Forever Affiliate Success and Exclusive Backlinking Tip

Forever Affiliate Success

If you’ve been following along on the site, you know that I started in on Andrew Hansen’s Forever Affiliate program back in March of this year.  That is a full step-by-step program on how get started in Affiliate Marketing, promoting the products of others for a commission.

It is a great program because it shows you from start to finish how to find the right products to promote, what keyword phrases to target, how to setup your website and how to build backlinks to drive free traffic to your site.  All with the end goal of eventually bringing in $$ in the form of affiliate sales commissions.

This past week I received not 1, but 2 sales of the product from FA site #1!   Each resulted in a commission of $34 and change.  I am super psyched about that as you can tell from the picture.  It is actually a picture of me at the Grand Canyon from a few years back, but it sums up pretty well how I felt.   😉

Getting an email that you made a sale is such a great feeling.  The kicker was that I received both emails while I was out and about with my wife, doing nothing at all related to my online adventures.

The entire niche/affiliate site process is by no means passive, it takes a good deal of time and effort over the initial 3 months to set everything up and additional effort down the road to maintain things, but getting those sales was 100% passive.

I did not have to do a thing at the time of the sale.  Someone can find your site, read your content and make a purchase, all with absolutely no intervention from you.  That is such a powerful thing.

That is the great part about niche/affiliate sites and the whole online adventure thing.  Once you get that first sale and realize the true brilliance of the whole idea of being able to make sales passively, you’ll be hooked.

You’ll still have plenty of ups and downs along the way, but the key is to never give up.  Keep learning, keep making progress and know that eventually things will pay off.

It took a full 7 months to get that first sale, but hopefully with 2 sales in a week I’m gaining some momentum.  I actually did not do much of anything with that site the entire summer and then due to some issues that I ran into due to changes made by the vendor, I picked things back up at the beginning of October.

The short version of the story is that the vendor used to offer a discounted version of the product and they also provided me a link that would take the customer directly to an order page vs having to weed through a sales pitch page.

At the beginning of October I realized that the discounted product was no more and the link they provided me was not giving my affiliate ID credit for any clicks/sales.  So I had to modify my content that was talking about “product name discount” and fix my links.

At that same time I also decided to personalize the site a bit.  I added some info on an “About” page and also included an email address in case anyone had any questions.

Two weeks later I received an email.  It was from someone that had already purchased the product, not though my link, but they had a few questions.

Getting that email provided some validation that what I was doing was working, even though they hadn’t purchased the product through me.  I was glad to assist and we went back and forth for a week and I was able to help that person out.  It felt good.

Based on the questions that person had, I created a new piece of content and also started back in on commenting on other blogs to get more backlinks.

Exclusive Backlinking Tip

I am not sure exactly what caused me to get not only 1, but 2 sales out of nowhere, but I have a feeling it was due in part to some recent blog comments that I made.

I found a great way to find very recent, relevant blog posts to comment on and wanted to share this tip with you here.  It will be useful for anyone with a blog or website, it is not specific to Forever Affiliate style sites.

If you are following the Forever Affiliate program, you will want to work on the initial link building strategies first before following this tip.  You want to have that core set of backlinks and referring domains first before moving on.

The process of finding recent/relevant blog posts to comment on is very simple, but powerful:

1. Go to Google and type in a keyword phrase related to your site and put the word commentluv at the end.  For example: weight loss commentluv.
2. On the search results page, click on “More” towards the top and select “Blogs”.
3. Then click on the “Search Tools” option.
4. Select “Past Month” .

Here is a screenshot :

That’s it!  You will now have a listing of recent, relevant blog posts to comment on.  Check out the posts and make sure they are indeed relevant and pick posts that have an active comment section.

After writing a relevant comment, you will be given the option to check the box for “Commentluv”.  If you are unfamiliar, Commentluv allows the commenter the ability to provide a link to a recent post from your own site, that will be shown below the comment.

That is a way to encourage folks to comment on your site, since you’re giving them the ability to get an all important backlink to their site.  I have Commentluv enabled on this site for that very reason.  If you are going to take the time to leave a comment, I feel you should definitely get something in return!

I recently commented on several relevant posts that had a very active comment section by utilizing this method.  Several people commenting had a particular problem that the product on my site could help them with.

Since I was leaving a relevant, thoughtful comment and there would be a link to an article on my site, the chances were high that someone would scan through the comments, see my response and click on the article.

Keep in mind, I am not trying to sell anything in that comment.  I am just writing a relevant response, empathizing with the person that wrote the article and those that are commenting and put a positive spin in there somewhere.   In that way, your comment will most likely be approved 80-90% of the time in my experience.

The more comments you have on active, relevant posts, the higher the likelihood someone will see your comment, click on the link to your article/site and possibly make a purchase.

Conclusion

Due to the recent activity and sales with Forever Affiliate site #1 I am going to focus some additional efforts on that site following the tip I included above.  I will also work on adding additional content as well.

It is very good to see that the process works, as validated by the 2 sales this week.  I have some additional ideas for another potential site that I will have to do the research on as well, but for now I want to focus on getting a bunch more backlinks to site #1 to keep the momentum going.

I hope this post helps to show that the Forever Affiliate program, and affiliate marketing in general, does work and can be very rewarding.  Like most things in life, it does take time and effort upfront, but the payoff down the road is well worth it.

Until next time, I wish you all the success with your online adventures and if you have any specific questions, definitely let me know in the comments or feel free to email me as well!  I love to get emails and am always willing to help out a fellow adventurer!