When an Affiliate Program Doesn’t Convert
November 17, 2007
I have spent a substantial amount of time building up a particular site of mine in the past two months. I was drawn to the niche because even though the core subject is relatively competitive, there was not a lot of affiliate competition in the market. The highest search results are filled mostly with reference websites and people who wrote their own books.
When I first started I wrote a couple of articles promoting the site and then I decided to let it simmer until it generated some sales. Fortunately, I made my first sales right out of the box, which lead me to invest more time and effort into the project. It is interesting because I did not have a lot of confidence in the product, but through the Clickbank marketplace I could tell that it was generating some ok sales for other affiliates. Once I made a few sales of my own, I started to get excited that I had found a winner – low competition and a $40 payout per sale.
But as time has passed I am starting to realize that this is unlikely to ever be a high margin website. The number of conversions per visitor is poor and they have gotten even worse after I added a mailing list opt-in. My only real hope is that the conversions will improve once the traffic increases over time. So far I have only managed to get one of my websites to rank highly in Google, but that single one has been a steady performer ever since. I am hoping the same will happen with this erratic one as well.
But all this leads back to one question – should I even bother to bust my hump to promote a site with sporadic earnings? Sure I have done a lot of work to get it to the meager level it is at, but would the time and energy I would spend to on it in the future be better spent on something else. Affiliate marketing, especially when using long-term SEO strategies, can lead to a lot of internal conflict for the marketer. On one hand you don’t want to give up on a site that you have spent hours on, but the flip side is that you don’t want to waste any more time on a dud product. Your pride can urge you to keep going forward even when your conscience tells you that you should face reality.
In this particular case I am going to tweak some things and give it until the end of the year. I plan on moving my email opt-in lower on the page so that people will see the affiliate offer first and hopefully make a spontaneous purchase. I am also going to tweak the sales page to be a little more aggressive. From there I will continue to promote as usual and see what happens in the next 45 days. Perhaps there is still a chance I can make it work.
