I discovered affiliate marketing around the beginning of summer and truly realized its power once the site started generating its first revenue.
In early 2018, I picked up an expired domain and put several content pages on it.
All you need to get started in foreign markets is to order a few pages for the site and wait. Naturally, after choosing a niche, keywords, and so on. So, if you’re wondering how to start, it’s simple: a strong expired domain, a few pages of content, and waiting 3–5 months to see if it takes off or not.
Content Sites Didn’t Work Out for Me
Honestly, I’m weak when it comes to informational content sites. Occasionally I succeeded with them and reached decent earnings, but I couldn’t invest millions to speed up capital turnover. Or rather, I was afraid the venture would fail.
I calculated my expenses long ago: I invested 800k roubles in total and wasn’t happy with the results. It reached about 50k–60k roubles, which is very low for me, though I admit that you have to learn the hard way first before scaling to an acceptable level.
Ultimately, though, I admit that I can’t move forward in this direction.
I don’t have the guts to take millions of roubles from investors or take out loans for content sites. I just don’t believe in their value. Besides, I was doing fine as it was.
Content Sites Require Heavy Investment
And I realized another thing about why I stalled on content sites: they require huge investments. To earn 1 million roubles a month after 2 years, you need to invest over 12 million roubles into content sites. It takes up to 2 years for a site to break even. From year two onwards, the income yields a 100% ROI. This is unprofitable and risky, considering that this content is easily replicable and the site has no inherent value. If anyone can write the exact same article as me, where is the value in a content site? This is a fundamental issue of content quality and replicability.
If everyone orders articles from copywriters on content marketplaces, where is the value in the article? I wrote in detail about the quality (or rather, poor quality) of medical articles here
In Early Summer, International Stats Came In
Let’s look at the stats from the international site:
For example, after investing 8,000 roubles in content for a site in January 2018 and understanding how the system works, I ranked a few pages in foreign Google. Total earnings so far: $1,156 + $292 (from an old account) = 91,224 roubles. And these are the stats 6 months after launch. That’s affiliate marketing in a nutshell.
The site had only 3 pages in total.
If memory serves, a good indicator for info sites is making 100% ROI in a year—meaning recovering costs plus making that same amount on top. So investing 3 million roubles at the start of the year means recouping those 3 million by the end of the year plus another 3 million roubles on top.
UPDATE June 2019 — payback period for content sites is now 2 years. That’s a lot. And these sites don’t last long. The average lifespan of a content site is 3 years. After 5 years, the site earns nothing. That’s why everyone sells them 3 years after launch to extract all possible revenue the site can yield. Some guys even calculate the optimal time to sell for maximum profit.
Here’s an article on content obsolescence for content sites: https://devvver.ru/seo/vremya-zhizni-kontenta/
I really hope you fully appreciate the power of affiliate marketing.
Now the main question on my mind is scaling this setup to $10,000 in six months with minimal capital expenditure.
If you’re tired of churning out doorway pages and making $1 per 1,000 visitors (but look at those pretty graphs!), or tired of pumping out info sites, or if you have no money but plenty of drive—ask your questions in the comments.
UPDATE June 2019 — by creating 3 pages in early 2018, I got amazing results, but I perfected the entire system on that site. If that site hadn’t taken off, I don’t know if I would have gained a foothold in foreign markets back then.
Looking back, I should have registered 10 strong expired domains and tested everything on them. Otherwise, if that single domain hadn’t worked out, I wouldn’t have made it into international markets.
All I need now is strong expired domains with a few pages to test the site itself. If it gets traffic and grows, the domain is good and worth populating with content.
And if an expired domain doesn’t rank—like what happened to me—it means I picked the wrong domain; it happens, and it’s a risk you have to factor in.