300+ clicks, still no converts. Bad luck or something wrong

hey. that may have been my science experiment website (I'm pretty sure it was). well i'm sorry because the price was set at 0.00 for a while and i had no clue why. i'd like to blame it on the daylight savings time change but i am not too sure what happened. anyway, i changed it last night at 17:00 click bank time and now, less than 24 hours later so far we have sold 5 products. so you may wanna try again cuz it is doing pretty well.

 

Dont think ill bother. That mistake cost both of us alot of money(if it wasnt your site then it cost that owner money) and the customers got freebies and wont be comming back. Ive been promoting other projects and no converts. I think im just gonna sell my own ebooks and projects and send traffic to my site and let others be my affilate. I emailed that guy on the experment website and he never responded. Dont think he cares.

You have been saying clickbank has a problem with "ghost sales" maybe this is why I am not getting any credit. Also some customers can "cheat" and change(to their own usually) or remove the affilate to prevent me from getting a comission. Sad but lots of selfish people. Youve been making lots of money promoting stuff so ill do the same and let the customers come to me. Ill also use Yahoo to send traffic to my site and get 100% profits(dont even need clickbank for this)

 

Update: I got 3 converts so far but none in the last couple days. Do affilates really have this bad luck and would I be far better off as a merchant? Im promoting like 20 merchants now, how many merchants do I need to promote? 100? 200?

 

I was thinking the same thing. Im promoting but not converting at times. The merchant idea doesnt look too bad. All you have to do is sit back and let other people run around worrying about conversions and adword costs.

 

Just got another convert an hour ago but only two websites are converting for me. I will give the other sites some more time, if they dont convert, im emailing the merchant and if he cant help, im dropping support.

I talked to a friend who tried being a merchant and he got no sales. Maybe the product or website wasnt good? I think ill try being a merchant, there is a one time $50 activation fee plus the cost of hosting your websites at your hosting company, cheap like $10 a month and I already have websites so this wont add to the cost. Then I can make like 10 merchant websites, oh theres the cost of domain names but thats $8 a year, if I sell one or two item a year I make profit LOL. I figure my affilates should be able to get me one sale per product a week, adds up.

If being a merchant doesnt make me enough to move out of parents house but is still making me a profit, I will also affilate. Make money as affilate and merchant

 

Hey Need_Incomes,

The problem here, though, I'm afraid, is that you're not yet familiar with how to write effective sales copy such that you can consistently convert traffic to the site in to cash.

You said you had a few conversions on a few sites... but it seems to me that if you take a bit more time to do some research, you may not need to email the merchant - I doubt there is much they can tell you about why you're not converting.

I think you may be underestimating what it means to be a good merchant.

A good merchant isn't one to try to throw a bunch of products out there and get a sale a week. A good merchant does the following, at the very least, in order to really do well:

-Thorough market research in a niche so as to really get a feel for the target population.
-Takes time to write a solid eBook or piece of software worth purchasing; something much more than a compilation of free tips, but something of value.
-Employ the necessary resources (copywriters, graphic artists, HTML/Web designers, anything else needed) to get the product and sell page put together well, based on their solid understanding of what all it takes to make sales on products.
-Designs & creates affiliate information and help: Keyword lists, videos, autoresponder sequences, graphics, keyword traffic tracking features, other tips, free guides & resources for mailing lists, and other things to set up the affiliate to make maximum cash promoting the site. Also is responsive to affiliate needs & concerns
-Tries, tests, refines, analyzes, and a ton more things in order to get the campaigns, product, and affiliates successful.


I say this not to discourage you from becoming a merchant, but just that if you want success, you cannot expect to go from not knowing how or why your affiliate sales do or do not convert, to becoming a full-fledged merchant with 10 products that are actually successful. Heck, Chris McNeely doesn't even have 10 products (that I know about), yet his Affiliate Project X, Adwords Miracle, and Day Job Killer are possibly some of the most successful products on CB ever. But simply expecting to up and become a merchant because the affiliate side of things is confusing is NOT something that will help you succeed in the way you're looking to!

I know it's easy to blame things on Clickbank problems, blocked cookies, missed sales opportunities, and the like- but the reality is, from my perspective, that it's really not about these problems but really more just about lack of efficient, good sales copy, and tracking/testing procedures when it comes to analyzing how Adwords is costing or paying off for you.

I realize it's easy to get discouraged when you put a lot of money into something and don't see any sales... but use it as an opportunity to learn. Learn from your failure, and let it make you better. Try, test again, and again, and again until you succeed.

Running away from a few industries that didn't work out will only keep you making the same mistakes wherever you go. And there is potential here! People ARE making quite nice incomes on the web - people like you and I, with no special training, background, computer or marketing skills - just average people who are willing to do the hard work of putting in the time, doing the research, and figuring out how to improve their tactics.

It sucks to put a lot of time into something to not see it work quite like you thought... but at that moment, tell yourself "I can either give up now (or run away and try something else), and will never know how close to success I really was... or I can choose to stay, learn, and master this, and reap the benefits of hard work paying off.

It seems like you've had a few good things come your way so far! Expand on their success, and figure out what's working and what's not. Stick with it, learn affiliate marketing inside and out. Only then will you be really set to become a merchant whose time and energy pay off in their sales.

Best of luck to you, and we're (I'm) here to help critique & offer advice, when things go wrong.

-T

 

i read somewhere that duvet dollars was his too?

 

Thought a lady made that site? Of course it could be him pretending to be someone else to get more sales.


I am not yet ready to be a merchant, but it is tempting, they are the ones getting most of the money. Ive noticed you could order an ebook with master resell rights then promote that as a merchant. I dont really have any good ebook of my own to write.


Is it possible to make $70-100 a day net as an affilate? That is enough money for me to relocate, buy a house and live off the money comfortably. Yahoo ADs is giving me a hard time with their "approval" and has deleted a few keywords and didnt approve some of my ADs. Too bad for the merchants, they lose me as an affilate.

Can I use another service in addition to Yahoo? Recommend a good one. I want to promote my best two sites that have converted for me some more. One AD service says they will get me 10,000 targeted US visitors for $35. That is about a third of a cent per potentional customer! If I get even a handful of converts out of 10,000 people, I make profit!


Oh by the way its the merchant's fault if his site and "program" is not good enough to convert. I have no luck with many sites but got converts on a couple niche sites so far. I am sending them traffic and it wont convert. Gonna let it go some more, like 150 clicks to get a good idea. Some sites just dont convert, others convert like crazy.

 

very.

you can buy a house off of 100 a day?

yeah it sucks but atm i like it better thhan adwords @@ adwords pissing me off. ads/keywords that make complete sense to real people and not computers get low QS

lol too bad XD

to an extent....

 

300 clicks is a lot...i would contact someone at clickbank and make sure you're using the right code and it is tracking correctly.

 

I find that the costs of good pay per click adds eat up most of your profits or actualy cost more than you make.

 

I'd wager to say then you're not using good pay per click

-T

 

forelmashi, I don't think it is easy to make $100 net profit a day. I am making like a few dollars a day. Got only two cheap sales this week, my ADs cost more than that actually I am not gonna be greedy, $100 a day and I can live a comfortable life and enjoy my own house in the northeast. I have seen lots of nice houses for between $25,000 and $50,000. I aren't staying in overpriced south Florida, id need like $300k to $500k for a nice house and to afford that I would need to make like $500 a day profit! If I made that much I would be really rich and id get a huge mansion elsewhere. Im using Yahoo for my ADs, been told google eats up your money, too much fradulant clicks and poor ROI.

I have long dropped that merchant that had 300+ clicks and no converts. So far I got converts from 4 different merchants. I will give it more time and drop the others if they don't convert and focus on just those 4 plus any others I can find that convert. There doesn't seem to be enough different merchants at clickbank. I avoid those with less than 70% comission(they are too greedy) and I also avoid those with cheap ebooks, like a $9.95 ebook. Anyone have tips to reach my $100 net goal a day?

 

I'd say easy is a relative term. To someone who's making 300$/day net profit, an extra 100$ isn't hard. To someone who's never made 1$ online, 300$/day seems like the moon.

Wow, 25-50k houses? That's mind boggling to me! Over here in Seattle, you'd be lucky to find a decent 1br 1bath older house for $200k. But I digress...

I think the people who say "google eats up your money" are those who don't know enough about the content network and accidentally left it on. There's a lot of click fraud on the content network; on the search network, much less.

I feel there is a lot of merchants at Clickbank! Maybe not all are offering quality products, but it's definitely not hard to find a well-written sales page that converts with the right kind of traffic.

I'm not sure about anything under 70% being greedy; I'd gladly take 50% of a 100$ sale over 80% of a 40$ sale, all other things being equal. You have to look at profit margins - how much does it cost to make a sale? You might get 90%, but if it's impossible to make a sale, that doesn't give you a lot of profit to work with. I agree you should stay away from promoting products under 20$ with PPC unless you've found a super targeted niche that converts well - usually these smaller products just aren't worth the time.

As far as tips to meet your goal, I'd have to suggest most of the stuff that people here have been suggesting. Do your research - find a niche that needs a product, or find a quality product that's known to convert and find a niche that's hungry for it, and match them up with a really decent sales page that gets them excited for it. Use good research to find keywords that are likely to convert- watch competitors' ads to see how they are advertising and use their tactics. Forum marketing works really well too. So does making a mailing list, subscribing people, and then sending them relevant offers.

Most of the time success comes not because you discovered a special super tip that just allows you to go forth and conquer; but rather a bunch of mini-tips or lessons learned along the path of hard work that eventually allow you to accurately succeed in setting up a product campaign and making solid positive ROI.

-T

 

I think single keywords are bad idea.

A longer one like "buy house in tumbuktu" would be more useful.

 

Make it clear guys, what you want is a lot of conversion, a lot of sales, not a lot of clicks that can't convert, try to use more specific and targeted keyword, clicks mayb less, but conversion may be higher.

 

Be ultra specific. Relevancy is the key!

 

Maybe you're advertising to kids, that want to play free games online, or download some 2d games. Kids don't have credit cards and all they get is lunch money.

Have you tried using negative keywords like -free and others?

Haha, don't be so gullible, there are 100000 web sites that claim to be number one, but that isn't physically possible, so to really find out if it is a good converter you must spend some $$$ to see for yourself.

Plus those kinds of niches usually have high refund rates.

 

I also have bad conversion rate this month, compared to last 3 months. I think you are in a unlucky period now. Keep sending visitors for 2 weeks and if nothing happens change the merchant until you find some good one.
Think about the people that are ready to pay for playing games. 30-40 years old women and men. I was in the game industry for a while and I have to say that simple, old arcade classic games are converting better.

 

I've spent quite a bit of money with adwords and Miva, and have hundreds f clicks and no sales. I thought the keywords were targeted, but apparently not. I'm not sure what else to do, since my imagination is so limited.