Affiliate Marketing – Does It Work ?
The short and easy answer to this, is that for most affiliate marketing groups, whether they be small businesses or stay at home moms, the short answer is no, and the long answer is still no. No, we are not trying to be funny, but any way you cut this pie and there are lots of ways to cut it, affiliate marketing is really quite lucrative and yet so few internet marketing groups or individuals are making money at it.
Affiliate Marketing – the proof
For those that agree whole heartedly with the prior paragraph, have a look at the front page of clickbank where they claim to have given away 1.6 Billion so far in 2010 in affiliate marketing commissions. We don’t have easy access to commission junction,amazon,ebay or dozens of other major sites but its pretty obvious that this marketplace of affiliates selling products that they don’t own is well over 5 billion dollars annually.
In fact, most of us in the affiliate marketing biz know of at least half a dozen IM ( Internet marketing) guys by name whom we wouldn’t mind trading financial positions with. The truth is, affiliate marketing works for some, according to clickbank less than 5% of their signee’s, and isn’t working for most others.
Why Affiliate Marketing Isn’t Working For Most of us ?
There are basically 4 things that a successful affiliate campaign needs
- An offer that hungry people want to buy
- A way of driving traffic to the offer ( hopefully a CPA lead offer which requires no actual sale )
- An earnings to cost ratio that is positive enough that you want to …
- Rinse and repeat again.
There is no big secret about any of the above and while there may be a few issues concerning finding HOT affiliate offers, its neither impossible to find them nor a big deal, per se. Niches having to do with relationships, how one looks (dermatology, muscle gain,teeth whitening ),cures for pain, etc are going to be forever popular.
Biggest Affiliate Marketing Problem
The real problem is usually finding either enough traffic or qualified traffic. And the reason that most marketers fail is because we typically start the whole process with no money and end up trying “natural means” such as organic seo.
While there is nothing wrong with this approach, the truth is that most marketers entering the weight loss market will naturally attempt this natural seo on the keyword weight loss, which last time I checked had tens of millions of competing website pages.
After the failure to get enough buying traffic ( primarily due to both competition and the commercial intent level on this phrase ), a tenacious marketer will keep trying and keep trying and keep trying the same old thing with different variations in an attempt to get some positive result for their affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing – The end result is predictable
No sales or too few sales accrue to be worth the marketing effort.
What most of us don’t calculate is that the 6 months of effort equals about 200 hours of trying. Even at a paltry 10.00 per hour this is already $2,000.00 worth of time.
The biggest problem is also the easiest problem to fix, but the mindset has to be there. I know of 3 and 4 year veterans who are making 2-3000 monthly and who have 3-4 CPA offers that are doing so well that 1 in 14 visitors are becoming solid leads which pay 20-30 dollars per lead.
This particular affiliate marketing guru had never thought to examine her earnings to see
- where specifically they were being earned
- how specifically she could use better title tags to increase the CTR from Google and thus the traffic to the offer
- how she might just buy additional traffic of the same demographic to incredibly boost the offer.
We have had a hard look at her earnings, and now think that with the addition of about $500 monthly in 5 cent ad purchases, we can more than double her revenue to about 4-5,000 per month.
The biggest problem for affiliate marketing groups, particularly those who are now doing CPA, ( Cost Per Action ) paid lead generation, is simply getting enough qualified traffic to make the affiliate marketing work profitably.
What has killed the ability of most affiliate marketing groups to earn any decent amount of money is a lack of qualified reasonably costed traffic.
From 2000 to 2004, affiliates could have bought reasonably inexpensive yet qualified online traffic from Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or AskJeeves.
When hundreds of thousands of affiliates plus corporate started to pile into the bidding for specific keyword phrases, the aggregate pressure on the bidding process made Google rich and drove prices from 5 cents a click all the way up to and beyond $10.00. Google and I both blame corporate buyers for the steep price increases in bids but click fraud and researchers clicking on the top positions also contributed to pricing google adwords out of reach of most marketers.
During this rush to Google adwords, most corporate and many internet marketers unwisely forgot about yahoo, askjeeves and other search engines.
The rush to Google had the unintended but thoroughly wonderful effect of causing super cheap bidding on Yahoo and gave rise to a set of smart affiliate marketing groups who nearly always run the other direction from the mob.
One of the smart groups found a way to grab massive amounts of traffic from Google, but from an area of Google that most affiliate marketing groups and corporate were running from. Ha ha, notice the pattern. Both links above lead to products that show you how to do this in essentially 15 minutes, particularly if you already have a google adwords account. You will really smile when you figure out what they both figured out. Both links cover essentially the same critical area of 5 cent affiliate marketing traffic from google, but each has additional information that you might find useful.
Notice in both cases, the cheap traffic is being purchased in areas from which most people are running away from.
That is key, since nearly all traffic sources are now sold based on bids. We will talk about places where other individual internet marketers are spending up to 24,000 dollars a day.
Keep watching this space. I am going to talk about how to go where the mob isn’t and get good quality 1 cent to 5 cent traffic that converts well for affiliate marketing groups whether you are a mom and pop or small 25 person company.
