Forum Moderators: skibum
If Pepsi said to the Washington Post, "Here, run this full page ad in the Sunday edition and we'll give you 5% of sales to consumers who were pointing to the ad with their right index finger at the time they bought the 2 liter of Pepsi", do you think the Washington Post would run the ad?
No. Advertising creates brand awareness. It should cost.
Who's going to marry Sally when Mary, Jenny, Molly, Barbara, and Gina are giving it away for free?
Those 39,000 pageviews would have earned me a high 4-figure sum on one site that sends highly targetted traffic to a specific merchant. Unfortunately the site generates nowhere near that amount of pageviews - yet ;)
It's horses for courses - as has been said, with the right site, the right traffic and the right merchant, the figures can and do work.
I doubt contractors will buy a table saw online when they can go to Lowe's and have it now.
mosley700, my friend, I sell table saws, circular saws, reciprocating saws and a whole slew of power tools through targeted product specific pages. Whether these buyers are contractors or not, I don't know. I suspect contractors, however, are like the rest of us. It takes time out of your day to go to Lowes. And here in California, you have to pay sales tax. I would think that just as many contractors proportionally will buy on the internet as the buying public in general.
Now that Amazon is lifting the cap on commissions in this category, I intend to expand on what I've done so far. If you're squeamish about making money from the internet, I respect that. I simply don't agree, and refuse to indulge in limited thinking. I'll try anything that seems to make sense. And when I find a product line that works well, I go at expanding on it full tilt. Its fun. Try it.
1. I can definately see that some products are not appropriate for selling online ... or at least are very difficult to sell online.
However you can still have an affiliate program for these products. You display the telephone number and a tracking code on the website. If someone calls the number the business records the tracking code and attributes the sale to the affiliate. Not a fool proof system, but better than no tracking system.
2. Personally I think branding is highly overrated (with the exception of some big companies like nike). For small/mid size companies sales are important ... not branding. As a small company, if your advertising doesn't make you money ... it's a waste of time.
3. Perhaps you can make money by selling banners at CPM for $20 per thousand, but I've got companies like altavista selling me (an affiliate) advertising for $6 per thousand, for targeted traffic. I can buy these impressions and make more money by sending the traffic to affiliate programs ... so in this case affiliate programs are a better option ... although I realize that this is not the case for all products.
