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The affiliate marketing industry has grown incredibly over the last decade and is not only made up of the voucher, cashback, and loyalty sites. There are numerous small affiliate publishers that contribute to the growth of affiliate programmes and are extremely valuable to the channel.
I frequently hear from potential affiliates that affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work for them, although when I look at their sites/blogs I find missed monetization opportunities in existing content. Having a substantial amount of traffic is not a prerequisite to monetize your site; in fact, there are small affiliates that can do very well from affiliate marketing.
Today I want to share with you five small affiliate publishers that are doing it right in their own niche. These sites have their own identity, quality and thoughtful content and above all, they know their audience very well.
1. The Drop Date
The Drop Date focuses on sneaker release dates, providing links (affiliate links) to products when they become available. It was founded in 2012 and is now counting 240k+ Instagram followers, 200k Facebook fans and an average of 500k monthly pageviews.
Their objective is to build awareness and generate demand just before sneakers launch in the market. They make it easy and addictive for sneaker fanatics to simply click and buy, making it one of the most influential affiliates for the biggest footwear retailers.
2. Bargain Buys for Busy Mums
Jody Leggett and Amanda Viner founded Bargain Buys for Busy Mums the biggest mums community of over 500,000 parents that share the same goal; to save money!
They started as a simple Facebook Group that has now grown into the biggest parenting community in the UK and most of their traffic is from social interaction. Their biggest affiliate programmes, just to name a few, are Amazon, eBay, Argos and Tesco.
They publish the best deals to their audience, even if it means sacrificing an affiliate commission, as their main objective is to help parents save money.
Bargain Buys for Busy Mums, is a great example of a community purely built on the strength of its content and the community built around it.
3. Best Mattresses
Best-matresses.co.uk ‘s mission is simple, to help you sleep better! It was created by a husband who found himself needing to purchase a new bed, he couldn’t find a clear buying guide and so decided to create one himself!
Best-mattresses.co.uk purely focus on mattresses, in fact, you can find reviews for almost every kind of mattress on this site.
The main takeaway from this site is its niche focus, dedicating a lot of content to just one product. They’ve focused on the mattress niche and created the ultimate resource for any mattress buyer. They publish buying guides, product reviews and comparison charts to help readers purchase the best mattress for their needs.
As you can see from SimilarWeb, most of their traffic comes from organic search. This shows that if you focus on a niche audience, it’s far more likely that Google will favour your content over a larger site when it comes to that audience. Best-mattresses.co.uk has done exactly that by only focusing on mattress reviews.
4. Make a Website Hub
Web hosting is one of the most competitive niches on the web. Makeawebsitehub.com was founded by Jamie Spencer, a dad from Kendal, Cumbria back in 2015 with the aim to help people get started with creating their own blog or website.
The strength of makeawebsitehub.com lies in its exceptionally useful and thoughtful content, on a variety of topics, not only about web hosting but general blogging advice as well.
Even though the site was built in the UK, most of the traffic is coming from the US and the site now has more than 1 million page views per month.
5. Weather2Travel.com
Weather2Travel is not new to the affiliate industry, in fact, they are regularly seen at affiliate marketing events and travel get-togethers. They have the likes of Expedia, Travelodge, Hotels.com, Holiday Extras, among others, featured on their site.
The aim of Weather2Travel is to help their audience find their next travel destination in the sun. Offering information on temperature, sunshine hours, average rainfall and providing the best travel deals and discounts, even if Weather2Travel has no affiliate deal with the merchant.
More than 20% of their traffic, in fact, comes from direct sources which means they have a strong brand and people visit them because they trust their site.
Being a travel affiliate, it’s very important to always stay up to date with new technology, trends and customer behavior and that’s exactly what Weather2Travel is doing.
These five small but mighty affiliates are an example of how focusing on delivering real value and understanding an audience can bring great results. I am sure we’ll come across more and more small affiliate sites in the coming years and perhaps inspire new ones to join the affiliate marketing industry.
