Hey Elle!

As far as how long did it take? Quite a while — we were super stubborn and tried to produce content we liked vs. asking our readers what they liked. We did that for the better part of 18 months without making much income because we failed to adapt. Around the 18 month mark or so, we began to realize that general personal finance topics meshed better with our audience than did ultra-specific stock market advice and that’s where things took off.

Look at competitors, find out the types of content that are working in front of their audiences and that will give you a good idea of what your readership might like (or, alternatively, you can always poll/survey/email them as simply ask!).

Lastly, as far as hiring goes, we haven’t done too terribly much outside of our dozen or so contractors — we are still working through some of the complexities of hiring remote full-time workers. Our first planned hires were more editors/copywriters, a few developers, and probably a full-time affiliate liaison/affiliate manager.

Hope that helps!

To get there I am sure you must know your audience well! How long did it take you to finally go- ah ok, I know what these readers need and I am going to place xyz there? Affiliate marketing seems very strategic too and tricky. I see many people just use ads for revenue- and then it just boils down to traffic only and not always providing a need.

I struggle quite a bit with Affiliate marketing and look forward to the day when I feel I can understand my readers needs well enough to be able to make 6 figures in 1 month! Super impressive!

Ok, one last question- when you started hiring, who did you actually hire first (besides freelance writers)?

Thanks again for the inspiration!

Last month I started using Asana to organize my editorial calendar as well. I like it a lot. It makes it so easy to see at a glance what I need to be working on or to move things around if I need to.

Hey Victoria,

So affiliate marketing is obviously pretty tricky from a tracking perspective. You typically promote a company through a network, or directly, usually with a tracking link from the company itself.

In either instance, you’re wholly dependent on third party data. You earn whatever they said you earn. There are very few ways to confirm the data/whether you’re being paid out correctly (and companies have varying levels of transparency when it comes to tracking issues).

Some large(r) brands use first party tracking systems and a two-way API (typically a piece of software), where they’ll will essentially act as the affiliate network…they then pass their data on to the companies for comparison/consolidation. Hypothetically it helps reduce tracking discrepancies, and gives you (the brand), way more insight/data into how affiliate transactions are occurring.

On Categories: yes yes yes! I have been working on improving the Category pages of my blogs, too. So many bloggers just throw their category links in their header menu and call it a day. Not user friendly at all.

I did have one question: What is a 1st party affiliate link management system? If not in the comments, would love to learn more in the next report!

Victoria

Thanks Meredith! We’re hoping 2019 is going to be an awesome year.

That wholly depends on your experience with ad purchasing (and how well your content is optimized).

To get an idea of whether or not you can utilize paid traffic as a profitable funnel, you’ll need to understand/know how much a visitor is worth to a specific page.
If you can create an ad campaign that drives target cheaper than your revenue/visitor, it’ll be a profitable funnel.

For us, Facebook remains the cheapest ad platform to advertise on. A combination of their retargeting features (pixel) and audience building allows us to drive traffic at or near our average revenue/visitor (which then allows us to recoup our ad spend each month which we’re aiming to aggressively scale in the coming months).