Affiliate Marketers Behind the Scenes: Success Stories

Alexandra Belski Alexandra Belski
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If you ever doubted your ability to figure out affiliate marketing because you don’t have the “right” background, connections, or experience, this post is for you. We’ve gathered success stories of some of the most fortunate affiliates, most of whom hadn’t had a proper education or work experience when they just started out in affiliate marketing. But it didn’t stop them from trying, and it shouldn’t stop you either.

Affiliate marketers behind the scenes: Success stories

Attila of iAmAttila

Attila is a legendary affiliate marketer and owner of several businesses: BannersLanders outsourcing company for affiliate marketers, Transey translation company, AdsBabe video ads service, and iAmAttila community with affiliate marketing jobs and tips. Attila is also the founder of the STM Forum, one of the most popular affiliate communities worldwide.

Before

Atilla started making money online very early, having launched his first web design company Wilike New Media at the age of 15. The company didn’t last long, and after high school, Attila found a job in technology sales, then in ad sales and finally moved on to organizing dance events. This job was earning him good money in Canada, but after moving to Serbia, things got difficult, and that’s how Atilla started to explore internet marketing and SEO.

Success Story

Attila got inspired by the amounts of money that webmasters were making and decided to follow their path and start blogging. His writing got noticed for its high quality, and that’s how the copywriting company ContentPimp.info was born. Both the company and SEO blogs were earning really well up until the moment Google adopted anti-SEO tactics, and the number of clients started to decrease. Then, Attila turned to paid traffic and focused on niches like lead generation, nutra, dating, ecommerce, and CPI.

Rules of Success

  • Delegate. Find reliable people to help you out so that you can focus on more important things.
  • Don’t give into the pandemic’s panic and use this time to learn. The number of affiliates is growing, as is the competition, so why not learn coding, photoshopping, marketing, A/B testing and so on. 
  • Verticals that are doing well now are work from home, dating, games, products related to COVID-19 and app installs.
  • Don’t put all your landing pages and trackers on one server to be on the safe side in case it crashes. Also, use server monitoring software.
  • The key to success with paid traffic campaigns is collecting enough data so that it becomes statistically valid.
  • It’s okay to lose money when getting started before you see positives. Thus, Attila was spending $4,000 per month for four to five months in a row before his investments started to bear fruit. 
  • Start in a niche that doesn’t require cloaking and provides value to the user. Mobile apps are great for getting started, as you don’t need much money to gather data and learn the ropes fast.

Ian Fernando of IanFernando.com

Ian Fernando is an affiliate marketing blogger with over 15 years of experience. He is a public speaker at international conferences and is a digital nomad. He went a long way from working three jobs to becoming a marketing guru. On his site IanFernando.com, Ian shares secrets to reaching $1,000 daily income within a month and becoming a top-performing affiliate marketer, as well as an international speaker. 

Before

It all started when Ian dropped out of college in his early 20s and had to take on three jobs just to pay rent and buy food. He was a Customer Service Representative at night, Human Resource Manager in the daytime and waited tables on weekends (and he was also a hip hop choreographer at some point). In the meantime, he was striving to earn more, and the only way to do that with three jobs was to make money online.

Success Story

First, Ian started with eBay and reselling. But working three jobs, it was hard to provide customer support, so Ian began exploring other money making opportunities and discovered affiliate marketing platforms. AzoogleAds was the first affiliate network that he joined and within less than a month it was already earning him good money. 

In view of Ian’s growing success, he was approached by Affiliate Summit the following year and got introduced to public speaking. In February 2019, Ian took on Amazon FBA which is now earning him five figures in sales each month.

As for now, Ian combines Amazon FBA, affiliate marketing, brand arbitrage, as well as blogging. The niches he focuses on are mostly clothing, toys, and electronics. As Ian says, the biggest advantage of affiliate lifestyle is the freedom and time to travel and live the life he wants instead of working nine to five.

Rules of Success

  • The biggest challenge in affiliate marketing is quick changes (trends, traffic sources, etc.) which you need to adjust to. 
  • Prepare to lose. But in fact, losing money is winning as you get the data and understand how to react to it. Thus, your income is never stable. For example, one time Ian earned seven figures in a month, while another time he spent five months without any revenue. 
  • To overcome failures, you need proper support from a mentor, such as an affiliate marketing manager, or peers. They’ll help you understand why you fail so that you learn faster than if you were on your own.
  • Choose offers and niches that you feel passionate about. Thus, it will be easier to grow your campaign and be creative. 
  • Regarding verticals, evergreen never dies. Consider health, wealth, and relationship niches.
  • As for geotargeting, international space is better for beginners, as, for example, the USA market is already saturated.
  • To earn the first $1,000, create a website and write content for users that will be useful for them. Add affiliate links but don’t push sales too hard.

Charles Ngo of Charlesngo.com

Charles Ngo is another thought leader in affiliate marketing, making millions of dollars in profits each year. Charles now has over nine years of experience in the niche, and his blog reaches out to 75,000+ subscribers.

Before

Charles started making money online in college. He would sell stuff on eBay, run blogs and SEO sites, but the money wouldn’t cover living expenses, so upon graduation in 2007 Charles took a job doing Adwords for a large company and continued doing internet marketing. 

Success Story

As Charles recalls, he would spend hours reading blogs on affiliate marketing and online money-making, with John Chow and Shoemoney among his favorites. He set up a WordPress site and started blogging on a daily basis. To promote it, Charles posted on forums and social media and monetized the blog with Adsense. At some point, he realized that the best blogs always come from niche experts, so he decided to wait for a while and pick this up later.

Even though many people focused on SEO, Charles didn’t want to depend on Google and turned to paid search (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search, Facebook Ads). He tried different niches (home insurance, credit reports, ringtones, Clickbank products, etc.), failed fourteen campaigns and lost $4,000 until the first big success in 2008

Within six months, Charles was earning around $10,000 per month in profits, dedicating only a few hours a day. Inspired by this success, he quit his job to work on the projects full-time. However, within a month, the income was down to zero, and Charles had to start looking for profitable campaigns again. 

After a while, he stumbled upon a campaign that generated $500 worth revenue on the first day with only a $100 spend, and a $350 spend the next day brought $1,750. This campaign made about $75,000 USD in profits in total, and Charles got back on track again. Now, his annual affiliate marketing salary is over one million USD, and the rest is history.

Rules of Success

  • The most common causes for failure among affiliates are information overload (there are plenty of sources of information), low-quality information (too many bloggers write fluff and share useless advice) and no action (most affiliates read 90% of their time and take action only 10% of time). 
  • Don’t be startled by competition. The tougher it is, the more you can grow your skills. 
  • To be a great affiliate, you need to learn how to overcome failures, and most importantly it’s about the mental bounce back.

Servando Silva of Stream SEO and Servando Silva

Servando Silva is an affiliate marketer and blogger behind Stream SEO and Servando Silva, where he shares the secret to earning $150k-$200k per month.

Before

Servando started writing content for websites back in high school and did it for five years. In 2011 he finished with his bachelor’s degree and got a job at a company he really liked at that time. However, the office work turned out to be quite boring, so Servando started blogging a few hours a day in addition to his main job. 

Success Story

In order to grow the blog, Servando did SEO and ran paid traffic from Facebook, as the organic reach was going down. At some point, Servando decided to monetize traffic with affiliate marketing (CPA/CPS) and tried multiple niches such as gaming, app installs and utilities, t-shirts, dating, sports and more. He also experimented with desktop and mobile traffic, and eventually decided to focus on mobile. To talk about his journey as an affiliate, Servando decided to launch a blog in 2016, where he now shares secrets to earning six figure income.

Rules of Success

  • SEO is great for marketing if you don’t have a budget, but it takes time. Otherwise, consider running paid traffic, especially from social media such as Facebook. If you have $1k-$2k per month for marketing, start with pop traffic, which has good volume and is easy to optimize. With a bigger budget, it makes sense to do ecommerce.
  • Focus on one traffic source and vertical, learn the ropes, make it work and then move to another one.
  • Affiliate marketing evolves fast, so you have to constantly learn, which means testing your knowledge in practice, as reading itself isn’t enough. Check out free sources, for example, forums such as StackThatMoney and AffiliateFix.
  • If you’re just starting out, don’t choose high-payout offers. If you do, you risk spending too much money without yielding results.
  • Don’t try too many ad networks at once by putting less money in five of them instead of spending, say, $500 in one network and testing it inside out. This will help you understand how the network operates and whether it’s a good choice for you.

Hieu Nguyen

Hieu Nguyen is an affiliate marketer from Vietnam and a former software engineer. He made a name for himself in the industry after selling a website for over $17k and is also known for developing and selling Amazon affiliate marketing websites. 

Before

After two years of work as a software engineer, Hieu Nguyen decided to leave the boring routine and take a plunge into web development and affiliate marketing.

Success Story

Hieu’s earnings grew together with his knowledge. At first, in 2013, the site he was working on didn’t bring any income, but within four months, it started to generate over $100 per month, and in nine months earned over $4k. 

In 2017, Hieu joined an affiliate marketing course, which inspired him to start building Amazon niche sites. Although the first two sites were too competitive and didn’t generate much profit, Hieu didn’t give up and started learning keyword research, content outsourcing, and link-building. The efforts paid off, and Hieu managed to sell the site he had been working on since 2013 for $17k. 

The traffic on Hieu’s site was mainly organic, but he also built base links using brand name, naked URLs, and generic keywords and then gave the site a boost by purchasing PBN posts and high PR links.

He also found it very useful to add CTA buttons on the site, as they helped increase the conversion rate.

Hieu’s story clearly shows the importance of understanding the market and delivering solutions. Hieu created pre-packaged websites with earning potential and sold them to beginning marketers for ten times as much as the cost price.

Rules of Success

  • Keyword research and link-building are two main reasons for a website’s success. Remember to use diverse backlinks and anchor texts.
  • You can create a successful solution by understanding the demand and focusing on your own strengths.
  • Learn from the best and try to copy their success first. 
  • If you like building websites, but don’t enjoy maintaining them, simply sell sites for the right and start all over again. Alternatively, if you aren’t good at developing sites yourself, buy one and then improve it.

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income

Pat Flynn is an American online entrepreneur, podcaster, WSJ best-selling author and creator of the Smart Passive Income blog. 

Before

Pat Flynn’s journey to success began with a dismissal from his architecture position in 2008. Long before that, Pat started a blog in order to organize his notes for the LEED exam in architecture he was preparing for. Pat didn’t know it yet, but the blog was gradually gaining popularity and ranking high on Google. He started to get positive feedback from website visitors, which encouraged him to develop the site and learn about online entrepreneurship. Termination from employment was the final straw that encouraged him to take on blogging seriously. 

Success Story

So here is what Pat did to grow his site:

  • Sell ad space. With a few thousand unique visitors per day on the site, Pat easily found advertisers. Ad space and Adsense together brought him around $600 per month at that time. 
  • To get skills, Pat joined an online entrepreneurship mastermind group, which was a great business decision and encouraged him to write an ebook. 
  • Based on his extensive knowledge in architecture, Pat created a study guide to prepare for the LEED exam. The first month of sales brought him over $7k, and the month after that, around $10K. After launching an audio version of the ebook, Pat was earning over $30,000 per month. 
  • To document and share this success, Pat created SmartPassiveIncome.com. He transparently shared the stats on his earnings, monetization strategies and other tips. As sales grew on his guides to the LEED exam, Pat would continue to share his revenue and accumulated a huge audience within a year after launching the blog. 
  • The next step was launching a YouTube Channel and a podcast, which now has over 440 episodes. Pat acknowledges that podcasting was what got him into online business in the first place, so launching his own podcast was an important milestone.
  • Then Pat decided to experiment and created some more projects: SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com, CreateaClickableMap.com, FoodTruckr.com, and more. 
  • In view of his growing affiliate success, Pat started to take on public speaking.

Rules of Success

  • Overdeliver. For Pat, the best business decision was to share his experience and knowledge. The more value he gave away, the more he’d get in return.
  • The reason for the success of ebooks, courses and other paid products is that people like well-organized information in a nice package and are ready to pay for it. Also, Pat has observed that after sharing so much of free useful tips, readers felt obliged to return the favor by purchasing his products.
  • Don’t expect quick results. The hardest part in affiliate marketing is that you need to work upfront, not seeing the results or getting paid. 
  • Address the need. Think of pain points your potential readers might have and what you can do to help them. Make sure you bring value to the internet, whether it’s educational, useful or just entertaining.
  • To establish authority, you don’t have to be the best. You need to know slightly more than other people to look expert to them and be able to solve their problems.
  • Network. It’s important to be surrounded by like-minded people who go through the same battles as you do. That’s a great way to learn from your peers.

Johnny Ward of OneStep4Ward.com

Johnny Ward is an Irish travel blogger who has visited all 197 countries and is now the founder of a non-profit organization helping people travel. He also boasts earning over $2 million from blogging.

Before

After graduating from university in 2006, Johnny decided to take a gap year and teach English in Thailand. Within a year, he flew to Sydney to work as a sales rep. Around that time Johnny started a blog to document his travel adventures.

Success Story

By 2011, Johnny was already making over $1,000 per month from his blog, publishing SEO-linked articles. As the traffic continued to increase, he started writing media stories, and then leveraged CPC, affiliate marketing and more of SEO content. 

When monthly income from the travel blog exceeded $7,000, Johnny launched several more blogs and hired writers to create content. These sites were monetized through sponsored content, which soon brought his income to $50,000 per month. 

Within three years, Johnny became a millionaire, growing from one blog to over 250 sites and launching his online media company. He has even started a nonprofit Mudita Adventures, aiming to connect adventure travelers to local communities and help grow sustainable projects in the developing world. 

Rules of Success

  • There is always room for quality content.
  • Things are constantly changing, so when you find a way to earn money that works for you, be sure to make the most of it, because it won’t be around all the time.
  • Build authority. As your blog grows and people link to it, so does your domain authority. After it reaches the score of 30, advertisers will start offering to buy a post on your site. That’s a very lucrative way to make money.
  • There are many ways to monetize content, such as direct advertising and Google Ads, link sales, affiliate marketing and brand ambassadorship. An ambassador can make from $500 to $5,000 per month, but it’s necessary to have hundreds of thousands of followers. 

Earl of WanderingEarl.com

Earl is the blogger behind WanderingEarl, with over 20 years of continuous travel experience and 100 countries under his belt.

Before

The journey of Derek Earl Baron began in 1999, when he graduated from college with a degree in Sports Management and went on a post-graduation trip to Southeast Asia. The soon-to-be Sports Agent only had $1,500 USD in savings. That’s how the life out of a suitcase started for Earl, as he never went home and has been traveling ever since.

Success Story

To date, Earl has visited over 100 countries across six continents, which allowed him to live, work and volunteer all over the world. This crazy travel experience encouraged Earl to start sharing his adventures with the rest of the world through ebooks and blogging and even organizing a private tour company.

In December 2008 Earl wrote and sold the first ebook, using his knowledge and experience of a cruise ship manager to help passengers make the best of their vacations. 

After some time, Earl started experimenting with affiliate marketing. He would spend eight to ten hours each day working, and within less than a year the income for online projects was $1,000 per month. That’s when Earl officially launched his blog Wandering Earl, transforming gained experience into a well-organized system of posts. After selling three ebooks and joining affiliate marketing in the next two years, Earl’s monthly income reached $2,500. You can find the full timeline of Earl’s travel adventures and a breakdown of income sources on his blog. 

Rules of Success

  • The competition among bloggers is now higher, and to succeed, you need to solve a problem that many people are facing.
  • Being a travel blogger doesn’t require much investments, even $1,000 per month is sufficient to travel extensively. Don’t let the fear of not having much money stop you from embarking upon your dream adventure. Some teaching here, some marketing there would get bucks in your pocket. So, what you really need is the courage to take the first step.
  • Try to find niches and ideas that correspond with your personal beliefs, skills, interests and goals. Thus, you’ll enjoy the process of building your project, which is paramount for being successful.
  • Accepting advertisement offers can be tempting especially at the beginning of your career, but don’t forget that keeping your audience is more beneficial in the long term than putting too many disturbing ads and losing readers soon afterward.

Monica Stott of The Travel Hack

Monica Stott is a traveler, blogger with 11 years of experience and the author behind The Travel Hack, one of the UK’s leading travel blogs. Today, Monica earns over $10,000 per month and has 4,500 newsletter subscribers, while her blog gets around 2M page views every year.

Before

Monica started blogging in 2009, when she was studying journalism at a university. The blog would help build a portfolio as a writer and document her backpacking journeys. Upon graduation, Monica worked as an editorial assistant on a travel website and later moved into social media and digital marketing. Thus, she managed to gain relevant experience as well as industry contacts along the way and then use them to develop her own blog.

Interestingly, Monica didn’t have monetization in mind at first. Back in 2009, hardly anyone was making much money from blogging, so Monica didn’t even know it was an option.

Success Story

  • Revenue streams

Let’s have a look at revenue streams that Monica had throughout her blogging career:

  • 2009 – starting a blog
  • 2011 – sponsored posts
  • 2013 – guest posting
  • 2014 – brand partnerships and collaborations, paid press trips
  • 2015 – e-course “The Blogger Course”
  • 2016 – affiliate marketing
  • 2017 – launching her own suitcase
  • 2018 – displaying adverts

Now, the revenue model comprises all these sources. 

  • Traffic

Main traffic sources are SEO, Pinterest and Facebook. Monica opts for organic traffic and writes for real people rather than search engines. She prefers long reads full of useful tips, which won’t need additional SEO efforts. There are mainly two types of articles: informative content that performs well in Google search results, and more personal posts that help convey the personality and draw regular readers.

  • Email marketing

Monica also has a subscribers’ list of 4,500 people. It might seem small, but the newsletter aims to generate engagement rather than sales and often has a 60% open rate. Monica used to run contests to collect emails, but such followers never became readers, so she stopped doing it. Now she sends out a newsletter two times per month, and it usually brings hundreds of replies from people to her mailbox. In the newsletter, Monica often communicates with readers to find out their preferences and suggestions and use as an inspiration for the future posts. 

  • Content

With a degree in journalism under her belt, Monica has great writing skills and creates a blog post in a couple of hours. She uses a casual, informal, and friendly style and shares tips from her own travel experience. 

  • Networking

Another step to success for Monica was attending networking events. This greatly helped make new acquaintances and connections.

Rules of Success

  • Balance out writing useful content and conveying your personality, because the latter is what will keep readers on your blog. Trends come and go, but having your own style will differentiate you from the rest of bloggers.
  • Spend a year developing each revenue stream. And within four to five years, you’ll be doing well with different revenue streams. Trying different strategies at once won’t allow you to master any of them.
  • Create easy-to-read posts. It can be listicles or articles with a clear structure, headers, and so on.
  • Choose topics that you feel passionate about. Your passion will always shine through your posts and make readers come back.
  • You can’t do everything yourself, so to grow the business, consider hiring experts, so you’ll focus on what you are good at.
  • Network with other bloggers. It’s important to talk to people who have the same struggles as you, be able to ask for advice and support as well as test new ideas.
  • Be nice and focus on quality and quantity. Word of mouth is great advertising, and you never know who your current clients can recommend you to, so work hard on each project.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net

Darren Rowse is one of Australia’s premier bloggers and the author of ProBlogger.net, home for bloggers who want to grow their business. With an average of two and a half million visitors per month on his site, Darren is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the niche and also the author of the bestselling book “Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.”

Before

A youth worker and minister in churches, Darren Rowse was further from affiliate marketing then many of other affiliates, but it didn’t stop him from trying. 

Success Story

Darren started blogging in 2002 and for the first two years simply ran a Blogspot blog, keen to amplify his voice and talk about faith and spirituality. The readership grew to thousands visitors a month, which inspired him to start other niche blogs and experiment with advertising and affiliate marketing

At first, the income was only a few dollars per week, but by 2004 blogging started to yield good results and become Darren’s full-time occupation. He then began to create his own products and diversify revenue streams. 

As Darren recalls, one reason for his success was that there wasn’t much competition at that time in the niche as there is now. His ability to produce new content on a daily basis for almost five years in a row was also a key to success.

With such a publishing frequency, it might be hard to always come up with new topic ideas. Darren finds inspiration either from his own experience, like the strategies he uses, things he learns, etc., or the questions that he’s being asked by readers, as they greatly help understand the audience’s interests.

Another thing that helped Darren grow his blog was communication with readers. For instance, he would visit other blogs, leave comments, and even email those who commented on his blog to show readers how valuable they are for him. Some of these readers still keep coming to the blog and bring friends with them.

A great channel for communication is an email newsletter. It perfectly helps drive traffic and even doubles or triples it on the day it was sent. Darren puts ads in the newsletter to promote his own products or simply sells the ad space to other advertisers.

Rules of Success

  • Set aside blocks of time for blogging and work hard in those times. By being disciplined, you’ll keep the right work-life balance and keep your blogging productive. 
  • Success in blogging requires time and consistency, so prepare to work hard and don’t give up too soon, before you see the first results. Only 1% of readers comment on blogs, so you might be doing something important and not know about it up to a certain point. And it usually takes three months to start getting feedback from people. To actually see the results and evaluate the efficiency of your blogging, it’s better to wait for a couple of years, and then decide whether to continue or not.
  • Address the needs of your audience and produce useful content. Before you start out blogging, explore your potential readers, find out their problems and pain points, map out your road ahead and start creating content. It might take a while, but your content marketing strategy will hit the target.
  • Podcasting allows for a better connection with an audience and, on top of that, there is less competition among podcasters than among bloggers.
  • Build community. Show that you appreciate readers’ interest and respond to all comments on your blog. To increase engagement and give readers a sense of belonging, try doing challenges together. To find new readers, publish guest posts on other blogs and network with bloggers who have your potential reader. It’s also important to create a space for interaction, such as a forum, page on social media, and so on.
  • Make sure to create evergreen content. You’ll always be able to repurpose it later to give it a second wind.
  • It’s important to know who you want to reach. Darren builds short profiles of a target reader and then tailors the content: what things will look appealing to them, what sites do they visit, and so on.

Chris Guthrie from Make Money On The Internet

Chris Guthrie is the author behind the Make Money On The Internet blog, host of the UpFuel Podcast and web developer with a decade of experience. Chris now owns several businesses in the Amazon space and can tell from experience how to make money with affiliate marketing.

Before

Chris started his online ventures back in Junior High School, when he was selling Pokemon cards on Ebay. A few years later he began to create video games, which actually made him so popular that in 2005 he decided to launch a forum for gamers. In 2007 he migrated the business to an LLC as he was already making good money. Being dismissed from an IT sales job was the last step on Chris Cuthrie’s path to becoming a full-time online entrepreneur. 

Success Story

As Chris acknowledges, it was very important to set a clear monetization path to start making good money.

The problem with gaming forums was that members were so used to banners that they stopped noticing them. This was one of the reasons Chris started experimenting with affiliate marketing and in 2009 was already earning well with Amazon’s program. The key to his success were niche websites with a specific product oriented focus and overcoming competitors, for example, reviewing products with videos, etc. This is how Chris got a bank wire payment for his Netbook Reviews website worth six figures. 

You can find Chris’ income report for 2010 to understand monetization strategies he’s using.

What Chris also does is improve affiliate marketers’ websites that need optimization. 

Rules of Success

  • Consider potential business models for a website before investing time and resources in its development or purchase. Ask yourself, “How can it make money?”
  • You need to take action. It doesn’t make sense to try to learn something without trying it in practice.
  • Find niche site ideas with great monetization potential and then build your own one that will be better than all the rest in terms of backlink profile, domain name quality, content, and so on.

Tasha Agruso from Designer Trapped

Tasha Agruso, a former medical office lawyer, is now a very successful DIY/design blogger. She runs a wildly popular blog “Designer Trapped in a Lawyer’s Body” and another site “Designer in a Binder,” and now earns more than she did as a lawyer.

Before

Tasha and her husband Joe have been DIY addicts since 2002. They redecorated their own house and started a blog to show home decor skills and share DIY tips in 2013. After just four years, income from blogging already exceeded the lawyer’s career, and Tasha left the corporate world in 2016, after 13 years of work as a civil trial lawyer and making partner at her law firm.

Success Story

Tasha’s blog grew rapidly from the very start, and one reason for such swift success was her ability to focus on mastering one skill or strategy at a time. At first, the blog got rejected by Google AdSense, so Tasha didn’t run ads for quite a long time and dove into affiliate marketing with the Amazon Associates program. Tasha tried to maximize the revenue with the traffic she already had by optimizing affiliate links and texts. 

She also monetized the blog through sponsored posts and ads. Tasha would write a lot of sponsored posts, starting from $150 per article, but looking back now, it wasn’t the best investment of time. 

Growing an email list is also very important, but one of the best monetization strategies for Tasha is selling her own products. Thus, after creating her first ebook on how to earn with affiliate marketing, Tasha saw her revenue surge from $1,000-$2,000/month to over $10,000/month, and now her monthly income doesn’t fall below $20,000.

One of the reasons behind such a rapid success is that Tasha consistently reinvested her income from blogging into business growth, such as taking courses, and so on. 

Rules of Success

  • Focusing on one thing at a time. Thus, if you take on affiliate marketing, try to maximize your revenue with the traffic you already have by optimizing your site and campaign.
  • Affiliate marketing might be the best monetization strategy for new bloggers, because the income doesn’t directly depend on pageviews. But as your traffic grows, you’ll be earning more.
  • Grow your email list from the beginning. It’s a great way to reach people and then sell your product. Bloggers ignore this thing for longer than they should. 
  • Stop chasing traffic and focus on serving the audience you have. There are bloggers earning a six figure monthly income with just 25,000 pageviews per month. 
  • If you ever plan to get ads in your income portfolio, place them from the start to make readers used to seeing banners. 
  • Do sponsored posts only if you have an established audience and take on projects that are relevant to your readers.
  • Look ahead when planning your business growth. For example, does your blog name go with your long-term vision? If not, you’ll eventually face the need to rebrand your business, which is quite a challenge.

How to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly developing industry, and to succeed, you need to keep up with the trends. In addition, different niches have absolutely different conditions for business growth, and competition levels vary as well. But, you don’t have to quit your job or invest thousands of dollars to get started in affiliate marketing. As the stories above demonstrate, all you need is persistence, dedication, and the ability to analyze and learn. With these ingredients, success is only a matter of time!

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