Yep, I had a user find a good deal for some bar stools on my site and they went right ahead and ordered two of them. This was one of the reasons why I chose to promote bar stools. Despite the average commission value being around 5% per sale, it will be very rare that a user will buy only 1 item. Bar stools come in pairs, (or more than that) so the average items in the basket should be at least two.

Now the stools that were ordered only cost £33.99 each so the commission amount is not great; it’ll be 4% of £67.98 (£2.72) so I’d need to do significantly better than 1 customer every month to make any of this worthwhile and in all reality, I need to ramp up sales to around 4/5 per day to make this really worthwhile and build myself a little cash generating asset but I am determined to keep going to make this happen.

The good news about all of this is that this commission was received whilst my site was not indexed by Google and was receiving the new site deindex penalty so I can only remain positive and upbeat about the future of this site when it actually returns to full index in the next couple of months or so. See this post documenting March’s Affiliate Earnings to get a full graph of the traffic pattern to support this.

As a recap, despite the site having virtually no traffic during the last 4 weeks, I have continued to add content (about 1 article/post per week) and continued to build links – about 1/2 links per week from related websites (when I say related, I mean closely related – eg, selling bar stools or bar furnishings related sites).

This has not been easy because the site has earned nothing (£49 from one sale prior to this one) and my motivation and enthusiasm have taken a real battering but I have weathered on and hopefully this is a sign of better things to come.

I can only keep my head down and keep going, but this little drip of commission has really made my day and given me a small boost of hope that all the groundwork I put into this site will be worth it in the end.

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I was starting to lose a bit of faith in the site until this commission arrived. You could probably tell from some of my earlier posts and I was getting a little downhearted by the lack of conversions from good quality traffic. I don’t know why I was feling like that other than I was genuinely over-ambitious and unrealistic with my initial expectations. I knew it wasn’t going to happen overnight but I think until you get that first commission, you really do find yourself asking if it was all a lost cause. I was feeling like that so much so yesterday that I didn’t even check stats or do any work (link building, product posting etc.) But today, alas! It’s always nice when you get that first commission from a site. It gives you some confidence to keep on going. The next bit of good news was that it was a whopping commission of £49. That was a total sale for the merchant of £1060. £1000 down, £19,000 to go…remember, that’s my monthly target of merchant revenue. Based on a 5% commission, hitting this target every month would give me £1000 in commission per month.

Is it really good news or am I just lucky?

Alright, so let’s have a deeper look at the commission. The conversion of visits to sales that I discussed in a post the other day is slightly better than expected but 1 sale isn’t really anything to go by so I won’t hold my breath over that one just yet. The other thing that perhaps makes me think this isn’t all roses is that the product that drove the conversion only sells for £349…

So either the user bought 3 of these items (which is perfectly reasonable to assume given the nature of the product), or he bought something completely different but by then, my affiliate cookie was already on his system so I got the commission anyway. This just serves to highlight the fact that if a merchant generally has good products and converts well, that just by sending them traffic, you can earn commission.

So here’s my analytics stats for the last two weeks…

As you can see there’s a definite upward trend but that’s to be expected from a site so new. If you click on the stats, you’ll see 75% of traffic is coming from the search engines – or, rather, google. I showed you the other day a list of keywords that were hitting my site and how I was dissapointed that none of them had turned into a sale because they were highly targeted, long tail keyword searches for specific products that I (my merchants) were selling. I have absolute confidence in this website but the no commission thing was really bugging me so I set about contacting a few other affiliates via the Affiliates4U forums.

After driling down a few of my traffic results to a fellow marketeer musketeer, it was refreshing to hear the thoughts of someone else outside my head. Basically I was whinging because my site received 16 visits and only sent 2 clicks to my merchant. I showed this to my colleague who came back at me with some sound logic.

“Yeah, but if you take out the searches that were instant bounces (because you aren;t selling what they want), you’re down to 10 relelvant visitors. Then when you work it out % wise, you achieved a CTR of 20%.”

A 20% CTR sounds good but I was hoping for 70/80% due to the highly targeted traffic and relevant landing pages. But am I being over ambitious? Is a 20% CTR a good amount? I also asked of my fellow musketeers and of myself what the average clicks to conversion numbers are and there was a clear, “around 100 visitors per sale” message. This doesn’t really bode well for me at my current volume of traffic and if it remains as it is, I’d need to wait 50 days to send 100 visitors to my merchant and then hope that I get the 1% conversion…

If this is the rule of thumb moving forward then clearly I need to ramp up traffic significantly so that I am sending 100 clicks to my merchants every day. This means that my target in terms of visitor numbers should be up around 500 visitors p/day.

I now have two options to push this site forward which must be taken in order to make this all worthwhile.

1. Use PPC to increase visitor numbers
2. Improve my organic rank of 11

Now with my product paying an average 5% commission on an avge order basket of around £130, that would net me £6.50 in commission per day. To make this anywhere near worthwhile, I’d neet to cap my PPC spend at £3 per day to come out with over 100% gross profit and even then I’d only be looking at £105 a month. I mean c’mon, really, is it worth 2 hours a night for £105 a month?

The answer is, of course, no. The numbers I’m throwing about here are simply too small to get me going and I need to be much better than my little model above. I’m looking for £1000 a month in commission from this site and that means (at a rate of 5% per sale) that I need to send £20,000 of revenue to my merchant. Now the math on that means I need to refer 154 conversions a month, or, to make it easier for me to comprehend, 5 per day.

The result of all of this is that I need to dramatically improve my CTR to my merchant to give myself a chance. I also need to dramatically increase my traffic and I don’t want to spend on PPC to do it. That leaves me with no option but to get link building and writing content every day for SEO.

As to why I’m still waiting for my first commission, the answer, at this point, is simply that I’m not sending enough traffic to my merchants.

How To Build a Money-Making Affiliate Website from Scratch

1. Early Stage Research
   This chapter looks at all the things I did to research my idea. It includes keyword research, product research, whether or not it would interest me, potential commission (merchant) research and domain research.
2. Site Design
   This chapter will show you how I easily created my affiliate site so that it was simple to update and free to setup.
3. Building a useful Site
   In this chapter I begin to look at how to add value to a site so that it is of genuine benefit to your users.

Affiliate Marketing is the process of marketing products and services from other companies (known as ‘merchants’) and getting paid by those companies (merchants) for each sale or lead you generate for them. It is particularly effective in the online marketing world, where webmasters like yourself can set up a website and promote the products of merchants in order to send your website visitor to the merchant’s website where the user can actually buy the product. The user that you sent will then hopefully buy a product or service from the merchant and if that’s the case, you will get paid.

Now this just doesn’t work with any company and any product, so you cant just setup a website and throw up links to other websites and get paid for it. The company whose products you want to promote must run an affiliate program. Affiliate programs can either be ran in-house by the company themselves or through an independant, 3rd party company such as Affiliate Window or Commission Junction. Of course there are many more 3rd party affiliate companies out there and I’ll include a full list in an appendix at the end of this series. It makes more sense to me to use 3rd party companies because, for example, with Affiliate Window, they have access to over 700 merchants who all want you to promote their products or services and their independantly monitored so there’s little risk of ‘losing’ commissions, which used to be the case when companies kept their affiliate programs in house. Anyway, 700 merchants with websites….that’s a lot of products you could choose to promote and a huge market to tap into.

How Much Can You Earn as an Affiliate?

How much you can earn is unlimited. Really, it is. In Affiliate Window, for example, there are currently 755 merchants to promote. Lets use an example and say that each merchant has 100 products (the real average figure is probably more into the 1000s), thats 755 x 100 = 75500 products that you could promote to website users. How much you earn is only down to how much time and effort you want to put into the job at hand. There’s stories online of people earning 10s of thousands per month through affiliate marketing and probably just as many people out there offering you products or services that TELL YOU HOW TO DO IT. I’m not so sure if all of the so-called gurus have actually made as much as they claim but one guide I really do recomend is The Black Ink Project by Jeremy Palmer – this pretty much strips affiliate marketing bare and is the blueprint that allowed me to build my own affiliate marketing business up. I for one however, do like to rely on my own history and stats rather than take someone else’s word for it and I can say that, to date (as at july 13th 2009), my monthly earnings through affiliate programs are averaging £3500.

I’ve only been doing this full time for 6 months now but I did have a background in Internet Marketing (SEO) and used to work for a web design company based in Sunderland, UK, so I didn’t start from complete scratch with this. Even still, it’s taken me quite a while to pull things together and no short amount of hard, hard graft and lots of trial and error. Its my aim to share some of those experiences with you to try and help you start making a living online too. Now, don’t expect anything formal with this, it really is just a place to catalog my own experiences and hopefully offer advice to people that genuinely helps them in their own affiliate marketing endevours.

I think that pretty much covers it, come back soon where you’ll find regular progress reports and open book explanations of exactly what I’m doing, how I’m doing it and how much money I’m making!