Diversifying Revenue with Affiliate Marketing

For the past year, I've been focusing on increasing InboxReads' revenue. The only source of revenue before were advertisement slots on the website and newsletter but there are only so many slots you can offer. And prices should only increase when your traffic increases. So at the start of each year, my maximum potential revenue was already limited.

That was the main motivation for diversifying my potential revenue. But I needed to do that by providing value for users.

Anyone who's spent time on any newsletter related groups will see several common questions. What email service provider should I use? How do I set up referrals? Where do I find sponsors? There are a lot of popular tools for this but everyone wants to hear what the creators are using. That lead to the first idea.

InboxReads Tools

This feature shares popular newsletter tools separated by categories. But where I thought InboxReads could be unique is by displaying which newsletters are using those tools. It provides the social proof that many creators are looking for. And it provides an opportunity to create a new revenue stream. By recommending tools I could use affiliate links to monetize those recommendations.

Paved

Soon after I launched Tools Paved, the sponsorship marketplace, reached out and floated the idea of tighter integration. I could display links to purchase sponsorships in newsletters in my directory via their platform. And I could monetize it through an affiliate link as well.

Results

So far Tools has generated $0 in revenue. There are still ways to improve it and share more useful data for creators that I can think can increase revenue here. Disappointing but there's still potential.

But the Paved integration has already made over $3000 in just 4 months. I think this has worked so well because it serves a direct need of users. Some people use the website to find newsletters to advertise in and this integration removes one step from that process. And I think there's still room for this to grow as well.

Future

My next steps are to continue to improve these features as well as launch a new subscription model to offer unique features to power users. That would take me to 3 different revenue streams each providing value to users and unrestricted in growth the way advertising is. Let's see how it goes!