Nine years ago, I ran a small online shop selling digital automotive gauges called digital-auto-gauges.com. The store wasn’t very successful but I think it had around $20,000 per year in revenue and $4,000 in profit. It took a ton of time to run and I probably only made a few dollars per hour on it after splitting that with my business partner Josh (who now owns his own successful dentistry practice).
I had built the site originally on ZenCart, which was a horrible ecommerce platform and made Josh and I’s lives nightmares. So after a year or two, I did a ton of research into what the best ecommerce platforms of the time were. I ended up switching over to BigCommerce after completing my research.
On a whim, I set up an affiliate account with all of the ecommerce stores I reviewed on my site. Those affiliate links now make $3,000 per month and have consistently helped buoy my bottom line for years. Affiliate links were an unexpected method of making me a lot of money.