Organic – Affiliate Marketing Programs

A blogger turned wellness influencer and CEO Olivia Amitrano started her business with only $200.
She said the best way to grow a blog is to use captivating titles, listicles, and specific solutions.
Her supplement business, Organic Olivia, now brings in about $14 million in revenue every year.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Olivia Amitrano, a 29-year-old wellness entrepreneur from New York City. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up with health problems that I always thought were connected, including skin and gut issues and some anxiety. We know now that there’s a gut-brain axis, but at the time, the doctors I went to kept telling me my issues weren’t related.

This motivated me to enter Fordham University as a premed student in 2011. Even though I eventually realized traditional, or integrative, medicine was my true calling, the statistics and research classes I took turned out to be extremely helpful later in my career. After one year, I switched majors to psychology and graduated in 2015.

Now I’m a wellness influencer with 474,000 Instagram followers and 94,000 TikTok followers. I also have my own supplement line that brought in $14 million in revenue in 2020, my highest-grossing year yet. Here’s how I built my business.

From my teens to early 20s, I was stressed out and sick, and my doctors said they couldn’t do anything

One day in 2012, I left school and drove myself to an acupuncturist who practiced traditional Chinese medicine. He took one look at my tongue and noted every symptom I was experiencing. He also prescribed me herbs that gave me more relief over the next week than anything else I’d tried.

After that visit, I started a blog detailing my journey. I began experimenting with herbs and seeing more alternative-health practitioners. I wanted to explain to people what worked for me to fix my issues, the diet changes I was making, and why.

In 2013, I tried to monetize the blog, but there wasn’t much information about affiliate marketing at the time, and influencers weren’t big yet. All I could do was post Amazon affiliate links for different herbs, skincare, and home products I blogged about, which made me anywhere from a few cents to a dollar per sale. I made $200 to $500 a month on average.

I grew my blog using specific strategies

Blog titles are critical. People are inundated with digital grabs for their very short attention spans, so you need to convince your audience in seconds that this topic is going to be easy to understand, fun to read, and valuable.

The most high-value content provides solutions, so ensure your article is solving a real and specific problem for your audience. Instead of writing about a skincare product you’re loving, write about a skincare product that has helped you with a specific skin complaint or condition such as eczema.

Structure, format, and quantify your articles. It’s easy and fun for our brains to contain things in neat, digestible bits, and lists help break up long articles.

Naming my blog posts “Everything I Wish I Knew About _____” has been an effective format, particularly on TikTok and Instagram reels. One of my blogs in this style, adapted from a reel that got 329,000 views, had “protein, calories, and hormones” in the blank, and it performed well on my site.

Other topics that performed well for me were digestion, cutting out sugar, aphrodisiac herbs, and preventing cognitive decline.

In 2013, I decided to write an e-book to help accelerate my business

I was working a series of side jobs, and I had $200 to my name. I spent it all at Trader Joe’s buying ingredients to make my favorite juice recipes to test and photograph them. The juice-recipe book made about $4,000 over three months, and I plowed all of that back into the business.

The key was starting very small with digital products since they have such low overhead and eventually putting that money into physical products. I started working on my supplement line in 2016 and named my business Organic Olivia.

In 2017, I started at ArborVitae School of Traditional Herbalism in Brooklyn

I wanted to understand the science and traditional wisdom that could explain why the herbs I was using for my health conditions were so effective. I also wanted the credentials, knowledge base, and real-world experience to formulate my own products and be taken seriously in the supplement and wellness world.

I completed a three-year intensive clinical program in 2020, where I learned how to formulate herbal remedies with the right therapeutic dose and complementary herbs.

Manufacturing supplements was a huge learning curve

I was lucky to have a friend who had worked in food manufacturing who explained the dos and don’ts of the industry to me and pointed out some of the corruption that exists.

I then met a great manufacturer at a supplement conference called Expo West who helped me navigate tricks in the industry, and we worked together as co-formulators. We also ensured our 33 products, which range in price from $25 to $79, were tested and certified by a reputable lab.

I’ve never taken investor money and now have nine full-time employees.

As an influencer, I promote my own formulas

I was an early adopter of Instagram and was really part of the first “generation” of influencers, but I don’t take sponsorships. I make commissions from affiliates, but I’ve never promoted something because a company approached me, which helps me maintain trust with my audience.

Instead of putting 100 products in front of my followers, they can trust my line of supplements because we’ve built a relationship.

Maintaining my blog has been a big part of my success. Researching and writing content doesn’t directly translate to revenue, but it’s important that it’s my voice because the brand is my face and philosophy.

The biggest mistakes I’ve made were spending too much on web-agency fees instead of hiring my own developer and keeping employees who weren’t working out because I wanted to be nice. Not only did it hit me financially, but it impacted the company’s energy and culture.

Having an online presence is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.

From small businesses to huge multinational companies, online visibility has a big impact on the success of a business.

This is why having a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is paramount for anyone who wants to grow their business online.

What Is SEO, And Why Is It Important?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s the best way to get more eyes on your website, content, and brand.

By optimizing your content for search engines, you increase your chance of ranking higher in the search results.

Organic search is so effective because the people who come across your content are actively searching for it. This usually means better quality leads and, therefore, more engagement and conversions.

SEO is a cost-effective way to boost your visibility and has huge long-term potential.

Unlike paid advertising, where your reach typically nosedives the second you stop paying, a search engine-optimized piece of content can continue to get traffic months (or even years) after its original creation.

It takes a bigger upfront effort and may take a while to see the results, but it is definitely worth the wait.

5 Beginner-Friendly SEO Strategy Techniques

Even though SEO is a strategy to get the search engine algorithm to rank your content higher, your focus should always be on your audience and providing valuable content!

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO techniques.

Bad SEO practices will backfire, so always remember: your content should be written for humans and optimized for search engines, not vice versa!

Focusing on SEO is a great way to increase organic traffic to your website.

Let’s dive deeper into some basic techniques you can use today to get started with your SEO strategy!

1. Focus On The “People Also Ask” Section

Google’s “People Also Ask” section is a goldmine for your SEO strategy.

When you search for something, Google will often suggest what other related topics may be helpful.

Screenshot from Google, May 2023

This is a great, free way to do keyword research and write about things people are interested in.

By addressing these questions in your content, you are giving users the answers they’re looking for and increasing your chances of appearing in this section.

Great for visibility and great for credibility. Win-win.

Another resource to find out what questions your audience has about certain topics is Answer the Public.

2. Study Your Competition

Looking at what your competitors are doing is a great way to gather insights that will influence your SEO strategy.

Identify the keywords they are ranking for and study their backlink profile – you’ll need an SEO tool such as Semrush or Diib for this.

Before investing in an SEO tool, you can sign up for a free trial, gather the information you need, and determine if this is a tool you’ll want to use again in the future.

Another way to do this is by analyzing your competitors’ content. Review what it is that they’re writing about and what response they are getting from their audience.

Don’t mimic their strategy, but evaluate what appears to be working for them and use that knowledge to make decisions about your own strategy.

If you want to dive deeper into this analysis, check out this guide.

3. Internal Links And Backlinks

Links are really helpful for SEO, as they provide further information for your readers. Search engines see that as a more helpful piece of content.

Internal linking also helps search engines understand the relationship between different pages/posts on your website. It’ll also encourage readers to check out more of your content.

You can also link to other external resources if you believe they’re helpful for your readers or help you prove your point. You should also turn any mention of a brand into a link.

Backlinks, on the other hand, are an important ranking factor.

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Even though quantity helps here, quality is even more important.

When high-quality websites link back to your site, it tells the algorithm that your content is accurate and trustworthy.

On the other hand, having suspicious sites linking to yours can hurt your reputation, making it harder to rank on top.

4. Refresh Outdated Content

Your SEO content will remain effective in the long term, as long as it remains relevant.

That’s why it’s so important to frequently take a look at older content that’s been performing well and update it if necessary.

It may not always be necessary, but think: is there anything else you can add to make this content even more valuable?

Or is there anything in there that’s no longer true or relevant? Regularly updating your content is a great practice for SEO.

Google tends to favor up-to-date and relevant content. This can also attract new backlinks, which should be part of your SEO strategy.

5. Core Web Vitals

Another important factor of SEO is your website’s Core Web Vitals. They are part of the ranking factors search engines use and should not be overlooked.

A Core Web Vitals report is gathered through real user data, and those factors are important to an overall user experience. It measures:

Largest Content Paint (LCP) – How much time it takes for the main content on your page to fully load (aim for 2.5 seconds or less).
First Input Delay (FID) – How much time it takes for users to be able to actually interact with your content (aim for 100 milliseconds or less).
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – How much your content moves around on the page until it sets in the right place (aim for 0.1 or less).

This can be a bit too technical, but overall, it’s about the user’s experience when they first come into contact with your website.

A good user experience is an important part of your SEO strategy, so you should take the time to make sure your website is healthy.

Some other factors you should pay attention to:

Page speed – Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze your site’s speed and get recommendations for improvement.
Mobile responsiveness – Most people use mobile phones to browse, so make sure your website looks good on mobile and is functional.
Image optimization – This is a common mistake that causes a big problem – heavy images slow down your website, so make sure you optimize any media before uploading it to the site.

Content may be king when it comes to SEO, but if people leave before they get to see your content, it doesn’t really matter how good it is.

Key Takeaways: Powering Your Brand With Organic SEO

To recap, these five points will help you grow your organic SEO:

Focus on the “People Also Ask” section on Google.
Study your competition.
Use internal links and backlinks.
Refresh outdated content.
Pay attention to your core web vitals and user experience.

Remember, these strategies work hand-in-hand, and implementing them together can often lead to better results!

Working on your organic traffic is a great way to get more visibility and grow your brand.

And a human-centered marketing approach to your SEO content strategy will not only result in more organic traffic to your website but will get more eyes on your content in general.

It’s a great addition to your organic marketing efforts.

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