I’ve Been Writing Software Reviews for 1 Year — Here’s What Happened
Making 4 figures is possible.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you might know I launched a website in July 2021 that I’ve been growing alone since then.
I’ve never hired anyone to work on my website consistently.
A good writer worked with me for some time, but his rate was rather high. I don’t publish garbage content on my website. That’s why the content was expensive.
Every article I write or someone else writes for me goes through the following process:
- Keyword research via Semrush or Ahrefs (I use both tools nowadays)
- Content brief creation
- Outline creation
- Content writing
- Editing
- On-page optimization
- Publication
It’s a lot of work. However, it’s worth it!
My website has been growing steadily and was not affected by Google updates. Since May 2022, impressions have increased from 2,548 to 19,688, which is 672.68% growth!
I explain how I grow my website with the help of SEO in my SEO writing ebook and in these articles:
In this article, I want to share my experience, learnings, and findings from writing software reviews.
A long time ago, I created a website category called “Creator tools.” The idea was to write honest tool reviews and monetize this content through affiliate partner programs.
I follow two ways to decide what to write about:
- Pick a new tool with low keyword difficulty and growing search volume to quickly rank in the top 10 for the target keyword.
- Pick an existing tool with decent search volumes but low/middle competition.
Both options work and can help your website rank high for the target keyword quickly.
Since there is almost no competition, your content can rank in the top 10 search results even if created with AI tools. I don’t encourage you to do this, though. I ran an experiment where my Robinize review generated by Bard climbed to the 4th position on Google.
This article will continue ranking in the top 10 until more established websites write a similar but longer and more extensive review.
Even though the Robinize review helped generate over 18 leads, I did not make any affiliate commissions. Users, including me, are happy with the Robinize freemium plan.
The Robinize review is one of the 18 reviews I’ve published on my website. Considering I’ve already earned $2720,76 from my website as an affiliate, this strategy has potential.
It’s also worth mentioning that one article generated almost all affiliate revenue — Beehiiv review.
CR: visitor to lead is 8.8%
CR: lead to a paid client is 10.12%
Making almost $2.8k as an affiliate commission from a growing website is an achievement.
That’s roughly $150 ROI per every software review I’ve published on my website.
I don’t promote my software reviews in any way. Nevertheless, most rank in the top 10 search results, generating organic traffic.
I regularly update top-performing articles, such as Beehiiv review, to maintain high rankings.
Content update is an underrated SEO strategy that always works.
I talk more about my experience with the content update in this article:
In conclusion
Affiliate income is only one of the ways I use to monetize my website. Based on my experience, it takes time to scale affiliate income. You’ll likely earn pennies at the very beginning.
You can make more from affiliate partnerships by creating more software reviews or improving the rankings of the existing pages. Both tasks are not easy to achieve. However, if you are dedicated to making it work and ready to create a lot of optimized content, you’ll likely succeed.
Besides affiliate partner programs, I sell my SEO writing ebook, offer my SEO services, monetize via Sparkloop, and run Google ads.
In a nutshell, the website makes four figures a month from all income generation sources.
Compared to other personal websites, my website has roughly 6k monthly traffic, which is not much. Nevertheless, I turned it into one more income generation source. You can achieve similar and even better results if you run a niche or a personal website.
I hope this article was helpful.
If you have any questions about on-page or tech SEO, don’t hesitate to ask me.
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