affiliate website case study

Affiliate Marketing Case Studies: 15 Examples for Success

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.

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.

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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

affiliate marketing case study numbers 2020

2021 Numbers

2022 Numbers

affiliate marketing case study profit and loss

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.

How to Make Money from an Amazon Affiliate Website (Case Study)

With 120,000 people searching for “Amazon Affiliate” per month, it’s no surprise that the Amazon Associate Program is one of the best affiliate programs available on the internet . The reasons for this are:

You can leverage a brand authority of Amazon to sell any products (in short, higher conversion rates).
You get paid for “everything” that consumers buy using your affiliate link. For instance, if you are recommending a pair of Stan Smith shoes and the consumer buys Nike shoes instead, you still get a commission.
30-day cookie (if the user adds any product in the cart).
Smooth payment cycle.
Real-time sales and commissions tracking dashboard.

I started with my first Amazon Affiliate website years ago and I must say that it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Now unlike hundreds of other case studies you’ve read on the internet, this case study is going to be different.

How is it going to be different?

Well, I’m going to reveal the URL of one of my live Amazon Affiliate website, along with all keywords and ranking strategy so that you can get a clear idea on how to move things in the right direction.

So without wasting any further time, let’s get started.

Choose a Niche and Perform Keyword Research

How to Set up an Amazon Affiliate Website

Rank Your Amazon Affiliate Website
Improving Your Conversion Rates

How to Choose a Niche for Your Amazon Affiliate Website and Perform Keyword Research

The most common advice any SEO can give you about keyword research is to use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and select keywords that have high search volume and low competition.

Now let be clear on one thing – there is nothing called “high search volume and low competition.” Whether it “best bluetooth speakers” or “best glitter heart stickers 2019” – everything has a competition.

Google doesn’t have any metric called competition (the competition inside the keyword planner tool is competition for Adwords and not for SEO, however, it is an indicative metric of SEO competition as well. The greater the competition for CPC, the more likely the competition in SEO and hence more revenue potential too.)

Here is what you can do to find the keywords which can be ranked easily:

Visit Ahrefs , put in bestreviews.guide , and click on “Organic Keywords” from the left-side menu.

Apply the following filters:

Include: best, review
KD: 0 to 10 (Although there is no such thing as keyword difficulty, Ahrefs is the best tool available on this planet which can give you estimated keyword difficulty metric)
Keyword Position: 1 to 20
Sort by volume (higher to lower)

Here is a screenshot of the filters and keywords selection process.

Amazon Affiliate Website: Keyword research

Once you apply these filters, you’ll get a list of keywords that can be ranked easily.

Why bestreviews.guide?

Because I think this site is dominating the “search” with automatically generated content (although now they have started adding some manual content as well) which has 16.4M visitors per month with almost 70% of them coming from Google Search (according to SimilarWeb).

The reason why I said it’s automated content is that every single page has a similar structure and all of the content on the website is based on “templates”. Google shows that bestreviews.guide has 250k+ pages indexed, which ultimately means they have reviewed at least 1M products, which is practically impossible unless they have a team of thousands of people working days and nights creating authentic reviews of every product.

I know this is surprising, but yeah – they are doing extremely well and I appreciate their skills.

But as Mike Tyson said:

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

We don’t know if Google will wipe them out one day or if they’ll continue growing their organic traffic at a rapid pace.

Anyways, let’s make things more interesting now.

One of my SEO clients applied the same strategy and planned to create an Amazon Affiliate website in the “Coffee” niche. The URL of the website is coffeedx.com (The website link has been shared with the consent of the owner).

Coffee is such a broad topic to explore and has over 5M+ people searching various coffee types, espresso machines, and coffee recipes on the web. Therefore, the possibilities for expansion of this website are exponential.

Our strategy for keyword selection for this website was pretty simple:

Write recommendation articles about various coffee makers (as they have a moderately high price and search volume).
Write individual product reviews.
Write generic articles around coffee for the keywords which have monthly 5,000+ search volume.

Using the above strategy, we were able to pick 30+ keywords which could drive our sales and at the same time bring traffic for informative articles (we are not selling anything from these generic articles).

Here are a couple of examples for each type:

Listicles: Best Keurig coffee makers, best single serve coffee makers
Product reviews: Breville 870XL review
Generic articles: types of coffee

So you must have an idea about what kind of keywords you should select to get started. Note that if you can plan your entire content map for 6 months, you wouldn’t stumble here and there and feel lost. So always plan your keyword strategy before starting and have the whole content map ready and laid out. Then make sure you stick to it.

This way you will ensure that content flow is in place and you don’t have to spend more time doing more keyword research over and over.

Tip: A fellow blogger, Vivek Sacheti from India, has compiled this sheet of 1038 niche ideas for Amazon Affiliate websites , which can be helpful for you to select your niche and keywords.

(Suggested reading: How Much Is My Website Worth? ).

Setting up an Amazon Affiliate website is pretty much similar to setting up a blog. All you have to do is make sure whatever you write is well-presented and that you use a high-quality hosting provider (Make sure your website uptime is close to 100% and load times are fast).

The design is so important that when it comes to establishing trust online and investing $50 to purchase a premium WordPress theme , it could be the best investment you can make.

Hers is a sample homepage of an Amazon Affiliate website I found on Google.

Since the main method of monetization for this website will be Amazon, try choosing themes that have one column, as one column (or full width) themes have better readability.

You don’t need to have a sidebar section in your Amazon Affiliate websites, this will save more space and make everything simple and readable. You want to focus on conversions!

Along with the design, you have to make sure all basic pages such as about us/me, privacy policy, affiliate disclosure , contact us/me are in place.

Warning : I’ve changed the WordPress theme on one of my websites recently, and all rankings dropped by almost 80% (I know this might sound stupid, but that’s the reality). As soon as switched back to my original theme, I was able to recover 100% rank. So make sure you stick to the same theme from start to end. The structure is very important.

What Kind of Articles Should You Publish?

As I have explained various types of keywords in the “keyword research” section, you must have an idea about how you will display and publish your content. But still, let me explain things in detail. Here are a few various types of articles that are typically used on an Amazon Affiliate website:

Individual product reviews.
How-tos or troubleshooting guides.
Interviews of influencers from your niche or maybe reviews of events/conferences from your niche.

I’ll briefly explain each of these:

Listicle Articles

Listicle articles usually tend to attract more visitors, who have the intent to buy something. So these articles have to be lengthy (I usually prefer 3000+ words article when it comes to listicles)

Individual Product Reviews

Product reviews can talk about the pros and cons of a product and convince consumers on why that product is useful to them. While writing individual product reviews (or any article), try to keep the language simple and not too technical.

For instance, if you are writing a review of a mobile and you write: “Buy this mobile device because it has Bluetooth,” it will always be under-performing as compared to writing something like “Buy this mobile device because it has a feature called Bluetooth, which will allow you to transfer images and videos across nearby devices”. Try to explain every single feature of an XYZ product in detail and how it will be useful to buyers.

How-tos or Troubleshooting Guides

How-tos or troubleshooting guides can bring you a lot of users, for example in my client’s case – we chose keywords such as “Keurig troubleshooting”, which has 6600+ monthly search volume and such guides are capable of attracting a lot of backlinks. (I will cover the rankings and backlinking part in next section)

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the next big thing, as people believe in people more than brands today! When you get an army of influencers to talk about your brand/product – it gives you an enormous boost. Shredz is an example of a successful company that was built on an “influencer marketing” channel.

If you can manage to get a bunch of influencers to share their experience/interviews on your blog, you can get FREE content plus they will promote you on their social media channels, so it’s a win-win for both.

How to Rank Your Amazon Affiliate Website

This is the “most important” part if you are fully convinced that you want to start with an Amazon Affiliate website and make money from it.

In my opinion, content plays only 10-20% role in case of new websites (while there are some exceptions too), but the whole game of SEO is all about backlinks. Period.

I will split the backlinks generation plans into 3 stages:

Beginner: In this phase, you get started with generating backlinks from free sources such as profile links, comment links, social shares, etc., which will create a small presence for your website in the digital world.
Ongoing: Outreach to bloggers/webmasters from your niche and ask them for links. This is a traditional strategy for backlinks generation, which is slow these days (but it still works).
Growth Hacks: You have to connect the dots and see what kind of content can attract links in bulk. Here are some examples of growth hacks.

Suppose my niche is, say, “fitness.” I’d outreach to all the fitness bloggers and run some competition on my fitness blog and ask these bloggers to participate in the competition by providing them a badge that they have to place on their own blog. This badge will have a “powered by” link which will point to your website.

Suppose your niche is crypto, you could create a crypto price ticker WordPress plugin and place your “powered by” link in it.

You can reveal some bugs or technical errors in some tech startup and do PR of it and you’ll attract a lot of eyeballs. For example – one guy revealed “How you can chat with any Facebook group member without being friend with him”, which was a bug on Facebook and his article attracted tons of backlinks from big publications such as Mashable, Techcrunch, etc.

Growth hacking is not easy, and it needs a lot of experience and understanding of human behavior and sometimes technical knowledge too.

Now that you have understood how to build backlinks to dominate in “search”, tracking your keyword rankings is the next important step. This can give you a clear idea of how your keywords are improving/declining with respect to time so you can take action based upon these ranking graphs.

I’m using my own tool Rankz for tracking ranks of thousands of keywords every day so I can get insights for my SEO campaigns. Here’s what the dashboard of the tool looks like.

Improving Your Amazon Affiliate Conversion Rates

Once you start to rank a few (or all keywords) for some positions and start getting enough traffic (say, suppose 1000 visitors) per day, the next important thing is conversion optimization .

Before I answer the question of how to perform conversion optimization, I want you to understand one thing:

Marketing is all about understanding human behavior. Once you start understanding the behavior of users, tools or processes become irrelevant or less relevant.

Conversion optimization for Amazon Affiliate websites can be broken down into the following essentials:

Content optimization: Initially, I have explained how you should write content for listicles. If I have to give you a real example, let’s consider an example of the “best espresso machine.” All you have to do is break down various questions which you can possibly think of when you think about someone searching for an espresso machine online. Here are a few questions:

Are they looking for an espresso machine for home or office or a commercial cafe?
Do they know about the different types of espresso machines?
Do they know that selecting the wrong machine can cost a lot of money and time?
Do they know about the common problems with espresso machines?
Have they used an espresso machine before? Or are they buying the machine for the first time?

Once you start understanding your user’s intent by answering all these questions, you can get the best possible content in your articles.

Design and placement optimization: As the name suggests, you have to play around with Call to Action buttons and their colors and content positioning. For example, you have to decide whether your article should start with “advantages of espresso machines” or “recommended espresso machine models.”

Here is an example of a quick product recommendation section.

Using comparison tables (which should be responsive) is one of the best ideas for listicles, as it gives clarity on the pros and cons of multiple products to the consumers and it becomes easier for them to choose the right product.

Here is an example of a comparison table that converts well.

Another important aspect of conversion optimization is “data analytics.” You need to test your hypothesis and gather the data to decide what works and what doesn’t. Even if you don’t have any advanced knowledge of data analytics, you can still achieve greater conversion rates. Coffeedx was able to achieve a 9% average conversion rate, which goes as high as 40% during December (thanks to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas).

Remember, the goal of listicles is to send visitors to Amazon, and you have two elements on which you can make people click: images and text links. So make sure that you use CTA buttons and images, which are appealing.

I’ve tried to give you 100% actionable tips backed with my own experience building Amazon Affiliate websites. If I had to sum up everything in one line, I would say:

Create value , and money and fame will chase you! Chase money and fame, you’ll eventually die chasing!

So if you’re serious about taking advantage of an Amazon Affiliate website, I wish you luck and I hope to read your success story someday.

Thanks Suumti

I’m just getting started on the ‘net, and will follow your guidelines as an Amazon affiliate.

Hey, thanks for stopping by Rahul. Hope those tips were helpful.

Hello Sumumit Shah,

Well explained about the Amazon Affiliate program. And I agree with” Warning: I’ve changed the WordPress theme on one of my websites recently, and all rankings dropped by almost 80% (I know this might sound stupid, but that’s the reality). As soon as switched back to my original theme, I was able to recover 100% rank. So make sure you stick to the same theme from start to end. The structure is very important.” But if the new theme is better then it can also increase SEO and rankings.

Thanks and Regards, Gurjit Singh

Hello Gurjit,

I just shared my personal experience and I prefer spending more time on fixing one base theme at the start of any project (although I tweak the existing theme at times to give better user experience).

You can try switching to new theme and see how it goes. Do share your experience here [just in case if you do this experiment]

Thanks for this awesome information on setting up an Amazon affiliate site.

Amazon is slashing commission rates for its affiliate program and I hope you are aware of new commission rates :)

Hello, Which table maker plugin are you using? It looks nice.

Can you please write an update to this article, since Amazon has ended API 4 support on October 31st. Also, the current rules on product comparison tables and star ratings is a bit fuzzy, as well.

Hi David, thanks for the feedback. We will take a look and see how we could improve the guide. Thanks!

The problem with amazon affiliates program is the recurring reduction in payout percentages. Another problem is being banned without any ( most times ) being informed of a specific reason as to why or how to restore your website. They where good in their day, but I see amazon eventually removing their program. IMO.

They needed to boost sales and marketshare, affiliate programs do a great job at that. Looking at amazon now, they don’t need affiliates anymore. Money can still be made, I just wouldn’t invest a lot of money into a AAS site. There are better ways to invest your time and money. My 2 cents.

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.

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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.

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FinvsFin.com
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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.

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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!

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Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

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!

Affiliate Marketing Guide – Blog post header

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

Semrush – Backlink Analytics – Referring Domains

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:

Google SERP – Running shoes affiliate program

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”:

Keyword Magic Tool – Search – 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”:

Keyword Magic Tool – Include keywords filter

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:

Keyword Magic Tool – Filtered keyword list

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.

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.

Affiliate marketing case studies: examples for success

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.

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Strategic Growth for a Video Gaming Affiliate Site: From Ground Zero to 29,000 Monthly Visits

February 29, 2024

Evgeni Petrov

Executive Summary

This case study outlines the transformative journey of an affiliate website in the competitive video gaming sector, from its inception in 2016 through a period of inactivity, to a robust revival in 2022. Our strategic overhaul was centered around amplifying profitability and securing a dominant online presence. Key achievements include a surge in organic search traffic from zero to over 29,000 monthly visits, a significant uptick in affiliate revenue, and ranking for around 3,000 high-intent keywords, many of which are directly tied to consumer purchase intent. Despite the volatility of search engine algorithms, our adaptive strategies and relentless focus on results have set a new standard for SEO success, proving that even in fluctuating digital terrains, precise, data-driven approaches can yield exceptional outcomes.

More details follow below.

Background Information

Initial Development and Success (2016-2019)

At the heart of this case study is a website we built from scratch, dedicated to the Video Gaming niche—one of the most fiercely competitive arenas in the digital world. Our involvement from the outset in 2016 involved not only crafting the website using a WordPress theme optimized for SEO but also spearheading a content strategy that quickly established the platform as a go-to resource within the gaming community. A testament to our strategic and technical prowess was our success in getting the website listed in Google News—an achievement that speaks volumes about the quality and relevance of the content we produced. This recognition not only enhanced the site’s visibility but also underscored our ability to navigate complex SEO landscapes and adhere to stringent content standards.

Hiatus and Shift in Focus (2019-2022)

Despite the remarkable traction and the strong foundation we laid, the project was put on pause as the owner pursued other ventures. During this hiatus, the website remained dormant, with no fresh content or updates, even as the digital landscape—and the Video Gaming niche in particular—continued to evolve at a breakneck pace.

Revival in Summer 2022

The summer of 2022 marked a pivotal moment when the owner, reinvigorated with a fresh perspective, decided to re-engage with the website. Recognizing the untapped potential and the need to adapt to the latest trends in digital marketing and SEO, a renewed effort was initiated to rejuvenate the platform. Our goal was not merely to restore the site to its former glory but to significantly enhance its reach, engagement, and authority in the now even more competitive Video Gaming niche.

Objectives and Goals

Our SEO campaign for the affiliate website was focused on maximizing profitability and establishing a strong online presence in the Video Gaming niche. The key objectives were:

Boost Affiliate Revenue : Increase earnings by improving rankings for high-intent, product-related keywords to drive more affiliate link clicks and commissions.
Establish Authority : Position the site as a trusted resource by delivering engaging, quality content, enhancing reputation and SEO metrics.
Develop Strategic Partnerships : Form alliances with key players in the gaming industry for exclusive affiliate deals and content opportunities.
Optimize Conversions : Increase the conversion rate from visitor to affiliate link click-through by refining CTAs and the conversion pathway.

These goals were designed to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) to ensure clear direction and measurable success.

Strategy and Implementation

To maximize the affiliate website’s potential in the Video Gaming niche, our on-page SEO strategy was focused on creating a user-centric, magazine-style design complemented by precise keyword integration and content optimization. Here’s a succinct overview:

On-Page SEO Enhancements

Magazine-Style Design: We designed the website to emulate a magazine media platform, aiming to enhance user engagement and readability. This format was strategically chosen to meet Google News inclusion criteria, significantly boosting the site’s authority and visibility.
Keyword Integration: Through comprehensive research, we identified and integrated high-value, niche-specific keywords and entities into the core website content. This careful placement was aimed at improving search rankings while maintaining natural readability for the audience.
Content Optimization: Our content strategy focused on delivering high-quality, engaging content that addressed the gaming community’s interests and needs. Each piece of content was optimized for both user engagement and SEO, with clear calls-to-action to drive affiliate link clicks.
Meta Data Optimization: We constantly refined the website’s title tags and meta descriptions to include targeted keywords and relevant entities. This effort aimed to improve click-through rates from search results, drawing more organic traffic to the site.

These enhancements were crucial in transforming the affiliate website into a trusted, authoritative source within the niche, driving increased traffic, engagement, and affiliate revenue.

Technical SEO Adjustments

It was a self-hosted WordPress website, so we had plenty of control here. Here’s an overview of the key technical SEO adjustments we implemented:

WordPress-Specific Enhancements

Theme Optimization : We selected a lightweight, SEO-friendly WordPress theme to minimize load times and ensure clean, efficient code. This theme was chosen for its compatibility with SEO best practices and its responsiveness across all devices.
Plugin Utilization : Strategic use of plugins enhanced the site’s SEO capabilities without overloading it. Key plugins included ‘The SEO Framework’ for on-page SEO management, WP Rocket for caching and performance, and Smush for image optimization.
Permalink Structure : We customized the permalink settings to create user-friendly and search-engine-friendly URLs, incorporating relevant keywords to improve content discoverability.

Site Speed Optimization

Image Compression and Optimization : We implemented aggressive image compression techniques without compromising quality, ensuring fast loading times. Lazy loading was also employed to defer the loading of images until necessary.
Caching Solutions : Utilizing WordPress-specific caching mechanisms in conjunction with a Litespeed Web Server hosting, we reduced server load and page loading times, providing a smoother experience for visitors, and meeting Core Web Vitals requirements.
Minification and Concatenation : CSS and JavaScript files were minified and concatenated to reduce the number of HTTP requests and enhance page load speed.
CDN Utilization: We offloaded as much as we could of the content to be served by a CDN, Cloudflare in this case.

Mobile Optimization

Responsive Design : The site was rigorously tested and adjusted to ensure it was fully responsive, providing an optimal viewing experience across all devices and screen sizes.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) : We implemented AMP for key pages to speed up loading times on mobile devices, improving the mobile user experience and complementing our SEO efforts.

Structured Data and Schema Markup

Rich Snippets : Utilizing schema markup, we enhanced the website’s listings in search results with additional information like ratings, prices, and availability, making the listings more attractive and informative to potential visitors.

XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt

Sitemap Optimization : We created and submitted an XML sitemap to search engines, ensuring it was dynamically updated with new content and structured to prioritize key pages. We used a separate xml sitemap for Google News.
Robots.txt Configuration : The robots.txt file was carefully configured to guide search engine crawlers effectively, ensuring they could access important content while avoiding unnecessary pages.

These technical SEO adjustments within the WordPress framework were critical in laying a solid foundation for the website’s SEO campaign, ensuring the site was optimized for both users and search engines, ultimately contributing to improved rankings, traffic, and user engagement.

Off-Page SEO Tactics

Backlink Building: We adopted a minimalistic approach to backlink building. Instead of investing heavily, we concentrated on earning high-quality, relevant links naturally. This strategy was designed to incrementally boost the site’s authority and search rankings while adhering to budget constraints.
Social Media Engagement: We leveraged various social media platforms to extend the reach of our content and engage with our target audience. The platforms of choice were Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit.

Content Marketing Tactics

For our content marketing strategy, we focused on establishing the affiliate website as a leading authority in the gaming niche. Here’s a revised overview of our approach:

Educational and Insightful Content Creation: We developed a comprehensive series of blog posts, guides, and videos specifically tailored to the gaming community. The goal was to position our client as a key thought leader by providing valuable insights, tips, and in-depth game reviews. This content was not only designed to inform and engage but also to enhance our SEO efforts by incorporating targeted keywords naturally.
Industry News and Expert Roundups: In addition to evergreen content, we regularly published industry news and expert roundups. This approach kept our audience informed about the latest trends and opinions in the gaming world, fostering a sense of community and keeping the website content fresh and relevant.
Downloadable Resources: To further engage our audience and generate leads, we created downloadable resources such as infographics, checklists, and ebooks. These resources offered actionable value to our users and were optimized for shareability, extending our reach beyond the website.

Continuous Monitoring and Optimization

Performance Tracking: Using tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, we continuously monitored the website’s performance, tracking improvements in traffic, rankings, and conversions. Additionally, we added Microsoft Clarity, to gain more insight on how visitors navigated through the website.
Iterative Improvements: Based on performance data, we made iterative improvements to the SEO strategy and tweaked UI, refining our tactics to adapt to changing market trends and search engine algorithms.

The implementation of these strategies was spread out over several months, allowing us to carefully monitor the impact of each action and make data-driven decisions to further refine our approach.

Results and Performance Analysis

The outcomes of our strategy speak volumes about its success, evidenced by substantial improvements in key performance indicators. Here’s an analysis of the results achieved:

Growth in Organic Search Traffic: Starting from a baseline of zero, the website experienced a significant surge in organic visitors. By August 2019, monthly visits had climbed to 7,000, and this figure impressively reached over 29,000 by September 2023.

Keyword Ranking Success: The focused approach on high-value keywords led to a remarkable increase in visibility. From an initial ranking for approximately 150 keywords (second campaign), the website’s presence expanded to rank for around 3,000 keywords. This leap not only improved the site’s search engine presence but also brought in a higher quality of traffic, with over half of these keywords being directly linked to purchase intent.

Traffic Value Enhancement: A direct reflection of our strategic efforts was seen in the monetary value of the website’s organic traffic. Through targeted optimization and engaging content, we raised the traffic’s estimated value from nothing to a significant $10,000 per month. This metric underscores the tangible financial benefits of our SEO campaign, demonstrating a clear return on investment.

Lessons Learned

Reflecting on the comprehensive SEO journey of our affiliate website in the Video Gaming niche, several pivotal insights and strategic takeaways have emerged:

Tailored Strategy’s Efficacy: The campaign underscored the significance of customizing SEO strategies to align with the client’s unique landscape and objectives. A generic approach would have faltered in delivering the impactful results we witnessed.
Value of Niche Specialization: Focusing on specific, less competitive keywords within the niche initially paved the way for more substantial wins. This methodical approach laid the groundwork for scaling to broader, competitive keywords, demonstrating the effectiveness of a targeted strategy.
Impact of Content Alignment: The direct correlation between content that resonates with the target audience’s needs and improved engagement and conversions was unmistakable. Content that genuinely addresses user queries and pain points fosters a more engaged and loyal audience.
Importance of Technical Foundation: The campaign reinforced the crucial role of a solid technical SEO foundation, including site speed, responsiveness, and architecture. These elements are indispensable for supporting broader SEO efforts and ensuring a seamless user experience.
Quality vs. Quantity in Link Building: Our minimalist approach to backlink building, focusing on securing high-quality, relevant links, proved more beneficial than chasing a high volume of less relevant links. This strategy enhanced the site’s authority in a more meaningful and sustainable manner.
Adaptability in a Dynamic Landscape: The rapidly evolving digital landscape necessitates a flexible and adaptive SEO strategy. The ability to pivot based on performance data and emerging trends is crucial for maintaining and enhancing search engine visibility.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Continuous analysis and learning from SEO performance data were instrumental in refining our strategies. This iterative process of evaluating what works and what doesn’t is key to driving ongoing improvements.
Patience and Perseverance in SEO: The journey reaffirmed that SEO is a long-term endeavor. Substantial and lasting results are achieved through consistent effort, patience, and a commitment to quality over quick fixes.
It’s crucial to understand that SEO success is never guaranteed : Despite our meticulous adherence to SEO best practices and the significant progress we achieved, the website encountered a setback due to a Google algorithm update that particularly affected sites with affiliate business models. This unforeseen challenge has necessitated a strategic pivot, and our team is diligently working to reassess and adjust our tactics to restore the website’s online organic presence. We are committed to navigating through this complexity and will provide an update on our recovery efforts and any new strategies we employ in the next iteration of this case study.

Testimonials and Client Feedback

In the dynamic arena of SEO and digital marketing, where algorithms shift like the tides, the essence of success lies not in never facing setbacks, but in rising every time we fall. Each challenge is a lesson, each failure a stepping stone. The journey is relentless, and so are we. To quit is to concede defeat to the transient. Instead, we adapt, we learn, and we conquer. Onward we march, for in perseverance, we find victory. – The Website Owner

This case study showcases our journey and achievements in enhancing our affiliate website’s presence in the competitive Video Gaming niche. Through strategic SEO efforts, we’ve significantly increased traffic and revenue, reaffirming our commitment to excellence and continuous improvement. We remain dedicated to adapting and evolving our strategies to meet the challenges of the digital landscape.

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Affiliate Marketing Case Study

Posted on July 20, 2023

Influencer Marketing Platform » Glossary » Affiliate Marketing Case Study

July 20, 2023
1 minute read

Introduction

Affiliate marketing case studies provide in-depth analyses of successful campaigns, demonstrating the effectiveness of affiliate marketing strategies. These real-world examples offer data-driven insights into how businesses leverage affiliate partnerships.

What are Affiliate Marketing Case Studies?

Affiliate marketing case studies are in-depth analyses of successful affiliate marketing campaigns. They showcase strategies, tactics, results, and ROI from real campaigns.

Where are Affiliate Case Studies Used?

Affiliate marketing case studies are widely used in influencer marketing. Businesses, e-commerce companies, and agencies utilize case studies to understand the potential impact of affiliate marketing.

When to Use Affiliate Case Studies

Businesses should use affiliate case studies when considering implementing or optimizing affiliate marketing programs. Case studies provide insights into benefits, challenges, and best practices to inform strategic decisions.

How to Use Affiliate Case Studies

To leverage affiliate case studies, businesses should carefully examine campaign strategies, analysis, ROI measurement, and affiliate success examples. This provides valuable insights into structuring effective campaigns.

Why Affiliate Case Studies Matter

Affiliate case studies are crucial for understanding the benefits and potential impact of affiliate marketing. They provide tangible evidence of success, demonstrating how businesses have driven revenue through affiliate partnerships.

In summary, affiliate marketing case studies offer inspiration, proven strategies, and evidence-based guidance. By analyzing real-world examples, businesses can gain insights to make informed decisions and drive successful outcomes with their affiliate marketing initiatives.

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How I Made $2,955/mo with Amazon Affiliate (Case Study 01)

If you’re looking to start generating passive income, then starting a blog and monetizing with an Amazon affiliate is one of the best ways. In this case study, I’ll share how I made over $2,955 per month in affiliate income through my very first Amazon affiliate blog.

I started my affiliate journey in 2015, and later in 2021, I started working on my first Amazon affiliate blog (yes, I ran a few automation sites early, but this was my first blog dedicated to Amazon affiliates).

I was quite passionate and eager to get results.

And I got results in the first three months! My blog started generating around $5-10/day in affiliate income, which was around $150-300/month.

Not bad for a newbie!

In the other 2-3 months, it increased to $2,231 ( combined data of all Amazon stores ), and after that, it hit over $3k for the first time ever! From there on, things just kept on growing.

Getting started with an Amazon affiliate is really easy, and you can start earning $5 to $10 a day within the first 4-5 months. You just need to pick a good, easy-to-rank niche for your website and then create a list of relevant keywords for your niche.

Once you choose your niche, you need to write and publish 2-3 posts a week (you can also use AI tools like Jasper.ai to increase efficiency and speed). After the initial 30-40 days, start building foundational links and then outreach for guest posts and contextual links.

That’s all you need to do to earn $2,955+ from an amazon affiliate. And if you want, you can hire our HeySERP team to build a DFY Amazon affiliate site for you!

In this study, I’ll show you exactly how I did it and what methods I used to grow my blog’s affiliate income so quickly.

To give you an idea of the scope of this case study, here’s an overview of what I’ll be covering:

Getting started with an Amazon affiliate
How I picked my niche
The starting phase of development
Doing keyword research & finding LSI keywords
The strategies I used to grow my traffic
How I increased my conversion rate
What tools and resources I used

…and many more!

So if you’re looking to start your own Amazon affiliate blog or website, then this case study is for you.

Let’s dive in!

What is an Amazon Affiliate

Before sharing my case study, let me give a brief overview of what Amazon affiliate is for those who are new to this concept.

Ok, so what is an Amazon affiliate? In short, it’s a program where you get a commission for promoting products on Amazon.com or any of their other international stores. It is a great way to monetize your blog or website and start generating passive income from it.

It’s one of the most popular affiliate programs because:

Amazon is a trusted brand with a great reputation
They offer a wide range of products in nearly every niche
The commissions are decent (usually around 4-8%)
And it’s relatively easy to get started

The commission rate may vary depending on the product category you promote on your website, but they usually range from 2.5% to 10%. And sometimes, you can even earn up to 20% commission on qualified sales (you can check standard commission rates here ).

To become an Amazon affiliate, click here and sign up for their affiliate program. After you sign up, you can start promoting products on your blog or website.

How I Make Niche Selection?

This is one of the most important decisions you’ll make before starting your first Amazon affiliate blog, and believe me, it’s not an easy decision.

The niche you choose will further determine the type of products you can promote, the keywords you’ll be targeting, and the overall direction of your blog. So it’s important to choose a profitable niche you’re passionate about.

There are many things you need to consider before making your selection, but here are the 3 most important ones:

Passion is one of the most important factors, and you need to make sure you’re passionate about the niche you choose.

Because it is your main focus, and you’ll spend a lot of time working on your blog and doing lots of research. And if you’re not passionate about the niche you choose, you’ll quickly get bored and give up (which happens to 90% of people)!

2. Potential

After the passion, you need to ensure that the niche you’re working on has a lot of potential to be profitable. It is really important because no one likes to waste 5 to 6 months on a blog that doesn’t generate money in the end.

To do this, you need to check the demand for the products you’re going to promote and see if people are actually buying those items.

You can use tools like AMZScout , Ahrefs , SEMrush , KWFinder , and Google Keyword Planner to get an estimated idea of certain keywords in your niche.

3. Competition

The last factor you need to consider before starting your Amazon affiliate blog is competition. You need to make sure there’s not too much competition in the niche you choose.

If there’s competition or if the first page has lots of high-quality blogs, it’ll be hard to rank your content and get organic traffic. Therefore, before starting your blog , you need to make sure your niche isn’t crowded with high-quality sites.

Aside from these, you also need to…

Determine what problems your website is solving and how it will stand out
Pick a good domain name (you can choose between EMD, PMD, or a branded domain)
Begin in-depth keyword research on topics you’re going to publish
Consider long-term strategies, etc.

Now, enough of these theoretical talks; let’s see how I pick my niches…

For niche research and checking the estimated traffic of keywords, I always use SEMrush. It’s because they have the largest database with the most accurate and up-to-date keywords.

Here, I’m using their “ Keyword Magic Finder ” tool, which works similarly to Ahrefs keyword explorer.

You can also use Ahrefs for keyword research – but after the recent price hike, I switched back to SEMrush. And if you’re looking for a SEMrush free trial , then you can grab a 14-day trial of Guru from here and a 30-day Pro trial from here .

Now, back to our niche selection part…

As I told you earlier, follow your passion. So, I’ve decided to start my search for the “Bike” niche here.

Once you’ve decided on the niche, enter the main keyword (i.e., bike) into the search box and hit enter. On the next page (as shown below), you’ll see different types of filters.

Here, you need to use some main filters to find the perfect keywords, and these filters are;

Keyword Difficulty (KD): You need to find keywords that are easy to rank, so I recommend you choose 0-30 KD.
Include: Here, you need to enter some related words. For example, in the “Bike” niche, I’ve added words like “best,” “vs,” and “review.” Adding these words will help you find more related keywords.
Exclude: You can also add some negative words to this filter; it’ll help you find more relevant keywords. For example, I’ve added words like “near” because I don’t want these types of unrelated keywords.

Depending on your needs, you’ll also find more filters. But these are the core ones that you need to consider. And when you hit enter, you’ll get a list of easy-to-rank keywords for your blog.

Now, manually check the ranking of websites on these keywords and see if there are any low-quality websites ranking for those keywords, and if there are, add the keywords to your list.

The Starting Phase of Your Amazon Affiliate Blogging Journey

You’ve seen how I select the niches and IMPORTANT low-competition keywords for my blogs. Now let’s see how to start your Amazon affiliate journey.

First of all, you need to get a suitable domain name and hosting and then set up your website. While registering your domain name, you also need to focus on a few things, like EMD, PMD, and brandable domains.

But what does it actually mean?

An exact match domain (EMD) is a type of domain name that matches your main keyword. For example, if your niche is “best car”, you can get a domain name with something like “bestcars.com”.

However, after the recent few updates, most importantly after the product review update and the helping content update , Google’s algorithms are constantly giving low preferences to sites with these types of domains.

Here’s what Google’s product review update says about publishing reviews on your website.

Having an EMD domain isn’t mandatory because it’s not the only ranking factor. If you’re looking to dominate the market in the long run and want to create a brand, then we do recommend getting a brandable domain name .

Lastly, if you’re interested in getting a domain name that includes your main keyword, then you can also consider getting a partial match domain (PMD). For example, if the main keyword of your niche blog is “best car,” then carreviews.com would be the perfect PMD for your blog.

After you decide on the name, the next thing is to register your domain name. For this, I strongly recommend choosing Dynadot or GreenGeeks (as GreenGeeks offers free domain names with their hosting plans – see the deal here ).

If you’re registering your domain name from Dynadot, you separately need to purchase a hosting plan and connect your domain to your hosting. In this case, I strongly recommend Cloudways hosting (you can get $30 free credits by using our exclusive Cloudways promo code ).

But if you’re thinking of starting with GreenGeeks , then you’ll get a free domain name with your hosting purchase.

✍️ Author’s Note:

Once you have the domain name of your choice, connect your domain to hosting and set up Cloudflare. After the setup, you need to properly configure SSL, caching, firewalls, and page rules for your WordPress website.

And if you’re new to Cloudflare and don’t know how to set it up properly, here’s a guide from Kinsta showing the proper steps for configuration.

Installing useful plugins and themes is another necessary part you need to do once you’ve installed WordPress on your domain name.

Here is a list of plugins I highly recommend for an Amazon affiliate website;

RankMath – Highly recommended for on-page SEO and technical SEO.
WP Rocket – The most recommended plugin for WordPress caching.
Easy Tables of Contents – Create a simple and easy-to-use table of contents for your website.
GP Premium – Helps enhance the features of the “GeneratePress” theme. Alternatively, you can use themes like Astra or Divi .
AAWP – Helps you increase your website’s conversions and sales.
UpdraftPlus – Prevent any unforeseen issues on your website by taking complete backups.
WP-Optimize – Helps in cleaning WordPress database for enhanced performance and speed.
TinyPNG – Recommended plugin for image optimization.

These are all the recommended plugins I use on my website.

After you’ve installed and configured these plugins on your website, you need to move towards other important features, such as setting up a webmaster, analytics, etc.

In-depth Keyword Research & Writing Content for Your Amazon Affiliate Website

Once you have finished building your website, you need to focus on creating content for it.

But before writing content, you first need to do in-depth keyword research and find LSI keywords and top competitors having low DR and DA. It’s because if you’re not targeting the right keywords, then all your efforts will go in vain, and you won’t be able to generate any traffic or sales from your website.

✍️ Author’s Note:

Before starting keyword research, you should have an understanding of your buyer’s persona, their intent behind searching for a particular keyword, and also the type of product they’re looking to buy.

You can use various free and paid tools for in-depth keyword research; some of the most popular ones are Ahrefs, SEMrush, KWFinder, and Ubersuggest.

I personally prefer using Ahrefs and SEMrush because they provide a complete overview of the keywords I want to target. However, you can use any of the tools mentioned above at your convenience.

After you find sites with low DR and DA, start copying their content and making it better.

Plus, always try to use proper keyword placements in your title, meta descriptions, H2 & H3 tags, etc., as it will help you improve your website’s SEO and also help Google index your pages faster.

For this, you can use tools like SurferSEO and MarketMuse for content optimization and tools like Jasper.ai for fast and efficient writing.

This is one of the easiest ways to rank several keywords on your website.

You also need to make sure the content you’re publishing follows proper guidelines , uses high-quality images, and has internal and external links , etc.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, try to publish an article every day or every two days to maintain good momentum.

On this blog, I have maintained a frequency of publishing an article every two days, which helps drastically increase the keyword positions in Google . Whenever I check Ahrefs’ keyword movement on my website, I see my keywords going UP and UP, and every day, there are MANY NEW KEYWORDS that my website has started RANKING for.

If you’re not good at writing or don’t have enough time to write, you can always hire a writer from a freelance content writing website. Just make sure you give them proper instructions about the type of content you want and also provide them with the target keywords you want to rank for.

You can also let our writers at HeySERP handle your content writing and blog management needs, starting from $0.045 per word for an optimized article.

AND ALWAYS MAKE SURE THE QUALITY OF CONTENT IS GOOD BEFORE HITTING THE PUBLISH BUTTON.

Now, you might be thinking, what’s next after content writing?

The answer is simple…

Start promoting your content on social media and start building backlinks…

After 30-50 days of starting our “ Project One ” website, we started working on the SEO part!

In the starting few days, we worked on building the foundation links for our blog. Building a solid foundation link is IMPORTANT for our website’s SEO and helps in increasing the visibility of our website on Google.

These foundation links can include the following:

Building comment links
Social bookmarking sites (high-quality sites only)
Niche Relevant Forum & Q&A Websites
Profile creating sites, and lastly
Web 2.0 sites.

Don’t build too many links in the starting days, as it will result in a Google penalty . Try to build one or two links per day and gradually increase the number of links per day as your website’s authority increases.

It is also important to be aware of natural anchor text distribution before building links to your website. For this, you can use tools like SEMrush , Anchor Text Generator by Linkio , and Wiki Grabber .

And to build these links, we’ve used a combination of both manual and automated methods.

But if you’re a newbie, I wouldn’t recommend trying automated methods. Despite that, if you’re doing so, make sure you know how to Disavow your spammy links .

Disavowing your links is important , especially when you’re creating links in bulk or not following the anchor text ratio properly.

And after building foundation links for around 20-30 days, we started building backlinks through guest posts and link roundups.

But, before starting with guest posts and contextual link building, it is important to do a competitor analysis to find out which websites are linking to your competitor’s website.

For this, you can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Majestic.

After analyzing our competitor’s backlinks , we made a list of websites that we need to target for link-building. You can use SEMrush’s free prospecting tool to find and reach high-quality websites for link-building ( Get a 14-day free SEMrush Guru trial ).

You can also use websites like HARO and Terkel to naturally get links from high-authority websites. I use Terkel because of its higher approval rates than HARO.

In case you have some custom requirements and want to get high-quality links for your website, you can try our link-building services from HeySERP.

We’ll help you get high-quality links from websites with a DA of 30+.

And that’s it…

This is how we did SEO for our experimental website on an Amazon affiliate and got significant results in a very short period.

Tools & Resources I’ve Used:

Domain Name: Dynadot
Hosting: DigitalOcean
Server Panel: ServerPilot
Finding Keywords: Ahrefs and SEMrush
Finding Content Gap: Ahrefs
Finding Low Competitive Sites: Ahrefs
Topic Cluster: WriterZen
Writing Blog Posts: Jasper.ai
Grammar: Grammarly and ProWritingAid
Agency : HeySERP
Paraphrasing: WordTune
NLP : SurferSEO
Email Outreaching: Lemlist
Email Finding: Hunter.io
Backlink Monitoring: Google Sheet Template
Finding Opportunities: SEMrush
Link Building Agency: HeySERP
Theme : GeneratePress
SEO Plugin : RankMath
Performance Plugin : WP Rocket
Image Compression : TinyPNG
Security : Wordfence
DB Optimization : WP-Optimize

Final Thoughts!

Building an amazon affiliate website and making it successful is not an easy task. It requires a lot of hard work, dedication, and patience.

But if you follow the steps that I’ve mentioned in this guide and put in the required effort, I’m sure you’ll be able to build a successful amazon affiliate website.

If you want to share your experience or have any questions regarding Amazon affiliate websites, feel free to leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to help you out. 🙂

Now it’s time to hear from you…

Number of posts: 145

Hi, I'm Sunny Kumar, a passionate tech enthusiast and a blogger from New Delhi, India. With a degree in IT from IIT-D and expertise in SEO, Cloud Computing, Telecom & Networking, and CEH, I specialize in various technical fields, including SEO, WordPress Development, and PC Building. And being a proficient WordPress user, I’m dedicated to delivering quality content and a remarkable user experience.

FTC Disclosure: Some of TheWPX links may contain affiliate links for which I receive a small compensation from sales of certain items made through these links at no extra cost to you… [Read More]

Case Studies

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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.

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!

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12 Month Amazon Affiliate Site Case Study – Exact Steps Revealed

Interested in following this strategy? Pickup a pre-built turnkey Amazon Affiliate site HERE (limited quantity and often sold-out but you can get on the wait list!)

This case study is hopefully the most actionable 12 month affiliate site case study ever published. The goal is to break down what was done over 52 weeks to show you exactly how we grew a website to over 11,000 unique visitors per month (revealing all the numbers down to the # of posts and blog posts made!).

Monetization Comment – This business was started with the intent of creating an Amazon Affiliate site to then push the sales of a physical product we would source. With my Amazon Associate account getting suspended it hurt this sites earnings A LOT! So definitely the earnings are not very impressive but the traffic results are.

Why drop a case study as ONE big post… one of the issues with case studies is that sometimes keeping the pace moving on the case study is difficult by keeping this quiet until I was ready to publish an entire years worth of updates with data it should be a useful complete read.

4 Main Methods Used on the Site

During the process of building out the site, we focused on 4 particular methods that helped to steer the site in the right direction. The idea with this case study was to do something a little different and stick to only a handful of tactics and document every single little step then only reveal the results once I was ready to publish a BIG case study post like this!

Great Keyword Research, Niche Research, and Solid Initial Site

Starting out with a great site was very important. Both the sitemap, initial content and site creation is important for our strategy.

Resource – Turnkey Affiliate Sites (often sold out) or Custom Affiliate Sites
Resource – How to build an Amazon affiliate site

Blog Commenting

Each week we try to do 5+ blog comments. This is simply going to articles that are relevant to the niche/topic and leaving a comment on their site. The key is, when you leave a good useful comment, you also leave your URL which will be linked to your name once published. Although these are nofollow links, we still believe they hold some value. If you are interested in learning more about blog commenting you should read this article.

Resource – Blog comment and guest post campaign procedure to follow (we never ended up doing any guest posting)

Article Posting

Each week I try to keep the site fresh by adding an article. Each article I create follows the ContentRefined process to ensure quality. If you are interested in learning more about the ContentRefined process you can go here .

Resource – How to systematically create great content! ( the ultimate guide to content creation at NichePursuits.com)
Resource – Done for You Content Marketing at ContentRefined.com

Use My PBN Links

At the start of building the site I worked on getting 1-2 links per week for our Use My PBN service, but after a few months I wanted to dial it down a bit and do 1 every other week. Use My PBN is a service I created where I built up a large network of PBN sites that have on average DA25 and PA30. I have seen good improvements with our sites as well as our clients sites when using these links. If you are interested in learning more about this service you can do so here .

Resource – How to build a PBN
Resource – Use My PBN

Editorial Links

Before starting this site, we had not used the editorial link building root, so we decided we wanted to try it out a few times. This is the process of getting backlinks from sites such as lifehack.org, huffingtonpost.com (now nofollow links), engadget.com etc. These links hold a lot of power as they come from some of the best sites on the internet, and when you have a link from it to your money site, Google really likes it. If you are interested in learning more about our editorial links you can find out more here .

Resource – Sometimes getting Videos Created can help make the site look better and allow more editorial links to be published – Buy links on major editorial sites here

Month by Month Update – In the section below I will a month by month update showing eactly what we did to built the site.

March 2016

Last March, my project manager came up to me and asked if we could build a site around a niche that she had been doing keyword research around. After taking a look at the niche, the competition and the keywords I decided it would be a worthwhile venture to take on with the intent of growing the affiliate site and then turning it into an Amazon FBA business. During this month we dug into keyword research more and found a handle of keywords that were low competition. We then took a few of those keywords and created 20 articles around them. We knew that the niche was going to involve a few silos so we planned to get 5 articles created per silo.

In April, we started to plan out how we were going to build and structure the site. We picked out a theme ( Luxe – from Thrive Themes ) and worked on getting it up and running. We then added the 20 articles (5 articles per each silo) to the side and gave it the proper category tag. For the menu, we added each category tag as its own. For the homepage, we added a monster post on the main keyword we wanted to rank for with internal links to the main pages for each silo.

After 2 weeks of the site being up, we started to do some off page as well as adding more content. For off page we were able to get 37 blog comments made.

During the last week 2 weeks of the month we started ranking and getting organic traffic to the site. By the end of the month we were able to get 42 organic searches to the site while ranking for 15 keywords.

In May, we wanted to continue on April’s upwards momentum so we did more content, backlinks and blog commenting. During this month we saw a great increase in the amount of keywords we were ranking for. We went from 42 organic traffic last month to a total of 171 this month. This month we added in an editorial link and 4 links from the Use My PBN service which had a great impact on our keywords and their rankings. We also were able to work on the internal linking structure of the site as we didn’t have to many in place during the previous months.

This month we had some great breakthroughs with our keywords and having some of them jumping to the top 20. One of the main keywords we are trying to rank went from 28th to 11th this month. Near the tail end of the month we started making our first few dollars with the site. This month we also were able to reach 356 organic searches which is just about double of last month.

This month we had a few down weeks put near the end of the month it started picking back up and improving again. This month we saw that a lot of our traffic was landing on a particular article and was getting click throughs to amazon on a specific product so we decided to think about getting our own similar product created. Again this month we saw a doubling of organic searches from last month, going from 356 to 725. Another one of our keywords had a good ranking increase over the month going from 32nd to 15th position.

August 2016

In the month of August we had a few positives to touch on. We had good growth with monetization from Amazon. Our rankings also had a positive uptick by increasing the number of keywords we are ranking by over 200.

We also started to look at outsourcing our product and looked on Alibaba . When looking at the best way to go about getting a company and your product created, we followed Scott Voelker’s and his article on how to find and source private label products . If you haven’t read it and are looking at getting into the FBA business it would be a great resource.

6 Month Update (March 2016 – August 2016)

September 2016

This month had a few negatives and a few positives. This month we made progress with our product outsourcing. We got 4 quotes back from suppliers and we created a weighted matrix chart to decide which ones we wanted to get samples from. We even got two samples, however one was a no right away.

We saw good growth this month in terms of monetization, however by the last week of the month our Amazon account got banned and so we lost a good source of revenue that we were hoping to have.

This month we also did a bit of design change on the site. The homepage, which once was a monster blog post is now laid out with videos, images and small descriptions on each of the silos our site talks about. We also added a call to action button that takes people to the monster post.

October 2016

This month I was able to get an average 156 organic visitors per day. When looking at the metrics for the site, I found that we had made some good progress, Page Authority 36 Domain Authority 25 Citation Flow 26 and Trust Flow 23.

We were having a LOT of issues with sizing for our product, we are still working with the one company to come up with a solution to solve this problem.

One of our main keywords went from 8th to 3rd this month.

November 2016

Monetization for the month also hit a new high at $164.04 (despite loosing Amazon Associates account!). This month we found a solution to the sizing issues on our outsourced product. I also hired a graphic designer to create the packaging design for the product.

December 2016

Almost increased the keywords I was ranking for by 1,000 in one week. As expected from a December month the monetization had some good weeks.

I also order 600 units of the product FINALLY! The product will take about a month to complete. We also incorporated the new business and signed up on Amazon Seller. In order to get the barcodes for the product I had to buy GTINS from GS1 . The product is being shipped to a third party company in the US where they will be labelled with their barcodes and sent to Amazon.

January 2017

Every day this month the site had received over 250 organic visitors. The site now reached over 6,000 keywords that it is ranking for, 845 of which are below 20.

The site has not been collecting any email addresses so for next month I decided to make that a priority, especially with our product being released soon.

Our product landed in USA and we asked for 3 units to be sent to us so that I can get pictures done and the listing created. I also got the shipping labels created and mailed to the company so that they can send the boxes with the units to Amazon.

February 2017

This month we were focusing on Amazon and getting everything setup. We ran into some issues with the shipping labels not being correct as the product was over the weight limit that the shipping label said.

The email list has been going well, the site now has an email list of 145 people. Later down the road we will be doing a free giveaway promotion with the audience and the email list.

12 Month Update

Overall in the last 12 months the site has been doing well. Not so much in terms of monetization as the site took a hit when my account was banned from Amazon.

However the traffic is growing and the amount of keywords the site is ranking for grows each week. Hopefully once the product goes live on Amazon there will be some traction and a few sales.

Traffic over the last 12 months:

We will do more updates in the future on this site and how the FBA part of it is going. This site should continue to grow with the continued weekly effort of editorial links , Use My PBN links , blog commenting and content plan by following the ContentRefined structure.

If you have any questions on anything in this case study please let me know!

About Jon Gillham

I am a husband, father of 3, engineer and a huge fan of developing systems to build useful and profitable businesses (mostly online). The reason I build online businesses is to provide financial independence for my family so I can spend time outside skiing and biking with my them.

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Comments (14)

Frustrating with the Azon account ban. But solid performance, otherwise. Love it. Love all of the deets. people should be able to take this study and implement it right away.

How come your Amazon account was banned?

Very helpful case study and to compare to my own sites.

Are all the blog comments pointed at the homepage? How do you go about anchor text (all same name/ different variations of same name/ different names)? Do you over put links in the comment box?

Why did it get banned and how did you get out of it?

Hi Celise it was unfortunately due to a partner on another business that spread to my business. I wrote about what happened and why it was suspended… https://websiteincome.com/amazon-associate-account-suspended/ and https://websiteincome.com/amazon-associate-account-closed/ .

Takes a lot of patience to wait for a whole year to publish such a complete case study, but i think it shows a complete picture of how a website is grown from scratch. Too bad about the Amazon stuff, and with the lower fees nowadays, perhaps FBA is the future of niche sites.

I found this very useful in terms of what number of articles/links etc. it takes but I feel this is an incomplete case study without a view on expenses (excluding FBA stuff) and time spent. I imagine you have made a loss on the website to date so surely this would have to be viewed as a failure. I get you may turn it around with the FBA angle as you have good traffic, but this is an affiliate case stud not an FBA one.

I also get there is the unknown variable of the amazon account being banned so I feel to make this a better case study you should at least try an estimate what that loss equated to financially and then with the expenses you could determine the profitability of the site.

Hi Oliver in terms of earnings I am definitely at a loss in terms of cashflow but ahead in terms of if I liquidated it I would more then cover my costs. Your points are valid but I chose to use concrete numbers and some people will choose to do a bunch themselves and outsource other parts of it so that was my reason for leaving it off. Appreciate the comments!

Great information.

Hi John, detailed information and easy to understand the way you build a steady income. I am new to this market and interested in learning techniques. Please let me know that, end of 12 months, how many articles were posted? and how you regain your azon account?

Thanks for the reply.

It could happen to anyone, including a PRO like Jon, Ben. Especially if you’re testing new, different things, Amazon would be ideal in this case. Amazon works with you, unlike other programs that ban you forever with little to no chance of appeal. Having a strong basket as income first and having Amazon, Adsense or any long term investment (401k, TSP, stocks) is ideal in my opinion.

A useful post. What did the Amazon account got banned for?

Apologies, comments didn’t load originally so I missed your explanation above, thanks.

Where were the majority of these links pointed towards? And how did you decided on whether to point them towards the homepage or inner pages (and how did you decided which inner page?)

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.

The competition for the niche in 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:

More on the niches' top rankers via Ahrefs.

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 stats for the 301 redirect that was used.

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.

Traffic results after the 3rd month of link building.

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.

Traffic results after 6 months of building links.

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.

Traffic results after 8 months of link building.

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.

Traffic results after 10 months of building backlinks.

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…

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[Case Study]- 3 Real life examples of winning Affiliate Websites

Table of Contents

Affiliate marketing is an effective way to monetize your website traffic because it allows you to present your visitors with offers that they are likely to be interested in. And, it has been a long-standing monetization strategy on the web.

Affiliate simply means generating revenue from traffic . Being an affiliate in the internet marketing business can be difficult. However, keeping on motivated is an important part of moving your business forward.

[pullquote align=”normal”]“You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”- Seth Godin [/pullquote]

That was the new strategy affiliate marketers had to hold and implement to continue to succeed.

In this case study, we’ll show how Affiliate marketing is a viable business model .

Affiliate Success Stories

Here are examples of successful websites monetized with other affiliate programs .

#1 The Wire Cutter

The Wire Cutter is one of the Internet’s favorite review sites for electronics, gadgets and consumer goods.

Today, The WireCutter focuses on doing dedicated testing and research to create in-depth and useful product buying guides to help readers pick the best products in a wide range of categories.

Since its birth in 2011, the Wire Cutter has grown into one of the top 6,000 sites online. The affiliate website was reported to be acquired for over $30,000,000 in cash by The New York Times in October 2016.

Founder: Brian Lam ( @blam ), a former Editorial Director at Gizmodo
Niche: Consumer product reviews
Goal: To help people find the best product in every user category
Key Challenge: To design innovative tests and select the best product possible, without being influenced by commercial interests.

Content Strategies

The Wirecutter’s success is clear once you read any one of their reviews. They do fun tests with products that are so good; they have a very high chance of successful in each space.
For example, their review of best wirless earbud headphones under $50 is on such another level that all content makers should use The Wirecutter as the premier example of what a product review piece should be.
Never seen a product review, or any blog post for that matter, with over 750 comments.
It looks like they start by reading reviews on Amazon and other major online marketplaces to narrow down the best products of a category and then they actually buy them to run their own tests to come to their own conclusion.
As seen in another example of the Best Home Bluetooth Speaker , this allows them to create much better, in-depth content than all of their competitors. And it works.
It has over 11.4k referring domains and is just about leading Google for every “best product” search terms in the gadgets and electronic space.
They have expanded by starting a sister site, The Sweethome , that is also doing just as well for home-focused products.

How they make money?

The Wire Cutter explains its monetization model on its “How to Support Us” page, which builds trust with their audience through transparency. They mostly make money from Amazon’s Associate program but also use affiliate programs from various other retailers and Skimlinks .

Some different tactics they use to monetize include:

“Best of” product pages for each category and each recommendation comes with an associated Amazon link.
They use quite a lot of in-content affiliate links to the recommended products throughout the article.
They also include a callout of their best pick at the end of the review

Key Takeaways

The Wire Cutter does just one thing: in-depth reviews builds trust with your audience and significantly helps improve conversions.
It uses a simple page with a list of best items in each category.
Quality > Quantity: The Wire Cutter’s tests are so innovative and extensive that manufacturers sometimes ask it for advice on how to improve their products. It also writes only 6-12 posts a month.
In fact testing products gives the ability to create much better content than most other niche sites allowing better opportunities for getting links, traffic, and conversions.

#2 Snapsort

Snapsort offers an online platform that allows its users to find and compare cameras by its features.

The site uses a data-driven method to produce their review and comparison content. Most of their pages are less than 1000 words but they still rank very high for their targeted keywords.

What they do basically is collecting specs and features of digital cameras on the market and then uses that data to generate side-by-side comparison pages like Canon vs. Nikon

This is different to the common approach of creating in-depth and long-form content that most people follow.

Founder: Alexander Black , Christopher Reid
Niche: Digital Camera Comparison and Reviews
Goal: To help people find the best digital camera by comparing with other products.
Key Challenge: To stand out in a niche and add credibility and trust for the user.

They publish reviews of various digital cameras and navigating the site is easy to find what you’re looking for.
Using their “popular recommendations” section sorted by category makes it easy for people to find a camera based on their needs and the ultimate goal of a camera.
It likes to use the camera’s features as the main review standards. for example the Nikon D750 review
They compare these features to other cameras in its class in order to give a more accurate rating, which is a great way to rate technology.
Their camera vs. camera pages also attracts a ton of search traffic by ranking highly for thousands of keywords like “ Nikon D750 vs. NikonD800 “.
To attract international traffic, they provide the ability to translate the site into a total of 6 different languages.
Also, you can change the prices that displayed to 11 different currencies and the affiliate links change to the selected country.

Customers have the choice to buy the products through affiliate links to Amazon, B&H Photo-Video, and/or Adorama. They automatically change the affiliate links based on the selected country as well for more optimization.

Here are some tactics they use:

Affiliate links to three different online dealers giving the user the choice where to buy
Automatically switch links based on selected country (11 available)
They also accept advertising requests in various forms to extra affiliate income
Translating your site into multiple languages can boost income over time
Using custom graphics or designs builds branding and credibility
Finding a good way to rate and compare products can help make the user make a better choice and therefore buy
You don’t always need to create long-form written content in order to rank high in Google. What’s more important is the ability to help the users with exactly what they want.

#3 Smart Passive Income

Pat Flynn from The Smart Passive Income Blog, where he conducts income experiments and shares the results.

Now, Pat has multiple income streams from advertising, sponsorship and his own products, a large percentage of his income in the start and over the years is through promoting other people’s products.

Founder: Pat Flynn
Niche: Blogging, passive income, and online business
Goal: He reveals all of his online business and blogging strategies, income sources and killer marketing tips and tricks so you can be ahead of the curve with your online business or blog.
Key Challenge : To show you what’s possible when you truly become a specialist in your market.

He has been updating his blog pretty often with fresh content every week sharing his progress and lessons learned while building his own online business.
One of his first major successes was the Niche Site Duel he did with a few other bloggers in 2010. The content of the Niche Site Duel was so good it attracted tons of new traffic for him and helped solidify his place in the blogging world.
Around the same time, Pat started the Smart Passive Income Podcast . He has discovered the podcast is now the number one driver of new subscribers to his brand.
Pat’s mantra is to “be everywhere” and has used this idea to grow his audience very speedily.
He also has a YouTube channel he updates weekly and self-published multiple books.

Pat publishes all the sources of his income in complete monthly income reports.

In March 2017, Pat made $258,737.45 with a profit of $212,117.09. In specific, Pat makes most of his money as an affiliate recommending marketing products with Bluehost being the most profitable.

He also launched 2 new courses in March which contributed more than $150,000 to his total revenue.

Here are some tactics he uses:

He publishes product reviews and does affiliate promotions to his email list.
The income reports, which are some of his most popular posts, contain affiliate links
He also creates in-depth video tutorials teaching specific online marketing strategies while representing the tools that he uses on-screen.
He has a dedicated resource page in the main navigation for his top affiliate products
Now he is aiming more on making new software products for his audience as an additional income stream
Being the #1 expert in a niche can be really profitable when you earn your audience’s trust
Putting out content in multiple channels increases your chance of success
Leverage relationships with other bloggers and authority sites to build your audience
Diversify your monetization strategy for constant income and growth
Don’t be afraid to put yourself front and center, be relevant, and give a good reason why your audience should follow you

There are successful affiliates out there, but these examples are crushing it. If you want to be the next eight-figure affiliate superstar, look at their business models.

Here are a couple of takeaways to get you started:

Huge affiliate marketing success stories take time. These sites weren’t built overnight or ripped from a spy tool .
You go to work with proven brands or become one.
You can’t just write great content. You have to be a great marketer to make it work.

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Last updated: October 8, 2023
5 minute read

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Helping Choose Wheels Grow 124%

Their site had been hit with a Google penalty and traffic was down 80%. See how we helped one affiliate partner to recover [and grow 124% in 6 months].

Written by Pat Ahern

Pat Ahern is the Managing Partner at Intergrowth®. He breaks down SEO/content marketing concepts & strategies into layman’s terms to show you how to grow your business. Outside of work, Pat spends his time rock climbing, traveling, and enjoying the best IPAs that he can get his hands on.

The team at Choose Wheels came to us with a problem. Their site had been hit with a manual penalty from Google and traffic was on the decline.

For those who aren’t familiar: Choose Wheels is a website that provides comprehensive guides on personal transportation devices (electric scooters, electric bikes, and much more). Their business model focuses on building partnerships with companies that sell these devices and collecting a portion of each sale that they help to generate.

Choose Wheels isn’t like most successful affiliate marketing websites. They don’t have a massive monthly ad spend. They don’t rely on sending people to landing pages through Facebook Ads to make money.

Instead, they rely on great content.

Choose Wheels focuses on educating their target readers through writing informative product reviews and other useful guides. Their affiliate program focuses on partnering with online retailers like Amazon and collect affiliate commissions when they help their customers to make an informed purchase. As a result, search engines have historically made up 70% of their total site traffic.

The previous site owner was involved in a private blog network (“PBN”, for short), which was uncovered by Google’s webspam team several months after the current owner took over.

Over the course of the next 2 months, Choose Wheels lost 80% of their organic traffic.

Choose Wheels came to us shortly after their penalty had been lifted to learn about our content marketing services and see how we could help recover some of their lost organic traffic.

This affiliate marketing case study delves into exactly what we accomplished together.

Marketing Strategy

We started with our Discovery Process to learn about their business goals, primary competitors, and more.

During our initial analysis, we identified 3 primary issues with the Choose Wheels site (in addition to the PBN penalty):

We had a much weaker backlink profile than our primary 3 competitors
Much of the content on the existing site was becoming outdated
On-page metrics like bounce rate and average session duration were underperforming

We knew that we had an uphill battle ahead of us. Given these issues, our content marketing strategy consisted of the following action plan:

Short term:

Write monthly blog articles that targeted long-tail search phrases (to drive more qualified visitors as we rebuilt our site authority)
Revamp existing posts on the site with the greatest search ROI potential to maximize organic traffic and website conversions
Focus on building our site authority through targeted link outreach to relevant publishers
Write quarterly premium blog articles that targeted high-value search phrases with a high search volume (to drive significant long-term search ROI as we scaled our site authority)

Related: learn about 9 actionable affiliate marketing SEO tactics that we use every day.

The Implementation Process

Kicking off the seo foundation.

We analyzed the competitive landscape to learn about the search positioning and top-performing content of our largest competitors. Next, we explored Reddit and Quora to see what topics our target customers were most interested in. With this, we built our editorial calendar for the first 6 months of content.

We optimized the 15 pages on the site with the highest potential for organic traffic improvements. We re-wrote title tags and meta descriptions; incorporated term frequency, inverse document frequency (TF-IDF); enhanced site speed , and much more.

Also see: 7 Common Mistakes Every Affiliate Marketer Needs to Avoid

Strategic content creation

Our content creation process started with targeting long-tail search terms that the Choose Wheels website would see immediate traction on.

We analyzed top-performing content for each topic to identify the key success factors for each post. Our team then published long-form articles and promoted them across relevant social communities.

One by one, our articles started to outrank authoritative sites in search results for high-value search terms.

Managing link outreach

We launched our first link building campaign to drive high-quality backlinks and boost our site authority.

This consisted of reaching out to 1,000 industry-leading bloggers who had written about or linked to content that was similar to our own. We started discussions and built relationships. In the process, we encouraged 10 of those bloggers to link to various articles on the site each quarter, and dozens more to share our articles on social media.

Revamping underperforming content

Next was the process of revamping underperforming content.

We used our Click-Through-Rate Calculator to identify the pages on the site that were losing out on the most organic traffic. In other words, our team found the pages that were seeing far fewer clicks than the industry average for their given position in search results.

content marketing revamps for affiliates

We re-optimized title tags and meta descriptions for each of these to maximize the ROI of each of these rankings.

Next, our team looked at pages with a high bounce rate or low average session duration.

We broke up walls of text and revised outdated content to improve readability and usefulness to their target audience.

Related: download our content marketing playbook to see our step-by-step walkthrough of how to scale your online presence.

Organic traffic took a small dip in the first two months of partnering together as we built our SEO foundation and kicked off the first quarterly campaign.

However, everything started coming together in our 3rd month of working together.

We had implemented our SEO foundation, published our first 2 months of blog posts, began to revamp underperforming content, and kicked off our first link building campaign.

The result was that organic traffic climbed 20.2% in April 2018. It was clear that we were headed in the right direction.

The Results

We continued to implement our initial strategy for the next 4 months. Here’s what we’ve seen so far.

Target keyword visibility (how well Choose Wheels ranks for their top-priority keywords) has increased by 459%.

Affiliate marketing keyword ranking growth

As target keyword rankings improved, so too did their monthly organic traffic. Organic traffic, which drives 76% of their total website traffic, is up 121% in 2018.

Affiliate organic traffic growth metrics

As a whole, website traffic has increased by 124% this year, as of August.

Related: think Choose Wheels is an outlier? See how content marketing helped another partner to grow 487.1% (so far).

One important thing to note is that massive increases in organic traffic often result in lower-quality site visitors. This can often be seen by worse bounce rates, average session durations, and conversion rates.

In the case of Choose Wheels, on-page performance saw massive improvements.

Bounce rate and average session duration improved by 15% and 40%, respectively. All the while goal conversions increased by 526%!

We couldn’t be more excited about the growth that Choose Wheels has seen since partnering with us.

Looking for a partner to help you scale your online business? Let’s see if we’re the right partner for you .

SCALE YOUR ORGANIC TRAFFIC

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Niche site case study: my first three amazon affiliate sites.

NB: You can now read my second niche site case study

I have started branching out into the world of Amazon affiliate sites hoping to increase my online income.

I have been working very hard on this for just under two months and I am happy to say that I am now the proud owner of a small PBN and two Amazon affiliate sites – one finished for the time being and the other nearly there. I am also close to starting a third Amazon affiliate site. As you can imagine, I have been working pretty damn hard! Especially as I need to keep my travel blog running at the same time, while also travelling and dealing with my kids.

Anyway, more about that in the monthly update. This post is to keep my commitment to start posting more regularly and to share my latest venture with you – that of trying to make money through niche sites. If you are confused by what I am talking – keep reading I will define this below.

This post is my first in a new series about my first three Amazon affiliate sites. Hopefully it will be a very successful series since I hope the sites will be successful, but time will tell. If nothing else, we can all learn from my mistakes! As I said, I currently have two online and a third one is mostly planned. The two online have only been online in the last fortnight so they are very very new.

But first, what are niche sites, money sites, PBNs and expired domains?

Niche Sites and Money Sites

Niche sites are basically sites built around a certain topic. For example, you could say that my main site, WheresSharon.com, is a niche site about family travel. Generally when people are talking about niche sites in the context that I am currently, they mean sites built around a niche (generally a small specific one, but not always) that are purposefully built to earn money. Usually this income is from advertising, such as adsense, or affiliate programs, such as Amazon.

Niche sites can be many shapes and sizes. Some are ultra small, maybe only about ten pages, about a very specific niche. Others can be massive, like WheresSharon (over 1000 pages although not all are live at the moment).

Money sites refer to sites that are built to earn money. So if I build a site about moisturising creams, for example, and link out to Amazon, then this niche site (where the niche is moisturising creams) is also my money site. Not all sites are built to earn money directly.

Expired Domains

Expired domains are domains that were used for a site but are now available to purchase. Just because a domain name expires and is no longer used does not mean that it loses all its links or authority in Google’s eyes. Many, many, many domains expire every day and many of them already have a great link profile. Also many have a spammy link profile – ensure you do some research before purchasing one. Buying an expired domain that already has a good link profile can be a good way to quickly create sites that already have great authority. These can be used for money sites, but often they are used to build a private blog network…

Private Blog Network (PBN)

A private blog network is a set of sites that have been built specifically to use to link build to a money site. These sites are usually built on expired domains. This way within a few hours you can have a site that has the potential to have great authority links without having to go build any links yourself.

The idea is to build a series of sites on expired domains, ideally with the expired domain being in a similar niche to your money site. Google attaches more link juice to relevant sites linking to your money site.

They are called private blog networks because usually a network of sites is required to produce enough link juice to help a money site rank well in google. I have been told 5-10 sites in a PBN for a single money site is ideal.

Why use a PBN? The idea is that then you have total control over your links to your money site. When you pay other people for links, you don’t know exactly what will happen. If Google changes it rules, you can easily change links on your own sites.

You could create a PBN to help give link juice to any site, it doesn’t have to be an affiliate site. I could do this process to help gives WheresSharon a boost. I don’t and I won’t though as it is already going well by itself without me doing any link building and there is some risk associated with any type of link building – if google discovers you are doing it, your site can be deindexed. For a new site, this is a risk I am happy to take. It is not a risk I want to take with my main cash cow and labour of love.

Why amd I building three sites?

Everything I am reading about building niche sites at the moment is saying that sites are taking a long time to rank well in Google – about six months! So I feel pressure to get at least a few up as quick as possible so they can start earning credibility with Google. I also had quite a few niche site ideas that I liked, and each of the sites have taken a different angle in aspects such as how competitive the keyword is, how many searches there are and how big I see the site growing. I feel these three sites will be a good experiment for me and, at the end of it, I will know whether to bother continuing with Amazon affiliate niche sites or not. If I do continue, I will have a better idea of what to target.

All my niche sites are in the parenting niche. I am certainly not an expert in any of them, but I do have some vague idea thanks to being a parent. My PBN is built around this niche. I am not going to reveal the sites, as I am weary of copycats and negative SEO. The KC I mention is keyword competitiveness and it is based on using Long Tail Pro keyword tool (which I love). Basically, the lower the better. Here is a brief introduction!

Site 1: 5,000 monthly searches, KC: 34

The keyword competitiveness for this site was a bit higher than I would have liked, but the product is related enough to travel that I have already been able to get some good links from some travel blogging buddies and I hope to get more. I think it is definitely a bonus to choose a niche where you know lots of people with sites in that area. I do not want any footprint, so I am avoiding the temptation to put a link from WheresSharon.

This site is already up and running with a great look and feel (even if I do say so myself!), 7 product reviews and a detailed home page, buying guide and comparison chart. I am leaving it at that at the moment, but I plan to make time in a few weeks to add some more articles.

For this site, I tried outsourcing six of the reviews via iWriter. They were mostly great and overall I would have been quite happy if I had realised how iWriter worked before posting the job. Six different people writing the reviews meant that even with a strict template and example, I ended up with six slightly different reviews and I had to rewrite them all to make them more consistent.

Site 2: 1,900 monthly searches, KC:28

The searches are not high for this, but the KC seemed more achievable and the product is quite pricey so I will not need to make many sales to make money.

The site is currently live with about 6 articles, including the main ones. I have a list of six other ones to post, then I will concentrate more fully on getting my third site up. I am writing all of these articles myself. I am trying to write one a night.

This site may have an advantage as it is actually using an expired domain. This was completely accidental! I didn’t realise until I was building it and I noticed it had a DA of 9 and PA of 22 in my moz toolbar. I was worried initially that it might have some spammy links, but thankfully its link profile looks fine. This was a lucky purchase! In future, I will definitely check out domains before I buy them just in case. I would hate to build a whole site on an expired domain and not realise it has a bad link profile.

Site 3: Main keyword (for now) 4,400 searches, KC: 26

This site is still being planned and I have many ideas of how I will make it work. The other two sites will be small niche sites, but I am hoping to grow this into a large niche site. I plan for it to be a more general niche with me targeting more specific niches within the site. I will start with one of these specific niches. I already have a long list of keywords I would like to target overall and I feel this site has the most potential, but it will also be the most work.

I hope to get a skeleton site up in the next week with some articles.

How did I pick these keywords?

I basically used a process from another blogger which I have since not found to be the best so I no longer link to this (updated after first publication) using the AmaSuite tools which allowed me to quickly find good, recommended and popular products on Amazon.

Click Here to Download a Checklist of the 7 Steps to Building a Money Making Niche Site!

I did run into some problems, though. I only recently discovered an absolutely amazing case study on Niche Pursuits where the expert, Spencer, teaches his student and fan, Perrin, how to build an Amazon affiliate site from scratch. It is probably the most useful resource I have come across with the million and ones things I have read about this topic. One of the many things I learned was that normal SEO rules do not apply when it comes to eCommerce sites .

My husband was originally working on a third site when I read about this where the search terms were completely dominated by eCommerce sites so we had to scratch this. I was a bit annoyed as I had heard other authorities saying it was a good sign when search results were dominated by eCommerce sites and to ignore search results with already established niche sites which was the opposite of Spencer’s advice. At least we hadn’t gone further down that path. However, I do think the search results for my first two keywords are more dominated by eCommerce sites than I would like. I probably wouldn’t have chosen them had I known that before I started. However, now that they are already up, I feel I may as well continue. At least they are not totally dominated.

What have I learned so far?

I have learned so much. A few months ago, I had never even heard of PBNs, expired domains, niche sites, etc and now I have built some! I think I am improving my technique to research keywords all the time. I am now very quick at signing up for domain names, hosting and building new WordPress sites thanks to my PBN. I am definitely glad of both my IT and writing background through this process.

I have also hired my first freelancers through oDesk and have mostly had success thanks to following a great article by Lewis at Cloud Income about how to hire cheap writers. They have written the vast majority of my PBN articles.

I wish I had come across the information earlier on Niche Pursuits about SEO with eCommerce sites that I mentioned above. However, I have been doing A LOT of reading as well as a PBN course, so at some point I just had to start.

Next steps?

I am going to continue slowly link building for Site 1, finish off Site 2 and start Site 3. I actually go to Singapore in a week’s time for a week and I also have many travel blogging obligations around that, so I will not get as much time to work on this as I would like. Still, I am hopeful I will have something to report again soon. I also hope to post about how I built each of these niche and PBN sites and how I am going about the beginning of my link building.

Read my next update or skip ahead to my second niche site case study .

You can also find more posts on my case studies and niche sites here .

Any questions or advice?

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate link to products that I use and personally recommend. If you decide to purchase any of them, I would love it if you could support my blog by using these links.

Best Travel Affiliate Marketplace? My Travelpayouts Review

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About the Author

Sharon is passionate about working online and helping others to follow in her footsteps. She started blogging in 2005, but became serious about it when she left Australia with her young family at the end of 2014 determined to grow an online business. She succeeded by becoming a SEO and affiliate marketing expert and now supports her family of 5 to live their dream lifestyle. She has a degree in web development, a graduate diploma of education (secondary teaching) and consumes everything SEO. She loves putting her teaching diploma to good use by teaching other bloggers how to have the same success that she has had.

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COMMENTS

Affiliate Marketing Case Studies: 15 Examples for Success
Affiliate Marketing Case Studies: 1. Going From Zero To $10K In Affiliate Marketing Revenue 2. Helping Choose Wheels Grow 124% Case Study 3. Zero to $20k/month In a Year 4. How I Made $16,433 With One Product 5. Amazon Niche Site Project 4: Own The Yard 6. Amazon Site Earns $2,000/month with 100 Articles 7. How We Sold An 18-Month-Old Site For Mid 6 Figures 8.
Affiliate Marketing Case Study (from Zero to $10k Per Month)
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%
How to Make Money from an Amazon Affiliate Website (Case Study)
How to Rank Your Amazon Affiliate Website. This is the "most important" part if you are fully convinced that you want to start with an Amazon Affiliate website and make money from it. In my opinion, content plays only 10-20% role in case of new websites (while there are some exceptions too), but the whole game of SEO is all about backlinks ...
Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Zero to $20k/month in a Year
Nick Loper, Alex Goldberg, and Healy Jones Nick Loper, Alex Goldberg, and Healy Jones. $50k a Month Online in 2 Years $50k a Month Online in 2 Years. Send me more money-making ideas. 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!
7 Affiliate Marketing Examples & Why They Work So Well
If you haven't heard, Wirecutter is a giant affiliate marketing website that sold for $30 million in 2016 and made over $20 million in 2018. It's most well known for doing product reviews ... We also did a case study on RTINGs.com to see what made it so successful. Here are the takeaways:
Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
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. ... 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 ...
Affiliate marketing case studies: examples for success
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.
Amazon Affiliate Website Case Study ($2,000/mo. with 100 articles)
His popular "Niche site profits" course has helped thousands follow his footsteps in creating simple niche sites that earn big. Awesome case study of an Amazon affiliate website earning $2,000 per month with only 100 articles. This is impressive by a guy who knows how to launch and build awesome niche websites.
Strategic Growth for a Video Gaming Affiliate Site: From Ground Zero to
This case study outlines the transformative journey of an affiliate website in the competitive video gaming sector, from its inception in 2016 through a period of inactivity, to a robust revival in 2022. Our strategic overhaul was centered around amplifying profitability and securing a dominant online presence.
Learn everything about Affiliate Marketing Case Study and Influencers
In summary, affiliate marketing case studies offer inspiration, proven strategies, and evidence-based guidance. By analyzing real-world examples, businesses can gain insights to make informed decisions and drive successful outcomes with their affiliate marketing initiatives.
Wirecutter SEO Case Study: 5 Ways to Win at Affiliate Marketing
4. Keep your content up to date. No matter which affiliate niche you're in, the business landscape, product development, and prices are constantly evolving. And you should reflect that in your content as well because some product recommendations can get outdated quite fast.
The Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing in 2024
For example, if an affiliate is in a program where they make 100 sales per month, the average sale price is $100, and the commission rate is 5%, their earnings would be: Monthly Earnings = 100 sales/month x $100/sale x 0.05 = $500/month. However, this is a very simplified example.
[Case Study] Flipping an Affiliate Website for $136K in 16 Months
The goal of this case study is to share our methods and concepts detailing how we approach the process of buying and selling websites as a scalable process. Here are some of the essential facts about the site and the sale. Niche: General Amazon Affiliates; Site Created: May 2014; Site Acquired: April 2017 for $ 52,256; Monetization: Amazon ...
How I Made $2,955/mo with Amazon Affiliate (Case Study 01)
Getting started with an Amazon affiliate is really easy, and you can start earning $5 to $10 a day within the first 4-5 months. You just need to pick a good, easy-to-rank niche for your website and then create a list of relevant keywords for your niche. Generating over $2,955/mo from Project 1.
Case Studies and Success Stories by Affiliates and Bloggers
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. Read more.
5 Success Stories from Affiliate Marketers
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.
Case Study: Making $19 263/ Month With an Amazon Affiliate Content Site
Case Study: Making $19 263/ Month With an Amazon Affiliate Content Site in 14 Months — a $900 000 Case Study . ... content site and scaled it to the point where it now makes him $19 200 per month in passive income through the Amazon affiliate program. This site was originally making $371 per month at the time when James bought it, but just 14 ...
Affiliate Site Case Study
Is there such a thing as 'the perfect affiliate website'? In this video I use The Wire Cutter as a case study and assess just how they remain competitive acr...
12 Month Amazon Affiliate Site Case Study
This case study is hopefully the most actionable 12 month affiliate site case study ever published. The goal is to break down what was done over 52 weeks to show you exactly how we grew a website to over 11,000 unique visitors per month (revealing all the numbers down to the # of posts and blog posts made!). Monetization Comment - This ...
Affiliate SEO Case Study
Get Started. 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 ...
[Case Study]- 3 Real life examples of winning Affiliate Websites
In this case study, we'll show how Affiliate marketing is a viable business model. Affiliate Success Stories. Here are examples of successful websites monetized with other affiliate programs. #1 The Wire Cutter. The Wire Cutter is one of the Internet's favorite review sites for electronics, gadgets and consumer goods.
SEO Case Studies: Insights into Affiliate Marketing Success Stories
The case studies reveal that effective SEO strategies have led to substantial increases in traffic, sales, and overall profitability in affiliate marketing ventures. The use of optimized content ...
My 1 Year Old Amazon Affiliate Website Making $3,000 Per Month
The site also made some money via some other affiliate programs managed by Commission Junction.. The site made $43.20 via Commission Junction affiliate sales in August.. In total the site made: $2,872.51 from Amazon Associates; $515.13 from Google AdSense; $43.20 from Commission Junction
Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Helping Choose Wheels Grow 124%
This affiliate marketing case study delves into exactly what we accomplished together. Marketing Strategy. We started with our Discovery Process to learn about their business goals, primary competitors, and more. During our initial analysis, we identified 3 primary issues with the Choose Wheels site (in addition to the PBN penalty):
Niche Site Case Study: My First Three Amazon Affiliate Sites
NB: You can now read my second niche site case study. I have started branching out into the world of Amazon affiliate sites hoping to increase my online income. I have been working very hard on this for just under two months and I am happy to say that I am now the proud owner of a small PBN and two Amazon affiliate sites - one finished for the time being and the other nearly there.

Affiliate Marketing Case Studies: 15 Examples for Success

Affiliate Marketing Case Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is an Affiliate Marketing Case Study?

Are Case Studies Good for Affiliate Marketing?

Read More Case Studies

Affiliate Marketing Case Study Examples Summary

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

Affiliate Content Site Case Study

Summary Stats

2020 Numbers

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2022 Numbers

Costs to date

Income to date

Traffic to date

Timeline and Learnings

August 2020

Key Learning

September 2020

October 2020

November and December 2020

January 2021

February and March 2021

April and May 2021

June-September 2021

October-May 2022

Current Valuation

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

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Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

1. Grasping the Basics

What is Affiliate Marketing?

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Key Players

Why You Should Get Into Affiliate Marketing

It’s Easy to Get Into

It’s Low-Cost

It’s Low-Risk

It’s Easy to Scale

How Affiliates Get Paid

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS)

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL)

Pay-Per-Action (PPA)

Chapter 2: Setting the Right Foundations

Identifying Your Niche

Find Your Passions