Kieron Donoghue has been in the affiliate game for years, most widley known for is PPC work on the likes of Broadband and mobile phones he now writes one of the biggest Affiliate Marketing blogs in the UK.

Kieron’s blog shot to fame when he posted a copy of his bank statement online showing the earnings that are possible in the business.

Right first off I know you have spoken about it on Fraser’s Podcast but do you want to take us through how you got into affiliate marketing?

In 2000 I got made redundant from the job I had. So whilst looking around for a new job I thought I would teach myself a new skill, so I bought a book on how to use Microsoft FrontPage. From there I built my very first website
- albeit very basic, and then it was just a natural progression to see how I could then monetise it.

How have you seen affiliate marketing change in your time?

I guess the biggest change is how popular and mainstream it is now. I remember back in the early days of Google AdWords there were so many opportunities to buy cheap traffic. Now, its much more difficult to do so as even the smallest of niches get filled quickly - due to the volume of advertisers now out there.

How many people do you have working for you? Do you work from home? What sort of hours do you work?

I don’t have any people working for me. Instead I contract out development, design and content writing as and when I need it. I work from home although earlier this year I did rent an office, just to see if I would like it. I didn’t. It felt like having a “real” job and that I had to go to work every day. So now I’m back working from home, from my study and enjoying the freedom this allows. As for a typical day, I usually sit down in front of my PC at 9am, them work until early afternoon. I then go to the gym (not enough), meet friends or even just shopping! I then tend to work a bit more in the evening. Of course some days I don’t work at all and some days I may be sat in front of the PC for 14 hours. But the great thing is I choose my own hours.

Your Blog seems to have gone from strength to strength, if you were going to give advice to other bloggers what would it be?

Write about something you know about and be unique. There are thousands of “make money online” blogs out there which serve no purpose other than to make the author’s money. They are fill of the same old “how to” guides and rubbish that has been regurgitated all over the web. So instead blog about something that you are knowledgeable and passionate about, no matter what it is. And try to be a little different too, don’t be “dry”, try to inject some of your personality into the blog.

What do you think were the defining moments when building traffic for the blog?

To be honest, apart from one or two link building competitions and the odd sponsored review - which were all done as an experiment, I haven’t actually gone out to try to build traffic. I’m happy to say that the blog traffic levels are where they are today due to mostly organic growth via word of mouth.

Obviously you got a lot of online press after posting your earnings, how much do you think this helped build traffic? Do you think it is still possible for newbie affiliates to earn this much with the margins being much harder to come by than they were in the past?

It still helps traffic to this day, I’m still getting referrals from the SitePoint forums thread every week. Obviously that was one of the reasons I did it, and to raise my profile in the USA.

There is no doubt in my mind that new affiliates can still earn big money in this industry, they just need to look harder for the opportunities and think outside the box. Not easy, but most definitely still possible.

Do you put more effort into building blog traffic or monetising that traffic?

I don’t put much effort into either to be honest .As I mentioned above I do very little to build blog traffic, I could probably increase it quite a lot by working on this but I’m more than happy with the organic growth at the moment. Same applies to monetising the blog, I’ve been fortunate enough that I get quite a few advertising queries almost weekly, some of which turn into genuine paying advertisers which is great. One thing I won’t do though is advertise any sites/services that I wouldn’t use myself or recommend personally to a friend. A good example of this is the link-purchasing site TNX.net who are plastered over loads of blogs at the minute. They’ve emailed me a few times asking to advertise, but after looking into their services I couldn’t hand-on-heart recommend them to anyone, so I turned them away. I think its important to only associate yourself with advertisers you would be happy to work with.

I have noticed you pull out of the PPC arena quite a bit over the last 6 months, specifically the broadband market, what was the reasoning behind this?

The problem with the Broadband and Mobile sector is that in recent times the big suppliers (Orange, AOL, Virgin etc.) have ploughed more and more of their ad budget into paid search. This meant that click prices of £3 to £5 were very common for top placements and margins were squeezed for affiliates. This coupled with the fact that I began to see managing these huge campaigns as more of a “chore” than something I enjoyed meant it was time to pull out. I was one of the first, if not the first affiliate in the UK to promote broadband back in 2000 and have made a good living out of it.
But I think its important to know when to move onto other areas when it gets to the point when margins and profits become too small. And like I say, I really wanted to go into a different direction as I felt I was getting really bored of managing huge PPC campaigns day in day out. I still do a lot of PPC now, but its spread out much wider over many more sectors.

Do you think affiliates and the affiliate industry has become too dependent on PPC? Where do you see new revenue streams coming from?

No, not really. I know of many sites and long standing affiliates who don’t touch PPC and enjoy a really successful business and good living from natural traffic. This is the area that I’ve been trying to conquer over the last year as for me it is a totally new concept to make money from “free”
traffic, and a challenge that I have really enjoyed. In order to secure new revenue streams for my business I’ve been branching out into all sorts of new sectors and trying to build a network of quality sites that have regularly updated fresh content and are actually useful to visitors! The same couldn’t be said for some of my PPC sites back in the day

Also, as well as hosting affiliate links on my sites I also try to monetise them with tenancy deals. By building big “branded” sites that get good traffic I find I can almost name my price on some ad slots and that brings in a whole other revenue stream to compliment affiliate sales. Of course there are always CPC and contextual ad services to try out too.

I have done a few interviews now, but please leave me comments with any suggestions along with questions for Kieron. If you would like to be interviewed and think you have something interesting to stay drop me a line and we can have a chat.

Links:

Kieron’s Blog

Podcast with Fraser

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