How far ive got with affiliate marketing, what to do now?

[opensesame]

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Ok,

So ive been at for just under a year (part-time in my spare time).

I'm currently making roughly £200 a month from each of my sites. I can get a site to do around £150-£200 a month but my problem is if I want to make £2000 a month im going to need around 10-15 sites, so if I wanted to make £6000 a month im going to need 45 websites, which sounds a bit crazy to me, is this just the way it is?

It's no problem getting a site to do £150-£200 a month but its just effort to rank it, do the content etc, id rather have 6 sites doing £1000 each a month.

Lets say you find a domain which gets 30,000 ems, and you take 40% traffic because you have managed to rank it first, so thats 12,000 a month (400 a day).

Now lets say you have a conversion rate of 2%, that's 8 sales a day, lets just say you take £3 for each sale, thats only £720 a month.

Now im always seeing on here people are earning 6 figures etc but they must have tons of websites unless they have a site that is getting literally 100,000's of visits a month.

[mallyord]

Thats the big problem I've fallen into.

Either have a couple of sites and dedicate all your time

Have a lot of sites, and not have alot of time of them all.

Ive fallen into the trap of the second one,

[kamikaze]

One option would be to repeat what you're already doing. A £200 site in your 1st year isn't bad going so don't get too disheartened. It's a case of finding the right balance that suits you. Build too many, you could struggle to maintain them all, build too few and they may get eaten by the next panda.

I would suggest analysing your formula to see how you could improve things.

Firstly think about targetting additional keywords or look into other forms of marketing to boost your visitors. Google isn't the only source out there. Building up a brand can also will increase your returning visitors so you don't need to rely so much on Google.

Conversion rates can vary a bit depending on the type of visitors you're attracting. How close are they to making a purchase ? Do you have what they're looking for ?
Visitors looking for the cheapest price usually convert better than those looking for an in-depth review. Also have you tried A-B testing to see if you can improve your conversion rates.

And finally, have you thought about targetting more expensive products or merchants offering higher commission rates ? For example, one of my niche websites gets around 150 visitors a day. The conversion rate is around 2%, giving me an average of 3 sales a day. But because I'm targetting expensive products with good commission rates, the website is making roughly £60-£90 a day (£1,800 - £2700 pm).

[John Jupp]

I don't know if you do jewellery but The Jewellery Channel on Linkshare is ramping up especially for Valentines with plenty of high end value and bargain basement products. Pendants, necklaces, rings and earrings all do superbly this time of year.

[accelerator]

Think carefully about profitability, i.e. what is really going to worth promoting. Keep quality over quantity in mind. Focus on areas where you will see a return. Improve your conversion rate.

Rgds

[allthediscounts]

I'm tempted to say, look at 1 or 2 bigger sites rather than 45 smaller ones.

Apart from the complexity of managing so many sites, the way Google is moving might indicate that your smaller sites would get harder and harder to rank over time, requiring more effort to stand still.

Obviously the smaller site route is not scalable and not sustainable in the long term without taking on help.

[opensesame]

Thanks everyone for the great replies.

I want to explain what is troubling me and I'll take something relevant to this time of the year.

Flowers.

So we got valentine's day and mothers day coming up.

Lets say I want to come into this industry as an affiliate, commission looks good from most flower companies between 8-10%, they say the average basket value is £40'ish that says to me £30, don't know about you.

The main industry keyword from what I can see is 'flowers delivered' generating 27,000 exact match searches a month.

The emd is not free so from the offset ranking looks tough but lets just say I get through to top 5 and take 25% of the traffic - 6750 visits.

Now lets say I have a conversion rate of 3% - 202 sales a month.

Well doing the maths its roughly £2000 a month.

Is this the sort of thing everyone is talking about? Because if it is, that's some tough SEO (I'll save someone the time of saying 'no one said it would be easy')

The only thing I will say is that's just one keyword, if the categories and sub-categories ranked then I could see how 1/2 sites could set you up nicely.

BUT looking at Kamikaze's response (no offence here by the way) that looks a lot easier then what I have described above - with roughly the same return.

Guessing im just moaning, best get back to the drawing board.

Question for accelerator quickly: Are you saying rather then just banging sites up, focus on one site at a time, making it look nice, focusing on UX, split testing etc? I got a site which I just knocked up some content, grabbed the emd and ranked it 3rd with a couple ECU's on.

Maybe I would see a lot better conversion if I actually made it into a proper site with recommendations, customer testimonials etc.

[accelerator]

Firstly what I am saying is put a bit of time and effort into investigating where good returns are. This is not easy, but you have to come up with a method to establish what things are going to give you a decent return. Also, you have to be happy promoting the products and services you choose, and it helps if you know a lot about them and are enthusiastic. A big skill is identifying what is going to work. I can't spell it out for you, but this is at least half the battle.

Once you are lucky enough to have something that is working, then you should jump on it, and try to maximise your return, e.g. add further longtail pages, more articles, better methods of marketing etc.

You can also think about how to improve return on your revenue generating pages. These conversion rate optimisation resources will help you with that.

Good luck.

[aotagain]

Given that nobody actually knows what Google has in store, unless you have a site that is gaining an increasing number of repeat visitors and is therefore becoming a brand making it more independent of search results, it seems risky to just bet on a couple, especially if they have similar structures. One bit hit from an update and your revenue is halved.

On the other hand if you can build say 3 sites around a potentially lucrative market, but with very different structures...

Plus, I haven't any proof, but it looks to me as if old sites, whether good or bad are still doing quite well (I don't particularly mean affiliate sites). I do PPC for a couple SME's in holiday business and their old sites are still there, higher than the new ones (which have 'better' SEO). Google also picks up and ranks new pages quite well (a few added occasionally) on the older sites.

I'm currently trying it with a couple of 2008 affiliate sites that have had stable rankings for a long time. Adding a couple of high volume/value keyword pages and see what happens. I'm pretty sure they would get nowhere fast on a recent site.

(Also seem to come across quite a few sites of old bust businesses, not updated for ages, but ranking quite well, which is quite bizarre. Who knows what to expect when a retailer can have the top 3 results for a product search, when you didn't even type in the name of the retailer ! - crazy search - Google lost plot etc. etc.)

[aotagain]

In terms of the 'next big thing' (which I certainly haven't got yet), its worth chatting to people or friends who are not familiar with AM, because they'll be free of any preconceptions.

I've had loads of bonkers advice over years from friends, except that every few months, someone says 'why don't you do X' and its a cracker.

You can get way too close to it when you're doing it day in, day out.