Forum Moderators: skibum
I have started a grand total of about...5 different online stores, spent several months on each, promoted it as best i could, and in the end...i have had no sales. Now I know it takes work, but man...not one sale!
anyway, as this is the affiliate portion of this site, I have also been trying my luck with affiliate marketing, and that has been interesting. So far I have made a meer speck of money compared to what i spent with google advertising.. Im not sure if i am choosing the wrong affiliate program, or doing something else wrong!
anyway..thanks for reading, I feel better now :)
What kind of traffic are you getting to your 5 sites? Do you have any generic traffic vs. PPC traffic? Are you using some 2nd tier PPC sites where the click per cost is much less than with Google?
Have you thought about setting up an affiliate program for your products if you can't get any sales yourself? Perhaps there are affiliate marketers out there who would be able to bring you qualified traffic if you paid them.
Affiliate programs take testing to determine which products and programs work for you. Do you set up a test campaign and limit the amount of the spend to determine if the product will break even or make you some $$.
The problem with his idea (which I told him but he ignored) was that there are 4-5 huge sites to sell your RV on (including ebay) and MANY thousands of small RV classified ads site just like his.
In today's internet it isn't "build it and they will come" anymore. You have to have be a big boy with a huge advertising budget or you have to have an angle.
The angle gives you a niche of customers who will choose you over the big boys and the thousands of small sites because your site fits their SPECIAL needs better than others.
So my food for thought is: Does your sites have a niche? Or are you part of the ecommerce mini-store ocean.
Well said - I was asked to review a similar non-performing aff site recently and this was precisely the problem. When I asked the guy "What do you specialise in?" and "Why would people buy from you and not somewhere else?" he had no answers.
If you're going to build an aff site today, get these answers worked out first and build around them. The ocean's a big place so your fish needs to stand out and be different enough to survive extinction.
An 'angle' I have often had success with when working in competitive areas is to target the local audience while trying to get into the bigger markets.
A call from a local customer is often more qualified than that of a distant one whether you market youself online or offline. It is also a lot more cost effective to run advertising campaigns in your home town, personal contacts and limits of the geographical reach of the publisher can lead to some very resonably priced targeted leads.
The one thing I do struggle with though is the other big businesses that make a site with a page targeted to each city in the USA, but that's another story....
Focus. I wouldn't build 5 sites without having a "formula" for success. Start with one thing/site/topic that you know is a money earning area and learn how to do it [PPC, SEO, etc] and do it well - then repeat the formula with a new venture. Good luck ;).
We have a small books and dvds store in our area and this is VERY well placed in the search engines. Every item on our store has a "Buy From Us" button and a "Buy From Amazon" button if you're not in our area. We average about 8-10% from Amazon (after bonus / growth tiers) and about 15-20% on our own sales.
About 10% of our visitors from our area turn into customers, about 10% head onto Amazon to buy. Win Win ..
This store also has adsense for the visitor who is just browsing and wants to move onto the next site.
If you're running OsCommerce on your stores, have someone on their forums critique your site.
(By the way .. it does sound like you're doing way too much stuff at the same time. Make one thing work solidly then move onto two then move into four.. don't start 7 things at the same time. Not enough hours in the day)
Proven method for quite some time now. It's not the only way, and perhaps not the best way to make big money. But it does work.
I've sometimes heard it said that out of every 10 affiliate sites, 8 won't work, 1 will generate a little money and one will be a cash cow. Keep at it, and keep reading as widely as you can from real affiliates and webmasters.
:)
With the Internet, the barriers to entry are very low, which encourages many people to try affiliate marketing. Most of these people believe that if they build a site, the buyers will come. The reality is that this low barrier to entry also results in many low quality sites that generate no sales.
In the brick and mortar economy, the participants are limited to those with better qualifications, due to the higher barriers to entry. Since they have more to lose than Internet based affiliate businesses, there is more motivation and planning to make it work.
I think you are being very generous with those statistics for affiliate sites. In the real world, the 80/20 rule may hold true, but IMO 95% of the sites out there generate little to no revenue and only 2% or so are cash cows.
Perhaps, it's hard to say. But the point I was trying to make is that it's quite normal to put in a lot of work and generate virtually no sales. A lot of affiliate give up when their first couple of sites don't generate significant income, because they don't realise that this is actually par for the course.
Works for me though. Makes the field less crowded :)
It took me several years to start making money on my site, but once I got it I really got it.
Then I just started building more and more sites.
Some still work better than others. But when one is not working well I find out why, I get a whole crop of new info and then apply that to my other sites.
When you have at least 1000 visitors a day (before advertising) it becomes much easier to start determining what works and what doesn't.
Then you can take your site(s) in the directions that your visitors are more interested in.
and for some ODD reason today i made 3 sales
... I guess it is the power of your mind that does it for you.
I don't know if you've read a particular ebook on getting rich -- it has certainly helped me stay positive and get better results.
If you want to know where to download a free copy of this ebook, sticky me :)
