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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.

Read More Case Studies

In addition to affiliate marketing case studies, you may also be interested in these other examples of digital marketing success stories.

  • SEO case studies
  • Content marketing case studies
  • Digital marketing case studies
  • Email marketing case studies
  • Social media case studies
  • PPC case studies

Affiliate marketing case study examples

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.

affiliate seo case study

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SEO Case Study: Affiliate marketing website goes from 0 to 600k monthly impressions

Zero to $3,000 in 10 months

Here’s how one JetPage customer with no social media following or paid ads went from ZERO to 600,000 monthly Google Search Console impressions in only 10 months ! The website is an affiliate marketing website that is currently earning $3,000 per month thanks to this SEO traffic.

Google Search Console results

We talked to Chris about how he was able to overcome past failures, and what strategies, and tools he used to find success online.  You can listen to the full story on this Podcast episode or keep reading below!

How Chris started and how his affiliate website makes money

After previous failures online, with other affiliate websites using WordPress, and business models like Kindle publishing, Chris pivoted to a personal brand which allowed him to explore more potential niches. 

While in the past Chris spent months just getting his website set up, this time he was able to go from zero (no social media following, no existing successful business) to a full-time income in less than a year! 

He makes $3,000 in affiliate commissions, and sponsored posts. On top of that, he also has used the success of his website to get freelance writing jobs which add even more income. 

While many beginners focus on ad revenue, Chris says that the negatives, such as slowing down your site and annoying your visitors far outweigh the small payouts you receive from ad revenue and display ads. 

He was kind enough to break down exactly what tools he uses, and the strategies he employs to find success so quickly. 

The tools Chris uses on his affiliate marketing website

While a lot of people are looking to make money for nothing online, you need to be willing to invest in your business if you want it to grow. Chris notes that 

“You need to be prepared to spend that for several months before anything happens on the blog. You will have a good 5, 6, or 7 months where you won't make any money because you're starting from zero. 

Google is trying to figure out your website, where it fits in terms of topics, and where you have authority and then you can start to rank for certain keyboards.

That's when you can start to think about monetization and bring in some money, but until then, you will have to be comfortable with dishing out somewhere around $300 a month.” 

The tools Chris is using for his website in 2022:

After using WordPress in the past and spending months just to get a site that he was somewhat happy with, Chris wanted something simpler. 

He knew to start ranking for keywords he would need to focus all his energy on creating useful content, not having to maintain a website, and worry about things like security and performance scores. 

With JetPage he got a huge boost in technical SEO without having to lift a finger. He was able to start writing right away. No time wasted in website design, or back-end engineering. Compared to the experiences of WordPress users he sees. According to Chris:

 “I even saw someone in a Facebook group say that after six months they're finally done with their website. I can now start on content and I'm like, have you done nothing? It's been six months! 

So just to put this into context, if you're fiddling around with your website for six months, and then you have me who is producing perhaps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 content pieces per week, who do you think we'll win? Who do you think will get traffic? The guy who produces content. 

So if you're fiddling around with a website and not doing anything that leads to the results, then you might as well just quit. And that's, that's why I, highly recommend JetPage because you're done in like two minutes, upload a logo and a background, and you're done, and then you start writing and then you start focusing on keywords.”

Click here to learn why JetPage is able to improve your SEO!

For keyword research , Chris uses Ahrefs to identify opportunities to rank for keywords that are often overlooked by most people. While the $100 a month price tag can scare people off, Chris notes that it’s crucial:

“Ahrefs is hands down the absolute best and you cannot live without it if you want to make it in the blogging game, because you need to find keywords that you have an opportunity to rank for.

You need to see how hard it is and how many search results there are and all the other data you need to run in the correct path. That was one of the mistakes that I learned with my first website.

 I was using like free tools and just finding topics and stuff like that, and that resulted in nothing but. With Ahrefs, you really pinpoint exactly where you have a chance to rank. And find long tail keywords.”

In Chris’s experience just with JetPage and Ahrefs, you’re already 60% or more ahead of the competition. Most people aren’t willing to invest into their website, and if you’re looking for every way to get an advantage you can easily outpace the competition. 

Surfer SEO is a tool that checks your blogs for on-page SEO. It helps you make sure you have enough keyword density, images, and other factors that can affect ranking. (JetPage is working on an on-page SEO checker, so soon you can do this without the need to buy any additional software). 

Chris also found that free tools like Yoast just weren’t cutting it to give him a competitive advantage in 2022 which is why he switched to Surfer SEO. 

AI Writing Tools 

While AI writing tools can’t write a blog post from beginning to end, Chris has found that they help him go from idea to finish post much faster. 

“What AI does is that it helps you to create the content. It's more like an assistant. You can't really push one button and generate a blog post with 3000 words out of thin air.

We're not there yet. But it helps and speeds up the process. So what used to take me five to write, now maybe it takes two hours right now which is a huge improvement.” 

When you’re trying to create a lot of content quickly every tool that can help speed up that process and get you over writer's block is worth it!  

How to create content efficiently for your website. 

Now that you have the tools, you need to actually write. Once Chris has picked a keyword he searches it on Google to see what the “search intent” is. This is what most people are looking for when they search that term. 

This will give you a sense of how to write using that keyword. Then Chris uses an AI Writing tool to get started. He does the actual writing on Google Docs because JetPage allows you to simply copy and paste without losing any formatting. 

This means he can set custom formatting settings on Google docs that he can easily re-use on every blog post. He makes sure to add some images, and internal links to other of his blog posts on every article, which helps SEO. 

Chris’s most important keys to success with an affiliate marketing website in 2022 

So besides the tools what are the most valuable things to know if you want your affiliate website to actually succeed? 

Finding a Mentor

“Find a mentor, don't reinvent the wheel. Learn everything that they have to teach because they have made it. You have not, and you can save so much time. So step one, find a mentor.”

Set Results Driven Goals

Chris emphasizes you need to figure out what actions drive revenue, and then focus your goals on doing more of those actions.

Deep Work by Cal Newport, is one of Chris’s favorite books and focuses on how to do “Deep Work” and avoid the distractions that we always encounter when trying to do hard tasks.

Daily Actions

“Take daily action consistently over a long period of time” This is based on the book Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. This allows you to make huge progress over time because every day you’re doing something, and over time that equals results.

When something isn’t working after a while, be open to pivoting or niching down until it clicks.

If you’re ready to get started on your own website you can get a free 14-day trial of JetPage .

Related Posts

Why JetPage is the Best Website Builder for SEO

Why JetPage is the Best Website Builder for Affiliate Marketing

Why JetPage is the Best Website Builder for Blogging

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SirLinksalot

Affiliate SEO Case Study – From 0 to 40,000 Traffic

Header image for Nicholas Altimore.

by Nicholas Altimore

An in-depth SEO case study of a new affiliate site going to 40,000 monthly visitors.

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.

Example of a normal backlink profile.

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.

Traffic results during the first month of building.

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…

Remember that this is a much-shortened version of the case study. Be sure to grab the full version by subscribing below!

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Hey I'm Nick, the Founder/Director here at SirLinksalot. I have a passion for building online businesses and taking websites to the next level with the help of my amazing link building team .

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2. Low Traffic (Relatively)

When we started out for this case study, our client’s monthly traffic was a little less than 100K. Sure, that’s quite a lot of traffic, but we were looking for ways to take it to the next level.

Prominent websites in the digital marketing niche have traffic that goes well into a few hundred thousand per month.

Low Traffic

However, growing traffic in such a competitive niche was a challenge in itself. And that’s where our SEO strategy comes in.

Let’s take a look at it in the next section of this case study.

SEO Case Study: The Strategy We Leveraged

To grow our client’s website traffic, we outlined a new SEO strategy, focusing on extensive keyword research, on-page optimization, powerful content planning, and more.

Our idea here was to ensure that we were able to create content that could rank well in Google searches and also give it the right impetus through other SEO techniques.

1. Backlink Audit and Disavowing Bad Links

The first thing we needed to look at was our client’s backlinks. There were hundreds of thousands of backlinks from a few thousand domains.

However, that also meant that we needed to audit the client’s backlink profile well.

There were chances that some of the links were bad links, which were having an adverse impact on their site’s SEO. It was important for us to spot those links and disavow them.

For this, we first got a snapshot of our client’s backlink profile from Semrush . Next, we started going through the list of backlinks to spot bad links.

Backlink Audit

The idea here was to prune their backlink profile such that only high-quality links remained for better SEO.

We analyzed each backlink for a variety of parameters, including:

  • Domain authority (DA)
  • Page authority (PA)
  • Type of link
  • Anchor text
  • Toxic score
  • Link relevance

Once we checked all of the links for each of these parameters, we had a list of potential bad links.

The next step was pretty straightforward — disavow them.

We created a text file with a list of all of the bad links and submitted the same for disavowing.

2. Perfect On-Page Optimization & Timely On-Page Audit

The next step we used for making this SEO case study successful was to check the client’s site for on-page SEO parameters.

Because even the best of content won’t rank well in organic search results if it’s not optimized well.

If the website offers a poor browsing experience due to slow loading speed or not being mobile friendly, it wouldn’t rank well in searches.

The Page Experience update also meant that we had to optimize the website for Core Web Vitals.

To ensure that our client’s website passed all these checks, we conducted timely SEO audits using Semrush . It helped us get a detailed idea of where the site stood in terms of on-page SEO.

Technical SEO audit helped us track the following:

  • Core Web Vitals
  • HTTP errors
  • Structured data errors
  • Page loading speed
  • Internal linking
  • Crawlability
  • JavaScript and CSS issues

We really like Semrush’s Site Audit tool for this purpose. It gave us detailed insights into each of these errors and helped us fix them to boost our client’s on-page SEO performance.

You May Also Like:

  • How to Improve Your Website’s SEO

3. Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis

In this section of this case study, we’ll discuss the next important part of our strategy – keyword research and competitor analysis.

To improve our client’s site ranking in the SERPs, it was important to target the right set of keywords.

While our client’s posts already ranked for over 78K keywords, we wanted to take their SEO performance to the next level through the duration of this case study.

So, we came up with a new strategy for all of the new posts that we were going to publish. It involved both keyword research and competitor analysis.

Keyword Research

Keyword Research

Before we started writing any post, we conducted thorough keyword research for better SEO targeting. We selected keywords that had good search volume, high CPC, and low competition.

We also went after high CPC keywords to open more opportunities for monetizing the client’s website.

Selecting low competition keywords made it relatively easier for us to rank the client’s site higher for those keywords.

Keyword Research 2

And why did we choose to target keywords with high search volume for the client during the tenure of this SEO case study?

Our goal was to drive maximum targeted traffic from the new posts published during the period of this SEO case study. And that is something that high-volume keywords with lower competition could help us achieve.

Competitor Analysis

Along with keyword research, we also conducted in-depth research about the SEO strategies of our client’s direct competitors.

The goal here was to understand how well their competitors ranked for the keywords that we were targeting.

For this, we leveraged the Keyword Gap tool provided by Semrush . It helped us understand where our client stood and what else we needed to help them outrank their competitors.

Competitor Research

To find more keyword ideas, we did an in-depth analysis of the keywords that they were already ranking for.

These were the keywords we could potentially target through our new content and improve our client’s SEO for this case study.

4. Solid Content Planning and Publishing

Content played a central role in the SEO strategy that we devised to grow our client’s traffic.

Once we had found the right set of target keywords for our client, we moved on to the content creation and publishing stages.

In this section of our SEO case study, we’ll delve into how we created content that helped them rank higher in the SERPs.

Strategic Content Creation

Content is at the heart of any SEO strategy and that’s why we decided to create content strategically during the period this case study talks about.

We started brainstorming ideas for our client’s blog posts and infographics based on the selected keywords. The idea was to create content that could rank higher than others and attract backlinks too.

After all, good content means better SEO.

We set out to create valuable resources for our client’s readers in the form of comprehensive blog posts.

Note how we created a detailed content calendar for the same.

Strategic Content Creation

The idea here was to create blog posts that dived deep into each topic and provided more information than any other competing post.

Also, we extensively created infographics, which typically help a lot when it comes to earning backlinks. Distributing the infographics well using their embed code helped us generate backlinks and improve the client site’s SEO.

What’s more?

We also created loads of tools and software review posts to help our client’s readers find the best solutions based on their requirements. These, too, helped boost traffic and contributed to turning this project into a successful SEO case study.

  • How to Build a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy

User Intent-Focused Content

Another important thing that we’re going to talk about in this SEO case study is how we created content focusing on user intent.

We did this as it’d ensure that their content aligns well with the expectations of searchers. As a result, it helped us boost the time readers spent on the client’s website.

For example, note how the post below serves the basic intent behind the search request.

Focus on User Intent

And how did we go about this?

Rather than focusing on creating content for search engines, we decided to focus on the target readers.

We asked questions like:

  • What would the searcher want to read about?
  • What is the prime goal behind the search request?
  • Does the content on our client’s website answer the questions posed by the searcher?

These questions helped us figure out if our client’s content truly helped satisfy the search intent behind the keywords we targeted. In turn, it helped us make our client rank for those keywords.

Content Upgrades

Yet another strategy that we employed was to update the already-published content on the client’s website.

In this section of this SEO case study, we’ll tell you how we updated the existing content on the client’s website to make it relevant to the present day.

We scanned through the few hundred blog posts published on the client’s website and made a list of posts that were ranking on the first or second page of Google.

We then created a plan to update them with new statistics, strategies, and examples. Here’s how we tracked all content upgrades in one place.

Published Content

The idea was to improve their SEO and search rankings so that their posts can reach the top three positions in the SERPs.

So, how did we go about content upgrades?

We mainly did the following:

  • Replaced old statistics with new ones
  • Updated strategies to reflect new advancements
  • Increased the content length to offer more value
  • Replaced old examples with new and relevant ones
  • Optimized content for the target keyword and other related keywords
  • Improved internal linking structure
  • How to Conduct an In-Depth Content Audit

Optimization Using Advanced Tools

Publishing content or updating it wasn’t enough. We decided to take things a step further to make this SEO project successful.

We’ll tell you exactly what tools we used for better content optimization under this section of our SEO case study.

We didn’t just focus on keyword optimization. We also leveraged the TF-IDF (Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency) formula to improve the competitiveness of our client’s content on the SERPs.

Basically, we identified the frequency of relevant side words (secondary keywords and long-tail keywords) and optimized the client’s posts for those keywords too.

Internal Links Addition

Internal links are crucial for a variety of reasons. These include:

  • Quicker discovery and indexing of new content
  • Keeping visitors on the website for longer intervals
  • Passing link juice from one page to another

While we already included internal links in every post that we wrote, we doubled down on our internal linking efforts.

Internal Links Addition

Our goal was to add as many internal links as possible to each new post but in a relevant manner. Even while updating old posts, we added more internal links to them.

Experimenting with Content Frequency and Volume

Content frequency matters a lot for both search engines and your readers.

If your regular visitors don’t see new content being published frequently, they may likely think that your website is inactive.

On the other hand, if you publish too much content, they may think that you’re overloading them with content.

But what about search engines?

Search engines crawl your website regularly. If they find that you’re not adding new content, they may reduce the crawling frequency. This may lead to a long delay in indexing your new posts.

So, we experimented with content publishing frequency on our client’s website. This allowed us to get more posts indexed on Google and also helped us retain their readers.

For instance, we published 7 posts on the client’s site in December 2020.

Experiment with Content

On the other hand, we published 13 posts in January 2021.

Experiment with Content 2

5. Brand Mentions and Link Acquisition

The next step in our SEO strategy was to provide a focus on off-page SEO parameters. To achieve this, we had to get the client more brand mentions and backlinks.

We put sufficient impetus into getting branded backlinks too, which would serve a dual purpose of improving brand awareness and SEO.

That’s what we’re going to tell next in this SEO case study.

Along with guest posting, we also leveraged competitor research for link acquisition. This helped us spot websites from which our client’s competitors were getting backlinks.

We created content that could provide value to the readers of the target sites and approached those websites to link to relevant resource pages from our client’s site.

Get More Brand Mentions

The result?

We were able to get backlinks for several important pages on the client's website that were ranking well in the SERPs.

Similarly, to secure brand mentions, we approached several websites and provided quotes and expert answers to them. They added our client’s quotes in their existing content along with a brand mention.

  • Steps to Get on the First Page of Google

6. Content Promotion & Distribution

You’ve probably heard of the strategies we’re discussing in this SEO case study. But one thing that most marketers forget to give more attention to is content promotion and distribution.

These two things are necessary to ensure that the content you create reaches the right audience. For this, we came up with a powerful content distribution strategy for our client.

We’ll tell you how exactly we increased the exposure of their content in this section of this case study.

In our experience, guest posts are one of the most effective ways to distribute content and get backlinks.

We wrote several high-quality guest posts for prominent websites and linked back to our client’s content. This helped us increase exposure to their content and also strengthen their backlink profile.

In addition, we syndicated our client’s blog posts on platforms such as Medium.

Content Promotion

In the case of infographics, we wrote short descriptions for our client’s infographics and shared them on numerous other websites. This not only helped us build our client’s brand awareness but also improved their link profile.

SEO Case Study: The Results

In this case study, now we’ll show you the results that our SEO strategies helped the client achieve. Let’s take a look at how our strategy and efforts paid off.

But before we delve into the results, let’s take a quick look at the period of this case study.

Case Study Duration

We implemented our strategy from 1st October 2020 to 31st March 2021 and tracked results for the same period.

In this case study, we are comparing results to the results from the previous six months – 2nd April 2020 to 30th September 2020.

Let’s now take a look at the results of our SEO efforts.

SEO Results At a Glance

Through our SEO strategy, we were able to:

  • Rank our client’s website for 53K+ keywords on Google in the U.S. and for 150K+ keywords globally (as of April 2021)
  • Rank the client’s site for 3.6K+ keywords on the first page of Google (as of April 2021)
  • Increase their site’s organic traffic by 321% in just one year
  • Increase their inbound leads by 52%
  • Get their blog posts featured in Google’s featured snippets

Increased Number of Clicks and Impressions

The results were pretty good when it came to the number of clicks and impressions we generated for the client. We generated over 877K clicks , which was greater than 794K clicks generated in the preceding period.

And that’s not even the best part.

We nearly doubled the number of impressions generated from 37.8 million to 66.3 million . Even the average keyword ranking positions improved from 35.5 to 34.

Clicks & Impressions

Improved Backlink Profile

Another good result that we would like to highlight in this case study is how our SEO strategy improved our client’s backlink profile.

There was a massive jump in the number of dofollow and nofollow backlinks the client’s site had. The total number of backlinks shot up to 389K from over 7,200 referring domains.

And the best part?

Most of these links (69%) were dofollow links while nofollow backlinks constituted only 32% of all backlinks. These backlinks helped improve their off-page SEO.

Backlink Profile

Increased Organic Traffic and Page Views

Our main goal, of course, was to drive more traffic to our client’s website. Through our powerful SEO strategy, we successfully drove a lot more traffic to their website in the six months of this case study duration than in the preceding period.

We increased the number of visitors to 533,458 visitors between October 2020 and March 2021 from 463,185 visitors between April and September 2020.

This marked a 15.7% increase in the overall organic traffic to our client’s website.

Organic Page Views

And guess what?

The traffic growth was consistent throughout the case study duration. It dramatically shot up between October 2020 and March 2021.

On 1st October 2020, the client’s site received 93,150 visitors per month .

Organic Page Views 2

However, by 31st March 2021, it grew to 128,785 visitors per month .

Organic Page Views 3

This marked a 38.2% increase in traffic within just six months. And as you can see from the graph below, it’s still growing.

The results of our SEO strategy started showing pretty soon too.

The organic search traffic to their website grew by 18.82% between 24 September 2020 to 24 Jan 2021 when compared to the preceding period from 24 May 2020 to 23 Sep 2020.

Organic Page Views 4

Improved Keyword Rankings

One of the biggest tasks we had at hand was increasing the number of organic keywords that our client was ranking for.

And that wasn’t the only task.

We also wanted to ensure that our client’s website reached the top positions of the SERPs for the keywords it was ranking for.

In the duration of this case study, our client’s website started ranking for 7,134 more keywords. Additionally, the number of keywords ranking in the top 3 positions grew by 199.

Keyword Growth

Best Ranking Keywords

In this section of the case study, we’ll disclose the keywords that drove maximum traffic to our client’s website.

It was “how to become an Instagram influencer.”

We created a blog post for our client targeting this keyword and optimized it for relevant phrases and user intent.

Through our SEO efforts, we ranked the post on the top spot for the main keyword. We also ranked it for 1.1K keywords other keyword variations.

Keyword Specific Rankings

Among these 1.1K keywords, the post ranked in the top 50 positions for 589 keywords .

Keyword Specific Rankings 2

Posts Ranked as Featured Snippets

Another significant result we want to talk about in our SEO case study is that we got our client’s post listed in featured snippets results on Google.

The post we wrote on, “how to become an Instagram influencer,” for the client showed up in the featured snippets section of the SERPs for 29 keywords .

Rich Snippets

This helped us drive massive traffic to our client’s website from that one post.

Here’s how the post appeared as a featured snippet for the main target keyword:

Rich Snippets 2

Q1. What is an SEO case study?

A. An SEO case study is a study that documents the challenges a brand or marketer faced, the strategy they used to overcome those challenges, and the final results they achieved.

An SEO case study uses relevant screenshots, figures, and reports that substantiate the strategy and the results.

Q2. How do I write an SEO case study?

A. Here are the steps you should follow to write an SEO case study:

  • Write your goals.
  • Cover the challenges you faced.
  • Write about the strategy you leveraged.
  • Showcase the results your strategy and efforts generated.
  • Include relevant screenshots in the case study.
  • Add data and reports to support your results.

Q3. How do I find case studies on Google?

A. To find a case study on Google, all you’d have to do is search for terms related to it.

For instance, to find this SEO case study, you can search for “SEO case study” on Google.

Similarly, to find a case study related to social media marketing, you can search for “social media case study” on Google.

Q4. Is SEO illegal?

A. No, SEO is a perfectly legal marketing tactic.

In fact, it’s one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your website in the long run. All you have to do is ensure that you follow white hat SEO techniques to make the most out of it.

We leveraged SEO tactics to grow our client’s traffic too, as you can see in this case study.

Q5. What is SEO in 2021?

A. SEO is one of the best ways to grow your website traffic in 2021. Using it, you can improve your search presence and reach your target audience.

We did the same for our client, as you can see in our SEO case study.

Ready to Replicate the Strategy Discussed in This SEO Case Study?

While we did face an uphill challenge in boosting our client’s traffic in a highly competitive niche, the efforts paid off very well.

Through a well-planned SEO strategy, we were able to significantly boost the traffic to our client’s website.

And that wasn’t even the best part.

We also helped the client build a solid backlink profile and enhance their online reputation.

If you’d like to replicate this kind of success, you can implement the SEO strategy mentioned in this case study. You can also leverage our SEO services .

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

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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

affiliate marketing results nov 2021

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

affiliate case study traffic numbers

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. 

mvp-affiliate

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.

case study affiliate income amazon

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. 

setupad-march-2021

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.

affiliate website case study ahrefs

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.

ahrefs stats affiliate marketing

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.

Author Image

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.

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How we’re scaling our business to $1,000,000+ in annual revenue, keyword clustering: from 0 to 50,000 monthly visitors in 6 months, tasket va services merges with contentellect (yay), content + links: it's that simple.

Let's talk about how we can scale your content and link building efforts

affiliate seo case study

Affiliate SEO Case Study

Tool reviews website case study: 81% increase in organic traffic.

affiliate seo case study

Increase in Organic Users. From 3.6 million to 6.6 million, year-over-year.

affiliate seo case study

Increase in Ranked Keywords. From 153,000 to 215,000, year-over-year.

About the Tool Reviews Website and its Goals

The company extensively tests new tools, including hand tools and power tools, as well as tools primarily used commercially — e.g. used by homebuilders, automotive mechanics, landscapers, etc. Once the company vets the tools, they write “best of” reviews and articles about the tools they’ve tested.

In addition, they produce videos of the tools in use and provide “how-to” articles that assist users with how to use particular tools to complete specific projects.  The website is not a retailer.  They generate revenue through affiliate links to big-name retailers’ websites and through ad views on the domain.

The company decided to partner with Sure Oak in order to increase organic traffic through SEO, which would increase its revenue through its ad views and links to affiliate websites.

However, there were several challenges to overcome.

First, the website was outdated, slow, and did not support up-to-date display ads.

The fact they couldn’t run ads in specific locations or that were a certain size or in a specific format on their pages meant they were missing out on potential revenue. The website not only restricted the placement and size of ads; it was also difficult and time consuming to update content on it.

Additionally, the website did not adhere to SEO best practices.

For example, consistent content production over several years had created thousands of URLs that utilized an old WordPress URL convection with permalink numbers. So those needed to be cleaned up and the old URLs redirected without negatively impacting the website’s existing SEO.

And finally, while the content on the website was extremely high quality, it wasn’t optimized as well as it could have been, which limited its ability to rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

We worked closely with the company to completely replace the existing WordPress site without harming the SEO value that had been built over several years. In addition, we developed a custom WordPress plugin that made it easy to update the old permalink URL conventions to new base URL conventions.

More specifically, the plugin could be used to update an old URL that looked like this:

www.toolreviewssitename.com/purchase-guide/best-name-of-hand-tool-review/55895/ 

www.www.toolreviewssitename.com/best-name-of-hand-tool-review/

In addition to replacing the website and developing the URL plugin, Sure Oak provided content briefs for hundreds of pages, including existing pages and new pages, on the tool reviews website.

Those individual page recommendations supported a comprehensive content strategy that helped nearly  double the number of organic sessions and organic users when comparing metrics year-over-year.

Organic Sessions

affiliate seo case study

The number of  organic sessions increased from 4.6 million in year one to 8.4 million in year two, an increase of 81 percent.  The number of organic users saw an even greater percentage increase;  the 3.6 million users in year one compared with the 6.6 million users in year two represented an 83 percent increase.  To top it all off, the number of impressions on the website increased 78 percent.

Keywords ranking.

affiliate seo case study

While working with Sure Oak, the number of keywords the website ranked for rose to 215,000 up from 153,000  — an increase of 40 percent — when comparing the same month year-over-year.

In addition to those site-wide metrics, specific pages achieved top rankings for highly competitive keywords, beating out competitors, such as Consumer Reports, CNET, and the New York Times, in SERPs.

Some examples of those keywords include:

  • Best cordless drills
  • Best tape measure
  • Best shop vac
  • Best electric pressure washer
  • Best battery chainsaw

The increased organic traffic for relevant and valuable keyword phrases — combined with being able to run more high-quality ads on the redesigned pages — spurred ad revenue as well. The company shared with Sure Oak that  their revenue from ad views increased roughly 300 percent during our engagement.

Looking to increase your search rankings and get more leads directly from your website?

©2024 sure oak solutions llc., terms of use , privacy policy , sitemap, privacy overview.

Side Hustle Nation

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

alex and healy finvsfin

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.

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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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Nick Loper

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, Hubspot, Ahrefs, Shopify, Investopedia, VICE, Vox, Mashable, ChooseFI, 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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What Is Affiliate Marketing & How It Works (2024 Guide)

Affiliate Marketing Guide Cover

The story began in 1989 when William J.Tobin birthed the idea of the affiliate program for his business, PC Flowers, Inc.

Fast forward to 1991: PC Flowers is swimming in cash on Prodigy Network. We’re talking to the tune of $6M.

And now you’re thinking,

I’m glad you asked. The Global Affiliate Market is currently worth over an estimated $13 billion dollars .

And the United States is leading the way with the lion’s share at $6.8 billion.

Global Affiliate Market Worth

You can slice off your own share of this incredible market if you’re willing to work for it .

I’ve been working as a full time affiliate marketer for over 10 years, during which I’ve built multiple 6 figure affiliate marketing businesses, including The Search Initiative, LeadSpring, The Affiliate Lab, and Diggity Marketing.

In this article, I’ll go through what is affiliate marketing, how it works, and how to get started.

Table Of Contents

Quick Summary

What is affiliate marketing, the customer, the advertiser, the affiliate, affiliate network, the traffic source, how do you become an affiliate marketer, how much money can you make as an affiliate marketer, little to no overhead costs, low barrier to entry, passive income potential, hello impromptu vacations, step #1: choose your niche, step #2: develop your strategy, step #3: create a website, step #4: research your products, step #5: promote your affiliate links, unattached affiliate marketing, related affiliate marketing, involved affiliate marketing, frequently asks questions (faq), get started.

affliate marketing banner

Affiliate marketing is the process of receiving payment after you promote a product or service on behalf of another business.

Think of yourself as a salesperson earning commission for every sale you make. The difference here is that as a marketer, you don’t work directly for the company.

In layman’s terms, you make money by sending your audience towards the company through an affiliate link. Once a customer follows through with the desired call-to-action thanks to your unique affiliate link, you get your commission.

Promote products to your audience often enough and you will have created a salary for yourself.

Below, you’ll find out step by step how to earn a sustainable affiliate income as soon as possible.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Knowing how affiliate marketing works involves understanding each part of the process.

how to do affiliate marketing

1. You provide a link or an ad on your online platforms to a particular online store for your audience to see.

2. A potential customer clicks on the link or ad.

3. The customer is sent to the website through the tracking link.

4. The customer then makes a purchase for a product or service.

5. The company records the sale as well as the transaction details.

6. Each sale is confirmed as valid and credited to you.

7. You get your commission.

The three main players in the online affiliate marketing business definition include:

The customer starts off as a member of your audience looking for answers to satisfy a particular need. They trust that you have the answers they’re looking for and they believe in your authoritative word.

Through your content, you direct your audience to your advertiser’s website for the solution to their query.

They become a customer when they have purchased a product or service on the affiliate’s online store.

understanding affiliate marketing per click

They want more sales without spending money on marketing campaigns. Instead, they’d rather pay someone a commission for every paying customer sent their way.

And that’s where you come in.

Promoting a product or service

Once you’ve been doing it for a while, you can more easily pinpoint the best customers for specific offers. Over time, you can start sending hundreds of customers a day to an affiliate product.

It gets better: the advertiser may increase your commission and even grant you exclusive discounts for your audience. This results in the likelihood of a higher conversion rate, which means more affiliate income for you.

At this point, your effort mostly goes into maintaining the site and making improvements to raise your ROI. The reason? Your business now runs like a well-oiled machine.

And this is where everything really starts snowballing.

There’s a HUGE opportunity to scale.

In this video, I share a scaling hack for growing your affiliate SEO website portfolio.

Key Terms for Every Affiliate Marketer

Now that you know the three main players involved in the process, it’s also important to recognize a few of the most important terms, including:

A network to sell a product or service

On the other hand, the offer owner only deals with a single network as opposed to hundreds of affiliate marketers.

So all you need to do is sign up with an affiliate network and set up your affiliate link.

Traffic sources are the places where you find potential customers. You need actual people to share your links with.

Traffic Source Illustration

The smart way to build traffic is to start by creating great SEO content before starting an email list[ 1 ] once you already have some traffic coming in.

how to be an affiliate marketer

1. Choose a company and the specific product you want to promote.

2. Sign up for any of these affiliate marketing programs .

3. Get your special affiliate link and promote it on your site.

4. Anyone who clicks on the link goes to the product page.

5. If they buy something, you earn a commission based on the price of the item purchased.

The most important part of this process involves creating high-quality content. It should attract a large audience and include links naturally, in a way that doesn’t seem too sales-y .

If you already have an existing website with a following, then the five steps are pretty straightforward.

If, however, you’re starting from scratch and need to create a website, then there’s a bit more work involved. I cover this below where I show you how to get started with the process.

Remember that $12 billion that you could have a share of? Well, the prospect is very real.

Just take a look at a recent poll from our members-only Affiliate Lab Facebook group:

course members using affilitate marketing to make money

Now, this is important because they visit multiple sites[ 3 ] before making a purchase. So best believe, this process is here to stay.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

As well as the financial gains you can make, there are other benefits of affiliate marketing to consider, such as:

Just grab your computer, get a reliable internet connection, and invest a bit of money into building your website.

You can also expand your business with low overhead costs. No need to rent a working space or hire a team for an affiliate marketing program. So the sky is the limit!

Minimal costs mean easier entry. It’s easy to join an affiliate program, even if you are just starting out and you only have a small amount of traffic. Since you don’t have to think about creating stock or shipping products, there’s less hassle.

“Affiliate marketing is an excellent opportunity if you truly believe in the value of the product you’re selling. Because many times, you can make money off of something you would probably recommend anyway.”

Neil Patel img

You don’t own the product purchased through your links. So you lose nothing if a customer doesn’t make a purchase.

As you grow, you can diversify your affiliate marketing income sources and traffic streams, reducing risk. With different streams and sources, you’re less reliant on a single affiliate marketing program or traffic source. For instance, if an affiliate program reduces its commission or Google changes its algorithms, diversification means you take less of a hit.

The best part of the job is earning passive income as a marketer.

What 9 to 5?

The life of great affiliate marketers basically involves earning money while sleeping, through their links.

In fact, the right content can consistently generate revenue for you if it ranks well in the search engines.

And we’re not talking a few weeks or months but up to several years! Isn’t that the dream?

selling a service or product from anywhere

After all, who wants a day job when they are already earning a bucket-load of f-you money elsewhere.

With internet access, you can earn your passive income any time and from anywhere in the world. We wrote a comprehensive guide on how to get a job in affiliate marketing that you may want to check.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

Here’s the complete walkthrough of everything it takes to get started as a marketing affiliate.

a guide to promoting a service or product

Picking a niche that you enjoy is a good idea, particularly if you are new to this, but choosing one that makes things easier for you is even better.

Niche selection determines how much money you can make and how difficult it will be to rank for quality keywords.

Do you want to become a successful affiliate promoting a product or service? Then stick to your chosen niche for maximum profit .

Physical Products

When you’re promoting physical products, the opportunities are endless. The Amazon Associates program is the most popular affiliate program for a physical product.

But on the flip side, a physical product tends to fetch lower commission rates. This is to offset the costs of manufacturing, storing, and shipping.

For instance, Amazon’s[ 4 ] 10% commission can drop to a measly 1% depending on the affiliate marketers’ sales volume and the product category.

Information Products

An information product can be a guide, an e-book, a webinar, or an online course.

Commission rates for an information product tend to be higher compared to other types of affiliate products.

Some merchants offer commissions as high as 75% – an uncommon rate when you’re promoting physical products.

You can also decide to promote services like graphic design and web development. You just need to ensure your readers are actually interested and will use them. Furthermore, commission rates can be as high as half the sale.

You need to create an air-tight strategy that keeps you from wasting time and resources while maximizing your passive income.

affiliate marketing strategy illustration

The real question is, how much time are you willing to invest? Is this full-time, or are you balancing it with another job?

You simply can’t half-ass this. You need to be a dedicated learner in order to consistently produce quality content.

Next, get started on keyword research and brainstorming content ideas. Add all your ideas to your calendar and enforce a regular publishing schedule.

Your site is your money-maker, so invest in it. Shop from hundreds of templates or use a website builder . They’re beginner-friendly and you don’t need prior coding experience or skills on how to make a website for an affiliate marketing business.

website builder

Google Trends is good for finding breakout products that won’t show search data in Ahrefs.

This data helps you identify the level of demand and determine which product will gain popularity with time. This could mean the difference between low and exponentially high affiliate sales for your business.

For instance, if health and beauty is your chosen niche, a quick search on “collagen protein” may reveal a high search volume with an upward trend over the last few months.

Therefore, you can anticipate that it’s a popular product from which you can generate high affiliate sales.

People need to actually see your affiliate links for you to make any profits. So marketing your content is necessary if you want to drive traffic to your site.

Here are two affiliate marketing strategies that top affiliate marketers commonly use:

Search Engine Optimization illustrated

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your website attain the top SERP on search engines. The higher your position for your target keywords, the more likely users are to click on your website.

People want curation. When there is a choice, people need help organizing and understanding all of the options. They WANT someone with a voice and experience to filter the noise and find the best products for them, ultimately saving them time and getting them results, faster. That person, that curator, can be you, and everyone can win.

Pat Flynn

SEO takes a while to master but if you can diligently apply it to your site, you stand to reap massive benefits.

Email Marketing

Once you have great SEO content, create an email list, and use it to promote a product to your audience.

Potential customers will be organically attracted to your content, allowing you to build a community based on genuine interest. This makes it easier to push a product to your audience and get a higher conversion rate.

email marketing illustrations

Affiliate Marketing Examples

Let’s take a look at two affiliate website examples  that are currently killing it.

the wirecutter homepage

The Wirecutter will definitely point you in the right direction[ 5 ].

Founder Brian Lam and his team put all reviewed products through rigorous tests. So much so, the site has earned the title Mythbusters for gadgets .

Top Content

The Best Air Purifier wirecutter

The Best Air Purifier

best air purifier wirecutter post specs

Source of Money

Their simple model is commissions through Amazon and BestBuy. No advertisements or sponsored posts and neither do they sell their own products.

nerdwallet homepage

NerdWallet reviews financial products from credit cards to mortgages to insurance.

best credit card 2020 nerdwallet

Best Credit Cards of 2024 Reviews, Rewards, and Offers

best credit card nerdwallet post specs

NerdWallet is purely an affiliate site; there are no ads or sales from their own product sales.

Wondering whether you should put display ads on your affiliate website? In this video, I share my test results.

Types of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are usually shrouded in mystery; you never know if the individual has really tried the product or is only advertising it for financial gain. Both examples continue to exist.

Affiliate Marketing

Pat Flynn, a notable affiliate marketer, divided the various sorts of affiliate marketers into three categories back in 2009. Regardless of your moral compass, understanding these types of affiliate marketing can show you the many methods individuals earn money online in this field.

The first type of affiliate marketing is known as “unattached” and occurs when you have no authority in the product’s area. No relationship exists between you and the consumer.

Typically, you conduct pay-per-click advertising campaigns using your affiliate link in the hopes that people would click it, purchase the goods, and earn a commission.

Unattached affiliate marketing is appealing since it requires no effort. Online affiliate marketing firms depend on their reputation and the audience’s confidence.

This form of affiliate marketing is the greatest alternative for marketers who lack the time or inclination to cultivate such partnerships.

Related affiliate marketing is the practice of advertising items and services related to your niche that you do not personally utilize. In this instance, an affiliate marketer has an audience, whether via blogging, YouTube, TikTok, or another outlet.

A linked affiliate marketer also has influence, making them a reliable source for promoting things even if they have never utilized them.

Social Media

Despite the fact that linked affiliate marketing efforts might earn greater affiliate money, it comes with the danger of recommending something you have never tried before. It may be the worst product or service ever, yet you would have no idea.

One terrible suggestion is all it takes to ruin your audience’s confidence. Without trust and openness, it will be difficult to develop a lasting affiliate marketing firm.

Involved affiliate marketing refers to suggesting only items and services that the affiliate marketer has personally tried and wholeheartedly endorses.

We believe involved affiliate marketing is the way ahead. It is founded on trust and genuineness, which is beneficial for both the audience and the company.

Instead of paying for clicks on banner ads, an affiliate marketer leverages his or her influence to sell items and services that followers may genuinely need. It takes more effort to establish this form of credibility with a target audience, but it is essential for establishing a lasting company.

In my opinion, the involved strategy makes advertising for affiliate marketing partners simpler. You do not need to hide behind pricey PPC advertisements and hope for clicks and purchases.

A natural Instagram Story or blog post about your product experience will go a long way. It is the only authentic way to become a reliable source in any niche.

Which Affiliate Program Is the Best?

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

Affiliate marketing for beginners is not immediately easy. It takes time and effort to truly impact your customers and develop trusting relationships with them.

How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid?

Do You Have to Pay to Be an Affiliate?

You don’t have to pay to be an affiliate. Most affiliate networks are free and easy to join. Simply complete a signup form and start making money by promoting your preferred product and service. Before you start, we highly recommend reading several good affiliate marketing books that we reviewed.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

Affiliate marketing is not a pyramid scheme . It is a legitimate commission-only business model with no upfront cost for becoming an affiliate.

What Is the Difference Between Affiliate Marketing and Referral Marketing?

The difference between affiliate marketing and referral marketing is that affiliate marketing revolves around a business relationship between an affiliate and a brand, while referral marketing focuses on the shared relationship between your customers, their associates or friends, and your brand.

What Is the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

The difference Between SEO and SEM is that SEO focuses on organic search results and optimizing websites to rank higher, while SEM involves paid advertising to increase visibility and drive traffic. We addressed this subject in our SEO vs SEM article.

Can you already see yourself resigning from your 9 to 5 because your passive income is sustainable?

I sure hope you can.

Because that’s the purpose of this affiliate marketing guide; to show you that it is profitable and attainable for you.

Simply make sure you’re following all the steps in this ultimate guide when you start affiliate marketing to promote products.

Or you can go a step further and enroll in (in my opinion) the best affiliate marketing course, The Affiliate Lab .

I consulted for a while before uncovering my strong desire to help people achieve their dreams with digital marketing.

Blogging is fantastic, but there are certain complicated techniques that require a better learning format.

Enter The Affiliate Lab.

This is an evergreen course so it changes as soon as my tests reveal that the algorithm has changed.

The Affiliate Lab : for those who want a successful affiliate marketing career and get paid.

Matt-Author-Img

Matt Diggity

Matt is the founder of Diggity Marketing, LeadSpring, The Search Initiative, The Affiliate Lab, and the Chiang Mai SEO Conference. He actually does SEO too.

Want to rank easier, higher and faster?

Sign up and join 100,000+ other subscribers and get SEO test results sent straight to your inbox.

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Search Engine Journal

How to 132X Your Website's Profit

The biggest wins from 3 case studies.

  • Female Beauty Niche: $500/month to $16,400/month.
  • Weight Loss Niche: $4,000/month to $33,100/month.
  • Toy Niche: $400 to $45,000 per month on Christmas.

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Research, write, and optimize across industries with the click of a button.

B2B Services SEO Case Study: 198% Growth In Traffic

SEO for niche businesses can be challenging to start with. 

Setting an SEO strategy detailing which topics to cover and if your target demographic is actually searching for them, can feel like a drain on your resources, especially if you’re yet to see tangible results from SEO.

However the relative lack of competition and saturation in the search results can also help grow your organic presence quickly.

I recently helped a business client’s website triple its organic visitors over 6 months. The client provides backend services to business customers who typically sign up for a subscription.

They came to us for help with increasing search traffic and ultimately, leads for their business.

As you can see, my agency was able to nearly triple their organic search traffic from 239 to 714 per day. 

affiliate seo case study

These results came from executing tactics in 3 areas:

  • Content optimization
  • Link building
  • Technical updates

If you make improvements to each of these elements, you can expect to increase your website’s search traffic. 

I’m breaking down the 6 steps we took below.

The foundation of SEO is content. 

Without it, you won’t attract any visitors to your website. 

Instead of writing a ton of new articles, we focussed on identifying opportunities within the website, and publishing content that could help us earn backlinks. 

Optimizing existing content

Optimizing existing content is an effective way to realize quick results. Eventually, you want to optimize all of your content.

But the site in question had a ton of existing content, so we needed to identify which pages to focus on first.

So here’s how you can replicate our approach.

  • Make a list of all the pages ranking in positions 4 to 20 for their target keyword.
  • Filter those pages and select our business’s most important pages

Your website’s most important pages are those that will directly increase revenue or leads for your business if they rank in the top 3 positions on Google.

We then pasted these URLs into Surfer’s Audit tool to help uncover easy-to-implement recommendations that could improve ranking.

affiliate seo case study

Now check the following reports in this exact order.

  • Exact keywords report
  • Partial keywords report
  • Page structure report (only red issues)

These reports will reveal critical keywords that your page is missing. Ensure that you implement these keyword suggestions as best as you can.

For instance, the Exact keywords report here has identified the lack of my target keywords in the page title and H1.

affiliate seo case study

And the Partial keywords report here suggests using an exact phrase.

affiliate seo case study

Fix the issues and then refresh the report in the top right corner.

affiliate seo case study

Next, check that your Word count matches the top ranking pages in length and add more content if necessary.

For example, the report here recommends adding more content based on competitor pages. 

affiliate seo case study

Refresh the report again to account for your changes.

Lastly, work on the “ Phrases ” section report in the Terms To Use report. You can ignore the “Words” and “Numbers” sections here.

affiliate seo case study

When you’re done, hit the “Refresh” button on the Surfer Audit report for the last time and double check everything is right.

That’s all.  

Optimizing your existing pages is easy to do and for the most part – is a case of rewording sentences or adding/removing things as Surfer tells you.

Creating linkable content

Most people focus on ranking content that drives leads and sales.

That’s good.

But there is something else you should be doing too.

I will show you how we created statistics posts that earned links from big media publications without paying for them.

It’s like link-building on auto-pilot.

So, what are statistics posts?

Statistics posts are a round-up of key statistics, data and trends related to a specific topic or company.

Like this article about Amazon Prime’s key figures.

affiliate seo case study

They are often very easy to create and rank for. 

You need just a handful of links, a well-written post and a couple of custom graphics.

But once you rank among the top 3 positions for your target keyword, you can earn high authority links from big authority sites on autopilot.

Because journalists are always looking for statistics to reference in their articles. When they find a relevant statistic, they’ll often reference the source and link back to the site.

Statistics roundups make it easy for journalists to do their job, so we could sit back while those juicy high authority backlinks rolled in automatically from sites like Techcrunch and Gizmodo.

affiliate seo case study

So how do you create a statistics post that earns links from authoritative websites?

The key to a great stats post is finding compelling stats to include in relevant topics.

Here’s how to come up with ideas for statistics posts.

Brainstorm a list of ideas in your niche. These could be, 

  • Manufacturers

And anything else you can think of in your niche that you could compile a list of statistics about. This should give you a ton of ideas to start with.

But don’t stop there.

Think about hot topics and news in your niche right now. 

Do some research to see what’s trending. We used Google News and looked for relevant topics covered by multiple news and media groups.

affiliate seo case study

Ask yourself this question,

What specific news frequently breaks on a subject in your niche?

These topics are perfect because you already know that journalists are writing about them and looking for data to reference right now.

The key is to make each post specific and focused. 

The last thing you want to write is generic statistical posts because they won’t rank, and journalists won’t link to them.

For example, these are some ideas for evergreen posts that could potentially work:

  • Remote work Statistics
  • Gender pay Statistics
  • Climate change Statistics
  • Mental health Statistics

The sky is the limit when you are brainstorming statistics topics. Just make sure they are relevant to your niche.

You could also focus on brands, products, companies and services:

  • Brand statistics (eg Facebook statistics)
  • Product statistics (eg iWatch statistics)
  • Service statistics (eg Zoom statistics)

You might even include locations in your ideas:

  • US lottery statistics
  • Arizona car crime statistics
  • United Kingdom healthcare statistics

Brainstorm ideas and create the ones that are most likely to gain media coverage in your niche.

2. Technical improvements

Technical SEO is the foundation for strong results from content.

There is no point in spending your time, effort or money on link building and content creation if your website’s technical details are lacking.

Here are 3 things we implemented straight away.

E-EAT Signals

E-EAT is an essential part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines . That’s the handbook Google’s web rating team uses to evaluate the quality of search results

E-EAT stands for:

  • E xperience
  • A uthoritativeness
  • T rustworthiness

Put simply – E-EAT signals prove to Google that you are a real and trustworthy business they can confidently send traffic to.

E-EAT indicators are becoming more and more important – especially in the age of AI content.

You must demonstrate each of these signals if you want to rank higher on the search result pages. 

The good news is there are a couple of quick changes you can make to your site to boost its’ E-EAT signals.

How to add E-EAT signals to your website?

There are a few key must-have elements needed to improve your E-EAT signals.

We worked our way down the list below and added each of them to our site.

1. Implement name, address and phone number (NAP)

In prominent areas, add your business name , address , and phone number to your website.

In SEO, this is also called NAP.

Here’s an example of NAP in action in the footer of my SEO agency’s website.

nap signals

Add your name, address, and phone number to your websites in these areas.

  • Contact page

These are the places that people will look to if they want to learn more about your business or get in contact with you.

NAP is essential for every website, even if you’re an Amazon affiliate website and especially if you run a business with a physical location.

Don’t have a physical address?

Get permission from your accountant and add their physical address to your website. Or you could rent a virtual address online, usually for a few dollars per week.

You can also use your home address, but not everyone is comfortable with doing that.

Need a phone number?

Use CallRail and pre-record a phone answering message if someone calls.

Then have any messages you receive sent to you by email. 

I like this approach because it means we never have to be around to answer the phone when it rings.

2. About page

Your About page showcases who’s behind the business.

Google and website visitors should be able to see exactly who operates the business.

affiliate seo case study

Here’s what your About page should have:

  • Add an image to the page of the business owner and team members
  • Include a bio for important team members
  • Link bios to each team member’s LinkedIn profile
  • List achievements, qualifications, and awards
  • Write an “about the team” section

Add testimonials or reviews from real customers to your home page, about page and service/product pages. 

This is a great way to boost E-EAT signals.

testimonials example

Adding organizational structured data

We used the Local SEO module in RankMath to add organization-structured data to our website:

rank math local seo module

It only takes a few minutes to set up, and we recommend doing so.

Once you have added it, use Schema Validator to ensure it was correctly implemented.

organization schema verificaiton

You should be able to see your address, phone number, social profiles and more!

Review advanced schema

In 2011, the world’s leading search engines created a standardized way for web page data to be structured. 

It led an initiative called Schema.org .

Here’s why you should pay attention to schema data.

Schema data can,

  • Attract more attention to your page
  • Increase your click-through rate (CTR)
  • Drive more traffic

Who doesn’t want that, right?

You can structure data like:

  • Category pages
  • Opening hours
  • Telephone numbers

And more! The list goes on and on.

For example, if you publish recipes, schema can generate additional data like ratings and prep time displayed next to your search result.

affiliate seo case study

If you want to drive targeted traffic from Google, it really pays to use schema-structured data across your site.

How to check for schema

Before adding schema data to your site, you need to see if you’ve got any on there already. 

Use this free schema validator tool . Type in your page URL and click Run Test .

affiliate seo case study

All detected schema markup on the page will be displayed on the right side. 

You’ll also be able to see if there are any warnings or errors that need addressing.

Check your homepage, category pages, content pages, product pages, event pages and review pages, and anything else that is important to your business.

Which schema to use?

The schema data you add to your site is different for everyone.

Because there are over 30+ different types of schema, and not all of them are relevant to your site.

For example, at SearchLogistics we use,

  • CollectionPage
  • Organization schema

That’s the schema that's relevant to our site and content. Now, you need to figure out what’s relevant for you.

Head over to this page and look at the types of schema that Google supports.

Make a list of which schema types are relevant to your site and implement them using SEO plugins like RankMath.

3. Simple link building strategies

Link building is hard work. It is the last pillar of SEO to focus on and is often the most challenging. 

Even with the best link-building strategies, it still takes a lot of time, effort, and skill to see results.

This is why many business owners choose to outsource to link building agencies .

Here, I’ll show you how we approached building backlinks to get these results. 

Which pages should you build links to?

It’s important to make sure that you are only building links to pages that will increase your revenue and where you stand a good chance of winning the number 1 position for your target keyword. 

So I am going to show you precisely how to figure out which pages you should be building links to on your site step by step.

Identifying target keywords:

First, we identified keywords that were currently ranking on the first three pages of Google. You can see this data in your Google Search Console Search results queries report.

affiliate seo case study

Then, pick out the ones that are the most commercially relevant to your business.

Ultimately, you want to create a shortlist of keywords that are ranking on the first three pages of Google that will bring sales or leads to your business. 

It's best to avoid highly competitive search terms and focus on more targeted keywords with lower search volumes that appear later in the buying cycle.

The real trick here is being strict with your keyword selections by focusing on sales and leads rather than the search volume. 

Next, we calculated the link gap to assess the difference in the number of backlinks between our page and higher-ranking competitors' pages for the same keywords.

How many links do you need?

I will explain how to roughly calculate how many backlinks you need to break the top three rankings for a given keyword.

Knowing this is important because once you know how many links you need, then you can figure out how much to budget for your target keyword.

Start by searching for your target keyword and look for sites of similar authority to yours ranking on the first page. 

Then, use the free Mozbar extension to look at the backlink profiles of each of the top three results to figure out exactly which types of links are currently powering the top three rankings on average.

For example, in the image below, we can see the number one position has a couple of backlinks. 

However, you'll see that only 5 of those have a domain rating of above 30. 

affiliate seo case study

Clicking back to the results, you can do the same thing for the next 2 positions to find the number of links that have any meaningful authority. 

Based on this method, you can calculate the backlink gap. You will often find that it would take just a few good links to compete with the current search results of your page.

This is also helped by the fact that DR sites with similar authority to yours, or below are ranking with no or a few links. 

This means that you could estimate that if you were to build just three or four solid links, you would get good results on this keyword.

We were able to replicate this same method to help a client recover from Google’s Helpful Content update. 

affiliate seo case study

This is how you decide which pages to build links to, whilst also knowing how many links you need to build at what cost.

These strategies help us improve organic clicks by 3x in just 6 months. 

Success in B2B SEO comes from a combination of efforts on technical, content, and link building. 

By implementing a comprehensive approach that included content optimization, E-E-A-T improvements, and a robust backlink strategy, we achieved significant improvements in our client's online visibility, search engine rankings, and, most importantly, lead generation and conversion rates.

Please ensure you implement the steps I’ve shared with you above on your website because seeing more results like this would be great.

For B2B companies looking to drive business growth, investing in SEO is vital to growth.

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affiliate seo case study

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Affiliate Marketing SEO Case Study

  • WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing allows marketers to earn commissions by promoting another brand’s product(s). 

Commissions are paid out per sale, and can by either flat rate or percentage based. 

Top affiliate niches can easily generate 6-figures annually.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate SEO

Affiliate marketing SEO is the art of choosing products based on the potential search traffic available when analyzing niche specific keywords.

Affiliate SEO focuses on ranking a website for specific buyer intent keywords. This can be very lucrative, as you do not need to pay for ads.

  • START FROM SCRATCH OR BUY?

Building A Website From Scratch

Building a website is an amazing experience. 

Identifying your marketing, designing a brand you love and experiencing the excitement of launching your new site are all exciting.

It’s something we love, and we like to think we do it well. 

Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time and investment to get going.

affiliate seo case study

Buying An Aged Domain & Website

Buying an aged domain, and an existing website with content can save you months of time. 

The main advantage is that aged websites will react faster in the SERPS. They aren’t in the Google Sandbox.

Whether you would like to buy an established brand, or just a barebones website with content, this can be an excellent option.

  • WHY WE CHOSE TO BUY

Why An Agency Decided To Buy

Building a website is something we love, so why did we decide to buy?

  • To experience what every other buyer experiences. 
  • To save the time and investment required to build from scratch.
  • To test our skills within a niche totally unknown to the team.

Buying A Website

What We Were Looking For

When looking for a possible website to buy, we followed our internal checklist to ensure we picked a site we believed we could improve.

The complete list is too long for this post. The primary four were:

  • Minimum 6 months age & receiving traffic.
  • Niche with potential for growth & scale.
  • Already earning affiliate commissions.
  • No active manual penalties in Google Search Console.
  • WHY SURVIVAL FRONT?

Buying An Established Website

The perfect starter site.

Survival Front met the criteria, perfectly. We checked off over 90% of our website buying checklist.

The website had a brand that was higher quality than you see on many affiliate sites. This will save us time, as we do not believe in non-branded money sites.

SurvivalFront.com had over 430 pages indexed, and it was getting traffic in Google.

It was even making a little money. 

affiliate seo case study

Looking For Easy Wins

Survival Front’s organic traffic had been crashing for nearly 8 months.

Analysis indicated the site had grown rapidly since launching the end of 2019, and then appeared to be hit with a Google penalty in May of 2020.

Easy Wins: 

  • Establish Brand Authority
  • Easy On-page SEO Tweaks
  • CTR Optimization
  • Duplicate Content
  • Structural Changes (User Focused)
  • Interlinking Opportunities
  • Highly Toxic Backlinks (Manageable Amount)
  • PREVIOUS HISTORY

What Our Research Uncovered

First impressions suggested that Survival Front was being sold by an individual for an asking price of $8,000.

It was not until we were performing brand research that we uncovered another agency had built the site. 

Lucky for us, they wrote a case study about the site too.

Total invested by March 2020 – $14,000.

affiliate seo case study

What Were We Buying?

Survival Front was a well built base site. 

What Was Included:

  • Lightning fast, custom coded theme.
  • Highly brandable name.
  • 71 Published Articles.
  • Over 140k words of content.
  • All content is written in-house by a native speaking English SEO team.
  • A mixture of round-up reviews, single reviews (automatically pulled from round-ups), and informational guides.

*Details as provided in website listing. 

Reported Monthly Profit

Earnings reported were an internal area of conflict. The listing stated that the site made $224.00 a month.

There were two separate sets of numbers in the listing (possibly due to listing issue s ) , however, proof of earnings were provided.

We had to take previous earning into consideration, along with the loss of over 1/3 of the site’s peak traffic.

affiliate seo case study

*On April 21, 2020, Drastically Amazon Cut Affiliate Commissions

Our Own Evaluation

Our assessment of the website’s earning did not align with the listing.

Calculating earnings showed the website was earning an average of $189 a month.

We believed the month prior to being penalized was artificially inflated due to toxic link building, & PR related to the site’s case study (possibly for much of the site’s history in fact). 

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic attributed to the large increase in traffic and sales.

Removing this month from the average, and considering the massive loss in traffic, we put the monthly earnings as low as $130.00 – 150.00.

The Offer & Negotiations

Internally the team at BOx Digital calculated what we thought was a fair price, and also what our maximum offer would be. 

Typically, websites sell from 20x to 50x monthly profit. Knowing this, we would offer no more than $5k. 

Our decision was based on provable earnings, and on worst case profit scenarios.

We initiated a conversation with the seller, and offered $4,500 USD to purchase Survival Front. 

After negotiations, we successfully closed the transaction for $5,000.

affiliate seo case study

  • WHAT ARE OUR GOALS?

Create Additional Income Streams

We like the idea of having additional income streams that do not require large investments of time to maintain. 

We will increase the site’s earnings by increasing traffic & conversions, and also by moving to higher paying affiliate programs.

We believe that we can increase earnings to $500 a month within the first 60 days. 

Additionally, we aim to grow the site to $3,500 – $5,000 per month by the end of the year 2021, while working on it part-time.

affiliate seo case study

More Than Money

Yes, the goal is to first make money. Let’s be clear about that. That’s business.

However, we really want to know how we can perform in totally new niches.

We have ranked multiple 6-figure sites in other niches before. 

We know we can do it, but how do we stack up against the competition? 

Help Those Looking To Buy A Website

We believe that purchasing a website is a wonderful way to get started online. 

Be it affiliate marketing, dropshipping, eCommerce or SaaS website; buying can save you months of time.

The problem is knowing what website you should buy, and how much you should pay. 

BOx Digital would like to help make the  process of analyzing and evaluating a website easier. 

affiliate seo case study

Position Ourselves As An Authority

We run marketing campaigns for eCommerce & eLearning websites, and now we want more!

Our team believes that the goal of any marketer should be to grow.

To do that we have chosen to test the waters in a totally new-to-us field, and to do it publicly. 

We believe in our team, and it’s time for us to show off some of our work.

  • WHAT'S NEXT?

Monthly Updates

BOx Digital will document our experience growing SurvivalFront.com from day one.

Our next update will cover initial analysis of the website, and also what we are going to do to recover the site’s traffic. 

We will continue to document our progress, and share our wins and losses with you.

affiliate seo case study

Follow Our Affiliate Marketing Case Study

Whether you are interested in becoming an affiliate marketer, learning more about SEO or just want to follow for fun; we would love to share our story with you. 

Follow us to get all the latest updates as they are released, and to receive insider only content. 

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SEO Hustlers

SEO case study: a cool one-paged affiliate website (w/ weekly updates!)

' title=

Would you like to see how we build a brand new online business from scratch? 

Well, this blog post is exactly about that 🤠!

We recently came up with a new business idea and will update this blog weekly. We will show you our progress with regards to all aspects of setting up an online business: niche selection, domain registration, website creation, content creation, link building and monetization.

Every week we will post how much traffic and revenue we have generated. So follow along, let us know what you think in the comments at the bottom of this post 👇!

The business idea, as result of the current COVID-19 situation

One of our colleagues mentioned that her work from home ‘office’ was already getting quite hot, due to spring temperatures rising in the Netherlands. If we will have to continue to work from home in the summer due to the coronavirus, more people might experience this problem.

Joep immediately thought of the need for air conditioners and quickly checked Ahrefs to get some insights into this niche:

' title=

Damn, interesting! High volumes, low keyword difficulty. That’s how we like to see them 📈🔥. We dug a little deeper and found a very interesting angle: portable air conditioners:

' title=

As setting up a completely new online business would require a lot of work, we decided to pursue this idea only if it would meet the following requirements:

  • Buy a (semi) exact match domain
  • Setup only one page, but make it incredibly well (inspired by this article )
  • Invest in link building immediately and spend max $ 1.000

And so it begins … 🤠

Update: Week 1 (april 6-12): 

After bulk checking lots of domains with the keyword lists we exported, we found out that most of the hidden gems were taken. We even found a few affiliate competitors, with loads of content. This worked out quite well for this particular website:

' title=

This website is only one year old, and already receiving over 10K in monthly organic traffic with only 30 referring domains (of which most of them are low quality).

Domain registration

With these new insights, we registered a semi exact match domain, as we wanted our focus keyword [mobiele airco] in it:

  • VergelijkMobieleAirco.nl

Installing WordPress

We have built many websites over the last 16 years and still think WordPress is the easiest and fastest way to get a good looking website up and running.

After we purchased a very simple Webhosting package, we installed WordPress. As a theme, we used Enfold as it is a very versatile template with lots of opportunities and an advanced lay-out builder.

Plugins we usually always install are (all free):

  • iThemes security , for basic security
  • EWWW image optimizer , to optimize and compress images
  • Imsanity , to reduce huge file uploads
  • Yoast SEO , for sitemap creation and optimizing meta data
  • A3 lazy load , to lazy load images and videos
  • Akeeba backup , to backup our site

Drafting a template

To get an idea of what our one-pager would look like, we quickly drafted a template we had in mind:

' title=

Writing the first paragraphs of content

As it has to become a monster high quality content page, we decided to write the content ourselves. It’s harder to outsource content for a one-pager, that has to be the best in the game. Here’s what we did:

  • We looked up the first 5 results for our main keyword [portable air conditioners]
  • We analyzed the copy, questions (FAQ) and dived a little deeper into the topic to understand important subtopics
  • We started (re)writing the copy, having multiple windows open at the same time

Creating a logo

Creating a logo nowadays is super easy: if you do a Google search for [online logo creator] you’ll get a ton of useful and free websites where you can create your own logo. All you have to do is put in your company title, slogan (optional) and select fonts and examples you like. Then, the system will generate multiple logo’s for you to choose from. Some require user registration, but that’s absolutely worth the effort to get the download.

Here are a few good sites:

  • Hatchful (shopify)
  • FreeLogoDesign.org
  • Logomakr.com

' title=

Screenshots of the progress:

affiliate seo case study

Stats of week 1:

Update: week 2 (april 13-20): .

First results!

After the first update, we created a Google Analytics tracking-code and a Google Search Console property for our new project so we could start tracking results. Shortly after the initial upload of content, we already started to rank for a couple of queries:

' title=

This is a very good sign, as Google is already qualifying our website for certain queries 😎. Most of them are 80+ rankings, but you can notice a slight increase over time, where the page slowly gets pushed to the top to see if people click ( CTR = indirect ranking factor ) and if they find it relevant (do they bounce? Dwell time = ranking factor ).

Link building

As a few backlinks are crucial for Google to take our one-pager even slightly more serious, it was time to build some links this week!

We placed two links on our own websites, this blog and another dog related affiliate site. Unfortunately, not much relevance here. We don’t expect a lot of result from this, but it only took us 5 minutes and gets some initial linkjuice flowing which Google might notice 🤠. We resubmitted the URLs and corresponding sitemaps in Google Search Console to push this even a bit more.

We also reached out to our network of fellow SEOers to see if anyone could provide relevant backlinks (paid or unpaid). Luckily, we found a new contact who owns lots of websites in all kind of niches who offered us paid links in exchange for newly written blogs on his websites. The price was $60 dollar per link. We agreed to test five links and came up with the following anchor texts:

URL: vergelijkmobieleairco.nl

  • mobiele airco kopen | buy portable air conditioning
  • mobiele airco vergelijken |  compare portable air conditioning
  • beste mobiele airco |  best portable air conditioning
  • beste mobiele airco 2020 | best portable air conditioning 2020
  • vergelijk mobiele airco’s  | compare portable air conditioning

Be careful with exact match anchors, as you don’t want to over optimize and get penalized by Google’s realtime Penguin algorithm . That’s why we chose some semi exact match anchors, just to be safe. We emphasized we wanted as much links from websites with as much relevance as possible. The links should also be do-follow as these are the ones Google actually considers as ranking factor, compared to the other tags. Links will be placed in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

More copy, with neat little tables

Finally, we also added some more copy that focuses on keywords that have a high monthly search volume. As Google loves structured content, we placed some tables between the copy. One table contains a lot of outgoing links to the manufacturers of the portable air conditionings. We did this to help Google to understand our relation to this topic and to become part of the air conditioning related entities .

' title=

Stats of week 2:

Update: week 8 (april 12th – may 22nd): .

Time for an update again! It has been a while since our last update and we have some exciting news to share. We bought five more backlinks from the same supplier, added more content, got approved by multiple affiliate programs and … the first affiliate commissions are in 🤠🤑📈.

' title=

Now this is pretty insane if you compare it to the amount of traffic we received. It seemed we only just took off:

' title=

If you calculate the earnings per visitor, it’s currently at $ 1,50! We believe that’s due to the fact we rank for a lot of longtail, but buy-intent focused keywords such as [Fuave acb14k01 review]. So we basically frank for a lot of {brand} + {model} + review searches. Besides that, we also rank for other like [best airco’s] , [top 10 airco’s] and [buy portable airco].

Make sure to add all those amplifiers in your content as well:

  • Top 10 / Best
  • Review / Rating
  • Guide / Tips
  • Cheap / Affortable / Low price
  • Promotion / Discount / Promo codes
  • Online / Near me / +City / Store

Furthermore, we added promotions to the page  and we optimized the affiliate links on the page itself by linking brands to their overview page on the retail website. We just finished adding different schema markup (FAQ) to it as well.

All in all this is a very promising start and we’re almost breaking-even on costs, so we guess in a few days we are already making big profits from this website. It’s going to be a hot summer in the Netherlands and search volumes still have to go 10X. A quick calculation shows us that we should be able to get at least 10.000 visitors in the next two months * $ 1,50 per visitors = $15.000 revenue in affiliate commissions 😅😎! We will definitely post updates in the next two months to keep you informed because that would be nuts.

Don’t forget this is within eight weeks of domain registration with very minimum effort which means you can do this TOO!

affiliate seo case study

Stats of week 8:

That’s it for now 😃. Hit CRTL + D to bookmark this blog post and make sure to check out the next update! Also comment below if you have any questions 👇.

Update: Week 20 (april 12th – August 23nd): 

It has been a long time, we know, but it is time for an update again. A lot has happened in the meantime, both good and challenging… We obtained five more backlinks, created some more (related content), optimized page speed, finetuned the products and one-pager and waited for the heat to start and the commissions to get in🤤

That happened at first, but then things went downhill…. 🤯😭

From April until the end of May traffic was on the rise:

seo case study april-may 2020

At the end of May we:

  • Added more products to the page
  • Added more affiliate links to other e-tailers selling mobile airconditioning
  • Obtained five more backlinks

And we waited for the real summer to start and the revenue to come in…

As you can see below that happened in the month of May:

Commissions affiliate marketing seo

By the end of May the website had already generated close to € 1.100 (we’ve had some other affiliate programs running besides the one showing above in the screenshot), which translates to roughly $ 1.300 in the first month of doing affiliate marketing for this website.

Considering the ~1000 unique visitors we had by that time, that means a staggering $1.30 per unique visitor. And it wasn’t even summer yet.

We were expecting goldmines to come in  🤠💰

But then, what happened… 😮 😯 😧 😰 😨

' title=

A free fall 🪂

Our most important rankings were declining rapidly from the ~1st of June:

Ranking decline affiliate website

Have we been too reckless? 😵

Considering the following factors:

  • One-pager (not necessarily a red flag, but it can be more challenging)
  • Fifteen quickly acquired backlinks with similar exact-match anchors from low to medium quality websites. All websites had similar themes, sometimes even partly corresponding IPs
  • We didn’t add rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored to outgoing affiliate links; and the whole damn page was FULL of them.
  • Keyword density: although it can be more challenging with a one-pager, the amount of exact keywords [mobile air conditioning] on the website was way overdone.
  • A backlink from this shady website “seohustlers.com”😬 on which outreach tactics are as transparent as can be 🤫. Also not sure if Google contextualizes the name [seo hustlers] and sees its connection to an affiliate website as spammy? 🥴
  • June and July were actually not as warm as expected, so search volumes dropped.

This is what we said about this at the beginning of the challenge:

Citation seohustlers air conditioners

As we didn’t receive any manual penalty, we assumed that we were hit by the real-time penguin algorithm… We didn’t follow our own advice, because of hubris.

So we changed the following in different stages:

  • Lower keyword density
  • Changing exact match anchors into broader “more natural” ones
  • Drastically decreased the number of outgoing (affiliate) links
  • Disavowing domains gradually up to a total of six domains
  • Obtaining a few more diverse / qualitative backlinks without exact match anchors
  • Rewriting / adding pieces of content for more user-friendly texts and context
  • Adding “natural” outgoing links to Wikipedia and Google Maps (hoping that pleasing Google this way would help 😅)
  • Adding rel=sponsored to all outgoing affiliate links

Did any of it help?

Well, unfortunately only slightly:

Google Search Console clicks aircon may-august

For the keywords with highest search volumes [mobile air conditioning] & [buy mobile air conditioning] we’re still on the last page of the Dutch SERP… Nice and comfy between the Google Books and other irrelevant results 🤡:

last page ranking affiliate website

Both clicks and and positions never really restored, despite the efforts.

This is also reflected by the total revenue of the period May-August:

Affiliate commissions end of august aircon

Together with the other affiliate programs we run for this website, total revenue is ~€ 1.800, which roughly makes $ 2.130 

So what’s next?

Well we’re not going give up, because the project has proven to have far too much potential. However, this season won’t bring in the treasure fleet unfortunately. We are determined to make it a success and learn from our mistakes.

The first few steps will probably include:

  • Disavowing more domains
  • Obtaining diverse, qualitative backlinks
  • New relevant content
  • Doing a test by creating multiple pages (i.e. specific brand pages)

If you have any ideas or experience with this, we’re always happy to receive tips 🤓

Stats of week 20:

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Affiliate Marketing Case Studies (15 Examples for Success)-SEO

Photo of Hridoy Khan

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?

If that sounds, good then you’ll get a lot of value out of this post.

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.

When you’re done reading these affiliate marketing success case studies, make sure to check out this other SEO case studies page to find data on improving organic search engine optimization, this content marketing case studies page, digital marketing case studies, email marketing case studies, social media case studies, and this PPC case studies page if you’re interested in paid search advertising strategies.

Delivering the Best SEO Tips…

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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.

Stephen Hockman is an entrepreneur and founder of SEO Chatter. He specializes in search engine optimization and digital marketing and has been fascinated with SEO since 2005. His goal is to share the best tips and news about search engine marketing to help you get more website traffic.

#Affiliate #Marketing #Case #Studies #Examples #Success

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