An Affiliate Marketing (Accidental) Success Story

Have you ever wanted to have an inside look at some successful affiliate marketing efforts and how someone makes money from a blog?

We affiliate publishers are a pretty secretive bunch and opportunities to get an under-the-hood look are few and far between. Now’s your chance. I’m going to open up and share what has happened on Jangro.com from an affiliate standpoint in the past three years.

I have told this story many times. In fact it’s been told by others, including during a Keynote at CJU, but I’ve never written it down. It has sort of become a bit of a legend — ok maybe an inside joke with my industry friends. In any case, it is an interesting story, and a good lesson in SEO, Affiliate Marketing, and how to make money with a blog.

The History

I had a lucky thing happen about 3 years ago. My television broke.

I didn’t think so at the time of course. The television I had paid over $3000 for just a few years prior was just out of warranty and it started making a horrible screeching sound. Not to get too technical, but just to explain, the television is DLP technology and has a thing in it called a color wheel (see picture). This is a small device that spins at thousands of RPM. The computer in the television sends the picture through this spinning wheel at just the right intervals so the right image is sent through the right colors at the right time. And through marvels of technology, the picture is projected onto the screen.

As one does, I went to the Internet to research this screeching sound and I determined through much searching and little finding that it was in fact the color wheel that had gone bad. This particular manufacturer’s television had a problem with these color wheels. The bad news is that it would cost about $400 for a tech to repair it. The good news is that I could buy this part myself for about $100 and fix it myself. Like any good engineer, I took on the challenge.

It was a pretty big project to take the TV apart and I quickly realized that I’d better take good notes, even take pictures, so I could get it all back together properly. At some point I also decided that I’d document the process and publish it on my blog to help fill the gap of information on the subject. At the time, the Internet Marketer in me had an inkling that I might be able to get some search traffic for such a post.

Long story short, I posted the procedure on Jangro.com. It didn’t take long for the searchers to find me as it did pretty well in natural search.

There is about a year of missing data from July 2006 to Sept 2007 when I put Analytics on Jangro.com. But this is everything I have. This particular graph is any visit to Jangro.com from a search engine containing the word “Samsung”. This isn’t all the traffic for DLP stuff, but it’s probably most of it. The dips to zero are during blog maintenance when I disabled the Google Analytics tracking. As you can see, it’s been pretty flat and I know it can do better.

Now that I’ve freed up Jangro.com from this Affiliate Marketing stuff, I can post more of the money-making content without feeling like I’m annoying you folks that I care deeply about. I’ll share what I do as I go and the progress that I make.

Stay tuned for more information on how I got here and where we go with it. Feedback and questions are welcome as I go.