How much money can you REALLY make with affiliate marketing? How can you calculate an affiliate site earning potential? This is an important question when you are deciding to build your first site and can help you understand how much to invest.
In this episode, I “riff” off of an article published by my buddy Andrew Hansen and give you a framework for evaluation of your sites.
Also, I talk about SEO trends for 2017 — particularly the ongoing importance of mobile. You need to have a responsive design and you should consider AMP. Don’t know what all that means? Don’t worry, I discuss it all in the episode.
Next week, I’ll bring you an update on the niche site.
Show Notes
- Predictions for 2017 are now emerging, some are goofy but some resonates. One article that I love talks about Google moving from desktop first index to a mobile first index. Two things that they might mean to you, the blogger: you need to have a truly responsive, outstanding website going and Google’s search engine request to have an accelerated mobile pages (AMP). This prediction seems spot on to me and that means mobile will be increasingly important in 2017 and whatever your plans are for creating affiliate websites or blogs, you better think mobile first.
- How do you predict how much money a particular website would make? I call this Affiliate Math. These are guidelines that you can use to build a spreadsheet to figure out how much money you should invest in your website:
- Let’s say that you have a page and its targeting some key word terms that are very closely related and top 3 of those have 10k searches in total. If you are able to get to the 3rd position in the search engine results (Rank 3), you can expect maybe 10% of the order of clicks. Then let’s say you make great articles because you apply the principles of copyrighting and everything that we have discussed in the past thereby people are engaged after they checked your website out and they click through your product, then you are looking at a click-through rate of maybe 30%. After this, look at earnings per click information to expect how much you will be getting for that page for that month. If you have multiple pages in your website which are of this quality, then you can start multiplying this using the same principles. here’s an example calculation:
Out of 10,000 visitors, 1,000 visited your site (10% of clicks) because you are on Rank 3 in the Google search engine. Out of the 1,000 visitors in your site, 300 clicked through your product (30%). Your earnings-per-click is $.50 thereby you should be expecting $150 for this page. If you have 10 pages like this, multiply $150 by 10. You should be expecting $1,500 per month for this website.
Thanks to everyone asking about the course:
Hey @LateNightIM when will you be launching your affiliate marketing course? #LateNightAffiliate
— Chris Holdheide (@ChrisHoldheide) December 14, 2016
@LateNightIM Focus & taking action. And patience waiting for the Late Night affiliate course!!! Merry Christmas Mark. Cheers!!
— Rick Mueller (@RickMuellerAZ) December 18, 2016
@LateNightIM just listened to ep 103. Any details on the release of the affiliate course? I am very interested in it.
— Rick Smith (@SmittyDick) December 21, 2016
Links Mentioned In This Episode
- Late Night Affiliate course notification sign up
- Moz article on 2017 SEO predictions
- A Moz article on AMP
- My favorite theme — Divi from Elegant Themes
- My post on Affiliate Math from 2011
- Andrew Hansen Article On Earning Potential
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Affiliate Site Earning Potential Transcript
I hope everybody is having a fantastic magical awesome day as we approach Christmas here in the United States. Actually, it’s Christmas all over the world, but I know depending on where you are in the world you may or may not be celebrating Christmas. Whatever you’re doing over the holiday, I think that’s totally awesome and I hope it is wonderful for you.
My friends in China will be celebrating Chinese New Year next month. It’s kind of challenging for me because in my day job I work with a lot of people from Asia, we’re out in December and then they’ll be out for Chinese New Year after the first of the year, so that’s really complicated from a logistics standpoint to make sure we have things covered.
Whatever you’re doing right now, this month and next month, I hope you’re having an absolutely fantastic time. I hope you had an outstanding 2016. I’m personally very excited about 2017. Before we get to all of the things that are going to happen in 2017, we’ll probably cover that in the next episode, I did want to handle a little bit of listener feedback.
(Episode 119 Transcript Continued…)