19 Examples of Successful Affiliate Marketing Campaigns | Databox Blog

What do Wirecutter, Nerd Wallet, and The Points Guy all have in common?

They are all extremely successful affiliate marketing sites raking in millions upon millions of dollars in affiliate sales.

This stands in stark contrast to what you might find if you, Google, “affiliate marketing.” Scroll through a few pages of search results, and you will enter a rabbit hole of empty promises offering “a chance to get rich quick, “passive income,” or my personal favorite, “make money while you sleep.” 

No legal and ethical business allows you “to make buckets of money while you sleep,” at least not without investing a whole bunch of time and/or money for years to get that business up to that point.

Because there are many affiliate scams, many marketers are quick to dismiss it and forget there are tons of legitimate businesses that use affiliate marketing to make money without resorting to questionable or underhanded tactics.  In this post, we’re diving deeper into the world of affiliate marketing, including: 1. What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a strategy of promoting another company’s products or services on your website, email, and/or social media channels in exchange for a commission. 

For example, if you run a content site all about website hosting, you might become an affiliate partner of your preferred web hosting platform, like Bluehost. Then, whenever someone lands on your website and then signs up for Bluehost, you will earn a commission. 

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the earliest version of influencer marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing has been around since the early Internet days. 

Google pioneered one of the earliest versions of affiliate marketing with Google Adsense back in 2003. Many media companies, online publishers, and content sites still rely on Adsense today.2. How Do You Get Started with Affiliate Marketing?

Since affiliate marketing has been around since the early 2000s, and you don’t need to buy any products/inventory, the barrier to getting started is low. All you need to do is buy a domain name, build a website, create some content, and sign up for an affiliate program or two.  

Back in the early days of affiliate marketing, you could literally slap together a 5-page site in Dreamweaver, find a couple of products with high commission rates (that you of course haven’t ever used before), add the links all over your site, and start raking in that sweet cash.

Let’s just say – the days of making money with a 5-page Dreamweaver website are long gone.

While it is still possible to make good money with an affiliate site, most niches are saturated, so you are going to need to do A LOT more to stand out. 

The best affiliate marketing sites boil down to relationships and trust.

It is about building trust and rapport with your audience FIRST so that when you start making recommendations on your website, emails, and social media, they will be more likely to buy what you are promoting.  

The second part is building real relationships with the companies of the products you are promoting so that you really learn the ins and outs of these products.

However, for those just getting started, the easiest affiliate program to start with is Amazon’s Affiliate Program. Once you create and verify your account, you can start promoting specific products on Amazon with your affiliate link on your site.

Once you understand how affiliate marketing works, then start diversifying away from relying 100% on Amazon and building your own affiliate relationships.

Of course, don’t forget to set the right affiliate marketing KPIs, and to start measuring your performance early on. 3. 18 Successful Affiliate Marketing Campaign Examples  1. PC Games Sale 

“I am not big on affiliate campaigns,” says Deniz Doganay of PC Games Sales.

“However, as a personal hobby I quickly created an affiliate website for pc games which I have been sharing within the gaming community and quite pleased with the progress so far.

The website is not even half finished yet and is already bringing in sales. I guess it’s all about finding a niche, providing value for that niche and then getting in touch with the right communities and markets.

Having a personal passion in the subject also helps! Have not put any budget into marketing campaigns yet, however once I do it will be very limited.” 2. BreadnBeyond   

“I ran a winning affiliate marketing campaign by leveraging product reviews,” says Andre Oentoro of Breadnbeyond.

“Since we’re an explainer video company, there are a bunch of video tools or software that ask us for collaboration. We tried their tools and shared our personal experiences of using it. We made a detailed, insightful review by highlighting the features and listing all the good points and the cons of the product.

The reviews are genuine and unbiased. It’s crucial in building trust with our audience. It tells them that we’re looking out for their best interests, not just promoting something you claim is absolutely flawless when it’s not.

From doing this strategy, we won’t only increase our website traffic significantly but also allow us to develop a lifelong relationship with several video software companies.”3. Kinsta 

“Reaching out to affiliates one by one with a very personalized email,” says Tom Zsomborgi of Kinsta.

“I know this is time-consuming and not a good tactic for large companies but we are seeing great results by engaging with affiliates through these conversations.

Thanks to these emails we can send them the exact URLs of their existing content including a paragraph or two and a screenshot where they could add our service with their affiliate link.

We provide all the content for them to minimize the effort on their end and thanks to this we are getting a very high success rate of these emails. Not to mention the start of a long-term and fruitful cooperation.” 4. WowBlackFriday 

“We ran an affiliate marketing campaign for a web hosting company,” saysHarpreet Munjal of WowBlackFriday.

“The company was offering a good discount due to its holiday season sale. We planned and executed our strategy for the sale to generate revenue through affiliate marketing.

We found some easy to rank keywords and ranked those keywords on the top of Google. Also, we did promotion on social media and through our email list.

The results from our efforts were insane! We generated a 6 figure (200k+) affiliate commission in less than a week. That was the first time when we got this kind of success.” 5. Amerisleep 

“Our most successful affiliate marketing campaign has been with our content creator and review partners,” says Ryan Hindes of Amerisleep.

“These campaigns consist of several steps, the first being us sending our affiliate partner one of our products that they’re going to focus on when creating content.

We launched hybrid mattresses this year so I sent out several of our new hybrid beds to our affiliate partners. Upon receiving the mattress, the partner wrote an in-depth product review and also created video content showcasing the mattress and its various features and materials.

This type of affiliate marketing campaign is the most successful for us because customers do a lot of research before spending several hundred dollars, and sometimes over a thousand dollars, on a mattress online.

Our affiliate partner publishes their review on their website to share with their audiences and their video on their YouTube channel. They embed the video into the published review as well and promote the new content through their email lists and social media accounts for increased exposure.” PRO TIP: How to track these 10 popular Google Analytics metrics

Sure, there are dozens (and dozens?) more GA metrics you could track. But, starting with these 10 commonly tracked GA metrics will give you a pretty high-level view of how your marketing is working…Sessions: The number of sessions can tell you how many times people are returning to your website. Obviously, the higher the better.Sessions by organic keyword: Which organic keywords bring in the most traffic to your website? This may help you determine whether your SEO investments are paying off.Bounce rate: Do visitors leave shortly after landing on your website? Or do they stick around?Average session duration: How much time are people spending on your website? Users with a high average session duration are most likely relevant to your company.Goal completions: How many users responded to your call to action?

If you want to track these in Google Analytics, you might find the visualizations limiting. It’s also a bit time-consuming to combine all the metrics you need in one view.