My biggest affiliate project to date

[Dontwannaberich]

Intro:
I started my IM journey around 6 years ago when I first stumbled upon this forum. At that time I had no experience in marketing, SEO, websites or anything remotely related. Since then I've created several affiliate websites, tried to create my own product (which failed), amazon merch, started a small web agency, done bunch of consulting/freelance gigs and my "latest" project was an ecommerce store that is my main project since a few years back. While I love my store there's no denying that running a legit ecommerce business comes with a lot responsibilities, both to your partners and customers. I can sometimes miss the good old days when I just sat in my tiny office and worked on my own projects, not having to deal with anyone but myself. And that's the reason why I am here, to have my very own project where I am the sole owner (at least for now).

The project:
Back when I first started I had no clue what I was doing and I still managed to pull in $500-$1000 after a few months. Seeing as 6 years has passed and I've gain a whole lot more knowledge, I am aiming to take this website to the $10,000/monthly mark over the coming months/years. I don't have a time frame since this is a side project, but I am hoping to be earning at least a few K's per month next year. The project will be a larger affiliate website within a niche I enjoy (unlike my other affilaite projects so far).

Quick facts:

• Broad niche with tons of possibilties to narrow down
• Will be monetized with AdSense (or similar) & affiliate offers for a start
• Most of the work will be outsourced
• Traffic will come from SEO and paid ads
• New domain

What I've done so far:
I bought the domain and put up some content back in July last year, so it's been sitting indexed for a while which is good. I've also started creating a proper website structure based on my keyword research and so far it's looking like it will be my biggest project to date, with easily over 100 articles on just one topic.

What's next:
I have to finish up the structure and set a priority list on which articles need to be written first. When I have that list I will begin searching a decent writer and let him or her start churning out content for me.

Updates will come when I feel like it.

 

[Sandie2018]

Good luck on your journey. You seem to know what you are doing.

 

[praetserge]

Good luck with your journey.
Quick question... what is your backlink strategy?

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Good luck with your journey.
Quick question... what is your backlink strategy?

Thanks. The strategy for now is to mainly build content for the website, links will come later and most likely naturally, at least for a website like this. I will be promoting the website on paid ads and via niche forums, so I don't think getting natural links will be too difficult.

One thing I forgot to mention is that this website is already ranking in the SERPs and getting a dozen or so impressions per month. It's worth mentioning I don't have a home page (literally just an h1) and the content that's posted is about 500 words long.

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Another update:
So my other company got hit by a lot more taxes than expected, so the money I was originally going to use for content will have to wait for a while. Not a big problem and maybe, in the end, it will work out the best as I will have to choose carefully what I want to write about.

I think the biggest difference between this site and my old ones is that I can write a thousand words quite quickly without becoming bored because I am writing about a subject I enjoy. So far I got 12 articles up, 2 are unfinished, however. These 12 articles amount to 10.5K words, when I finish up the unfinished ones I will probably land around 12K.

Although I am not getting any clicks right now, impressions are steadily rising. As I put more content and start interlinking everything with each other I will rank even higher. Plan for now is to avoid buying PBNs or links and just doing it organically.

 

[Panther28]

Nice one, hope your plan goes well, keep the regular updates coming. All the best websites start with 1 click so you're in good standing!

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Update 3:
Logged onto Search Console to see a nice surprise:


Seems like I was featured on the Google Discover feed which gave a nice influx of clicks. I've been trying to write articles daily covering a wide range of topics and I will continue to do so until I have a steady flow of traffic. I haven't monetized anything yet and will probably wait a little longer before I do so.

I also think I have figured out a way to get first-page ranking quite quickly by writing on products that have just been released. For a lot of my posts, I don't even do proper KW research since I know the niche pretty well, I think I read another journey here where some guy did the same and he was banking at least $10K a month. It's not my favorite however, as product reviews are quite boring but then again, they're the money makers in the end.

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Update 4:

Being featured on Google Discover feed really provided a big boost when it came to traffic, sadly all of this traffic was from India. While I am aiming internationally, the US is my primary market. I've never dabbled with Discover before so I am not sure what triggered my being featured there, I'll have to read up on it, because if I could get featured in the US instead that traffic would probably provide a lot more value.

As you can see I am getting more and more clicks from the SERPS as well, so far I've just been writing articles and uploading them, not doing anything other than interlinking them with each other. I will keep doing this the whole summer, trying to at least get 3-5 articles out a week. Still struggling to find writers that actually have experience in my niche, I tried UpWork but no success. If you have any suggestions on where I could find writers that also know a lot of about niche topics, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks to the surge of traffic I was able to join a few affiliate programs. I also got in touch with a company that could set up my own landing page for their product, which is sweet since they don't have any affiliate info at all on their website.

As far as link building goes, I have only posted some links to social sites like forums, so they're all nofollow but it's a start. There is a big authority website in my niche that I'd love to get featured on, 70+ DR and they always link back to OP with a follow link. So I am currently brainstorming on how to approach them to get featured on their site.

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Update 4.5:
I was talking about how to approach bigger authority sites yesterday and remembered a video I did a while ago. This video was made just for fun, even before I started my affiliate project, but it got some traction from bigger sites in a semi-related niche. So I decided to reach out to one of them and ask for a link back to my new site, and behold, they didn't even want to verify if it was actually me. Just scored a do-follow link from an 80+ DR site that is over 10 years old.

 

[seomaster5]

What methods will you use to make $10000 from single blog ?

 

[VRChecksout]

Good luck! You seem to be on the right track sir

 

[Dontwannaberich]

What methods will you use to make $10000 from single blog ?

Affiliate offers + ads (adsense, mediavine or the like). Some other things I want to try, however that are not as passive are selling guest post space.

Good luck! You seem to be on the right track sir

Thanks! Slowly but surely we will reach our goal.

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Another small update: Because of other work stuff that took priority, this site has been chilling for a while. I haven't added anything new but I have commented on various channels on Youtube related to this niche. That's all I've had time for.

And yesterday the first comission popped in. A whopping $3.14.

Plan is to get my main project sorted and put some of that money into this site, most likely hire a writer and let them churn more articles.

 

[Dontwannaberich]

Another update, almost a year since last time.

General status of the website:
Site has been more or less getting one or two content pieces a month, but has still not gotten any real priority because of other projects. I had been dealing back and forth with a potential buyer of my ecommerce and finally sealed the deal a few weeks back.
So I have free'd up some more time but I still have sort my agency clients out, as the current economic situation has fucked some of them, making them not want to pay my invoices. Working with other people is a bitch, so getting this affiliate site scaled up is getting higher and higher up on my priority list.
I've been starting to gathering emails as well and slowly but surely growing my list.

Earnings:
Money wise they site has done just over $50 in commsion since my last update, which isn't amazing by any means.
The general products I am promoting seem to have a rather low conversion grade of 2%, it doesn't help that the average commission isn't that big either, search volume for the actual products is small too but I was a little naive thinking the conversion would be higher.
Also installed Adsense a fews back but the earnings are still small since traffic just below 2K a month.

Moving forward:
I am rethinking how to scale this website and have it work in the ong term. Obviously finding products that pay a higher commission is a priority, as well as finding another audience within this large niche that has more money to spend than the current ones.
What I am testing as we speak is running paid ads to a various of landing pages, lead magnets and blog pages to see what works and what doesn't. I'll keep you posted.

 

[seoworld983]

Good luck on your journey. following.

 

[gaso]

Good luck on your journey man Im following and applying some of your actions myself on my project