One point worth adding mate, diversify. Product sales can be very hot and cold. I went from making a couple of hundred dollars in commissions every month with one particular ebook, to virtually no sales overnight.
Oh, excellent point, and one I will take to the bank. This week I promised myself I would make one new affiliate site each day for a week and see how my profits grow.
are you guys making diffrent domain names for every product you watn to sell as an affilate? is it wize to sell all the products in 1 site?
You can't actually know if an offer works until you get a conversion. You should be very cautious, especially as you learn, with how much you spend before you get a conversion. I started affiliate marketing, literally with a $20.00 bill, and I have never lost money. I see some people spend thousands and thousands with few or no conversions and I cringe. Testing is your most important component, and you need to learn how to do it in a fiscally responsible way. If you are not getting any conversions after a certain point you have to decide that the offer is no good, you are using bad keywords, have a bad landing page or some other component that is causing it to fail. Irregardless, shelf it and move on. Lots of offers simply don't work well. Don't assume just because an offer is available that it is worthwhile promoting. You can always go back and try something different later, but you need to find something to get your feet wet, something that is going to give you a glimmer of hope without a lot of work. If you spend a lot of time on a bad offer changing keywords, changing land pages and the rest, you might just end up wasting a lot of time and money because the offer is bad. So you have to learn to discard those that are not working and move on to something else. Once you find one that gets natural conversions, then you can focus on tweaking the landing page, the keywords, the ads and the rest and try to maximize it and see how much real potential is actually there.
conversion rates are how much u sell in a % right? also, can u tell me what is gravity for a product?
Conversion rate is clicks(or visits) vs. sales, you can express it in a percentage. Gravity is a calculated number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the product.
Good points, AEIOUY. There's a lot of offers out there - some are fabulous, some are terrible. Of course, the thing is, it's tough to abandon a campaign or lander you've spent a bunch of time on - even tougher after you've spent time and money from PPC clicks on it. I think something that's absolutely imperative is to always be thinking it through from the point of your customer. Put yourself in their shoes. Think: "If I was really looking to buy this kind of product, what kind of ads would I click on? What would I want to find on a landing page that would convince me it was something that could really help, and not just a scam?" and finally, "Would the product being offered in the way it's being offered at the price it's being offered at cause me to buy or not?" Simple questions and mind-shift scenarios like these can sometimes cause fresh ideas. Remember as well, a little market research goes a long ways. You may have found a product and think you can sell it to group A, but in reality, it's actually group B that has the need/desire/hunger for it. Market research combined with testing and critical analyzing will help push your sales higher and your costs lower. -T
I've done both so far. For two products, I've created a similar landing page and one sells at least every other day and one doesn't sell at all. For both, I'm using a ton of keywords. It just seems like there are market fluctuations and my $20/day budget doesn't allow for a lot of breathing room.
True, but the question is - how long is the right amount of time to wait to see if a product just isn't working? What's the right amount to spend per click? How much should you not go over? These are tough to answer, because the wrong CPC could lead to zeroing out any profits.
I completely agree with you. You should definitely look at it from a customer's perspective and do research. I'm still in research mode, so I'm not profiting much. My buddy is making around $175/day profit.. so I'm listening to his advice.
Makes sense, about research and mode and all. Of course, there's some totally awesome ways to go about doing research & finding out exactly what's profitable in a niche - and what isn't for free... so hopefully your research is fairly low cost! 175$/day isn't too bad. Things do get kind of crazy when you get to the 1000$/day level, though! Good luck! -T
Heheh... not quite yet myself... but I have some good friends who've had some 5k$+ days, so I'm getting my tips from them! -T
*sry for butting in* I think I need to make new friends seriously I don't have any friends that do affiliating (they most some of them make is a few bucks of adsense) and the people I know in person don't know if online marketing even exist... (I wonder if there's a place like myspace only for webmasters/affiliates).
nice info guys!! i lost 2k last summer through adwords when trying to use clickbank. it was before i discovered this forum and let me say, you guys are great help
Butting in? Please do. Sounds like you could make friends with some of the people on here and make a killing! Oh, also -- I hate myspace.
Wow.. yeah. I've been making money on clickbank almost since day one, so I'm pretty happy with it. Luckily I have a friend leading me through it though. Otherwise, I'd be in the same boat with no paddles.
Just wanted to say that today has been excellent so far! I'm up to $33.90 on ClickBank and my AdSense is already at $4.57 so I'm at $38.47 and I've barely spent any advertising money! Seeing that it's not even 10:30 am, I'm pretty happy. I'm well on my way, thanks to the help of the DP people!