Amazon Affiliate Marketing Research and Results

[blisad]

So i found a survey on Reddit about top successful affiliates owning 6 figure affiliate sites on Amazon and other places and i thought i would share tons of useful info for those going the amazon route.

Affiliate Marketing Survey: Let's get some benchmarked data!
Around October 2017 I floated the idea of a survey of the r/juststart community. The case studies we all read are great for helping compare ourselves, but they don't report the same data points and it's hard to glean anything meaningful from a scattered array of text posts.

So the purpose of this survey: To create some benchmarks!

This survey asks 45 short questions broken down into 8 categories:

Overview/demographics

Content creation stats

Affiliate revenue stats

Ad revenue stats

Expenses

Traffic stats, aggregated

Traffic stats by source

Backlinks

There are no essay/free-form questions. It's all "How many affiliate clicks did you have?" type stuff.

What data does this mean you'll need?

Google Analytics or your traffic tracker of choice

Affiliate program dashboards/reports

Maybe Google Webmaster Tools or Ahrefs/Moz or something for backlinks? You can always approximate, too.

General idea of your expenses

I know that sounds like it'll take forever, but it only took me like 15 minutes. Kill some time while you're at work. You know you're slacking off on Reddit anyway.

A few comments I want to make:

Your data/anonymity is 100% protected.

I will only report stats/correlations in the aggregate (so more responses = better!)

It's only geared towards affiliate marketing (have to start somewhere) with a focus on Amazon.

If you want to submit data for multiple sites, you'll have to complete the survey once for each site.

All questions are optional, but I'd love if you could answer them all.


Results:


After around 45 days of data collection, the results are in!

Overview
We received 37 responses that were almost entirely complete. I was hoping for 50, but 37 is a very healthy number to see some trends.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond! I really appreciate it, and everyone reading this (even those who did not respond) will benefit from your contributions.

A note about anonymity. I did my best to only report results in the aggregate, but if anyone who responded feels uncomfortable with how I summarized things, please message me.

All data was manipulated and visualized in R using RStudio and the ggplot2 package. In case you're curious.

I created 20 charts to summarize the major data points. There's a lot more detail available since this was a 45+ question survey, but it took me around 12 hours to put this together and, well, that's a lot of time. If there's something you're curious about that I didn't explicitly show, just ask in the comments.

I'll try to keep this post short while also giving my $0.02 about the results. I encourage you all to ask questions and have discussions in the comments.

Part 1: Respondent Demographics
Chart 1: Where are survey respondents from?
The 37 respondents came from 7 different countries with the United States being the overwhelming majority (81.0%). We even had one person from Zimbabwe!

Chart 2: What is your high-level niche category?
The 37 respondents represented 11 different niches. These categories were my attempt at rolling things up to a level that was high enough to make people feel comfortable while still being useful. 41.0% of respondents stated their niche was "Outdoors, sports, recreational, pets" so maybe I rolled that one up too much, but I honestly didn't expect 2 of every 5 people to have that one category.

Chart 3: Are you a full-time affiliate marketer?
Only 5 of 37 (14.0%) respondents stated they were full-time affiliate marketers, but almost half (18, 49.0%) stated they were either full-time or trying to be full-time.

Chart 4: How many sites do you operate?
Only 25 of 37 respondents answered this question. The chart breaks down the number of sites operated by whether the respondent was full-time, trying to be full-time, or just doing this on the side. Overall 8 of 25 (32.0%) only operate 1 affiliate website, 17 of 25 (68.0%) operate no more than 3 websites, and the most someone operates is 10. Among the 4 full-time affiliate marketers who responded, the median/mode/average was 3 websites.

Part 2: Affiliate Program Participation
Chart 5: How many affiliate programs do you participate in?
Two people did not answer this question. Of those that did answer, around half (19, 54.3%) report they only participate in one affiliate program. 7 of 35 (20.0%) report they participate in more than 3 affiliate programs. The max was 10.

Chart 6: What percent of your affiliate revenue is from Amazon?
This was an Amazon-centric survey because it's the plurality/majority affiliate program used in this sub. However, as Chart 5 showed, it's not the only affiliate program people use. Only 29 of 37 respondents provided enough information on the affiliate revenue distribution among programs, but 21 of 29 (72.4%) have at least 85% of their affiliate revenue come from Amazon. 3 respondents (10.3%) have none of their affiliate revenue come from Amazon.

Chart 7: How much of your shipped item revenue comes from your target niche?
I also asked users to estimate what percentage of their shipped item revenue comes from their target niche versus from unrelated niches. I only included 15 respondents who reported data and had at least $2,500 in shipped item revenue (my arbitrary cut-off to exclude outliers). The majority of respondents reported between 70%-90% of their referrals coming from within their niche with 80% (33.3% of respondents) being the plurality.

Part 3: Post and Traffic Stats
Chart 8: How many words per post?
Overall the median reported post length was 1,464 words. This was calculated by dividing the reported Total Word Count by the Total Post Count. Since 41.0% of respondents stated their site was in the "Outdoors, recreation, sports, pets" niche, I wanted to break up post lengths for that niche versus all other niches combined. Median word count for the "Outdoors" group was 1,210 while the "non-Outdoors" group was 1,500. Small sample size? Probably. If you need help reading a boxplot, click here.

Chart 9: How much organic traffic per post?
For this chart I plotted Domain Age (Months) vs Organic Traffic (Sessions) to see if there was a trend. Unsurprisingly there is with an R2 of 0.30. If you don't know anything about R2, this is a good link. Basically it means that 30% of the variation in Organic Traffic Per Post is explained by Domain Age (Months). The other 70% is other factors, such as keyword selection, SEO, UX signals, etc. I have no idea if that 0.30 is anywhere near what the actual number should be, but with our small sample of 37 responses, that's what we get. Honestly, I was surprised it was this high.

Chart 10: How much affiliate revenue per money post?
I asked respondents to estimate what percent of their posts were money posts and used that to calculate the amount of affiliate revenue per money post for the month. Note that some info posts do make money with affiliate links and a lot of posts are a hybrid of the two. This isn't going to be perfect. Still, we got another R2 of 0.31 when plotting Domain Age (Months) vs. Affiliate Revenue Per Money Post.

This is a good place to mention that I converted all money numbers to USD. Every respondent provided the currency they were using with the exception of the first 3 respondents (I hadn't added the question then). However, the first 3 respondents were all from the US.

Chart 11: What is the relationship between all traffic and affiliate revenue per money post?
Next I looked at the amount of total traffic (not just organic) versus affiliate revenue per money posts. Again, I used self-reported percent of posts that were money posts to estimate the traffic share to these posts. This assumes the same traffic to info and money posts, which may not be true. This produced an R2 of 0.79, which is very high but also not very surprising. This means 79% of the variation in affiliate revenue per post is determined by the amount of traffic each posts gets. The other 21% of variation in affiliate revenue per posts is things like how well you sell your content to the reader, the commission of the affiliate program used, how often they click on links in the post, etc.

Chart 12: Do you outsource content?
23 of 37 respondents (62.2%) reported they don't outsource any of their content. On the other end of the spectrum, 5 people (13.5%) reported they outsource all of their content. On the "How much do you pay per word?" side, I'm now realizing I'm an idiot for leaving the "$0.00" in for those who said they don't outsource content. Oh well. Still, I'm shocked how many people report they pay only $0.02-$0.03 per word for content -- 7 of the 14 people (50.0%) who provided data. No one paid more than $0.15 per word.

Part 4: Ads
Chart 13: Do you display ads?
Overall the ad data reported was the most incomplete section of the survey. 35.1% of respondents display ads and only 1 person (2.7%) reported that they sell ads directly to companies. It seems most other people use a network with Google Adsense being the most reported. But again, the ads data was pretty incomplete.

Part 5: More Revenue and Expense Stuff
Chart 14: Total monthly revenue and expense by site
I also wanted to throw together some high-level stuff on overall revenue and expenses. Not a ton to really say about this.

Part 6: Backlinks and Linking Strategies
Chart 15: Domain age vs number of dofollow referring domains
I had the most fun working with the backlinks data. This plot shows an R2 of 0.12 between domain age and the number of dofollow referring domains, indicating there are a lot of other variables affecting how many dofollow backlinks a site gets.

Chart 16: Domain age and dofollow referring domains, natural vs built
I also asked people to estimate the number of referring domains they had earned naturally versus built through various efforts. Interestingly (but unsurprisingly) the R2 between domain age and manually built backlinks was 0.00. When you isolate only naturally earned backlinks, the R2 between domain age and dofollow referring domains increases to 0.18.

Chart 17: Popular backlink building strategies
The survey listed 11 different backlink building methods and asked people to rate how often they used each from 1 (very rarely) to 5 (very frequently). There was also a "Never" option. Using those scores I ranked each strategy from most to least used by assigning each 5 response a score of 5, each 4 response a score of 4, etc. The most possible points a strategy could score if everyone used it very frequently was 170. According to the responses from 34 people, the 3 most popular backlink strategies are Comments/Forums (50), Guest Posting (48), and Skyscraper Outreach (38). The 3 least popular backlink strategies are Blog Roundups (8), Scholarships (8), and Broken Links (11).

Also note that I forgot to add PBNs as a strategy until half of the responses came in, so I extrapolated the points PBNs earned over the entirety of responses.

Chart 18: How frequently is each link building strategy used?
This chart takes the link building strategies from Chart 17 and provides more detail. It reads from top-left (Comments/Forums, most popular) to bottom-right (Blog Roundup, least popular) and quantifies the responses each got. 17 of 34 (50.0%) of respondents reported using Comments/Forum links at least sometimes. Guest Posting got more 5s (very frequently) than any other backlink strategy. Only 1 person (2.7%) gave Inforgraphics more than a 2 (somewhat rarely).

Chart 19: How white hat is your site?
I asked people to rate how white hat their site was from 1 (not at all white hat) to 10 (totally white hat). 16 of 37 respondents (43.2%) gave their site a 10. 28 of 37 (65.6%) gave their site either a 9 or 10. Only 3 of 37 (8.1%) gave their sites less than a 5. One person (2.7%) gave their site a 1.

Chart 20: Backlink strategies vs white hat rating
Lastly, I was curious how people's backlink strategies aligned with how white hat they rated their site. The 1 person who gave their site a white hat rating of 1 gave their PBN usage a 5 (very frequently). Guest Posting is frequently used by people with sites of all white hat ratings. I'm not really sure what else to glean from this data. I just find the chart I made to be pretty cool.

That's It
I hope you enjoyed that and got something from it. It was interesting aggregating all the results and seeing some trends. Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Hey add Rep if you found this useful for your next journey

[signupf]

Thanks for the hard work you have put into it. I am doing some research my self to start a site. Let's hope I am not just making plans without any action.

[gratisterbaru]

tganks tganks