get traffic. If the users you refer buy a product, you get 10% commission on the cost of that product. Also, webmasters get paid if the referred user adds the product to their shopping cart.

More Amazon Associates offers special bonuses for Influencers, such as a page to showcase the Influencer’s recommended offers of top affiliate programs. This affiliate program can be an ideal start to a webmaster’s career for beginners. Once a webmaster has mastered attracting client traffic, he can move on to other best affiliate programs.

Amazon Associates terms and conditions:

• Commission — up to 10% of the product price;
• Cookie expiration date — 24 hours;
• Minimum withdrawal amount — from $100;
• Frequency of payout — 60 days.

Amazon Associates Benefits:

• Anyone can become an Amazon Associates affiliate, as participation in this affiliate program is absolutely free;
• Registration in the affiliate program is very simple and intuitive;
• Amazon has a lot of different offers of top affiliate programs to promote, so the affiliate program will not close;
• Amazon values its reputation, so partnering with such a large company will be very reliable.

Skillshare is an online platform for learning various professions and skills. Here people can learn design, business management, photo processing, programming and much more. This platform has its own affiliate program to attract new students.

Like other similar services with their own affiliate marketing programs, Skillshare pays commissions to webmasters for paid subscriptions and free signups. The Skillshare affiliate program has tools to track traffic, referral link clicks and payout amount.

In addition, Skillshare is considered to be a popular educational platform, so there are a lot of online courses on different topics on the platform and each of them can be promoted. Affiliate marketing programs of other educational platforms do not have such an opportunity. 

Skillshare affiliate program terms and conditions:

• Commission — 40%;
• Cookie validity period — 30 days;
• Minimum withdrawal amount — $10;
• Frequency of payout — monthly.

Benefits of Skillshare:

• You can earn commissions for free signups and paid subscriptions;
• Conversion and payout statistics are displayed in real time;
• Payouts for referred customers are made every month;
• Exclusive promotional materials are provided to reliable webmasters.

The affiliate program of the freelancer recruitment platform Fiverr offers webmasters to get paid for attracting new employers and clients willing to buy paid online courses and work plans. Affiliates can earn by attracting a large number of new clients or engage in remarketing, receiving a commission for each renewal of a paid subscription to the service.

Depending on the offers of top affiliate programs and services promoted, the webmaster will receive commissions of different amounts. Another positive difference between Fiverr and other affiliate marketing programs is seasonal bonuses, with which a webmaster can earn many times more. Fiverr affiliate program provides webmasters with various creatives, such as banners, GIFs, videos, widgets for their own affiliate websites examples, programs and so on.

If you want to become an affiliate of a technologist in the field of finance, you can take a look at the affiliates of our rating .

Fiverr affiliate program terms and conditions:

• Commission — $15-$150 CPA or $10 CPA + 10% profit;
• Minimum withdrawal amount — $100;
• Frequency of money payments — monthly.

Advantages of Fiverr:

• There is a choice between promoted offers of top affiliate programs;
• Webmasters can receive regular payments for subscription renewals;
• There are seasonal bonuses that increase the income of webmasters;
• Webmasters can get various creatives for effective promotion;
• Support service is available 24/7;
• Management in the personal cabinet is intuitive and simple.

Unbounce 

Unbounce, a company that creates push notifications and landing pages, has its own affiliate program that focuses on promoting offers of top affiliate programs and services for marketers. Unbounce’s clients are usually marketing agencies and affiliate marketers, so this company’s offers of the best affiliate marketing programs can be promoted to fellow webmasters and small and medium-sized business clients.

Unbounce offers its affiliates a 20% commission payout for every subscription renewal by a customer. Another bonus of the Unbounce affiliate program, which other affiliate marketing programs in the same field do not have — each webmaster is assigned a personal marketing coach who is ready to answer any question and share effective advertising bundles. In addition, Unbounce has customizable tools for tracking conversions and income, flexible payment options, additional benefits for reliable partners.

Unbounce affiliate program terms and conditions:

• Commission — 20%;
• Cookie validity period — 90 days;
• Frequency of money payments — quarterly.

Benefits of the Unbounce affiliate program:

• Webmasters can promote offers of the best affiliate marketing programs and services to their fellow marketers;
• High commission for subscription renewals by referred customers;
• Flexible options for receiving payments;
• There are additional promotional materials;
• Exclusive benefits are available for regular affiliates.

Hostinger provides reliable and affordable web hosting solutions. Hostinger also offers an affiliate program with great commissions for successful sales. With the Hostinger affiliate program, webmasters can earn up to 60% commission on every sale made by a referral. Hostinger provides promotional materials including banners, text links and coupons to help you promote their products more effectively. Webmasters can easily track their performance, earnings and payouts through their affiliate dashboard. If you want to become an affiliate of a techie in the IT industry, you can check out FoxOffers , an affiliate promoting cryptocurrency offers.

Hostinger affiliate program terms and conditions:

• Commission — up to 60%;

Advantages of the Hostinger affiliate program:

• High commissions;
• Large selection of promoted products and services;
• Support service is very responsive and works around the clock;
• Payments are made steadily every month;
• The affiliate program has a high average conversion rate.

Affiliate marketing case studies are not just an opportunity to gain new knowledge and skills. With successful affiliate marketing stories, study research or creating your own cases, you will always be the first among your competitors, gaining more profits from utilizing new, effective bundles. Check out the affiliate marketing programs from this article or use our ranking of the best affiliate programs to work only with profitable affiliate marketing programs to create your own successful case studies.

Like it? Share with your friends!

Posted by RateMeUp Team

forgot password

Find Keyword Ideas in Seconds

Boost SEO results with powerful keyword research

Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

Written by Backlinko Team

This is a complete guide to affiliate marketing.

In this all-new guide you’ll learn all about:

• Basics of affiliate marketing.
• Overview of payment models.
• Niche identification and mastery.
• Effective website creation.
• SEO and CRO strategies.

So, let’s jump right in and turn these key points into your blueprint for affiliate marketing success!

1. Grasping the Basics

2. setting the right foundations, 3. joining an affiliate network or program, 4. seo and traffic generation, 5. converting traffic into sales, 6. legal and ethical considerations, 7. advanced strategies, 8. avoiding common pitfalls, 9. case studies, chapter 1: grasping the basics.

Let’s kick things off with a chapter on the basics of affiliate marketing, setting the stage for your success. Here’s what’s in store:

• Defining affiliate marketing and its mechanics.
• The roles of key players: merchants, affiliates, networks, and consumers.
• Benefits and appeal of affiliate marketing.
• Understanding different payment models: PPC, PPS, PPL, and PPA.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing strategy, where businesses team up with content creators and influencers (affiliates) to promote their products or services.

Affiliates connect their audiences with products or services they’ll love, and earn a cut of each sale they generate.

It’s a win-win-win scenario: businesses gain wider reach, affiliates earn income, and customers discover valuable products.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

After you sign up for an affiliate program, the merchant who created the program provides you with a unique affiliate link or tracking code. These links are placed on your website, blogs, social media platforms, or email marketing campaigns to direct users to the merchant’s site so that they can make a purchase. The links are used to monitor sales that come from your affiliate marketing efforts and provide you with a percentage of the sale.

When a consumer clicks on the unique link, a cookie, a web tracker, is stored on their browser for a period of time. If they decide to make a purchase during that time, even if they leave the site and come back later, the cookie lets the merchant know who sold the product and earns the affiliate a commission.

If done right, affiliate marketing can be super profitable for both the merchant and the affiliate.

Key Players

The affiliate marketing ecosystem can be broken down into four parts:

Also known as the “creator”, the merchant is the business selling a product or service. Their job is to identify and recruit the right affiliates for their affiliate marketing program and supply them with promotional materials like discounts and banners. It’s also their responsibility to motivate affiliates by keeping them up to date on deals, product features, and their top converting products.

They also have to supply the affiliate with an affiliate link to track the sales that the affiliate makes. Merchants can range from solo entrepreneurs to startups and Fortune 500 companies.

Also known as the “publisher”, is a person (or people) that promotes the merchant’s products or services on their platform and drives their audience to the merchant’s site.

The affiliate usually comes up with a marketing strategy and content to leverage the product/service. This could be in the form of videos, blogs, paid ads, and email campaigns.

The success of an affiliate marketing program relies heavily on the affiliates’ ability to effectively market and promote the merchant’s offerings to their audience.

The network is the middleman between the merchant and the affiliate. These networks provide a platform where merchants can list their products and services and affiliates can find suitable products and services to promote. They also handle important tasks such as tracking sales and commissions.

Essentially, they speed up the affiliate marketing process for both merchants and affiliates.

Also known as the “customer”, the consumer is the end-point of the ecosystem. These are the people the affiliate is trying to target and convert into customers. They are the ones who ultimately decide whether to click on an affiliate link, make a purchase, or engage with the promoted products or services.

Understanding how they behave and what they prefer is essential for successful affiliate marketing strategies.

Why You Should Get Into Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular marketing strategy for individuals because of the fact that payment is performance-based.

Here are the four main benefits of affiliate marketing.

It’s Easy to Get Into

Affiliate marketing doesn’t require your to create your own product, worry about inventory, or handle customer support. Your job is to market to your users and get them to take an action. All you need to do to get started is create an engaging website and appeal to your audience. Once you’ve done that, the merchant handles the rest.

It’s Low-Cost

Unlike other business ventures that require a lot of investment for website and project development, all you need to start earning money in affiliate marketing is a website or social media platform.

It’s Low-Risk

On top of being cost-effective, affiliate marketing is also low risk. Since there is no large upfront investment, if it doesn’t work out, you’ve only spent some time and a small amount of money.

It’s Easy to Scale

Part of the beauty of affiliate marketing is the fact that everything can be done from the web. There’s no need for a physical space or inventory. That means there’s no limit to how many products or services you can promote.

With the right strategies and techniques, you can quickly scale your affiliate marketing business and increase your earning potential. Plus, you have the freedom to work from anywhere in the world.

How Affiliates Get Paid

Affiliate marketing is driven by results. That’s what makes it such a cost-effective marketing method for merchants and a great source of passive income for affiliates. However, as commission is based on performance, if you don’t get people to convert, you won’t earn money.

Here are the main payment models you need to know.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

The PPC model means affiliates earn a commission every time someone clicks on a link that leads to the merchant’s site. This model is great because getting a user to click on a link is a LOT easier than making a sale.

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS)

PPS stands as the most commonly used payment model in affiliate marketing. Simply put, with PPS, affiliates get paid for each sale they bring in.

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL)

In the PPL model, affiliates are paid for every lead they bring in. Leads can range from email sign-ups to consultation calls. The PPL model usually has a higher commission rate than the PPC model because the leads you bring in are more qualified.

That being said, this method does require more work, and some merchants evaluate every lead you bring in, which means commissions can be delayed.

Pay-Per-Action (PPA)

Also known as “Cost-Per-Action” (CPA), the PPA model is very similar to the PPL model. The biggest difference is that the user is usually much further down the marketing funnel, which means they’re done researching different products and are closer to making a specific purchase.

If you want to learn more about this model, you should take a look at our article on CPA marketing .

Chapter 2: Setting the Right Foundations

To ensure you get the most out of your affiliate marketing efforts, you’ve got to set the right foundations.

A huge part of this is identifying and qualifying your niche. But it also includes building a website that engages your users, understanding your audience, and performing keyword research to ensure you’re creating high-quality, valuable content for your audience.

For this chapter, we’re going to focus our explanations primarily on SEO, but the same rules apply across other traffic mechanisms.

Identifying Your Niche

Choosing a niche is usually the most difficult part of affiliate marketing since you need to find a balance between market demand, personal interest, and the potential for profitability.

Find Your Passions

As mentioned above, it’s important to enter a niche that you’re interested in. After all, if you’re going to invest time, effort, and money into building a long-lasting business, it’s important to invest it in a niche you’re interested in. Entering a niche purely for profit is the biggest mistake a beginner can make.

Start by identifying your passions, hobbies, and interests. For example, let’s say you enjoy running.

You feel like you’ve got a lot of knowledge to share on the topic and decided that it’s the niche you want to enter into. The next step is to qualify your niche.

Qualifying Your Niche

Before you invest time and energy into a niche, you’ll need to look at its competitiveness, as well as the breadth of search interest and, of course, profitability.

These are the factors you’ll need to assess when qualifying your niche.

Step 1: Identify Search Trends

The first thing you should do when qualifying a niche is to identify whether or not there is consistent interest in the niche. You can identify this by looking at the search interest over the period of a year or more.

Search trends that experience frequent fluctuations suggest that a niche isn’t consistently popular. Therefore, you might not generate a stable and reliable income from it.

Here’s how to identify search trends.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to analyze the search trends for keywords.

Here’s an example.

In the search bar, enter your topic and hit “Explore”. We’re going to use “running shoes”.

Next, click on “Past day” and change it to “Past 12 months”. The most effective way to gauge search trends is by analyzing data over a year or even two.

This will give you a much better idea of how popular the niche is:

As you can see, the interest in “running shoes” fluctuates throughout the year. However, by analyzing the timeline at the bottom of the graph, you’ll notice a consistent level of interest in this topic throughout the year.

Another place to look for search trends is by looking into the fastest growing subreddits or even looking at what’s trending on TikTok.

Step 2: Identify and Assess Competitors

The next step in qualifying a niche is to identify and assess the competition. These are sites already ranking for the keywords and topics you aim to target. By understanding what types of sites they are, you can determine whether or not you will be able to compete in the niche.

Let’s take a look at the most important steps for identifying and assessing competitors in your niche. If you want a more comprehensive guide on SEO Competitor Analysis , then check out our guide which we’ve linked to.

First things first, you want to search for your keyword and have a look at the search engine results page (SERP).

Next you’ll want to check out the site’s that are ranking. Then you’ll want to have a look at the Authority Score (AS) of each site (to determine if they’re authority sites or not).

Before we go any further, let’s differentiate between authority sites and non-authority affiliate sites:

• Authority site: A site with an AS of 40+. Authority sites cover broad niches like “running” and contain content that deals with all aspects of the niche (not just affiliate content).
• Non-authority affiliate site: A site with an AS of less than 40. These are websites that don’t possess the same level of trust and credibility as authority sites. These sites often have fewer backlinks and may not be well-recognized within their niche.

With that being said, let’s jump into the competitor analysis.

Assess Your Competitors’ Authority Scores

To check a site’s AS, you can use Semrush’s Bulk Backlink Analysis tool . All you need to do is paste the URLs of the sites that are ranking for your primary keyword and click “Compare”.

Then, you’ll be able to see the AS for each URL.

Identify Affiliate Sites

The next thing you need to check is if the top-ranking site is an affiliate site. If so, then that’s good news because it indicates that Google is choosing to rank affiliate sites for the keyword.

How do you identify affiliate sites? First, click through to the page.

Then check for the following:

• A clear disclaimer stating the site earns commission from product links in the articles
• “Best”(Best 15 Airfryers of 2023)
• “Top” (Top Texas Tours)
• “vs” (Adidas vs Nike Running Shoes)
• “Roundup” (Best Laptop for Video Editing Roundup)
• “Reviews” (Pink Gaming Chairs Reviewed)
• Buttons with CTA’s like “Book Now” or “Buy on Amazon”

Here’s a real world example.

Runners World has a clear disclaimer indicating that it’s an affiliate site.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Backlinks

The next thing you need to check is the number of backlinks directed to each top-ranking page.

If a domain has a low number of backlinks (eg. fewer than 10), then there is a chance that you could overtake the site by outlinking them. But, you need to acquire quality backlinks from high authority sites that are relevant to your niche.

To check up on your competitors’ backlink profile, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Analytics Tool .

Copy and paste the top-ranking competitor’s page URL into the tool’s search bar. Then,

• go to “Referring Domains” tab
• select “Active”
• set the Authority Score to 30-100, so you only see referring domains with a high AS score
• and select “follow” to see links passing link juice as they carry the most weight

Looking at the results for the Runners World page that is ranking in the top spot, you can see that they have a total of 28 high-quality backlinks pointing to their page. This will take some beating but can be done through formulating an effective link building strategy .

Analyze Your Competitors Traffic and Traffic Value

It’s crucial to take a look at your competitors’ traffic and traffic value to determine if there’s commercial value and search interest for the topics they cover.

To do this, you can use Semrush’s Organic Research Tool. Simply copy and paste your competitor’s domain into the tool.

You’ll then get an overview of their site:

In this example, you can see that Runners World is getting over 1.4M in monthly traffic. This gives us a pretty good idea of the breadth of the search market.

Plus, you can see that their traffic is worth almost $1.1M. That means advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money for this traffic, which tells us the keywords they’re targeting have commercial value.

Analyzing these factors will give you an indication of whether or not there’s potential in this niche. But you’ll also have to look at affiliate programs and their commission structures to find out if they are programs that you’d benefit from.

Step 3: Assess Profitability

Several factors come into play when evaluating the profitability of a niche. First and foremost, it’s crucial to identify the revenue generated by sites within your niche.

One way to do this is to work out some basic forecasting. For example, let’s say an affiliate is paying a 10% commission and the average order value for their site is $50.

This means each sale is worth $5. If you can get your page to rank number one in the SERPs with a 33% click-through rate (CTR) for a keyword with a search volume of 1,000, then that equates to 333 clicks per month.

If your conversion rate for this page was 3%, then that’s ten $5 sales a month, which works out at $50 per month in revenue just from that page.

Another way of assessing profitability is to use Flippa , a platform dedicated to buying and selling domains.

After you land on the homepage, click on “Browse”.

Next, select “Websites” > “Content” > “Review”.

Scroll down to the “Industry” filter and select your niche. We went with “Electronics”.

Here, you can see that this site is generating $1,330 per month from affiliate sales.

While this provides a general insight into the profitability of your niche, it’s crucial to factor in the cost of content creation and site maintenance.

Next, you need to find and analyze affiliate programs and their commission structures.

Step 4: Find Affiliate Programs

Now that you’ve established that there are sites in your niche making money off of affiliate marketing, the last thing you need to do is look for relevant affiliate programs.

Once you’ve found them, you have to determine if those programs have commission structures that you’d be able to benefit from. But if you’re looking for something more niche, here are three ways to find affiliate programs.

Perform a simple Google search.

For example, if you’re looking for affiliate programs in the running shoes niche, type in “running shoes affiliate programs” and hit search.

You’ll get a list of sites you can check out:

2. Look at your competitors’ sites

Another way to find affiliate marketing programs is by looking at your competitors’ sites.

Some sites have their disclosures placed in the footer menu — this is usually the case if they’ve only partnered with one merchant, like Amazon.

Here’s an example:

Other sites maintain a dedicated affiliate disclaimer page where they outline all the affiliate programs they have joined.

3. Analyze your competitor’s backlinks

Analyzing your competitors’ outbound links can help you identify which affiliate programs they’re signed up to. To do this, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool.

Simply copy and paste your competitor’s domain into the tool and hit “Analyze”. For this example, let’s use Runners World (runnerworld.com).

On the “Overview” page, click on “Outbond Domains”:

Set the “Category” filter to “Shopping” or “Internet & Telecom”. We went with “Shopping”.

You’ll now see the affiliate programs your competitor is signed up to.

In this image, you can see the competitor has signed up to a few affiliate programs, for example Amazon, Walmart, and Awin.

The next step is to research the affiliate programs you found. You’ll need to identify if they offer products or services that are related to your niche and that you would want to promote.

Additionally, you’ll need to look at their commission structures and rates to assess if the ROI is worthwhile.

After you’ve gone through all of the steps needed to qualify your niche, it’s time to find topics you can create content around.

Understanding Your Audience’s Needs

Understanding your audience’s needs is fundamental for a successful affiliate marketing strategy.

It goes beyond identifying demographics.

It involves delving into their interests, challenges, and preferences. This understanding is crucial for various reasons that contribute to the effectiveness and sustainability of your affiliate marketing efforts.

Here are the key aspects that highlight the importance of grasping your audience’s needs:

• Relevance: Knowing what your audience is interested in allows you to choose and promote products that are relevant to them, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversions.
• Trust Building: When you address your audience’s specific needs or pain points, it builds trust. Users are more likely to trust recommendations from a source that understands their challenges and provides solutions.
• Effective Communication: Knowing your audience enables you to communicate in a way that resonates with them.
• Long-term Relationships: Affiliate marketing isn’t just about one-time transactions. Understanding their needs helps in consistently delivering value and encouraging repeat business.
• Adaptability: Audience needs can change over time. Keeping a pulse on your audience allows you to adapt your marketing strategies and product/service promotions accordingly.
• Tailoring Your Content: When you understand your audience, you can customize your content to match their preferences. Whether it’s adjusting the tone, format, or type of content, aligning with your audience’s preferences enhances engagement.

Building an Engaging Website

Building an engaging website is crucial for attracting and retaining visitors and fostering trust. It entices your readers to explore further and interact with your content. This can enhance your chances of improving conversions.

First, let’s start off with creating engaging content

Create Engaging Content

Providing high-quality, engaging content will capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to spend more time on your site and ultimately convert. By creating valuable and relevant content that caters to their interests and needs, you can become the go-to source for the information they seek. This can establish your authority in your niche.

Creating great content can be easier than you think. Just keep these factors in mind:

Be Honest and Provide Value

When reviewing products or services, don’t be afraid to give your honest opinion. Just because you’re earning a commission from an affiliate link doesn’t mean you need to tell the user the product or service is great if it’s not.

Users are more likely to find you relatable if you’re honest with them about any issues with a product or service. This will help to enhance your credibility. Additionally, you need to write original content that provides value to your readers.

This is SUPER important in growing your user base and gaining trust with your audience. Here’s what Nabil Al-Baidhani (Affiliate Marketer, KRA Marketing) says about providing value:

“Money will follow if you focus on helping potential buyers get the information they want. When I understood and implemented this, my business took a positive turn.”

Tell a Story

Telling a story instead of just trying to push a product can make the product seem more desirable and can help establish a deeper relationship with your audience.

Write from Experience

Great content comes from a place of experience. That means your reviews and articles should be centered around products or services that you’ve actually had experience with.

For example, GearJunkie does lots of reviews on pocket knives.

They test each knife to meet a bunch of criteria that most knife fans are looking for, and break down their choices in detail.

They also have a section at the end of their articles explaining why you should trust their reviews:

By doing this, they signal to both users and Google that they know what they’re talking about, and they’ve got experience and expertise.

Embrace Their Frustrations

Don’t sugarcoat it. Dig deep into what’s bugging them from the get-go. If you can vocalize the reader’s problem, they’ll trust you to give them a solution. Here’s an example from Wirecutter. Notice how they immediately recognize the problem (bulky wallets in a cashless society) and offer a solution (a slim wallet):

Use Eye-Catching Visuals

Incorporating compelling visuals like high-quality images and videos enhances the overall visual appeal of your web pages. This not only captures visitors’ attention but also creates a more engaging and visually pleasing user experience (UX).

Visual element displays are a great way to showcase a product and provide concise information about it. If used right, they can be eye-catching and make it easier for users to skim through your content.

Here’s an example from Lasso:

As you can see, this product is inserted into a table that not only makes it easier to spot, but provides the core information like the rating and pros and cons. The table format also features a link to the review and a link to try (or buy) the product.

On top of that, using product comparison tables helps users to compare products at a glance.

Send Strong Trust signals

Trust signals convey to users that your site is trustworthy. In the realm of affiliate marketing, establishing this trust is crucial. Users need to have confidence in the information you provide about the products or services you’re linking to in order to make a conversion.

In addition to establishing user trust, trust signals also convey to search engines that your site is credible.

Trust signals are sent from on-site and off-site features.

On-site trust signals include:

• Disclosure Statements: Clearly disclosing your affiliate relationships and any potential commissions (This is often required by law and ethical standards.)
• User Reviews and Testimonials: Including genuine user reviews and testimonials about the products or services you promote
• Affiliate Program Selection: Choosing reputable and well-known affiliate programs
• Privacy and Data Protection: Clearly outlining your website’s privacy policy and how user data is handled
• SSL Certificate and HTTPS: Implementing an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate (This is indicated by the presence of “https://” in the URL.)
• Clear Contact Information: Providing clear and easily accessible contact information, including a physical address, phone number, and email addresses

Off site trust signals include:

• Backlinks from Reputable Sources: Acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites in your niche
• Social Proof and Engagement: Positive engagement and social proof on social media platforms, such as likes, shares, and positive comments

Additional Tips for Building an Effective Site

Creating engaging content and establishing trust are vital, but there are plenty of other elements that go into building an effective site, such as:

Consistent Branding

It’s SUPER important to maintain a consistent brand identity across your website to establish a cohesive and recognizable online presence. This helps build trust and ensures a unified experience for your audience. Additionally, a consistent brand image conveys professionalism and credibility.

Interactive Elements

Include interactive elements, such as polls or comment sections, to encourage user engagement.

Embrace the User Experience

No one enjoys a sluggish or confusing website. Prioritize items that allow for easy use of your site like mobile friendliness, lightning-fast loading times, intuitive menus, and clear CTAs.

Chapter 3: Joining an Affiliate Network or Program

Once you’ve picked your niche and set up a reputable site, it’s time to decide which company you want to partner with and start the process to become an affiliate.

In this chapter, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to join an affiliate program or network, as well as some top options to look into.

Discover the Ideal Program for You

Take a closer look at each network and assess the industries the merchants cater to. For example, if they operate in the B2B sector, it might not be suitable for a B2C affiliate marketer to promote their products or services.

If you decide to work directly with a merchant, make sure they offer a product or service that is relevant to your niche you chose earlier.

Read Up On the Terms & Conditions

Prior to enrolling in an affiliate network or program, carefully review their terms and conditions. It is crucial to understand the commission structure and the prerequisites required for registration. Additionally, assess the regulations as they may vary among different merchants.

Complete the Application

After you’ve read the terms and conditions and are happy to proceed, it’s time to complete the application. You will need to provide accurate and relevant information. This may include details about your website, marketing methods, and payment preferences.

Wait for Approval

After submitting your application, the merchant will review your information.

Approval times vary, but you will typically receive an email notification once your application is processed.

Top Affiliate Networks to Consider

With your target audience in mind, here are some affiliate networks to consider.

• eBay Partner Network
• Rakuten Advertising
• CJ Affiliate

Top Affiliate Programs to Consider

Here are some affiliate programs to consider.

• Amazon Associates

Chapter 4: SEO and Traffic Generation

In affiliate marketing, revenue is closely tied to the amount of targeted traffic you can drive to your site, and SEO is an absolutely vital part of doing so. By leveraging the power of SEO, you can get your site ranking higher in the SERPs and attract more potential customers.

Since the goals of a successful affiliate marketing campaign usually include things like lead generation, sales conversion, and customer acquisition, SEO strategies integrate seamlessly, creating a synergy between the two.

Simply put, if you can nail your SEO strategy , then you have a very good chance of achieving your affiliate marketing objectives.

Keyword Research for Affiliate Content

Keyword research is one of the foundations of any SEO strategy, as understanding what your audience searches for can guide you in creating content that will draw them in.

Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is helpful to find the most relevant keywords for affiliate marketing campaigns. It’s easy to use and provides you with a ton of keyword suggestions.

We’ll give you a quick example of how to use Semrush’s tool to carry out your research. If you’d like more comprehensive advice, check out our full guide to keyword research .

To start, type in your seed keyword and hit “Search”.

For this example, we’ll use “running shoes”:

As you can see, the search volume is almost 4.9 million. This indicates a substantial interest in this niche.

There’s also over 248K relevant keywords, but not all of these will be relevant to your site.

You’ll need to narrow down this list to help you target keywords that are both easy to rank for and beneficial for affiliate marketing.

First, use the “KD%” filter and select “Very easy” to find low competition keywords.

Next, you’ll need to include keyword modifiers in your search. Modifiers are words that you append to your base keywords. This ensures that the results you receive are specifically tailored to meet your affiliate marketing needs. Some go-to modifiers for affiliate marketing include:

• and “review”.

You’ll also want to look for branded keywords, for example, Nike.

Click the “Include keywords” filter and type in your modifiers and hit “Apply”:

Then, click the “Intent” filter and choose “Commercial” to filter and display only keywords with commercial intent :

Focusing on search queries with commercial intent will enhance your chances of attracting relevant traffic to your site and achieving your affiliate marketing goals.

Here’s what Harry Boxhall (Squarespace SEO Consultant, Boxhall Marketing Ltd) had to say about understanding and addressing search intent:

“By tailoring articles to answer specific questions or solve problems that users were actively searching for, I noticed significant improvements in engagement rates and time spent on the page. More importantly, this nuanced approach led to higher conversion rates for affiliate links. Understanding and addressing search intent turned out to be the game-changer, leading not only to better search rankings but also to a considerable increase in affiliate revenue.”

After applying all the filters, we’ve narrowed down the results from 247,000 to 213. This trimmed-down list is more manageable, and the keywords are now more specific.

And, they’re WAY easier to rank for:

Content Creation: The Foundation of SEO and Traffic

Once you’ve identified your keywords, it’s time to start creating an optimized content marketing strategy that supports your SEO goals and engages your target audience. You need to focus on creating valuable content that’s highly relevant to user intent and entices them to convert.

As outlined in Google’s Helpful Content Update , the primary aim of your content should be to help the user resolve their issue, rather than solely trying to improve your rankings.

There are many different types of content that have proven to be successful for affiliate marketers, such as how-to guides, product reviews, and comparison posts.

Let’s take a look at some of the most effective types of content marketing that you should incorporate into your SEO strategy.

How-To Guides

How-to guides are a great way of establishing trust and transparency with your target audience. As the name suggests, they show users how to use a product or service.

This is crucial as you want users to feel confident they’ll be able to use the service or product you’re promoting. Plus, if a user understands how something works, then they tend to be more inclined to make a purchase.

These guides typically target queries with informational search intent like “how to use an air fryer”. You could also consider targeting search terms related to errors like “air fryer not working”, and then lay out the steps for solving the issue.

Another good strategy is to target queries where you can position your product or service as the solution. For example, let’s say you identify the keyword “how to roast potatoes” during your keyword research. You could create an article called “How To Make Perfect Roast Potatoes With An Air Fryer”, where you demonstrate how users can use the product you’re promoting to achieve their desired outcome.

This is an excellent way to match search intent and ensure your guides rank highly in the SERPs, leading to more user engagement and higher volumes of targeted traffic to your affiliate site.

Product Reviews

Users search for reviews to give them the information they need to make an informed buying decision. They’re a go-to source for potential customers, and they should form a key part of your SEO content strategy.

Your reviews should be transparent, honest, and well-rounded. Make sure you mention the downsides of products as well as the upsides. No product is perfect, and if you try to make the products you’re promoting seem perfect, your audience won’t trust you.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a review of a new Lenovo laptop. You have several sections covering its powerful graphics card, awesome resolution, and massive amount of RAM. To build trust with your audience, you should also include a section called something like “Where It Falls Short”. Here you can give users your honest opinion about any cons, like its short battery life.

This gives the review balance and means your audience will be fully informed before making a purchasing decision—which is exactly what they’re looking for. Users are then more likely to return to your site for reviews in the future, which can lead to a sustained increase in targeted traffic.

Comparison Guides

Comparison guides are similar to reviews but give users even more information by comparing similar products or services to each other. They’re great for driving targeted traffic to your site as you can use them to address long tail keywords like “Specialized bikes vs Giant bikes” or “is Specialized better than Giant”.

Users who search for queries like this are in the consideration stage of the buying process, and they have high purchase intent and specific product preferences. By creating engaging content, you can move them further along the sales funnel (and hopefully boost your affiliate income).

Your guides should include detailed comparisons of the products that show how their different features stack up against each other and give users your honest opinion about which product best suits their needs.

You can improve user experience by creating tables that list things like the price and specs of each product you’re comparing.

Building Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are simply hyperlinks from one site to another, and they’re one of the many trust signals used by search engine algorithms when they’re ranking pages. It’s important to bear in mind that not all backlinks are the same, and some are more high quality than others.

Building high-quality backlinks can help your affiliate site rank higher for your targeted keywords, leading to more traffic and increased affiliate sales. In order to rank well and increase organic traffic, the backlinks should be from relevant and authoritative sources and earned naturally.

Links like these help your site grow as an authority within your industry, and acquiring them will form a fundamental part of your SEO strategy.

Some of the best ways to build high-quality backlinks to an affiliate site include:

• Guest posting: This involves creating posts on other sites relevant to your niche,and placing links back to your site within the content.
• Linkable content ideas: Content like case studies, videos, tools, and infographics are great for attracting backlinks to your site and showcasing your platform as a reputable source.
• Broken link building: If you identify broken links on other sites within your niche, reach out to the site owners and suggest they replace it with a link to relevant content on your site.

These are just a handful of the ways you can build backlinks to your affiliate site and give both your traffic and authority a boost. If you’re looking for a more in-depth guide, check out our guide on link-building strategies .

Chapter 5: Converting Traffic Into Sales

While it’s great to drive traffic to your site, that’s only half the battle. Now, you’ve got to optimize your webpages to maximize the amount of conversions you get from your visitors.

This is known as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), and it’s something that’s absolutely vital if you want to succeed as an affiliate marketer. The good news? Effective CRO doesn’t have to be difficult. Here’s what you need to know.

CRO Best Practices

CRO requires gathering data on your current user behaviors, for example:

• How they’re navigating a site
• Which pages they spend the most time on
• When users are dropping off

Using that data, you focus on streamlining their experience on your landing pages to make it as easy as possible for the user to convert.

Ideally, you should always follow these best practices:

Add a Table of Contents

A table of contents provides a super quick overview of the article and is an easy way to give your users the option to jump straight to what they’re looking for. By doing that, you help cut out all of the information they weren’t looking for and give them the answers they want immediately.

Here’s an example of the table of contents we’ve created for our large guides here at Backlinko:

When it comes to affiliate marketing, you’ll often end up reviewing a lot of products to cover all the relevant keywords.

This can lead to huge walls of text and long articles, which can be daunting for readers. With a table of contents, you can make it easy for them to navigate the page.

Include a Comparison Table

Comparison tables are a great way to give your reader a quick overview of your article. They are especially useful if you’re writing an article comparing different products.

For example, if you’re writing a review on the best bluetooth headphones, you can use a comparison table at the start of the article with a round-up of all the products. You can then use various columns, such as “price” and “features”, to give your reader a quick overview.

Make it Easy to Skim

Every paragraph should highlight your key points, so that readers can easily skim through if they’re looking for a specific section or an answer to a particular question. Subheadings are great for quick skimming. They help users quickly find what they’re looking for, giving them the answers they want and bringing them closer to a conversion.

Here’s an example from PCMag:

As you can see, they’ve broken down each product by why they’ve chosen it, who it’s ideal for, and the pros and cons.

This makes it super easy for a reader to skim through and find the exact information they’re looking for.

Use CTA Buttons

It’s no secret that a good CTA can increase conversions. But you’ve got to make sure they’re easy to find. While in-text links are great, buttons are eye-catching and worth implementing into your content.

Here’s how to make sure your CTA buttons effectively contribute to your overall CRO strategy:

• Clarity: Ensure the text you use is compelling and clear. It should tell the user exactly what action you want them to take, such as “Sign Up” or “Buy Now”.
• Placement: Place your buttons strategically, they should be near the products your promoting (either under or next to). Ideally, add them near an image or text describing the product. You can also add them to an overview table.
• Colors: The color of a CTA button should contrast with the background color of the page to make it eye-catching for the user.
• Size: Your buttons should be big enough to be noticeable and clickable. However, they shouldn’t be so large that they overwhelm the page.
• Whitespace: You can prevent visual clutter by surrounding the button with whitespace. This also helps it to stand out.
• Urgency: If you have limited-time offers, use text that conveys a sense of urgency to the user, like “Sale Ends Soon” and “While Stocks Last”.
• Mobile optimization: CTA buttons need to be tappable on mobile screens, and the text should remain easily readable. Browsing and shopping on mobile devices is very common, so optimizing for mobile is vital for CRO.
• A/B testing: Use A/B testing to test various placements, colors, and text for your CTA buttons. You can see which ones lead to higher conversion rates and use this info to refine your approach.
• Benefit-oriented language: Use language like “Get My Free eBook” instead of “Submit” to clearly emphasize the benefits of taking an action.
• Security icons: Include trust signals like SSL certificates and secure payment icons near your CTA buttons, where applicable. They help to increase trust in the security of your site, which can improve conversion rates.

Here’s an example of a CTA button from Lasso:

Keep an Eye on Your Top Performing Products

It’s important to monitor how many clicks you get on each product.

If you’ve posted a top 10 list, your 4th product shouldn’t be getting more clicks than your 2nd.

But if it is, then you should reevaluate whether or not your list should be ordered the way that it is.

Utilize Video Content

While written content has its place, more and more people are turning to video content to inform their purchasing decisions. YouTube used to be king of this arena, but the rise of TikTok has made short-form video content an essential. Plus, videos are often more engaging than the written word.

Nowadays, consumers spend their free time scrolling through various social media platforms in search of some easy hits of dopamine. So, why not take advantage of that?

Utilizing videos to help break down complex concepts into digestible content is a great way to boost your conversion. It’ll also make it easier for viewers to understand your message.

Creating videos (and starring in them) can also help position you as a source of authority and add a human touch to your content.

Then, you can take these videos and embed them into your content, giving readers a reason to stick around on your site. Additionally, including them may even boost your SERP rankings. To learn more about this, check out our video SEO guide .

Monitoring and Analyzing Performance

Monitoring and analyzing your performance is absolutely vital if you want to succeed as an affiliate.

When joining an affiliate program, each affiliate gets access to a dashboard which allows them to track the performance of their links.

There are also plenty of third-party tools you can use to keep tabs on your performance. Let’s take a look at some of them and the types of data you need to track.

User Behavior Metrics

User behavior data refers to information gathered on how individuals interact with your content and navigate your website. This data provides insights into users’ actions, preferences, and engagement patterns.

User behavior metrics include:

• Page Views and click-through rate: Tracking the pages users visit and the specific elements such as links and buttons they interact with.
• Bounce rate : Insights into the percentage of users who leave a webpage shortly after landing on it without further interaction. High bounce rates on your pages may indicate that users aren’t finding your content useful or that your pages lack a good user experience in terms of page load speed and responsiveness to user inputs.
• Dwell time : This refers to the amount of time a user spends actively engaging with a particular page. A longer dwell time suggests that users find the content valuable, engaging, and relevant to their search queries.
• Device and browser: Analyzing information about the devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) and browsers people use to access your website. For instance, if you notice that a majority of visitors use mobile devices to access your site, it’s essential to focus on making your site more user-friendly for mobile users.
• Conversions: This metric measures the rate at which users complete desired actions, such as clicking on your links or signing up to your email list.

Tools You Can Use to Monitor Your Analytics:

You can use GA4 to measure metrics like bounce rate and dwell time and to track the performance of on-page elements like CTAs. To learn all about how to use GA4, check out this comprehensive GA4 guide .

Google Search Console (GSC)

GSC is also useful as it allows you to track your Google keyword ranking , measure your CTR and page indexing, and identify your most popular pages. Our in-depth GSC guide tells you everything you need to know about harnessing the power of this tool.

Reviews and Surveys

Harnessing the power of customer feedback through reviews and surveys is a strategic move to gain valuable insights into the performance of your affiliate marketing efforts. When combined with the traditional analytics mentioned above, you can gain valuable insights into what’s performing well and identify areas that might need improvement.

You need to encourage your users to leave reviews of the products or services you promote and participate in surveys. This will provide you with a deeper understanding of:

• Your Audience: Through customer reviews, you will be able to analyze common themes, positive aspects, and pain points mentioned by users.
• Product Relevance: Through surveys, you’ll get insights into the relevance and appeal of the products you link to from specific pages. The feedback will allow you to identify whether the promoted products or services match your audience’s needs and preferences.
• User Experience Assessment: You can use surveys to gauge the overall user experience on your website. This feedback can guide improvements in your site’s layout and functionality.
• Identifying Trending Products: Monitor reviews and survey responses to identify trending products within your niche. This can inform your content strategy and promotional efforts.
• Content Evaluation: Use surveys to inquire about the effectiveness of your content. This will allow you to identify which types of content resonate most with your audience and contribute to successful conversions.

Heatmap Analysis

Heatmaps visually display where visitors are clicking, moving, and spending the most time on your website. This helps you understand their behavior patterns and preferences.

Here’s the super cool part, heatmaps use color gradients to highlight “hotspots” where user activity is concentrated.

These areas often indicate high engagement.

By identifying popular sections of your site, you can strategically place affiliate links, CTAs, or important content.

Monitoring your Links

Most affiliate programs don’t have evergreen links, meaning you’ll need to keep track of which links are broken or expired.

Lasso is a great tool you can use to find and add affiliate links, as well as to monitor and track existing ones:

At the top, you can see three icons in red, yellow, and green:

• The red icon tells you how many broken or expired affiliate links you have.
• The yellow icon tells you which products you’re linking to are out of stock.
• The green icon tells you when there’s an opportunity for another affiliate link.

You can also connect it to GA4 to identify how affiliate links perform on specific posts and pages. This allows you to identify what kind of content is getting the most conversions on your site.

If you click on the “Performance” tab, you can see what your revenue is for a selected timeframe, as well as which networks and programs on your site are getting the most clicks from your affiliate link:

Chapter 6: Legal and Ethical Considerations

If you want to be a successful affiliate, you need to understand and comply with all the legal and ethical rules that apply to your region.

Here are the most important legal and ethical considerations you need to keep in mind.

Provide Disclosures

As well as being a trust signal, disclosures are a primary and crucial obligation for any affiliate. It’s essential to clarify that any purchases made through your links will result in you earning a commission.

In most countries, including the United States, this is a legal requirement .

Respect Intellectual Property Rights

Both merchants and affiliates have to make sure that they’re not infringing on anybody’s intellectual property if they’re showcasing a product or using promotional content.

Abide by Consumer Protection Rules

There are rules and regulations put in place to safeguard customers from dubious dealings or exploitation. These include the CAN-SPAM and Federal Trade Commission Act. It’s crucial to stay well-informed about these guidelines because failing to adhere to them can lead to serious consequences.

Maintain Honesty & Transparency

It’s important that affiliates are honest with their customers. That means no false claims or any marketing efforts that could be misleading.

Maintaining consumer privacy is a cornerstone of successful affiliate marketing. It not only ensures legal compliance but also builds trust, fosters long-term relationships, and instills confidence in users. Adhering to privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA is essential to avoid legal consequences and maintain a reputable business.

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you stay up to date with the guidelines:

• Ask other affiliates how they’re following these rules and regulations.
• Check your affiliate programs regularly to see if there are any changes in rules.
• Look at the rules and regulations listed on your government’s official website.
• Subscribe to newsletters, blogs, and websites that focus on affiliate marketing news and compliance. Lots of industry experts publish articles covering these topics.
• Attend webinars and seminars dedicated to affiliate marketing. Many of these have sections dedicated to discussing legal and ethical regulations.
• Consult legal experts who specialize in affiliate marketing and advertising law.

Chapter 7: Advanced Strategies for Affiliate Marketing

Once you’ve established yourself in your niche and you start to see success, it’s time to expand your efforts.Let’s take a look at the most effective ways to do this.

Scaling your Affiliate Marketing Efforts

The goal of scaling is to expand your business so that you have more reach, more impact, and earn more revenue. Here are a few ways you can scale your marketing efforts:

• Cross-promotion: If you’re doing well, why not reach out to other affiliates and cross-promote? Asking them to promote your content means you’ll get access to their pre-existing audience.
• Expand your niche: If you’ve established yourself in a niche, you could expand your audience by delving into a shoulder niche. These are niches that don’t completely overlap with your current niche but are still relevant to it. For example, if you’re in the car niche, then motorbikes would be considered to be a shoulder niche.
• Build a community: Establish a strong online community with your users via your site and social media channels. This community can become a space where users organically share your products with each other and recommend them to users outside of the community too.
• Create multiple sites: Once you’ve found a lucrative product or keyword, build several affiliate sites around it. This will help you dominate the SERPs by gaining more real estate and increasing the chance one of your websites gets clicked.
• Focus on higher-paying offers: Increase your revenue with fewer conversions by promoting products or services with high value/prices.
• Utilize retargeting campaigns: Retarget users on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to bring them back to your site. Make sure you keep track of your ROI and adjust your retargeting campaigns based on results.

Another great way of scaling your marketing efforts is to simply ask your current merchants for more money. If you’re a top performing affiliate who makes a lot of money for your merchants, then you actually have a lot of leverage in terms of increasing your commission rates. As affiliate marketing expert Jamie I.F. says:

“If you’re driving sales, and are likely a top performer, you’d be surprised how much wiggle-room there is. Affiliate managers often have secret higher rates for top affiliates – but unless you ask, why would they give them to you?”

Exploring Multichannel Strategies

Implementing a multichannel strategy involves reaching your target audience across various platforms. This approach enables you to engage with customers at different stages of their journey. When executed correctly, it can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

A multichannel approach is important as it helps you to diversify the sources of your traffic. This is vital as overly relying on one platform for customer acquisition can leave you vulnerable. Instead, diversification ensures your marketing messages reach a broad audience.

For example, email marketing can be great for nurturing leads, while Facebook is useful for building brand awareness.

Let’s dive into what you need to know to kick off your multichannel marketing journey.

Consistency

When employing multichannel strategies, it’s essential to keep your brand tone and messaging consistent across all channels. You need to put together a brand style guide which will include:

• Your brand colors
• Tone of voice

Choosing the Right Channels

When it comes to selecting channels, the options are abundant. Social media stands out as a top choice, given the multitude of platforms available.

A study by Authority Hacker found that the following platforms were the most popular:

• Facebook — used by 75.8% of affiliates
• Instagram — used by 61.5% of affiliates
• Pinterest — used by 42.2% of affiliates
• YouTube — used by 36.9% of affiliates
• TikTok — used by 29.6% of affiliates
• LinkedIn — used by 19% of affiliates

The study also revealed that, on average, affiliate marketers on social media utilize a minimum of three different platforms.

Email is an effective channel for affiliate marketing too. It allows you to segment your audience based on factors like behaviors and demographics, so you can send relevant and targeted affiliate offers to specific groups. By targeting users, you can boost your conversions and revenue.

Chapter 8: Avoiding Common Pitfalls

With everything you’ve just read, you’re probably itching to get started.But first, we want to make sure you’re aware of some of the common mistakes affiliates make to help you avoid making them, too.

Overpromoting

Overloading your audience with affiliate links and promotional content without providing value can quickly lead your users to lose faith in you and bounce from your website. Make your content valuable first, then worry about working the affiliate links in.

Entering a Niche That’s Too Competitive

Choosing an overly competitive niche puts you at a disadvantage from the beginning. The intense competition makes it challenging to stand out and compete effectively.

Promoting Low Quality Products

While certain products may offer lucrative commissions, promoting low-quality items solely for financial gain can erode trust with your audience. It’s better to endorse products you genuinely believe in to maintain credibility.

Focusing on One Merchant

Using a single merchant establishes a solid relationship between the two of you, but it leaves you vulnerable if their policies change. Diversifying your affiliate partnerships by promoting products from various merchants reduces your vulnerability to unexpected changes.

Unrealistic Expectations

The reality is that affiliate marketing can bring in a lot of revenue — but it’s not an overnight process. According to Affiliate Marketer Training , if you’re just starting out, you shouldn’t expect a lot of revenue for at least 6 – 12 months.

Make sure you set realistic goals that prevent you from being discouraged and can help you grow consistently.

Not Adapting to Change

Rules and regulations change, and they impact affiliate marketing. If you don’t keep up, you run the risk of getting caught out. Like every industry, the best way to stay ahead is to stay informed. Regularly review your affiliate program’s rules and regulations.

Not Monitoring User Behavior

If you fail to monitor user behavior, you won’t be able to adapt quickly if conversions start to drop off. You need to keep track of metrics like CTR, so that you can change your strategies when necessary and ensure you don’t lose revenue due to shifts in the way users interact with your site.

Simply put, without this data, you won’t be able to tell what’s working well and what isn’t,

Ultimately, being an affiliate marketer means you’re always learning and adapting. It’s a core part of staying relevant and being successful—and monitoring user behavior is a fundamental part of this.

Chapter 9: Case Studies

Analyzing case studies is crucial for gaining real-world insights and practical knowledge.Case studies provide specific examples of successful strategies, challenges faced, and solutions implemented by other affiliates.

By studying these real-life scenarios, you can learn from the experiences of others, understand effective techniques, and discover potential pitfalls to avoid.

Success stories

Let’s take a look at some examples of affiliate marketing done right and identify what led to their success.

Spencer Mecham

Spencer Mecham is a well-known affiliate marketer and the founder of a company called Buildapreneur. After he was laid off in 2008, Spencer committed to growing his blog and turning it into an affiliate marketing powerhouse.

The success of his blog allowed him to start several online businesses, and, as a result of his marketing strategies, Spencer became the top ClickFunnels affiliate in the world. Since 2016, he’s generated more than $100 million in sales.

Jamie I.F. launched his first site in 2018 without knowing anything about affiliate marketing. However, after fully committing to growing his site (Increasing.com) in 2019, the affiliate revenue it was generating started to explode.

By 2022, his portfolio was generating more than $32,000 per month. Now, Increasing.com offers highly-rated newsletters and blog posts to help other affiliate marketers up their game, too.

On the other hand, it’s crucial to analyze situations where affiliate marketing didn’t yield positive results so that you can learn from the mistakes.

Aleksandr Zhukov

Aleksandr Zhukov is a Russian man who was part of a gang of five people who ran display ads on their sites in exchange for revenue for every click.

But it turned out that Zhukov and his buddies set up fake sites and programmed data centers to generate billions of clicks on these ads.

As a result, he scammed merchants out of $7 million in revenue from 2014 to 2016. But we wouldn’t be talking about him if he’d gotten away with it. In 2016, a cybersecurity firm called WhiteOps (now Human), published a report analyzing the fraudulent activities.

What happened then?

Well, US law enforcement flew over to Berlin, arrested Zhukov, and flew him back to America, where he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

What’s the lesson here?

Well, it’s an example of what happens when you try to get around the law to make a quick buck as an affiliate.

Get Started with Affiliate Marketing Today

Affiliate marketing can be an incredibly powerful tool in growing revenue streams. If done properly, you can see consistent success.

But it’s important to be transparent about your product, to be willing to put in the hard work, and to be wary of so-called “hacks” to speed up your growth.

You shouldn’t rush into affiliate marketing — take the time, do the research, and make sure you’re set up to succeed before you agree to market any products.

If you have any affiliate marketing insights you’d like to share, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Case Studies

Learn from experts and aspiring beginners in affiliate marketing and ad monetization. Affiliates, bloggers, and webmasters share case studies with best practices and life hacks you can also try. See how to turn social traffic into cash, apply traffic buying tecniques, and get inspired by payment proofs our partners share.

How to Increase YouTube Earnings With Display Ads [Case Study]

How can one increase YouTube earnings outside Youtube? One of the star vloggers on gaming is here with the answer, with a …

2-Fold Deposit Boost: How to Increase iGaming Conversions [Case Study]

This story is here thanks to a media buyer in charge of acquiring European traffic for an iGaming operator. He owns a …

Interstitial Ads: Example of How to Make Real Money on a Sports Passion

The big game has begun! Interstitials and iGaming are two exciting topics that we have combined into one thanks to the coolest …

A Fresh Approach to Email Monetization: A 20% Revenue Boost

Email monetization is witnessing a surge, with new ways of getting more leads, clicks, and payouts appearing. We reached out to one …

How to Earn With Blog Site & Youtube x Adsterra

How many answers to the question “How to earn with blog?” do you know? Our publishers can immediately offer you their proven …

Case Study: High ROI of 360% from Adsterra’s Traffic on Play Regal Offer

You are welcome to explore a case study presented by an affiliate marketing coach KJ Rocker. Stay tuned while the coach will share …

[Success Story] How to Start Monetizing if You’re not Skilled in Making Money?

We’ve all been there. With dozens of tutorials read and a bunch of courses passed, you’re still in the starting point. You …

Direct Link Monetization: $2000 From Scratch

The stories of our partners are always not only inspiring, but also personal. This is what makes them alive and unique: the …

Quora Monetization Strategy: $18K Total Earnings With Adsterra

Bloggers and publishers can monetize Quora content leaving expert advice and answering questions. You know that. But what if you could add …

8000+ Clicks A Week Via Direct Link Monetization

Direct link has opened up a lot of opportunities for our partners, and we never tire of rejoicing at their successes and …

Advertising and CPA marketing Traffic monetization and SEO

GET FREE INSIGHTS

• Free Traffic

Built for advertisers. Set your budget, target your visitors, get traffic. Create Your Ad

5 Success Stories from Affiliate Marketers

There’s a lot of skepticism in the affiliate marketing community about how many people are actually successful out there. I can certainly appreciate why that is, too. Anyone would be skeptical if they looked around and noticed the only people making money in affiliate marketing were the people selling tools to help newbie affiliate marketers get into the game.

Combine this with the fact that so many people are stingy with their information and techniques for fear of having their niche stolen and their profits undercut, and you can see why it happens.

Sometimes, you need a good refresher about how successful actual people can be. People who post about their success, people who try to help others become successful, people who don’t care about their niche being undercut because they know they’re the best at what they do. I’ve tracked down case studies from five of these successful marketers , and that’s what I’m bringing to you today.

Don’t feel like you’re being played just because you haven’t gotten a foothold yet. Affiliate marketing takes time, to establish yourself, to build an audience, to create content, and all the rest.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net

Darren is one of the most prominent affiliate marketers around, precisely because he’s always open with his history, his techniques, and his success. This post is from 2013, so he’s had three more years to rack up his success, but even then it was impressive. In 2013, it was the 10 th year he had been working affiliate marketing with Amazon , and he had racked up nearly half a million dollars.

Now, $42,000 a year isn’t all that impressive, all things considered. That’s not quite the whole story, though. His earnings only really started to shoot up in 2008 or so. It’s more accurate to say that he started out making a pittance, and that in recent years he has hovered around $80,000 per year. That’s a respectable haul, and all from running a handful of websites, one of which is geared specifically towards helping bloggers reach their own success with affiliate marketing.

What’s impressive is that Darren isn’t even one of the top tier Amazon Affiliates. His experience is actually rather typical of the people who put a lot of time and effort into getting serious with affiliate marketing. There are, no doubt, much more successful affiliates.

The meat of Darren’s post is about why he chose to use Amazon for his affiliate marketing, despite all of the perfectly valid criticisms out there. Amazon commissions are small, sure, and a lot of Amazon products are cheap, so success often relies on big ticket niches – which are packed – or volume, which takes a long time to build. However, he points out:

• Amazon is a highly trusted brand, much more than many other affiliate sellers.
• One referral link works for everything a user buys in that session, whether or not you referred them to that product. If you send someone a referral for a $2 book, and they decide to buy a $900 TV, you get the commission on the TV.
• Amazon is perhaps the easiest affiliate network of all to get started using. They provide a ton of tools, easy embeds in a half a dozen different ways, and even referral tagged shortlinks.
• Amazon sells, well, everything. There’s very little that Amazon doesn’t sell, and often those categories are just MLM schemes anyways.

You can read the rest of his post above for a bunch of tips on becoming an Amazon affiliate success. Some of the tips are pretty common, like “get more traffic,” but that doesn’t change how valuable Darren’s site is as a whole. You can also listen to a more recent post about his success – showing he topped the $500K threshold – with this podcast post .

David McSweeny of Top5SEO.co.uk

David is a UK marketer and SEO expert who has been working in the industry for 15 years. He shares his methods and tips for how to create and grow a marketing site, based on his own experiences. The blog he uses for a case study went from freshly created to making just under $4,000 a month, in the span of six months. That’s remarkably fast, and stands as a testament to David’s skill as an affiliate marketer.

The meat of the post is his month by month playbook and recounting of how his site grew. The first month was all about creating and setting up the site, as well as how he chose a product and how he decided to monetize it. This highlights the sheer amount of work he put into research and content to fill his site. He dug deep into reviews for his chosen product and he wrote deep reviews stretching into the 2,500-word range. Month 1, he had just over 800 visitors and made $115.

Month 2, he made a blog to accompany his site, and he talks about how he created content, how he linked things together, and how he worked on link building. Through content and links, he boosted up to 2,200 visitors and $391 in sales. Month 3, he further expanded the blog, and his traffic continued to rise, as did his profits.

All of this shows how much work goes into running a site. His total time breakdown for the first four months reaches 234 hours of effort, creating content, researching products, building the site, and earning links. Combining this with the holiday season, his affiliate site shot up, where it has stayed since.

David’s study is a case where white hat effort can grow a site very quickly, but it does rely a little on timing, as well as a lot of research in picking the right niche. His post doesn’t go too deep into it, but you can find more about picking a niche in a post we wrote a few days ago. There’s also a ton of information on it out there on other sites, like David’s, Darren’s, and others.

This Is Why I’m Broke

The website named in the subheading there is little more than an odd product aggregator, with a focus towards interesting, often expensive, amusing stuff. I’ve seen everything from drones to pajamas, and let me tell you; it’s always tempting. Looking at their front page right now, I see things like color changing showerheads, the Playboy Mansion that recently went up for sale, a magic wand TV remote, and a dolphin-shaped speedboat. Needless to say, the selection of products on the site runs the entire spectrum of price ranges.

The site has grown immensely popular as one of the first of its kind, though its design has been mimicked endlessly in the years since it reached success. It’s estimated that, as of the time of the post I linked above, it was making an estimated $20,000 per month from Amazon affiliate sales alone , along with more from, eBay partner sales and referrals to a whole host of other sites, like ThinkGeek and Wicked Lasers.

The post I linked isn’t a direct post from the owner of the site. It’s a case study performed from the outside , so you have a better idea of how objective it is. The founder of TIWIB struggled with failed ventures before he hit upon the formula he used for the site, taking existing product affiliate pages and adding infinite scrolling, better images, and careful product selection.

The case study goes on to tell you what you can learn from the site, and how you might be able to mimic its success with a drilled down niche version of the same concept. Niche affiliate sites are typically less lucrative but easier to start than broad category sites like TIWIB, and that’s okay.

TIWIB receives millions of visitors every year and is still a very lucrative site, so you can learn a lot from watching how it works and mimicking its success.

Chris Guthrie on UpFuel

This post is very much like Darren’s post in the first section. So why do I include it? It proves to you that Darren is not a random outlier, he is – as he says – in the middle of the road. Chris’s websites combined to earn him over $45,000 annually, and would be making him more if he hadn’t sold one of his best sites for six figures.

Chris only really uses his success as a framing device for the post itself, which goes into great detail about how to get started with affiliate marketing. You can visit the post for the tips in full, but I’ll summarize them here.

• Pick a good niche. This has been hammered into any affiliate marketer time and again, so it should be nothing new to you. A good niche is the foundation of all good affiliate marketing. Don’t try to be too broad; you can always expand later.
• Use content links rather than Amazon boxes or sidebars or tables. Content links are much more commonly clicked. Just make sure you’re not trying to trick or mislead people into clicking links to Amazon that they thought went somewhere else. This includes cloaks and redirects; don’t use them.
• Make your product images into clickable affiliate links. A lot of people click images, so having them lead to the product page is valuable. I – and many other people – hate clicking an image link just to be brought to the image itself rather than something relevant.
• Link to Amazon quite frequently , but don’t overdo it so much that you earn a penalty from Google. Chris recommends 5-10 links per post, but his posts are quite lengthy. Keep track of what you’re doing and slowly push boundaries to find what threshold works best.
• Write review articles that come across as genuine ; they are some of the highest converting content you can produce. You can pay people to write the reviews for you, so long as they’re well written.
• Make sure to cover the holidays and take advantage of the sales you find in your niche. Aggregate sales posts are insanely highly converting. A “Best Black Friday Deals on [Product]” post is incredibly valuable, and I’m sure you can see why.
• Gradually expand your niche and sell more and more products , both to increase variety and increase volume. If you start off by selling faucets, you can expand into more plumbing products, more bathroom fixtures, other kinds of valves, or all of them. Just don’t try to take on more than you can handle.
• Focus on small, cheap products early in the month and expensive products later in the month , so the cheap products boost your variable commission rates. Amazon’s commissions are a monthly performance test, starting at 4% and rising up to 8%. You’d rather get 8% on big purchases, so push those more when your commissions have grown.
• Make evergreen content as much as possible. Product comparison tables and recurring deals posts are both great for this. Make sure to keep them up to date and, most importantly, make sure people know they’re up to date. Update them monthly if possible, and always update the most recently edited date.
• Publish retrospective monthly bestseller lists and analysis to accompany it. If nothing else other affiliate marketers love to see what is and isn’t working, but if you’re doing everything right, they shouldn’t be able to undercut and supplant you.
• Ignore the Amazon AStore functionality completely; it’s not very useful.

Once again, we see that Amazon can be a great, lucrative place to be. However, pretty much all affiliate marketing advice works with other affiliates as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re promoting web hosting, selling products on eBay, or selling digital services for some app company; it’s all the same information.

Hieu Nguyen’s Affiliate Sale

Hieu is a marketer from Vietnam, and while his case isn’t as impressive as the others on this list, it shows the viability of a different sort of affiliate marketing business model. Specifically, what he did was build an affiliate site and then sell it for a sizable profit.

We’ve already seen how much work it is to set up and establish an affiliate site. It’s also a lot of work to maintain, but many newbie affiliate marketers believe that it’s the startup that’s the hardest part. As a consequence, they look out for affiliate marketers selling their sites, and they buy. Oh, do they buy.

Hieu’s business model isn’t designed to set up 1-2 sites and push them until they’re powerhouses he can live off of indefinitely. Rather, he builds sites and makes them moderate successes, something like a proof of concept. The site he sold in this case study took nine months to reach a monthly income level of $1,600, at which point he sold it for about 10x that amount.

There are two things to take away from this success story. The first is that, if you enjoy building sites, doing the research, and establishing the start of a business, you can still make a profit without having to maintain the site. You can simply sell it for a good chunk of change, then start over and do it all again. The second takeaway is that if you’re on the other side of the coin – perfectly capable and willing to maintain and improve a site, but incapable or unwilling to build it from scratch – you can just buy a site and go from there.

The post is an interview with Hieu, and it goes over the strategies he uses to build and rank his sites. Be aware that he does use some gray and black hat strategies, so your results may vary if you’re trying to follow in his footsteps. The post is over a year old, so some of those techniques may be more heavily penalized now than they used to be.

So there you have it; five successful affiliate marketers and the techniques they used to achieve that success. By following their guides, you too can be one of the people on a list like this someday.

Written by James Parsons

James is a content marketing and SEO professional who enjoys the challenge of driving sales through blogging while creating awesome and useful content.

Related Posts

Join the Discussion

Thanks for mentioning me in the blog. I’m actually doing a bit better than that now from my websites but I also run some other companies as well. Currently have about 6 decent sized income streams that all add up pretty well. It’s been a lot of fun over the last several years trying new things 🙂

Yunus Hassim

Excellent post, I really enjoyed it. Keep it up!

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email (will not be published) (required)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Built for advertisers. Set your budget, target your visitors, get traffic.

Drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, online store, or affiliate links, and use powerful geolocation and interest targeting. Track your campaign daily in our reporting dashboard. Change your URL at any time and split test between multiple pages to see which performs best.

Cheap quality traffic, $0.002 cents per visitor

Growtraffic.com is the leading pop-under traffic network. Get thousands of targeted visitors for wholesale prices.

No thanks, I don't want targeted traffic

Before using our website, please familiarize yourself with our Frequently Asked Questions page and read our Terms and Privacy Policy .

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Zero to $20k/month in a Year

Helping people make decisions is a big business!

In fact, these two Side Hustle Show listeners started a website to do just that, and it’s now bringing in $17k to $20k a month .

Oh, and the project is only a little over a year old.

Alex Goldberg and Healy Jones run a site called FinvsFin.com , which focuses on reviews and comparisons of direct to consumer brands.

They earn money as affiliates — basically earning a commission on sales that are referred through the site.

FinvsFin is an example of what I’ll call the modern comparison shopping site — helping readers make decisions and getting paid for it. And since comparison shopping was my original side hustle over a decade ago, this was especially fun to dive into.

The impressive part is that this is still very much a side hustle. Both Alex and Healy have full-time jobs, and their business falls under the “ passive income ” business model.

Tune in to hear how Alex and Healy prioritize and create their content, what they’re doing to market the site and drive traffic, and how you can borrow some of their same strategies in your own niche.

NOTE: My first interview with Alex and Healy aired in late December 2019. For the 2020 update, please see “Where Are They Now?” below.

Free Bonus: Download Alex and Healy’s Top Tips For Growing and Monetizing an Affiliate Site

• Download the Free PDF "Highlight Reel" from this Episode

Want More Side Hustle Show?

Suggested playlist: affiliate marketing, links / next steps, what have you been doing to grow your site over the last 9 months, what does your content process look like now, what else have you guys been working on, any tips for creating affiliate relationships with brands, is it easy tracking all these affiliate links, what’s been working on the seo front to drive traffic, any sign of this becoming a full-time business for you, any tips to share for 2020, download the free pdf "highlight reel" from this episode.

With all of my guest's top tips and resources included.

Enter your email to access it now:

Success! You just unlocked the highlight reel from this episode ... AND over 200 other subscriber-only bonuses. Check your email for details :)

(If it doesn't show up in 5-10 minutes, check spam/promotions.)

You'll also receive my best side hustle tips and weekly-ish newsletter. Opt-out anytime.

Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show on Apple Podcasts!

Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show on Google Podcasts!

Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show via RSS!

Or use the player app above to listen right in your browser.

• Skillshare – Get two months of unlimited access to 24,000+ Skillshare courses free!

• The Online Course Guy – Check out the free on-demand workshop, The Simple Path to Online Course Success!

• Why Alex and Healy decided to start their site.
• How they come up with unique, low competition content ideas.
• How they are structuring their content.
• The various ways they form affiliate relationships with the brands they’re reviewing.
• What they’re doing to build, and more so attract links.
• Some interesting on-page optimization tactics they’re using to grow their traffic and land featured snippets.
• How they’re splitting their time and roles within the business as partners.
• Alex and Healy’s #1 tips for Side Hustle Nation.

Make money online by sharing relevant products and services with your audience. Here's a killer playlist packed with actionable advice from the pros.

Add to Spotify

• FinvsFin.com
• CB Insights

Where Are They Now?

Since I last spoke with Alex and Healy at the end of 2019, they’ve grown their site FinvsFin.com from $20,000 a month to $50,000 a month!

They’ve also added some more sites to their expanding portfolio.

Here’s what they’ve been up to:

“It’s been quite a ride. I think actually, we’ve benefited a lot in this tumultuous time with more people at home and spending time online,” Alex told me.

Their strategy hasn’t changed, it’s been a case of rinse and repeat with what’s working. Alex and Healy have published a load more content, been finding new partners to work with, and creating direct relationships with sellers.

They aim to publish 3-4 times a week. It’s still a side hustle for them though, so when they’re busy with their day jobs, publishing slows down.

“80-90% is being written by freelancers,” Alex told me.

It’s not hands-off though. Alex and Healy still put a lot of time into uploading, formatting, doing the on-page SEO, generating links, and managing the partnerships.

They’ve been able to outsource and automate a lot of their processes. However, Alex calls that the “tip of the iceberg” looking at the entire process.

As well as continuing to grow FinvsFin, Alex and Healy have also purchased a couple of additional websites.

To help their decision, hey looked at which categories were working the best on FinvsFin.

Not wanting to make a huge investment for their first purchase, they bought a dog care site for $2000. They’ve had some success with dog care on FinvsFin, so they have high hopes for the site.

They also bought a home gym site , which is something Healy is excited about as he’s in the process of building his own home gym.

The home gym space is trending upwards right now as the pandemic has forced more people to workout from home. Plus, Healy already has experience working with a company called Peloton who supplies a lot of the equipment he’ll be recommending.

As the guys discussed in our first call, they build a lot of direct relationships with the brands they recommend on their sites.

They always have the Amazon Affiliate program to “fall back on”, but they’re able to secure much higher %’s working with brands directly.

The two main ways they recommend for finding direct relationships are:

• Performing a Google search for an existing affiliate program. Not all companies advertise their affiliate program on their site, you’ll have to do a little digging to find it.
• Reaching out to their marketing managers on LinkedIn. Alex said the key here is not to be put off by “no’s” or radio silence. He’s had to contact some managers in excess of 30 times to start a conversation.

Alex said it’s always worth reaching out, as you never know what they’ll say. Some brands he makes contact with do not have an affiliate program, but are willing to start one when they see the traffic Alex and Healy are sending them.

If a company is plugged into an affiliate network it’s just a matter of using their links and the network provides all of the reporting features.

For the brands that do not use a network, Alex said he works with them to track their conversions using a custom Google Analytics parameter.

It’s a bit of an honor system doing it this way. But if they aren’t part of a network, it’s the best solution. Alex said any form of tracking conversions is better than nothing, it’s starting the relationship and taking some money that’s the important thing.

The guys know that link building moves the needle in affiliate marketing and still spend a lot of time on it. Although Healy admits, “link building is, as you know, really, really, hard”.

A few of their best link building strategies are:

• HARO (Help A Reporter Out) – They’ve had a lot of success securing links in media articles using this service.
• Marketing Studies – They have been building publishing articles they call “marketing studies”. These are articles laying out how they see an industry and naming all the influential brands. Some of those brands will link back to the article, which is awesome when it happens. But there are no guarantees, some of their articles do not attract any links.
• Podcast Appearances – They also credited appearing on the Side Hustle Show the first time around as helping. The guys are open to appearing on more podcasts if any podcast hosts are listening.

In addition to link building, Healy said investing in a site redesign and custom graphics has also helped their SEO.

They’ve seen an increase in dwell time and other important on-site metrics. As well as noticing their custom images are appearing high in the Google search results.

Alex said they’re finding it easy to win images searches just by adding a keyword-friendly alt tag to each image. So, that’s a useful tip if you’re not already doing that.

The guys are also updating older posts several times a week to try and keep up with the competition.

A couple of SEO tools they’re using to do this are:

• SE Ranking – This allows them to track the keywords they’re ranking for. If they see keywords dropping, they take a look at the article.
• Surfer SEO – This tool makes on-page optimization suggestions to help improve the SEO “score” of an article.

“Right now, I’m enjoying having it as a side hustle,” Healy told me. Healy has some other side hustles on the go and likes juggling various projects.

He’s aware that Alex handles a lot of the “painful technical” stuff though, so he’s willing to listen to Alex if he thinks they should go full-time with their sites.

Alex said he’s in the same boat as Healy. He’s enjoying his full-time tech job and doesn’t plan to quit anytime soon. He does see a lot of opportunities in what they’re doing with their sites though, so doing this full-time is always a possibility.

“Figure out the first model, then the challenge becomes thinking outside of the box,” Alex told me.

“If you’re showing any glimmer of greatness, you just got to go 100% for it,” Healy added.

Pin it for later:

Like That? There's More!

Join the 100,000 who get my best stuff via email.

I'll also send you my free guide: The 5 Fastest Ways to Make More Money .

You're in! Make sure to check your email (including spam/promotions) for your free welcome gift.

About the Author

Nick Loper is a side hustle expert who loves helping people earn more money and start businesses they care about. He hosts the award-winning Side Hustle Show, where he's interviewed over 500 successful entrepreneurs, and is the bestselling author of Buy Buttons , The Side Hustle , and $1,000 100 Ways .

His work has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Forbes, TIME, Newsweek, Business Insider, MSN, Yahoo Finance, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Financial Times, Bankrate, Hubspot, Ahrefs, Shopify, Investopedia, VICE, Vox, Mashable, ChooseFI, Bigger Pockets, The Penny Hoarder, GoBankingRates, and more.

5 thoughts on “Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Zero to $20k/month in a Year”

Do you verify the revenues of the businesses or is it submitted by the owners.

Great episode.

There were many candid and valuable insights shared by Alex and Healey – the right questions were asked and they were both very generous in providing the details.

I’m seriously considering re-starting my blog (Tech news).

Thanks Val!

Awesome episode Nick! Always bringing the heat in your interviews. Thanks!

Thanks Kelan – these guys are crushing it!

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Usually hustling, occasionally social.

The Company About Contact Books Advertise Media 4580 Klahanie Dr SE #155 Sammamish, WA 98029 925-365-6671

Free Resources Blog Community $500 Challenge Personalized Playlists Side Hustle Quiz

The Fine Print Terms of Use Privacy How We Make Money CCPA Do Not Sell My Personal Information As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Home category Case Studies

member area traffic dating offers dating traffic Affiliate marketing Case Study: Achieving Remarkable ROI: Leveraging AdsEmpire Offers on Mirelia Networks Member Area Traffic

In this case study, I am excited to share my recent accomplishments in promoting AdsEmpire's SOI dating offer through Mirelia's Member Area Display traffic. This approach proved to be a winning combination, driving significant ROI.

TikTok PWA Apps Affiliate marketing Betting Case study – $28 900 on TikTok through PWA apps

How to make 160% of ROI through PWA apps on TikTok? Read this case study to know all secrets of high profit

PWA Apps Facebook Affiliate marketing betting Case Study: ROI 135% on India through PWA Apps

How launch ad campaign from Facebook to Betting through PWA apps with 135% of ROI? In this case study we are going to show you results about sending traffic on 4RaBet offer to India.

Google Play Apps affiliate marketing iGaming How to run iGaming using your own Google Play apps

Affiliate Valley provides tips on how you can launch and run iGaming in this case study, kindly provided by a webmaster who ran an iGaming campaign with his own Google Play apps on the ClickDealer platform.

clickdealer google UAC dating How to make $1500 a week running dating with Google UAC

Affiliate Valley shares how you can make over $1500 weekly by implementing this case study shared by a veteran webmaster who successfully ran a dating campaign with UAC on the ClickDealer platform.

Gambling Casino Offers in 2021: Boost your ROI with Push Traffic + Webinar

Check out the trends of online gambling including GEOs, approaches, creatives in the guide prepared for you by RichAds

Gambling Push Traffic Affiliate Marketing 158% ROI Gambling Case Study: Running Profitable Campaign with RichAds

Learn how to get an incredible 158% ROI on a Gambling offer with RichAds! A fresh case study on one of the biggest verticals.

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Running Aliexpress Smartlink on a small blog

This time, we’re giving a closer look at the MyLead smartlink campaign and the story of one of MyLead’s publishers.

Pop-Under Case Study: 130% ROI on Gambling from Popunder

Check our latest Case Study to learn how to get 130% ROI on Gambling from Popunder traffic.

Push Traffic In-Page Push: Social & Light Theme Skin vs. Classic Skin

The brand new Social and Light Theme Skins may surprise you in our trial run.

Ad Tracking Case Studies

Voluum helped these businesses scale. Get inspired…

Recommended

Finance, Lead Generation

How Leedia got 60K Google Ads conversions with Voluum tracking

How to run paid ads for an iGaming company with Voluum to increase profitability by 50%

Lead Generation, Native Ads

Quality of leads increased by up to 150% with Voluum & Taboola - Xevio case study

Lead Generation

How to Lower CPL by 20% on Native MediaGo Traffic with Xevio using Voluum

Customer Acquisition supercharged with Voluum and Ringba

eCommerce, Mobile Apps

How Voluum Can Do the Work of 3 Employes in Brand Advertising

Native Ads, Social media ads

Ringba, Everflow & Voluum Team-Up to Bring 20% EPC Increase in Legal Niche

eCommerce, Lead Generation, Traffic arbitrage

Easy 15% Profit Increase on Leadgen & Arbitrage thanks to Voluum Conditional Paths with Everflow

Cost per lead cut in half on people-finding services with Impact thanks to Voluum

20% Revenue Growth on AWIN offers Thanks to Voluum Postbacks & Reporting

Display Ads, eCommerce

Scaling to 6 figure profits with Voluum & GuruMedia

Start tracking with voluum today.

Affiliate SEO Case Study – From 0 to 40,000 Traffic

by Nicholas Altimore

Join the 1,000+ brands that trust us for their link building.

In this case study, we’ll be covering the success of our ground-up project in a competitive niche.

Yes, that means starting with a site with absolutely no traffic or keywords and taking you through the process all the way until it had 40,000 unique visitors per month (according to Ahrefs – much higher in Google Analytics!).

We’ll begin with an overview of the project as a whole, and then cover things chronologically for the first 10 months which translated to just over $32k in monthly revenue at its peak.

Let’s get into it.

What’s Covered In This Case Study

• Keyword Research
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Monetization
• Link Building Strategy
• Using Partial Match Domains
• 301 Redirects

This online version will only cover the off-page SEO aspect of our work (link building, 301 redirects, etc).

To get the full 50-page case study including all of the advanced tactics used including content, plugins, site structure, and much more, subscribe to our newsletter below (we usually send two emails per month).

Subscribe For FULL 50-Page Case Study

Thank you. please see your email for the next step, project foundations and overview, competition in the serps.

The competition in the SERPs for this niche is stiff. It’s a sub-niche within the “outdoors” niche.

You can see in the image below that for a broad keyword term that the homepage of the site was to be based on, the competition metrics are high according to Ahrefs.

It has a keyword difficulty score of 86 (super hard) for a little over 200k monthly traffic.

According to Ahrefs, I was going to need over 500RD to get onto the first page of a SERP.

The majority of sites that were (and still are) in top positions for the keyword are massive authority sites with a lot of history in the industry.

Below is an image of Ahrefs metrics for a handful of the sites ranking for that term:

In order to be able to rank for keywords this competitive within a decent time frame, some unconventional techniques would need to be used.

Though the site would mainly be geared towards targeting national-based SERPs, 2 local areas would also be focused on in order to promote foot traffic to physical locations.

Domain Background

A quality aged domain was used as they can give you a massive shortcut and really shave off some time in the ranking process.

You can find aged domains for your projects through a trusted provider or by using tools like Register Compass or Spamzilla to hunt them (be aware this takes some know-how).

We found this domain while hunting ourselves.

At the tail end of 2016, domain hunting hadn’t yet become as competitive as it is now and this site was purchased for a little over $500 on Godaddy Auctions.

Some things to note about the domain when it was found:

Partial Match Domain

This means that some (but not all) of the site’s main keyword was in the domain name.

It was related to a sub-category of the outdoors niche and was very brandable.

It had been registered since 2001 according to Whois .

Archive.org history showed it was a massive outdoors-niched e-com site for over a decade that generated a lot of press (and backlinks).

It used to compete with the massive sites that controlled the SERPs in the niche, and it still had a lot of indexed pages on Google (over 100).

It had 500+ referring domains from high-authority, very targeted domains in a very specific niche

The homepage received the majority of the links, but plenty of inner pages had great exposure too. This gave us a great place to start strategizing content (over 100 historical pages with some juice).

The backlink profile was made up of authority links from a bunch of major US news sites, .gov sites , and .edu sites.

It had a natural-looking anchor profile: lots of branded, naked, and generic anchors that would serve as proper pillowing. A good ratio of money anchors (15% or so) would help with the initial content strategy.

A Few More Things

It had a solid social media and brand search presence that could be traced back over a long period of time.

Given the current landscape of purchasing domains at auction, it wouldn’t be outlandish to consider paying upwards of five times the original price paid in 2016 in today’s market.

Ongoing Link Building

This section will cover the ongoing link building that was done throughout the process.

Month 1 (September)

The idea was to go extreme with link building in the first month.

Over 700 new referring domains to the money site would be built alongside an immense amount of content!

A small number of tiered links would also be built on top of that.

And remember that this is on top of the 500+ historical referring domains the original aged domain already had.

This may sound somewhat risky to the average SEO, but rest assured this money site was built with longevity in mind.

The startup plan would be to emulate a massive amount of press upfront and let that momentum push a large amount of content up in the SERPs.

Did we get the desired result? Absolutely.

By the end of this move, we were already beginning to gain the traction we were looking for, and that would set us up for optimal growth in the months after.

Backlinks Ordered

About 500 of the 700 links built in the first month came from another aged domain we 301 redirected to the site.

Looking at it from what naturally occurs in the SERPs, it made perfect sense for us to have over 1000 backlinks from the merger of two sites accompanied by around 200 links to emulate press about this merger.

Though we went incredibly aggressive with the number of links ordered, it’s important to note that nearly all of them went to the homepage with naked, branded, or generic anchors.

We were not attacking specific money keywords at this time, but rather building up the overall authority of the site.

We always recommend blending the authority values of the backlinks when doing a blast this large as that’s what typically occurs naturally when a site like this gets press.

A small group of authority or news sites begins to talk about something, and then countless smaller sites begin to piggyback off of that press.

A diverse link profile is one of the hardest things to properly mimic in SEO, but our intention was to do just that.

About The 301 Redirect

We decided to start everything off by 301 redirecting another aged domain to the site.

Some quick stats:

• Partial match domain (PMD)
• About 500RD
• Links were high-quality and niche-relevant
• Registered since 1999
• Over 50 pages still indexed on Google
• Former e-com site in a sub-category of the niche
• Cost: $1,200 at auction
• Most of the inner pages with links became supporting content hub pages due to them not fitting any parent categories.

The 301 would provide us with a huge amount of niche-relevant referring domains and backlinks.

It would also give us the narrative needed to give Google for our first backlinks order:

“Powerful Company A purchases Powerful Company B and decides to 301 their domain to their main site. At the same time, more content is posted on the site, there is a lot of press about the merger, and the whole industry is talking about it on their blogs and social media.”

Conceptualizing this narrative made it much easier to decide on what links to build for the month.

The additional links built for the first month were as follows:

Guest Posts

• 12 Guest Posts (mix of authority levels)
• Lower Quality Guest Posts from other vendors (For Tiered Links)
• All to homepage/hub pages
• Naked, branded, generic anchors

Niche Edits

• 2 Blade Packs (14 mid authority links)
• 1 level 4 Pack (3 mid to high authority links)
• 1 level 5 Pack (3 mid to high authority links)
• 1 Barrage 15 Pack (15-20 low authority links)
• 1 Barrage 30 Pack (For Tiered Links) (30-38 low authority links)
• 5 PBN Links
• All to homepage

Pillow Links

• Main Social Profiles (with IFTTT)
• Press Release (related to the company buyout)
• Blog Comments
• Web 2.0 (unique content, no spammy stuff here)
• Social Signals
• A good amount of lower-quality backlinking I didn’t even catalog (yes, spammier stuff)

Again, please note that this is a very aggressive approach concerning the number of links coming to the site at once. But at the same time, it’s conservative considering the anchors used and where the links were pointed.

You can still be aggressive up front all while mitigating risk and setting yourself up for long-term success by targeting the homepage with natural anchors rather than building links to inner pages with money anchors.

We even consider it safe enough to use high-quality PBN links at the very beginning if used sparingly and in this manner.

Also note that we diversified the anchors, link types, and power of the links we ordered.

Usually when a site gets press, many smaller blogs comment on the press released by larger sites. This is what we attempted to emulate.

Also, remember that this site was an aged domain with over 500 RD that had been sitting in the SERPs with content on it for around 3 years before doing any of this.

This compounded with the fact that we 301 redirected another very niched down and comparable site to it helped us start off on the right foot.

The barrage 30 and some lower-quality guest posts were used as tiered links to historic referring domains going to the original website and the 301 domain. The reason for this was to get more crawlability to powerful links that were many years old – sort of a refresher.

Note that we still like to diversify our tiered links as well as tier 1 links.

Something else worth mentioning is that we did not force-index any links! Natural indexation of these links makes the timeline stretch a bit further as it takes time for crawlers to crawl everything.

Some of these links may not index until months two or three, and some may not index at all ( pillow links ).

And that’s perfectly fine!

Using Low-Quality Links Strategically

A lot of SEOs shudder at the thought of tailoring what they consider “spammy” links into the mix.

Unfortunately for these folks, they’re thinking more like a human and less like a crawler.

Low-quality links have their place on the internet and can help diversify a well-rounded backlink profile. From a data standpoint, it just makes sense.

No, don’t go blasting your sites with these links expecting awesome results, but you can inject a little bit here and there. This seems to help with crawlability and diversification.

The way to do this is by emulating what massive amounts of press looks like naturally in the SERPs.

When analyzing content that’s gone viral, specifically the backlinks to that content, you’ll come to find that time and time again there is a diverse mix of links that hit that site all at once.

Inner page links, homepage links, contextual links, social media chatter, web 2.0’s , the list goes on.

The anchors from these links will also be incredibly diversified, and the majority are typically branded, naked, or somewhat random.

What you won’t typically see is a large percentage of money anchors coming from one type of link.

The quality of the links will also vary, as real press creates big waves that get picked up by random bots, etc. Learning what this looks like allows you to strategically inject some lower-quality stuff into the mix.

If you look at the backlinks of any major site in Ahrefs and sort by the lowest DR links, they all have some pretty low-quality stuff attached.

Rapid growth from a diverse set of backlinks is hard to emulate, but if you study how it happens naturally, you can get away with high link velocities over short periods.

This is the exact reason we added some lower-quality links into the mix in month number one.

Traffic Results

We didn’t expect much growth in the first month, but a small boost in traffic was enough to feel secure with our movement.

By being more conservative with our anchors, piggy-backing on 1,000+ RD from the original domain and the 301, adding a lot of pillow links, and ordering 30-40 authority links ( guest posts and niche edits ), we were able to create a very well-blended set of links without a footprint.

Using generic anchors to the homepage in an attempt to emulate some serious buzz was giving us the desired results and momentum for what was now a large site on its way to becoming an authority in the niche.

Months 2-3 (October through November) 800 to 4000+ traffic

For the next few months, the plan was to focus more heavily on authority backlinks alongside content.

We would still send most of the links to the homepage with branded, URL, and generic anchors as this is a practice we like to use to help insulate the site from a penalty while building overall authority.

Where a lot of newer SEOs want to get to using money anchors targeting inner pages quickly, we would stay the course and be patient with our tactics as the goal for this site would be long-term growth.

We wouldn’t send as many links as we did in month one, but we wouldn’t stop linking abruptly either (a mistake we see a lot of newer SEOs make).

The idea is to be continual with building links… and of course content, too!

The narrative for Google is that we already had our big news (the merger), and now we are getting some trailing press.

Consider it a “cool-off” phase from month one. Though it may still look pretty aggressive, it will look tame compared to the earlier orders.

By the end of this period, the site would grow exponentially, monetization would be achieved through affiliate partnerships, and a dropshipping partnership would be discussed.

Though the project would still not be profitable yet, it would be in great standing considering it was only 3 months old.

Again, for this period we were still going pretty hard, but compared to the first month would be substantially tapered.

Same as month number one, since this was still essentially the beginning of the project, we were still going to focus on links to the homepage with naked, branded, or random anchors.

Overall authority was still going to be the goal set for this project until we saw a hard spike in rankings, though we did send a small number of links to inner pages in month 3.

Also the same as before, a mix of authority levels would be used in order to diversify the information search bots would be crawling.

Note that one thing you’ll see us order every month is social signals . It’s rare to see a site get a lot of press while not getting any traction on social media, and it’s not something we think you can really overdo.

• 16 Guest Posts
• 2 Level 4 Pack (6 mid to high authority links)
• Level 6 Pack (3 high authority links)
• Barrage 30 Pack (Tiered Links – 30-38 low authority links)
• Barrage 15 pack (15-20 low authority links)
• 7 added through this period
• Diversity Links (pack of 20 white hat pillow links)

Like we said above, it wasn’t until month 3 that we started linking to inner pages. Even then, we linked to them sparingly and used URL, branded, and generic anchors for the most part.

A couple of long tail anchors snuck through on pages that were historically heavy with referring domains and gaining traction in the SERPs.

Still no direct money keywords.

One blast of “Barrage” niche edits would be used as tier-2 links for some of the previously built links and social profiles.

These would all be naked, branded, or include some long tail anchors.

This would be the last period we ordered pillow links to this site as we felt we had covered our bases on that end.

Here is what growth looked like at the end of this period:

Traffic was on a big uptrend considering we had only been actively building links and working on the site for a total of 3 months.

By the end of November, the website had gone from around 400 monthly visits to about 4,300 visitors according to Ahrefs, which resulted in a little more money in our pockets from Amazon Affiliate earnings.

Months 4-6 (December through February) 4000 to 6000+ Traffic

From month four onward, we would shift our budget towards content more than backlinks.

We didn’t stop building links or “generating press,” but we began a more steady-looking stream of links with higher authority values rather than a constant blast of random links.

Not to say the link profile was not going to be diversified, but that we’d mainly be using guest posts and niche edits rather than a huge mix of links.

The buzz (links) we created early on would help us push content up in the SERPs much easier now.

Since we had this advantage we also ended up trying out some new tricks with content that we honestly weren’t sure would work at first.

For this period, we would actually be starting to target some money anchors.

However, links would still predominantly go to the homepage with naked, branded, and generic anchors. While we were getting traction in the SERPs and were ready to use money anchors, we would do so sparingly.

Overall, the split would be roughly about 20% money anchors mixed into 80% generic anchors.

Thanks to the authority level of this site, content for some of the lower to medium competition terms would begin auto-ranking during this period.

This got us to stay the course and build the overall authority to this site versus getting aggressive to inner pages.

Again, as stated above, we wouldn’t really be doing any more pillowing to the site (unless you count social signals) and would be focused on higher authority links from here on out.

• 12 Guest Posts
• Mainly higher authority values – DR 36 and up
• The majority to the homepage with naked, branded, generic anchors – 10% money anchors to inner pages
• Level 3 Pack (3 mid authority links)
• Level 4 Pack (3 mid to high authority links)

Even though we started using exact match anchors, we did obviously use them sparingly, and the majority of the links went to the homepage with naked, branded, generic anchors.

The way we would decide which inner pages we would target with money anchors was pretty simple: If they had traction in the SERPs and had no money anchors going to them, then that’s where we added them.

If a historical inner page already had a good amount of money anchors from historical referring domains, then we would diversify links to those pages using long-tail or generic anchors.

Though this was still a good amount of authority hitting the site in the form of backlinks, compared to the first few months things had definitely gotten tamer.

Again, we don’t ever just abruptly stop building links to a site, which is a good way to signal to search crawlers that press has essentially fallen off and no one is discussing your business anymore.

A big no-no.

Remember too, that we were not force-indexing any links to this site. This means that some of the previous orders may not have even been indexed yet, and would get crawled at a later time.

We opted out of using PBN links and tiered links for these months. This was most likely due to oversight as we most certainly would have felt comfortable adding a small number of them throughout the period.

The plan definitely started coming together perfectly during this period.

Though not quite as significant a gain as the last period, this period still kept shooting us up in the SERPs.

From December through February, we were able to 2x traffic, which also increased sales.

Months 7-8 (March through May) 6500 to 27000+ Traffic

At this point in time, it would appear our attempt to build an authority site had worked.

We were ripping through the SERPs; articles would rank quickly after posting, featured snippets were awarded to us, and traffic was turning into a return on investment.

Had this been exclusively an affiliate/e-commerce venture, I think it would have been in an excellent spot to be in given the traffic values to the website by the end of this period.

Nothing went wrong with the physical partnerships during this period, but we did begin spreading our focus thin here, which would eventually lead to issues down the line.

During this period we even began to manufacture a small set of products in our larger shop!

Regardless, as far as the website was concerned, the orders for it would be similar to the previous period.

We’d be focused on pumping a lot of content through the site while maintaining higher authority backlinks.

By doing so, we would hit exponential growth this period and do over 4x our previous monthly traffic according to Ahrefs.

As stated in the previous section, this would be a similar period in regards to what we ordered and how we did our link building.

The only thing that would be a little bit different is we would be ordering a set of links specifically for these new product pages we were planning on manufacturing goods for.

Due to this, about 40% of our link orders during this period ended up going to inner pages, and the order was slightly larger than the previous one.

Links to these new pages would be naked, branded, and generic since they were brand new pages with no historical links going to them.

As for the remainder of the pages, higher authority links would be used with a similar mix of money to natural anchors; about 20/80.

Though we were essentially trying to hit the ground running with this new campaign, we were still going to be pretty conservative with our link building tactics.

• 10 Guest Posts
• Majority to the homepage with naked, branded, generic anchors – 10% money anchors to inner pages
• 3 Level 4 Packs (9 mid to high authority links)
• 1 Barrage 15 (Tiered Links – 15-20 low authority links)
• 2 Pro Level PBN Links
• To the homepage
• Branded and generic anchors

Pretty much the same concept as the last period, no fancy stuff, but we did remember to add some tiered links and a couple of PBNs here.

Once the initial period of growth is over, sustaining seems kinda mundane, but it’s the job.

Similar to the last period we were focused on maintaining our link building more than doing a large amount. Higher authority values were used during this period, similar to the last.

Note that almost anytime we use a PBN, it’s with naked, branded, and generic anchors to the homepage.

To us, this is the most logical way to use a PBN in terms of what looks natural. Though there are many ways to use this tool, in our opinion it seems like the best way to boost authority without seeming like we’re trying to game the system.

It also helps insulate the PBN itself since there is a wider diversification of anchors to homepages vs. a heavier amount of money anchors linking out to inner pages.

After all, most homepage links come in the form of advertising space unless you’re fortunate enough to get news sites resonating about your brand in the form of homepage links (which is rare).

Once you’ve built out an authority site that gets some favor in the SERPs, it’s beautiful to watch it continually push upward.

Add content and reap the rewards.

This was the rip we’d been waiting for.

By the end of this period, this site was getting almost 30k monthly visits which was over 2x in traffic, but this time into exponential territory for the financial side of the business itself.

Months 9-10 (June through July) 27000 to 40000+ Traffic

As stated, the website itself was doing spectacularly when looking at the traffic increase. And also as stated, had it been a purely affiliate-style site with no real-world ties, this would have been a really great spot to be in.

We kept pushing with the site through this period even though the real-world side of the business was definitely struggling.

The plan for the website during this period was still to add a good amount of content tailored to specific SERPs using keyword research while maintaining a good amount of high-authority backlinks.

Similar to the budgeting for content, backlinks budgets were stripped down substantially during this period.

We tapered things down by focusing on the overall authority of the site. During this period we mainly built homepage links with branded, generic, or naked anchors.

• 6 Guest Posts
• Homepage Links
• Generic, naked, branded anchors
• 2 Level 3 Packs (6 low to mid authority links)

It was unfortunate that we had to bring budgets down at a time the site was doing so incredibly well, but we hoped it would be enough to keep things moving forward in the SERPs.

Since we had less budget for linking this time around, the direction we took was to just go to the homepage with natural anchors using mid to high-authority value backlinks.

We really weren’t sure what the future would hold for the overall project but knew that the website had enough momentum to keep it moving along.

Due to this, the concept shifted from wanting to get more traction to inner pages to just keeping overall authority as the main focus.

Another amazing traffic growth period had occurred. By the end of this period, the website had hit over 40,000 monthly visits according to Ahrefs.

Final Thoughts

Some of the main takeaways from this case study:

• Try to conceptualize a narrative that makes sense in terms of building a website and it gaining traction in the SERPs
• To try and keep things looking as natural as you can by analyzing what occurs to sites that rank in the SERPs and emulating that
• Diversify your link profile using the “Holy Trinity” of link building
• Work both on-page and off-page factors together consistently
• Be cautious and rational with the moves you make and make sure to keep your budget allocated over a long period of time

But also…

Remember that this is a much-shortened version of the case study. Be sure to grab the full version by subscribing below!

Hey I'm Nick, the Founder/Director here at SirLinksalot. I have a passion for building online businesses and taking websites to the next level with the help of my amazing link building team .

We are active in our Facebook Group seven days a week and would love to hear from you. Ask us questions, learn from other group members, and share your knowledge.

Join the discussion on Facebook →

Related Posts

Case Study: Recovering From Bad Links

Case Study: 111x Traffic in 4 Months

No results found.

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Ready To Start Building Your Rankings ?

Your link building journey to the top of Google starts today!

Apply for Managed Link Building to get a free analysis and game plan, or order backlinks a la carte.

Today we have an amazing case study from our Follow Along contest we organized with our friend Luke Kling, the owner of the affLIFT forum.

What’s special about it? The case study’s author, Ahmed Naser Abdelgaber, had never tried affiliate marketing before our contest. It was his very first campaign ever — and, a little spoiler ahead — we were REALLY impressed with his results.

No more introductions, let’s look at this gem!

About the Campaign

Before running his very first campaign, Ahmed has been reading tons of information about affiliate marketing on the affLIFT forum. Armed with theoretical knowledge, he decided to try running a Sweepstakes offer. Here are the campaign details:

Ahmed shared all details about how he prepared for his first experience. We won’t retell it here in the blog, but you can read the full version of this case study on the forum, in the follow-along thread. Still, we will focus on how he picked an offer.

To make things easier for the first time, Ahmed decided to choose an offer in his native language — Arabic. So, he needed an offer targeting Arabic-speaking countries — to avoid any mistakes in landing pages and creatives.

Another criterion was the average CPM: with the budget of $100, he decided to stop on the GEO with an average CPM of $1-$5.

The choice fell on Tunisia — a GEO with an average traffic volume, Arabic-speaking users, and an average offer CPM of $1-$5. 

So, Ahmed found a Sweepstakes offer for Tunisia in Golden Goose and created a landing page using Purelander:

By the way, PropellerAds customers get the juiciest discounts from AffLIFT, PureLander, and Golden Goose — check them o ut!

Setting a Campaign

Ahmed worked like a pro! He added his campaign to the Bemob tracker and adjusted all necessary settings in his PropellerAds account. Here is how he set his campaign (scroll the gallery):

Besides, Ahmed added a ProPush Smart Tag to his landing page for extra monetization. Great job! Even some experienced affiliate marketers miss this step — while it can really boost your profit.

Campaign Flow

Can you imagine that? The very first campaign ever and 70 conversions/73% ROI just within a single day. We even started doubting he was a newbie!

What happened later? Well, we can’t describe it better than Ahmed did it himself:

Does anyone know what red color looks like?

Let’s just look at his daily stats for the first four days, sorted by hours and OS versions: 

Campaign Results

Numbers speak louder than words in this case study. Well, really, what can we say when Ahmed didn’t change literally anything in his campaigns to optimize them, and his profit only kept growing?

Here are his final results, according to the Golden Goose network — 791 conversions and an overall profit of $213 .

And, without no effort as well, he also got an extra $25 from ProPush! Here is the evidence:

Comments from  Konstantinos Kafkalias, Senior Account Strategist  at PropellerAds

Great job, Ahmed!

On behalf of the Account Strategists team of Propellerads, let’s have a look at what Ahmed did well, and what more we can all do to keep the green numbers for our campaigns.

Step by Step guide for setting up tracking:

Ahmed, thank you for this. You show in simple steps how anyone can integrate with the Bemob tracker.

It’s worth mentioning here that Propellerads is fully integrated with 13 trackers , plus, we can help you integrate with any other s2s tracker out there.

Choosing offer based on Affiliate’s mother tongue

I need to admit that this is a very smart move, as it helped Ahmed to be confident about the content. 

How to choose a Sweepstake offer?

When choosing offers, knowledge of the culture and language of the user is of high importance. Be careful, though, not to fall into the trap of limiting your options based on the above.

Each GEO, vertical and offer have their own specifics, be brave to explore as many as possible!

Setting up the campaign

Wow, man, I wish all first-timers were so efficient! 

Emphasis on the ‘Audience’ collection and ‘Audience’ exclusion – Ahmed, very smartly, decided to be collecting all the converted users under one audience, which he named ‘Tunis’.

Another awesome case study with PropellerAds Audiences

And right away, excluded this audience from the newly created campaign. I mean, he will never show his campaign again, to all the users that have already converted!

This is money management, my friends.

Adding Propush.me tag

He extra-monetizes his page by collecting push notification subscribers and selling them to Propush.me . 

Here is one more great example of extra monetization with Sweepstakes

Ahmed chose a Sweepstakes campaign to run. Sweepstakes are crazy good for extra monetization, for two reasons: 

• The vertical is universal and the audience is broader. The bigger chance that the user will be more curious to subscribe to a push service, expecting special offers, discounts, etc.
• Sweeps have relatively lower payouts, so with Propush.me extra monetization, you really feel the difference!

You should do it too — try ProPush.me for your next campaign!

With positive ROI comes the need to scale! What we suggest to Ahmed, from now on:

• Test offer on all the ad formats . Onclick, Interstitial ads , In-Page Push ads . You know that the offer converts, go get them
• Optimize the existing campaign by analyzing the following: Operation System (OS), OS Versions, User Activity, Time scheduling
• Play with ad models , and create a Whitelist campaign with top-performing zones, on a CPC basis, to get as much traffic as possible from the good-performing sources
• Test new GEOs, new offers , and get to understand the traffic of Propellerads

Thank you, Ahmed, and good luck on your journey.

It was inspiring enough, right? So why wait — we bet you can rock like Ahmed, too!

Want to discuss the case study?

Welcome to our Telegram Chat !”

• Sweepstakes

Join us at the Grand MAC 2024 in Yerevan, Armenia!

Igaming in brazil: forecasts for 2024 [+ insights from experts], how to run cricket campaigns: ad formats, geos, and creatives in focus, us presidential elections: will they affect web traffic, propellerads at afiliados brasil 2024: meet us there, digital marketing strategies: do you need one and what works today, conversion rate: what is it and how to boost it, 11 influencer marketing platforms to make your campaign more legit.

1-888-225-7932

Remarkable Revenue Growth Thanks to Affiliate Marketing

Share this:

About the Client

This client is on a mission to redefine the shoe industry by approaching footwear from a fresh perspective, one that is attuned to the demands of urban living. They are a Canadian shoe retailer that caters to all-season needs, offering a range of footwear from spring to winter.

The Challenge

The client expressed a desire to enhance both their revenue and publisher program , seeking opportunities for growth in these areas. This aligns perfectly with the type of projects our team of affiliate experts thrives on–and the results speak for themselves!

The Solution

The affiliate marketing specialists at Bloom developed and implemented proven strategies that were optimized for maximizing return on investment. Here is what we did:

• Revamped commission structures and reassessed our roster of publishers, actively bringing new partners on board. Additionally, we heightened commissions for our top-performing partners and collaborated with them to explore innovative tactics.
• Shifted to lower funnel–in periods of reduced activity–to maintain a robust revenue stream while optimizing expenditure efficiency.

The results?

Within a year, we recruited multiple partners and achieved remarkable results:

• The revenue soared by an impressive 47%.
• Clicks witnessed a remarkable increase of 103%.
• Orders experienced a significant surge, with a notable uptick of 38%.
• A rise in net items by 42%.

Not only that, but the publisher commission experienced a significant boost of 42%. Talk about growth!

Jeremiah Curvers

Co-founder and ceo.

Download this case study

Where should we send the PDF?

How can we make your business bloom?

More Case Studies

increase in Facebook Ads sales

increase in conversion rate; ad views goal reached in less than a week

increase in organic traffic in less than 6 months

SEE MORE CASE STUDIES

Affiliate Marketing Case Study [How I Made $16,433 With One Product And How Can You Do the Same?]

Recently when Harsh Agrawal wrote about our affiliate partnership with Bluehost that has helped me to make over $16,000 in income, most of the readers were really excited to know how I made it.

So I’ve decided to write an exclusive affiliate marketing case study around it to help affiliate marketing beginners to do the same. Are you curious to know more about it? Let’s get into it.

I know majority of the people create blogs to make money.

There’s nothing wrong in that. Most professional bloggers say that don’t start blogging unless you have passion. But in reality, if you don’t have a clear idea on making money from your blogs, you won’t succeed no matter how passionate you are. That’s the harsh truth about making money online.

When it comes to monetising a blog, there are a gazillion ways to make money .

Out of all of them, there are only a handful of monetization strategies that really work such as selling banner ads, online consulting services, one on one coaching, selling online courses and more importantly affiliate marketing .

If you want to make money from your blogs, without a second thought I’d recommend to consider affiliate marketing. At least give it a try and you will be astonished by the results you get. That’s the good thing about it, affiliate marketing can help you make money even while you are sleeping.

If you are wondering how can you make money with it, don’t search beyond, you have come to the right place. I’ll share you my affiliate marketing case study on how I made $16,433 by selling ONE product!

Quick Note: Grab our premium book “ Affiliate Marketing Blueprint ” today to take your affiliate revenue from $0 to $1000 a month now.

Interested now? Let’s dive into the actual details.

Table of Contents ☰

• Affiliate partnership with Harsh Agrawal
• 3 Things You Need to Make a Successful Affiliate Partnership
• Find long tail keywords for the products you promote
• 3 Ideas to Educate Your Audience About the Products You Promote
• Final Thoughts about affiliate partnership case study

Affiliate Marketing Case Study [How I made over $16000 by selling ONE product?]

Affiliate partnership with Harsh Agrawal from ShoutMeLoud is one of the reasons that helped me make $16,000+ by promoting one product i.e Bluehost .

Here’s a sample screenshot of my Bluehost affiliate sales ..

If you want to know more from Harsh Agrawal’s point of view about our affiliate partnership, you can read How Affiliate Partnership Helped Anil Agarwal Earn $16,433 at ShoutMeLoud.

I know most of you guys might wonder is it really possible to make huge sales by promoting a single product. It’s possible and you need the following 3 essential things in order to make successful affiliate partnership with the influential bloggers in your niche.

1. Be honest

When I observe new bloggers who are struggling to make more affiliate sales, I usually notice one thing in common – “lack of honesty”.

Most believe in “Fake it til you make it” policy. So that, they can get more social proof that can help them increase the sales. They share fake income reports, fake sales, fake traffic reports etc just to get more attention on Facebook, twitter or from their blogs.

But in reality, your audience or website visitors easily figure out if you are faking. And the worst part is, if they sense that you are faking it, they simply stop reading what you share, let alone the sales.

So here’s the tip if you want to make more affiliate sales, “BE HONEST”. I know it sounds silly, but it works.

Notice any successful affiliate marketer (Pat Flynn, Darren Rowse, Neil Patel, Harsh Agrawal), everyone is honest with their readers. They don’t fake anything just to increase their sales. They always give highest priority to showing actual proof of making real money. And that’s when they build more momentum and attract more people to trust them.

Once your audience starts trusting you, you are on your way to make more money from affiliate marketing (even while you sleep!).

2. Connect personally

If you are blogging for a while, you know the importance of networking. Without getting to know others (especially the influencers), it’s almost impossible to make a sustainable income from your blogging efforts.

I highly recommend you to spend at least an hour or two in just connecting with others in your niche. Be it leaving comments on their blogs, tweeting their stuff or staying in touch with them via emails.

But one of the best and fastest ways to build strong rapport with the influenctial bloggers is to meet them personally. Take pictures with them. Tell what you feel about them and give feedback about their websites if you have any.

This all counts in building strong relationships with the bloggers. It also helps you build a bond that builds trust.

That’s how I build a good rapport with Harsh Agrawal, we both trust each other and we always believe in the same thing – “help others to make money”.

I hope by now, you understood the importance of interacting with others both online and offline. Always think about how you can help others before seeking help from anyone.

Now that leads me to the third point.

3. Let your work do the talk

From the last couple of years, I’m making sure to spend around 5+ hours on crafting every single post I publish here at BloggersPassion. I know, without content marketing, no one can actually build a loyal readership.

And I was also been able to land on the biggest marketing blogs like Problogger.com, Semrush.com and a lot more with my guest posts. The key here is – “I spend a lot of time from research to finish the posts I write”. If you create posts worth bookmarking, you will naturally attract links, shares and sales. That’s what you need to do – “create great content and add value”.

Okay, those are the 3 major pillars one needs to build to successfully make money from affiliate marketing. Now my question to YOU is..

So do you want to repeat the same?

If I can make $$$$$ from one product, just imagine how much you can make by selling another product or two more products?

The point here is: affiliate marketing is a goldmine, you can dig how much ever you want!

Here’s a simple strategy if you want to repeat the same (and if you are really serious about making money from affiliate marketing).

You can’t make more affiliate sales without getting traffic, especially from search engines. If you are blogging for a while, you already know getting traffic from Google takes time. That’s the reason why you should consider affiliate marketing as a long term journey.

If you are thinking about “getting rich quick schemes”, affiliate marketing is NOT for you.

Affiliate marketing helps you make money even while you sleep, but in order to do that, you need to first work harder and reap the rewards later.

Most beginners fail to make any sales from affiliate marketing is they don’t have patience. They don’t spend time on finding long tail keywords for the products they promote.

If you are serious about making money from affiliate marketing and ready to work hard, I help you how you can find long tail keywords for any product you promote.

Tip: I highly recommend Long Tail Pro or Semrush for finding long tail keywords. I’ve been using them both and they are really worth every penny.

Here I’m going to demonstrate how you can use Long Tail Pro for finding profitable keywords that help you drive more traffic and increase your affiliate sales.

Quick note: For a limited time, you can get Long Tail Pro for just $37/month. It’s a MUST if you want to make more sales from affiliate products.

Let’s say you are into Fitness niche and you want to promote fitness related affiliate products to make more money. Here’s how you can use Long Tail Pro keyword research tool to find better keywords.

Step 1: Firstly, get to know the list of all the affiliate products that are proven to make you more income.

For instance, if you are into fitness niche, you can find out all the products that are being promoted in the top blogs. You can use search terms like “fitness + top blogs”, “fitness + blogs”, “fitness + best blogs” etc to find the good blogs in your niche.

Make a list of all the products they are promoting. It won’t take you more than 10 minutes, so do it now. Replace “fitness” with your topic. Like, “marketing + top blogs” can give you a list of all the links that talk about the best marketing blogs.

Step 2: Once you make a list of 3 to 5 affiliate products, start finding relevant long tail keywords for them.

You can use Long Tail Pro or Semrush to find the best performing long tail keywords. I’ll show you how.

#1) Once you logged on to Long Tail Pro, enter any of the keywords that are related to the products you promote, click on “Find Keywords” to start keyword research.

#2) Now, once you click on “Find Keywords” it will allow you to add your seed keywords and pick the search volume with below 1000 monthly searches to rank higher in Google results for any product you want to rank for.

By clicking “Generate keywords & Fetch data” it will give you a list of all the keywords you can choose from.

#3) In the final step, make sure to pick 3 to 5 long tail keywords that you can use on your blog posts naturally. That’s it! Start writing more contents by using those keywords and build backlinks for the pages to rank higher and increase your sales.

Step 3: Create awareness about the products you promote

This is REALLY important and this is where all the money is.

If you fail to do this part, you will fail to make sales. If you successfully create awareness about the products you promote, you are almost done in converting your readers into buyers. It’s as simple as that.

See, you can’t make affiliate sales just by putting too many links all-over your blog or pasting banner ads everywhere. Affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work that way. You have to educate your blog audience about the products you promote to make more sales.

Read: Benefits of Affiliate Marketing: Top 8 Advantages of it

If you are wondering how to do that, here are 3 simple ideas to educate your audience about the products you promote.

1. Write honest product reviews

The best way to teach others about the products you promote is by writing reviews. Not just any random reviews but the genuine reviews. Most beginners write reviews just to increase their sales, they are least bothered about what they promote.

If you are one among them, stop it! Whatever the product you are going to recommend, make sure to first use it. Then once you are completely satisfied with it, write a detailed and unbiased review about it.

Share all the pros and cons so the readers trust you instantly. And buy what you recommend if they really need the products you recommend.

2. Build links for the products you promote

If you want to increase your affiliate sales , you need more search traffic. To get that, you need more backlinks. I recommend you to either use Skyscraper technique or guest posting to build quality backlinks.

3. Show banner ads at the most visible places

This is a no brainer. If your blog audience wants to know about the products you highly recommend, you need to use “banner ads”. See my blog’s sidebar, and you will find at the top “Bluehost” product banner ad. It’s the most visible place and a huge percentage of visitors click on it daily! My income goes up when they buy.

Recommended Reading: List of high paying web hosting affiliate programs Is Affiliate Marketing Legit? Let’s Bust Some Myths!

Of course, yes! There are so many affiliate marketers in the world who are making a hell lot of money from affiliate marketing.

If you follow the right approach affiliate marketing lets you earn huge profits in the long run for sure.

There is no limit. It totally depends on the efforts you put in the right way. Still, for me, you can start earning $1000 per month if done properly (choosing the right niche and products)

There are a lot of reliable networks like ShareASale, ClickBank, Amazon Associates, etc.

Absolutely yes, there is no restriction on using both at the same time.

I’m done with my affiliate case study of making $16000+ by promoting one product. And I also discussed about all the strategies I used to make that happen.

Browse more helpful case studies:

• How I end up making $13000 within a week time?
• How We Exploded Our Traffic to Reach 2 Million Views with Semrush
• SEO case study: How long does it take to rank in Google?

Now, I want YOU to repeat the same. If I can do it, you too can do it. Just believe in yourself and be honest with yourself. Consider affiliate marketing as a “work harder now and reap the benefits later” thing instead of “get rich quick scheme”.

If you found this post useful or inspirational, please share it with your friends on Facebook and other networks so they can also benefit.

Let me know what you think about my affiliate marketing journey in the comments below, I’d be glad to listen to you.

• Facebook 215

Reader Comments (12)

Hey anil bro, Such an awesome post. This really help me find my mistake which is preventing me to make more affiliate sales. However, i will love to know, How to write a better review posts. Like what should the structure of the post?

Thanks you so much

I am new to the blogging. I wanted to learn more about it works. I have never blogged so all this was some what confusing. Date I ask how to get start. In a simple way. Thanks for your information .

I’ve just found that Harsh Agrawal has deleted the case study from his blog. That post is no more online.

My question is, is it wrong to disclose this kind of partnership?

Very inspiring post. Thanks Again

Please let me know which keyword tool is better ? SEMRUSH or long tail Pro.

I have written a detailed post which will actually answer your question here https://bloggerspassion.com/semrush-vs-longtailpro/ . In case you have any additional questions, please let me know.

Hey, First of all congratulations! (Y)

I agree with you “Network” is the key to get success! Make sure you make “Honesty” you priority!

I Love this article – LTP (Longtail Pro.) is really a good KW-Researching tool to promote! I have made 2 sales overnight, I know it’s not a massive sales or something but that’s my first affiliated income so it’s quite a good experience for me!

Anyways, Thanks for the case study! Regards Jagdish Kashyap 🙂

This was a very informative post. As a blogger I really enjoyed it.

Firstly many congratulations for your success and many thanks for sharing this inspiring article with us. I impressed with your words “if i can make $$$ than you can make too” Thanks for motivating us.

Thanks for sharing this case study, it was insightful.

I’ll take a cue

I like the part of your article about connecting personally to your visitors. It’s good to be able to talk to them directly and write in that form, including forms like “me” and “you”. As it were a conversation.

I’m using bluehost affiliation for last 6-8 months, No $ eran yet! Suggest some more useful affiliate products.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

© 2010-2024 BloggersPassion - All rights reserved.

Some of the links to products on this blog are affiliate links. It simply means, at no additional cost to you, we’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy any product.

• Privacy Policy
• 215 Facebook

Partner Case Studies

Discover how our partners have used awin's platform to grow their affiliate marketing programmes and reach their goals..

Brand partnerships raise profitability, CVR, and AOV at Secret Sales

Growing baskets 15% with Envolve Tech customer assistance AI