Newbie Questions....apologies in advance

[Matty1]

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Hi I am new here and apologies for what may appear to be basic questions, however if you could give me any insights it would be really appreciated!

I have created a site and it is currently generating traffic using various promo methods and we are sending traffic to merchants BUT to date we have not earnt any revenue.

Over the last 7 days we have sent 188 click thrus to several different merchants, the top merchant has received 39 clicks thrus, our site is hosted athttp://members.webs.com/
and I have registered on numerous search engines and done all the metatags etc

My question is will google visit a site on a free server?

When does the google spider arrive?

Are sales normally generated on the fisrt click through or do cookies provide revenue after that date

I am adding content everyday and want to make this work although the site is in a competitive niche I am using it as Laboratory and would really appreciate any thoughts comments or insight from the more experienced on here!

If you take the time to reply thank you and if not then thanks for reading this far...we were all NEW at something once

Cheers

Matt

[Matty1]

I would like to thank all 13 of you for your help! LOL:tup

[Bud]

Don't be disheartened. It sounds like you're well on your way.

Quick answers:

Sales - There's no set figure you can expect as to the number of sales you will make. It all depends upon numerous things such as what product(s) you're promoting, how competitive the merchant's prices are, where your visitors are coming from (i.e. are they just browsing or ready to buy?), etc.

If you manage 1 sale per 100 click thrus you will be doing extremely well. Anything less than 1 per 1000 then you may need to re examine what is happening. Anything in between these could be considered to be the norm.

Google - It will come, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe more! A respectable free server shouldn't have any negative effect (certainly not with webs.com).

The Google spider has probably already made it's first few visits if you have links elsewhere and have submitted the site. The results aren't instant.

Cookies - I find most sales are made within 24 hours of a cookie drop but plenty are made well past this period. Obviously the longer the cookie period offered the better but remember other affiliates are dropping their cookies over yours if the buyer goes browsing.

Hope that is some comfort - but like I said it sounds like you're doing most things right already. Keep promoting and the sales will soon come.

Best of Luck (Oh and welcome to A4U - you've definitely found the best place!)

[Matty1]

Thanks so much for your reply I really appreciate the words of encouragement!:tup

[accelerator]

1) My question is will google visit a site on a free server?

Yes it will, as long as that web page has it's own url and doesn't require a login to reach it.

2) When does the google spider arrive?

As soon as it has followed a link to your site or, if you added your site into the Google indexing queue for spidering, as soon as it gets round to your entry in the queue. Best way to get spidered is to get a link from a high PR website.

3) Are sales normally generated on the fisrt click through or do cookies provide revenue after that date

Usually the first click through, occassionally from cookies. You can reckon on making 1 sale per 100 visitors or thereabouts if your website is half decent.

4) I am adding content everyday and want to make this work although the site is in a competitive niche I am using it as Laboratory and would really appreciate any thoughts comments or insight from the more experienced on here!

Make sure you are providing quality text content answering the questions people are searching for. Switch over to your own hosting as soon as you can afford it, it will be much better than freespace.

Take a note of the following resources:

Conversion Rate Optimisation

UK Affiliate Marketing Networks

Article Distribution Sites

Link Masking

Search Engine Optimisation

Consumer Trends Data

Domain Name Trading Resources

I hope that helps, we all had to start somewhere

Rgds

[Matty1]

Cheers I appreciate your input!

[Jonza_K]

I won't add much to the practical advice that was given here, but I have a couple of basic notes about conversions:
It seems that you had set some expectations for conversions based on a number of clicks to merchants. The clicks / conversions ratio is very flimsy, and in order to adjust your expectations you must be very knowledgeable about the industry in which you are working. As an affiliate, who relies on conversions for revenue, you need to make sure that not only do you get relevant traffic, and not only are you able to forward said traffic to your merchants, but that the traffic you had attracted is also made from the paying type of visitors.

The best indication I can offer, presuming you rely on traffic from search engines, is analyzing the keywords through which visitors have arrived. You might find that a lot of traffic has arrived via keywords which might not be associated with online purchases.

If your site is relatively small (in these days the definition covers almost anything less than a mega-portal), Google will be more comfortable associating you with a narrow range of related key words, rather than giving you the benefit of being associated with the wide range of keywords Google knows are related to those in your website description. You must find out and cover the profitable key words and variations related to your industry, in order to get a better conversion ratio.

I remember getting excited about great indexing and good traffic from exactly the key words I had set for my affiliate site, only to find out later that the words I had optimized for were only being used by free-loaders and that the hundreds of visits and dozens of clicks did not even cover the hosting costs.

Do research and find out (or rather speculate) said key words, and enhance your site, or build additional sites, to specialize in those words as well.
Content-wise, be as specifically relevant as you can to the queries of your target traffic.