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When it comes to making money online affiliate marketing is one of the best methods out there. The industry generates over £3 billion worth of sales in the UK alone each year. As it’s a topic that we haven’t previously covered here at PiggyBankPie we approached Max, a student who owns a number of profitable affiliate websites along with the Affiliate Student Blog, for an interview and fortunately he accepted the invite:

Can you tell us a little about yourself, how long you’ve been involved in affiliate marketing, and some of the main websites that you run?

I’m Max, I’m 19 and currently go to Manchester University where I’ve just finished my first year studying International Business, Finance and Economics. I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing for around 2 years. Some of my sites are www.OnlineWineOffers.co.uk, www.DiscountHotels.org.uk and www.GoVoucherCodes.co.uk. I don’t ever say my main sites so these are some of the smaller ones.

Are any sectors particularly hot right now, and any which are to be avoided?

I think you have to think about what’s happening right now, bills going up, petrol up etc and so looking into areas around that would be good.

When setting out to start an affiliate site how do you go about it? Do you look for a sector with low competition and then assess the affiliate programmes which are available, or do you look for attractive affiliate programmes and then evaluate the competitiveness of the niche?

You can do either to be honest. I do a bit of both, will see a program or product and then research it, see if it’s worth having a go in that area.

Do you place a high emphasis on both PPC and SEO and which one do you prefer?

Obviously SEO is best as it’s free traffic and I currently do about 75% SEO to 25% PPC. But PPC can be very profitable and so both really have to have an emphasis on them for different reasons.

Link building for affiliate sites can be difficult. How do you go about attracting links to a new affiliate site?

I find this hard, I often ask around other affiliates and see if they want to swap links, or give me a link which can be quite good. Also just writing good content or having something that means other sites will link to you is always a brilliant method of getting lots of links. I did a blog post on some funny exam answers, which can be seen here, a few days later it gets stumbled upon, and so many links to it from other sites, thus my site still gets around 200 uniques a day just looking at that page.

How well do you feel blogs lend themselves towards promoting affiliate programmes? Do you feel that it can result in the credibility of the blogger being questioned if they’re discussing a product which they’ll earn a commission on?

If the blog is to an affiliate based audience then they will know that you’ll be earning money so you have to be careful, if its a general blog then they won’t realise you make money from it. The credibility of the blogger is down to how it’s written, if I write a blog post about something irrelevant or not great just to make money then it won’t look good on me.

Social media marketing is considered especially effective at generating large numbers of visitors but conversion rates are very low. With this in mind do you place much emphasis on social media when promoting your affiliate sites?

Well saying this I’ve just started trying facebook ads out, so far it’s not converting too well. But I think it’s potential is huge!

Generally do you build affiliate sites for the long term or are there still short term profits to be made, perhaps through using PPC?

Various. Some I build purely for PPC, others purely for SEO and longer term. Depends on the domains I have, the area, the competition etc.

Finally, for those starting out with affiliate marketing do you have any advice? Particularly any top tips to help you go from owning “just another affiliate site” to a business in its own right?

Start small, start with a niche and build from that. Don’t go for the big markets straight away like finance, gambling etc. You won’t succeed unless you have people working for you, or you have massive budgets and the know how yourself. Something you may think is small and doesn’t pay well can make you a lot. Imagine a small site that only gets say 50 uniques a day, imagine its a product that converts well so say 20 buy the product, small commission of say £1.50, thats £30 profit a day if its all natural, £900 a month, £10,800 a year! Not bad.

Thanks Max for taking the time out to answer all our questions. Has anyone else tried out affilliate marketing? What’s your experience been like?

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