Affiliate Site Making $1,000 a Day In the Extremely Competitive Insurance Industry

Hey Everyone, my name is Sa El, after over ten years of selling life insurance over the phone I became tired of chasing down one customer at a time to sell a $25.00 life insurance policy. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, helping someone to protect their family’s financial future is very important to me; however, I was working 16 hours per day and spending very little time with my family. 

On top of that, more and more customers started asking if they could just sign up online and not have to speak with me on the phone. 

I realized that it was now or never to take my entire business from offline to online, my only problem was that I had absolutely no idea that websites could make money, or how to make money online. 

Getting Started

I started doing my research in January of 2017 and took a few online courses about making money online.

I started with Niel Patel and Brian Dean and went 100% into their courses.  I learned everything that I could and did as much research as possible.

My husband came up with a fantastic name of Simply Insurance, and we were good to go. 

Now, the funny thing is that when I went to purchase the domain, it was $10,000, and of course, I gasped at the price. 

We decided to go with the “.co” version of the domain name until we could prove that this concept would work. 

Long-Form Content

My goal was to follow the process I learned from the courses, which was to build long-form insurance content based on detailed keyword research. 

The first post that I created was a long tail, long-form, money page titled “How To Get Life Insurance Quotes With No Phone Calls From Agents.” 

The post was well over 3,000 words, and the primary focus was to create a piece of content that would not only rank in google but also convert traffic into sales. 

I thought my next step was going to be challenging, and that was building backlinks, but it turned out that being a sales agent made outreach more easy for me than the average person.

Building Links

My plan for Links was a three-step process:

1. Respond to as many HARO requests as possible.
2. Guest Post Outreach
3. Outreach To People Who Already Linked To Similar Content

Overall I was able to start building links and generating traffic.  I remember getting 30 visits in 1 day felt soo amazing, and I couldn’t believe people were visiting my site. 

Making My First Sale

It took me a total of 9 months from starting to make my first commission sale.  I made a whopping $120.00; however, once I made my first sale, I knew everything worked. 

For the rest of the year, the site started to make money from a few products, and I continued to add more content.

Figuring It All Out

Once I knew that I could make money from the site I needed to figure out how to keep growing my organic traffic and my revenue; below are the steps I took:

Multiple Products / Silohs

My initial plan was to focus entirely on Life Insurance, but my husband stepped in and reminded me that the site was Simply Insurance, and to not just focus on life insurance but other insurance products.

This still would keep me in the insurance niche, but change the focus to now over 10 products.   This is probably one of the best moves I made for the site, but at the same time, probably the worst move to make. 

I say this because, at the time, I didn't really understand how adding all of the additional content and products would affect the site.

In hindsight, it probably would have been much better if I would have dominated in one space first and slowly added more products, but it didn't play out like that. 

At the beginning of 2018, I added about 9 products to the site.  I created their main money pages like “home insurance quotes” and then did a review of the main affiliate product or products “hippo home insurance review” and then I created one power page around the content “what does home insurance cover” 

Now, this gave me a place to start and while I did start seeing revenue from these different products, overall I had a site with heavy life insurance content but super thin content for the other products.

Joining A Group

As I started to see a bit of real growth in 2018 I kept hearing about this personal finance conference in my industry that was full of people like me (a money nerd). 

I decided to buy tickets to the conference, which gave me access to their Facebook Group.

Guys, this was the best decision I have made so far because this group had everything I needed in one place to grow my site. 

It was full of journalists, bloggers, CPA’s, pretty much anyone in the personal finance space.  I think my first week in the group, I probably landed 10 to 15 Guest posts. 

This is all to say that you should find some group to join that’s relevant to your niche to help you build links fast.

Inspiration Before The Conference

Right before the personal finance conference in 2018, I found Niche Pursuits, and I learned that even though I was building links, I probably needed way more than my 30 or so pages on the site and that my goal should be 200 pages of content.

At Fincon, I wrote around 50 new pages of content and published them to the site in one week which was amazing and super tiring.  This really helped increase my traffic at the start of 2019.

Buying My “.Com” & Transferring My Site

So, remember earlier when I stated I wanted to buy my .com but it was $10,000; well, I was able to purchase the domain name at the beginning of 2019, it was on Jan 18th when I purchased the domain and by that time the price was $25,000.

In only 2 years the value of the .com increased by over $15,000 and I knew then that we couldn't lose the ability to get the .com so we bit the bullet and purchased it.

My biggest challenge was trying to figure out if I should just redirect the .com into the .co or if I should redirect the .co  into the .com and update all of the URLs.

Well, I decided that I wanted the site to be a “.com” and basically redirected the entire “.co” into the “.com” and for a few months, this move tanked my traffic. 

As you can see, everything was transferred in February and that's when we started to see the referring domains decrease.

We also started hitting over 300 visitors per day right before we made the switch; which was awesome for our industry but as you can see below, it was like starting all over again. 

Once we made the change our traffic was cut to less than half and we were back to the 100 to 125 visitors per day.  Of course, this completely crushed my soul; but I knew I needed to make the change and that it would all work out.

We pushed everything into overdrive for 2019 and our goal was to have over 500 referring domain; which we hit before the end of 2019. 

The Numbers 

I know you all want to know the numbers and see how it all turned out so below I want to give you more insight. 

Traffic

We are seeing double-digit year over year growth in our traffic and this is caused by getting backlinks, internal linking, and creating new content.

Going into 2019 a bit more you can see that the traffic grew slowly and of course we had some ups and downs from all of the Google updates but in general, the traffic started to really shoot up in September. 

But it gets even better:

For 2020 we are already crushing it and in January already have a 763.30% increase in traffic compared to January of 2019. 

Rankings

I also want to give you an idea of where I left off before the change from the “.co” and where we are today with the “.com.”

This was a snapshot taken a few months after the transfer had been completed for simplyinsurance.co

The above screenshot was taken on January 24th 2020.

Revenue

You can see that we had a drastic change in revenue from 2017 to 2019. 

We started to hit our $1,000 to $1,200 per day in November of 2019 and are still in the growing process.  My goal for 2020 is to hit $600,000 in revenue. 

Final Thoughts

Building a blog in the insurance space is very complicated because it is super competitive; my average KD is around 70, and I am going up against companies that have been around for decades. 

It’s a challenge going up against their link profile; however, the good news is that my competition doesn’t seem to be scrappy, and I am building my links at a faster pace.

If you want to have multiple products it's probably best to get 1 product to be killing it and then add the other products slowly.

The most important thing to remember is that it all takes time, don’t give up and never stop… If you stop, you 100% won’t be successful.