Not An Endless Supply Of Money

3 replies
I am a new (newbie) Affiliate Marketer. The problem that I am running into is not having an endless supply of money. Being retired I live on a fixed income. I have worked tirelessly to create a website to publish products and services that I hope will generate an additional income source. Not having my own product or service, I decided to go with Affiliate Marketing. I need assistance in finding a traffic producing company that is honest and will provide results. There is a multitude of these companies who for a monthly fee, don't deliver as promised. Can someone please suggest a company to me that can be trusted? My website has been up and running for two months. I use Commission Junction to find the companies that I advertise. As my traffic source companies I use Optindatalist.com and I-needhits.com. According to what they report they have sent out traffic for over 1,000,000 leads. My website reports I have had around 1,200 site visitors however no conversions and no commissions earned to date. Why? My site is tinyguy.com. It is difficult for me to believe, that not one sale has been made out of all this traffic. I do not know who is to blame or what the problem might be? Are my traffic companies not producing good solid targeted traffic as promised? Or could I be getting cheated by the companies who I promote? Can anyone give me some good advise?
#endless #money #supply
  • Profile picture of the author Joseph Robinson
    Banned
    Counting on a company of the type that you are using to deliver you targeted traffic is not a smart strategy at all. You need to figure out where your target audience is, figure out what they want/need, and present yourself in a way that brings them back to your site and into your sales funnel.

    I know "autopilot, point and click income" was promised; but it will take more work than that if you want to do anything other than flush cash down the drain.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dan Grossman
    You probably shouldn't spend *any* money until you figure out a working sales funnel. You can get enough free traffic just participating in forums, e-mailing people (personally, not bulk spam), guest posting on blogs, starting discussions with people, etc. to make your first sales... if you have something that will provide value to people and can figure out how to get that message across effectively. You start with just one sale here, one sale there, then reinvest that money into getting the next few.

    That's how I started off ~15 years ago. All I had was a domain and a $5 website design template to start with, no money for advertising at all, and by the time I finished college I had turned that into a six figure a year business.

    One little twist -- I wanted these customers I worked so hard to get, one by one, to be my customers, not someone else's. I wanted control over followup e-mails and wanted them back for repeat sales. So I didn't use an affiliate link. I made a deal with a company that had an affiliate program to resell their service instead. Every time someone ordered from me, I ordered from my partner company to deliver the service. Like dropshipping, except for service instead of a physical product. I got control of the business, while the other company got a great high-volume customer, win-win for everyone.

    As for your current website -- I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. You don't have a business here. What you've created is the digital equivalent of a corkboard with a bunch of business cards pinned to it. Confusingly, it's called Tiny's Pet Prodcucts while all but 2 of the ads haphazardly stuck to the page have nothing to do with pets. If I wanted a halloween costume, or a diamond ring, I wouldn't buy it from a corkboard with some stranger's dog plastered on top. Nobody else will either, no matter how many thousands of people briefly see the page before closing it to go back to professional, name-brand stores and sites they trust.

    If you want to earn some extra money, then you have to approach it seriously and methodically -- you're creating a business. Your business must provide something some group of people want to pay for, and you must know something about reaching that group of people to make them aware of your something they want. Your goal is to identify the product, identify the market, and learn enough about marketing (through both educating yourself and trial-and-error -- experience) to be able to connect the two together. When you do it successfully, you make money. Until then, you haven't earned the right to call yourself a marketer.

    Rather than joining a bunch of unrelated affiliate programs, and sticking ads for them all on one website, identify one market you know how to reach (you like pets? do you know other people with pets? do you know some place they hang out? can you advertise or otherwise reach them there?) -- then identify one product you know will be valuable to that market, either something you can create or something someone sells that has an affiliate/reseller program -- and start there.
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  • Profile picture of the author MarketingMonk
    The companies you are using to get traffic is not targeted traffic. That is why you are failing to do conversions. I would suggest produce good content, comment on related blogs, try to guest post on a popular blog in order to get quality traffic.
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