Just because a niche is insanely competitive, it doesn’t mean you can’t start an affiliate site and claim a slice of the revenue.

At least, that’s what Sa El of SimplyInsurance.com has done, and the way he lays out how he’s done it will pique the interest of affiliate marketers out there.

Sa was a door-to-door insurance salesman in Atlanta. He wanted to get into the online space and build an affiliate site, and with more than 11 years’ experience in the insurance industry, it made sense to enter the insurance niche.

He took Brain Dean’s SEO That Works course to learn the ropes. But, when he told Brian he was going to build a site in the insurance niche, he was advised against it.

Did Sa go back to the drawing board and look for a new niche?

Nope.

Sa told me there were two reasons why he decided to go ahead and build his site:

1. He likes a challenge, and
2. If the niche is that competitive, most of his competition is already at the top, leaving room for him to work his way up.

That was 2 years ago.

Today, Sa’s site is bringing in 6000 visitors a month and $13k-$15k in revenue.

Note: Click here to download Sa’s top tips for starting and growing an affiliate site in a competitive niche from this episode.

These numbers prove how competitive the insurance niche is. That’s a huge revenue number for 6k visitors, and Sa told me that only around 4.5k of those visitors are landing on his “money pages.” (Some examples linked below.)

Tune in to hear how Sa strategically built out his content to capture longtail traffic, how he builds backlinks (lots of them) to rank his money pages, and the tools he’s using to accelerate his efforts.

Kimberly Gauthier has been running KeepTheTailWagging.com since 2011, but things really started to take off when she niched down her focus to raw feeding for dogs.

Raw feeding is basically the paleo diet for dogs -- attempting to mimic their ancestral diet.

Her blog had than 2 million page views last year -- almost entirely from organic search in Google, and she’s monetized the traffic with a few different income streams.

Tune in to hear how Kimberly arrived at his niche, what drives content and marketing today, and how the business makes money -- all on the side from her day job.

Meredith Marsh is a “total introvert with over 3 million views on YouTube.”

When Meredith started VidProMom.com she didn’t set out to be a “YouTuber”. She started a blog and YouTube channel because she wanted to help families better capture those classic, picture-perfect family moments.

What she discovered was “a pretty big gap in the whole video creation side of things for people who are creating videos for fun,” Meredith said.

She started creating a video series on how to use a GoPro and some of the software - and things quickly snowballed.

Note: Click here to download Meredith’s top tips for growing a YouTube channel from this episode.

Her YouTube channel was getting more subscribers than all her other social media metrics and blog visitors added together – so it was obvious that YouTube was the ideal platform for her content.

A year after starting her channel Meredith left her day job, and her blog/YouTube channel that started as a side hustle is now her full-time job.

Tune in to hear how to set up your YouTube channel for success, how to master the YouTube algorithm to reach more people, and how to make money from your new video content.

Jodi Carlson has been running her blog LeaderConnectingLeaders.com part-time since 2014 and has slowly built it up to $5-6k a month in revenue.

The earnings come from a combination of mostly digital product sales, as well as advertising, and affiliate relationships.

Click here to download Jodi’s top tips for growing a blog and creating digital products from this episode.

The surprising thing – to me at least – is that she’s done this in a niche that theoretically doesn’t have any money.

Her readers and customers are almost all volunteers and they’re donating their time to local non-profit groups – in this case, Girl Scout groups.

On the surface that makes it seem like it’s as tough a niche as any to tackle, which makes Jodi’s results even more impressive.

She brings more than two decades of experience in Girl Scouts to the table, as a scout, then as a troop leader, and even though the blog didn’t start out with dollar signs in mind she’s turned it into a substantial income stream.

“I actually started it to help myself, and to then help troop leaders in my community,” Jodi said.

Jodi started documenting the activities she was doing with her Scout Troops in her blog and making PDF books so she could refer to them again in the future, and shared her articles with a small circle of other leaders in her community.

It wasn’t long before Troop leaders further afield started asking for her activity books. This sparked the idea to start selling her books and growing her blog.

Tune in to hear how Jodi comes up with product ideas and prices those, how she made her first sales, how she’s grown her traffic to more than 100k pageviews a month, and income to $5k + a month – all while working full-time and raising a family.

Related: Check out my free video series on how to start a blog.

“I feel like this is the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” Mike said about his blog YoungArchitect.com.

Mike Riscica runs a blog, podcast, and has built a thriving community for young professionals in the architecture field.

The idea for the blog came from a pain point in Mike’s life, and for many others – passing the Architect Registration Examination (ARE).

After failing to pass the exam 4 times (before passing) and seeing his peers struggling, Mike started blogging about his challenges.

“[My story] resonated with people in a pretty serious way,” he said, and he started seeing traction within the community.

He started monetizing his blog from day one with affiliate products and continued to add more revenue streams to scale up his business with courses, speaking gigs, books, videos, and more as his traffic grew.

Today his blog in a full-time business. He's had the opportunity to travel the country with his dog doing speaking gigs, has helped hundreds of students pass their ARE, and has some interesting plans for the future.

Tune in to hear how Mike grew his blog, how it rings the cash register in at least half a dozen different ways, and the strategies you may be able to lift for your own project.

FoodTruckEmpire.com generates $60k a year on the side from Brett Lindenberg's marketing consulting job.

Why'd he start a blog about the food truck industry?

“I started the blog at a time in my life when I was looking at just a whole bunch of different business ideas,” Brett said.

Originally, Brett wanted to start his own food truck. While researching how to start a food truck business he discovered there wasn’t enough quality information online.

So, he did what all good entrepreneurs do – capitalized on this gap in the market and started his own blog.

Note: Click here to download Brett’s top tips for starting and monetizing a part-time blog from this episode.

Brett creates the bulk of his content interviewing food truck owners and influencers in the industry.

He’s grown his blog to $60k a year in just 4 years through building an academy course, securing paid advertising, running AdSense, and selling ebooks.

And spoiler alert: he never ended up starting that food truck!

Tune in to hear Brett's content strategy, the different ways he monetizes his business, and how you can apply these methods to your own blog.

“Go big or go home, that’s kinda my whole philosophy with SEO,” Matt said.

And his results speak for themselves.

Note: Click here to download Matt’s top SEO tips for writing and ranking epic content from this episode.

It’s been more than 200 episodes since we last heard from Matt Giovanisci. Back then, Matt was explaining how he was growing his authority site SwimUniversity.com with epic content and strong SEO.

Since then he’s started 3 more authority sites and has fine-tuned his SEO practices for even bigger and quicker results.

His latest site BrewCabin.com is just a few months old and Matt is already ranking well for high traffic “money” keywords – without building backlinks or promoting this content.

How is he doing this?

It’s not through longtail keywords.

Quite the opposite, Matt goes after those high traffic keywords and outranks his competitors by producing epic content that people want to read.

Tune in to hear Matt explain how he does his keyword research, how he formats his content to ensure strong on-page SEO, and why he’s seeing such rapid growth across all of his sites.

Note: This is "round 2" of SEO for Bloggers. Round 1 was this conversation with Joseph Hogue last year.)

Could a part-time blog really bring in that kind of cash? Rosemarie swears she only works 20 hours a week!

Yes, The Busy Budgeter is back for her 3rd round on The Side Hustle Show, and it's a good one.

If you missed the first two:

• In episode 142, Rosemarie Groner's blog was about a year old and earning $5k a month. She shared a step-by-step system for generating massive traffic from Pinterest, which I immediately implemented myself. [this strategy is outdated, which why I didn't include this episode in The Blogging Mixtape.]
• A year later, in episode 199, she was earning $20-25k a month, and shared her "date your list" and "core affiliate strategy."

A few months after that recording, she started posting consistent $100k months from her blog, so of course I had to invite her back to hear what changed.

Note: Click here to download Rosemarie’s top tips for improving your blogging ROI.

If you guessed creating her own products and driving paid traffic, you'd be the big winner.

“I eliminated anything that wasn’t important for my growth,” Rosemarie said.

Tune in to hear how Rosemarie started selling her own products, the sales funnels tactics and tools she uses to turn subscribers into customers, and her tips to keep improving your ROI so you spend less time working while increasing your revenue.

Is your website guilty of these common sins? How secure is your site, really?

WordPress is like the new toy you unwrap on Christmas morning -- you know it's going to be awesome, but there's some assembly required.

To break down some of the most common website mistakes, I invited my friend Anthony Tran on the show.

Anthony runs MarketingAccessPass.com, a web design and development agency, as well as AccessWP.com, a WordPress support company offering unlimited support for a low monthly subscription.

(Get $20 off your first month of Access WP through my affiliate link)

With years of experience building websites for himself and for clients, he definitely knows his stuff.

Note: Click here to download Anthony’s top tips for optimizing your WordPress site.

In this episode, we walk through how you can tighten up the security of your site, speed up your load times, and some quick changes that’ll improve your SEO and user experience.

Whether you’re new to WordPress or have been blogging for years, I think you’ll take something away from this episode as Anthony shares his tips, tools, and best practices from years of working online for himself and for clients.

Note: If you don't have a website up and running yet, my free video series will show you how to get online quickly and affordably.

You might know Michelle Schroeder-Gardner from her super-popular blog MakingSenseofCents.com where she gets hundreds of thousands of readers and makes 6-figures a month.

Around $50k of that monthly revenue (or more) comes from affiliate marketing.

Note: Click here to download Michelle’s top tips for maximizing affiliate revenue from this episode.

Michelle’s online journey started in the summer of 2011 when she decided to start blogging about paying off her student debts, “I didn’t know what blogs were at the time… I literally didn’t know that you could make money with a blog,” she said looking back.

It was when she made her first $100 six months later with a sponsored post that she knew she wanted to build an online business.

“It became super addicting,” Michelle said.

Fast-forward just two years and Michelle had become a full-time blogger making money through affiliate marketing sponsored posts, working as a freelance staff writer and selling display advertising.

She started to focus on affiliate marketing, and with her most profitable post making more than $400k to-date it's fair to say she's nailed the right way to do affiliate marketing.

The secret to her success?

Listening to her audience and providing relevant content that solves a pain point.

Sounds simple, right?

Tune in to hear Michelle explain how she finds the right affiliate products to promote to her audience, as well as her tips to maximize conversions, increase your social media following, diversify your traffic sources, and much more.

Don't have a blog yet? My free video course will help you get started!