Newbie Affiliate marketer desperate for help

To start with:

Not to be picky, but each of the reviews contains a Visit Site button and a Click Here link that aren't links. The extra box at the left with "links to reviewed products" won't be noticed by most people. This isn't helping to get the affiliate links clicked.

Second, the site is running as a sub-site of infoguides, which takes away much of your potential for brand recognition through your domain name (and some SEO points as well).

Have you checked your site statistics? How many visitors are you getting? No visitors means no purchases. Look at your page times and routes to see what is happening. Are people sticking around long enough to read the content? are they looking at one page more than others? Where are they coming from? The answers to these and other questions can help you decide what you need to do to help your site out.

I noticed you have a 4 page site. 3 of the pages are essentially pushing TruthAboutAbs program, but it's only number two on your recommendation list. Why? Why aren't there similar articles about the other two choices, and especially about the first choice?

I don't personally know of anyone that is using PPC without their own domain name and site. Perhaps that's why Google suspended the account...

Your opt-in form isn't helping much either... When someone enters their name and email, they get a green box that starts "Almost finished...We" in the bottom of the white window where the subscribe button was, but you can't read the rest of the message. Also, people don't know what they are signing up for, other than the ebook. There is no mention of a mailing list (though most people would assume the free ebook comes with one).

Sometimes the little things make a huge difference.

Making your first sale can be relatively easy, but you need to get traffic to your site. Once you know if you are getting traffic to it, you can see what you can do to convert some of that traffic to buying customers.

Don't give up. Assess where you are and find out what's happening, then set out to correct any deficiencies. Repeat until you win.

Weight loss is a highly competitive topic, (there are around 5000 sites promoting Fat Loss for Idiots) if you were in a niche, there's a much better chance of showing up in the search engines.

They say Google would prefer there to be no affiliate sites, your sales page looks like the classic hard "review" sites sold in pre-made collections. That and the any unsupportable claims in adwords copy might have been enough to get you dumped. I would guess that page would have a very low quality score and high click costs. Don't know if you heard of the great purge of 2009 in which 1000s of accounts, some spending huge amounts, were banned. It seems these were mainly associated with 'troublesome' products with credit card re-bills, etc.

To get search engine listing and to live up to "Honest reviews without the hype!" you would probably need 10++ pages of original informative articles.

If you are a newbie then I would advise you to keep well away from such a competitive niche, the guys who are successful at it have been doing it for years and have gotten it down to a very fine art.

What I recommend you do is go to Hubpages.com, make an account there and then start recommending and reviewing products in the hope that people will come and start buying, it will help you dip your toes into these very murky waters and figure things out.

Hubpages is free of charge, you get 50% of sales, hubpages gets 50% based on pageviews.

If you don't I am guessing you could go bankrupt very quickly with PPC.

It is not a bad thing to aim high,but when you are a newbie you need to start slow and build your way up to it...

You must to be able to measure how many visitors you get per day and where they came from. Check out Google Analytics for that.

Once you are able to do that, then next question becomes how can I get more visitors who all have something in common.

Then, what product would all these visitors be interested in buying.

But first you need to figure out how to get visitors who are all looking for the same thing to your website. That is the hardest part, but most essential.

Thanks Guys and thanks for your pointers on my site.

Being absolutely Green at this - How do I go about getting traffic to my site?

Should I ditch the site I have and start again?

Does anybody have any examples of a good site that I can look at that shows me what you all mean?

Cheers

Forgot to say - My site has only been up about a week or so, so I am getting virtually no traffic yet - this is the problem, I don't know how to

Have you thought about getting organic traffic to your page via a higher pagerank?

Here some tips, hopefully they help you in some way.

Tip 1: Before thinking to start driving traffic to your site, make sure that absolutely all links are working properly, especially the affiliate links.

Tip 2: Stay away from PPC or any other kind of paid avdertise until you get more experience.

Tip 3: Absolutely STAY AWAY from all that products that promise you instant results and more money than you can count. Don't waste time nor money on them, most of them never works for newbies.

Tip 4: If you are going for the weight loss niche you are in for a though fight, be clever and think outside the box, follow the big fishes there and do what they do but using your own twist.

Tip 5: Use free traffic, article marketing, video marketing, link building, participate in forums on your niche, post comments on other blogs on your niche, answer questions on yahoo answer, make satellite sites around your main site link wheeling.

Tip 6: Use the search feature on this forum to get your questions answered I bet that every topic on the IM world is covered in more than one thread.

Good luck and the best of success for this 2011

Start here:

The Challenge

After you complete it, go here:

Watch Us Put Clickbank Checks In Mom's Mailbox (From Start To Finish) (Watch every video, you can reverse these two items if you wish.)

Then, once you have completed those steps, come back and tell us about your first sales, how you found cool new niches to explore, and ask your new set of questions.

Hi There,

I started with PPC on Adwords too. You do have to know your stuff or you can lose your shirt in no time, as I found out. The product that I bought failed to mention that a 1% conversion rate is the norm, so you will get badly stung if you are paying too much for clicks.

You are better to focus on free traffic, and that means choosing the best keywords that you can actually rank for. I spent ages setting up several sites with the wrong keywords and therefore got too little traffic to make sales. Get you keywords right early on and you will save yourself a ton of disappointment, pain and frustration. I now have Market Samurai and i wish I'd had it from day one. You can get a free trial if you Google it.

I have just been looking at a poduct called Profit Intstruments, which I think might teach you a lot in a short time. The course has a testemonial from Mark Ling whom I rate highly as an honest IMer. Again Google it.The course is pricey, but there are 3 free vidoes and a good PDF, which you can get without cost, and I think you will find them very valuable. You will learn basic SEO and how to get free traffic if you pick the right keywords.

Hope this helps, and I do wiosh you every success in 2011.

Kind regards,

Jon

I also noticed the same thing as others have. Links are not working.

Have you developed it yourself or someone has done it for you? The site is new and SEO not done.

I would suggest the first thing is that read this free book: The Best Free SEO Tips On The Internet | www.onlinemarketerstools.com

I've been through the same problem you had couple months ago. my account were suspended too, what a coincidence..

I personally recommend an experienced mentor/ tutor for you. Clickbank is highly competitive nowadays..Knowing where to find your potential buyers, converting traffics into buyers, are the keywords now.

I recommend Dan Brock, he's cheap and does excellent work. He will help you restructure your marketing skills..

The biggie that I see is your links don't work. Get that fixed quick!

Then move onto the content. Start visiting weight loss forums and get a feel for what everyone is REALLY wanting. What's their hotbuttons? What do the wish for? What struggles are they having? Use that research to write the reviews for you site. Make it match what they're thinking in their mind so when they see your site they think 'Whoa... this is EXACTLY what I've been looking for!'

Then start marketing/promoting your site. That should get you a good start.

I second the recommendation for Travis Sago's "Project Mom" videos. Really good stuff there.

I agree with most of the comments above as well. When you set up your site, you need to ensure you have all the links working. This is also especially important if you have a "click here" button. You won't want to get people to click on it when there is no link at all right?

Also, I suggest you switch to target a less competitive niche. if you want to focus on weight loss still, zoom in to a sub niche. The most important thing is, you must do proper keyword and competition research, no point going head to head with more experienced marketers when you are still so new.

Alternatively, you could maybe try out Amazon affiliate marketing. It's a potential goldmine that you can exploit!

Cheers,
Lester

Thanks so much everyone - I really do appreciate it.

I'm determined to get this to work but as you can tell I'm a bit green at it all.

I will take time to digest all of your comments and re-plan.

Thanks Barry for posting the links for me - I will look at them in great detail.

I may get in touch again for more help

Thanks all very much for your kind words and advice

Cheers

Al

Hey Man,

I sympathize, I've been at this for months and there's a ton of info to ingest.

Google Adwords suspended your account because your site is what they call a "bridge page". Essentially Google has eliminated pages where people are obviously just putting up a little article with some fluff and then an affiliate link. Once they spot an affiliate link, in particular to a clickbank product, you are out. They can be real dicks about it.

If you still want to use adwords, you aren't supposed to sign up for another account but if you go to another wifi setup (different ip address) clear out your cookies and use a different payment method/id you should be able to. (Normally I wouldn't endorse this but Google is being way too harsh on new marketers who don't know what they are doing just yet). Don't try signing up for another adwords account yourself or google will suspend that one too.

My experience has been using the Display network for cheap clicks and sending those visitors to a squeeze page, having people opt in to receive a free report works well if you stick with it. Can work even in a competitive niche, but it's best to find a niche you have a genuine interest in. (I tried selling a Farmville product and was going to shoot myself in the head of boredom). Looks like you had that on your site but the affiliate link is what sunk you.

Without the affiliate link you would be okay on adwords, they don't mind squeeze pages with opt ins.


If you want some basic cheap click PPC training and are able to use adwords again also feel free to check out my site called 3 Cent Clicks. It's not a get rich quick roduct but it is a way I get cheap clicks for competitive keywords.

Dan Brock is good, but remember he's talking about creating very specific product name websites (like sansasandiskfuze.com or whatever), whereas other marketers talk about creating a list and getting opt ins to sell to.

I would avoid profit instruments simply because it is way too much money for this basic training. You could stick with Dan Brock for $37 instead of $197 or even look for Commission Ritual with teaches similar things. All of them teach you how to focus a site around a small niche and do keyword research.

My personal favorite is Rosalind Gardner, she is very down to earth and real with the Super Affiliate Handbook. She teaches you to write for people not search engines

Best of luck,

Seth