Hi Kirsty,

Been following u on twitter and this site for a while, and you certainly know your stuff! I have a number of great domains, and wish to turn them all into affiliate sites. However, I want to start on the most profitable one first.. so do you know, anywhere, where i can get a list of the potential income by affiliate sector at all??

i.e. music, gaming, news, lighting, etc etc .. i thought it would be easy to find, but it certainly isnt !

many thanks,

nigel

Hi Nigel,

Sorry to say that such a resource does not exist! Affiliates are notoriously cagey about such things and besides I think such numbers would be very difficult to accurately measure. The only thing I can suggest is to try to do a bit of research in a few different ways.

• Check out EPCs of merchants in the sectors you are thinking of working in on the main networks. These are of course averages and can be skewed by the presence of things such as incentive sites so it is important to have a really good look at any merchants you think could be decent performers and try to see how you think you will perform. Place yourself in the shoes of a consumer interested in your niche products. Would you buy from them? It may even pay to go as far as placing a few test orders to see who you really rate. After all, it’s a small investment compared to the time you will spend building your site!

• Don’t get distracted by considerations of product values when considering the performance of potential merchants. The main thing you are interested in is getting the most amount of profit from the least amount of clicks, thus making your progress towards a nice profit much quicker. Sometimes lower value products will convert better. I’ve found lots of affiliates get distracted by dreams of wild riches from selling thousands of high end products every month. Focus on conversions and how much you think every click through to a merchant can earn you.

• Check out the competition. One factor I’d consider if I had lots of domains to choose from would be which one I’d be able to get ranking most quickly. With that in mind I’d test a few key terms around each of my domains and see if there was lots of authority sites competing for positions. Also, if any of your domains are keyword based and might attract a good search volume I’d bump them towards the top of your priority list as you will rank them much more easily.

• If you really want to try and come up with a concrete figure I suggest you try to work out what EPC you would achieve sending traffic to the merchants you think you’d work with. Use a combination of the network figures and your own gut feeling, and then look at how much you’d earn from 1,000 visitors sent to them. You also could attempt to work out how much traffic your various sites would get using the monthly search data on a range of keywords from Google and a reasonable CTR based on top ten positions, but I really feel there are too many “what ifs” in this kind of analysis for an affiliate. However it might help you work out potential for growth and longer term profits that you can feed into your considerations.

Finally, my best suggestion for you is that you get at least a mini site up for each and every one of the domains you are considering developing. That way the ones you aren’t working on can be in the index and ageing. This will also allow you to keep an eye out for any link opportunities that may come up. This is advice I really also need to take myself, LOL.

Finally finally, all the above bits of advice are great. But really you shouldn’t spend too long on them or asking yourself lots of questions. Just do it as the clever people at Nike would say. Advice that Tiger Woods really took a step too far

• Ask Kirsty – What Would You Do if You Were Starting Out Again?
• Ask Kirsty – Pros and Cons of Datafeeds?
• Ask Kirsty – Has Google Penalised My Site?