Successful Affiliate Marketing Websites to Learn From
These are examples of some of my
favorite affiliate marketing sites. They all get tons of traffic and I'm guessing
they all generate millions of dollars in revenue. Let's take a deeper look at these affiliate sites
and some key things they do well starting with the first site which is CamelCamelCamel. CamelCamelCamel isn't your
typical content affiliate site. They're a data company that provides
free tools and information on Amazon product prices. Here's how their site works. Just search for any product
as you would in Amazon. Click on a product you want to research,
and you'll see historical pricing data. Now, if you're not in a rush to buy, you
can set price alerts to get notified when a product drops to a certain price point. Now, according to Ahrefs Site Explorer the website
gets an estimated 1.4 million monthly organic visits, with peak season consistently being in
November – probably due to Black Friday.
Now, despite the fact that they have kind of
an outdated design with arguably a disruptive number of ads, I think their affiliate site
is pretty awesome for 4 main reasons. #1. Their content is data and data
collection is most likely automated through their own crawler or API access. #2. People who use their site are probably close to
making a purchase because they're price shopping. And this should lead to
higher conversion rates. #3. They don't really have that
many real competitors. And I think a big reason for this is because
there's no easy way to get historical Amazon pricing for all of Amazon's products. And seeing as CamelCamelCamel was
one of the if not the first to market, they probably have the most and best data
when it comes to Amazon price tracking. And #4, which I believe is the main thing that
separates them from 99% of other affiliate sites is that they provide a very valuable and free
service to a huge addressable and wealthy market – Amazon shoppers from the US, UK, Spain,
Italy, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and Japan. Alright the next affiliate site is Hey Grill, Hey. This is a niche content affiliate
site about BBQ and grilling.
They have tons of product reviews, recipes
and they even have their own line of products that they sell in their ecommerce store. And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer,
this website gets around 1.3 milion monthly organic visits. Now, despite the fact that they have over
3,000 affiliate links throughout their site and only around 900 indexed pages,
I absolutely love that their site doesn't really feel like an affiliate site. And there's two reasons for that. The first reason is because they've
beautifully diversified their revenue sources. And I want to expand on the importance of
this a bit, especially for affiliate site owners, so stay with me here. When you become an affiliate, the fine print will
almost always say that the company reserves the right to terminate the program
or change rates at their discretion.
And it does happen. In fact, Amazon, the world's largest affiliate
program, slashed their affiliate commission rates quite substantially back in 2020. So rather than leaving the fate of your business
in the hands of one or many companies so-called "discretion", it's worth diversifying into other
monetization methods like ads and products you own whether they're digital or physical. And that's what HeyGrillHey has done. For example, in this recipe post, they have
affiliate links sprinkled throughout their post when it makes sense – like one
to this instant read thermometer.
They have ads from Mediavine
and Adsense on the same page. They recommend joining their private
membership program called "The Grill Squad", which costs $50 to $150/year. And at the bottom of their recipes, they
have links to BBQ must haves which are products in their ecommerce store. Now, despite the fact that they've monetized
a recipes post in 4 different ways, you might think it'd feel like they're overselling. But the quality of their content and the very
organic mentions of their products were actually more helpful than harmful
in my opinion at least. And I think that's because the quality
of their content is so good that trust is built with their readers. I mean, they have really well produced
videos for a ton of their recipes. They've done hands-on reviews for tons
of different grills – and these aren't cheap. They take high-quality photos for
just about every post they create. And they talk about things that
BBQ enthusiasts would care about. Hey Grill Hey, in my opinion, is a solid example
of the 5-step monetization model I recommend in our tutorial on how to make money blogging.
I highly recommend watching that video
if you want to increase your blog revenue while hedging against over exposure. Alright, the next affiliate site example
is perhaps one of my favorite websites and that's Slickdeals. Slickdeals is a forum where people share
about hot deals they've found on pretty much any product. Now, the super unique thing about this
site compared to the first two affiliate sites is that all content and affiliate
links are user generated. For example, someone noticed that
the Amazon Echo 4th gen is 50% off so they shared it in the hot deals forum. Now, if I hover over the "see deal" link, you'll
see that it points to an internal redirect.
And if we follow those redirects, you'll
see that it includes Slickdeal's affiliate tag. Now, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer,
Slickdeals gets an estimated 3.8 million monthly organic visits. And if we head on over to the Site Structure
report, you'll see that the traffic is split between their coupons subdomain and their main
site, which is mostly the forum threads. Now, the reason why I love this non-traditional
affiliate site is because they've streamlined the hardest parts of running an affiliate site –
creating content and getting traffic to it. As I mentioned before, their content creation
is user-generated which pretty much makes their content automated. Cool beans. Now, the other part of their content
comes from staff contributions. For example, these board shorts were
marked down 77% and the staff writer includes a nice summary of the deal
and of course, the affiliate link is automatically generated.
Now, in my opinion, the main reason
for Slickdeal's success isn't just because of the deals. It's the fact that they've created a community
of shoppers that come together to share a common interest – saving money. And some of the conversations are really
telling about how much this community loves getting a good deal. For example, this chest freezer
goes on sale for $500. The forum thread gets over 150 comments
including this one from someone who says: "Bought on impulse – is this a good deal?" I mean, who buys a massive 112-pound
freezer for $500 on impulse? To which another community member provides
a helpful comment with no judgment passed. In my opinion, it's pretty cool how these kinds of
conversations happen completely organically. And this is probably why around a million
or so people search for the slickdeals brand name or variations of the brand
name every month in the US alone. A strong community leads to consistent
traffic and in Slickdeal's case, consistent affiliate commissions. Alright, the next affiliate site example is
a content site called Garage Gym Reviews.
Now, on the surface, this site doesn't
have a particularly fancy design, no fancy copywriting, and no fancy affiliate boxes. But this affiliate site gets around 750,000 monthly
organic visits according to Ahrefs Site Explorer. Now, I love that this site actually does
hands-on reviews of various fitness products. And the most impressive part to me is that
they do them for some really tough products like squat racks. They're not exactly cheap and you need
a lot of space to test and review them. Now, there are plenty of affiliate sites that
actually do hands-on-reviews of products. But what drew me to this site the most was how
quickly they scaled traffic, links, and content considering the amount of time it would take
to actually build out their content assets. This led me to a rabbit hole
in Ahrefs Site Explorer. And long story short, I noticed that
they have around 2,600 pages in their equipment subfolder which accounts
for over 10% of their total search traffic. So I visited one of their equipment category
pages and assumed they have had a decent sized ecommerce store because
it looks like one, right? Well, it's not.
If we click on one of the product pages,
you'll see they've mimicked the styles and content of an ecommerce product page. But if you click on this button which would
typically be an "Add to cart" button, it'll send you over to the affiliate merchant's site. Now, the reason why I think this works is
because their fake product pages match searcher intent for some transactional
and navigational queries.
For example, if you search for "stall mats
tractor supply," you'll see that the top results are category and product
pages from Tractor Supply. This page for example shows details,
specs, and reviews about the product. Now, if we go back to the SERP, you'll see that
GarageGymReviews' page is ranking high too. Click the page and you'll see product
highlights, a hands-on video demo, product details, specs, and reviews. Now, the cool thing about this is that a typical
content affiliate site would have a hard time ranking for so many transactional
and navigational queries. But they've kind of slipped their way into a lot
of these SERPs which I'm sure contributes to their revenue. So as you can see, there are tons of creative
ways to differentiate your affiliate site so you can stand out from the rest of the crowd. And I'm gonna leave you with three tips: #1. As cliche as it may sound, always
focus on providing a ton of value. That can be in the form of data like CamleCamelCamel, community like Slick Deals, or hands-on-reviews
like our content site examples.
#2. Building a community helps
to build your brand. And by increasing brand searches, you're going
to continue to drive consistent traffic to your site. And #3. Get creative and consider going
after queries that other affiliate competitors may not be competing for. In the case of MyGarageGymReviews,
that was transactional and navigational ecommerce queries. So please please please…
stop making sh***y affiliate sites..
