Affiliate Site Case Study – Month 5 Update

We’re quite pleased with the progress we have made in the first 4 months of our Survival Front journey (October 2019 – January 2020).

We invested a huge amount in this initial period, as we always suspected we would move the needle a lot quicker if we did – which is exactly what happened.

Over this initial period, we had one of our team working on Survival Front pretty much full-time.

So, as you can see, there was a lot of time and money invested into this site and a hell of a lot riding on its growth.

Luckily, it paid off and our average month-on-month growth in earnings over this period was a whopping 210.83%.

We produced a ton of content – an estimated 406,000 words, to be precise.

And acquired a respectable number of links – a total of 51 referring domains.

We also produced a brand new, hand-coded affiliate site theme from scratch and significantly improved speed and performance, plus reduced our reliance on third-party plugins.

And, we earned a grand total of…wait for it…

$54.06!

At the 4-month point (January 2020), we estimated that Survival Front was worth between $833.56 and $1,025.92, based on a multiple of 26x – 32x its monthly revenue.

All in all, a pretty decent start, if I do say so myself…

Remember I said we had remained ‘in the green’?

Well, what I meant by that was that we’ve seen our keywords increasing more than decreasing, and upwards movements are green – hence the term…

On desktop we had 33.33% more keywords increase in position than decrease.

On mobile, the difference was even greater with 45.36% more keywords moving up than down.

Not too shabby.

As I said in the introduction to this chapter, we finally have pages ranking in positions 1-3 in Google’s SERPs.

However small this achievement may seem, it’s a milestone nonetheless, and indicates to us that we’re doing something right in ‘Google’s eyes’.

So far, we have the following number of keywords in positions 1-3:

• Desktop: 2 keywords
• Mobile: 6 keywords

Desktop Keywords (Positions 1-3)

1. Keyword: folding survival knives
   • Position: 1
   • Volume: 10
   • Traffic: <1
   • Location: UK
2. Keyword: best survival poncho
   • Position: 3
   • Volume: 100
   • Traffic: 12
   • Location: US

Mobile Keywords (Positions 1-3)

1. Keyword: survival poncho
   • Position: 2
   • Volume: 250
   • Traffic: 41
   • Location: US
2. Keyword: survival ponchos
   • Position: 3
   • Volume: 10
   • Traffic: 1
   • Location: UK
3. Keyword: scaxe3
   • Position: 3
   • Volume: 20
   • Traffic: 2
   • Location: US
4. Keyword: best survival poncho
   • Position: 3
   • Volume: 100
   • Traffic: 12
   • Location: US
5. Keyword: survival poncho
   • Position: 3
   • Volume: 30
   • Traffic: 3
   • Location: UK
6. Keyword: friendly swede fire starter
   • Position: 3
   • Volume: 30
   • Traffic: 4
   • Location: US

Don’t worry – I won’t list every single keyword we rank for as these updates progress (as I hope there will be a hell of a lot more).

I just think that our first few are worth a special mention.

Another key milestone achieved.

Check out our full ranking movements below…

All in all, as far as rankings go, a very positive month this month.

We’re still seeing green across the board in the majority of ranking groups and our priority going forward is maintaining this trend.

Let’s wait and see what the coming months have in store, but if the previous are anything to go by, we’re in for one hell of a ride.

Overall, traffic this month dropped by a huge 41.32% compared to January.

This month (February) we had 1,024 total visitors to Survival Front, whereas, in January, we had 1,745.

But this data is extremely unreliable as a growth metric.

Even if you discount the fact that January had a couple more days than February, there’s another, even bigger factor at play here.

Niche Affiliate Empires.

We’ve spoken about this before, but the group is massively skewing our data figures when it comes to total traffic, as significant numbers of people are visiting the site from the Facebook group.

In fact, we drove a total of 598 users from social in January, compared to just 70 this month – a decrease of 88.29%.

The truth is, there’s not much we can do about this.

We’re aware of it and, as we’re focusing predominantly on organic search traffic, we’re not too fussed either.

In fact, every acquisition channel on Google Analytics (excluding organic) dropped in February compared to the previous month.

Take a look for yourself…

Clearly, though, there is a positive to take away from the data shown above.

Organic traffic increased once again – this time by a cool 20.11%.

While 663 organic users doesn’t seem like a big deal, we have to remember that this is only month 5 of the project, using a new domain.

It’s all baby steps, but we’re pretty damn happy with what we’ve achieved this month.

In fact, if we breakdown organic search even further, we see that users, new users, and sessions were all up on the previous month.

You’ve probably heard me bang on about the ‘tipping point’ on a number of occasions now – I’ve discussed it in a number of the previous updates.

But for the readers who may not have seen the previous blog posts, let me briefly recap.

A large part of our strategy in building and rapidly growing niche affiliate websites is our ability to plough significant investment into them initially, while seeing ‘limited’ growth, prior to hitting a ‘tipping point’ and reaping the rewards thereafter.

We generally hit it hard for the first few months, prior to pulling way back on our resources, and reassessing where we are.

This site is no different.

From October 2019 to January 2020, we invested significant resource (time and money) into Survival Front.

Spoiler Alert: From this month onwards, we plan to scale down our operations quite significantly, wait for the ‘dust to settle’, and see where we’re at, prior to re-focusing and re-investing.

Up to this point (February 2020), we’ve seen positive, consistent growth, but nothing on the level we expect to see in the months ahead.

Personally, I think at some point over the next 2-3 months, we’ll see growth trends upwards of 100-200% month-on-month (or maybe more), while Google ‘catches up’ with the work we’ve put in to date, prior to it slowing way down.

In essence, we’ll have hit our tipping point and growth will become exponential.

And, when the slow-down does occur, we’ll know it’s time to re-invest once more.

This month, we had a total of 48 ordered items, 1 returned item, and our conversion was 9.66%.

We also drove over $1,100 in revenue – you’re welcome Amazon…

The best part?

We smashed our previous month’s earnings out of the water!

Get ready for it.

Another ‘sales guru’ headline…

“Double your earnings in just 30 days!”

And that’s exactly what we did.

Well, almost.

Earnings in February increased by a whopping 96.66% on the previous month, culminating in us earning a cool $63.05, compared to $32.06 in January.

Again, while these aren’t huge figures in and of themselves, the growth trajectory is pretty awesome to see.

There’s no denying that we still have a long way to go if we want to hit our end goal of $100k monthly recurring revenue across our entire affiliate site portfolio, but we will get there!

And it’s my guess that Survival Front will be instrumental in us achieving that goal.

And, here’s the thing…

There is literally no other case study out there that goes into as much depth and detail in how to go about building and growing an authority site as this one does; and certainly not to the degree of following the site, month-on-month, as it grows to the point of earning tens of thousands of dollars per month.

You have front row seats!

So don’t miss a trick and make sure you’re signed up to the Niche Affiliate Empires newsletter if you want to get early access to all of our strategies, processes, and inside knowledge.

Link building.

It’s a tough one…

No, really.

It’s often rated one of the toughest parts of the entire SEO process.

It’s time-consuming, costly, and downright boring.

But acquiring high-quality, highly relevant backlinks is essential for anyone who is serious about competing in the niche affiliate website space.

Sure, there are the low-hanging fruit (low competition) keywords that you can target initially, but if your niche is even semi-competitive or you’re looking to start competing with the ‘big boys’ in your industry, a strong, natural-looking backlink profile is a must!

We started off relatively slowly with link building, as we focused on ‘fleshing out’ Survival Front and ensuring that it had tons of high-quality content.

But, since, we’ve slowly started to ramp this up.

In fact, we acquired 26.31% more links in February, compared to the previous month.

This isn’t a major victory for us, as we try to focus on relevance and quality, over quantity.

Nonetheless, it’s always nice to see that upward growth trend.

So far, in the 5 months since Survival Front’s inception, we’ve acquired a total of 75 referring domains.

Again, not bad going considering the amount of content we’ve produced, as well as all of the other work we’ve put in to date, such as theme updates, etc.

While we’re going to continue building links and promoting our content assets going forward, we’re always conscious of the fact that too much growth, too quickly, doesn’t just bring reward, but may also bring risk.

We often ponder on whether we’re too risk-averse in our approach to link building, but, as we’re all about building long-term, sustainable digital assets (brands), we’d rather be overly cautious than overzealous any day.

Here’s the truth…

We’re not going to overtake the ‘big players’ in the survival niche any time soon when it comes to referring domains, so our plan is to build steadily and minimize the risk.

FYI, here are our current top 10 competitors as determined by Ahrefs:

1. Secrets of Survival – 874 referring domains
2. Survival Fortress – 545 referring domains
3. Best Survival – 229 referring domains
4. Bug Out Bag Academy – 245 referring domains
5. Primal Survivor – 926 referring domains
6. Survival Skills – 88 referring domains
7. The Bugout Bag Guide – 546 referring domains
8. Uncharted Supply Co – 544 referring domains
9. Geek Prepper – 518 referring domains
10. Outdoorsman Toolkit – 47 referring domains

Before I go into too much detail about what we intend to do going forward, let’s first take a look at what we won’t be doing:

Mass Content Production

While we may produce content over the coming months, this will be infrequent and nothing like on the scale you’ve witnessed so far.

We’re constantly researching and analysing Survival Front’s progress and competitors, and as such, we intend to produce content when we deem it will have a significant impact on our results going forward.

Content production – be it roundup reviews, single product reviews, or info posts – will be even more targetted going forward.

We will, of course, update you on any future content, however, this will be pretty sporadic, at least for the immediate future.

Social Promotion

Whether it be Quora, Facebook, or any other social platform, we’re going to be dedicating pretty much zero resources to it going forward.

At this stage of our journey, we believe that the highest ROI will come from focusing on organic search and, in particular, growing our authority.

Therefore, social is at the bottom of our priority list at the minute.

We’ll revisit this in the future no doubt, as our brand becomes more established, but for now, there’s just so many other areas that our time and effort would be better invested.

Development and Theme Updates

There are many improvements we want to see incorporated into our custom affiliate site theme, such as; ads integration, changes in the way our single product reviews function, eCommerce integration to allow for easy adoption of the dropshipping model, and much, much more.

We also intend to further develop the theme to allow for licensed access.

However, we also need to be realistic with our time management and development capacity.

These improvements are coming, but they likely won’t be rolled out until around June 2020.

In addition, public use of the theme on a licensed basis won’t come until further down the line – if you want access to it before then, the only way is via our done-for-you affiliate site service.

So, although we’d like to further improve our theme right at this minute, unfortunately, it’s just not realistic with Survival Front (and other internal site) growth, the development of our brand new automated link building SaaS tool, and client work (which always takes priority).

Our Affiliate Site Growth Strategy Going Forward…

In one word; links.

While we’re continuously running CRO tests to improve conversion rates and optimizing for on-page, our focus going forward will remain on link building.

Again, we’re not going to kick the arse out of it, but we’re looking at maintaining our current pace.

What does that look like in practical terms?

Well, around 15-20 links per month.

This phase of the project is all about maintaining an element of growth, while reducing project resources, in order to recoup some of our investment to date.

And a steady trickle of high-quality, topically-relevant links should do just that.

As with anything we do, we’ll keep our input and output under continuous review and will, of course, make adjustments where required.

If that means dialling it down a little further in the short-term, then that’s what we’ll do.

Similarly, if we feel that we need to ‘up the ante’ and increase the number of links we’re building each month, then we’ll not hesitate to do this.