Who are you and what are you currently working on?
My name’s Winston and I run Bitcoin SEO, an agency that specializes in ranking crypto/blockchain websites on Google.
I also run affiliate websites for SEO experimentation. The successful experiments get monetized and bring me a decent side income.
How did you get started in affiliate marketing? What keeps you excited you about it?
It all started because of gaming.
I’m a huge gamer and I love playing games whenever I have the time. I’d even love to make a game someday.
Way back in high school, I wanted to buy a premium membership in a game called ‘Runescape,’ however, my parents didn’t allow me to and I couldn’t do it myself, because I didn’t have a credit card. So I took it into my own hands and did some research on how I could do it myself. That’s when I stumbled on Points2Shop which compensated you for completing surveys and bringing referrals. Doing surveys was a slow and tedious task, so I asked myself ‘how would be the best way to get referrals?’ And that’s how I learned SEO.
Using SEO, I was able to generate 35k users to Points2Shop and that was my first success in affiliate marketing. You can even find my profile there still: https://www.points2shop.com/members/profile/freezeice04
I still owe those guys a lot for helping me with my living expenses and for always paying on time.
What is one piece of advice you’d give to a newbie affiliate marketer? And what is one piece of advice they should ignore?
DO MARKET RESEARCH.
If you want to make money, you’re going to have to spend money (whether you’re doing SEO, PPC or Youtube), so market research is CRUCIAL to finding the best money making opportunities and minimizing the risk of losing that investment.
With SEO, I use a tool like Keywords Everywhere to get keyword ideas, then I analyze the topics it presents me with these 3 questions:
How can I monetize it? What’s the conversion rate like?
What is the search volume of the keyword I’m targeting and what about it’s long-tailed variations? Take into account that the rank 1 result on Google gets 33% of clicks on average and the rank 2 result gets 18% (though you should always optimize CTR).
What’s the competition like? Is ranking top 5 achievable?
With these questions answered, I can get a good sense of how much money I’ll be making and whether it’s worth the investment.
What has been your favorite mistake? A mistake that in retrospect led to a great lesson and progress in your affiliate marketing?
It isn’t necessarily one big mistake that changes your outlook on marketing, rather it’s a bunch of small mistakes adding up. I guess my favorite lesson is you can’t expect to get good results just by creating good content. Some people tell you ‘just write good content’ and the traffic will come. I found that to be false in almost all cases.
Even large websites struggle to get visitors if they don’t have an effective marketing strategy in place. For me, every piece of content needs to be keyword-targeted, meaning you can’t just write about anything. You need to write about stuff people are searching for on Google, and you also need to SEO optimize every blog post.
What is one piece of software or a web service that allows you to be more effective as an affiliate marketer?
Ahrefs – I use it for market research (it’s great for determining competition), traffic estimates, monitoring backlinks and building backlinks. I also use Keywords Everywhere for keyword research.
How do you continue to educate yourself as an affiliate marketer? What are some of your favorite resources for learning?
I follow SEO sources on Twitter. My favorite resources are Ahrefs blog and Backlinko. I’m also subscribed to them on Youtube – they have some good videos there too.
If people wanted to connect with you, where should we point them to?
Email: admin@bitcoinseo.services
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Crypto_Marketer