Cryptocurrency has exploded in popularity in recent years, with more and more people looking to invest in digital assets. This presents a huge opportunity for affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs to capitalize on this growing trend by building affiliate websites that share content about cryptocurrency coins, exchange platforms, and trading platforms.
By creating high-quality, informative content and strategically promoting relevant crypto products and services, it's possible to generate substantial passive income streams reaching six or even seven figures annually in this niche.
In this article, we'll break down proven strategies and real-world case studies to show you exactly how to build highly profitable crypto affiliate sites. We shall also share insights from Kasra Dash, an affiliate marketer who owns a number of crypto affiliate marketing websites and monetizes them to 6 figures per year.
The key elements we'll cover include:
- Establishing topical authority through content clusters
- Increasing domain authority with linkable assets
- Improving E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness)
- Using AI to generate and optimize content at scale
- Effective keyword research and competitor analysis
- Monetization models and affiliate programs
- Measuring and scaling results
By implementing the tactics laid out in this article, you can position yourself to ride the crypto wave and build highly lucrative affiliate sites in this exciting vertical. Let's dive in!
Establishing topical authority
One of the most important aspects of ranking well in Google and driving targeted organic traffic is establishing strong topical authority. You want your site to be seen as an expert resource on all things crypto.
Kasra Dash, explains that the key is creating clusters of interlinked pages and articles covering your subject matter in-depth:
"To scale an SEO website, what you need to be doing is you need to be creating a cluster of pages that are talking about your subject. The more articles you have on a certain subject and the more factual articles that you have, essentially it'll also build out trust as well."
For a site focused on cryptocurrency, your content strategy might include:
- Top of funnel informational content like "What is Bitcoin?" or "Beginner's Guide to Crypto Investing"
- Mid-funnel content comparing different coins, wallets, or exchanges
- Bottom of funnel "best of" roundups and reviews promoting your affiliate offers
The goal is to have a variety of optimized pages targeting keywords at each stage of the customer journey. Informational content brings in top of funnel traffic and establishes authority, while commercial content converts that traffic into affiliate commissions.
Here's an example of what a topical cluster targeting "best crypto wallets" might look like:
The central/ pillar "best crypto wallets" page targeting the main high-volume keyword is supported by in-depth articles (cluster pages) comparing different wallet types, explaining key features, and addressing common questions and concerns.
This interlinking helps boost the topical authority of the main money page. Kasra Dash elaborates:
"Once you've got all of these [supporting] articles, essentially this will rank higher and then this, the overall subject will rank higher as well... All of these are supporting articles to help you rank higher. For best crypto wallets is the main, primary keyword you almost want to come across as the expert friend."
This content model can be replicated for any affiliate niche - best running shoes, top betting sites, etc. The key is to cover the topic comprehensively and position your site as the go-to resource.
Using AI for content creation
Creating such in-depth topical clusters can seem daunting, but tools like ChatGPT and Google's Generative AI make it easier than ever to generate high-quality content at scale.
Kasra provided this prompt that you can plug into ChatGPT to get an outline of supporting articles for any given keyword:
"I need to rank for [keyword]. Give me some top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel supporting articles."
For "best crypto wallets", it will generate suggestions like:
Top of the funnel
- Types of crypto wallets
- How do crypto wallets work?
- Crypto wallet security 101
Middle of the funnel
- Hardware wallets vs software wallets
- Custodial vs non-custodial wallets
- Crypto wallet features to look for
Bottom of the funnel
- Best crypto wallets for beginners
- Most secure crypto wallets
- Best crypto wallets for Android/iOS
You can then either hand these topics off to a content writer or use AI tools to auto-generate the articles. Kasra recommends a WordPress plugin called AutoBlogging.ai which can bulk import your keywords and publish the AI-generated posts directly to your site.
While the AI content likely won't be perfect right out of the gate, it provides a strong foundation that you can have human writers go in and optimize further. Look for opportunities to expand on topics, incorporate additional semantically related keywords, and break out subtopics into their own dedicated posts.
Scaling domain authority
Establishing topical authority through comprehensive content clusters lays the on-page SEO foundation, but to really take your affiliate site to the next level, you need strong domain authority. This comes from earning quality backlinks from other high-authority websites in your niche.
As Kasra explains, "When a high authority website links to you, it's essentially like a vouch... we would essentially get more clout and we would rank a little bit higher for our keywords."
One effective link building strategy Kasra shared is called "link bait." This involves creating an interesting, newsworthy piece of content on your site, then pitching it out to journalists and publications.
For example, one of Kasra's sites published an article called "Where the Most Crypto Millionaires Stay in the World." While not directly promoting any affiliate offers, this type of content has viral potential.
By reaching out to relevant media outlets, the post ended up getting featured in major publications like Business Insider, Rolling Stone, and Yahoo News. Within 48 hours it had attracted:
- Over 100 high-authority backlinks
- 2 million impressions
- 400,000 referral visits
While this linkbait piece itself may not directly make money, you can strategically link from it to your commercial pages that do. So a post on where crypto millionaires live could link to your "best crypto exchanges" or "best crypto credit cards" affiliate reviews.
This helps funnel the link equity from those gained backlinks to your money pages, increasing their authority and rankings. Kasra shared an example where adding contextual links from linkbait articles to an affiliate page resulted in a significant boost in organic traffic to the money page:
Another way to gain links and brand mentions is by connecting with journalists and doing interviews on podcasts and publications. Kasra shared the example of his business partner James Dooley, an SEO entrepreneur who they pitched to various online media outlets with a hook about being a "top paid digital landlord."
This resulted in features in tons of publications with headlines like "Meet James Dooley, a Top Entrepreneur and Digital Real Estate Investor", all linking back to his site. While James may not be a household name (yet), this PR campaign made him look like an established authority.
As Kasra notes, this third-party validation is key: "It's all fine and well being the best brain surgeon in the world, but if nobody else actually is saying that you're the best brain surgeon in the world, nobody's gonna trust you. And Google's also not gonna rank your website higher."
Improving E-E-A-T
Building on the importance of establishing authority, a more recent focus in SEO is E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google wants to rank content from legitimate experts, not anonymous nobodies.
Kasra jokes about how he ranked for keywords like "hottest guy in Northampton" which attracted some funny looks from dates, but didn't exactly scream credibility or make him money. Contrast that to a well-known figure like David Goggins in the fitness space - his years of experience and verifiable track record make his content inherently more trustworthy to both searchers and Google.
Some key ways Kasra recommends boosting your site's E-E-A-T include:
- Getting quoted and mentioned (both linked and unlinked) on other authoritative sites
- Having a detailed About/Bio page establishing your background and credentials
- Leveraging personal branding (Kasra has his name on all his projects which lends credibility)
- Appearing in video content, podcasts, and industry events
- Connecting your site to active, high-quality social profiles
- Earning high-authority links from respected publications
- Clearly displaying contact information, author bios, and ways to get in touch
As you build up E-E-A-T and become a known entity in your niche, your affiliate site gains more and more inherent authority. Eventually, you may even reach the coveted "YMYL" (your money or your life) status - where Google trusts you to give sound financial or life advice.
Keyword research and competitor analysis
Of course, for any of this to matter, you need to make sure you're targeting the right keywords in the first place. With affiliate marketing, it's all about balancing search volume with buyer intent.
You want to target keywords that get enough searches to drive meaningful traffic, but also indicate the searcher is in a "transactional" mindset, ready to invest in the products or services you're promoting.
Some good keyword research tools and tactics include:
- SEMrush and Ahrefs for search volume, difficulty, and competitor data
- Exploring the "People Also Ask" and related searches in Google for content ideas
- Mining your competitors' top pages in Ahrefs or Google Search Console
- Checking keyword lists from your affiliate programs for product names and buying terms
- Using ChatGPT for related keyword suggestions
Another sneaky competitor research tactic Kasra shared is scraping their XML sitemaps. These are essentially a roadmap of every single indexable page on their sites.
You can access these by adding /sitemap.xml to the end of most domain names. Paste that URL into the ImportXML function of Google Sheets (Kasra provided a template here) and it will pull in all their page titles.
You can then eyeball this for keyword ideas or even hand the whole list over to AI content tools to mass generate similar blog posts. Of course, put your own unique spin on it - the goal isn't to copy, but to reverse engineer what's working for the competition.
Monetization and tracking results
Once you've built out your site with linkable assets and monetizable affiliate content, it's time to turn on the taps and start driving revenue. The beautiful thing about affiliate marketing is you can promote a wide variety of products and services from multiple companies.
Some of the most lucrative affiliate opportunities in the crypto space include:
- Crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, FTX, etc.
- Crypto wallets like Ledger, Trezor, Metamask
- Crypto credit cards
- Crypto trading and charting software
- Crypto tax services like TaxBit or CoinTracker
- Crypto investing newsletters and courses
- NFT and metaverse projects
Look for affiliate offers with generous payouts (some pay hundreds of dollars per referral), recurring commissions, and strong brand recognition. You want to promote companies you actually believe in and can authentically recommend.
To measure how your pages and offers are performing, dig into Google Search Console and Google Analytics. See which pages are getting the most impressions and clicks, then optimize them to drive more traffic.
Look at metrics like time on page and bounce rate to gauge engagement. And most importantly, track your conversions and commissions coming through your various affiliate dashboards.
If a page is getting lots of traffic but not converting, test out different offers, placements, bonuses and calls-to-action. And don't be afraid to prune or noindex underperforming content that's diluting your site's topical focus.
Conclusion
Building highly profitable crypto affiliate sites won't happen overnight, but by putting in the work to create great content, earn authority-boosting links, and promote relevant products, you can absolutely reach that coveted 6-figure and beyond mark.
Focus on matching search intent, creating the most comprehensive resource on your topic, and keeping the user experience front of mind. By constantly measuring and optimizing your key pages and offers, you can unlock powerful flywheel effects.
More traffic leads to more authority, which leads to more rankings, which leads to more revenue, which lets you invest in more/better content and links. Ride this viral loop to the moon!
Of course, never lose sight of the real goal - providing genuine value and solving problems for your audience. The better you serve your readers, the more Google will reward you with traffic.
