Make money with guitar learning membership sites (19)
Hello everyone, first of all thanks for this fantastic forum, I've learned (and still learning) a lot.
One of my websites is in the guitar learning niche, and I monetize it promoting the two biggest online guitar lessons site of the web (you can find easily if you google them)
There are millions of websites that promote these two offers with the same (fake) reviews, apparently nowadays this is the standard way to monetize a guitar related site if you don't have your own product/lessons to sell.
I make some money with this two offers, until now I used only SEO and social network content to get visitors, as I'm very passionated in this niche and I'd like to take care of this site; now I'd like to scale the thing up, exploiting paid traffic (thinking about Adwords and Facebook Ads).
I'd like to get feedback about the offers: is it worth to go into paid traffic for promoting these 2 offers?
How much I could scale the thing? What angle do you suggest? The review site model seems to me over-abused, I'm pondering if this is the way to go or I could go creative and experiment alternatives.
Lots of questions I know, thanks in advance for every kind of suggestion 
Reviews work, that's why people use them, don't reinvent the wheel when not necessary. You can obviously take it one step further - make new reviews, make your own video review ...
Facebook, adwords, bing ... these are your obvious picks for paid traffic sources. I would also consider making a facebook page in case you don't have one yet and build an audience there by using paid posts. Not sure how well you are with guitar actually, but well played covers can get viral, that could help you grow your audience a lot.
You could also make your own mini-series : how to play the basic tones, make good videos for it, people could like it.
I'm not sure how much you could actually scale the 2 offers you mentioned, but I could see your own site grow quite a lot, especially with the help of properly managed FB page. Maybe try to look at this avenue first.
Using paid traffic to grow an email list might be a good idea too ... show them 2 or 3 of your short videos, and email them the rest ... simple lead magnet like this could dramatically improve the optin rates.
I would suggest that you start to build out the site beyond just basic review style. Think of a more information rich, resourceful type of site that has lots of info, etc.
Facebook would be the ground I would start in due to the targeting options (and better costs) and then I would focus on building an email list vs. direct sale or promotion of a product.
Come up with a funnel of your own but let the focus be geniune quality content or helpful material, later you could transition to your own guitar type product of some sort.
Andrew
@Matullo, @Andrew, thanks a lot for your replies!
Actually my site is already grew a lot, I've published ebooks, chords and scale references, tutorials and even software tools. I have a mailing list of about 8000 people.
But I think that this organic growth is too slow, I'd like to be laser-focused and using paid traffic to make more sales, and use the income to produce new content useful to make the site better.
I need to find the right funnel that drives the generic user to the affiliate offers (which in my opinion are really top quality, btw)
Originally Posted by johncarlof
- Try to reach out to the offer owner and see if they can give you a special discount, then you could use that as an angle too - and email it to your list as well.
- Another tactic you can use is to lock part of your content and try to sell access to it, if it's good quality, it could be turned into your own offer.
- At some point, you might be able to strike a deal with producers of guitars and accessories, some must have online shops and those might be interested. This could also be done via a paid article or some prize poll.
- Not sure about your GEO breakdown, but you could also think about making paid listings for guitar schools, online shops that sell music instruments etc ...
Your monetization doesn't have to be based on affiliate offers only, try to think outside of the box.
There are TONS of guitar vids all over Youtube: covers, lessons, lessons on how to play covers, as well as demonstrations & reviews for guitars, amps, pedals, and other equipment. You don't even have to play well (as many of those videos will prove).
You don't even have to have a video--many of those channels monetize with ads, so there's an in if you don't want to create guitar video content. But there is a ton of guitar-related traffic on Youtube. There are plenty of college-age and struggling musicians who would probably be happy to create video content for you at a reasonable price.
I haven't worked it from the marketing end, but guitar vids are almost all I watch on Youtube, and there are some consistent things (content, content type, ad types, offers, and channels) that, as far as I can tell, seem to be working. Or at least, plenty of people have found some kind of value in doing these things over and over again. Video content and ads both might be worth testing out.
Originally Posted by matuloo
Also paid listings, my GEO is 70% US, it could work well
Originally Posted by elskafreya
Places like Zzounds have affiliate programs too. Pretty sure Sweetwater does, although I can't seem to find it on their site today.
Commission is low but sales are high. I've thought about using Zzounds before, since it seems like the payment plan might make things easier than, say, Amazon (or Sweetwater's limited 3-parter). But I ended up selling my guitar content as PLR instead of making a site out of it (which I now regret!).
https://www.zzounds.com/aff
Originally Posted by elskafreya
Yes, I also found these offers (instrument resellers):
Musician's Friend (on Shareasale)
Samash (on Linkshare)
I have to test them!
Originally Posted by johncarlof
I re-open this thread to add an insight of which I'm fully aware only now: the selling pages of the offer suck!
After studying a lot (on this forum and outside) about conversion, angles and landing pages, I'm pretty sure that a good landing page with a great angle between my site and the merchants could work well.
I'll keep you posted!
Originally Posted by johncarlof
After some years I'd like to post an update on this thread, as @matuloo suggested.
Eventually, I've created my own products, a couple of ebooks, and focused on creating valuable content. Results: organic traffic skyrocketed and profit has grown as well.
Affiliate stuff still bring some nice money but the turning point was to begin selling my own products.
thanks everybody for reading this
Originally Posted by Mr Payne
Originally Posted by johncarlof
Would you mind revealing the niche your ebooks are in? Even share some tips on ranking in google or any other lessons-learned? You must have a ton of insights we can all learn from.
Thanks again @johncarlof!
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Regarding ranking, nothing fancy:
Send out valuable content consistently.
Site speed and Core Web Vitals extreme optimization
CTA in the newsletter inviting users to share/linking content
I must admit that I've used my software engineering skills to accelerate the creation of some content (chord diagrams, video tabs, fretboard pattern, all stuff that is perfect to be rendered automatically thanks to Python scripts)
Thanks for posting the update! I'm really glad the business took off for you and I certainly hope that we (STM) played at least some role in this
Originally Posted by matuloo
I'm pondering now on launching a Saas in the same niche, I'll keep you posted
thanks!
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