I need to know why i still have not made any sales

[morninjoi]

I have been involved with IM now for 3 months. I have been using blogger and have two affiliate products and adsense.I use ezinearticles to drive traffic to my blog and after 140 url clicks,1,026 article views, i still have not made a single sale.What am i doing wrong?

[scrofford]

Originally Posted by morninjoi

I have been involved with IM now for 3 months. I have been using blogger and have two affiliate products and adsense.I use ezinearticles to drive traffic to my blog and after 140 url clicks,1,026 article views, i still have not made a single sale.What am i doing wrong?

You know, I could tell you that there are a lot of reasons why you haven't gotten any sales yet, but the simple fact is that it takes time. The other thing is that you might not be driving "highly targeted" traffic to your site. Sure you have a lot of people reading your articles, but they may not be the right traffic to buy what you have to offer.

Consequently 140 url clicks is a micro drop in the bucket! If you were to have a lot more traffic running through your site and still not getting the sales, then I would start to worry, but 140 visits to your site is hardly anything.
So drive more traffic to your site and make sure that it is "highly targeted" traffic.

Are you using the right keywords for your blog? Are they "highly competitive" keywords? If they are, you will have a harder time because of the competition.

These are just a few ideas that come to my mind. There are people here that have been doing this longer than I who can probably come up with some other ideas as to why. I just hope this will be a good start for you to figure it out.

[FrankJohnson]

Are you saying that you have had 140 clicks on your affiliate links (I assume so since you would have made money if you had clicks on the adsense ads)?

I might expect some conversions, although maybe not a lot (as a general rule of thumb, I base my estimates on a one percent conversion rate - I'm very conservative when I'm forecasting). On that basis, I would have expected one conversion. In reality, you can see better conversion rates than one percent - that's just where I start so I'm not disappointed.

It's hard to comment beyond that without seeing your website. There are a lot of factors that could play into not seeing conversions, so it's hard to say.

Frank

[Ron.]

The thing about affiliate marketing is how you present the product.

If you're selling lawn mowers you don't want to present it as just a lawn mower. You want to present it as the ultimate solution for anyone that want's to be the envy of the neighborhood and have the best yard in the neighborhood.

With that mower your neighbors will spying on you, wondering what are your secrets to having the greenest lushest yard they've ever seen.


Presenting your product is important
How well did you write the pre-sell copy?
Are you using Analytics to monitor your site?
And of course, you'll need much more traffic.

Originally Posted by morninjoi

I have been involved with IM now for 3 months. I have been using blogger and have two affiliate products and adsense.I use ezinearticles to drive traffic to my blog and after 140 url clicks,1,026 article views, i still have not made a single sale.What am i doing wrong?

[Scott M]

Test different variations of your copy until you see some progress.

Do some keyword research in your niche and find SERP's that are easy to own. Most likely these will be longtails. Put up a few blogs and articles specifically targeting these keywords. Build some backlinks to those properties. Own the first page for several keywords.

It takes time. Unfortunately it is not as simple as putting up a blog and writing one article.

Cheers.

[Holland]

Hi

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money, but doesn't happen over night. Selling info products is even harder though, takes much longer to convince somebody to buy (unknown to product)

Physical products have a huge marketing campaign behind it, so the selling is already done... people know what they want... all they need is the last doubt taken away.

Provide a review of some physical products and the change you sell is much greater in the shorter term!

Here is great guide that shows you step by step how to set up high ranking and converting physical product sites...

http://enichepublications.com/FreeReports/amazon.pdf

Hope that helps

Good luck

Angelina

[graham41]

Poor content probably. Your content is probably a PLR article offering What people have seen a 1000 times before. Also Adsense is no where as profitable as PPC. The days of easy adsense money are truly gone.

In any case 3 months is nothing.

To make easy money if you are not naturally gifted in this area you would need in my opinion pay big bucks for one of the respected gurus coaching programs.

John Taylor does a very reasonably priced one but demand was very high on his WSO, so don't know if there are any places left.

But really 3 months is nothing at all

G

[Colin Theriot]

My immediate suspicion is that it's because you suck at selling. Articles, blogs, traffic, affiliate links - none of those will equal sales unless you're actually assembling them in a way that arrests attention, implants desire, makes a compelling offer, and then calls for action.

Welcome to the reality of internet marketing! It's NOT as easy as someone told you it was. Sorry. However, it steal beats digging ditches for a living. Learn some sales techniques FIRST, get good at writing that way, and THEN figure out why you're not getting sales.

Hope that helps!

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by morninjoi

I have been involved with IM now for 3 months. I have been using blogger and have two affiliate products and adsense.I use ezinearticles to drive traffic to my blog and after 140 url clicks,1,026 article views, i still have not made a single sale.What am i doing wrong?

It's not possible to say without seeing.

Colin may be right (as so often)!

But here are a few little observations/thought based just on what you've said:-

1. You should almost certainly take away the Adsense, for several reasons: it looks unprofessional and it earns you only pennies while giving people a way to leave your site instead of staying there. The downside of Adsense on an affiliate selling blog is all too easy to see. The advantages are very questionable indeed.

2. I can't help wondering how many EZA articles you have, what sort of Keyword research you've done, and where you're going wrong with either the articles or perhaps the author resource box (but more often the articles, contrary to what most people think), to have less than 14% CTR.

3. When you say you're using Blogger, I can't help guessing that probably you're also using their free hosting at Blogspot rather than hosting it yourself? So you have a blog with that blue bar across the top that possibly doesn't look too professional? I know many people do make money that way, but for myself I'd even rather put it on some temporary free hosting (like Bytehost, or whatever) than do that.

4. Are the products you're promoting things with a vendor's opt-in (or some equivalent "obvious leak") on their sales-page? For myself, after doing article marketing and other things, with quite good traffic, I eventually learned through persistent lack of income that this was basically a mistake, changed the products I was promoting (this meant "starting again", more or less!) and suddenly started earning a living. And although it makes some people (especially vendors) rather uncomfortable to hear this, it's actually not uncommon at all. "Just saying".

I completely understand that even though you have no sales yet, you don't really want to expose all the details of your business in an open forum, but if you'd like me to take a look at a couple of your EZA articles and see if I can make any useful observations in confidence, just send me a p.m.

[graham41]

Alexa I think I might need your help soon as well.

[robitn4]

Originally Posted by Colin Theriot

My immediate suspicion is that it's because you suck at selling. Articles, blogs, traffic, affiliate links - none of those will equal sales unless you're actually assembling them in a way that arrests attention, implants desire, makes a compelling offer, and then calls for action.

Welcome to the reality of internet marketing! It's NOT as easy as someone told you it was. Sorry. However, it steal beats digging ditches for a living. Learn some sales techniques FIRST, get good at writing that way, and THEN figure out why you're not getting sales.

Hope that helps!

I'm dedicating a whole chapter in my swipe file to Colin. It's titled, "Colin".

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by robitn4

I'm dedicating a whole chapter in my swipe file to Colin. It's titled, "Colin".

Good idea. I particularly like the title: succinct, accurate, appropriate ... it has everything.

[Colin Theriot]

Originally Posted by robitn4

I'm dedicating a whole chapter in my swipe file to Colin. It's titled, "Colin".

I must warn you that I'm susceptible to flattery.

I love this, and am adding it to my testimonial file. But here's a free copywriting lesson - you can always make your testimonials BETTER. Here's how. Ask.

So...

I don't suppose you have another chapter in your swipe file dedicated to a single person, do you? I can't be the only one. If so, who are say, the top 3 most famous ones, if you don't mind my asking? Not necessarily your favorite ones, but the ones that people would most immediately recognize as a copywriter of note.

In case it wasn't clear, I want to add it to what you said above. The reason is that it will establish a maximal value on what inclusion in your swipefile is actually worth, and it will do so by presenting a simple and recognizable fact against which people will be able to make an immediate and favorable comparison.

This will look hott with a double-T when I put it on a salesletter about how awesome I am.

Now of course, I ONLY WANT TO DO THIS if it's ALREADY TRUE. In the event that you DON'T have other chapters devoted to any big name copywriters, I would like you to create three right next to mine, please.

"Frank Kern", "John Carlton", "Eben Pagan" - and then you can just let me know "Your chapter is right near..." etc.

You should totally do this, because it will be so cool.

[JohnMcCabe]

Since you've already copped to being new, I'm going to take a guess here. I'm guessing that your articles and your blog are targeted to "anyone who might be interested in [whatever]"...

Since Ron already brought up the idea of lawnmowers, let's use that.

I used to live in a neighborhood where people had strange attachments to their lawns. The older guy who lived behind me was a perfectionist when it came to mowing and trimming and weeding, etc. I was convinced that someday I was going to find him on his hands and knees with a pair of scissors and a level. Next to him was a prototype "gadget guy" who was much more interested in the tools for cutting his grass than in the actual results. He was always coming home with a new mower or trimmer or something.

If you tried to market lawnmowers to these guys using generic articles and blog pages, you would fail.

To catch the first guy, you'd do articles about how the mower you were promoting cut with precision, neither scalping high spots or leaving low spots too long. Those articles would hit him where he lives, while they might bore the second guy.

To catch the second guy, all you would have to show him is that your mower had some neat new feature that no one else would have. Maybe an auxiliary port connected to a Margarita blender, to use a silly example. If he could be the first, or only, one on the block to have that blender, he'd be in.

To complete the story, neither one of those would work on me. When it came to mowing that lawn, your best chance of hooking me would be to show me how your mower was faster, easier and cheaper than the alternatives. It didn't have to be unique, or all that precise. Just get the job done well enough with the least expense and hassle...

Before the next round of articles/blogs, spend a little time creating your own profiles of potential buyers. Then craft your articles/blogs to appeal directly to people who fit that profile, and don't worry about trying to please everybody...