Jitendra Vaswani, a professional blogger, author, and educational speaker, is one of the best known experts in affiliate marketing in India. As a member of the Sellvia affiliate program (here’s his amazing Sellvia review!), an AliDropship affiliate, and avid supporter of numerous programs around the world, he has gained truly precious experience to share. We’re excited to have a chat!
First things first: how did you start doing affiliate marketing in India?
The story is simple: I found out that people were making money on the internet and got curious. How could they do it through affiliate marketing, sponsor reviews, and such? If they can do it, I can also do it!
That’s how I started looking for answers on Google and eventually launched my first online blog. My whole affiliate marketing journey began at that point, in 2013.
What was it like to start doing affiliate marketing from scratch, with no experience?
To be honest, when I was starting out, I didn’t have enough money. I started saving money from my job salary: every single dollar was going into my blog. That’s the right thing to do, I think: if you really want to make things happen, you need to have so much dedication, patience, and consistency! It’s all about consistency. If you have it, you’re going to achieve your goals!
How were you learning about affiliate marketing in India? What can you recommend?
As a beginner, you can easily start learning online through Google and YouTube. You don’t have to buy any kind of paid courses, you don’t have to learn from any guru by buying a webinar or something. Just look online: everything is available for free! There are even great affiliate instruments that are either free to use or at least have a free trial, for example, Ahrefs, Semrush, Jasper.ai and Copyscape.
When I was starting out, I was following Neil Patel, Zac Johnson, and more pro digital marketers to learn SEO from them. I was looking at their example to learn how to make a proper page, how to get backlinks, how to optimize my blog, how to optimize my content to rank higher on Google, how to get traffic from Google – all the basic SEO strategies.
They were and are my role models – I met Neil Patel personally during an industry conference and gave him my book!
It’s all about making connections. He gave me advice on my blog, said that I needed to work on content and UI/UX because it sucked 😀 And I’m thankful for the feedback! If you really want to grow, you need to take criticism. In 2 months, I redesigned the whole content strategy with my copywriters and made the changes. I saw a great spike in traffic after that!
Speaking of results, how well is affiliate marketing working for you?
When I started this blog, it took me almost 6 months to start earning regular and solid money. I was putting out content every day because it’s all about consistency.
At some moment, I got $500 or $600 from a sponsored post and I was very happy to see that someone really wants to sponsor review content in my blog. This was my first big income – earlier, I was making about $50 a month with this blog.
So, this first big revenue was a huge leap and it gave me confidence to keep going: from $600 to $1,000, then – from $1,000 to $2,000 per month. In about 6 months I was able to reach a stable $1,000/month income. Then, I left my job and started focusing on this online thing only.
Currently, I make a 5-figure monthly income from my affiliate blogs.
My goal is to hit a 6-figure profit – the blogs are growing by 10-20% every month.
Tell us more about your affiliate blogs and the work behind them!
Right now, I’m handling about 25 blogs. About 20 of them are about making money online, software reviews, product reviews – I find tools that people use and cover them, plus promote some coupons. That’s how I’m boosting my ranking for review-related keywords and share informative content on products important to users worldwide.
I have about 20 people in my team: copywriters, SEO specialists, and there are three business partners working with me right now.
During the pandemic, many of the industry events got canceled, like conferences and meetings. Many companies had to shut down their affiliate programs. So, me and my team decided to invest more in creating more niche blogs in 2020-2021. It worked: we increased our revenue greatly even though we didn’t have any personal-level business meetings and lost some of affiliate payouts.
What a great strategy! Any advice for fellow affiliates who are just starting out?
First, decide what kind of niche you really want to work in. You need to be laser-focused in this niche: for example, my expertise is in making money online and review sites. I know what keywords I need to be targeting, what people are looking up online, what kinds of content I can offer. Plus, it gives an understanding of competitors.
Start creating lots and lots of informative content in this niche. With a new niche website, begin with insights that have value for the readers. Don’t go for reviews straight away: remember Google can’t trust your site yet.
That’s why it’s a good idea to invest in expired domains if you want to grow your affiliate marketing site through SEO. These will give you a good ranking boost because they already have solid backlinks and are recognized by Google. There are sites like seo.domains and spamzilla where you can easily buy expired domains after seeing and checking their metrics.
And the #1 advice I can give everyone: whatever thing you’re starting out – affiliate marketing, ecommerce – stay away from negative people! For a year I wasn’t sharing a thing with my family because they weren’t very comfortable with the idea of me being an internet entrepreneur. 😀 My father found it out only a year later when he saw my bank balance and asked “How are you making that much money, a six-figure number, it’s not possible with your job!”. I proved everyone wrong because everyone was against this idea when I was leaving my job, saying that digital marketing had no future. I chose this online marketing field and now I’m living the dream!
What an inspiration! Doing affiliate marketing in India turned out to be life-changing for Jitendra! The best part? Anyone can follow in his footsteps!
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