[ Case Study] How We Generated $80k With Affiliate Marketing (from one advertiser)

As a publisher, you devote a lot of time and effort to build your website and audience. When it comes time to monetize your online presence, are you generating the income you want?

We have talked to many publishers in our network who have spent a lot of resources on driving traffic to their sites yet aren’t delivering enough high-quality customers to their advertisers to maximize their ROI.

We decided to explore how publishers can attract high-converting leads and send more qualified users to advertisers.

(Plus, our little experiment generated $80k from one advertiser in one month!)

 

The Money Manual Experiment

To find out what’s really going to work in the “real world” with a “real audience,” we created The Money Manual.

It follows a similar monetization model used by many online publishers. On this site, we produce original content that is monetized with affiliate links, and support the growth of the site traffic with paid media.

Swagbucks is one of our advertisers and within three months of starting up business with them, we were generating $80,000/month in revenue!

Subsequently, as we grew the site and experimented with different types of content and methods for monetization, we were able to generate over $250,000 from one advertiser in a single month.

Now you may wonder – what’s the secret sauce?

 

How the Money Manual Generated $80k Revenue from One Advertiser – And Is Now A Fully Independent Business

In order to send high-converting leads to our advertisers, we need to attract high-quality visitors to our website. We do so by crafting engaging content with relatable facts and anecdotes, which helps us to build trust and relationships with our audience.

The content helps our readers cultivate a positive association with our advertisers while envisioning how the products can benefit them. So much so, that those users who do click through to an advertiser’s landing page convert on average of 30%.

Quality content is the cornerstone of this strategy. However, if you build it they probably won’t come…

 

“The immersive and engaging content created by The Money Manual team directly translates to an engaged and active consumer audience for companies like ours. Even better, by efficiently sourcing their traffic from paid social and search platforms, The Money Manual offers our team a viable way to optimize and scale this premium audience. We look forward to continuing to grow with The Money Manual over the coming months and years.”

– David Weinrot, COO, Swagbucks.com

 

Content Marketing For Publishers

To get the highest ROI from content marketing, you need to promote your articles in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

For The Money Manual, we acquire traffic from a variety of high-quality, transparent ad platforms including Taboola, Outbrain, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Quora.

We started out by understanding each advertiser’s target audience, then proceeded to test the different types of ads and messaging that works best for each platform.

We position the content pieces strategically so we’re communicating their value to the intended audience, in a language that they can relate.

 

Conclusion

Creating high-quality and targeted content is the foundation to successfully attracting high-converting leads that will click through to your advertisers’ offers.

To get the highest ROI, you need to understand the advertisers’ target market so you can strategically position the content to drive high-quality traffic (e.g., as an answer to the audience’s burning questions.)

Don’t forget to test and optimize your campaigns – everything from ad copy, images, and headline to article formatting and CTA can affect your ROI.

If these all sound overwhelming… get help! You can hire freelancers on platforms such as Upwork to create content and use a tool such as SEMRush for keyword research. In addition, there are many great blogs on content marketing with more information to help you get started. We particularly enjoy following HubSpot’s blog!

 

To join our exclusive content marketing network – and work with premium brands such as Swagbucks, Uber, Stash, Digit, and many more – apply for Aragon Premium by clicking here.

 

Get Started

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