SURVEY: How Much Per Subscriber [Monthly] VS Your Sales Funnel

A big variety of sources, but about 70% of my unique visitors (and about 96% of my income) comes from article marketing traffic.

I have 9 different ones, in 9 different niches, but they're all short reports I've written myself for the specific aims of branding myself and my site, fulfilling the promise of offering some information of genuine value which subscribers can't find elsewhere, setting my subscribers' expectations, ensuring that the subsequent email series gets the maximum possible open-rate and attention, continuing the process of establishing credibility and trust already commenced on my site, and providing some content able to interest and impress subscribers enough to grab their attention and make sure they "stay with me" so that out of all the other lists they're also on, mine will be the link through which they effectively choose to buy later, when I've eventually established enough trust from them to recommend products.

I usually don't, and I don't aim to. I think "problem-solving niches" have many overall disadvantages over "enthusiasts' niches".

I know all those awful "affiliate marketing guidebooks" tell you to "find something that solves people's problems and sell it to them", but it seems to me that they haven't quite thought it through.

When you're an affiliate marketer, once you've built your subscriber-list, established your credibility, formed your subscriber-relationships, and all the other basic, essential things you need to do to make affiliate marketing worthwhile, you're then going to promote your first product to each subscriber, according to the number of days for which s/he's been a subscriber and autoresponder emails s/he's already received from you (assuming that you have the sense to wait until then, and not lose most of the potential customers by promoting too early, as many people do!). A proportion of them will buy it.

At this stage, "in problem-solving niches", looking at it in very simple terms only, one of two things happens.

Either they like it, they think it's great and it solves their problem (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because they don't need to buy anything else, so you've just lost most of your potential future income) ...

Or they don't like it, they don't think it's great and it doesn't really solve their problem, (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because you recommended a bad product, from their perspective, and blew your credibility, and they don't trust you any more).

Not a great outcome for you, either way.

In "enthusiasts' niches", people gradually buy more and more and more, to feed their enthusiasm, so you don't have that problem to anything like the same extent. (Having bought expensive things from this spring/summer Louboutin collection won't stop me from enthusiastically buying more expensive things from their 2014/5 winter collection.)

Be aware that for successful affiliate marketers, most of the long-term money comes from making repeated sales to the same captive audience (your subscribers - that's why listbuilding is so important!). That's why "enthusiasts' niches" are better than "problem-solving niches", and we're perhaps better off looking at those, rather than at how to solve others' problems.

In short, once you solve someone's problem, they may not still be a customer at all; and once you fail to solve it, they may not be your customer.

No, never.

I know from extensive split-testing that I can't afford that mistake.

You and I have discussed this before and apparently disagreed about it, though on the last occasion, you did eventually accept my point that I've split-tested it rather a lot and you haven't, yourself.

Right after the opt-in, I show none, and wouldn't want to show one at all, at that point. For me, it would be a big mistake to do that. As people who have split-tested it have often discovered (and they tend to be the ones who quickly abandon that idea, once they've thoroughly tested it for themselves.)

I suspect there's quite a bit of misguided thinking about, on this subject. It's worth bearing in mind that it's possible to make the occasional quick sale that way and still lose a lot of money overall. Here's the key concept: the few people who will buy anything, that way, are all people who would have bought it in a week's time anyway, after receiving some email from you, so there's no real gain. But many other people, who would otherwise have bought it a week or two later, will be alienated by it, because of course it makes you look like "just another marketer", so if I did that, I'd expect a much lower open-rate for my emails than I actually get.

Also, for myself, I need the thank you page, in order to give clear instructions, both in words and in pictures, on what subscribers (two groups: "gmail users" and "others") need to do, in order to receive my emails in their in-boxes. Again, without doing this, my open-rates are significantly lower - and I certainly don't want anything else distracting from that, because it's what the bulk of my future income depends on, and long-term future income is the whole point of building the list in the first place?

It varies a little from niche to niche, but typically I send email on days 1, 3, 6, 10 and 15, and thereafter at 5-day intervals.

If I send more frequently than that, I earn less money.

I don't send any paid content at all.

I include promotional content in the second half of about one email in three, occupying maybe 40% of the email, so my overall proportion of content recommending products is about 13%.

Again, I make less money if it's a much higher proportion than that.

Yes. And I invite feedback (of course the feedback doesn't all arrive at once, as different subscribers are always at different points in the email series).

Yes, I have to. It comes naturally and easily to me, and makes it chattier and less formal, all of which people like.

And - if nothing else - the number of sales I make is in direct proportion to the clarity of the explanations I give subscribers about "how affiliate marketing works", and so on. People love openness and directness about that: it seems to enhance my credibility and how much people trust me very greatly, and unsurprisingly that translates directly into sales.

Affiliate products only. I have none of my own.

I rarely (maybe even never) promote more than two different products/services to the same people in the same month - and quite often only one, since I tend to promote each one at least twice before moving on. In the 6+ years I've been doing this, though, that figure's still varied from as low as about $60 to well over $10,000.

It varies much too much to be of any interest or relevance to anyone, really, and I don't feel comfortable disclosing mean or median figures: in the past it's even occasioned some resentment-based hostility when I've done so, so I'm more cautious over what figures I disclose, these days.

Maybe ... though you're asking quite a lot of different questions, and the replies are inevitably going to be highly self-selected and probably not representative even of "Warrior Forum members", collectively? You happened to ask a lot of things which I'm used to answering privately anyway, so I was able to paste in parts of my own responses, above. Good luck with your survey.


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