My first month in Internet Marketing - Statistics

Actually, it hasn't been a full month yet. I've registered my first ever domain on 22/02/2019 in an attempt to try affiliate marketing with Clickbank for the first time in my life. I was excited, but I didn't expect much in the first few months and to be fair, not much has happened either, but I will get to that later.

I've bought hosting the following day, I created a logo, set up my website and published my first article. I chose the gambling/sports betting niche, because

1: this is the niche I'm really passionate about (helps a lot when it comes to writing articles)
2: it had some products that had around 25-30 gravity, so I figured it's a good place to start
3: I thought it had way less competition compared to some of the other niches

The big downside: I can't use paid ads. Facebook suspended my ad account within like the first 6 minutes of me trying, Google didn't let me advertise either. I was stuck with free traffic, and this is what I've been using ever since. It's probably better this way, as I don't know shit about how Facebook ads work, so that probably would have been a waste of money. So, my main methods for getting traffic are the following: posting articles to Facebook groups (got in trouble for that as well, but now I'm okay), answering related Quora questions, posting articles to Reddit. That's about it. I have a MASSIVE (lol) email list of 18 emails, I use them as well, and I also post on my MASSIVE (146 followers) Twitter account. Here are the results after almost a month.

Let's talk about the traffic first and I will go from there. So the site has about 150-175 unique visitors every day with 250-300 pageviews. Some of my Quora answers went off, that helped a lot (Quora has been the best source of traffic btw). At the time I'm wiriting this, I have exactly 944 hops (I promote one vendor only) and recently I've started getting around 60-70 hops per day. Before that it was around 25-30. My order form impression count is at 74. Order form server calls are at 10. From those 10, only 4 ended up being initial sales, 3 of those were 7 day $1 trial periods, which have been cancelled and I didn't make any money from them. The other initial sale earned me $10.59 and I also have an upsell on that which earned me $27.89, so that puts my earnings right at $38.48 after one month.

I didn't expect to make sales at all during the first few months, so this was a pleasant surprise, BUT that 5.41% order form conversion rate really bothers me. I feel like it could be better, but I don't know if there's anything I can do about it. Overall I'm satisfied, because I literally didn't spend any money on advertising, I just pay $9 a year for the domain, $22 a year for the hosting, and another $9 a year for an SSL certificate. That's it. I've spent $40 on everything combined so far, and I've already made that back in one month, and I still have 11 months before I have to pay again. Until then, I don't have to spend any money, and I'm certain I can make more money than I've made so far.

However, that low order form conversion rate really bothers me, and also the fact that I can't get paid traffic. If you guys have any advice on what should I do next, I would highly appreciate it. Since I'm a complete beginner, I appreciate every advice I can get. Thank you for reading!