Affiliate Musketeer

I’m reaching a point now where the enthusiasm I had a couple of months ago is dwindling. This is primarily down to one factor: my new affiliate site is not making any money. Actually that’s a lie, it’s made £49 in about 7 weeks. The sad thing about this £49 is that it all came from a single sale. What’s even more depressing about this figure is that it seems way too high for the 5% commission I’d get for selling a £50.00 bar stool. This makes me think someone clicked on a link on my site and then randomly decided to buy a 50 inch LED tv or something…Hey, that’s good, I won’t knock the £49 but it’d be nice to have some validation that my site was actually working by selling the things it was set up to sell!

Anyway, to add to my woes for the month, all my stats this month are down on my new site and here’s the analytics traffic trend screenshot:

Now, I mentioned earlier this month that my previous high rankings for some pretty good looking long tail keywords had completely vanished. This graph just reinforces the discussion. You can see that shortly after turning the site on, there’s a hump of traffic for the first 4 weeks or so which then dies down to practically nothing as google decides to remove the site from 1st page rankings. This will be down to the site’s age. When a new site first enters the google index and it has been well optimised, it tends to perform very well. I guess that as more google bots crawl the site, more algorithms are applied until eventually, the ‘age filter’ algorithm kicks in at which point the site is dropped from the SERPs.

As you can imagine, this has really dented my traffic for this site this month and not surprisingly, commission for the month on my new bar stools site is £0.00.

So, what should I do about it? Should I give up all hope now and go back to the next big idea?

The answer is no. When I set this site up I made a commitment to get it earning and that is exactly what I intend to do. I will make this site make some money and I will keep going until I do. I have to forget about the google SERPs. The rankings will return if I stick to my original plan of writing regular content, adding fresh products and building backlinks. So, have I stuck to this plan this month? I have to admit I haven’t. I did pay someone to write me a press release though which I have yet to distribute properly. I had distributed it to one site but now that I have the content in my hands, I should make more of an effort to get this out there on a much wider scale…here I come all you free PR sites….

So the point of all of this is that if I really want to get through this especially low, disheartening period of my life as an affiliate marketer, then I have to get my head down and just keep going. This is a really hard thing to do when you feel like hours worth of work are simply lost with no earnings coming in as a result. I am confident that I can turn this round but that is due to my past experience in SEO and PPC and my understanding of how the ranking issue works. I know my site will regain its rankings in time but I am now starting to understand how difficult this period would be for affiliates who have no experience in SEO and I imagine that this point is where a lot of newcomers simply give up. I’m determined that I won’t be one of them. Not yet.

I’d be interested to hear how other affiliates get through this period, this exceptionally depressing and disheartening affiliate limbo…