Today’s article is a video transcription of our latest income report from one of Nick’s main affiliate websites. Enjoy the video, and leave any comments or questions below.
Contents
Income Report for Nick’s Main Website September 2020
- Amazon Associates: $1843.13
- Impact Radius: $5,908
- Mediavine: $1,000.84
- Sendowl: $91.80
- Post Affiliate Pro: $395
- Total: $9,237.97
Key takeaway: diversify.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Today, I’m going to give you an exclusive look into the back end of my affiliate programs, detailing how much I made in the month of September 2020. You’ll see the exact dollar amounts my traffic for the month and learn how I’ve diversified away from Amazon Associates.
First off if you’re new here welcome to the channel, Two Hour Blogger. This is a YouTube channel/blog where we teach you how to build successful blogs and affiliate websites with just two hours of work each night after you come home from your day job. You can eventually transition into a full-time blogger.
While I’ve got you here, we do have a Facebook group where we discuss different affiliate strategies, SEO techniques, technical stuff about your website, website design, all kinds of stuff. Join up here. I highly suggest you do so. It’s a small, tight-knit group, and we can get your questions answered quickly and, until the group gets bigger, right now I can run Ahrefs reports for you if you want to see what your website’s stats look like. So join up, and once you’re in send me a message and I can get that done for you.
Now let’s get into this. First we’re going to start off with the traffic numbers, oh and I almost forgot, let’s have a look at the Ahrefs stats for the website. We have 1.69k backlinks, a total of 335 referring domains, organic keywords are sitting around 40,000, and organic traffic (estimated) is sitting around 40 000, as well.
When we go into the Google Analytics report, the number displayed in Ahrefs (below) is smaller than reality. When you run your own website through Ahrefs, that traffic number might actually be smaller. Sometimes it’s half, sometimes it’s a third. It’s just an estimate. Keep that in mind.
We’re getting backlinks somewhat consistently, though a lot of them recently have been these very weird domain directory backlinks, that are no follow, that don’t really have any sort of impact. Coming over to the organic traffic graph, I started the website in 2016, but it took a little while to get out of the sandbox.
By about 2018, we started to see a little bit of an increase. There was a little bug with the Yoast SEO plugin, where it indexed a bunch of my images, so we lost some traffic. Eventually, that was fixed and we got back up. We’ve been climbing since.
Earlier this year we had a big algorithm update, so we saw a big big dip in organic traffic and then a correction. It looks like we’re seeing another correction right now. For the last last 30 days, we can see that it’s been on kind of a downward slope, but towards the middle of the month here, we are flattening out. All around good!
If you’re sitting here reading along, and have no clue as to what these stats mean, disregard this part of the article. This is for people who have already started websites who maybe have used keyword or backlink software before. This just gives me an overall idea of how the site is doing.
Check out our Facebook group to join other like-minded entrepreneurs!
For now we’re going to look at visitors who’ve come to the website via Google Analytics, which tracks the traffic to the website. As you can see here, over on Analytics we had a total of 65,000 users and 76,000 sessions. The bounce rate was looking decent at 65, with the average session duration being a minute and 26 seconds. 76,000 is on par right now for what I’m doing traffic-wise. As we approach Q4, I expect that number to increase maybe by 20 or 30 percent.
Let’s dive into page views: we had 76,000 sessions 88,000 pageviews. These are not unique page views. My main source of traffic is Google, being 85%. We have some direct traffic which could come from email, from Subscribers.com, or others. We also have traffic from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and others. It looks like some people are checking me out on Ahrefs, as well.
Affiliate Income for September of 2020 on my main website
Let’s dive in first to earnings from Amazon Associates. In the month of September, we did $1843.13—the majority of that coming from the United States. We do have UK, Canada, and France also monetizing. Once we saw Amazon slash commission rates, I got aggressive and started moving completely away from Amazon so this $1843 number may have been a little higher earlier in the year and last year. I’m trying to get away from amazon as quickly as possible.
Moving over to Impact Radius, in the month of September we did $86,000 in sales and that comes out to a payout of $5,908. The conversion rate is a little bit lower here because, this isn’t Amazon. The products here are going to be little bit more expensive. On average, I would say between $500 to $3000, in that range. You’ll get a little bit lower of a conversion rate, however, when you make the sale, you’re going to make more.
Display ads
Next, we have Mediavine, which is the ad agency that I use for display ads. In the month of September, we did $1,000.84. RPM is slowly starting to go up. We’re getting into the $13 range, but given this year, advertising over all has been difficult for a lot of people. Last year, I’d say RPM was around $25 to $30 dollars per thousand and these are per thousand sessions, by the way.
Other random affiliate programs
Next up, we have an e-commerce platform that is in the UK. They pay out in Great Britain Pounds (GBP), so converting that over, we get about $395. That is for the month of September, as well. Finally over here we have one more affiliate program that earned $91.80.
Totaling everything up, we get a monthly income of $9237.97. Not a bad month for September—I’m extremely happy with that.
How do we make sales on our blogs?
With the income numbers out of the way I wanted to take a minute and describe the process of what we’re doing in order to generate these types of sales. If you’re brand new or are looking to start a blog, this is going to be the general process that somebody would go through in order to make a sale on your website.
Let’s head over to Google and type a typical search. I have this water bottle—it’s one of those insulated one’s. It keeps your drink cold or hot for a long time. Let’s type in ‘best insulated water bottle’ into the Google search. The results display a bunch websites like CNN, New York Times, TheManual, BonAppetit, etc. All of these websites rank on page one of Google for ‘best insulated water bottle.’ Let’s try the New York Times’ Wirecutter article. Wirecutter is one of the best examples of an affiliate blog.
Right here we’ve got, ‘The Eight Best Water Bottles.’ It’s an article that they wrote where they’ve tested and reviewed all these water bottles. Once we scroll down and they have a top pick labeled ‘the best stainless steel water bottle.’ They write this content pick out a bunch of different options and when somebody comes to this site and they click this link, it redirects you to Amazon and Wirecutter will make a commission off the sale if you make a purchase.
The idea is to create content that rankson page one of Google for these top searches.
We can do another one like ‘best mechanical keyboard for gaming.’ The first-page results show PC Gamer, T3, Tom’s Hardware—a lot of big names. This is a very saturated niche. Let’s try RTings. It’s a similar type of article, where they give you a list of all these different types of keyboards. There’s a ‘See Price at Amazon’ button and by clicking this, it’s going totaled me right to Amazon. They now have what’s known as my cookie. If I buy this, they’re gonna make a sale and get a commission.
That’s the basic idea of what affiliate marketing is and that’s what we do. We try to rank on page one of Google for these search terms and get people to the article. It’s crucial to be honest with the reviews, number one. We can’t just throw up some garbage content and expect people to buy stuff.
Be honest, make sales, and increase our traffic—that’s big three.
A lot of people build affiliate niche websites and they’re very heavily reliant on Amazon Associates. If you don’t know and you’re just getting into this, back in April, Amazon went ahead and slashed commissions by 50% in most categories and up to 62.5% in others! I believe home improvement went down from 8% to 3%. That’s a major major hit if you’re in that niche. Before starting a website, you need to look into all the different affiliate programs there are, because if you just stick with Amazon you’re going to be bound to that. Honestly, I’m starting to think that they are slowly killing the Associates program.
You can start with Amazon, but just just know that there’s other options out there and make sure they’re exist before you build your website. You don’t want to be two, three years in and not be able to go anywhere because there’s no other affiliate programs outside of Amazon Associates.
A little bit about my website
I started affiliate marketing back in late 2016. I started my blog and my articles were absolutely terrible. I kept going to YouTube to watch different videos and eventually I’d improve my content. I got it a lot better to the point where I started ranking for things and I realized, “oh, look at that, I made $9 today! This can be a real thing!”
I went to work hard for two years and made a lot of mistakes. There’s lots of trial and error involved, but I was able to get it to the point where it was making me $200 a month, and then the next month I made $300. Then $500, then $700. There’s bumps and hurdles along the way where you go down in traffic or you come up and then you go down, but for the most part, we’re improving and we’re working constantly to make the content better.
I was interviewed by Doug Connington of Niche Site Project, who is one of the best educators when it comes to Amazon Affiliate, niche sites, and project management. That was at the time when I was making about $1,500 dollars a month. From that interview onward, I was motivated to keep pursuing what I was doing so I could get to the point where this would be my actual gig full time. Luckily enough, I’m there.
Just to give you guys an idea of what the traffic trajectory looks like, here is a graph from September 1st 2018 all the way up to today. Back in 2018 we weren’t doing much traffic at all and, as we kept growing and adding content, we can start to see this graph go up quite significantly. The little spike in the middle is right before the holidays. Before December, you can see how much traffic happens here. This is most likely Black Friday. Hopefully we’ll see another spike in traffic like that.
As you can see, the site is growing on this upward curve That’s what we want to see. There’s always a chance of some sort of algorithm change, a penalty, or something that can happen that is outside of our control. We’ll be watching for that. Hopefully we won’t see that.
My current goals for October
I’m aiming to earn five-figures in a month. I’ve hit it in the past—Q4 last year, specifically during the holiday season. Hopefully, October will be a great month, otherwise November and December should be on target. Next year, I’ll continue to add content, find more content writers, and get five figures each month moving forward.
