The Obvious Way to Make Up For Declining Affiliate Revenue

Spend to earn

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can just run paid traffic to a landing page with affiliate offers and make money.

I don’t know why affiliates are so obsessed with free traffic. I mean, OK technically I do get it, but at a certain point making money has to be more important than saving money.

Turning on the firehose of paid traffic is one of the most effective ways to increase the amount of affiliate commissions you earn.

You’re probably going to read this and be like “oh wow that sounds like a good idea but I’ll do it later”. Then once you finally stop being afraid to spend you’ll be like “damn I wish I would have done this sooner.”

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Set up a landing page. You can just run traffic directly to a best-of list on your website, but it’s not necessarily the best way to go about it. I recommend setting up a dedicated landing page instead. When you’re paying for traffic you need to make sure it converts. On your actual site you have to worry about on-page SEO, EEAT, internal linking, image optimization, et al. With a landing page you only have to worry about one thing: conversions. Instapage is a landing page builder that I’ve used many times with good results.

2. Send traffic to the landing page. For most affiliate offers Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Facebook are your best bet. I haven’t had much success with X or Reddit. Instagram and TikTok are better for selling an actual e-com product rather than sending traffic to affiliate landing pages in my experience (affiliates do have success with both of these though so YMMV). Microsoft Advertising is a hidden gem. I’ve noticed it gets higher conversions than Google, I’m assuming this is because the user base of the search engines in their network skews older (more likely to click on ads and more money to spend). But of course you should do your own experiments.

3. Tweak everything based on the results you get. Change the ad copy. Change the landing page copy. Change landing page layout. Swap out different affiliate offers. Run A/B tests on everything. You’re paying for this so make sure you’re getting results.

The downside is that you’re going to have to burn through some cash before you figure out what works.

For some reason people are cheap as hell and spend some insignificant sum of money and give up when they don’t get overwhelming instant results.

“Omg this is a waste of money I spent [$x] and didn’t get any sales!!!!111”

It doesn’t work that way. There’s a learning curve for everything.

No one hits a homerun right out of the gate.

Be prepared to burn some cash before you start raking it in.

That’s just how it goes.

SEO-only is a losing strategy

You don’t have to rely 100% on SEO. Doing so was never a good idea but in the post-HCU landscape it’s completely insane.

Even if you’re one of the few who are still pulling in Google traffic, can you honestly say that you’re completely certain you won’t get hit by a future algo update?

You need to diversify as much as you can.

Paid traffic is one way to do that.

Cookies are here to stay

A quick relevant news update:

Google announced years ago that they’re planning to get rid of cookies in Chrome.

They kept pushing the date back over and over again.

Once they started with the delays I became skeptical that it would ever happen. It’s the same as when an individual person says they’re definitely going to do something then next time you see them they’re like “actually I’m going to do that next month”. Plot twist: they never do the thing they said they’re going to do.

Surprise surprise Google just announced that they’re actually going to keep using cookies.

This is a major lesson for why you shouldn’t waste time trying to anticipate what Google is allegedly going to do in the future. Focus your efforts on what works today, then adjust if/when the landscape changes. Affiliates and advertisers have been panicking over the Death of Cookies for years. All that grief was for nothing.