Affiliate Musketeer

Yesterday was my first real affiliate bank holiday.  What I mean by that is that it is the first time I’ve actually been in a position where I’ve had an affiliate site up and running for a couple of months before-hand and have actually been able to say with confidence that ‘yes, the rainy bank holiday actually made a difference to my sales’…

I actually cleared £100 yesterday for the first time in one day.  I’ve been looking at my stats for the last week and for all intents and purposes the site has been performing exceptionally well, it just hadn’t made any sales.  This particular site had experienced it’s highest volume week ever, clearing 100 visitors every day – it’s only a new site about 4 months old – and everything was right about it.  Users were viewing on average 3.5 pages per visit, staying on the site for about 3 minutes and has managed an improved bounce rate from 45% in April down to 25% last month.

I put this down to the addition of more content and a change in the way page structure is setup.  I used to direct users from the homepage to the merchant’s site (which increases the bounce rate), but have now adopted a more ‘presell’ strategy in that now, I direct users from the homepage to a more in depth page about the product on my own site and then to a merchant’s site.  This gives me every chance to presell and means that when my user does click through, they’re mouths are watering for the offer/product.  The other advantage of course is that it gives me the opportunity to add content to my site – which I actually like doing and this, as I’m sure you’ll know, is contributing to a healthy SEO strategy for the site.

I am seeing the fruits of this change first hand in this last week’s traffic stats where organic traffic has slowly increased every day.  Although a very small number, it is up from less than 5 organic searches to almost 30.  These are all very targeted, relevant searches too and I am expecting this trend to continue.  It will continue because I will be writing at least 1 new content article each week, always offering up more for the search spiders to eat.

Anyway, all that aside, the whole point of this post is that all the work of the last few weeks has paid off because today, when I logged into my CJ stats, I’d cleared £100 for the first time in a single day.  Ka-Ching!

What do I think contributed to this success?

• It was a Bank Holiday here in the UK yesterday – more people off work means more people surfing the net.
• It was a shitty, rainy day yesterday which means people weren’t out playing rounders or having picnics, they were on my site considering buying my merchant’s product(s).
• I’ve increased organic traffic over the last week by 30% – there was no magic trick to this, it was just that my site is now just over 3 months old and google is starting to pick up and rank my rich content pages that are highly targeted to my [merchant's] target market.
• My merchant has good products.