A big flaw in most affiliate schemes?

So I'm going to go down the route of promoting a merchant and getting commission, like everyone else here

I've yet to decide on the market/products but I'm doing my research at the moment and something that crops up is that you are lucky to get a 5% clickthrough on ads and also that a 5% conversion rate is considered good too.

So with me sat in the middle, to get one sale I would have to pass on 20 potential customers to the merchant, which would mean I would have to have got 400 people to my site in the first place i.e. a 0.25% conversion ratio! And this is assuming good CTR and conversion rates of 5%. Factor in PPC and it is going to have to be a special product/service to cover this.

So what I want to do is integrate the merchants products right into the site so that the choice to buy is made on my site, with the merchant just handling the transaction, as transparently as possible.

So far I can only find one company like this (mpush mobile phone stuff) which works great, but is in a highly competitive market, so not one I want to start with.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to merchants that can do this sort of thing? Any market will do, I'm just researching at the moment!

Thanks all.

[hero]

You will find that all merchants from all sectors provide a datafeed, a very detailed list of all their products and information on them, which you can use to build pages on your site. This is the best tool to bring the sales in; banners no longer are the driving force for an affiliate program. You can use it for building content for your site, to power your search facility, to load it in your keyword builder for PPC, pull products for email marketing, use it for price comparison, and so many more options.

Hope this helps

[justhomdotcom]

I think what the OP wants to do is pretty much be a merchant (in terms of how the site works) but at the final stage then pass all the customers selections over to the real merchant for payment processing.

I haven't seen any merchants with affiliates do that personally (and we certainly wouldn't do it because of our live stock system). It looks like the OP would be more geared towards drop shipping rather than an affilaite program.

[Azam.net]

Amazon webservices allow you to do what you are seeking.

[pricethat]

Originally Posted by SMISLT2 So with me sat in the middle, to get one sale I would have to pass on 20 potential customers to the merchant, which would mean I would have to have got 400 people to my site in the first place i.e. a 0.25% conversion ratio! And this is assuming good CTR and conversion rates of 5%. Factor in PPC and it is going to have to be a special product/service to cover this.

I think you need to work on your figures, if you are genuinly promoting something that people want and targetting the right traffic then 400 people onto your site should result in 200 people visiting your target pages, if they are not then there is work you can be doing to get as close to that target as possible.

From 200 visiting i would expect at least 10-15 sales from those people which generally would cover the 400 clicks and leave profit. I am confused why you think this is a flaw in affiliate marketing, ppc marketing is not exactly the hardest of all affiliate marketing types, in PPC it is pure mathmatics, if you can not make a return on a specific product type it is not a flaw, it just means that the product is not economically viable to promote in this way, much the same way that TV advertising might not be a good way to promote flea circus kits for the under 2 year old.

[drivetowin]

Originally Posted by pricethat much the same way that TV advertising might not be a good way to promote flea circus kits for the under 2 year old.

Now he tells me......

"Hello, is that ITV" - "yeah the flea circus ad, can you not run it at peak time during Coronation Street - I've just had a different idea!!"

[mibut]

fleacircuskitsfortheunder2yearold.com and .co.uk are available for registration
Snap them up and save on that expensive tv advertising.
Think of the value of these superb type in domains and benefit from all that free traffic
Remember that christmas is coming up and all those parents "scratching" their heads wondering what to buy little johnny, what a superb opportunity to start up in a "niche" market

[petersonmark]

In my opinion start researching on well branded products. Then try keyphrase variations on the brandded producs. For eg, if the brand is 'Samsonite' try the competition for 'kids luggage samsonite', 'samsonite garment bags' etc. Like this we can narrow the search terms. Even though the no. of searches may be low volume, we can get ranking easily for such narrowed keyphrases and target the right product from the affiliate site. Land the visitor in the respective product page instead of the merchant's home page.

By doing this the CTR will be high and conversion also because since the visitor is searching for a narrowed term like 'samsonite garment bags' he is more inclined to buy than a visitor who search for 'samsonite' or 'garment bags'.

By doing so you can avoid the tough competition for more general keyphrase and still can make good commission. But we have to dig through the keyword as well as the merchant site to the targeted product's landing page. Most affiliate programs offer a way to deep link to individual products.

Am I right? Does it make sense? Your comments please.
Thanks.

[SMISLT]

Thanks a lot guys, especially the tips on the flea circus lol.

pricethat, interesting that you can push 50% of visitors to your affiliate site, I hadn't considered that to be possible. Care to show an example site?

petersonmar, good points ta.

[pricethat]

Originally Posted by SMISLT Thanks a lot guys, especially the tips on the flea circus lol. pricethat, interesting that you can push 50% of visitors to your affiliate site, I hadn't considered that to be possible. Care to show an example site?

Of course it is possible it just depends what you are selling and how. If you are working generic words then of course you are only going to get 20% or 10% of people sometimes, but if you are giving people EXACTLY what they are looking for on extremely targetted terms why shouldnt people click on the links of your page? thats what it is there for and yes it is possible to have half the people that visit your site go on to the merchants, whether you make a sale or not is another thing.

As for example, i think i would like to enjoy the benefits of my pages rather than 100 affiliates leech them

[Aceicol]

Originally Posted by SMISLT Care to show an example site?

To be fair this is one of the questions I get asked most when I explain to people what aff marketing is. It's not that people don't want to share their success, but if Pricethat gave away his site, PPC adverts etc, there'd be 100 people with a similar site and the same adverts tomorrow.

It is definately a trial and error business,