An interesting and very to the point question from Dave who is struggling with his new affiliate site!!
As in the title, I’m really pap at affiliate marketing, I just don’t get it.
I’m obviously doing something seriously wrong since I have a few sites that just don’t seem to generate any sales at all, so I wondered if you might be able to tell me where I’m going wrong.
The Insurance Groups site is a good example – it’s now 4th/5th in Google for the main term, commissions are great, but I make zero sales, just a few adsense clicks.
What should I do to make it work better?
Many Thanks!
Website: www.insurancegroups.org.uk
Well, there are a number of thing that probably aren’t helping your cause much!
1. The niche you’ve chosen – You have clearly worked hard on creating lots of content and pages for this site. I don’t want to belittle your effort there, the way you have approached it and created all the different site sections for different types of insurance is absolutely dead on, so well done there. BUT (and you totally knew that was coming, didn’t ya?!) this is an extremely competitive area.
Your pages targeting things like “Motor Cycle Insurance” simply have no chance of ranking for their search terms, you’re up against too many other sites. Taking that as our example, you have no less than 27,100,000 competitors. Given that people very rarely go past the top 10 results – 20 if you are lucky, perhaps the issue here is that you’ve set the bar a wee bit too high for yourself?
2. Your page structure / calls to action – is very poor. Although you’ve jammed the pages with good content, I just can’t see anything there that would compel your visitors to click on a link. Looking at your page, the strongest call to action on there is most definitely provided by those Adwords links. I see you have 4 insurance company choices on your motorbike pages, but those just fade into the background with all the other links you have placed on the page.
If you want to continue with insurance I suggest you take a good look around at how successful sites structure their sales pages. This might perhaps help you come up with an alternative design.
However, I would also strongly suggest that you dip a toe into some other niche waters to help you learn about affiliate marketing. Of course I am biased because I don’t do insurance, but I think if you go for a smaller niche you might find traffic and sales much easier to get which will keep you motivated and help you learn about what works.
October 13th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Kirsty,
Do you have an upper limit of search result competitors that would indicate whether you would enter a market as a “rule of thumb”?
I have just recently set up my first shop type affiliate site and am planning to attempt some ppc which i am familiar with, however not for ecommerce…any tips?
October 14th, 2009 at 10:28 am
I’d also be careful about ranking the insurance companies, as this may been perceived as providing financial advice. I couldnt see an FSA registration number on the site.
I’d also be interested to hear what Dave’s main search term is, as I couldnt find the site for the main keywords & titles, “Insurance Groups”?? If its this – wouldnt people who are searching for insurance groups be looking to find out what group their car/van/bike is in? Not a group of insurance companies. If so – suggest this could be the reason why conversions are pap.
Kirsty is bang on with the call to actions – there ain’t none.
Whats with Adsense? If thats not giving you any revenue (which my insurance have never done) – get rid, its taking up premium content space – but dont just whack in some banners!
Also “Your pages targeting things like “Motor Cycle Insurance” simply have no chance of ranking for their search terms”………….whilst thats true as the site stands, it is possible to get up there with hard graft for terms like that.
Aim for the stars, if you miss – you might just hit the moon instead!
October 16th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Hello,
It’s my website & I’m the guy who’s pap at affiliate marketing!
Firstly I’d like to thank Kirsty for her help, she’s gone way beyond the call of duty to help me out and for that I am extremely appreciative, and I think I kind of know where I’ve been going wrong now.
The very first website I ever built was to sell a couple of ebooks I’d written in a niche area. It looked horrible, but I wrote the copy with one thing in mind – to create desire for the ebooks to my visitors & to sell products, & it converted really well making me quite a good chunk of money.
However, the problem with that site was that it didn’t rank & adwords eventually got so expensive that it was nearly eating all of my profits, so I had to learn how to optimise my website.
Roll on to now, around 4 years later & I can see where my problem is thanks to Kirsty.
When I put a site together now I don’t write it for the visitor, to encourage them to buy, I write it for the search engine to rank it as highly as possible.
What I’ve come to realise is that this is utterly futile – what’s the point of getting visitors if they don’t go on & buy something?
The net result of low conversions was to create sites with ranking & adsense in mind, again not catering for visitors (although you could argue this works well for adsense – encourage the visitors to leave and hope they leave via an adsense ad).
Somewhere along the way I’ve lost the plot and forgotten about the most important thing – the visitor.
I’m now planning a new site that I’ll be launching over the next few weeks, and this time I’m going to write it for the visitors first & search engines second, and hopefully I can create a site that will successfully sell affiliate products.
Thanks again Kirsty.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:25 am
Possibly the biggest affiliate marketing misconception is that “It’s Easy”! It just takes so much research and planning, commitment and building to create a successful affiliate site. But it all starts with the research and planning or it’s probably going to fail.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Dave, I just found your comment in the deepest depths of my spam comments list – thanks so much for such a detailed response and my thanks for adding it here. Sorry I was a bit delayed getting it popped up, and good luck with your new site!