From mediocre middle class to six-figure SEO affiliate marketer

[Greg Jeffries]

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to introduce myself to the community.

I'm a big fan of The Millionaire Fastlane . I kind of consider it to be The 4-Hour Workweek version 2.0

But a little about myself...

I grew up middle class

The only real advantage I had starting out in the real world is that I somehow escaped college with zero debt, which was a HUGE blessing

But I've never really excelled in résumé writing, job interviews, etc. despite having tons of skills

I've never worked a job where I've made more than about $22k BEFORE taxes

Yet, somehow, after about 6 years of half a$$ side hustling I've managed to evolve into now making over six figures a year (and most of that comes from affiliate SEO - I know, pretty ridiculous)

And I've built that up over the years, funding my online education, with loans and credit cards

So, hopefully this is encouraging to others trying to "make it" because honestly if I can get to where I'm at in my situation, I believe anyone in this world can achieve success.

Happy to be apart of this community.

I know SEO (search engine optimization) can be an overwhelming game with a lot of shady services out there, so if SEO is something you have questions about or if you're interested in getting into affiliate SEO, feel free to reach out and send me a PM.

 

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[Zimbizee]

Congrats on your success.

I really struggled with affiliate seo a few years ago having jumped on the Amazon affiliate bandwagon back in 2012. Read loads, bought some courses and then took massive action. Built my first site(stunt scooters) and promoted the crap out of it. Did all the recommended stuff seo wise and then started to scale with more sites and a few ad-sense ones as well. i ended up grinding 10-12 hours a day writing product reviews, articles, guest posting etc for backlinking. I made a few bucks but the return versus the effort was dismal.

Then i like many others in the game at that time got destroyed ranking wise virtually overnight by googles panda updates. Knuckled down and recovered only for the penguin update to come out as well. Google was clamping down hard and also competition from other affiliates was getting intense. Eg, if you typed in best pressure cooker the first couple of pages would all be affiliate review sites.

In the end i just couldn't make it work, yet i knew dozens of others were having great success and even now many are making a great living from it.

Any advice you could pass on with regards to affiliate seo would be greatly received as it's an area i would like to revisit but understand that many many changes have occurred in the affiliate world since i left.

Cheers

 

[TonyStark]

Austin, Texas! Let's grab some beers?

 

[Greg Jeffries]

Congrats on your success.

I really struggled with affiliate seo a few years ago having jumped on the Amazon affiliate bandwagon back in 2012. Read loads, bought some courses and then took massive action. Built my first site(stunt scooters) and promoted the crap out of it. Did all the recommended stuff seo wise and then started to scale with more sites and a few ad-sense ones as well. i ended up grinding 10-12 hours a day writing product reviews, articles, guest posting etc for backlinking. I made a few bucks but the return versus the effort was dismal.

Then i like many others in the game at that time got destroyed ranking wise virtually overnight by googles panda updates. Knuckled down and recovered only for the penguin update to come out as well. Google was clamping down hard and also competition from other affiliates was getting intense. Eg, if you typed in best pressure cooker the first couple of pages would all be affiliate review sites.

In the end i just couldn't make it work, yet i knew dozens of others were having great success and even now many are making a great living from it.

Any advice you could pass on with regards to affiliate seo would be greatly received as it's an area i would like to revisit but understand that many many changes have occurred in the affiliate world since i left.

Cheers

Well, I'm not really sure what you were doing to rank your sites back then, but honestly SEO really hasn't changed much over the years.

It really just comes down to

A) Having really good, relevant content to the keyword(s) that you're trying to rank for (on page optimization)
B) And having the most amount of high authority, ideally relevant authority backlinks pointed at your site for the keywords you're wanting to rank for (this can be achieved with expired domains - basically the same concept as guest blog links back in the day, except if you buy your own expired domains with authority and build your own PBN (private blog network) YOU control the links, unlike guest blogging)

 

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[SirPsychoSexy]

Welcome, glad to see a successful entrepreneur like you as a forum sponsor! How do you see the future of PBN with Google looking to personalize search results and revamping their algorithm? Could be a risky investment, no?

 

[marfling]

I have a few private blogs built up from authority domains purchased from businesses that went bust. They're on different servers and as separate as I can get them, content good, but I still wouldn't use them on clients sites. Ever. Like you said, personally I think the risk is too high.

However I do use them on my own affiliate sites and they do work well. They're definitely an asset if you spend the time on them.

OP - congrats on the success! Has your traffic from Organic search been steady over the years? Have you had to evolve to stay ahead?

 

[Greg Jeffries]

Welcome, glad to see a successful entrepreneur like you as a forum sponsor! How do you see the future of PBN with Google looking to personalize search results and revamping their algorithm? Could be a risky investment, no?

Not sure. I don't keep up with the "algorithm changes"

SEO honestly hasn't changed much since the beginning of the Internet.

From what I know, when Google "changes their algorithm" all they're doing is temporarily giving more weight to what they're choosing to rank a site for.

But the fundamentals of SEO have really never changed. If they did, they'd have to re-write the whole Internet (which is basically HTML), and I'm pretty sure they're not going to do that

 

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[Greg Jeffries]

I have a few private blogs built up from authority domains purchased from businesses that went bust. They're on different servers and as separate as I can get them, content good, but I still wouldn't use them on clients sites. Ever. Like you said, personally I think the risk is too high.

However I do use them on my own affiliate sites and they do work well. They're definitely an asset if you spend the time on them.

OP - congrats on the success! Has your traffic from Organic search been steady over the years? Have you had to evolve to stay ahead?

Evolve...kind of

The more success you have, the better you need to get at diversifying and pivoting quickly.

Because obviously things will eventually go wrong, which sucks. But it happens to everybody.

So, having many multiple income streams, and several different sites in various niches certainly helps when something sucky happens like: affiliate networks deciding not to pay you, or Google slapping one of your sites or YouTube channels, etc.

 

[stefan]

Hey man. Welcome!

What are your thoughts on doing everything yourself as an affiliate in the SEO space vs. building a team/delegating?

I'm at a point where I'm just starting to gain some decent traction with a couple of affiliate-style sites, but I know that doing everything myself isn't really sustainable in the long run.

Thanks again.

 

[Greg Jeffries]

Hey man. Welcome!

What are your thoughts on doing everything yourself as an affiliate in the SEO space vs. building a team/delegating?

I'm at a point where I'm just starting to gain some decent traction with a couple of affiliate-style sites, but I know that doing everything myself isn't really sustainable in the long run.

Thanks again.

I personally like having some control over things like the niches and keywords, but honestly 90% of the stuff can be outsourced.

The biggest time suck is getting articles written, so you could outsource those, but unfortunately for super specialized information, it's probably going to be pretty challenging to find a decent writer.

But, there's plenty of other more generic niches.

PM me and I'll give you some resources that might help you scale.

 

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[redmillionaire]

What's your recommended ideal article length for a blog in the fashion and related industries? My thinking here is that content length would be a significant factor for on-page SEO.