When my two partners and I started building our cryptocurrency tax software company, we had no money.
The three of us were fresh out of college and broke as can be.
However, that didn’t stop us from chasing our business idea, and it shouldn’t stop you either.
In order to fund the early stages of the company, we turned to affiliate marketing.
Simply, we blogged about the top tools in our “cryptocurrency trading” niche and recommended our favorite products. We would then spread our blog posts across the internet with a simple content promotion strategy for interested readers to find.
This simple and replicable approach got our blog posts ranked on Google and ultimately brought in thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions. This tactic helped us pay for the infrastructure and early costs of getting our software platform off of the ground.
The process we used is dead simple. I explain below exactly how we did it.
Step 1: We identified popular products in our niche that had lucrative affiliate programs
For anyone new to the world of affiliate marketing, it simply works as such: you (the affiliate) promote/market a company’s products or services on the internet. For every product that you sell, you earn a commission.
The first step we took in our affiliate marketing quest was identifying tangentially related products that overlapped with our target market.
Since we were building a product that would automate the capital gains and losses tax calculations for cryptocurrency traders, it made sense to find affiliate programs for other products that cryptocurrency traders (our target market) were likely to use.
Taking this approach meant that our blogging efforts would not only make us affiliate commissions and help fund our company, but they would also progress our own marketing efforts for CryptoTrader.Tax.
People who read our affiliate blog articles would also come across our brand, sign up for our email lists, and possibly even sign up for our tax product.
Other beneficial side effects to these types of blog posts included increasing the domain authority of our website (and thus our SEO “juice”), attracting backlinks, training our Facebook pixel, and serving as future collateral for future partnerships with these companies.
The affiliate strategy would be a win-win-win.
After doing a bunch of Google searching, YouTube research, and online reading about our niche, we identified some great products to promote.
We started with crypto trading bots.
Crypto trading bots automate certain trading strategies for crypto investors, and three years ago, they were becoming very popular.
Additionally, many of the companies offering these types of bots to cryptocurrency traders had great affiliate programs.
We signed up for each of the affiliate programs and started writing our blog posts.
Step 2: Write the content
This part was relatively straightforward. Once we had identified the products that we believed were the best, we tested them out and signed up for the affiliate programs. We then simply wrote blog posts discussing the pros and cons of each platform.
The blog posts were extremely simple.
People would read about the various trading bots discussed in the blog post, and when they clicked on one of the links to the bots we recommended, they actually clicked on our affiliate link.
If they wound up making a purchase, we earned a commission.
Here are links to a couple of the articles we wrote on crypto trading bots:
Step 3: Promote the content
Once the articles were published and live on our site, we followed a simple content promotion strategy.
We would share a link to the article in relevant cryptocurrency trading communities. Reddit was the best community for us.
We would post our articles to subreddits like r/cryptocurrency, r/ethtrader, r/btcmarkets, and countless more to help spread the articles to interested readers.
In addition to Reddit, we’d post in Facebook groups made up of crypto traders, repost the articles on Hackernoon, and tweet about them.
This was the extent of our content promotion. It was super basic.
However, it was just enough to get the posts seeded on the web.
In a relatively short period of time, each of these articles started ranking for relevant keyword searches on Google such as “best crypto bots” etc., and this organic search traffic became our largest traffic source for these affiliate articles in the months to follow.
Step 4: Earn money
Bang bang – the posts were live and they were being distributed around the internet (mostly by Google). We then got to watch the money roll in.
These simple affiliate articles generated thousands of dollars for us once they started ranking on Google for relevant keywords. This money covered a lot of our early hosting and company costs, and allowed us to stay scrappy while focusing on building CryptoTrader.Tax.
We doubled down on this strategy by writing more and more affiliate articles reviewing other related cryptocurrency products to make more and more affiliate income.
This one article we wrote on the best cryptocurrency charting tools single-handedly generated us over $6,000 in affiliate commissions (screenshot of our affiliate dashboard below). Go type in “best crypto charting tools” in Google and you’ll see why!
Conclusion
There are a million scrappy ways to make money online. This type of affiliate marketing was one strategy that we used, and it was extremely effective for financing the early days of our software startup.
I blog about these types of online money-making adventures all the time (like the time I made $13,000 by growth hacking Instagram), and I email all of my best marketing tactics and ideas directly to the people on my email list.
If you want to get the inside scoop on the various digital marketing tactics that I’m using to grow my businesses, simply subscribe to my email list below! No spam ever. Just my best tips and tricks that I’m personally using. I’ll see you in the inbox!
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