Affiliate Marketing Case Study [How I Made Over $16,000 With One Product?]

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.

I’ll share you my affiliate marketing case study on how I made over $16,000 by selling ONE product!

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

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

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..

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.

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 able to land on major publications like Semrush, Kinsta, Forbes, HubSpot, G2, NeilPatel.com etc with my work. 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!

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.

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.

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

Tip: I highly recommend Semrush for finding long tail keywords. I’ve been using this tool since 2015 and it’s worth every penny.

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

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 Keyword Magic Tool from Semrush 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.

#1) Once you logged on to Semrush dashboard, enter any of the keywords that are related to the products you promote, click on “Search” button to start keyword research.

#2) Now, once you click on “Volume” filter and select search volume range from 101-1000. This way you will be able to find some easy to rank profitable keywords.

You can also filter keywords data in order of keyword difficulty (KD) as well

#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.

Quick Note: In case, you don’t have access to Semrush tool, Click this link to try it free for the next 14 days.

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.

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”.

Recommended Reading:

Discover the best web hosting affiliate programs to partner with and boost your earnings in the web hosting niche.

FAQs

Final Thoughts

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:

• How I end up making $13000 within a week time?
• How We Exploded Our Traffic to Reach 2 Million Views with Semrush
• SEO case study: How long does it take to rank in Google?

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”.