If there’s one thing that disturbs the mind more than anything else when switching from an Adsense paid-per-click revenue model to an affiliate paid-per-action it’s those times when everything goes quite. It happens, the trick is not to give up and to continue with what you’re doing. It’s far too easy to switch back to Adsense for those few easy, mind settling dollars, but don’t do it!
I’ve had a really quite couple of weeks. In terms of traffic I’m seeing green all over Google Analytics (indicating an increase in the number of visitors) but for some reason I’m not seeing the conversion I was even just a month ago. The question is what has changed in that time? For the most part not a lot, I’m promoting the same products and getting the same type of traffic from the same keywords. The truth is that shit happens with affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing – patience is a virtue.
Of course some of the time something has changed. For example one of the ClickBank products I promote has changed their model. They are now offering a free version of their service, it has limits and the aim is to get users to upgrade to the full software when people find out how useful it is. The trouble from my point of view is that those upgrades don’t make me a penny! Affiliates are only tracked up to the initial sign up. A simple change like this by a merchant can cause massive problems for affiliates and in the last 2 weeks it has cost me around $600 in commission. I’ll have a look and see if I can source an alternative offer but if not then I’ll just have to get on with it – the joy of using free traffic is at least I’m not having to break out a spreadsheet and do lots of ROI analysis. Everything is profit with free traffic.
If there are no obvious changes and it’s just a quite period then you’ve got to have patience. That doesn’t mean you have to do nothing though. When things get a little tight 2 jobs I love to do are cost analysis and keyword research. The second you should be doing all the time anyway but a lull in sales can be a great motivator to find some new traffic rich keywords. In terms of cost analysis I love cost cutting, is there a possibility of joining domains under a hosting account and cutting hosting costs? Are there any old domains auto renewing that I’m never going to do anything with? What services have I signed up for and never used? These are all things that you and I should be doing ongoing but it’s very easy to be complacent when the money is flowing. Right now I’ve got over $120 coming out of my Paypal account each month for services I don’t use. Not that clever really.
The trick is to first establish if anything has changed and if not just carry on with your link building and content creation. Making money online is all about percentages, things will balance themselves out. From a personal point of view my biggest issue during the quite times is not having anybody to share the self doubt with. We all get it don’t we? It’s very hard to explain to your family WHY things have gone quite when you can’t explain it yourself. I guess that’s why blogs are so popular, it’s the perfect opportunity to vent a little and even tell yourself off!