Help! My Affiliate Marketing Business Flatlined...

5 replies
All right- I just watched my wonderful, passive affiliate income dry up almost completely in the last week and have no idea what I did WRONG.

I have approximately 20 conduit mini-sites that review Clickbank products. I've been making approximately $500/week the last month which has all of a sudden stopped almost completely (only made $50 last week) and my Google Analytics shows that traffic has flat lined; the last 6 weeks it has been around 40 visitors per mini-site per day, and now I'm at 0-2.

Here's what I've done so far. Out of the gates I submitted the sites to a directory links service that gave me 100 links/domain. I then used Linkvana to target each product page (anchor text is product name).

Around 1 month ago I submitted each site to Onlywire to socialbook mark the sites (I made sure to bookmark a random page for everyone of my mini-sites to make it look natural).

The following 3 weeks I saw a very nice boost in traffic and sales. The fourth week (this past week) everything dried up.

I am wondering if there is a "rebound" effect of social bookmarking, or if my IP address somehow got dinged by Google. Additionally, I've slowed Linkvana down (the number of posts per day) as I've reached my desired number of links/page (not sure if that has anything to do with it).

I know this is a lot- but something happened along the way that has tanked my business. Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks,

JL
#affiliate #business #flatlined #marketing
  • Profile picture of the author kevin campbelle
    This happens a lot of times for new sites.

    It looks like you were getting traffic from the search engines, with the main traffic possibly coming from Google. Google sometimes give new sites a boost in traffic in the early stages, where you may rank decent for some keyword phrases and then the site may fall out of the index, come back in, fall out again, until Google decides where the pages of the site should rank. There is some degree of trust for sites that rank highly in Google and newer sites may take some time to develop this.

    Try not to get too many links at one time. You can approach link building consistently with a few links per day instead of all at once. Have you obtained many of the 100 links in a short period for the directory service that you used? If this happened and you did not continue consistently with the link building then this could have caused problems for you.

    Kevin.
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  • Profile picture of the author netstrife
    Was all your traffic previously coming from google? How old were most of your sites? It's normal for google to shuffle around rankings a lot for a new site or drop you back a few pages in the SERP's esp. if you are building a lot of links quickly. Often your pages will bounce back with stronger rankings than ever after a couple of weeks or a month. If all your sites are only like a month old, their ALWAYS going to fluctuate a lot - you can get strong rankings and then dissapear off the map.. happens all the time.

    Chances are since you don't seem to be doing anything blackhat, you're sites/income will come back again.

    Also if you have google analytics code on all your 20 sites then google knows all the sites that belong to you, so if you were doing something blackhat or got banned on ONE site then it could (possibly) have an affect on your other sites.
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    • Profile picture of the author angela99
      I agree with what Kevin said if your sites are new (under one year old); I've had this happen to clients. Google bounces the sites around, unfortunately.

      Here's what I suggested to them:

      * Update the sites once every couple of weeks. Even if you just add a paragraph or a word here or there, the Google counts it as "updated";

      * Buy some Pay Per Click for your best performers. Yes, I know, this won't affect how you're ranked, but it has worked for others, so... :-)

      I don't know how conduit sites work, but they sound like thin affiliates. If so, get some additional content onto the sites.

      Your sites will come back, you just need a little patience.

      Visit the Google Search News forum on WebmasterWorld Forums Index -- there's bound to be someone else that this has happened to.

      Good luck.

      Cheers

      Angela
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  • Profile picture of the author garyv
    Were you tracking your traffic? Do you know which keywords were used, and where you ranked for each one?

    If you know where your traffic is coming from, then you'll know why it has dried up. If you don't know where traffic is coming from, then you need to start tracking more closely. You'll never remain profitable if you don't know where your converting traffic is coming from.
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