Hi!
First of all, sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker.
I posted an article a few weeks back where I wondered if anyone were interested in a case study.
I got a lot of responses, so here it goes (a little late, but I couldn't justify writing a case study during the busy holiday-season).
This post will be a short summary of the previous months, and I will continue to publish an update each month after this.
History
I'm in my 20s, working full-time as a software engineer. I do enjoy my job, but I've always wanted to start something myself and not have to work for someone else my whole life.
I looked into affiliate marketing, and though that it looked promising.
I set up a few sites back in 2016 with English(!) content, which obviously failed miserably, but I learned a lot.
In 2017 I decided to launch an affiliate site related to the fitness niche, in my own native language.
I worked hard for about 3-4 months, and were able to earn about $50 each month.
I continued working on it sporadically until August 2019, when I decided to really give affiliate marketing a go.
This is my income, expenses and monthly visitors since August 2019 (I got the currency conversion all wrong in my previous posts).
| Month | Income | Expenses | Visitors |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 2019 | $122 | $27 | 1 303 |
| September 2019 | $222 | $27 | 1 719 |
| October 2019 | $923 | $42 | 2 874 |
| November 2019 | $1 788 | $112 | 4 477 |
| December 2019 | $5 089 | $307 | 6 196 |
I will publish an update for January as soon as the month has ended.
Post Strategy
My website consists of three "types" of articles:
- Strictly informational articles with no affiliate links (dieting advice, various guides and so on).
- "Top 10 articles" - Review of the top products for a given niche.
- "Single review articles" - Review of a specific product.
If you have an affiliate website and haven't tried writing detailed articles about one single product, you really should try it.
It builds authority, and really backs up your best-selling top 10 articles.
Online affiliate courses
None, never. Anyone claiming to be an "affiliate expert" while also selling you a course probably isn't an affiliate expert.
Like an ad I saw a few days ago - "I made $2,000,000 from Affiliate Marketing in 2019".
Yeah sure, but you still need to sell online courses for $15 a piece - right.
Hosting and royalty-free images
I pay a total of $27 for hosting and royalty-free images, not much else to say.
Advertising
I've run ads in two channels - Facebook and Google.
The Facebook ads has been run to get people to like the Facebook page, so they don't directly affect my income.
The Google Ads are however targeted towards my "top 10 articles", and they are highly targeted.
I only use "exact keyword match", and typically target keywords like "best [product name]", "[product name] review" and so on.
Link-building
When I first started out back in 2017 I actually bought some backlinks. It worked for a while, until I got blacklisted and decided to rebrand and get a brand new domain name.
Now I mostly ignore link-building. I've published a few links in some relevant forums, and I have a GMB (Google My Business) website where a publish links (yep, they are considered as backlinks by Google).
Cooperation with online retailers
To my surprise, multiple retailers in the affiliate networks have noticed my website.
One of the retailers reached out and asked if I had any "Best Product on abcxyz.com" they could use on their website.
I didn't, but I sure made one.
That was in November, and my "Best product" icon is now featured on several products on two of the largest suppliers in my country.
This builds authority, and really helps to establish my brand.
Summary
I wasn't sure how to structure the post, so please give me some advice if it was too long / short / not informative and so on.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions!
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* This article was originally published here
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