An inside look into one of our most successful Affiliates. Read what she had to say
We had the opportunity to sit down with Sarah Chetrit—one of our most successful affiliates. Sarah has been cashing in the commission by tapping into the blog niche, and she’s here to talk SEO, what makes readers tick, and ultimately, how she managed to make a profit from it all.
Question: To start off, please tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your blog.
Answer: Hi, I’m Sarah Chetrit, an SEO blogging coach who helps bloggers make passive income. I started my career out as a Certified Public Accountant but after a couple of chronic illnesses, I switched gear to travel blogging. After a few successful years of being able to make money right from my couch, getting paid to travel the world and improve my health on my own time, I started http://www.sarahchetrit.com to help bloggers and influencers make money around their lifestyle, not fit their life around their job.
Question: How do you decide which content will bring the most organic traffic?
Answer: For my travel and lifestyle blog, my content is really based on where I have physically travelled and sometimes the health problems I experience. For my blogging blog, I base my content on blogging and social media problems I’ve personally experienced as well as my blogging students’ issues. Then I use the same approach for both – by doing keyword research and finding the best keywords that fit into my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy to get organic traffic from Google.
Question: How did you manage to grow the traffic coming to your blog?
Answer: With both my travel and blogging blogs, the best way to grow traffic has been through SEO. It’s the most sustainable and targeted way to get traffic from Google, from the people who are searching for exactly what you wrote about! I used to like growing my traffic with Pinterest but with its ever changing algorithm updates and most website readers hanging out on Google anyways, I shifted all my focus to optimizing each and every post for search engines.
Question: What challenges did you face when choosing your affiliate partners?
Answer: I generally only like working with affiliate partners if I’ve personally bought the product or service myself from that brand. It feels most authentic to me to promote affiliate products like this. This however limits the number of partners I can organically work with. I limit my pool of affiliate partners even more by selecting those that offer higher commissions. Money isn’t everything though. If I don’t have a good working relationship with an affiliate partner, then I’m more apt to lose interest in the program and even stop working with them. Fiverr is one of my favorite Affiliate programs because of Idan’s helpful communication!
Question: What would be the most profitable partnership to have on a blog? How do you decide who’d be profitable to promote?
Answer: This really depends on your niche and the problems your particular audience is trying to solve. Whatever is most needed, will probably be the most profitable. I like to combine my audience’s needs with a program that’ll get me a minimum of $15 per sale (whether that’s fixed or variable). This is especially true for when my blog had 10k page views and less, because to sell low commission items one needs many page views to convert into sales, which isn’t easy when you’re starting out. It’s not worth the time for me. The only exception to this is promoting low commission items from Amazon because not only do you get commission on the item you promote but whatever else is in their cart!
Question: Did becoming an affiliate with your blog bring success right away? How long did it take until you saw promising results?
Answer: For my travel blog, I didn’t really know what I was doing so it probably took me a good year to figure out affiliate marketing, at which point I started making $1000/month. For my blogging blog, since I already had affiliate marketing experience, I made $160 in my first month, $400 in my 2nd, $800 in my 3rd and so on.
Question: How do you figure out the needs of your audience?
Answer: My target audience for my blogs is really someone just like me so if I have a problem and solve it myself, I’ll write about that first. Second, I ask bloggers when they join my Facebook group what their main issue with blogging is. Lastly and most importantly, I check my Google Analytics to see which posts of mine have the most page views, as well as to understand those topics that readers I don’t know (and get from Google) are most interested in. If you don’t have direct access to talk with your audience, then data will tell you more than you could ever need, to grow and make money.
Question: What did you do to build your brand and grow your audience base in order to make your blog a known and popular website?
Answer: If you use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effectively, there’s no need to be on social media, marketing your blog, in order for it to be well known. 93% of my traffic comes from search engines. However, because I love having a two-way relationship with real people, I created a Facebook group where bloggers can get help from each other as well as a TikTok account where I can add a more personable side to my blog.
Question: What is the best incentive you’ve given your audience to engage with the partners you’re promoting?
Answer: The best reason for my audience to purchase products or services I promote is that it solves a dire issue for them, but most importantly, they’ve seen me personally use and approve a product/service, which gives them confidence to safely let go of their hard earned money!