Black Friday Case Study: How I Made Over $13,000 Within A Week with Affiliate Marketing

Are you looking for some inspiration to succeed in affiliate marketing?

We are going to share a Black Friday case study showing how we end up making $13,000 within a week from BloggersPassion blog.

If you’re blogging for a while, you might already know that Black Friday comes only once in a year. And that’s when the majority of affiliate marketers make around 50 to 80% of their whole year’s income within a week. That’s a BIG week to boost your affiliate commissions.

In 2017 Black Friday week, we made over $13,000 from affiliate product selling.

If you’re wondering about how we did it, then this Cyber Week case study on Affiliate Marketing is a treat for you, where you’ll also discover the traffic stats along with the commissions.

How We Made Over $13000 During Black Friday [A Detailed Case Study]

Here’s the complete breakdown of all the sales we made from BloggersPassion during the Black Friday week. We’ll talk about each of the affiliate products that we used to generate that 13,000 dollars in a week. Let’s get started.

Breakdown of HostGator Affiliate Sales

Ever heard about 80/20 Pareto rule? It means that 80% of your results are generated from 20% of input.

Similarly, 80% of our black Friday income (13,000+ dollars) came from Hostgator alone.

So let’s first breakdown the Hostgator affiliate sales so you’ll get a better idea about how you too can do it by next year!

We made 81 successful sales from Hostgator during the black Friday week and that helped us make over $10,000!

Hostgator: 81 Sales

81 x 125 = $10125

Hostgator pays $125 for each successful sale if you refer 21+ signups in a month. And we had over 81 successful referrals within a week. That means, through 81 signups we made over $10,000 by getting $125 commission for each signup.

Here’s the screenshot of Hostgator payouts (just in case if you don’t know about their commission rates).

If you’re wondering about the successful 81 signups from Hostgator within that we made within a week, here’s the proof.

If you go through the above screenshot carefully, you’ll notice a few important things.

• We generated 1,117 clicks within the week (nov 22 to nov 29)
• 81 actions were taken (actions means successful signups)

So there you go, almost 80% of the affiliate income (10,000$) came from Hostgator alone, now let’s talk about the remaining products that helped us hit that mark.

Breakdown of Bluehost Sales

Bluehost: 13 Sales

13 x 75 = $975

During black Friday week, Bluehost paid $75 for each successful affiliate referral to their site. We referred 13 people (that means 13 people have successfully signed up to Bluehost using our affiliate links) which helped us made $975 which is a great amount considering the fact that we didn’t put too much efforts on Bluehost.

Here’s the Bluehost affiliate commissions proof.

From the above screenshot, you can notice things like;

• 373 clicks were made
• Out of 373 clicks, 13 people have signed up (to generate $975)

Breakdown of WP Engine and NameCheap sales

WP Engine $800 + $100 from NameCheap

We also promoted WP Engine and Namecheap where both of them gave some nice revenue which generated almost $1000 during the black Friday week.

Apart from them, we also made a couple more affiliate sales from other blogging related products.

Total amount will be approx: $13K (combining all the sales)

Black Friday Week Traffic Breakdown

Traffic got double in 2017 when compared to Black Friday event in 2016.

Here’s the difference in traffic that happened in 2016 November and 2017 year’s November.

If you notice the image above, you’ll notice things like;

• The traffic increased by 100% sessions
• There’s an increase of 96% new users to the website!

So there you go. That’s what the whole breakdown of both affiliate sales we promoted and the traffic we got to BloggersPassion during this Black Friday season.

Now, let’s get to the main point: how we did it? And most importantly how can you do the same so you can make $10,000 or even more during next Black Friday.

Steps We Took to Generate $13000 Suring Black Friday Time

If you’re wondering about what steps we took to achieve that mammoth goal, here’s the breakdown.

• Updating deal pages
• Increasing website speed
• Creating new deal pages
• Internal linking etc.

Importance of Creating Deal Pages

Deal pages are those pages that are specially designed to promote the affiliate products during Black Friday and Cyber Monday week. The aim with these deal pages is to get rankings for particular keywords and provide discounts when the sale goes live.

Here’s an example of how a deal page looks like.

These deal pages are really helpful in 2 ways.

1. They help you get better rankings (because you’ll be focusing on particular keywords)
2. You can provide deals and discounts easily (so your audience can easily buy stuff from you)

So if you want to increase your affiliate sales, create deal pages well in advance instead of creating them when the Black Friday week is coming (by creating deal pages in advance, you can also start building quality links to those pages to get better rankings in the search engines). It’s as simple as that.

Okay, let’s now discuss about the simple yet most effective steps we’ve taken during the Black Friday week to get massive sales.

1. Link Building

We did some blog commenting, guest blogging, linking to deal pages from Youtube videos, sharing the deal posts on popular social media & social bookmarking sites etc.

Google gives #1 priority to backlinks. Just don’t focus on building ONLY dofollow links (this is one of the biggest mistakes most affiliate marketers make, they are only after dofollow links).

Most of links that come from social media, blog commenting, blog directories are nofollow but they give you the right balance between both dofollow and nofollow links so Google thinks you’re building links naturally without just focusing on dofollow links.

2. Internal Linking

We have linked to deal pages from relevant pages on BloggersPassion and also linked from high DA pages within the site. We linked to all of our deal pages from top navigation, sidebar, high traffic posts that are written around web hosting and special deals.

This internal linking played a crucial role. Most people don’t realise the importance of internal linking but it’s one of the most effective ways to get better rankings on Google search results.

Pro tip: I started using Yoast premium plugin (even their free version is great) for better internal linking. It helps you use the right internal links whenever you update or create a post. I’ve even written a detailed comparison between both premium Yoast vs free version that you can read if you’re curious about quality internal linking to your posts to boost your affiliate sales.

3. Updating The Deal Pages

We updated the deal pages quite frequently to get top rankings in the search engines.

Whether you agree it or not, updating your blog posts can go a long way. It can help you in a lot of ways, updating your deal pages can;

• Quickly help you improve your search rankings
• Give accurate deals and discounts

So if you’re thinking about increasing your affiliate sales during next Black Friday season, be prepared to spend additional time on updating your deal pages frequently.

4. Increasing The Page Speed

We improved the Page speed for all deal pages.

Here’s one of the sample URL’s (one of the deal pages) that gives you an idea about how we increased their page speed.

97/100 speed on Mobile and Desktop

So did you notice that? We’ve a good page speed of 97/100 and we tried our best to apply all the suggestions given by PageSpeed Insights by Google to increase our deal pages loading times drastically.

5. Creating New Deal Pages

We also created a couple of new deal pages to promote the products that we are recommending on BloggersPassion to increase our chances of doing well for relevant terms in search engines.

Creating new deal pages should be your #1 goal if you’re just starting out. Don’t create just one or two deal pages and expect massive results like we got. Spend extra time to create as many deal pages as you can as it can give you super value in terms of search engines. You can easily rank for a ton of profitable keywords by creating new deal pages.

Make sure to create dedicated deal pages by removing all the sidebars and try to use landing pages as they don’t create any distractions for your audience. You can use tools like Thrive themes to create stunning landing pages within minutes.

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

If We Can Do It, You Too Can Do It

We didn’t write this case study to just brag about our affiliate income. We did it to inspire you that anyone can do it with a proper plan.

Affiliate marketing is all about helping others. Most people don’t make even a single affiliate sale because they are too much concerned about spamming their emails and overdoing everything instead of truly helping people.

When you strategically use the tactics that we’ve discussed above, you can dramatically increase your sales and you too can make thousands of dollars in the upcoming year.

Just be consistent, work really hard and have your own goals. That’s how you succeed in affiliate marketing.

Recommended Reading: Join the Highest-Paying Hosting Affiliate Programs and start earning big by promoting top web hosting services.

Final Thoughts

As I said above, we haven’t written this detailed case study just for the sake of bragging but to actually show people what affiliate marketing success looks like. Earning $13k within a week is definitely a crazy feeling but you too can do the same with the right execution.

Browse more helpful case studies:

• How I made $16000 plus while selling a single affiliate product?
• How We Exploded Our Traffic to Reach 2 Million Views with Semrush
• SEO case study: How long does it take to rank in Google?

So what do you think? Did you like this case study? Share your thoughts in the comments and also let us know if you’ve also achieved some success during this Black Friday season with affiliate marketing.