How I Added $1500+ To My Monthly Income
Within the last month I was able to add an additional $1500 in affiliate commissions to my monthly income. There were two very specific things I did to accomplish that, and I'm going to share those two techniques with you today!
The good news is that you don't need any kind of special plugin or savvy marketing skills to do the same thing to your website. The better news is that the holidays are coming up, so NOW would be a great time to implement these techniques, and you might see even better results.
First, the proof, then, then techniques. For the affiliate screenshots, I measured Sept 30 - Oct 21, and Oct 21 - Nov 11 for three weeks of clicks and sales. I wanted to do a full month, but didn't want Black Friday to mess up my stats. The changes I implemented were in late October, so that's why I chose these time frames.
Increased Affiliate Commissions
With your affiliate websites, there's no limit to how many affiliate programs you can promote. If your site is big enough, you may have income steams coming in from ten or more affiliate programs!
Here are the four main affiliate networks I work with, but within each network, I promote 2-5 affiliate programs (Impact, Shareasale, CJ, Flexoffers).
Impact October: $782
Impact November: $1711
CJ October: $198
CJ November: $370
Flexoffers October: $52
Flexoffers November: $136
Shareasale October: $147
Shareasale November: $480
But What About Higher RPM During The Holidays?
Some skeptics might say that November is generally a more profitable month than October, because people are ramping up towards the holidays. Fair enough. However, I don't think that had a huge impact on these numbers.
For one, we are only into the beginning of November. I labeled those screenshots Oct/Nov out of convenience, but really it's Early-Mid Oct VS Late Oct - Early Nov. RPMs (Revenue per thousand visits) are going up, but not at full throttle yet.
Plus, check out these clicks in comparison to last year!
September > November 2019
September > November 2018
Two Techniques To Increase Your Affiliate Sales
How can you replicate this? Pretty easy. I did two main things to get more clicks and sales from my site.
Update Old Content & Add Affiliate Links
I went through old content from multiple years past and edited for quality, but also added some affiliate links in key places. Many times I discoverd that I had planned to promote something, then forgot about it, or just happened to have be promoting a relevant product which fit in that content well.
Sometimes I didn't have a good affiliate link, but I was able to internally link to "money pages" (pages with affiliate links), sending more traffic to my affiliate links that way.
Better internal linking, and higher quality content increased the rank of many of my pages in the past weeks, getting more clicks to affiliate links by funneling traffic to my affiliate pages, but also getting more organic search traffic.
Pick A #1 Choice For Your Top 10 Lists
Top 10 lists are one of article format I covered in this training, which are easy to rank, fun to share on social media, and are very simple to get clicks to your affiliate links. They are simple to understand for newbies to write, but also very clickworthy in search engines.
What I didn't realize back a year or two ago, is that the simple act of telling people what my #1 choice was in the list is a very powerful way to get more conversions. I haven't even updated with charts or graphics at this point. I literally just added a single sentence that say something like, "Out of the options below, my #1 choice is [Product X] because...".
You can also add this info the the bottom of the article, which may make more sense if you want to create suspense, but really, adding it to the beginning is more effective in my experience.
Final Thoughts
I hope you find these techniques useful for your own affiliate websites! They will be most effective if your site is a little older, you have old content to update, and a steady flow of traffic to test with.
If your site doesn't have enough traffic yet, NOW is the time to get to work! This website I'm talking about above is about four years old. If you want to be writing similar success stories in the future, you need to get in the habit of writing and publishing on a schedule.
3 posts per week for four years is 624 published articles on your website.
1 post per day for four years is 1460 published articles on your website.
With numbers like that, you can absolutely make money from your website, even if you don't have any affiliate links at all! A daily habit of writing and publishing is extremely powerful if you are consistent over a long period of time.
Recent Comments
162
Hello Nathanial,
Thank you for your very useful blog post. Some very simple but practical ways to increase sales. I like your examples of writing a blog post per day, over four years a website can have 1460 posts, that's a lot of content.
Wishing you a very good day.
Roy
Some excellent stuff. Thanks. I am all for creating a lot of content even though I have only started 6.5 months ago with a new site and not quite getting traffic due to site being new, 430+ articles I can see the benefit in the number of pages attracting traffic.
Each page is an invitation or doorway to my site.
(aiming for ad revenue, hence ton of content!).
Long term, tons of content pays off. Even if it isn't ranking now, there's always a way to spiff it up later when you gain more knowledge and skill. Lots of my work from just 1-2 years ago is not as good as what I do today!
Really appreciate the share Nathaniel. I'm going back to some of my older posts and doing this!
I hope you dig up some opportunities! At the very least, you'll probably find lots of ways to improve old content, and plenty of new ideas to write about. Getting New Content Ideas From Old Content
Thank you for sharing what's getting results, Nathaniel. I have a lot of work to do, but I'm learning a lot from the posts that you and others share with us.
Thank you!
Colleen
There's always work to be done! Pace yourself, and long term you'll see incredible results.
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Very interesting and encouraging article especially for newer people and without stealing your thunder would add that I do the same on my site too
If you use the sidebars and footer sections wisely, as you say you can promote more than one venture And without it looking salesy
Good figures from your 4 ventures which has prompted me to review my own CJ affiliation
Out of interest, unless I missed it, what type of products are you promoting as I haven't viewed your site
I generally don't use affiliate links in the sidebars or footers, but that's definitely an option.
In the right way they look okay I feel