Affiliate Marketing Case Study Earned from an Aged Domain ROI $10k Valuation $35k



Mark
โœ… Affiliate marketing case study โœ…
At the beginning of 2021, I shared how we were launching and scaling an affiliate website on an aged domain.
We're now 18 months into the project and I thought I would share our successes, failures and lessons with this site.
Goal: Grow an affiliate site from $0 to $10k a month in under 24 months. ๐Ÿค‘
Result: Although we're a long way off from achieving our goal (we're at $1000 a month and 20k monthly sessions), we've learnt loads, had fun, and the site has been pretty passive for the past year (most of the heavy lifting happened in the first few months).
SUMMARY STATS
Site Launched: June 2020
Investment to date: $10,207.51
Income to date: $10,903.47
Estimated site value: $35,000
Return of Investment (RoI) to date: 345%
INCOME TO DATE
We only added affiliate links in late September 2020.
October 2020: $167
November 2020: $715.30 (Black Friday went well!)
December 2020: $215
January 2021: $523.44
February 2021: $367.18
March 2021: $900.15
April 2021: $811.05
May 2021: $954.67
June 2021: $1,190.40
July 2021: $1,031.71
August 2021: $701.93
September 2021: $916.26
October 2021: $1,148.64
November 2021: $1,260.74
Total Income: $10,903.40
TRAFFIC TO DATE
July 2020: 217 sessions
August 2020: 755 sessions
September 2020: 2,467 sessions
October 2020: 7,034 sessions
November 2020: 10,097 sessions
December 2020: 10,254 session
January 2021: 11,558 sessions
February 2021: 12,643 sessions
March 2021: 19,458 sessions
April 2021: 18,711 sessions
May 2021: 19,663 sessions
June 2021: 21,137 sessions
July 2021: 19,820 sessions
August 2021: 20,927 sessions
September 2021: 19,212 sessions
October 2021: 22,143 sessions
November 2021: 21,792 sessions
CURRENT VALUATION
As we're averaging around $1000 per month, we would estimate this site is worth: $35k (35-40x multiple).
Multiple justification is based on going market multiples for content sites with multiple income streams (Amazon, 3rd party affiliates, advertising), and 6-12 months of stable traffic and income.
LESSONS
We built this site on an aged domain. Many people look for a powerful backlink profile when trying to get an aged domain. These are great, but they can be very hard to find and costly. For us, we focused on relevance to our niche, a clean history and age. We managed to find a super relevant domain that was 15 years old on GoDaddy auctions. We checked it's history using archive.org and it was squeaky clean. We managed to secure the domain for under $30. Winning!
If your domain is aged and good, your content solid, and your site structure silo'ed and interlinked correctly, you don't need a lot of links to rank. Although Ahrefs shows 641 referring domains, most of these are citations and coupon sites. Hence our Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is 12!! It was 1.3 before we started building some links.
We specifically chose a niche that is not dependent on Amazon. When using other eCommerce affiliate programs, you have to test partnerships. We signed up to 3 affiliate programs โ€“ 2 sucked with low conversions. The one we settled on has been a great partner, although our commissions are pretty low compared to the 2 others (6% vs 8% and 15%).
We're now looking to increase our commission percentage with this partner as we go into 2022. We have leverage as we've worked with them for 12 months and have demonstrated our value. We think we can get them from 6% to 12%, which will double the site's income and valuation without increasing traffic or conversions etc.
Topical authority is key. We've created over 300k words of content for this site. We feel we've covered almost every topic in the niche. We're a topical authority in the eyes of Google.
Good content is important, but you have to properly interlink articles using a well-thought-out silo architecture. Keyword grouping is the fastest way to create topical clusters and formulate a silo'ed site architecture. We used KeyClusters for keyword grouping and then manually analyzed the results to create silos. Disclosure: we own KeyClusters.
Affiliate websites are definitely not passive income machines. Sure, we're making $1000 a month at the moment and have spent less than 5 hours on this site in the last 6 months. But equally that's probably the reason why we have plateaued and will whither and die if we don't invest more time and money over the next 12 months.
You can see the full case study with more insights here:
Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and I'll do my best to answer.
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29 ๐Ÿ’ฌ๐Ÿ—จ

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affiliate marketing case study earned from an aged domain roi 10k valuation 35k
๐Ÿ”—๐Ÿน

affiliate marketing case study earned from an aged domain roi 10k valuation 35k
๐Ÿ”—๐Ÿน

affiliate marketing case study earned from an aged domain roi 10k valuation 35k
๐Ÿ”—๐Ÿน

Martin
Which Tools you use for Clusters?

Mark โœ๏ธ ยป Martin
Keyword Grouping Tool (#1 SEO Choice) | KeyClusters
KEYCLUSTERS.COM
Keyword Grouping Tool (#1 SEO Choice) | KeyClusters
Martin ยป Mark
Thank you i have use keywordcupid and ClusterAI then i will check your ๐Ÿ™‚
Mark โœ๏ธ ยป Martin
KeyClusters is much more affordable, and much better output.
Martin ยป Mark
That write each developer About own Tools.
But ok, why you think is better to compare to other Tools?
Mark โœ๏ธ ยป Martin
It's much faster, much more affordable, better User Interface (UI)/User Experience (UX) and the output is more accurate. But you don't need to take my word for it, it's free to try.
Mark โœ๏ธ
Here's a video which explains how to use it:
How To Use KeyClusters With Ahrefs To Create Topical Keyword Clusters
YouTube.COM
How To Use KeyClusters With Ahrefs To Create Topical Keyword Clusters
Martin ยป Mark
I will, BTW great case study ๐Ÿ˜‰
Mark โœ๏ธ ยป Martin
Thanks man! If you have any feedback or suggestions let me know – we're keen to build a great tool for SEO users like yourself.

Neeraj
Awesome case study with details. Keep up the good work. Any sites you have with around $300-$500 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) for sale?

Mark โœ๏ธ ยป Neeraj
We have one doing around $600 MRR but not looking to sell just yet.

Felix
You've done solid work. Feels like there is a missing hub

Mark โœ๏ธ
Thanks Felix. Not sure what you mean by missing hub?
Felix ยป Mark
It's like… You've created a project with a lot of content as I see. Traffic is growing constantly and revenue also. At a size like that it's time to think about a growth of the growth. What are the processes and strategies to make big steps with that project. Question like: How to go up to 5k per month in the next 3 months. Or how double revenue with the existing traffic
Mark โœ๏ธ
Yeah, that's the challenge. Unfortunately we're spread so thin that it's very difficult to focus on this project. We'll probably end up flipping it for that reason. We do have some good ideas to double revenue over the next few months without increasing traffic – i.e. we're going to negotiate higher commissions.

Shaheer
That's great โ™ฅ๏ธ
What to do when display nothing on expired domain?
What does it mean
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
ARCHIVE.ORG
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

Mark โœ๏ธ
I'm actually not sure, but I would assume if shows no history then it's likely the site had indexing issues and/or got very little search traffic.
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
ARCHIVE.ORG
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

Najiulla
So you used Private Blog Network (PBN) service from IMPowerhouse? Is it safe to use service like that for money sites?

Mark โœ๏ธ
I would never say it's safe and in general I wouldn't recommend it, but given this site hit a plateau we thought it was worth a try. It made very little difference.



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