What You Will Learn
- How Jon Made his fortune
- How to make money without links
- Jon’s top tips for display ads
*Please excuse the audio and video quality of this Podcast. Due to a recording issue, it is presented at a decreased resolution this week. We’ll be back to our usual quality next week though!
97.7% of affiliates hate link building.
The other 2.3% are sociopaths who enjoy talking to complete strangers.
I joke.
But the truth is that getting backlinks is the least fun part of affiliate marketing for most of you.
The fun stuff is niche research, finding keywords, choosing products, designing a site, etc.
So, the question weāre going to tackle today isā¦
Can you build profitable affiliate sites without building backlinks?
The short answer is āYesā.
But, as with most things in life, itās not as straightforward as it sounds.
It takes YEARS
In my recent interview with Jon Dykstra, he revealed that he never intentionally builds backlinks to any of his sites.
And the guy earns at least US$70,000 per month, from 17 sites in total.
Heās also a one-man operation, outsourcing the majority of his content creation.
But ā and this is the real kicker – he has to wait at least two years for his sites to naturally gather enough backlinks to rank.
So he earns VERY little for the first 24 months from each new site.
And thatās the cost of his no link building strategy: Time.
This completely goes against the instant gratification mindset thatās so common today.
And thatās where you need to ask yourself: Are you willing to wait this long in exchange for not having to deal with link building?
How to build a no link building site
Letās say that you either canāt afford to or donāt want to build backlinks.
How would you actually go about building a no-links site?
Hereās what I learned from talking to Jon Dykstra for over 1 hour on his process
1 – Produce LOTS of content
Sure, Jon does not build links but my gosh does he produce lots of content.
His biggest sites get multiple new posts per day.
He outsources most of the work to Writer Access and Text broker but also has some in-house staff thatās more specialized.
To give you an idea of how much he invests, his latest income report states he spent $7,641 in August on content across his site portfolio.
2 – Target super low competition keywords
If you donāt build links your chance to rank for competitive keywords is small.
So he just doesnāt even try.
Instead, he goes for low difficulty keywords on Ahrefs (KD 0-5)
He also confirmed something weāve been saying for ages:
Even keywords with ā10ā searches per month on Ahrefs can generate thousands of visits.
And because your hit rate is high, itās often better to target these than more popular keywords.
You can easily filter for these inside Ahrefs and quickly pick the most relevant keywords.
3 – Donāt bother with social media except for maybe Pinterest
I know you probably read that you need to diversify your traffic on some Facebook group.
Usually, thatās the kind of advice given by keyboard jockeys that didnāt achieve much.
The truth is, most people who succeed focus.
You get outsized returns for being great at one thing vs average at many.
Thatās why for early stages sites, both Jon and us donāt recommend you bother with social media.
Pinterest being a bit of an exception because it works like a search engine and sends lots of traffic to your site.
4 – Monetize with ads
If you have been following this guide so far, youāre like, waitā¦
Why is the keyword section so light?
Thatās because Jon monetizes with ads almost exclusively.
Thatās right, he makes some money from affiliate marketing but the bulk of his money is display ads.
Thatās why he doesnāt really need to bother with intent or most other things affiliate marketers worry about.
The model is simple:
Just get people on the page and let Adthrive, Mediavine or Ezoic (the best ad networks) pay you for it.
5 – Rince and repeat
Thatās really the gist of it.
Jon is not a guy who likes to complicate things.
And you canāt really blame him for it when it works so well for him.
The rest, is just time, patience, and faith in your project.
Final thoughts: did Jon convince me?
So Jonās story is great and all but you know me.
Iām not easily convinced and I just tell you what I really think of pretty much anything we report on.
So do I think this is a viable model and you should do this?
I think it can work… with a lot of patience.
I mean, Jon proves it with his success.
But then again, if it takes 3 years for a site to take off, where will Google be in 3 years?
What are the chances my site is still relevant then and not affected by some crazy updates?
Itās a risk for sure.
I think if you want to go for this model, Iād at least learn how to pick up dropped domains so you start with a base of authority.
Or even buy existing sites that have some authority than just ignore link building.
In my opinion, the results will be much faster for not much more money if you consider the price of content.
Still, Jonās story is impressive and itās well worth watching the full interview if you want to learn more about his interesting model.
You know where to go for the full episode!
By the way. Do you want us to do more interviews? Who would you like to see on the show? Drop a comment on our YouTube channel or send us an email!
FatStacks Resources
- Fat Stacks
- Fat Stacks Income Reports
- Fat Stacks Lasso review
- Fat Stacks Answer The Public Premium Review
- John Dykstra’s Display Ads article (AH.com)
- Cyclebaron (One of Jon’s sites)