Forum Moderators: skibum
Disclaimer: I am not a expert affiliate marketer - some folks here can earn what took me months to learn in a few days only. But I found out what works for me and until my knowledge increases and develops, I'll stick to it - it just takes a bit longer, and the money's still good ;)
A quick recap of my background so far just to reintroduce the thread:
Recently off school, and working full time as a web designer for a year - when an early mid life crisis struck me - is this what life is about? a 9-7 job, go home, go work, repeat ad nauseum? I've found out that most people coming out from school faces those questions about life - I was no different than them.
Except - I had an idea for a website - a textbook swap and price comparison - this was an idea from way back while I was in school - but one that I didn't have the time or the full technical knowhow to implement. Now that I was done with school and facing the prospect of running in the rat race for eternity, it became more of a drive to get something going - I started building it and that's when I ran into Amazon affiliate program and datafeeds.
Within weeks I had a semi functional site running - and started doing some link exchanging. While searching for some help on the topic, I ran into webmasterworld! At first I was interested only in the link development forum, then somehow I migrated here to affiliate sales - while here, I started realizing that there were many people making money selling all sorts of things. I was only interested in how I could do Amazon better, primarily because I knew how to do their datafeeds, but also because textbooks was all I knew about. Mortgage? Credit cards? Hotel reservations? Gambling? I knew nothing about those industries!
Anyway to keep this (relatively) short - a year ago I discovered this forum. 6 months later I had a decent textbook site which was making me about $20/day. At that point I was already up to my ears from the corporate drone lifestyle and just about ready to quit my job - it was a gamble, but one would only need to look at the potential of affiliate marketing to know that if you play your cards right and you have some sort of idea what to do, the skies were the limit. It fit perfectly with the feelings I was going through, avoiding the rat race, doing something for myself, where I wasn't trading time for money, but instead building a sort of 'equity'. I pondered - if I am doing this part time and I can earn $20/day - then what happens if I go all out and do it full time? A fairly easy decision - I quit my job at the end of September.
Should I fail in affiliate marketing - I only have the next 45 years to work for someone else. Heh! In the meantime, the two problems I face is that I'm really bored with staying in the house for so long :) and to save money I moved in the the parents - to change a bit from this routine, I've decided to move out to europe and live somewhere over there while still doing more sites.
This new thread now will try to convey my ongoing quest to move from the $100/day I reached last month (6 months after I went full time) to $300/day - which is just short of $10k/month, a VERY nice round sum to reach, in my opinion :)... The $100/day pretty much lets me live anywhere in the world fairly comfortably (if it's not the french riviera, or beverly hills - you get my drift), but $300/day would let me actually start saving and possibly investing in real estate, and thus diversify one's revenue streams. That's the plan anyway.
...so after this extensive (re) introduction:
Last month my revenue was about $100+/day. Most of it was adsense - and so this month I was hit bad when adsense decided to go wacko and lost 40% of the revenue stream. Luckily, a site redesign increased the click throughs to make up for the shortfall, with the net effect that I'm a little bit over $100/day with adsense and affiliate sales combined. The current revenue for February has been around $135/day. Should it keep steady till the end of the month, that'll be $3750 in my pockets.
One site I put up last month - consumer products for women - I linked it to my PR5/Pr4 sites and got immediately indexed, and a few days later it was being found by surfers. This month adsense has started showing and paying(some pages still show public service ads) - from a paltry 50 cents at the beginning of this month, to $11 bucks today :) not a lot by any stretch of the imagination, but this is how all sites start anyway!... it has also generated some affiliate sales, so all together the new site has pulled in about $100 bucks.... We'll see how it grows(or not) in the following months.
I also have one site redesign to go through - this site is based on an amazon feed and has about 50,000 pages indexed - it gets some traffic, but due to the bad design it doesn't convert nearly as well as I'd like. Another site I have lined up was going to sell products from HSN.com - again, still in the works. I'm sure once I get those two sites up I can boost my daily revenue to closer to mid $100's...
Anyway - let's see how long it take me to get to $300/day. Place your bets, gentlemen! :)
Yesterday I was still 'suffering' from excess traffic and made over $300 (and this would make it the third time so far I made past $300 - although two of these times have been under these suspicious activity). I emailed google but no response so far, so maybe everything is okay, or they're really looking into it because there IS suspicious activity. Who knows.
Although for a split second my head calculated $660 (from two days ago) times 30 days ... that would have been sweet.
Any more threads like this that we should know of? They provide great info and inspiration!
I assume most of your money is made through affiliate sales, but I know you also make money on Adsense. Do you mind giving us a percentage of how much comes from affiliates, how much from Adsense, and other methods?
He did answer this question in the following quotes:
His April average earnings
April - $190/day
On May 11
my impressions as of 9am PST are 5-6 times higher than usual, and revenue is 3x higher (currently I just broke $500 in adsense today alone). And this is 9AM only!
On May 13
Although for a split second my head calculated $660 (from two days ago) times 30 days ... that would have been sweet.
He was making about $25 a day from affilliates, the rest was from Adsense,
To give you an example of a site that would make a killing I would.
1. Target clubs, do you know how many people search for specific club names, or cityname clubing etc every night? (scrap the content from citysearch)
2. Create forums for each city were users can signup and discuss the local nightlife.
2. Around new years clubs everyone is looking for a place to go, if you partnered with clubs you could pocket $20+ for every ticket you sell. Around new years you are probably looking at a couple hundred thousand referals a day if you target all the major clubs and cities.
A site like this would be looking at 30,000+ referals a day from google and the ability to generate millions. The nice thing is there is 0 competition in search engines. At any rate i'm not going into that market as I have enough monster sites to keep me busy for several lifetimes.
The point i'm trying to make is that don't rely on free traffic forever, build sites that build themselves and you will make way more money then you ever could building spam sites.
I've been saying similar things on this forum for quite a while.
There is money in building low quality "spammy" pages, but it's very short term. If you don't keep building, it'll die off. And if you get hit by a major search engine algorithm change, you could lose virtually everything overnight.
Building high quality sites that people will actually come back to and tell their friends about, however, produces longer lasting results and often much larger monetary rewards.
You're exactly right, although I wouldn't say clubbing has no competition (that's another story, though). The difference is whether someone wants to be a commissioned salesperson or a business owner. It's obviously a lot easier to be a commissioned salesperson because there is very little investment as far as time and money. To be a business owner, it takes a lot more time and possibly money because you have to develop a quality site and quality relationships with real businesses. A successful business owner's income is a lot more stable and likely to grow compared to a commissioned salesperson who's income is neither stable, nor has as much likelihood to grow without increased effort. A successful business owner will sleep a lot easier, but I still don't think that's for everyone. People need to decide what they are good at and what they are willing to risk.
Building high quality sites that people will actually come back to and tell their friends about, however, produces longer lasting results and often much larger monetary rewards.
I can confirm to this. I have a new site, 10 pages so far, launched a few days ago, and on the third day I have 5000 daily vistors. No feeds, it just got picked up and linked by others because the content is original, interesting and something people want to share.
Launched and picked up by others in 3 days to the tune of 5000 daily visitors? I'm envious! How?
No Kidding. Please do tell.
I was patting myself on the back for getting a new site into Google in 3 days. You certianly have me beat.
Dave
I have a new site, 10 pages so far, launched a few days ago, and on the third day I have 5000 daily vistors. No feeds, it just got picked up and linked by others because the content is original, interesting and something people want to share.
Add me to the list. I can’t believe this is possible, into Google yes, but 5000 daily visitors on ten pages? No way.
It's not that hard if his website got picked up by a big weblog or some kind of news site. But traffic won't stay up that high if this is the case.
I do take a certain offense to be called bottom feed, although I will also acknowledge that I run them too and have nothing against them. For clarification, even though I've mentioned this before:
My main (feed) site is actually of value - for example, just last week when my big site was down due to the big traffic spike, some lady emailed me telling me ´oh I just used your invitation feature to invite 50(!) people but now the main page seems to be down´, and then, when I replied to her saying ´by tomorrow it should be back up´, and when it wasn't by 10am PST, she was emailing me back again pointing it out to me (talk about a dedicated user...). My 'invite a friend' feature gets regular use, at the tune of 2-3 people a day, not counting the ones who may just mention in passing my site to a friend on an email or whatnot. I also get new reviews (probably over a 1000, all user entered) and new products added on a regular basis.
The products I used to seed the site do need reviewing (unlike the countless digital camera review sites and similar ilk *ahem* - no,my site is NOT about camera reviews..or, is it?) and people are genuinely helped by reading other people's feedback. I DID not do any research on this topic before I got into it. I did NOT go into #*$! and find out how many searches were being performed or how much a click was worth. I only asked myself a very simple question which is the basis of much innovation: 'wouldn't it be nice if there was a site that dealt with these products?' And that's how a couple of my sites are born. Maybe a bit of luck, but as my pops used to say, luck is having the right tools and frame of mind when the opportunity arises.
Anyway, I've been at the beach over the weekend to celebrate my bday (this Spanish cultural thing about staying up and out till 3am is throwing me off - families still out at 1am) but I'm very happy to report that for the past 3 days I´ve been offline I've been averaging 2x more traffic and averaging $270/day. Things seem to be slowing down from the looks of it but I'll enjoy it while it lasts(assuming everything is legit,and not a repeated competitor attack - still haven't received any emails from google yet) considering for the past two months I haven't quite done much to increase revenue. So maybe, just maybe, I was indeed mentioned somewhere in some big site as something worth taking a look at.
On other news, I´ve got some more pages back in the index, but they lost description again.
Revenue so far with breakdown:Adsense-$3000 AM-$650
Expected revenue at the end of the month: Adsense-$5000 AM-$1300
So yes, for newbies reading this thread, Adsense (for me) has so far paid off much better than AM - a click is always an easier action than a sale,IMHO - but that's not to say AM money can really be ignored.
(added) oh and I'd also like to know what kind of 10 page site gets 5000 impressions in 3 days :) Is it a joke/funny site, or real serious content, product based, or topic based or waht? Would love to know a bit more about it.
Taking your example of digital cameras, there are a few tremendous digital camera review sites out there. One that I know about gets 14 million visitors per month, with each visitor spending an average of 18 minutes on the site and views 12 pages (all details from the advertising page). That traffic is extremely well targeted. I don't think they even use AdSense. It all appears to be affiliate programs and paid advertising. I wouldn't be surprised if they make $0.10 to $0.50 per visitor, because they're providing an invaluable site for people who are buying digital cameras. There are very detailed reviews, extensive feature searching capabilities, side by side comparisons, sample images, discussion forums (which aren't counted in their page views and unique visitors), new reviews (as recently as Friday and cameras released within the past two weeks), a glossary, price comparisons, and other useful features.
On my own sites, AdSense provides less than 5% of my earnings, although I have fairly prominent AdSense ads on most pages. Affiliate earnings make up the rest.
(Added) Oh, and as for the types of sites that can grow to 5000 visitors in a few days, they are typically entertainment sites. Consider, for instance, JibJab.com. I'm sure they exceeded a million visitors a day at their peak, but I doubt they were able to make a penny per visitor. (Still, that's thousands of dollars per day!) Forums, photo galleries, humor sites, and rating sites are all similar. These types of sites are notoriously hard to monetize and only do well with high traffic.
May I ask you if you are using a CMS software like Mambo for your sites? Or did you code them from scratch?
Thanks!
From my experience, the ratio of AdSense earnings to affiliate earnings is inversely proportional to the usefulness of a site relative to specific products.
MovingOnUp, that's not my experience. I have an old, rather messy, information site. Some pages do well with affiliate program (Amazon), others with AdSense. But the handful of detailed book review pages I have do well with BOTH Amazon and AdSense, not just AdSense.
I think your generalization is true for some kinds of sites and products, but not all.
From my experience, the ratio of AdSense earnings to affiliate earnings is inversely proportional to the usefulness of a site relative to specific products.MovingOnUp, that's not my experience. I have an old, rather messy, information site. Some pages do well with affiliate program (Amazon), others with AdSense. But the handful of detailed book review pages I have do well with BOTH Amazon and AdSense, not just AdSense.
Perhaps my wording wasn't very clear. What you're saying actually agrees with what I was trying to say. I'll try to say it a little clearer.
A high quality site with extremely relevant affiliate links and highly targeted traffic will do very well with those affiliate programs and will not get many clicks on the AdSense ads.
A less useful site with poorly matched affiliate links and more general traffic will get a very high CTR on AdSense ads and not do very well with affiliate links. For instance, many of the domain parking sites get CTRs of 20-30% or more.
I've experienced this with my own sites. Normally, I get very low CTRs with Adsense ads but see an effective CTR of 30-90% with my affiliate links (when I consider all of them on a page). On a couple rare occasions, I've had periods of time where the content on the page was messed up and only ads showed up. When this has happened, my AdSense CTR skyrocketed.
So what I'm trying to say is that when you have what your visitors want on your sites (in the way of affiliate links), they use those links. When you don't, more of them use AdSense links. My presumption from that (which may or may not be valid) is that the higher the percent of AdSense earnings compared to affiliate earnings, the worse job you're doing getting targeted traffic, relevant affiliate links, and building a useful site.
my own ego aside, I'd tend to agree with you. Its all a matter of wether your site is a final destination or a go-between, having in mind that even 'final destination' sites are still go betweens to the merchant, and go-betweens are sites that leaves you wanting for more info, which leads one to click on to the adsense. ultimately I´d prefer my sites to generate most of their income from AM, simply because there are more players out there vs the one and only Adsense.
I was curious if all your sites are top notch resources in their fields, or in your stable of sites they are pearls amongst grains of sand.
Off topic: google finally responded to me after me sending them 5 emails. They´ll be keeping an eye at the situation, but things seems to be okay. I finally found a cybercafe that I can hook up my laptop to, so I will be doing some real work now.Maybe.
The last three pages gave me some ideas, and I am going to re-work one of my domains. (The name is perfect for the idea!) I also bought a fun new name that I think has some great niche potential. Unfortunately I'm just short on my PHP knowledge or it would be up already. If only I had a few more hours each day...
So, I have a few questions now about affiliate ads. I've been running them for about a month now with 5k+ impressions and about a 2.2% CTR. I think the ads are well targeted for the content, and I only take ads that go to quality sites, but the CTR seems pretty low to me. What is an average CTR for affiliate ads?
Also, the purchase rate for the advertisers is %^*(. They all promise great numbers, and they show high returns on the cj list, but that's not what I'm seeing. How long did it take most of you before you saw any decent numbers with affiliate ads?
my own ego aside, I'd tend to agree with you.
I'm glad you took what I had to say constructively. It wasn't intended as an attack against the quality of your site, although it could have been taken that way.
Its all a matter of wether your site is a final destination or a go-between, having in mind that even 'final destination' sites are still go betweens to the merchant, and go-betweens are sites that leaves you wanting for more info, which leads one to click on to the adsense.
True. The difference is how much value a site adds. There's a huge difference between sites that are basically mirrors of a merchant's site (and I'm not saying yours is, but there are many out there) and a site like the Digital Camera review site that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts on this thread.
It's sites like JibJab.com that are true "final destination" sites, which is why those types of sites are so hard to monetize without very high traffic.
ultimately I´d prefer my sites to generate most of their income from AM, simply because there are more players out there vs the one and only Adsense.
Excellent point.
I was curious if all your sites are top notch resources in their fields, or in your stable of sites they are pearls amongst grains of sand.
All but one (which gets virtually no traffic now) are top notch resources in their respective fields. All of the others are mentioned frequently (at least once a month between all the sites) in newspapers, magazines, news articles, books, etc. They also get unsolicited links from forums, blogs and directories pretty much on a daily basis. That's the power of the "organic traffic" you get from truly useful sites.
So, I have a few questions now about affiliate ads. I've been running them for about a month now with 5k+ impressions and about a 2.2% CTR. I think the ads are well targeted for the content, and I only take ads that go to quality sites, but the CTR seems pretty low to me. What is an average CTR for affiliate ads?
If you're talking about just an ad on a content page, 2.2% CTR isn't bad. If you build a page designed around affiliate links, you should see at least a 25% net CTR assuming you have good quality traffic and a well designed page. By 25% net CTR, I mean 25% of visitors to the page should click on one or more of the various affiliate links on the page. (Many pages designed around affiliate links have multiple affiliate links on the page.)
Also, the purchase rate for the advertisers is %^*(. They all promise great numbers, and they show high returns on the cj list, but that's not what I'm seeing. How long did it take most of you before you saw any decent numbers with affiliate ads?
I've found that the better the CTR, the better the conversion ratio as well. When I see a 50-90% net CTR, I often see a 10-30% conversion ratio. When I see a 5% net CTR, I often see less than a 5% conversion ratio.
If you're seeing a low conversion ratio, you're not providing your visitors what they're looking for. Perhaps you need to give them more choices or find some other way to further target them. Or perhaps you're not targeting people who are ready to buy. Or perhaps something about the merchant isn't appealing to your visitors.
From my experience, the ratio of AdSense earnings to affiliate earnings is inversely proportional to the usefulness of a site relative to specific products.
This is not true, at least, to some of the non-US based publishers with US audience but a limit selection of the affilliates' pool.
By the way, I have been away so anyone who has sent me a sticky I will reply - not that ignorant!
The way I approach earning through affiliate marketing is largely based on a key point that was just discussed and that rfung said "whether your site is a final destination or a go-between". To me that is totally the key issue of how you create a site, structure, design, income partnerships, content, marketing etc.
I think of each site as a mini business plan which is where I position my site in the "buying chain". I also think that if your site is a resource there is no correlation between that factor (the content) and making more money as an AM - it depends on where the content is positioned in the buying chain:
To me the buying chain consists of 3 steps in AM:
1. User searches, clicks link etc.. wants to find a list of relevant sites to choose from to find potential info about a potential purchase.
2. User visits a site that provides the buying info or qualification they need.
3. User purchases - or returns later to purchase.
Obviously this is a hugely simplified model, but gives an insight into how you want to position yourself in the buying chain - because after all if they don't buy (by buying I mean any action from your site potentially eg a click) then you don't get paid.
Content that is usually offered as a resource to me tends to get in the way of a buying message (and therefore without a call to action CTR to any external products etc can be lower - but these ads as well can get in the way of a good conversion as well), after all that is the point. So for example a "review" or "comparison" or "comment" that targets a particular group of products etc will be much more "buying" than info on how to put together a PC (flippant sounding, not meant to be).
With this in mind all the figures of CPC, EPC, CTR - etc. will differ massively when you take into account that one site vs another in the exact same niche may be set up to be in a different part of the buying chain (not on purpose - but thats where we have room for improvement!)
Theory aside, what I do is choose an industry that I would like to target. I then identify several niche areas and several competitive areas within that industry - both need different strategies. I then get a feel for competing sites, destination sites - everything in the chain. I look at design, content (and this is key - mind you isn't it all?), and I look at what a user would want to do landing at one of these sites. I then decide to position my site as close to the final stage of the buying chain as possible = higher CTR and higher earnings. I therefore discard Adsense EVERY TIME as a key earner.
I am still talking theory really but initial strategy and understanding can shape everything for you. What I believe is the key to maximising revenue on top of this theory is social engineering. By this I mean create partnerships - you can't earn a steady amount of AM income without it - look at how peoples Adsense income fluctuates. I use the rule that if you can't take your income projections (firm ones) to a bank manager (and meet them week in week out) then it isn't a good high income plan, especially when you don't even have a xx% revenue share contract with account manager etc with Google (unless you are on the premium plan which is out of most peoples' reach). You have to be willing to pick up a phone, be cheeky, get good deals and surface from behind the PC and online control panels.
In terms of why I have found Adsense always pays a fraction of the real value of my traffic I will go back to the buying chain (and therefore highlighting the point that the ad content needs to be one up in the buying chain in relation to the main content of the page or block)
When a user comes to my site I make an assumption - they have found me through another source, whether search or whatever. It is my job to pre-qualify whatever they looked for and move the buyer to their final destination. Adsense can not do this, or can but with extreme SEO nightmares of optimising a page for a user for one purpose and then trying to optimise the mediabot for ads that move the visitor to the next step. All Adsense does is scrape your content and serve ads - that is all it is intended for and all it can do. As a webmaster you are forced to splice pages etc. and spend a lot of time to try to get the ads you want to show up. There is also a major downside is that you ain't getting 50% guaranteed from each click - you need a contract for that - I would rather get 50% of $1 for an ad a choose than?% of?$.
I could probably go on for hours in detail about which programs and more about the programs to consider, traffic generation techiques based on content and how I got bigger contracts than I should - I have no problem with that if anyone is interested but I do have to go to bed!
Changing one part of that may not increase income, optimising all parts in line with your competitors will help a lot.
I haven't mentioned the "brute force" competitive area strategy either (which is a bit different!). Go on I bet loads of people want to get great cash in finance areas etc!
ZZZzzzz.
My traffic has decreased with 50-60 percent. From $175 a day to hardly $80 a day it seems :(.
Thanks all for your willingness to share some great information. I hope that I can repay the kindness with some pearls of my own in the future.
