Frustrated

**Melter** · 21-04-05

I've been doing this affiliate lark for a good couple of years now and think I've learnt a lot along the way and believe that I've compiled some nice sites in that time. However, it seems no matter what I try I can't get my sites earning like I think they should.

Of the four I have one is more community based so I don't expect a lot from that. Two others are fairly young and will need more time to develop, but one that is devoted to affiliate marketing has been around for a while and Im lucky if I make one or two commissions every three months.

Visitor numbers aren't great at 30-40 uniques a day but the frustrating part is clickthroughs are pretty good but they just aren't converting and I really don't know where I'm going wrong. Last month I made some major changes to the site to make it easier for visitors to find what they were looking for but that's shown no improvement.

I reckon I've been around this forum long enough to earn my affiliate badge so if some kind souls would pm me I'll tell you which site I'm referring to and maybe you could take a look and point me in a better direction. (Btw it's not the site in my sig)

Thanks for reading this.

**Melter** · 21-04-05

Cheers to all those that have responded so far. You've all been PMed.

**Melter** · 21-04-05

Just looking at my stats (as impressive as they are

) and for the month so far I've had 544 uniques, 801 visits, and 402 clickthroughs. Am I right to be concerned about my conversion rate?

**Deep** · 21-04-05

Test the affiliate program via the AdWords first.

It's much cheaper to find a program that converts really well first, than start building a whole site only to find out later that the program you built it for, doesn't convert at all.

Are you saying that your making 1 sale during 2 months? In this case, either your traffic is very untargeted or the aff product is a total crap. I bet you'd make much more money if you changed those aff links for an AdSense ad right now.

Deep

**Azam.net** · 22-04-05

You mentioned that the visitors weren't converting. It might be an idea to go to either Affiliate Window or CJ, finding the highest ranking affiliate programs in your field based on their EPC and then switching your links to them. See if they provide better results for you. If other merchants don't generate any money for you, unfortunately it may be the quality of your traffic. The demographics are essential. One visitor to our literature site earns us more revenue than 20 visitors to our freebie site.

Good luck - it's not easy, but keep trying.

**Melter** · 25-04-05

Wahey! A small sale made today following many changes made over the weekend. Hope this is a sign of things to come. Cheers everyone who PMed me and for the wonderful advice.

**mibut** · 25-04-05

Nice one Melter.

**Azam.net** · 26-04-05

Congrats. Melter

BTW, how did you manage to change the colour on the Amazon search box at your Autheretica home page ? Looks neat because same colour scheme as rest of your (excellent) site.

**Melter** · 26-04-05

Okay sign in to your associates section and click on 'recommended product links'. Select your product line and subcategory. On the next page at the bottom you'll find three boxes of different sizes that display products from your chosen line along with a search box. Select one of these and on the next page you can choose to 'customise link appearance' which includes background colour.

If you're using the standard search box then just have a look at the code given and you'll see where you can alter the colours manually (unless this is against Amazon's policies of course).