How affiliate marketing helped this blogger make over $100,000/month

Making Sense of Cents blog

As someone who has been writing a daily blog for twelve years now I’ve always been interested in how other bloggers do what they do. In particular, I’ve always been fascinated by people who can turn their blog into a full time income source, and in some cases, a seven-figure one.

One of the most successful bloggers out there that has done a stellar job turning her blog into a jaw-dropping $100,000+ per month income stream is Michelle from MakingSenseofCents.com.

How does she do it?

Well, this would turn into an epically long post if I tried to go through her entire journey from $0 to $1M+ per year so I’ll just share a few insights that might inspire other bloggers. First, like the title of my post says, a majority of Michelle’s income comes from affiliate marketing, here’s the breakdown:

What I think is particularly interesting about this chart is what a small little piece of the pie display advertising has become. As we all remember from the early days of the web, banner ads were all the rage, now – it’s pretty clear they certainly aren’t something many bloggers depend on.

For those of you who aren’t super familiar with affiliate marketing, the idea is – you promote a product or service and get a cut if someone signs up. Here’s an example from Michelle’s blog, it all starts with an informative blog post like this one:

(view the post)

Now this is actually an interesting and informative blog post. As you can see, it has had 356 shares, and I’d imagine it’s seen tens of thousands of reads. Anyone can read the article and benefit from the content…the magic of affiliate marketing is that within the content are links to services like Acorns, that can earn Michelle money if someone clicks on the link and signs up. Here’s an example from the post above:

See that link there that says “Acorns automatically invests for you” – click on that and you’ll end up at the Acorns website, sign-up for Acorns and Michelle makes money. Acorns runs their affiliate program through an affiliate marketing company called IgniteOPM – here’s the details.

As you can see, if someone opens and funds an account, the referrer gets $5.  If you read through Michelle’s blog you’ll find links like this all over the place and this is where 62% of her income comes from.

What I think has really made Michelle’s blog such a success is that it’s well written and interesting. While she might make money when someone clicks a link, that often happens at the same time that someone is reading an article and getting good information from it.

Congrats to Michelle on building one heck of an amazing blog and with it a lifestyle that most people dream of. If you want to learn more about how to start a blog yourself – well Michelle’s got that covered too, just click here to learn more.

Note: No affiliate links in this article and Michelle is not a sponsor of my blog, I just think what she’s doing is damn cool and thought other people would too!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton