From $0 to $10k In Affiliate Commissions [Case Study]

At the beginning of 2021, I shared how we were launching and scaling an affiliate website on an aged domain.

We’re now 18 months into the project.

Here are the summary stats...

Goal: Grow an affiliate site from $0 to $10k a month in under 24 months. 🤑
Site Launched: June 2020
Investment to date: $10,207.51
Income to date: $10,903.47
Estimated site value: $35,000
ROI to date: 345%

Learn about our successes, failures and lessons.

See full case study: https://www.contentellect.com/affiliate-marketing-case-study/

Here are some summary lessons...

Aged Domain: We built this site on 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!

Topical authority is key: We’ve created over 300k words of content for this site. We feel we’ve covered almost every topic in the niche, making us a topical authority in the eyes of Google. Keyword grouping is the fastest way to create topical clusters and formulate a silo’ed site architecture. We used KeyClusters (https://keyclusters.com/) for keyword grouping and then manually analyzed the results to create silos.

Choose the right affiliate partners: We specifically chose a niche that is not dependent on Amazon. When using other eCommerce affiliate programs, you have to test partnerships. We signed up to 3 affiliate programs – 2 sucked with low conversions. The one we settled on has been a great partner, although our commissions are pretty low compared to the 2 others (6% vs 8% and 15%).

Not Passive! Affiliate websites are definitely not passive income machines. Sure, we’re making $1000 a month at the moment and have spent less than 5 hours on this site in the last 6 months. But equally that’s probably the reason why we have plateaued and will whither and die if we don’t invest more time and money over the next 12 months.

Discover more in our real-time case study: https://www.contentellect.com/affiliate-marketing-case-study/

• Note on site 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.