Advice please couple issues!

If you drive traffic to your site, most are just going to bounce (leave without purchasing) and it will of been for nothing. I would drive traffic to a squeeze page and capture their email (generate leads / build a list). You could use an ESP like aweber or getresposnse, as they are probably the two most popular. Then follow up with them via email with worthwhile info / related offers.

It's real important to build a list, that way you can inexpensively follow up with subscribers. You will find that most that are successful are always building their list.

I have been doing CPA / affiliate marketing for over 16 years. However, I do things quite differently than most and it sounds like you are wanting to do more mainstream marketing. So I'm sure others will provide you with more in-depth advice than the obvious basics I provided.

Since you are new, also keep in mind that there's a big world outside of promoting MMO offers / selling products and services.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get caught up solely on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same and possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Bottom line: it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

I drive traffic by acquiring 3rd party email data, which is data that the users are interested in a specific vertical(niche)and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

So by acquiring data, I'm building assets that I then own and can market to over and over at very low cost. However, 3rd party data will rarely be as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list you build yourself. But it really doesn't matter because it is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to convention list building.

So the key to making it work is to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting, and removing unresponsive users. That way over time you are building smaller, but more responsive lists that you should eventually be able to send less and make more with each mailing. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality (cost effectively).

Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offers because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions and converting the data into cash producing assets.

Obviously, there is far more to it, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something to think about.

Look at this if you have a blog with no squeze page and lets say you have 1000 visitors onli 2 or 3 will buy your affiliate product and then the rest will leave .But if you have a squeze page and lets say it converts at 30% you will make some sales and you will have 300 clients for life .Be smart build your list

Hey Matt,

I think it's great that you're giving it your best shot and starting an online business. It's not easy to do, but that's why the rewards are so much sweeter.

To answer your question about if you should sell on your own site, Here's an option you may not have considered:

Use a separate URL for each of the products you are trying to sell. The great copywriter, Bob Bly does this all the time.

He writes a sales page that looks like an article to sell his wares.

Each one of his pages is a separate URL dedicated to the project he is working on. (He must be having success with it, because he's been doing it for years.)

If you would like to see a good example of this here's one: The Internet Marketing Retirement Plan :: Quit your job, stay home, and collect a $200,000+ a year "retirement income" in your spare time . working just one hour a week . within 18 to 24 months from today!

Also, if you don't have separate URLs and you are trying to sell stuff from CB or Amazon on your site, you will want to sell products that are only related to your niche.

Trying to sell flashlights to people at a sunny beach is No Bueno.

So, if you are writing a blog about drones, make sure that you're promoting drone related products instead of fishing lures.

That's just some basic affiliate marketing 101 stuff.

God Bless, and hang in there!

Elmo

Yeah you can have a Blog with reviews on it. Just make sure you list both Pros and Cons about the product.

Personally, I do some Reviews but most of my affiliate income comes from broadcasts and Follow Ups via email marketing.


- Robert Andrew

If your offering services are just the ones available, People are bound to use more well-known ones. you must be creative and offer some type of bonus or something. offer some bonus to some organizations for their members like Vouchers on your side and to their benefit. (regarding what you said about twitter, so far not bad ! really).