Hellooo,

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Affiliate Gathering finished a couple weeks ago, and it was a great event. It was great to meet so many of you at the mastermind, and at the main event the day after.

As promised, here’s 8 of the biggest takeaways from Affiliate Gathering, though I have had to remove a few parts that are in full within the Conversion Collective private community, that were posted almost immediately after the event, which generated a great discussion in the group.

They either involve progress updates that members are adding into the community, or other details based on discussions in there that can’t really be shared out of respect.

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Also… Click Wars podcast is BACK!

We had a bit of a nightmare as our video editor ghosted us and it took a while to find someone who could edit the podcasts to our standard, but we’re back.

​Today’s episode is with James Oliver. He talks about his affiliate SEO strategies that have made him $1M+ profit, and how he’s investing that money into building villas in Bali right now, and the real estate game. It’s a banger episode.

​You can watch the episode here.

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1. You can triple earnings with the same traffic if you acquire courses from expert creators

Credit to Mads Singers for this amazing tip he spoke about in his talk at Affiliate Gathering.

Mads would acquire sites, and 3-4x the value and income of the site by simply adding a higher-ticket course offer to the site, before selling the site on at a higher asset value.

To do this, he’d go to course sites like Udemy, find courses that had made very few sales over the last couple of years, and then offer to buy for the full rights to those courses.

You really have to be an expert, and really have to put in the work, to create a course, so with better distribution via the website’s email list and growing this via organic, then adding the higher-ticket offer, meant they could routinely triple their earnings.

Another strategy was [redacted]. For Conversion Collective members only, as this was an interesting discussion we had that I can’t really disclose here yet.

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2. Facebook GROUPS are a great source of traffic, as well as newsletter subscribers

This was a huge learning from Nina Clapperton, who has scaled several different Facebook Groups around different sub-niches that she operates in.

Not only are these a great source of traffic – and product recommendations for affiliate revenue – but with the correctly named group (think literally calling it someone would type on Facebook, old school SEO haha), you can get fairly consistent Facebook fans from people discovering your group organically.

And, you can change the settings so anyone who joins needs to fill in a form including their email address, to grow your list.

I haven’t set up groups before with email requirements, but I presume you can just set up automations with Zapier or whatever and send them to your email software once they add themselves into the group, and start winning them over from there with your welcome sequence for anything higher ticket.

Even smaller FB groups – we’re talking under 15K likes – can drive significant 10K+ traffic per month.

With Facebook attacking some smaller publishers’ outbound traffic over the last year, Groups are an interesting community-building play around your brands that is still sending traffic and emails.

Nina also mentioned another lead gen strategy, and she actually says she uses my tool, QuizWizard.ai, for this.

Nina has CTAs that use quizzes to gather emails, using it as a sort of lead gen form but more engaging, to scale her email list. I LOVE seeing people use my SaaS tools, and this is a great real usecase of the powerful AI quiz generation technology.

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Side note: we shipped loads of new stuff recently for QuizWizard. You can now choose whether you want to index your AI generated quizzes on our domain, which gives it a chance to rank for the keywords you try to rank it for.

Then, anyone who completes the indexed page that they find via the SERPs, can still give you their email – basically, now you can grow your email list, even if you don’t have your own website!

3. Dropshipping via UGC creators and brands you have a connection with, as well as UGC for affiliate product reviews so you don’t have to create the content yourself

This is somewhat similar to what [redacted] is doing and will be live updating members on progress with inside the Conversion Collective.

He’s having 20 high-ticket products delivered to influencers and product experts to then create the product review and video for, so he has the long-form video, the short-form standard UGC-style TikTok video, and the written product review to rank in Google.

Just a few reasons to do this:

• EEAT and trust from the influencer, as well as them pushing it to their audience for traffic brand signals
• You don’t have to do the review yourself… or pay a writer on your team to do it… then the influencer just gets to keep the product
• Rank the article for one spot on the SERP, the YouTube video in another spot, and try to drive traffic from the short-form version from IG, TikTok, etc.

And, if you’re dropshipping instead of doing affiliate (preferred by big G in the SERPs right now…lol), you can use the short-form UGC in product listings for CRO, better rankings for the product page (which seem to be getting better rankings for “Review” keywords right now…) and much more.

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4. 301ing clusters to different domains each, vs 301ing entire domains for better performance

[because of sensitivity, most of this section is redacted, but that person is in Conversion Collective and has spoken about it]

But, some people are having more success over the medium-term (still early to tell) versus 301ing an entire algo-hit domain, and this domain often eventually having a similar fate with being suppressed. I can’t really speak more about this here as it involves community members who were at the mastermind.

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5. LOTS of discussion on user signals vs “algo” signals in HCU hits, and how to avoid/recover

I’m still divided on this one, and tweeted about seeing counterevidence to the user signals theory of HCU hits with so many fake e-commerce sites ranking.

But, people far cleverer than me are still very convinced it’s more heavily user metrics based, and the fact you end an affiliate/display ads experience on another site is a big negative consideration, versus real e-commerce and other types of store that often have 4+ pages per session, versus probably like 1.2-1.5 on a content site.

I’ve said this before – all our new launches are e-commerce/selling products focused, with a more delicate approach to affiliate on some content, and NO display ads.

I personally think it’s to some extent a URL concentration thing, which was also mentioned by Eric Lancheres in his Sep 2023 HCU analysis, with some e-commerce stores with a vast majority of URLs being e-commerce-focused, rather than content-focused, meaning they skipped HCU classifier entirely.

It would be cheaper for G to do this versus actually check for helpfulness / anything else, and significantly reduces the sample size that you have to actually look at the content / metrics on. So yeah, thinking about it from a cost perspective makes this theory make more sense.

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6. Lots of people are moving into Local SEO, with EMDs working well, as well as expired domains

This was especially touched upon by SEO Jesus (Stewart Vickers) in his talk, with exact match domains for your location / city ranking very quickly with minimal link-building – just basic citation building, extracting entities and making sure they’re on the page, which AI can help you write. It’s also pretty easy delegate to a VA once you have the systems set up as it’s fairly basic stuff.

And… Stewart talks about far more interesting, higher-level stuff than this. Everyone just wants to do the marketing and lead gen, then sell these leads to real businesses…

…But, instead, another way of thinking about this… if you can generate these leads… shouldn’t you just find and hire someone who can fulfil, and then you actually have a real business, not just a lead gen machine?

Rather than just using a traffic source and your marketing advantage in it, you actually go out to create a real business. It’s more labour intensive, but more profitable and long-term if you can actually build a proper business that operates itself. And Google would rather rank a business with a more tangible footprint, GMB with reviews, etc…

I also saw this tactic of his tweeted, and some people were replying saying that this stuff is 2010 SEO, and doesn’t work. The thing is… it does work. In local, it 100% works – and everyone who’s done it knows this. It sounds outdated if you’re not in the trenches, but IYK,YK.

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7. Flipboard is an underrated source of traffic

As well as IRL discussions, a recent Niche Pursuits episode discusses how they drive hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors from Flipboard, too.

I haven’t really experimented with Flipboard but hearing from people as well as that podcast interview makes me curious about whether it could work for a few niches I’m in.

TLDR: It’s similar to some extent to Pinterest, but a wider variety of niches can work as it’s less female-dominated and so niches that don’t work as well on Pinterest, can work on Flipboard. But, there’s some other subtle differences with the magazines vs boards system on Flipboard vs Pinterest.

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8. Nobody wants to deal with display ads anymore

With traffic declining, and display ads being the lowest value way of monetizing each page view, as well as being suspect as a signal for HCU hits, people are NOT including display ads in their future monetisation strategies.

Even to some extent people are done with affiliate. I’m still bullish on affiliate – just with a more delicate touch.

The art is making sure you present as a domain that is not likely to get a HCU hit, and assess which affiliate keywords have e-comm intent, and go from there…

Now… in other notes, we have the first Beta version of spearwriter.ai ready for release. Spearwriter is basically an AI writer for introductions only, and currently only does affiliate content, specifically for “Best” product round-up buyer’s guides.
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It is only in Beta – the prompts still need fine-tuning to prevent it going a bit crazy every now and then, as well as being more direct, and making some other minor semantic tweaks. We’ll then add custom setups for “vs”, “review” and other affiliate keywords.

​Right now, it’s 100% free – you’ll even be using my API keys so I’m paying for you to use it ;).

Free members get 5 free generations per month, Conversion Collective members get 100, soon to be unlimited.

You cannot buy this yet. If it gathers enough interest we may create a very cheap BYOK version, but for the moment, it’s just intended as a free tool.

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I’ve also recently gotten back from Poland, at the SEO Vibes event with WhitePress. So I’ll have another email go out in a few weeks when it’s been long enough since the event to discuss the learnings here. But I’ve already broken down the full learnings in CC.

And, as always, if you want the full discussions in our private community, you can join the Conversion Collective for what is a really really cheap price all things considered.

We’ve had live stream Q&As with James Dooley, created several in-depth courses for niche areas of SEO, great discussions with community members, free software tools such as Spearwriter and QuizWizard, and much more.

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Until next time 🫡,

Jamie I.F.

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