Affiliate Musketeer

I don’t know how many of you are in a similar boat to me but I only run small handful of sites (actually not even a handful yet – working on my 3rd one at the moment), and I am working in fairly tight niches. The upside of this is that competition is fairly low but the major downside is that sometimes, these tight niches don’t have a lot of merchants to choose from. My biggest earning site, for example, up until today, was only working with one merchant…

Having all your eggs in one basket is never a good thing, and some people would say that just having one affiliate website was like having all your eggs in one basket but I’ve gone one step worse than that and only had 1 merchant on that site! Now, this isn’t for lack of trying mind you. Simply put, there are no other UK based merchants in this niche.

The silver lining in this cloud though is that about two months ago I started to flap a bit about stock levels on my merchant’s site with the run up to peak season and I was worried that if they ran out of stock or pulled their program, my PPC campaign and profitable site would get pulled from right under me. This prompted me to look around the industry for other companies selling the same types of products hoping that they’d have an affiliate program. Needless to say, none of them did.

But instead of leaving it alone, I decided to email a handful of companies in the niche and tell them how much revenue I was generating for their competitors and if they wanted a piece of the action. As it happens, from 3 companies, one did respond and was very keen to hear how I was doing it and what he needed to do to join in. I gave him a few network contact details and asked him to get involved, learn more about it etc etc. A few days later he came back to me to tell me that the network’s costs were too expensive at that time and he couldn’t justify the spend. I put forward my competitor’s case, cleverly laced with positive stats and revenue projections for peak season and hoped this would be enough.

The potential merchant came back and asked me if I’d like to do an honourable tracking system, where he’d pay me for the sales I drove to his site and we’d jointly monitor the traffic. At the time, I wasn;t so sure and transparency is a big thing for me. I only get so much time to work on my affiliate sites and I would hate to waste a lot of effort on a system that wasn’t kosher. After careful thought I backed out of the idea and advised him to keep looking.

Since then, my site has rocketed in its earnings (100% increase), £16,000 revenue for my merchant in 2 months and I am starting to feel a little confident about how things are going and what Ive managed to achieve. Backed by strong figures I decided to contact the potential merchant again and was chuffed to hear he’d just signed up for a network and his tracking codes would be live shortly!

Great news for me because now my site’s traffic can get split between merchants and it adds a whole new range of products into my site, which allows me to offer more value to my users.

The moral here then, is don’t just settle for what the networks have, do some digging of your own and use real busines sense.

Now the next part of my evil plan is to prove to the new merhcant that I can generate over £100,000 worth of revenue for him over the course of 12 months from my site and then offer him the opportunity to buy it off me. This would instantly increase his profits as he would be cutting out the salesman. I reckon at these sorts of figures, I could hold out for a good 5 figure sum….

Anyone ever tried that route?

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