“Don’t monetize with ads,” he said. “Everybody hates ads. Do affiliate marketing instead! Recommend useful products to your audience, and you’ll do just fine.”
The blogger whose advice I was reading ran a very successful blog. It looked super clean. It got hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. And it made multiple five figures every month.
Running a similar, though not as successful website, I thought I might learn a thing or two, but for some reason, I couldn’t wrap my head around the advice. “I tried all this. So why isn’t it working?”
After some reflection, I realized: The guy missed a step in handing out recommendations. He forgot to take off his glasses, and, as a result, it was your typical, one-size-fits-all kind of advice — and for me, despite running a similar business, it already didn’t fit.
As it happens, he mostly covered finance, an industry in which affiliate payouts are extremely high. Finance companies pay a lot of money for referrals because if even just one out of 1,000 leads invests $10,000 into their product or service, that’s still a great deal for them. Meanwhile, in terms of eroding trust, ads might do more damage on a finance website than any other.
My site, on the other hand, offers free book summaries. We get traffic from all over the world, but a lot of people are students, young professionals, and from lower-income countries. For the first four years or so, we did have affiliate links on every page — yet we only made around $200 per month from hundreds of thousands of visitors. At the same time, ever since we introduced them, ads have done great!
If you have a big audience that doesn’t like to spend money, ads allow you to monetize each visitor, even if only few click the ads. Affiliate links only work when you make a sale, and if not enough people are willing to buy, you can plaster as many links on your site as you want — you won’t make a dime.
Most people give advice in two steps:
- “These are the steps I took, and they worked for me.”
- “You should take these same steps.”
This framework glosses over the fact that just one little variable change might render the whole template moot. What these people are missing is a crucial second step. Here’s how we should actually give advice:
- “These are the steps I took, and they worked for me.”
- “This is the situation I was in before I took those steps, and these are some of the reasons why I think those steps worked for me at that time.”
- “If you’re in the same situation I was in and want the same outcome, you should try to take these same steps.”
What works for a finance website will be very different from what works for a book summary blog. What works in 2009 is unlikely to work in 2018. And what works for a white woman in her 30s might not be of use to a Black man of 54.
It’s great to share your wisdom. You’ve worked hard for it, and a lot of us will benefit. Just try to give us the full picture instead of a flattened, 2D-version of your story. It’s not just more fun; it’ll also be more helpful — and, graciously, if affiliate marketing doesn’t work for us, it gives us permission to turn on the ads.