﻿These are examples of some of my favorite affiliate marketing sites.
They all get tons of traffic and I'm guessing they all generate millions of dollars in revenue.
Let's take a deeper look at these affiliate sites and some key things they do well starting with
the first site which is CamelCamelCamel.
CamelCamelCamel isn't your typical content affiliate site.
They're a data company that provides free tools and information on Amazon
product prices.
Here's how their site works.
Just search for any product as you would in Amazon.
Click on a product you want to research, and you'll see historical pricing data.
Now, if you're not in a rush to buy, you can set price alerts to get notified when
a product drops to a certain price point.
Now, according to Ahrefs Site Explorer the website gets an estimated 1.4 million monthly organic visits,
with peak season consistently being in November – probably due to Black Friday.
Now, despite the fact that they have kind of an outdated design with arguably a disruptive
number of ads, I think their affiliate site is pretty awesome for 4 main reasons.
#1. Their content is data and data collection is most likely automated
through their own crawler or API access.
#2. People who use their site are probably close to making a purchase because they're price shopping.
And this should lead to higher conversion rates.
#3. They don't really have that many real competitors.
And I think a big reason for this is because there's no easy way to get historical Amazon
pricing for all of Amazon's products.
And seeing as CamelCamelCamel was one of the if not the first to market, they
probably have the most and best data when it comes to Amazon price tracking.
And #4, which I believe is the main thing that separates them from 99% of other affiliate sites
is that they provide a very valuable and free service to a huge addressable and wealthy
market – Amazon shoppers from the US, UK, Spain, Italy, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and Japan.
Alright the next affiliate site is Hey Grill, Hey.
This is a niche content affiliate site about BBQ and grilling.
They have tons of product reviews, recipes and they even have their own line of products
that they sell in their ecommerce store.
And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, this website gets around 1.3 milion
monthly organic visits.
Now, despite the fact that they have over 3,000 affiliate links throughout their site
and only around 900 indexed pages, I absolutely love that their site doesn't
really feel like an affiliate site.
And there's two reasons for that.
The first reason is because they've beautifully diversified their revenue sources.
And I want to expand on the importance of this a bit, especially for affiliate site owners,
so stay with me here.
When you become an affiliate, the fine print will almost always say that the company reserves
the right to terminate the program or change rates at their discretion.
And it does happen.
In fact, Amazon, the world's largest affiliate program, slashed their affiliate commission
rates quite substantially back in 2020.
So rather than leaving the fate of your business in the hands of one or many companies so-called
"discretion", it's worth diversifying into other monetization methods like ads and products
you own whether they're digital or physical.
And that's what HeyGrillHey has done.
For example, in this recipe post, they have affiliate links sprinkled throughout their post
when it makes sense – like one to this instant read thermometer.
They have ads from Mediavine and Adsense on the same page.
They recommend joining their private membership program called "The Grill Squad",
which costs $50 to $150/year.
And at the bottom of their recipes, they have links to BBQ must haves which are
products in their ecommerce store.
Now, despite the fact that they've monetized a recipes post in 4 different ways, you might
think it'd feel like they're overselling.
But the quality of their content and the very organic mentions of their products were actually
more helpful than harmful in my opinion at least.
And I think that's because the quality of their content is so good that trust
is built with their readers.
I mean, they have really well produced videos for a ton of their recipes.
They've done hands-on reviews for tons of different grills – and these aren't cheap.
They take high-quality photos for just about every post they create.
And they talk about things that BBQ enthusiasts would care about.
Hey Grill Hey, in my opinion, is a solid example of the 5-step monetization model I recommend
in our tutorial on how to make money blogging.
I highly recommend watching that video if you want to increase your blog revenue
while hedging against over exposure.
Alright, the next affiliate site example is perhaps one of my favorite websites
and that's Slickdeals.
Slickdeals is a forum where people share about hot deals they've found on pretty
much any product.
Now, the super unique thing about this site compared to the first two affiliate sites
is that all content and affiliate links are user generated.
For example, someone noticed that the Amazon Echo 4th gen is 50% off
so they shared it in the hot deals forum.
Now, if I hover over the "see deal" link, you'll see that it points to an internal redirect.
And if we follow those redirects, you'll see that it includes Slickdeal's affiliate tag.
Now, according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, Slickdeals gets an estimated 3.8 million
monthly organic visits.
And if we head on over to the Site Structure report, you'll see that the traffic is split between
their coupons subdomain and their main site, which is mostly the forum threads.
Now, the reason why I love this non-traditional affiliate site is because they've streamlined
the hardest parts of running an affiliate site – creating content and getting traffic to it.
As I mentioned before, their content creation is user-generated which pretty much makes
their content automated.
Cool beans.
Now, the other part of their content comes from staff contributions.
For example, these board shorts were marked down 77% and the staff writer
includes a nice summary of the deal and of course, the affiliate link is
automatically generated.
Now, in my opinion, the main reason for Slickdeal's success isn't just because
of the deals.
It's the fact that they've created a community of shoppers that come together to share
a common interest - saving money.
And some of the conversations are really telling about how much this community
loves getting a good deal.
For example, this chest freezer goes on sale for $500.
The forum thread gets over 150 comments including this one from someone who says:
"Bought on impulse - is this a good deal?"
I mean, who buys a massive 112-pound freezer for $500 on impulse?
To which another community member provides a helpful comment with no judgment passed.
In my opinion, it's pretty cool how these kinds of conversations happen completely organically.
And this is probably why around a million or so people search for the slickdeals brand
name or variations of the brand name every month in the US alone.
A strong community leads to consistent traffic and in Slickdeal's case, consistent
affiliate commissions.
Alright, the next affiliate site example is a content site called Garage Gym Reviews.
Now, on the surface, this site doesn't have a particularly fancy design, no fancy
copywriting, and no fancy affiliate boxes.
But this affiliate site gets around 750,000 monthly organic visits according to Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Now, I love that this site actually does hands-on reviews of various fitness products.
And the most impressive part to me is that they do them for some really tough products
like squat racks.
They're not exactly cheap and you need a lot of space to test and review them.
Now, there are plenty of affiliate sites that actually do hands-on-reviews of products.
But what drew me to this site the most was how quickly they scaled traffic, links, and content
considering the amount of time it would take to actually build out their content assets.
This led me to a rabbit hole in Ahrefs Site Explorer.
And long story short, I noticed that they have around 2,600 pages in their
equipment subfolder which accounts for over 10% of their total search traffic.
So I visited one of their equipment category pages and assumed they have had a decent
sized ecommerce store because it looks like one, right?
Well, it's not.
If we click on one of the product pages, you'll see they've mimicked the styles and
content of an ecommerce product page.
But if you click on this button which would typically be an "Add to cart" button, it'll send
you over to the affiliate merchant's site.
Now, the reason why I think this works is because their fake product pages match
searcher intent for some transactional and navigational queries.
For example, if you search for "stall mats tractor supply," you'll see that the top results
are category and product pages from Tractor Supply.
This page for example shows details, specs, and reviews about the product.
Now, if we go back to the SERP, you'll see that GarageGymReviews' page is ranking high too.
Click the page and you'll see product highlights, a hands-on video demo,
product details, specs, and reviews.
Now, the cool thing about this is that a typical content affiliate site would have a hard time
ranking for so many transactional and navigational queries.
But they've kind of slipped their way into a lot of these SERPs which I'm sure contributes to
their revenue.
So as you can see, there are tons of creative ways to differentiate your affiliate site so you
can stand out from the rest of the crowd.
And I'm gonna leave you with three tips:
#1. As cliche as it may sound, always focus on providing a ton of value.
That can be in the form of data like CamleCamelCamel, community like
Slick Deals, or hands-on-reviews like our content site examples.
#2. Building a community helps to build your brand.
And by increasing brand searches, you're going to continue to drive consistent traffic to your site.
And #3. Get creative and consider going after queries that other affiliate competitors
may not be competing for.
In the case of MyGarageGymReviews, that was transactional and navigational
ecommerce queries.
So please please please… stop making sh***y affiliate sites.