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Tuesday, August 21, 2018
How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing (I Went From $20,000 To $100,000 In 1 Year And Had To Write About It)
I went from making $20k in 2016 to $100k in 2017 by dropping my web design/SEO clients and doing affiliate marketing/blogging full-time. 90% of my (passive) affiliate income comes from SiteGround, a hosting company who awarded me affiliate of the month in July, 2017 when I made $9k in 1 month. Since then I’ve continued to hit numbers like this – the screenshot below is from March, 2018 when I made $14.5k in 1 month (just with SiteGround).
This literally changed my life… I moved out of my parent’s house (sigh) into a nice studio in downtown Denver, bought my first car (a Mercedes c300), adopted 2 kitties, and my credit raised 45 points. I also donated $3,000 to Red Cross at Hurricane Harvey. I’m a humble dude but in affiliate marketing, the numbers do the talking. So… I want to show you how I did it :)
97 sales x 150/sale = $14,550 in 1 month by promoting SiteGround (hosting company)
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? You partner with a company selling products/services you would like to recommend to your audience. If they buy something using your affiliate link, you get a commission from the sale.
About My Blog
I write about SEO + website speed optimization
Hosting is the #1 factor of website speed optimization
I make money by referring people to SiteGround’s hosting
I’ve spent a LOT of time collecting social media evidence (eg. Facebook polls) showing why SiteGround is a great choice, and how migrating to them can improve load times
I have about 1,800 visitors/day, 90% is from Google… adding affiliate links to your blog (or videos) is the easy part – generating consistent traffic to them is the hardest part
It took blogging full-time for many months with minimal income to see results, but now, I can (and have) stopped working for several months and still collect my affiliate income
About Me (Why I Am Writing This?) I come from a quite unsuccessful background of web design/SEO. I blogged because I knew it was good for SEO, but my articles never had a purpose regarding monetization. I finally took a leap of faith and dropped my clients to figure out blogging/affiliate marketing. I was good at website speed optimization and knew hosting was the #1 factor. Looking for the best, I saw SiteGround was rated #1 in multiple Facebook polls and had a great reputation with generous affiliate commissions. So I wrote detailed tutorials on website speed… how to configure WordPress cache plugins, hosting reviews, and other speed-related topics. Usually near the end of a post I would say “Oh, and here’s why you should switch to SiteGround” with evidence on why they’re the best… Facebook polls, Tweets, load time improvements, etc. That’s when things got good… I never had money so I feel like it’s my calling to help other people do this.
Biggest Success Factors
Choosing the right niche and affiliate(s) to refer my readers to
Finding topics (keywords) where people would be interested in a product/service
SEO: getting consistent traffic by writing AWESOME content about my keywords (there’s a phrase “length is strength” in SEO and this paid off big time for me). Maybe you’re doing videos or an eCourse, but I found blog posts WAY easier to update which means less maintenance. The biggest factor by FAR was the time I spent meticulously creating my tutorials… which eventually resulted in a sudden 3x increase in SEO traffic
Gathering Facebook polls, Tweets, other proof on WHY they should choose my affiliate
The patience it took to write content for many months even when I wasn’t getting paid
1. Find Your Niche (And How I Found Mine)
My career journey went like this: online marketing > web design > WordPress web design > WordPress SEO > WordPress speed optimization. Now I’m getting into affiliate marketing.
While I was doing WordPress speed optimization I noticed lots of people needed it, but very few people supplied it (there were a lack of services and tutorials when I researched Google). I also knew hosting was the #1 factor of website speed factor and these companies paid up to $200/sale. Hosting is a competitive space but the commissions and lack of supply enticed me.
I expanded my SEO blog and started writing about hosting, cache plugins, and other relevant topics… while recommending SiteGround in each tutorial. I added social proof like this pollwhere they were rated the #1 host. Each tutorial was super detailed and tons of people found them helpful – many generated 100 visitors/day since the great content got them ranked high.
Once I found my niche (WordPress speed optimization), a solid hosting company with a high commission affiliate program (SiteGround) and created tutorials around topics people in my niche would find helpful (and might want to change their host), that’s what got me to $100k.
Once you find a niche with high demand, little supply (do your Google research), and areputable affiliate offering nice commissions… and you have patience to wait for financial results while creating your assets (I’m talking about content), I encourage you to take the leap.
2. Types Of Affiliate Programs
One Tier – get a commission when a sale is generated from your affiliate link.
Two Tier – get a commission when you refer other affiliates and they start making sales (think multilevel marketing). An example is WP Engine’s program where I tell my readers about their WordPress hosting, they start making sales, and I earn $50/sale from each sale they generate.
Climbing Tiers – increased commissions as you make more sales.
Recurring Commissions – usually happens with subscription services… you continuously receive commissions so long as people are signed up. AWeber’s email marketing does this.
Sitewide Commissions – get a commission no matter what people buy on the affiliate’s website. Amazon’s affiliate program does this.
Pay Per Lead – get a commission based on the number of leads (eg. contact form fill-outs) you send to a business. Be sure setup your analytics to track this and have a solid, written agreement with your affiliate. You don’t want to spend tons of time and get burned, like I have.
Cookies – amount of time after people click your affiliate link you will receive a commission if a sale is generated. Usually 30-90 days but shouldn’t be a deal breaker when choosing affiliates.
3. Affiliate Programs vs. Affiliate Marketplaces
Individual Affiliate Programs – think Amazon where you just sign up through their website.
Affiliate Marketplaces – ShareASale and ClickBank have thousands of merchants to choose from. It’s nice to login to 1 place and check the performance of multiple affiliates without going to each affiliate portal on their websites. Many programs aren’t part of a marketplace though.
4. Choosing Affiliates – Run The Numbers
High Commissions, High Conversions, Low Reversal Rates Of course you want affiliates with high commissions, but they should also have a solid reputation with high conversions and low reversal rates (you get $0 if people cancel after signing up). If they’re part of an affiliate marketplace like ShareASale or ClickBank you can see some numbers there. Companies likes Amazon/SiteGround are safe bets, otherwise do your research (or track your affiliate links so you can monitor their performance). Avoid affiliates offering huge commissions since this probably means they’re struggling to acquire/retain customers naturally. This will hurt your numbers (specifically your conversions/reversal rates).
Why I Didn’t Promote WP Engine For $200/Sale I could have promoted WP Engine (hosting company) for $200/sale with no tier program to climb – sounds pretty good right? But when I checked ShareASale I saw their reversal rates were 24%! Just to give you an idea SiteGround’s reversals are less than 10%. WP Engine starts at $29/month while SiteGround’s is $3.95/month, plus SiteGround has a better reputation. I had to climb a tier program to get SiteGround’s $150/sale, but long-term my research paid off.
WP Engine: (500 clicks x 4% conversions x $200/sale) – 24% reversals = $3,040 SiteGround: (500 clicks x 10% conversions x $150/sale) – 10% reversals = $6,750
5. Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon’s affiliate program is the most popular of them all. I don’t participate myself (yet) but the majority of affiliate marketers I know use Amazon because… it’s Amazon. You can review products you have used or write tutorials (eg. how to connect computer to TV) and drop an affiliate link to an HDMI cable… just a couple examples. You may want to build relationships with the manufacturers so you can get products before they’re released – giving you time to create a review before the product is launched and capture sales during peak buying times.
Up to 15% commissions
Sitewide commissions (if they buy anything, you get a commission)
Super high conversions
Create a custom affiliate link to any product
6. WordPress Affiliate Programs
If you’re in the WordPress industry like I am (whether it be design, development, or SEO) I have accumulated quite the list of WordPress affiliate programs. I excluded those I found unsuccessful or pay too little to make a profit from, specifically ThemeForest, Creative Market, and low quality theme stores like Template Monster. Hosting pays well and I wrote a tutorial for SiteGround’s affiliate program and StudioPress themes which are my 2 highest paying affiliates. Those tutorials have tons of screenshots/social proof especially for SiteGround.
SiteGround – my main affiliate paying $150/sale once you reach their highest tier.
WP Engine – $200/sale with a two-tier affiliate program ($50 for each two-tier sale)
StudioPress – known for being the most quality WordPress themes built in Genesis
Zigzagpress – themes also built in Genesis which have been featured on StudioPress
Elegant Themes – high quality themes with generous affiliate program (50% of sale)
WP Rich Snippets – premium plugin that adds rich snippets (eg. review stars) to your snippets. You get 33% of sales and it’s what I use on my site. I recommend it over the All In One Schema.org plugin as it looks nicer with more settings and add-ons. Here’s a post I used it on. If you’re writing reviews as part of your strategy, get this for yourself.
Whitespark – in local SEO/Google Maps, citations (directories) are about 20% of ranking factors. Whitespark will build them for $5/citation and has a 10% affiliate program. You could upsell these to your clients which is what I did to make a quick $300 without hardly any work (they provide white label reports with logins, URLs, etc)
MaxCDN – content delivery network (CDN) which makes your site load faster. I get around $1,000/month by referring people to them in my cache plugin tutorials.
Freelancer – refer people to developers, designers, and other freelancers you’ve worked with and make 100% of Freelancer’s project commission for the first 90 days. I get a lot of people requesting WordPress speed optimization services… so I refer them to my developers with a freelancer affiliate link and make $125/month in passive income. You can’t use affiliate links to link to specific freelancer profiles, so I direct people to the homepage via affiliate link and give people my developer’s usernames.
7. Google AdSense (Avoid It… At All Costs)
It’s easy to throw up Google AdSenseon your blog – but good luck making decent income from it. It is NOT personalized whereas affiliate links involve people taking YOUR recommendation on very specific things. It also makes your site slower than a turtle. Not good for monetization!
8. Sign Up!
Once you’ve chosen your affiliate(s), sign up and let’s go!
9. Content Strategy: Blog Posts vs. Videos vs. eCourse
Blog Posts – in many tech industries like mine, there are lots of technology changes which requires me to update content. It is MUCH easier to update a blog post than to completely redo a video. Videos are good, but posts can last much longer (called evergreen content).
Videos – add affiliate links to YouTube descriptions and tell people you left a link there. You can’t edit a video once it’s uploaded though, so I had a hard time keep mine up-to-date. It requires more maintenance than posts especially if there’s a lot of change in your industry.
eCourse– same thing as videos where it’s hard to keep them up-to-date, though I’ve never done an eCourse.Udemy is probably your best bet though.
10. Setting Up Your Blog
WordPress – platform I recommend building your website/blog on.
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