In the middle of lockdown last year (June 2020), I decided to test just how difficult (or easy) it is to make good money as an affiliate marketer.
If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, basically it’s a partnership scheme where an online business pays commissions for traffic or sales generated by an external website. Sites like The Wirecutter or all those “Best XYZ” articles on the internet are in fact affiliate marketers.
I’m now 18 months into my test and I thought I would share my successes, failures and lessons.
Disclaimer: I’m good at SEO so although I think my results can be replicated and far exceeded, for those not well versed in internet marketing, these results are relatively difficult to achieve.
Affiliate Marketing Case Study
Here is some summary information on my website and it’s performance to date. To protect my site’s identity from copycats I won’t be sharing the domain, but I will share all the key stats.
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My Goal: Grow an affiliate website from $0 to $10k a month in under 24 months
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Result: Although I’m a long way off from achieving my goal (I’m at $1000 a month and 20k monthly sessions), I’ve learnt loads, had fun, and the site has been pretty passive for the past year (most of the heavy lifting happened in the first few months).
Summary Stats
- Site Launched: June 2020
- Investment to date: $10,207.51
- Income to date: $10,903.47
- Estimated site value: $35,000
- ROI to date: 345%
Income to date
I 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
Traffic to date
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July 2020: 217 sessions
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August 2020: 755 sessions
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September 2020: 2,467 sessions
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October 2020: 7,034 sessions
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November 2020: 10,097 sessions
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December 2020: 10,254 session
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January 2021: 11,558 sessions
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February 2021: 12,643 sessions
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March 2021: 19,458 sessions
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April 2021: 18,711 sessions
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May 2021: 19,663 sessions
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June 2021: 21,137 sessions
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July 2021: 19,820 sessions
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August 2021: 20,927 sessions
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September 2021: 19,212 sessions
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October 2021: 22,143 sessions
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November 2021: 21,792 sessions
Current Website Valuation
As the site is averaging around $1000 per month, I would estimate this site is worth: $35k (35-40x multiple).
The multiple justification is based on going market valuations for content sites with multiple income streams (Amazon, 3rd party affiliates, advertising), and 6-12 months of stable traffic and income.
Lessons
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Aged domains vs New Domains: I built this site on an aged domain. There’s a strong argument to use aged or an expired domain as they often get indexed faster and perform better than brand new domains. It can however be very hit and miss with aged domains - some work well and Google loves, others really struggle. Many SEOs 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 me, I focused on relevance to our niche, a clean history and age. I managed to find a super relevant domain that was 15 years old on Godaddy auctions. I checked it's history using archive.org and it was squeaky clean (i.e. no past Google penalties). I managed to secure the domain for under $30. Winning! I would only use a brand new domain for an online business where I have a particular brand in mind, and obviously I would always try get the .com version before looking at other alternatives.
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Backlinks aren’t always required: 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 641 referring domains, most of these are citations and coupon sites. Hence our Domain Rating (DR) is 12! It was 1.3 before we started building some links.
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Not another Amazon affiliate: I specifically chose a niche that is not dependent on Amazon, although I do have some Amazon Associates links. When using other eCommerce affiliate programs, you have to test partnerships. I signed up to 3 affiliate programs – 2 sucked with low conversions. The one I settled on has been a great partner, although our commissions are pretty low compared to the 2 others (6% vs 8% and 15%).
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Topical authority is key. I engaged an content writing service (Contentellect) for this site as I knew I had to create loads of content to rank. In the end I bought over 300k words of content for this site. I feel we’ve covered almost every topic in the niche. Becoming a topical authority in the eyes of Google is a sure path to lots of traffic.
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Interlinking is very important: Good content is important, but you have to properly interlink articles using a well-thought-out silo architecture. Keyword grouping is the fastest way to create topical clusters and formulate a silo’ed site architecture. I used KeyClusters for keyword grouping and then manually analysed the results to create silos. Disclosure: I own KeyClusters.
- Passive, not so sure: Affiliate websites often have the reputation of being passive income machines. Sure, I’m making $1000 a month at the moment and have spent less than 5 hours on this site in the last 6 months. But equally that’s probably the reason why I’ve plateaued and will whither and die if I don’t invest more time and money over the next 12 months.
Was the test worth it?
Hell yeah. I’m making $1,000+ passive a month and I’ve learnt a lot. I’m a little disappointed that I’m not closer to my goal but given the site takes literally no time to manage today, I’m really happy.
What’s next?
I’m now looking to increase our commission percentage with partners as we go into 2022. I have leverage as I’ve worked with them for 12 months and demonstrated my site’s value. I think we can get them from 6% to 12%, which will double the site’s income and valuation without increasing traffic or conversions etc.
If all goes well over the next 6 months I’ll probably sell the site.