Building a $64,000 Affiliate Business in 7 months using Organic Search

Since April this year we have been working with a client in a competitive vertical in the Australian market where they wanted to set up a new website and brand in a market. The business was already established in several other markets and they had the budget to move into this specific niche. For commercial reasons we can not mention the name of the business or the URL yet we can provide some data in this top level overview.

Step 1 – Domain name selection for the market.

Now the first step was the sit down the with client and work out what the domain name was going to use for the new website. Picking a domain which sounded great and already had some index history was going to be a tricky one. Yet after several days of research we had drawn up a list of target domains we wanted to use. We like to include domain acquisition in processes for some clients who have budget to obtain really great names as a great name can mean on going success for the business.

Step 2 – Development process of the website:

After buying the domain in April we were able to quickly build the new website property on the domain, we picked a custom WordPress set up for the site and were able to work directly with the developers to ensure optimal SEO set up using Yoast and content targeting on the website.

Step 3 – Have a great content and keyword targeting plan:

We included some keyword research into the initial phase of the development as well to ensure that any content been built on site was going to include the correct range of target keywords and category level pages. In addition to this we were also able to do a large amount of competitive research to work out where key competitors were driving traffic to specific landing pages. You do really need to invest some considerable time into analysis of what is working and what is not working in the market.

Step 4 – Launch and “drip feed” link building.

With any new website launch you need to ensure that you do not go too hard to fast with link building. I see so many SEO companies who simply do not test things and are quick to launch a new website into a market and throw up 100-1000’s of links in a very short period of time, they take no regard into quality of links. The graph below shows the development of the link profile over time:

Step 5 – On-going monthly content development and high quality link building:

On a weekly basis we were adding new content to the website, this content was very high quality in nature all posts were over 1,000 words in depth.

In terms of link building we focused on the following key areas –

High quality guest posts: We focused on sites who do not advertise they even offer guest posts.
Aged directory placement: Where they have an editorial process – we focused on sites that take a while to accept content.
Broken link building: Complete deep analysis on competitive link profiles to find fresh opportunities, this strategy is hit or miss for some niches from our experience.
Competitor link acquisition: we reviewed the top 10 competitors in the niche and completed deep analysis to find out what strategies were actually yielding results.
Donation and sponsorship strategy: we targeted sponsorship and donations in the specific niche.
Content Marketing development: we built some great content elements for the client and then used outreach to target placements in the market.
PR: We targeted several high quality Press Releases for the client and worked with media partners to ensure placement in the market.

As you can see we only focused on a small number of high quality links in comparison to focusing on a large number of poor quality links it will yield a far better result for the business.

Step 6 – On-going error tracking and SEO refinement:

With any campaign you need to focus on error tracking and refining your SEO targeting over time, you also need to be doing monthly competitive analysis too see what competitors are up too and you need to ensure you are doing monthly checks on your link profile to ensure competitors are not targeting you with negative SEO. You need to be investigating what competitors are doing and building better content!

Step 7 – Monitor results and continue building the business:

As we can see the business has already generated over $64,000 from organic search (only) since the start of the project. We aim to scale the business even further in coming months as we have not hit the peak of growth for the business in question.

Now in terms of cost for this campaign we had a monthly budget of $3,000 for link building and content marketing work.

Over 7 months the client invested $21,000 into content, SEO, Consulting and other services.

Which left a profit margin of $43,000 for the client (minus costs from other expenses such as development and internal content work) This still left a healthy profit margin for the client which we should be able to grow even further in coming months.

The data below shows the results we have made for the client in question:

Now who said SEO or link building was dead? This is just one small example from many different businesses we are working with currently to gain growth a specific market.

If you are serious about growing your business via Organic Search, SEO, Link Building or anything else feel free to get in touch with our team today on 1300 886 452.