I recently read a case study at CloudLiving about how the NoHatDigital team was able to double affiliate revenue in four months for a site that they bought.
The team was able to take the site from $6,998 per month to $14,677 in only four months by implementing three simple strategies:
- Creating more content
- Building more links
- Switching to a higher paying affiliate program
However, this was done at scale. We are not talking about adding 20 articles and backlinks, but much much more.
Creating More Content
For content, the team added 187 articles each of 1000+ words. The articles were keyword focused.
Building More Links
The next step was building high-quality whitehat links. The team chose infographics and hustled their way to get links through outreach.
The team created a total of 7 infographics over the 4 months and outreached for links by emailing 63,988 pet site owners.
For every site that was interested in publishing the infographic, NoHatDigital created a unique introductory content to avoid duplicate content issues.
The result of this outreach was 54 backlinks, with the majority of them coming from sites with a Domain Authority (DA) of 18+
The new content alone generated $1006.33 in 3 months.
Changing Monetization
The team switched from Amazon to a different affiliate program (Chewy) and negotiated a higher payout.
Generally, the site’s traffic did not increase significantly due to the increase in content. Here were the traffic numbers:
- Pre-sale month – 156,133
- Pre-sale month – 153,596
- Month #1 – 135,234
- Month #2 – 141,313
- Month #3 – 163,455
- Month #4 – 148,038
Okay, that’s a feat.
Double Affiliate Revenue Experiment
Now, it’s time for some experiment.
The goal of this project is to carry out a similar experiment with one of my niche sites. My aim is to double the revenue in 4 months using the same strategy i.e. more content, more links, and switching to a higher paying affiliate program.
Site Statistics
First off, here are the site stats:
Current published articles: 50
SemRush Stats:
Note: The site was initially built on a partial match domain (PMD). The problem with the PMD is that it was limiting the expansion of the site to cover other topics.
I 301’d the site in April to a brandable domain. That’s why you see the hockey stick graph starting in May.
Ahrefs Stats
If you are a fan of Ahrefs, here are the current stats:
Traffic Stats
I only installed Google Analytics on the site on April 26th. Thus, I don’t have much data on traffic. Here is a snapshot of the traffic stats:
Revenue
The site is fully monetized through Amazon at the moment. Here is an overview of its earnings this year:
January: $348.32
February: $534.06
March: $254.83
April: $258.09
May: $43.81
12th June Edit: Updated May earnings to reflect end of month earnings. I’d taken the screenshot on 28th April.
Note: In May, the earnings significantly dropped for two reasons:
i) The site went offline for 5 days as I messed up my VPS. By the way, I’m hosting the site on an SSD Nodes VPS. You can read this SSD Nodes review to find out more about the hosting.
ii) When I did the 301, the site temporarily lost rankings.
With that said, here’s the game plan for the next four months.
- Write 200+ articles (1000+ words). 150 of the articles will be based on buyer intent keywords while 50 will be informational pieces
- Build 50+ high quality links
- Get new affiliate opportunities to supplement Amazon
That’s all.
Simple to write, difficult to execute.
I will be providing updates on the project at the end of every month.
Catch you in 30 days.
Resources Mentioned: SSD Nodes VPS
Last updated, 3rd, September 2018.
