Passively Making Over $8,000 in 3 Months

Doing This One Thing

That thing is affiliate marketing and these are my commissions from one affiliate program, $8,400.

This is how I discovered it and plans for growing my affiliate marketing income in the future.

Discovering Medium affiliate marketing

I was no stranger to affiliate marketing and I’ve known about using Medium for affiliate marketing for a while.

I had made thousands with affiliate marketing before really diving into Medium affiliate marketing 3 months ago.

But, before Medium, I wouldn’t have considered myself successful.

I did affiliate marketing with my personal blogs mostly.

The problem with that is, you have to know SEO well to be successful, in my opinion. And, having a high domain authority (DA) website will definitely be to your benefit, as well.

Those were two strikes against me.

Since most of my websites were brand new starter sites (I create sites to sell and for myself all throughout the year) and since they were new and I wasn’t an SEO master, they had low domain authority.

Here’s how SEO ties into all this…

How SEO plays a part in affiliate marketing

SEO is what drives traffic to your content. It stands for search engine optimization.

Basically, there are things you can do to get your content to rank in search engines. That’s SEO.

Imagine a search term like “extra small fishing overalls” getting around 100,000 monthly Google searches.

If your article ranks on the first page for that search term, you can get a chunk of that search traffic. And if that article is monetized with affiliate marketing, you can potentially make money.

SEO can help you land on page one of search results for the keyword you’re writing for.

Some examples of things you can do to improve SEO include:

• Getting backlinks to your content from other websites
• Internally linking your content to other pieces of your content
• Using keywords in your article

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

SEO can be really serious business. There are SEO experts making a very lucrative living helping brands and websites improve their SEO.

I was failing big time because I just didn’t know SEO well.

And, I hadn’t really seen great results with what I was doing.

Then, my site had a low domain authority, which doesn’t help.

Here’s an interesting thing about all this…

You can rank your content without SEO and you can rank your content with a low domain authority (DA).

How?

I read a case study from a writer who was doing this by writing really long-form content around a keyword and providing a lot of value. I haven’t tried this myself but apparently, it can be done.

So, there’s different ways to slice the pie with the majority of people (I think) going the SEO route.

Anyway, Medium is a cool way to shortcut all this.

First, you don’t necessarily need SEO to succeed.

Medium is a huge publisher. If you write a story that’s a hit, you can attract tons of viewers from being featured in publications to getting curated and more. Those readers could potentially click your affiliate links, buy, and earn you a commission.

And then, Medium is a place where you can build an audience so when you publish, your followers can see your content, and they might click and buy, earning you a commission.

Medium is a high domain authority (DA) website, too.

So, you don’t have to work to get backlinks, guest post, and other strategies people take to increase their DA since you will be publishing on a platform, Medium, that has already done that.

So, what’s left?

Writing affiliate marketing content.

Here’s how I did it…

Creating affiliate marketing content that sells

How I do it…

1. Find an affiliate program
2. Write content
3. Track results

Step 1: Find an affiliate program and apply

I like high-ticket affiliate programs.

I used to refer affiliates (I still do have those links floating around on my sites) that pay $2 or $5 each. You need a lot of volume to make good money from those.

I’ve switched to high ticket offers that pay $20 to $500 each.

Compare referring 20 sales a month at $5 each ($100) to 20 sales a month at $100 each ($2,000)!

So, you put out the same amount of effort writing your content but you’re referring a $100 affiliate commission product instead of a $5 affiliate commission product.

To find affiliate programs, I like to target new affiliates, which I find on sites like Angel which shares startups.

The combination of high ticket offers and new programs really helps my content shine in the sea of competitors out there.

Step 2: Write content

I aim for my content to be:

• Long-form (1,500+ words)
• Keyword-rich
• Valuable to the reader

Make your article long. Write around a keyword. I use Ahrefs and SEMRush for this.

I choose a keyword with low competition and craft my article around it.

Then, I make sure the article is value-packed for the reader.

At the end of the day, you’re trying to sell a product but, you don’t need to make your content sound sales-driven. That can drive readers away.

Keep your reader in mind at all times and try to solve their problem. Give them value and write a high quality article.

Step 3: Track results

This is fun, for me at least.

Here’s a look at the one program that has helped me make almost $10K in 3 months…

I check in on my results periodically.

I like to see if I’m keeping a nice pace, if things are slowing down, etc.

This helps me identify when other competitors enter the space and take some of my traffic or my rankings improve.

Bottom line

Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to make money.

This is the national average salary, according to ZipRecruiter:

You’ll love affiliate marketing because you can do it online, once you’ve created your content, you can enjoy earning passively with little to no maintenance and honestly, the sky’s the limit when it comes to income potential.

For more about affiliate marketing, check these out…

Would you pursue Medium affiliate marketing for a passive income stream?

Why or why not?

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