$15k/Month From A Simple Online Course Affiliate Site
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The What 🚀
An Affiliate Niche Site With $15,000 Monthly Earnings and Over 100k Monthly Traffic!
In this week's newsletter, we provide you with insight into a niche site monetized with affiliate networks, and a breakdown of the distinctive technique it uses to gain thousands of organic traffic and revenue.
Our in-depth analysis shows what this business did to go from 6 blog posts, and $15 on the first pay-day, to making more than half a million dollars over the last three years, in affiliate commissions.
This niche site does something truly unique—it provides brutally honest reviews of affiliate marketing courses to its audience—regardless of whether it benefits from the product or not.
Additionally, we analyse how this business achieves success in a highly competitive "make money online" niche, by publishing crowd-sourced reviews.
The How 💻
This niche site earns 95% of its revenue through affiliate commissions from a vast number of product and service providers like Udemy, Swagbucks, and Flexjobs among many others.
Most of the content on this site are reviews of online business courses, which are rated following a unique system that we will explore further in this newsletter.
These review posts also include honest feedback from real users who have used the course over a period of time.
Ubersuggest shows that this site ranks between 1-3 on the search results page for the keywords; Hustlers university, Six figure mentors, Outpost opinion, and Pinecone research.
Findings from Ubersuggest
The articles driving the most traffic to this site according to Ubersuggest
Affiliate links are strategically placed throughout blog posts, using clear, enticing CTA's with buttons or links that are fixed into the content. This contributes to a higher click-through rate, increased conversion and earnings.
Another revenue source for this business is Patreon which is a platform that allows creators to receive financial support from their fans or patrons.
Users can subscribe to various packages for $2, $5 or $10 per month and get early access to new content, access to a private Facebook group and other wonderful offers.
However, the monthly sum of this doesn't amount to much, especially relative to the earnings from affiliate commissions.
Other peripheral sources of revenue for this business include;
- Book sales via Amazon
- Tips, Gifts & Donations
- Consulting
- Newsletter Sponsorships
The Why 🔥
From our analysis, this business has achieved considerable success due to the following;
- Employing SEO best practices and keyword research
- A templatized content writing process
- User Engagement
- Optimized marketing
Employing Optimal SEO Strategies and Keyword Research
SEO is pivotal to the success of a niche business like this one and quite frankly, this business is doing well for itself in this aspect. To begin with, this site has a well-defined niche that it concentrates on and is building credibility in that area.
Flourishing traffic as seen in this analysis from Semrush
This business prioritizes keyword research using proven tools like Ahrefs to discover what courses people are searching for. They do in-depth research and collect feedback from real users in order to give honest reviews to readers.
When they find a course review keyword with a good number of search traffic, they apply a unique approach which involves writing a stub review for that course.
The short stub review contains only facts about the course in question, without a judgement or rating. They then publish it and observe to see how the traffic performs over a period of months.
This approach enables them to know if writing a full review and making the effort to collect reviews from real users would be worthwhile.
After all, finding real users for each course and convincing them to leave reviews is no easy feat.
In addition, they use recommendations from professional tools like Surfer SEO, to tweak the course reviews and improve rankings.
Altogether, these efforts contribute to providing high-quality content that satisfies users' search queries and improves search engine rankings for the website.
A Templatized Content Writing Process
This business employs a unique strategy for its content writing process. All courses that are reviewed are evaluated based on a 31-factor process.
The scores from this evaluation process are run through an algorithm which projects an overall rating of each course.
The final review is written following a template which improves consistency, brand recognition and user experience.
Consistent course review format as seen on the site.
Consistent course review format as seen on the site.
User Engagement
By requesting feedback from users, this business is improving credibility, user trust, user engagement with the brand, conversions and customer satisfaction.
Similarly, the use of Patreon provides a platform for the business to build a loyal community, receive direct feedback and suggestions from its supporters, and increase revenue.
This business' strong presence on Youtube with over 12,000 subscribers and 67 posts also contributes to its visibility, user engagement, and access to a new audience.
Source: Youtube
Optimized marketing
This business sends out emails twice weekly to over 28,000 subscribers. What's more, they leverage lead magnets to entice potential subscribers by displaying bold, visible offers of free cheat sheets or discounts.
With a decent audience like this one, this business is using email marketing to effectively improve its traffic, user engagement and conversion rates.
The Opportunities 🔥🔥🔥
This business is doing great, but it could be making more! From our analysis, it can improve its earnings and brand growth by adopting the following;
Active Link Building
While this business has a commendable number of backlinks, most of them were built back when the website was used as a travel blog.
Backlinks for this site as seen from Semrush
Having backlinks from referring domains in a completely different niche can harm a site's SEO performance.
Backlinks are a crucial factor in determining a site's domain authority and search engine ranking. When a site receives backlinks from a different niche, it can signal to search engines that the site's content is not relevant or credible within its own niche.
This site can build high-quality, relevant backlinks within its own niche by getting the site to be listed in directories, cross-promotions, interviews, guest posts and social media promotion.
Utilizing Social Media
Although this business has an impressive Youtube presence, it could do better with other social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Source: Twitter
Source: Instagram
The activity on Instagram is still picking up probably because the account became active in December 2022 and the content basically consists of tweets that are repurposed for Instagram carousels.
Repurposing content from the website and Youtube is a great option for keeping the social media presence alive. However, it's important for the business to know its audience on every platform and make content that appeals to them specifically.
They should also identify and follow trends, practices and algorithms that are unique to every platform.
Leveraging Display Ads for Increased Revenue
There are no display ads on this site, and while it might be advantageous to keep it that way, it could also be a potential loss of additional revenue.
Some businesses choose to exclude ads from their website or Youtube channel because ads can be intrusive, inappropriate or contain malware if they're not managed properly.
In such a situation, they may go ahead to collect donations from supporters to disable ads and cover the costs—just like this business achieves using Patreon.
However, a business looking to earn from display ads can sell ad space directly to advertisers instead of through an ad network or program. That way, they can have a level of control over the ads that are displayed to ensure that they are safe, relevant, and appropriate for their audience.
The Big Reveal 👀
Are you ready for the moment you've been waiting for? The wonderful business we analysed in this newsletter is eBiz Facts founded and owned by Niall Doherty.
Before eBiz Facts, Niall was a Digital Nomad and Freelance Web Designer. He left his full-time role in Ireland to work for himself and travel the world.
He ran an online course for a few years, teaching people how to travel the world and work online as a freelancer like he had been doing.
He also blogged about travel and personal development but didn't hit the ROI he wanted, so he repurposed the site and launched eBiz Facts.
The initial big idea behind eBiz Facts, was to publish in-depth, carefully researched, and brutally honest reviews of "make money online" courses and gurus.
So far, Niall has stayed true to this idea, his rating of a course isn't determined by whether or not he has an affiliate partnership with the course creator. This approach sometimes causes him to be kicked out of affiliate programs, however, he is more interested in the long-term benefit of building trust with readers.
The Takeaway, What We Learned 🎓
Here are some core ideas that you should know from this week's analysis;
- Clear Niche Focus: Having a clear focus on a specific niche, allows you to establish authority for your business and attract a loyal following of readers.
- Use SEO best practices to improve your site's visibility in search engine rankings and attract more traffic. This includes keyword research, using relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags and descriptions, and building high-quality backlinks.
- Prioritize the use of high-quality content. It helps to know users' search intents and satisfy them using well-researched articles, engaging blog posts, and honest, informative reviews.
- Optimize marketing efforts by using captivating CTAs, lead magnets and email marketing.
- Templatizing your content process can make a difference in brand consistency, and efficiency among other things.
- Leverage viable opportunities to broaden your income source.
- Utilize social media for direct engagement with the audience, improved visibility, targeted marketing, and increased traffic.
Before You Go 👋
Thank you for reading.
In my next email, I’ll have another business breakdown for you.
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Bye for now,
Scott Max
