How to Make Money With Affiliate Sites?:Selling Credit Karma For $7 Billion

This article tells real example on how to make money with affiliate sites that you personally can build and sell for big profit and 7 main take ways from this useful example.

According to the New York TimesCredit Karma.com is about to avoid the IPO market, and sell to a financial firm for $7 Billion in 2020.

I’m talking about an affiliate site today. It earns commissions from promoting other people’s products by linking through a special link.

Ken Lin is the founder of Credit Karma. It is a website that has grown to have a lot of content and makes commissions from credit repair, loan, and other sites.

This site was just an ordinary affiliate site, but it changed significantly and has now become a reputable one.

It has been claimed that 1/3 of Americans have credit profiles and have used Credit Karma.

So that’s a lot of data they have collected on potential customers in the past years.

It has grown to be huge, But I don’t want to sugarcoat this either.

This an example here are really inspiring and there are lots of valuable lessons to be learned.

How to Make Money With Affiliate Sites?:7 Valuable Lessons From Selling Credit Karma For $7 Billion

7  Valuable Lessons

1- To build a big, successful business online, You don’t need to be a product owner

Did you know that over a decade ago, 8 of the top 10 ClickBank account owners were pure affiliates and didn’t even own their own products?

These were people who simply bought traffic to send it to their own website to earn money promoting other people’s product sales.

Credit Karma’s founder and his team have taken affiliate marketing to a whole new level.

2- Leads are worthy

As an affiliate, you can make a good chunk of cash without even having to collect subscribers’ data (Leads).

While it is true that the amount of money you can sell your site for is dependent on how much revenue you are making each day, this does not tell the whole story.… The more contact details and data you have on the leads, the better.

It is illegal to sell/share the data of leads separately, however if you sell your online business, then the purchaser is legally entitled to that information in the process.

Credit Karma collected information of millions of people so that it has huge data based of leads. This data based of leads is now worth billions (as part of selling process). The data based of leads included the names, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers and credit scores.

Affiliates at the beginning of having organic visitors should still follow the same principles. Collect email addresses, first names, and addresses. You can also have a newsletter follow-up sequence that builds relationships and promotes relevant products too.

This way, if you ever decide to sell your site, it is worth more money and you’ll make more from your site even if you never do sell it.

3- Track visitors on every page in your site using Facebook Pixels.

By looking at Credit Karma’s website, it can be seen that they have 2 Facebook pixels being dropped on every page.

That means they can now target Facebook and Instagram ads to people who have previously visited their website. That includes Facebook Pages, for example.

 Engaging with people occurs at many points throughout the conversion funnel and retargeting is a valuable tactic to keep in mind.

Using SEO, people visit your pages as it is, and if they aren’t on your email mailing list, then another great way to get them to come back is through retargeting ads.

Those who have been to your business before are much more likely to re-engage with you in the future and could even go on to make a purchase.

4- There are more shares on Free Software than other types of freebies.

The Credit Karma site actually started out as a very simple piece of software. While it may have been more complex to build what they have today,

People loved the idea and shared it with their friends. This resulted in a large number of organic visitors landing on their site. Combined with any deliberate attempts at driving traffic, this helped it to grow over time.

For it to be successful, it has to provide a genuine benefit that the other tools cannot offer. It also has to be significantly better than the other tools publicly available for free.

It can be challenging to come up with a superb idea for software that you’d like to make available for free. However, if you really do have the next big idea, it can prove to be more valuable than any other gift. Plus, people often don’t opt-in without giving anything in return.

5- A lot of money can be made in affiliate marketing.

Credit Karma may be an extreme case (potentially about to sell for $7 Billion), but new affiliates start out every year and can make good money.

This is not the case for everyone, It isn’t a push-button solution for everybody. Many people who are new to this coming in and succeeding really quickly, within just a few months.

You’ve surely noticed that there are many offers that have a high conversion rate available in many different niches (health, wealth, relationships, finance, education, and so on).

& this isn’t rocket science.

Here’s the equation for being a successful affiliate:

(Number of Leads x Conversion Rates x Avg$ Per Customer) – Ad Spend = Affiliate’s Profits

For instance,

If it costs you $1000 to send 2000 clicks to an offer, and that offer converts at 2%, and you earn on average $40 per sale:

Leads = 2000 clicks, Conversion Rate = 2% (0.02) , Avg $ Per Customer = $40, Ad Spend = $1000

Then 

(2000 x 0.02 × 40) – $1000

= $1600 – $1000

= $600 (This is the profit for the Affiliate)

If you as an affiliate are not in profit, then the following s are some of  reasons:

  • Either the traffic that you purchasing is wrong audience (and conversions will suffer),

  • The offer isn’t proven (conversions aren’t good),

  • Or the leads are very expensive,

  • Or low average commission $.

It’s true that affiliate marketing is about making money, but a lot of people get lost in figuring out how to do it. If you just stick to the basics and do things right, you’ll be able to make a lot of money without any extra effort.

Sometimes words in your ad or on your page can make all the difference. This can push your conversion rates from an average of 0.3% up to 2%. You can learn to be a professional writer, who creates profitable and powerful headlines for your ads.

On some occasions, you might need to test out different audiences to find the most effective options for your campaign.

And sometimes your job is simply to get leads, and then follow up with them via email using autoresponder series. It might not lead to immediate sales, but it can help you sell other products in the future.

6- How to make money with affiliate sites

Affiliate marketing is a popular business model for people who want to make money from the internet. It is also one of the most popular ways to start an online business.

You can make good money with affiliate sites. You can build affiliate site and start earning commissions and then selling it for huge profit, but you need to know what you are doing.

It is simple as 1,2,3,4,5,6

1) choose a niche

2) Build your website

3) Promoting your site

4) Making money

5) Sell your site

6) Making huge money

how to make money with affiliate sites

7- Dream big and take action

As difficult as it is to dream big, dreaming small also takes a lot of energy. You are not protecting yourself or others from taking chances.

Small dreams = Not exciting to carry on long term.

I don’t think people who know they’re going after the stars and reaching the top of a skyscraper are ever disappointed.

I also don’t see people reaching the sky, while they are aiming top of a skyscraper either.

It’s important to make sure that there are no ‘glass ceilings’ holding you back. Set a big, exciting goal that you can strive for in your life. Map a plan and work towards it every day.

Ken Lin has followed his passion and is now living an inspiring life. From a distance, it may have looked like nothing more than a dream, but he kept going nonetheless. And as time went by, his vision became clearer to him.

In my experience, the difference between those who get results in affiliate marketing and those who don’t is that the successful ones are always dreaming big and doing what it takes.

When mistakes are encountered, they see them as part of the process and know that they’ll learn from these encounters.

They are willing to take a lot of risks and mistakes will make them self-reflect, learn from the lesson, and eventually get that ball out of the park.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and that it helps inspire you to take action in your online marketing dreams.

In the coming weeks I’ll be sharing several more affiliate marketing tips with my newsletter subscribers.

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14 thoughts on “How to Make Money With Affiliate Sites?:Selling Credit Karma For $7 Billion”

  1. HI Safia,

    This is one of useful and inspiring article I never read long time. 

    I think that everyone is hoping to make money online but not everyone has the passion and patience to do it. I personally believe that affiliate marketing is a process, not an instant overnight success. And looking at your valuable lessons—especially number 3 is something that I would like to learn more about and try for my own site.

    Have great day! 

    Reply
    • Hi Sugiya,

      Yes, everyone heard about making money online wish to do so. The wishes are not enough and taking actions are very important.


      No. 3 is advanced stage of affiliate marketing, as you can retarget the previous visitors using the paid ads. It is such as re-hunting your visitors in smooth way.

      Have great day.

      Reply
  2. Hey safia thanks for this info!

    It’s good to enough that around ⅓ of Americans have credit karma as this makes it a little easier to target customers. As for affiliate marketing, it is a role which takes a while to see some success at times unless you are a pro, which also means many people give up easily, they don’t stick around to see their potential!

    Posts like these can be a big help to those who are unsure of what to expect!

    Reply
    • Hi Sariyah,

      Yes, that why I wrote this article to share this great example of success and have the 7 takeways.

      Happy to read your comment.

      have great day.

      Reply
  3. Hi There,

    Thank you for the interesting read. My daughter is looking for a way to make some extra money on line, she was thinking of trying Etsy and eBay selling used items, your article has given me an idea for her. It sounds like with a bit of hard work and some persistence you can make a few extra $ without actually selling a product, which is great.

    The key point for me in your interesting article was “To Build A Big, Successful Business Online, You Don’t Need To Be A Product Owner”

    Great info –  Thank you

    Mike

    Reply
    • Hi Mike,

      Good idea to sell used products too, if the items don’t cost money!

      Yes, I agree that affiliate marketing is all about working strategies nor owning any products.

      Great luck for your daughter.

      Have great start for her & nice day for both of you.

      Reply
  4. There were several points you made to promote affiliate marketing using Credit Karma as a mega example of how one company did this using the credit score niche. 

    It seems your focus was on using paid leads to promote affiliate products. The math showed a 60% return on investment. Pretty good results. However, you would need to have $1000 initially to earn $600. 

    At the end of your article, you went into details of the processes one can use to get leads and customers organically. I would strongly recommend that newbies go this route first to earn growing sales. Then use some of this to scale up one’s business with purchased and PPC leads. 

    Cheers.

    Edwin

    Reply
    • Hello Edwin,

      Yes, the newbies is better to focus first on generating organic traffics to get constant sales, and then start PPC to scaling up the business.

      Happy to have here.

      Have great day. 

       

      Reply
  5. I found this article to be super informative. As an affiliate marketer, there was a lot here that I did not know, especially numbers 2 and 3. Thanks for sharing these lessons! I think a lot of people don’t realize that success does not require a physical product within a physical location rather it can all be done online from the comfort of our home. This was so informative and motivating. Thanks again!

    Reply
  6. Hello Safia,

    Your blog is very interesting. I am still new to Affiliate Marketing. I’ve been building my site for a couple of months. I haven’t started earning yet, but I hope it’ll be soon. I don’t have much time for it as I have my regular job, but it is always about 4 hours a day that I spent working on it. Getting traffic is a little problematic for me at the moment, but I am getting over it. 

    Reading your blog, I think I am getting the idea of why I am not earning still. I think I see my mistake. Thank you, I am going to fix it now. 
    Thanks for the great blog!

    Reply
    • Hello my friend,

      I remembr that after 4 article I got my first two sales! I write from my heart and try to fill the gap within the market in my niche though.

      The traffic can come so easily using social media BUT keep writing content into yr website to rank higher in search engines.

      Remember: the earning is the results of helping your niche while you are enjoying doing that, if your reach this point, then the earning will be as flood in your bank.

      My first recommendation to get traffic was mentioned in this post, please, have a look and try and do not confuse yr self with different training approach and focus about one training until you get the required results.

      have nice earning ahead.

      Reply
  7. And this article has good information in it. As a newbie to affiliate marketing, this article has expanded my knowledge about PPC advertising. I appreciate this lesson. Many do not realize you can have success online without having a physical product and a physical location.

    You can see you reveal the process used to get leads and customers organically as well as focusing on paid leads to promote affiliate products. You showed the math with simplicity using $1000 as the base investment. The ROI according to your article is 60%. There is a great return for the investment.

    However, as a newbie, I choose to gain leads organically before using the PPC method. I do appreciate this article.

    Othnyel

    Reply
    • Hi Othnyel,

      It is very wise way to start having organic leads/traffic first and then use the PCC method to scale up your profit.

      Have nice days ahead.

      Reply

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