What would you do with this affiliate site?

I have an URL, www.yourfriendlypharmacy.com that I had been running an affiliate online pharmacy on for about a year. Unfortunately the original company stopped paying commisssion and disappeared owing me about $3,000.

I have now found a new company who pays a 60% commission on all sales and who seem very reliable.

Now this is the situation.

1. I don't want to get involved in email marketing although that is how it appears most online pharmacy marketing is done.

2. I have optimized the site and rank fairly well for a number of keyword phrases.



3. Despite this I only get 120 uniques per day. During Sept. I earned $50 per day from these 120 unique visitors, so the site seem to convert fairly well.

4. I've tried AdWords and the ROI is breakeven at best. I've tried cheap PPC services and the conversion rate is virtually zero.

5. The new site is giving me my buyers email addresses and I'm following up with a thank you post and a 10% off coupon good until the end of the year.

6. I have also reduce my shipping cost from the industry standard $18.00 to $10.00.

Now the math is pretty easy. If I could get 1,200 visitors a day I would earn $500 per day or $15,000 per month. That would be a nice income and it seem so close and so attainable.

Does any one have any ideas on how to move this affiliate venture to this level?

 

have you made individual pages that target keywords related to individual medications? no one page like that is going to get you really really far, probably, but if you add 500 of them, it might start to help a bit..

 

At first glance it looks like there's a lot of traffic potential from the phrases your don't place well or at all for. Placing well for those phrases should bring a nice bump in traffic. If your current conversion holds you would be sitting in an alright spot.

Do you think decent placement for those phrases is attainable?

 

I have considered working with individual pages -- ie individual drugs. I didn't want to until I got the home page properly ranked in the SERPs.

Google now reports 1200 backlinks to the home page. So I'm getting close to being able to spend some effort on individual product pages. The three big keywords are 'online pharmacy', 'online pharmacies' and 'prescription drugs'. As you can see Google keeps jerking me around on 'online pharmacy', but these two phrases are bringing me most of my traffic even in 13th and 27th place.

I'm not sure why I haven't surfaced for 'prescription drugs' yet.

 

personally, I'd try with the individual pages right now. there's only so much you can do per search term- so if you've done everything you can, don't waste your time- you probably just need to wait.

to put it in perspective: my largest site recieves around 15,000 unique visitors a day. not even an 8th of that is coming from our "primary" (homepage) keywords. they come from internal pages.

you may also be able to snag additional users with location-targetted pages; mention cities, states, etc.

 

Good to see you're back Compar.

Yeah I'd say target individual pages too. I used that site we talked about in PMs a while back to target about 2000 secondary phrases and a bunch of internal pages. Net result, traffic has close to doubled from Aug. All the less-often searched but still relevant and converting phrases bring in a lot more traffic than a few big but too-competitive phrases. I added 4 more domains on separate C-class addresses and am waiting to see the effect once they get into the index.

I've got to run, I'll PM u about it later.

 

I work for an online Direct Marketing company (based in London) specialising in entertainment and prize give away propositions. We get around 2.5 million plays a month and all the sites and they are not even optimized for search engines. We have achieved this by spending money on Affiliate Networks and key partnerships.

I know very well how good you are in terms of SERP, but maybe it would be worth considering this. It's probably a silly suggestion, I am sure you are already thinking about it.

Let me know your thoughts

Cheers

Krilin

 

Some medications have complicated names. I'm sure there are some lucrative and easy to SEO misspellings. A #1 misspelling can yield a ton more visitors than that same #29 kw.

I'd try AdWords again as well. Forget about the big expensive words. Again, go for the multi word phrases with less searches. Cheaper and often more targeted. Keep tweaking the ads.

Yuo could perhaps make it so that the customer gets that 10% off voucher, but gets another one they can send to a friend. Gives you yet another e-mail address to follow up and another person pitched in a relevant manner.

Even $10 delivery sounds an awful lot to me. It depends on the overall price but does it cost you $10 to send it? I'd drop it to cover cost and no more.

Another thing to consider is this. Many people are looking for a solution to their problem, a way to satisfy their need. Thing is, they don't know the solution because if they did, they wouldn't have the problem. This is, in my experience, why people use their problem in their search. Not the solution. So optimize for the diseases and illnesses and symptoms etc. Then it's easy to convert and you don't have to compete with the big pharmacy brand names. So instead of SEO for 'cystitus' you go for 'bladder infection'. Instead of 'inversion table' you go for 'lower back pain'. Instead of 'Ibuprofen' you go for 'inflammation relief' etc.

 

Go for adwords again litle TOPS Says, but don't spend any more than 5c per click.

Make sure the ads are well written and you should eventually climb up as a result of the interest that ads show...

In terms of SEO, I agree with Disgust - target individual pages (I have no idea what drugs you are selling, but I'm sure that there would be at least 500 there right?).

 

Compar, just out of curiosity, have you had many potential customers not buy because the cartadmin.com payment site won't work if cookies are blocked? Is this your payment service or that of the firm with whom you're an affilliate?

 

Why can't you 'continue shopping' after pressing 'order'? It's a bit annoying. There basically isn't a basket. It's like having a cashier looking over your shoulder and asking for money as soon as you grab something off the shelve... Very strange.

 

If you think you can get better results with "online pharmacy", put some weight behind that. Getting in the top five in the SERPS would definitely give you over 1,000 uniques a day. You may only need to be in the top 10.

 

Compar
Have you properly optimised your site for your keywords? H1 tags etc. I can't see them!

 

While my site's income is miniscule, I get about 30 times more revenue from AdSense than I do Amazon. Seeing as how you have such a high conversion factor, I doubt yours would be the same.

 

Mixed PM and thread, sorry