Quick Intro of me
Hi Guys, before I jump into the case study let me introduce myself quickly. I’ve been building affiliate sites now for around 3 years and they have been a big earner for me. So much so that I could live off their income. My SEO skills have allowed me to travel the world and be a “digital nomad” in countries such as Vietnam and Thailand. I’ve never blogged about this before but I think I have a lot to offer and want to help people whilst at the same time keeping myself accountable.
Onto the Juicy Details
Note: Along with this case study I will be posting step by step guides on how to produce killer Amazon affiliate sites, so I won’t go into full details here. (first part here)
This website was started in September 2014 and is in the Home & Garden niche offering reviews and guides of a particular type of product. It has around 20 pages of high quality content, some being 2000+ words offering comparisons of products along with shorter informational articles which acts as filler content for the site. It is siloed with the homepage as a kind of introduction page to the main pages, I’m not trying to rank the homepage so my link building efforts are focused on inner pages.
The site took a long time to start ranking until the “phantom update” in May this year when all of a sudden things got interesting. Since then I have been consistently building backlinks and using other methods which has resulted in it’s earnings increasing rapidly each month along with some very exciting rankings. Overall the site is targeting many keywords across multiple pages which means it can become a true authority site and potentially a $10k+ per month earner.
May
During May the rankings jumped and traffic started increasing which led me to monetise the site. Though at this stage it wasn’t ranking on page 1 yet for anything significant. The main keywords I am targeting were still on the 2nd page or below.
Over $400 for it’s first month with monetisation is not bad at all! I knew there was more to come though if I can get those rankings up higher and that’s exactly what happened.
June
The earnings for June were very encouraging, with an increase of more than 4 times the previous month due to higher rankings and having a whole month of the site being monetised.
July
In July the earnings soared again and we have a really solid money site with a lot of potential.
Traffic
As you can see, the amount of visitors has exploded over the past few months, going from around 200 visitors a day to over 700 and doesn’t look like slowing down. My target for the next couple of months is to reach the 1000 visitors per day mark.
How did I increase the rankings?
Well, I added more links of course. Backlinks are still working especially for sites that are already ranking. Creating new sites takes a long time because of the sandbox which I’ve found to be about 6 months for sites going after mildly competitive terms (2000+ LMS). Once they are climbing then hit them with links consistently and reap the rewards. I did also order a press release from BHW that many people recommend (link here). I mostly did that for trust, I’m not 100% sure whether it really helps or not at this stage but it’s something I’m using as links from high DA sites certainly aren’t going to hurt.
What Next?
I’m will be adding a small amount of social signals to each post, I don’t expect this to boost the rankings but it does help the site look more real.
I will be adding 2-3 powerful PBN links each week, I still have plenty of sites to link from in my network which I am building constantly.
It is now ranking on the first page for many juicy keywords going up to 9900 LMS. If I can get those ones ranking in the top 3 I expect the earnings will rise to the $5k+ per month range. It is also ranking on the 3rd page for some terms that are almost 50,000 LMS, if I rank higher for them then the sky is the limit!
I’ll be back with update next month, and in the mean time please feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.
I'm Ben and I've been doing SEO for around 4 years. I believe in working smart in order to achieve your goals, passive income still exists but it takes a lot of work to get there and once you do, you should keep on building.
