Who are you and what are you currently working on?
My name is Darcy, I’m 31 and currently living in the beautiful Brunswick Heads area of Northern NSW, Australia.
The weather up here is basically outdoor-friendly all year round so I try to spend as much time as possible swimming, running and adventuring in the sun to balance out the demands of a laptop lifestyle!
As for work, I have a few great projects on the burner but my main affiliate passion at the moment is a health and wellness site called The Bircher Bar. It’s taken a pretty unconventional path into being an affiliate business but, I think that’s why I love it so much.
How did you get started in affiliate marketing? What keeps you excited about it?
I stumbled into affiliate marketing after being in business as a cafe owner and wholesale producer for about 3 years. The Bircher Bar website was first launched as an e-commerce website within this business model, and although the business was doing well, personally, I was burning out and realised that this wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted to build.
After coming back from a brief holiday a bit over a year ago, I made the decision to sell off the cafe and close the e-commerce business as well.
It was around this time that I met my wonderful partner Sarah (pictured as well) who was working for an affiliate website at the time. The Bircher Bar website was already ranking for some keywords and I had been doing quite a bit of research into the affiliate model, and so between us rather than shut the website down, we decided to start converting it from an e-commerce site to an affiliate site.
Since then we’ve been busy converting old product pages into reviews and producing new content that fits the brand. It’s an exciting project as it’s something we now work on together, it’s starting to show some promising results and it’s an unconventional way to go about it which makes it feel like we are trail-blazing a bit rather than just reproducing a ‘copy / paste’ template approach.
What is one piece of advice you’d give to a newbie affiliate marketer? And what is one piece of advice they should ignore?
Just get started!
Analysis paralysis is real and if you don’t get up and running until you have everything ‘perfect’, you may never get going.
We still have a number of pages that need some serious work, but the site is still performing well regardless. I can be a bit of a perfectionist at times so I understand that this can be hard advice to take, but it’s more important to make mistakes and adapt.
What has been your favorite mistake? A mistake that in retrospect led to a great lesson and progress in your affiliate marketing?
My biggest mistake has been wasting serious amounts of time in trying to save money.
It’s important to be aware of your expenses but some things are just worth paying for. The biggest example of this for me has been with content creation.
I don’t even want to think about how many hours I’ve spent editing poorly written content that was insanely cheap. It took a while to find good writers but by paying that extra couple of cents per word, I’ve saved myself countless hours (and hence money as well) as well as invested in articles that are performing significantly better.
What is one piece of software or a web service that allows you to be more effective as an affiliate marketer?
Ahrefs is an affiliate marketer’s best friend.
Everything we do to craft our strategy and build our site out is done on the back of Ahrefs. Granted, it isn’t the cheapest software on the market but back to my previous point – some things are just worth paying for.
How do you continue to educate yourself as an affiliate marketer? What are some of your favorite resources for learning?
Affiliate marketing is endlessly dynamic. With more and more competition entering the game, and another Google update undoubtedly on the horizon – continually educating yourself is key to thriving.
There are some great affiliate marketing juggernauts out there that are all too happy to share some brilliant inside knowledge. The two that come to mind that I find engaging, authentic and trustworthy are Matt Diggity & Mark + Gael from Authority Hackers. I’d read at least one article from these guys daily.
If people wanted to connect with you, where should we point them to?
Drop me an email at info@thebircherbar.com.au or head to our website and hit the ‘Message Us’ button – more than happy to have a chat! 🙂