My February Affiliate Income Story

[Yaro]

Hi Team,

I've posted this story to a few other forums mainly because I wanted to tell this story to a lot of people and also to see how much traffic it would bring to my blogs. I think it's a good traffic technique but I won't discuss it in this forum category because it's not really appropriate.

Here's my story!

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About six months ago I attempted my first affiliate product sale on my blog. My audience are small business owners, entrepreneurs and internet marketers and while I suspected the product I was going to affiliate sell would be interesting to my audience I wasn't sure they were buyers. You never really know until you try.

I went to work writing a solid sales letter which was quite effortless since I had used the product myself so I knew how good it was. It's easy to write about something when you feel comfortable recommending it and know about it. My sales letter wasn't exactly a traditional sales letter - just a recommendation blog post with lots of sales-esque talk in it - a very natural conversational tone as you would expect in a blog.

My traffic was nearing 900 visitors per day at that time so I was hoping that even with a low conversion rate of around 1% that I would make at least 10 sales, around $100 in affiliate income (it's a start!), with the possibility of doing better.

I finished the sales letter, clicked publish, read it over once and then went to bed hoping to wake up in the morning to lots of sales.

I woke up the next morning, powered up my computer, scanned over my email headers and saw...

no sales

I was pretty bummed. There were some comments made to my post but no one was buying.

Over the next few days and following week no sales came through and I started to question why I was even bothering to blog, whether I should choose a different target market or refine my existing niche further. I was depressed at the time but it didn't last long.

About three weeks later the first sale came through. I was pretty happy to see that "You have made a sale" email in my inbox, but still quite disappointed with how badly I went given my traffic numbers, especially considering how many hours I had put into blogging during the previous months for no financial return at all.

I decided not to change anything about my blog and just went back to work as per normal. That was about four months ago.

Fast forward to two weeks ago I woke up to another "You have made a sale" email, which by this time I had gotten used to receiving.

Over the months I added more subtle sales pitches in blog posts, I started promoting a few different products and very lightly "played" with affiliate selling techniques. I haven't had amazing results but thanks to my continuous efforts I have reached the point where I make around $100 - $300 in affiliate income per month.

My sales letter while performing dismally initially had created a trickle of sales over the months even though it was well archived within my blog. I may have been disappointed with the immediate results but the longer term results have made it worthwhile proving that not all sales happen immediately. Some people won't by for many months but as long as you refer them you will eventually make a commission when they finally make that purchase.

Now, that email I received two weeks ago notifying me of the latest sale was a bit different. Generally one of those emails come in and it's anywhere from a $13 - $140 commission, that's what I had gotten used to receiving anyway (but I was pretty darn excited when I saw $140 commissions for the first time).

This latest email was different. I opened it up, quickly scrolled to see what the person had purchased and it was something big, something very big...I kept scrolling and hit my commission payment...

$875 USD!!!

I was pumped! That was the single biggest sale I had ever made at one point, was more than week's salary for most people and best of all, I didn't have to do anything - someone else had to provide the customer support, the services and the products - I just collected the affiliate payment.

Immediately the potential really started to hit home. Imagine doing this even just once a week. Just once a week would be more money than most of my friends earn for a full 40 hours of work in a week. Imagine doing it once a DAY!

The only thing stopping me from reaching goals like that were the numbers. If I had ten times as many readers would I have had ten times the sales? - $8000+ in one month now seemed realistic. The more relevant traffic and audience I had access to, that trusted me and enjoyed my work, the more potential I had to earn. Best of all was all I needed to was keep doing what I loved - helping others run their own businesses.

Since then I've had another $800+ sale and the usual trickle of smaller sales. February is going to certainly be my best month so far with over $2000 in affiliate income. I don't expect to do this well every month since the big ticket product I've sold twice is a once off event, but the opportunity is clear and by continuing down this path $2000 months may quickly become regular events.

I'm definitely sold on affiliate income!

[Aitch]

That’s a good read Yaro and the ole ‘patience & persistence’ rule kicks in once again. In my opinion, patience simply means to give something time, whereas persistence suggests I need to tweak, test, and fine tune whatever it is until it starts to work.

As my website is all about finding rooms, I figured I could include ‘hotels’ alongside apartments, condominiums, houses and offices etc.

The difference with visitors searching for hotels as opposed to the rest is that when someone books a hotel room through my website I get an affiliates commission from the hotelier. It couldn’t possibly fail, I thought!

I placed a link to the hotel listings right smack bang at eye level on the home page. I also dedicated a tab to the hotels page on the navigation toolbar. I then framed the hotels listings pages into my own site so that it became part of and not apart from, the Roomfinder project.

Guess what? Nothing happened for what seemed like a life time! Not even a click despite the hi-profile plug. All my visitors were interested in was finding homes and reading the odd article.

Then one day, as I was thinking of replacing the hotels page with something new, I saw that 2 people had confirmed a couple of rooms in Bangkok hotels which gave me a net commission of about £50 - Now if you’re used to earning diddlysquat, fifty quid is a great little earner believe you me.

I then went a couple of months without any results again and just last week, 2 more rooms were booked for Thailand hotels. The commissions were much smaller than the first bookings but commissions all the same.

As you point out Yaro, it’s a numbers game, and increasing the number of visitors to ones site can only benefit affiliate sales.

I get anywhere between 180 and 450 visitors a day with a monthly average sitting around 9,000

If only I could bring in a national audience as opposed to a local one (mainly greater Bkk) and get the numbers up, I would inevitably be making more commissions on my hotel affiliation.

But there’s a bit more to it than just the numbers. Unless your website is a web store of sorts that has all the usual purchasing tools and sales spiel, a webmaster and his site have to build up web credibility, get known, get trusted, and get recommended, and that my friends, takes time despite your best efforts.

Aitch

[James]

Should have no problem with paying for that Crusie then Yaro

[Yaro]

Yeah you would think that wouldn't you! Unfortunately BetterEdit didn't pull it's weight during February this year because I wasn't in Canada promoting it so most of that affiliate income has been in the "keep yaro eating" wallet.

[toad]

That's a pretty exciting sale. I am hoping to be able to do some affilliate sales in the future. So far I have had a couple sales from Amazon, but I am not so sure if that is the best way to go about it.