6 Figures With Amazon Affiliate Marketing: Interview with Chris Guthrie

Welcome to the interviews with super affiliates series where we post our chats with affiliates that are doing really well and making a good living using affiliate marketing. These interviews are part inspirational, part educational and totally interesting! Enjoy today’s interview…

In this post we’re interviewing Chris Guthrie. 4 years ago he was fired from his corporate sales job and faced the prospect of either going and finding another one and earning about the same kind of money, or starting an affiliate marketing business. He chose the latter and the rest is history.

You might know Chris because of his huge successful exit from a reviews website that was monetized primarily through Amazon affiliate marketing.

He made 6 figures from that website and has gone on to bigger and better things since then including recently exiting on another site for $55k late last year. Clearly he’s someone that has been on our radar to interview 🙂 Let’s get stuck in.

1. For those that don’t know, can you tell us about yourself and what you do?

My name’s Chris Guthrie and for nearly the last half decade I’ve been working full time on building my online businesses. I got my first big break with Amazon affiliate marketing and since then have expanded out into buying and selling websites, creating software products and other revenue generating activities.

2. How do you use affiliate marketing in your business and on your sites?

I use affiliate marketing both as a product owner to get affiliates to promote my own products and also as an affiliate by promoting other products as well. I’ve found the best results have really come from using my email lists to drive sales. Social media has been absolute worthless for driving sales (at least in my business) but each platform has it’s intricacies that enable other business models and niches to thrive (e.g. Instagram works well for fashion stuff, Pinterest works well for design, home etc, Twitter works well for… nothing [in my experience]). No matter which social network rises and falls people will always have and use email for at least the forseeable future.

3. What is one thing you can point to that you’ve done in the past that really had a really positive and lasting effect on your affiliate marketing and made your income take off?

Number one thing that has had a huge effect on my income and results is building an email list. Everyone says it all the time but in countless conversations with beginners they just don’t really believe how powerful it is and then invariably (if they stick with it) sometime down the line they’ll start an email list and thing “why didn’t I do this before?”

4. How much time do you invest in your affiliate marketing strategy now compared to when you first started?

I think I spend more time now focused on getting new affiliates to promote the software products that we’ve created. That’s the main change for me. That and just doing more affiliate promotions across the portfolio of websites I own.

5. Whats your number 1 tip to new affiliate marketers?

This type of question is always tough to answer because affiliate marketing is so broad a topic, but ultimately I’ll go back to my earlier comments – build an email list.

Relevant traffic > Opt in page > Build relationship with subscribers > Promote relevant products that solve their problems > Profit

6. If you had to start again tomorrow, what would be the first thing you’d do to rebuild your affiliate marketing empire?

I’d ignore smaller opportunities and focus on larger ones. Having done a lot of different things online I’ve come to realize that focusing on smaller income sources that can only do less than $1k a month or so (e.g. niche sites) isn’t as good of use of time as focusing on larger projects (e.g. authority sites). One of my better projects was a product review website that promoted products as an affiliate and I sold that one for six figures whereas my smaller sites never had that type of exit potential.

7. Where can people find out more about you? Plug your site 🙂

Best place is my blog: Entrepreneur Boost and the plugins we create for marketers can be found at Boost WP.

Affiliate Link Disclosure