The Shabby Creek Cottage- How To Do Affiliate Marketing

How to do affiliate marketing is a well worn question- apart the articles/ tips and tricks...people make quite a bit of money and others, well...don't.

So after a brief search, you find websites that are willing to tell you about their profits. Now, they are not doing it for good will. It is actually a nice marketing technique where you:

• offer information that not many people offer and this opens you up to be "honest". How many websites tell you how much they earn? Not too many. the ones that do? You trust them a bit more
• with that trust you then believe what they say. If they offer "how to blog" guides etc then you are more inclined to go through that avenue rather than some overt affiliate marketer trying to sell you something.
  
• sprinkle a few links within the text- which might be affiliate links or ads. Its OK to do because it is reciprocal. You gave me free info, for that I don't mind the ads. That is how we tolerate Youtube.

One of the more clean and direct websites that has offered their expenses is Shabby Creek Cottage.

Here are some of the stats and thoughts:

• 125k backlinks
• 5k organic (search and paid) traffic per month, was 30k- this is an estimated figure though. But...has 113K monthly visitors
  
• it is very clean, same style throughout
• The author keeps in contact on the comments
• it is very much geared towards Pinterest- because the author likes photography, so use something that you like
• its "TV" channel is well promoted through most pages then minimizes to the bottom right hand corner of the screen
• tons of how-tos
• quite a few ads
• i like the freebee pages
• It is nice how the topics are stacked under logical headers
  
• Sometimes however the text is hard to see- especially trying to figure out the newsletter fields and where to type
• The wording is meant for Gina to be talking to you. It comes across as very informal
  

How to do affiliate marketing. Where does Shabby Creek Cottage make its money?

The report, created by Gina, was created in 2016. But if you check out their stats the websites is steady at the points stated above. So the income might be a a bit more.

So Gina makes $25k monthly from this website. She states 500k/ month of visitor traffic. Broken down that equates to:

• AFFILIATE INCOME: $9,736.02
• SPONSORED POSTS: $6,500
• DISPLAY ADVERTISING: $8,981
• PRODUCT SALES: $99.85

Go onto any page and there is some link to a product page. But they are so smoothly placed they don't seem like affiliate links. But, they are very noticeable to be links. But again not harsh- quite artistic- like the golden style link on the picture below.

Sponsored posts are ones like this (https://www.theshabbycreekcottage.com/little-desk-redo.html). Home Depot sponsors the post by sending Gina stuff. She writes about it/ puts it into a post that would be suitable for the website and job done.

What increased her earnings?

1. By educating herself on affiliate marketing- which accounts for a vast amount of her income
2. By increasing the rates of sponsored posts. As Gina puts it: "I took a long, hard look at what kind of results I was giving my brand partners, then I looked at magazine statistics and compared my results with theirs (my unique visitors per month versus their subscriber numbers). When I did the math, I realized I was drastically undercutting myself. Instead of doing 6 posts at $1000 each, I did two (one paid more than the other). Less work, more money. Boom."
3. Hired help. Most people will do everything themselves but there is one important thing to remember. You need to be part of the business but no in the business. This is what happened to Tim Ferris- he exported tasks which could be done by someone else and the "main tasks" he did himself. Efficiency increased, costs reduced and profits increase.

But what do all websites seem to forget?

Costs.

Sure, $25k/ month is cool. But what did it take to make you that kind of money. Gina has the answers:

• ASSISTANTS: $1200
• CONVERTKIT (my email service): $175
• BOARDBOOSTER (how I schedule pins): $30
• SUPPLIES FOR PROJECTS: $315
• MISC.: $239

I believe these are monthly outgoings. So $1,959/ month expenses. To be honest I would also put my monthly wage as an expense. Gina states she goes on holidays to Disney and states at the start of the post what a blogging life has given. So monthly income would be nice. But even if you give yourself $3k/month (after taxes) it still doesn't make a huge dent in $20k/month profit.

It is also worthy to note that it took 8 years.

Future and why questions for The Shabby Creek Cottage

You may wonder what is next for Gina. Well she states:

• Trying to ad buy. She has created a few products that she wants to promote, ad buying would be a good idea. Also placing them more prominently on the website would be nice. The Shabby Creek Cottage shop would be a good touch. Chalk Couture Shop is nice...but it doesn't seem warranted to be so prominent on the website. It also sounds very specific. If I like chalk great, if not then I won't check it out- regardless of what you have there
• SEO. Gina wants go more into SEO. I would assume that SEO would be OK already and you would be picking the very low fruit. I would swap that out for more Pinterest and then Insta. Also build up your videos more. SEO might be a waste of time at this point.
• Gina also wants to figure out a content strategy. Well I think that each post should have some interlinking. And maybe start to remove some of the ads and start to put ads towards your own products. You know which ads are working so you would know which products people are liking. Why not Shabby Creek Cottage furniture, your own supplies, paints, cookware...this niche is very lucrative. 
• BoardBooster. You might ask why Gina spends money on this. Again, it is a time magnet that you want to automate as much as you can. 

We wish Gina all the best.

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