Affiliate Marketing Case Study [How I Made $16,433 With One Product And How Can You Do the Same?]

Recently when Harsh Agrawal wrote about our affiliate partnership with Bluehost that has helped me to make over $16,000 in income, most of the readers were really excited to know how I made it.

So I’ve decided to write an exclusive affiliate marketing case study around it to help affiliate marketing beginners to do the same. Are you curious to know more about it? Let’s get into it.

I know majority of the people create blogs to make money.

There’s nothing wrong in that. Most professional bloggers say that don’t start blogging unless you have passion. But in reality, if you don’t have a clear idea on making money from your blogs, you won’t succeed no matter how passionate you are. That’s the harsh truth about making money online.

When it comes to monetising a blog, there are a gazillion ways to make money.

Out of all of them, there are only a handful of monetization strategies that really work such as selling banner ads, online consulting services, one on one coaching, selling online courses and more importantly affiliate marketing.

If you want to make money from your blogs, without a second thought I’d recommend to consider affiliate marketing. At least give it a try and you will be astonished by the results you get. That’s the good thing about it, affiliate marketing can help you make money even while you are sleeping.

If you are wondering how can you make money with it, don’t search beyond, you have come to the right place. I’ll share you my affiliate marketing case study on how I made $16,433 by selling ONE product!

Quick Note: Grab our premium book “Affiliate Marketing Blueprint” today to take your affiliate revenue from $0 to $1000 a month now.

Interested now? Let’s dive into the actual details.

Affiliate Marketing Case Study [How I made over $16000 by selling ONE product?]

Affiliate Marketing Case Study

Affiliate partnership with Harsh Agrawal

Affiliate partnership with Harsh Agrawal from ShoutMeLoud is one of the reasons that helped me make $16,000+ by promoting one product i.e Bluehost.

Here’s a sample screenshot of my Bluehost affiliate sales..

Anil-bluehost-tracking

If you want to know more from Harsh Agrawal’s point of view about our affiliate partnership, you can read How Affiliate Partnership Helped Anil Agarwal Earn $16,433 at ShoutMeLoud.


3 Things You Need to Make a Successful Affiliate Partnership

I know most of you guys might wonder is it really possible to make huge sales by promoting a single product. It’s possible and you need the following 3 essential things in order to make successful affiliate partnership with the influential bloggers in your niche.

1. Be honest

When I observe new bloggers who are struggling to make more affiliate sales, I usually notice one thing in common – “lack of honesty”.

Most believe in “Fake it til you make it” policy. So that, they can get more social proof that can help them increase the sales. They share fake income reports, fake sales, fake traffic reports etc just to get more attention on Facebook, twitter or from their blogs.

But in reality, your audience or website visitors easily figure out if you are faking. And the worst part is, if they sense that you are faking it, they simply stop reading what you share, let alone the sales.

So here’s the tip if you want to make more affiliate sales, “BE HONEST”. I know it sounds silly, but it works.

Notice any successful affiliate marketer (Pat Flynn, Darren Rowse, Neil Patel, Harsh Agrawal), everyone is honest with their readers. They don’t fake anything just to increase their sales. They always give highest priority to showing actual proof of making real money. And that’s when they build more momentum and attract more people to trust them.

Once your audience starts trusting you, you are on your way to make more money from affiliate marketing (even while you sleep!).

2. Connect personally

If you are blogging for a while, you know the importance of networking. Without getting to know others (especially the influencers), it’s almost impossible to make a sustainable income from your blogging efforts.

I highly recommend you to spend at least an hour or two in just connecting with others in your niche. Be it leaving comments on their blogs, tweeting their stuff or staying in touch with them via emails.

But one of the best and fastest ways to build strong rapport with the influenctial bloggers is to meet them personally. Take pictures with them. Tell what you feel about them and give feedback about their websites if you have any.

This all counts in building strong relationships with the bloggers. It also helps you build a bond that builds trust.

That’s how I build a good rapport with Harsh Agrawal, we both trust each other and we always believe in the same thing – “help others to make money”.

I hope by now, you understood the importance of interacting with others both online and offline. Always think about how you can help others before seeking help from anyone.

Now that leads me to the third point.

3. Let your work do the talk

From the last couple of years, I’m making sure to spend around 5+ hours on crafting every single post I publish here at BloggersPassion. I know, without content marketing, no one can actually build a loyal readership.

And I was also been able to land on the biggest marketing blogs like Problogger.com, Semrush.com and a lot more with my guest posts. The key here is – “I spend a lot of time from research to finish the posts I write”. If you create posts worth bookmarking, you will naturally attract links, shares and sales. That’s what you need to do – “create great content and add value”.

Okay, those are the 3 major pillars one needs to build to successfully make money from affiliate marketing. Now my question to YOU is..

So do you want to repeat the same?

If I can make $$$$$ from one product, just imagine how much you can make by selling another product or two more products?

The point here is: affiliate marketing is a goldmine, you can dig how much ever you want!

Here’s a simple strategy if you want to repeat the same (and if you are really serious about making money from affiliate marketing).


Find long tail keywords for the products you promote

You can’t make more affiliate sales without getting traffic, especially from search engines. If you are blogging for a while, you already know getting traffic from Google takes time. That’s the reason why you should consider affiliate marketing as a long term journey.

If you are thinking about “getting rich quick schemes”, affiliate marketing is NOT for you.

Affiliate marketing helps you make money even while you sleep, but in order to do that, you need to first work harder and reap the rewards later.

Most beginners fail to make any sales from affiliate marketing is they don’t have patience. They don’t spend time on finding long tail keywords for the products they promote.

If you are serious about making money from affiliate marketing and ready to work hard, I help you how you can find long tail keywords for any product you promote.

Tip: I highly recommend Long Tail Pro or Semrush for finding long tail keywords. I’ve been using them both and they are really worth every penny.

Here I’m going to demonstrate how you can use Long Tail Pro for finding profitable keywords that help you drive more traffic and increase your affiliate sales.

Quick note: For a limited time, you can get Long Tail Pro for just $37/month. It’s a MUST if you want to make more sales from affiliate products.

Let’s say you are into Fitness niche and you want to promote fitness related affiliate products to make more money. Here’s how you can use Long Tail Pro keyword research tool to find better keywords.

Step 1: Firstly, get to know the list of all the affiliate products that are proven to make you more income.

For instance, if you are into fitness niche, you can find out all the products that are being promoted in the top blogs. You can use search terms like “fitness + top blogs”, “fitness + blogs”, “fitness + best blogs” etc to find the good blogs in your niche.

Make a list of all the products they are promoting. It won’t take you more than 10 minutes, so do it now. Replace “fitness” with your topic. Like, “marketing + top blogs” can give you a list of all the links that talk about the best marketing blogs.

Step 2: Once you make a list of 3 to 5 affiliate products, start finding relevant long tail keywords for them.

You can use Long Tail Pro or Semrush to find the best performing long tail keywords. I’ll show you how.

#1) Once you logged on to Long Tail Pro, enter any of the keywords that are related to the products you promote, click on “Find Keywords” to start keyword research.

1

#2) Now, once you click on “Find Keywords” it will allow you to add your seed keywords and pick the search volume with below 1000 monthly searches to rank higher in Google results for any product you want to rank for.

By clicking “Generate keywords & Fetch data” it will give you a list of all the keywords you can choose from.

Keywords research using Long Tail Pro

#3) In the final step, make sure to pick 3 to 5 long tail keywords that you can use on your blog posts naturally. That’s it! Start writing more contents by using those keywords and build backlinks for the pages to rank higher and increase your sales.

Step 3: Create awareness about the products you promote

This is REALLY important and this is where all the money is.

If you fail to do this part, you will fail to make sales. If you successfully create awareness about the products you promote, you are almost done in converting your readers into buyers. It’s as simple as that.

See, you can’t make affiliate sales just by putting too many links all-over your blog or pasting banner ads everywhere. Affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work that way. You have to educate your blog audience about the products you promote to make more sales.

Read: Benefits of Affiliate Marketing: Top 8 Advantages of it


3 Ideas to Educate Your Audience About the Products You Promote

If you are wondering how to do that, here are 3 simple ideas to educate your audience about the products you promote.

1. Write honest product reviews

The best way to teach others about the products you promote is by writing reviews. Not just any random reviews but the genuine reviews. Most beginners write reviews just to increase their sales, they are least bothered about what they promote.

If you are one among them, stop it! Whatever the product you are going to recommend, make sure to first use it. Then once you are completely satisfied with it, write a detailed and unbiased review about it.

Share all the pros and cons so the readers trust you instantly. And buy what you recommend if they really need the products you recommend.

2. Build links for the products you promote

If you want to increase your affiliate sales, you need more search traffic. To get that, you need more backlinks. I recommend you to either use Skyscraper technique or guest posting to build quality backlinks.

3. Show banner ads at the most visible places

This is a no brainer. If your blog audience wants to know about the products you highly recommend, you need to use “banner ads”. See my blog’s sidebar, and you will find at the top “Bluehost” product banner ad. It’s the most visible place and a huge percentage of visitors click on it daily! My income goes up when they buy.

Recommended Reading:
List of high paying web hosting affiliate programs
Is Affiliate Marketing Legit? Let’s Bust Some Myths!


FAQs

Can I become a millionaire from affiliate marketing?

Of course, yes! There are so many affiliate marketers in the world who are making a hell lot of money from affiliate marketing.

Is affiliate marketing still profitable in 2024?

If you follow the right approach affiliate marketing lets you earn huge profits in the long run for sure.

How much can affiliate marketers make?

There is no limit. It totally depends on the efforts you put in the right way. Still, for me, you can start earning $1000 per month if done properly (choosing the right niche and products)

Which affiliate network is best?

There are a lot of reliable networks like ShareASale, ClickBank, Amazon Associates, etc.

Can I use AdSense and affiliate?

Absolutely yes, there is no restriction on using both at the same time.


Final Thoughts about affiliate partnership case study

I’m done with my affiliate case study of making $16000+ by promoting one product. And I also discussed about all the strategies I used to make that happen.

Browse more helpful case studies:

Now, I want YOU to repeat the same. If I can do it, you too can do it. Just believe in yourself and be honest with yourself. Consider affiliate marketing as a “work harder now and reap the benefits later” thing instead of “get rich quick scheme”.

If you found this post useful or inspirational, please share it with your friends on Facebook and other networks so they can also benefit.

Let me know what you think about my affiliate marketing journey in the comments below, I’d be glad to listen to you.

About Author
Anil Agarwal is the Founder of Bloggerspassion. He is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable blogs for over a decade Now. He has been featured in Over 100 Publications including Forbes, The HuffPost, HubSpot, Shopify, Semrush, Kinsta, Bluehost, Hostinger and G2.com etc. Know more about Anil Agarwal from here.

Reader Comments (12)

  1. Hey anil bro,
    Such an awesome post.
    This really help me find my mistake which is preventing me to make more affiliate sales.
    However, i will love to know, How to write a better review posts.
    Like what should the structure of the post?

    Thanks you so much

    Reply
  2. I am new to the blogging. I wanted to learn more about it works. I have never blogged so all this was some what confusing. Date I ask how to get start. In a simple way. Thanks for your information .

    Reply
  3. Hi Anil,

    I’ve just found that Harsh Agrawal has deleted the case study from his blog. That post is no more online.

    My question is, is it wrong to disclose this kind of partnership?

    Reply
  4. Hey,
    First of all congratulations! (Y)

    I agree with you “Network” is the key to get success! Make sure you make “Honesty” you priority!

    I Love this article – LTP (Longtail Pro.) is really a good KW-Researching tool to promote! I have made 2 sales overnight, I know it’s not a massive sales or something but that’s my first affiliated income so it’s quite a good experience for me!

    Anyways, Thanks for the case study!
    Regards
    Jagdish Kashyap 🙂

    Reply
  5. Hi Anil,

    Firstly many congratulations for your success and many thanks for sharing this inspiring article with us. I impressed with your words “if i can make $$$ than you can make too”
    Thanks for motivating us.

    Reply
  6. I like the part of your article about connecting personally to your visitors. It’s good to be able to talk to them directly and write in that form, including forms like “me” and “you”. As it were a conversation.

    Reply

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