One Person Business: This Is Why I'm Broke
The Internet's Mall
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This Is Why I'm Broke (TIWIB), created by Adam Freedman, is a website that lists cool random stuff found in the vast internet shopping world.
The site was born in 2011. Adam started the site because he followed similar websites and thought he “could improve on their experience with a better website design and higher quality products presented”.
On the website, you’ll find endless lists of products. At first, it might look a lot like all the other listing websites on the Internet. But it is not. Adam did something different: he carefully chose the products he wanted to list, and also made sure they had quirky and non-boring descriptions that would pull people in.
Under the hood, all the products are basically affiliate links that point to other e-commerce platforms. If a user clicks a product and ends up buying it, TIWIB gets paid a fee for the referral. Lots of interesting products x Good traffic = Nice payouts.
In the early days of the website, after it gained some traction, the estimated revenue was around $20k/month just from Amazon alone, which accounted for 66% of their income. Add other affiliate programs on top of this, plus ads, and you get a nice and chunky amount. Nowadays TIWIB gets about 2M unique visitors per month. Assuming a good click rate (let’s say 20%), and an average conversion rate (maybe 5%), that’s about 20k referral purchases.
Although a website like this requires some grunt work at first (sourcing the products, preparing the listing, etc), it can really grow quite nicely if focused on the right target. And, if done right, automating these processes or subcontracting someone to do so wouldn’t be hard.
If you want to learn more from Adam himself, he did a Reddit AMA almost 10 years ago, where he answers all different sorts of questions.
Looking to get into affiliate marketing?
Here is a podcast for you
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Until next time - Guilherme
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Great one person business. And fun too. Good find!