Starting's easy - but when do you stop?

[Bill Smith]

As a relatively new entrant to affiliate marketing I seem to have reached a space that other folk must have also reached. So I'm curious to know what to do next.

Like many people (I suppose) I have stumbled into aff mktg - made heaps of mistakes - bought a few carefully selected how-to ebooks from the more credible 'donkey and shovel' salesmen & women, and have managed to create a steady monthly income of around $600.

On the one hand that's quite satisfying - I made it over the first hurdle - but on the other, it's scarcely a king's ransom. So I now find myself in a business-building quandry.

All this limited success has come from one product. It's a good product that fills a genuine need but I'm wondering whether to keep trying to build this campaign or diversify.

Clearly - having multiple products gives greater stability - but my initial goal is to cover my monthly bills - plus a bit more that can be invested back into the business.

I understand this is a business where you build brick by brick - but I'd like to avoid wasting too much time constructing rooms in the castle that aren't attractive to paying visitors.

My questions are:

1) How do you know when you have exhausted a product's potential - so that more articles and more promotion will only win decreasing marginal returns ?

2) After you have built a campaign that works reasonably well - how do you examine and monitor it to calculate whether you have constructed it in the best way possible - or whether you need to pull it apart and rebuild ?

As a footnote - my feeling is that writing articles seems only slightly better than sitting on an island stuffing keyworded notes into empty bottles and tossing them into the sea in the hope that someone, somewhere, will find and read them and respond. Does anyone have a good method for evaluating a campaign's effectiveness ?

Any thoughts will be most welcome.

 

[ArizonaJay]

GREAT questions. I'll be very interested in the answers for this (posting primarily to get subscribed - sorry for the no value addition to this thread.)

 

[Linda Buquet]

GREAT questions. I'll be very interested in the answers for this (posting primarily to get subscribed - sorry for the no value addition to this thread.)

Hi Jeanette, so you know you can subscribe to threads without posting.
Go to thread tools right above the post and hit subscribe.

 

[Linda Buquet]

I understand this is a business where you build brick by brick - but I'd like to avoid wasting too much time constructing rooms in the castle that aren't attractive to paying visitors.

My questions are:

1) How do you know when you have exhausted a product's potential - so that more articles and more promotion will only win decreasing marginal returns ?

2) After you have built a campaign that works reasonably well - how do you examine and monitor it to calculate whether you have constructed it in the best way possible - or whether you need to pull it apart and rebuild ?

As a footnote - my feeling is that writing articles seems only slightly better than sitting on an island stuffing keyworded notes into empty bottles and tossing them into the sea in the hope that someone, somewhere, will find and read them and respond. Does anyone have a good method for evaluating a campaign's effectiveness ?

Hi Bill, welcome to 5 Star.

WOW! Thanks for starting off with such a great post. LOVE your analogies!
I really may need to re-use those sometime!

Sounds like you are at a plateau and need to decide where to go from here. I'm sure many other affiliates are at similar crossroads. Smart that you decided to stop, re-evaluate and ask for help. We'll try our best to help.

Actually before I start answering and possibly barking up the wrong tree, I'd like to ask what type of marketing you've been doing so far. You mention article marketing but don't seem like you like it so I'm wondering if that's what you are doing? But you also mention campaigns which many times affiliates use that word when they are doing PPC. So I just wanted to check with you 1st.

This post brings up so many issues, that I may need to come back and add more later, maybe even a couple times. After you answer the marketing Q above, there are some blog posts I want to go find when I get time that will help you too.

 

[Bill Smith]

Hi Linda - many thanks for your speedy response.

To answer your marketing questions - my campaign is not ppc. I read Perry Marshall but decided that was a great way to hemorrhage money for a beginner.

I then decided to follow the Travis Sago method of Bum Marketing. I read some Squidoo stuff (One Week Marketing) written by Jennifer Ledbetter (PPG) - but decided I wasn't that excited about selling what I saw as dubious quality ebooks on Clickbank.

So I made it up as I went along. A bit of this and a bit of that - starting off with a product I actually use myself.

What I have, is a reasonable understanding of keywords and an ability to write in a way that engages people (most of the time). So I went for organic traffic via article marketing with the plan that I would try to get potential customers ready to buy before they hit the manufacturers landing page.

I do enjoy writing - but find that it takes me quite a while to get my articles how I want them (I have an eye defect which makes it slower than I would like) so will invest in some text to speech software when I can afford it.

I got myself a Hostgator account and figured out how to install Wordpress and now have a couple of clumsy sites (techy stuff not my best skill) so I'm a bit like a 5 year old who's just got the keys to his Dad's car and can't quite reach the pedals.

But I guess that's just the learning curve everone seems to go through.

That's my story in a nutshell.

 

[Linda Buquet]

1) How do you know when you have exhausted a product's potential - so that more articles and more promotion will only win decreasing marginal returns ?

2) After you have built a campaign that works reasonably well - how do you examine and monitor it to calculate whether you have constructed it in the best way possible - or whether you need to pull it apart and rebuild ?

As a footnote - my feeling is that writing articles seems only slightly better than sitting on an island stuffing keyworded notes into empty bottles and tossing them into the sea in the hope that someone, somewhere, will find and read them and respond. Does anyone have a good method for evaluating a campaign's effectiveness ?

1) That's so hard to answer and lots of people have varying opinions on this, but I tend to lean more toward focusing energy on one goal, project, site IF there is potential left. That said, how do you know for sure there is? That's tricky.

One thing I'd suggest is to be sure you've scaled your campaigns all you can and are covering all the keyword bases. This post is about PPC but the principles are the same for article marketing.
Keyword Research Secrets to Explode Your Affiliate Business

2) That link above sort of could apply to answering your Q #2 as well.

I wish I knew the niche you are in. I hope it's not Internet marketing or make money online. Doesn't sound like it is. The type of niche you are in can define to some degree the best marketing approach to take.

Many here know I'm not a big fan of article marketing. I have lots of reasons for that and am sick today so don't really feel up to trying to explain it all.

But one thing I'm wondering is this... Assuming the product is good and converts well, assuming you've done exhaustive keyword research and have scaled all the possible keywords, are you up for trying a different marketing method? Again not knowing your niche it's kinda hard. But I'm wondering if you've tried SEO, blogging and social marketing?

If you want to PM me your site so I can take a look I promise to keep it and your niche in confidence and can give more targeted advice.

 

[Bill Smith]

Hi Linda - thanks for your thoughts and links. Apologies for the time delay - but I'm in London in a different time zone.

Now that you're challenging me to show you my work to date I suddenly feel nervous! Distant memories of handing in sub-standard school homework flash alarmingly before my eyes.

However, it is forcing me to be realistic. In this fledgling business right now I am sending an average of 15 visitors per day to the vendor's website and those are currently converting into sales at 11.87%.

I differentiate between "clicks" and "visitors".To me - a click is someone who responds to a headline or an ad. At this stage, they have probably no more than curiosity to find out if they are in the right place.

A visitor has read my articles or visited my website. They now (hopefully) believe that what they want is available by following my link to the vendor's website. I picture them wide eyed and open mouthed tightly clutching a valid credit card in a sweaty hand.

Have I set up the perfect sales funnel? Probably not.

Could I do a better job? Almost certainly.

Which brings me to believe logically that if I maintain 11+ percent conversion - but increase daily visitors to 30 - that should double my average monthly income from $600 to $1200 on this single product.

I am going to create a new keyword list and set up a new Wordpress website with a mixture of fixed pages and blog entries and make the content much tighter than before. By adding additional links from my previous articles it should start to rank reasonably quickly.

Linda - if you were going to suggest another or additional approach (bearing in mind you are not keen on article marketing) what direction would you put forward?

(The sector is dental hygene and it's a product that deals with general oral health and gum disorders. It's quite busy with plenty of competition - but I seem able to get my articles read without too much difficulty).

If anyone's interested - I will update on my progress.

I am sure there are many other people out there in similar/parallel situations. They will have read some stuff and been momentarily blinded by the endless chatter about processes and people trying to sell them the next fool-proof method of making gazillions of $$$ on autopilot garbage. Then they set sail in their leaky boat and have just realized they are alone in an unforgiving ocean with a tin-pot business and their own decisions, having completely lost sight of land.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Which brings me to believe logically that if I maintain 11+ percent conversion - but increase daily visitors to 30 - that should double my average monthly income from $600 to $1200 on this single product.

I am going to create a new keyword list and set up a new Wordpress website with a mixture of fixed pages and blog entries and make the content much tighter than before. By adding additional links from my previous articles it should start to rank reasonably quickly.

Linda - if you were going to suggest another or additional approach (bearing in mind you are not keen on article marketing) what direction would you put forward?

(The sector is dental hygene and it's a product that deals with general oral health and gum disorders. It's quite busy with plenty of competition - but I seem able to get my articles read without too much difficulty).

If anyone's interested - I will update on my progress.

Bill, great to hear about the niche and your conversion rates. I would say ramp it up. With conversion rates like that you just need more traffic. If I had to suggest one approach it would be what you said you are planning to do anyway.

Focus more energy on your own blog, with good keyword titles and SEO optimization. Then I would start commenting on related do follow blogs for visitors and for back links. Join some health related forum where people ask questions about gum disease, etc.

So I would work on SEO and links for your own site and build up your traffic. Then possibly add 1 or 2 more dental related products. But keep focusing on the same niche.

Sidenote: My thoughts on article marketing? If I'm going to take the time to research and write an article I want to be the one to get all the benefits. I want it bringing traffic to MY site. I want visitors to remember and hopefully bookmark MY site. I don't want to do all that work then post an article on an article directory that has a zillion Adsense ads only to have that traffic click off the page, before they even see my link in the resource box. And I certainly don't want my article putting Adsense money in someone else's pocket when I could be making money from getting affiliate clicks on my own site instead.

Article marketing as part of an overall strategy to get targeted backlinks is probably OK I just think putting the focus on building up your own web property instead of someone else's should be the primary goal.

So that's just my own 2 cents and I admit I've never done article marketing, so possibly I'm missing something. But my blog is ranked #1 on all the search engines in a VERY competitive niche and I get several hundred thousand visitors a month, by generating content and spiderfood here instead of posting articles other places.

I admit too, I could be biased just because this is how I choose to do things. We all have to find out works best for us.

And yes, do keep us posted on your progress!

 

[Bill Smith]

All good advice Linda - and thanks for that.

The real reason that I do article marketing is to point links to my own website. It's a kind of clumsy SEO procedure. And it's clumsy because the conversion rates from my articles to my website are much much lower than from the merchant's website to the 'buy now' button.

However, without some backlink help, my own website will probably appear in position 30 or worse in a Google search for a given keyword or phrase - which is worse than useless. Although the articles help - (as you say) they definitely 'bleed' significant numbers of visitors to the targeted adsense graffiti that's plastered all over the page.

The articles do have another good effect. If I am trying to dominate a long-tail keyword, I can hoist a number of pages that have the effect of pushing other weaker pages out of the top ten.

I suppose the answer is to create and own more internet real estate and get better at SEO. I think my beginner's technique has been all about slinging mud at the wall in the hope that some of it sticks. My vague plan was to becoming more sophisticated at some point in the future when enough mud had stuck to the wall.

Now I have a hosting account that will support unlimited websites, perhaps now is the time to learn more about shaping the appearance of Wordpress and getting to grips with SEO. I have a pretty good understanding of keywords but need to spend time discovering how to generate the backlinks and other tricks.

Thanks again for your help Linda.