Affiliate Musketeer

My new affiliate website has been online now for approximately two weeks. For those of you that are following my ‘How To Make a Money-Making Affiliate Website From Scratch‘ series, you’ll already be familiar with the site and the domain name I’m using. I want to open up today’s post with a couple of stats from this last week and a few observations about SEO and then a sadly depressing statement about why I’m still waiting for my first commission from this site.

Ok, for those not familiar, I run an affiliate site and will, by the end of the year, be running an affiliate marketing company. My website is live now and is currently sitting at position number 11 in the Google.co.uk search results for my primary keyword. It started off at position 18 or 19 and has crept up a few places in the last 48 hours. I am using wordpress to power the website and I’ll be talking you through how to set up your own affiliate website using wordpress in an upcoming series post.

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.