Forum Moderators: skibum
I do have some queries though. Is affiliate marketing about slapping related product affiliate links onto the websites? Or is it about creating a sales copy to selling a particular affiliate product.
I did some trying out and just slapped some product links onto my website and have not got any conversions. Would anyone be so kind as to point me in the right direction please?
IMVHO, if I were to pick one word that affiliate marketing is really about, it would be "pre-selling". That can be done in many different ways, depending on the type of site, but unlike PPC ads, you want the customer to be ready to buy - or at least to be seriously considering it - when they click on the link. My main site is content-related, and the links to specific items that are pertinent to that page's content are integrated into that page. The content isn't "ad copy," but hopefully will make some readers interested enough that they want to check things out for themselves.
Judging not just from my own results, but from what I've read of other people's comments in this forum, on content-type sites:
Banners = bad
Text links= good
And other types come in-between.
[edited by: encyclo at 1:22 am (utc) on Dec. 22, 2006]
Please help! I would like to make a go of this but do not want to waste my time if i cannot really generate a good income.
By the way I have no website design skills or any knowledge in marketing or selling!
[edited by: skibum at 6:37 pm (utc) on Dec. 23, 2006]
Also, 99.9% of the time, anything that tells you it'll do something like this "automatically" is going to end up with your money without any guarantee that you'll get some back. Computer algorithms are nice things, but they still can't beat the human brain (IMHO).
It's very honest of you to admit that you don't know much about marketing or selling. I don't either - which is why I never put anything into it that I can't afford to lose. There are other people here who know a lot more about it than I do, and make a lot more money at it than I do; if you want to join them, you need to have the mindset that online business ("even" affiliate marketing) is every bit as much a business as offline business, and you can't do it successfully without being savvy about it. It takes time to learn, but it also takes patience for affiliate marketing to be successful.
Not much I can say at this point except that general warning. I'll admit your post made me kind of scared - for you! Unless you have a lot of "mad money" to play with, know what you're doing before you spend any more.
ETA that this doesn't mean you can't do it. It's just that the odds are against you making it the way you've been approaching it so far.
[edited by: Beagle at 5:56 pm (utc) on Dec. 23, 2006]
By the way I have no website design skills or any knowledge in marketing or selling!
It's kind of critical to have those types of knowledge & skills. 3-5 years ago click prices were cheap and with some research you could get around $5.00 back for every dollar you spent doing PPC. Now you're generally lucky to get $2.00 for every dollar spent. It require a Google-type mindset to turn a profit in the affiliate world. Keep throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Don't expect to make anything for between 6 months & two years. Get a job at a company or an agency to get some insight into what works, what types of keywords and sites generate sales. Plan on investing thousands of hours in testing, researching and learning what works. Plan to lose a lot on PPC initially (or take lots of time to learn to build sites) as you try different things, promote different merchants & discover what works.
Starting from scratch even with some design & marketing skills is not fast or easy money. Learn to build sites, watch the traffic patterns, keep pushing, keep researching, keep testing but be prepared to make rather large investments of time and money and don't expect ANY e-book to provide a magic formula to even make the investment on the ebook back inside of six months to a year.
thanks again!
