When do you stop promoting affiliate products?

First off, you should not be sending traffic direct to affiliate products. it is very difficult to make a profit like that with paid traffic.

Think about it, traffic costs find their own level. It costs what people are prepared to pay. Those that are prepared to pay are those that are good at converting that traffic into income.

Unless you are a true expert at that how can you realistically compete with those that are?

So send your traffic to some kind of email capture system (opt-in/lead magnet) and build a list.

Secondly consider that any sales funnel has two parts (at least). The traffic and the product. If traffic does not buy product, which one is duff?

With that done now ask the same question!

Your options are now much better. Switch your list to another product. Does that sell?

With direct traffic you get one shot at selling. If it's not right you lose. with a list you keep sending traffic to other offers. Eventually you will win.

Agreed..you shouldn't send any paid traffic straight to an offer. It's like throwing a rock in the sky and hoping it hits an airplane…that's how amateurs do internet marketing….

Instead, send the traffic to a squeeze page giving away some type of content (add value) that complements whatever product you're promoting. This way, you'll build your list so that you can market to these people later, be building the trust since you're giving them awesome content related to the niche, and still be able to present an affiliate product that you recommend to them. And on top of that, since you need an email service to collect emails, you can setup an autoresponder to email them to go back to the affiliate sales page.

By sending traffic directly to an affiliate offer, you're not building your business, you're helping somebody else build their business…

I hope that helps and good luck

Im not going to repeat it but yea as the above guys said, don't send paid traffic straight to an affiliate offer because its like putting money down the toilet.

As far as knowing when to stop marketing an affiliate program, if its to a email list. Ask your self how many times would you like to hear about the same offer? if its just online to a squeeze page. then as long as the affiliate offer is there, I keep the squeeze page and all the links to it there as well.

Hope that helps in some way shape or form.

I don't use a tight cutoff (in terms of traffic)

Instead, I focus on how many clicks and how many order page entries I get (CB lets you track order page entries)

If these don't line up with my conversion goals (positive ROI), I drop the offer.

The good thing with Clickbank is that you can get a great idea whether something is converting before you even promote it. By looking at the gravity score you can get an idea whether or not it is selling well for other affiliates. If that is the case when you promote you know it is proven to convert. Then it is up to you to presell the offer. If it's not converting on your end then most likely you are targeting the wrong audience or you aren't preselling well enough.

The fact that you send traffic to a squeeze page or direct linking doesn´t mean anything if you don´t know who are you talking to and what is your prospect. Imagine having a store and the first one hundred people that goes inside doesn´t buy anything, how would you feel about your business? I would wonder what is wrong before opening the store the next day.

I understand the importance of sending traffic to a lead capture page FIRST so that you can follow up with them via email. But then you would need to build a decent sized list that is capable of generating meaningful conversions that could justify your efforts.

After consulting numerous sources, I have come to the conclusion that it is safe to assume an average CPL (cost per lead) of at least $1. According to the same sources, you need at least 1000 subscribers to get decent conversions, which will set you back at least $1000.

When you are starting out, that is somewhat expensive to be honest, especially knowing that the whole thing is still an experiment and you still need to test several offers before you finally find a winner. And even though sending out autoresponder series does not cost you money, you still have other overhead costs (hosting, content generation, website maintenance...etc) that you will need to live with until you finally find that d@mn winner.

You can try to offset some of the lead acquisition costs by placing OTOs (one time offers) on your "thank you" page, but that brings us again to the original question: how long should you promote those OTO's before deciding to drop them?

It's bit of a catch-22 situation: don't sell anything until you build a list, but the best way to offset the cost of building the list is to sell something!

If you can't make sales from a list, how do you expect to make direct sales? It's like saying that you can't get someone to buy from you even on the 10th try, so you're ditching the plan in favor of trying to sell from the first try.

That's how it feels like when you're spending money on traffic, but you aren't building a list. The whole idea of building a list is that it's almost impossible to sell Clickbank products from the first try, so you have them opt in in order to try a few more times via email.

Why don't people buy from the first time they see the product? Because everyone can slap a sales page and say they'll sell you a miraculous solution to your problem. Therefore, people are skeptic, and the only way to reduce skepticism is to gradually prove to them you're trustworthy. The best way to achieve this is by email.

In other words, you would have to spend a lot more than $1,000 on PPC traffic to make any decent amount of sales and figure out if a product is good or not. So opting people in is actually a way to reduce costs.

This is the correct way to do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence_interval

Don't base it on clicks, or CPC, base it on statistical confidence. I suggest making a spreadsheet.

Confidence should be > 90% (ideally 95%+) whatever the result is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_trial

Is also helpful.

Edit: Most people will just use their emotions to dictate the spend level and will spend until they are unhappy with the loss then dump the product. This works for a lot of people but I would highly recommend that you utilize a scientific approach.