Affiliate Musketeer

How many times have you heard that? When you throw together your site you do your quick calculations and work out how much commission you’ll make from your merchant and then try and guess how much traffic you’ll need to make X so you load up Google’s keyword tool to see how many searches a particular term gets etc etc. on and on…

But even though you think you’ve planned everything down to a T, you still can’t get your bloody site to rank in the organic results and this is a major de-motivating factor. My bar stools affiliate site is still not ranking in google for any of my target terms – actually I haven’t really been targeting any terms other than the site’s domain name, bar stools uk.

I’ve written articles and submitted them to ezine articles, I’ve written press releases and submitted them to a handful of press release sites, I’ve exchanged links with other webmasters in my niche and I’ve even paid for someone to build me high pr links through oDesk but despite all of that, 6 months into my affiliate site’s life, I’m still nowehere to be seen in organic rankings.

Obviously after such a long time, despite getting lots of encouragement from other affiliates, the hopelessness creeps into your body like a slow bitter syrup, smothering your hopes and dreams in a thick shroud of endless blackness, only to feed on your tortured soul, lost somewhere in the empty shadow that remains – actually, it’s not that bad but it really kicks you in the balls to say the least.

I’m Sure This Road to Nowhere Is Getting Longer…

So, this painful road to nowhere forced me to take a decision that I had really been trying hard to avoid for so long. Something I really didn’t want to do because I was pretty sure it would cost me more than I’d make. Yep, you guessed it, I threw common sense, reason and GCSE maths aside and PPC’d it anyway!

You may have seen my past post about starting an adgroup in google adwords; well, I started another one and this time went for some more competitive terms. The problem with competitive terms though, is that they’re generally more expensive to start off with and my new adgroup was no exception. Nevertheless, my starving soul needed some validation (some proof that my site could work if…) so I was willing to pay to see if my bar stools affiliate site would actually make some money if it was receiving [organic] traffic.

I paid £15.00 on the first day for 47 visits (yes, I know, crazy price, way too expensive but I had to see if my site had potential) and I was pleased to see that by the end of the day, I’d sold 4 items with a conversion of almost 10% which made me a total of about £11.00 in commission. Yes, yes, I know it made a loss but the point here is that if my site was getting traffic, it would make money!

After seeing this little exercise bear some fruit, I tweaked the PPC campaign for the following day, turned broad matches into exact matches and reduced the min CPC to see how that fared. I got less visitors but paid less and still made some commission (only about £4.75) this time on a total cost of £6.00. At least it was a little better…

Ok, so you’ve proved you can lose money on AdWords I hear you say, so what? Well, the AdWords campaign has given me a great starting point for a proper organic SEO campaign. Rather than try and rank for ‘bar stools uk’, I’m now going to try all of the organic SEO methods mentioned above (link building) to try and rank for a different term – the one which resulted in great conversions from the AdWords campaign. So despite losing me money, it proved the concept and now I’m absolutely positive all I need to do to make money out of this site is get some traffic to it!

Oh, I forgot to say too, how did I know which keyword turned into the sale? Well, I used a free WordPress Plugin developed by fellow affiliate, Shane Brown, whose Keyword Tracker plugin takes care of all of that for you!

I guess the underlying theme here is that we can all make money if we do this, or if we do that, or if we’d done this or that but the undisputable rule is if you don’t keep working on new things (and old things like link building) and if you don’t keep trying, or taking small risks, then you’ll never get out of the what if phase and you’ll be stuck at your day job FOREVER!

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