Affiliate Website from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months (CASE STUDY - Amazon?) [AMA]

Hello Everyone,

After getting an amazing response on two case studies posted earlier, I decided to share another one of my projects that grew from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months.

In this post, will try my best to cover each and everything so that you can replicate the same process on your sites as well.

Quick Overview of Site's Valuation

• When we started: ~ $13,350
• Current: ~ $1,092,650

I will explain later in this case study why this multiple is higher (50x) than the industry standard of 30x (which applies mostly Amazon affiliate sites and other kinds of online businesses).

Previous Case Studies

• Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months!
• Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+)

In this post, I will take a highly data-driven approach so you know EXACTLY: what, why, how, when of all the steps taken.

For example...

• How the research and planning was done?
• What was the number of articles and why?
• Content writing guidelines
• Uploading, formatting, onsite SEO instructions
• Outreach, backlinks and PR
• Conversion rate optimizations (A/B testing)

However, if you still have ANY questions, feel free to ask. I would answer EACH one of you.

This is an AMA. :)

So, let's dive right in...

Background of the Website

• Broad Niche: Technology (software mostly)
• About: Work from Home (WFH) [We got lucky because of COVID, the search traffic is increasing with time]
• Type of content: WFH guides, product reviews, success stories of entrepreneurs (viral) etc.
• Physical products promoted: work stations, chairs, accessories related to WFH etc.
• Digital products promoted: Virtual team/project management tools, SaaS subs etc. (most money from here)

Note: Can't share more information about the site because of the NDA. I am very thankful to the client for giving permission to share this case study.

Quick Overview of Stats (the month we made $21,853)

• DR: 56
• Traffic: 499,383/m (Jan. 2021)
• RPM: $43.76 (earning per thousand visits) - this is combined for affiliate and display ads
• Countries targeted: United States (primarily), EU, Canada
• Primary source of traffic: Search Engines but we are working to create proper emailing lists too

Summary of what we did to get here...

Note that the RPM is combined for affiliate and display revenue.

Research and Planning

• Combined search volume of all keywords: ~ 750,000
• Average search volume per keyword: ~ 610
• Total keywords: ~ 1230
• Total traffic achieved (in 19 months): 485,556 (this represents the increase and ignores the already existing traffic)
• Success rate of traffic achieved (in 19 months): 64.74%. This basically means that based on our keyword research plan, the combined search volume of all keywords was 750,000 and we hit a success rate of 64.74% in 19 months which is a traffic increase of 485,556

Note: The success rate of traffic will increase a lot and is expected to cross even 100% because the search volume of WFH related keywords has risen significantly due to COVID. Moreover, our rankings are improving due to an increase in DR, aging of content and social shares)

Approach:

1. Choose broad keywords based on the brand of the site
2. Use Ahrefs to scrape all the "having similar terms" and "questions" list of words
3. Filter the lists to remove cannibalization, irrelevant keywords, duplicate content and anything that doesn't make sense
4. Group similar words together (Tip: If you have doubt about two similar keywords whether they should be targeted in one article or different articles, you should see if there are 3 or more results on the 1st page of Google that are ranking for both these words. If the answer is yes, then you can also rank for both these words in the same article. However, if you can't find 3 or more same results for two different queries then you should also make unique pages for each one of these keywords)
5. Organize the keywords into proper silos and categories

Note: We didn't really pay a lot of attention to the KW difficulty. Our approach was and still is to completely dominate each and every registered query related to a certain topic. We went big on the content part, we knew it would work and we were right. This approach was different from my previous case studies where we just wanted to make money and didn't really care about being the biggest guys out there. However, most of our keywords still have a KD of less than 4 (we produced this content at the earliest phase of content production).

Content

• Articles before: 31
• Articles added: 1230
• Articles after: 1261
• Average words per article: 1349
• Total words produced: 1,701,089

Approach:

1. H1, URL, and SEO Title must include: main keyword and other important keywords based on KW research
2. At least one image with proper ALT text
3. Table of content for jump links
4. Proper use of headings
5. How to articles with guides that include images as screenshots with red arrows or circles to indicate steps/process worked really well
6. At least 1 internal link per 250-300 words with proper anchor text (DO NOT OVER OPTIMIZE) to a relevant article
7. Recommended SEO plugin: SEOPress

There are a lot other things that we took into consideration and there could be a separate post on onsite SEO alone. But, for the sake of keeping it short, let's just focus on this for now.

Outreach, PR and Backlinks

• Prospects outreached: 7500
• Conversion rate: 2.3%
• Total links got: 173
• Links before: 323
• Links added: 173
• Links after: 496
• Change in DR: 12
• Final DR: 56

Approach (Outreach)

1. Find highly linked content pieces using Ahrefs (Use content explorer feature and sort from higher to lower KD. High KD indicates that this keyword is being linked a lot)
2. Write amazing pieces of content (better than the competitors)
3. Scrape the list of sites that have linked to your competitors (Ahrefs)
4. Find their contact details (Hunter is a good tool)
5. Manually check to filter out the bad contacts
6. Use Mailshake to outreach (tip: send 2 followups with a gap or 1 week each)
7. Reply fast to increase conversion rate
8. Tue, Wed and Thursday are the best days to send emails and expect responses and conversions

Note: We also adopted other methods like guest posts, PR and community engagement to drive traffic and build meaningful links.

While building links, we ensured that the site is:

• Either niche relevant or has high DR (80+) - we got nice DR 11+ links through targeted outreach
• Has proper search traffic
• The DR is greater than 20
• Niche edits work the best because they don't incur additional costs like content writing in case of guest posts and manual labor like in the case of targeted outreach. It's the best method to build links at scale

Conversion rate optimization (A/B Tests)

• RPM from: $19.31 (this was just affiliate and no display ads were applied then)
• RPM to: $43.76 (this is affiliate + display)

Approach:

• Relevant content that ranked and converted well
• AB testing on top 30% of the pages (we have added highly converting call to actions, CTAs in the right places with the right copy which are giving amazing returns)
• We also added a display advertising network
• Coordinated with our affiliate manager to increase the payout commission

As the traffic increases and we collect more and more data, our RPM and conversion would improve even further. Our goal is to increase the RPM to at least $50/1000 visits. This is considered a very good RPM.

Note that, usually the RPM on our sites is from $25 - $40 (affiliate + display combined). So, this definitely an exception. I am referring to other sites in our portfolio (we have currently 16 content based brands).

An overview of the important numbers, stats, ROI and more...

The multiple of 50x is applied because our brand is uniquely positioned to be strategically acquired by 3 major competitors promoting similar products in the home productivity space.

They are heavily funded and based on our discussions with them, they seemed more than interested to acquire our media venture.

We won't go through a traditional route of selling via online business brokering spaces. However, we would directly sell to one of the major players whose products we are promoting.

It is to be noted that, we don't plan to sell the venture till it hits at least 30,000 USD per month. We believe we can hit that without further investment and just optimizing the site for better conversion rate optimization.

What's next...

In essence, content marketing regardless of how it's done is the backbone to grow all kinds of online businesses. Whether it's writing an amazing copy to promote ads or producing content in bulk to drive relevant, highly targeted and converting traffic.

This goes without saying that the times of making money through content websites by writing a handful of pages and building spammy links are gone.

Now, you need to plan properly, create content that not only ranks but also helps the user and then deploying the right strategies to promote it is the way to go.

But, even with those conditions, the kind of ROI that these kind of online businesses offer is much higher as compared to traditional modes of investment like stocks, index funds, real estate etc.

The passive way of making money especially around 30K USD a month through a site definitely requires a lot of resources but it's not impossible.

The communities (like this one) where people help each other are becoming more and more common and it's becoming easier to make money. However, it's also increasing the competition and the kind of resources required to reach certain level of passive income and possible exit.

Anyway, I wish you luck in all your endeavors.

And yes, if you have any questions, please feel free to let me know. I understand that I couldn't cover everything in just one post. That's why I am available to answer your queries.

ASK ME ANYTHING AMA!

Regards