When do I give up?

Mark,

That's a great question. Unfortunately, there's no
easy answer.

I guess the key is to thoroughly research the niche
before you invest any time and money in promotion.

It's important to really get to know the products you
plan to promote. Make sure you find out the average
earnings per click. Check out the sales copy and make
sure there are no links that take traffic away from th
page. Check out the sales process to ensure there are
no barriers to buying.

See if you can determine other stats, especially the
refund rate!

John

A "gut measure" I'd use is: "Is the effort to continue the process of pursuing this goal using up time and energy that would be more profitably spent on something else?"

I know how fiddling around with things online can suddenly eat up many hours of your day. You start with putting a couple of backlinks in, and suddenly it's four hours later if you're not careful. So is this worth it to you? Can you control your time? Budgeting a certain amount of time each day or week to pursue your goal, and feeling comfortable that this can be a "throwaway" if it doesn't work out, is a way of achieving this. Then you can put in your effort, be committed, learn new skills, but not be upset if you don't get to massive success right away.

You sure this shouldn't be...

"...am I really sending high quality targeted visitors with potential BUYING intent"

As a vendor I see affiliates come and go all the time.

Traffic spikes like crazy for a week, then dissipates.

Not because the product sucks, but because the traffic does.

I could be wrong, maybe the product does suck - but something to think about nonetheless.

Knowing what's the best thing your product has to offer that can benefit your buyers and makes them want it more if there would be another update for it is a big yes. There's alot of rehash product being marketed online and created much disappointment to their consumers, be careful of that , be sure you are contributing to the world and not just for yourself and if you feel you are not then that's the time you have to give up on it and find a better option to satisfy your customer.

As Johnny Ramone implies above, you can say this only if/when you're confident that other affiliates are also not selling it.

Otherwise you don't have a way of knowing whether the problem lies with the product's sales page, the traffic, or something else you're doing. Certainly, as one gains experience with a wide variety of different products, one becomes a little better at guessing that, but it's never an easy matter to judge reliably.

Only if you've already decided that SEO traffic is going to be your primary source of traffic. And if you have decided that, you'll typically need to do better than just "the first page". "The top half of the first page" is a far more realistic objective. Ranking in position 7/8/9, say, for a really long-tail keyword isn't typically going to bring you enough buying traffic to be worth talking about, and rarely enough to be worth specifically targeting.

There are many ways.

The starting-point (if you've determined that SEO traffic is what you're going to use) should be to assess the SEO quality of the top 5 SERP's listings for the various keywords for which you may want to compete, to determine which are viable/reasonable objectives for you.

If you've done everything in a best manner then it's a time to get into another product research and side by side analysing your newly launched product. During the process of analysing and testing already launched product you'll get clues.

Wait 2 months. Then analyze the result.

I dont know what type of product youre promoting, whether its an info product from Clickbank or a physical product from Amazon ...or, or ...or

At the end of the day, sure there are plenty of products that suck, but there are plenty of great products too.

Ive never done affiliate marketing myself, but as a vendor I would make a few recommendations....

1. Get in and get out as quickly as possible
2. Dont invest any money initially if possible
3. Dont invest too much time initially
4. Analyse your competition before even thinking about promoting the product
5. KEYWORDS KEYWORDS KEYWORDS!! - there are opportunities EVERYWHERE, and there are some great products that WILL convert, given that you choose the RIGHT KEYWORDS!
6. A decent product, SHOULD be converting at, at least 1%. If its not, ditch it!
7. Dont base your opinions of the product on a failed effort!
8. Dont promote a product for anything less than a week if you're using PPC. Some days are better buying days - MON, TUE, WED, whereas other days may not be - FRI, SAT, SUN.
9. If you're using PPC, then PLEASE know what you are doing. You really should be using paid traffic methods if you have proven sales conversions and want to boost things up further.
10. Ask Alexa to post her "ways to finding a product" worth promoting thread


Hope this helps

I think that's just something that comes with experience. Maybe an indicator would be if you were getting traffic but the gravity is low, which could be an indicator that the sales page doesn't convert very well. It could also be true that the product has been out for some time, and people have stopped searching for it, too.

Good luck.
Joey

If it's a proven product that you are promoting, don't give up. Just test, test and test.
If the product is not proven and you test the daylights out of your campaigns you will never know why you weren't successful. Start at square one and test a good product instead of going back to the same square again and again.

It seems to me, if you can absolutely determine the product sells somewhere, to somebody, then I would keep trying. You may have the wrong traffic, or bad non-converting bridge page, but those are issues you could fix, imo.

Always a tricky question. I use paid traffic to test out offers before I plunge into anything else. A previous warrior mentioned sending 1000 unique's to the offer. I do that same actually. Depending on how long it took to get them there, whether anything come from sending them there, and if there was any interest at all, that's when I decide if it's worth my time.

1,000 unique visitors is a good measuring stick. If you get to this point and you have not sold more than a couple it is time to move on.

Benjamin Ehinger