Finally pulling the plug on CJ

These were my stats for last year:

Impressions: 617,342
Clicks: 292

Commission: $0.28

My only sale came from eBay, otherwise I'd say about 85-90% of the ads were the exact topic of my site. No idea why I left it going that long.

 

Good moove. I believe affiliate markerters such as CJ have spread themselves far too wide. For them, that's OK, since of like having lots of small earners adds up.

For most site owners, though, they are a waste of page space.

 

Impressions: 617,342
Clicks: 292
Somethings wrong? You should have around 5K clicks for that traffic. I think there's some good merchants on Cj and some bad. The trick is to find them.
But my results with Cj are moving downhill too.

 

What advertiser where you using?
Those stats just suck.
To me they don't really get any better at this point than CJ.

 

Honestly? More then I would care to list. Namely eBay, a couple of ones that had banners like "click here to claim your $25" and prob 90-95% were the same topic as my site (health and fitness, supplements etc). I also tried advertisers that kind of went along with health and fitness - like back country among others.

I would say I used 30-35 different advertisers total, all of which I tried for at least a month. eBay is the only one that made me any money (the entire 0.28 )

 

I am successful with CJ and supplements. They have Bodybuilding.com, a hugely recognized brand, as well as Vitamin Shoppe. Both have low prices and both stores have very high conversion rates. Vitamin Shoppe has amazing coupons each month that generate a lot of sales. Right now it is 20% off of any $40 order. I'm at about $0.125 per unique using CJ and supplement traffic.

 

I had applied for vitamin shoppe but I was declined I didn't realize bodybuilding.com was even on there, I may have to check them out. When I had first gotten into all this I had signed up with Apollo Fulfillment thinking I'd get rich in no time, unbelievable how much of a difference in pricing there really is

 

Vitamin Shoppe is a good program but they don't offer any assistance or response to their affiliates. I'm not huge with them yet, but I'm up a few tiers in the payment system; still.. no response to my emails. They do have extremely low prices though, especially for the well advertised brands and products. It might be worth doing some design work on your site and applying to them again when you have more visible traffic or content. I'm not sure what their judging criteria might be.

Bodybuilding is new with CJ since January. They dropped their default commission from 15% to 10% when they made the switch. Definitely have a go at signing up with them.. then use their articles as landing pages-- offer your visitors more content and attach your CJ ID with it as well.

 

You will probably find it's location, I have been denied by a few programs I really wanted to join so I got in touch with the people directly and found it was always my location that was the problem.

It didn't help when I pointed out the websites in question only related and only pointed to the US.
Some people have very narrow minds....they can't grasp the concept that the WWW means World Wide Web and miss out on so much because of that attitude.

 

I think it's possible that you are painting with too broad of a brush.

CJ is a great network. But like any network there are good and bad programs within it. Some convert better than others. Some are managed better than others. Some industries pay better in general. There are just a ton of variables.

All our CJ programs have the longest possible cookies and the highest payouts in their markets typically - plus they convert or we don't work with them. They also have the very best management support. I can say that without bragging because I don't do the management anymore - PartnerCentric or AMWSO do - and they are the top 2 affiliate management companies in the industry.

Have you considered testing a different merchant in CJ as opposed to dropping them all together?

 

What kind of traffic do you need to join CJ? Also, can I run CJ along with adsense on the same page?

 

Traffic doesn't matter, but after 6 months if you haven't generated any commissions they will de-activate your account.
It's rather silly as they tell you to join up again using another email address.

Yes you can use CJ on the same pages as Adsense.

 

I am approaching this mark myself - 0% conversion over several months, now (beg. of November). I had not heard this before nor have I read of it - anyone with more information on this?

Paul

 

Yes Paul cyclops is right on both counts.

About de-activation - I'm not certain an alarm goes off at exactly 6 months for each individual affiliate. Seems to me like they may do house cleaning all at one time in one fell swoop because typically when one affiliate complains of being deactivated a bunch of others do all at the same time.

 

I heard overstock was meant to be good, they were interviewed on webmaster radio

 

Relatedly (and I have asked this elsewhere), but I wonder whether entering into affiliate programs with advertisers who themselves have extremely well known product branding, along with a powerful stand-alone web presence, means a waste of time for affiliates. In other words, if I am selling sporting goods, why would someone buy from me when they can go to the online company directly themselves?

Affiliate marketing, I would think, works best when an affiliate is acting as a true conduit to a company which needs it; a company which has good products but relies on an affiliate with web presence to move the product for it.

I have seen zero conversion. I am wondering whether people come to me but say, "why not just go to XXX directly?"

For the advertisers, it's a win-win, as they make incremental sales with no additional out of pocket. Is it so for publishers?

 

You would think so Northpointaiki but we know Shawn does very well out of the ebay affiliate program. Who would think anyone would sign up to ebay under an affiliate link...... I mean everybody on the planet knows about ebay.

I have Amazon on some of my sites and although its not that great I do make sales through it...I get more $ than I do through Adsense.

 

The last 3 days I've moved into $xxx/day territory on CJ. The merchant program that makes the most money for me is probably the best well known brand in the arena. They also have very good SE penetration naturally.

So where is the room for affiliates? Associated phrases... their natural pages don't go for all of the related keyphrases. That is where you can outrank them -- "reviews" OR "discounted" OR "free shipping" + product name. The fact that they are the most well known brand gives them incredibly high conversion rates when they get the clickthrough.

 

Odd I do almost as well with CJ as with Google... It's my number two on the list of online advertising income!

 

It is definitely all about finding the right advertiser. I personally know a few people who are doing quite well with CJ.