Andrew Fiebert runs a personal finance site called Listen Money Matters (LMM) that he started back in December 2012. It gets about 425,000 visitors a month.
About 75% of the site’s revenue comes from affiliate marketing, which earns roughly $29,000 a month.
1The Struggles of a Large Affiliate Site
LMM is a substantial affiliate site with a lot of links. In the past, Andrew had tried plugins like SimpleURL, which only cloaked his links.
But he had no idea where they were or if they were monetized with his partner sites.
He had to let the team know which links to use, the products to promote, always watching what was being published.
He would catch issues and then update them on how to approach things going forward.
It was cumbersome to announce to the team every time we created (or lost) an affiliate relationship and what we should be focusing on.
In the personal finance space, many companies offer similar products to Listen
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His team didn’t have a process for improving affiliate link clicks or commissions. They had to take wild guesses and occasionally landed on the right things. However, they rarely understood why.
They were able to get some click data in Google Analytics and started to learn things like age groups that would perform well with specific affiliates. But that was all they knew.
Lasso lets you showcase your affiliate links in beautifully designed displays. When your visitors see a descriptive product box, they're more likely to click because they know where they're going.
2The Team With The Right Tools
After seven years of running and growing the site, it became harder to manage. With thousands of affiliate links and no way to control them, Andrew struggled to increase his affiliate revenue.
After searching for a solution to his problem, he had this to say about Lasso:
It was the only tool letting me manage my inventory of monetized links from a single dashboard without having to dive into specific articles.
It allowed his team to focus on creating great articles while he focused on making sure what they create earns
He specifically mentioned how much he loves the Affiliate Opportunities in Lasso. It helps him find both unmonetized domain mentions of existing affiliates and keyword mentions to
But surprisingly, Lasso showed him what affiliate products were out of stock. That was the game-changer.
Andrew and his team operate another significant affiliate website that’s huge during Christmas, and things sell out all the time.
Before Lasso, they played a whack-a-mole game trying to guess which affiliate links were out of stock on Amazon.
But now they’re immediately alerted when things run out, can keep articles up-to-date, and
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3Double the Affiliate Revenue
This turnaround happened quickly. Andrew saw noticeable gains in affiliate link click-through rates and conversions after installing Lasso. That said, it hasn’t been a silver bullet.
He said, “text links work great in some scenarios, and rich displays work great in others.” They used Lasso’s Google Analytics integration to learn how to make the best use of each.
After using Lasso for about two months, Andrew and his team were able to more than double their affiliate revenue by understanding which partners performed best (and rolling them out site-wide).
They also used Lasso to find unmonetized mentions of existing partners and built new relationships they immediately monetized across the entire website.
Plus, The Listen
Andrew mentioned there aren’t any advanced tools out there compared to Lasso. Everything feels like it was built ten years ago for entry-level websites.
These tools were great when starting, but growth would’ve been quicker if integrating a pro-level tool like ours.
Matt Giovanisci
Matt Giovanisci has been a self-employed online business owner for over a decade building four profitable websites along the way. His #1 rule is to have fun, make money, and ignore "best practices." Ok, so three rules.