Has anyone ever actually converted an affiliate marketing promotion?

Hi Whitealbum - I hear your frustration. The reality is that there are countless Warriors making our full-time livings through affiliate marketing, but how can we even offer an opinion on what you might be doing wrong without seeing any of it? If you show us some of your sites, squeeze-pages, traffic-sources, traffic demographics, autoresponder emails, and so on, then people may be able to comment, and some of the comments may be helpful to you, and some of them may even be right, but without seeing any of what you're doing, without even knowing what kind of thing(s) you're an affiliate for (Amazon? ClickBank? Dating agencies? Vitamin supplements? Private jet chartering?) how can we even guess?

Indeed - in affiliate marketing, the income potential is close-to-unlimited when you communicate regularly and effectively with large enough numbers of relatively affluent people who really trust your recommendations and you can provide them with (or point them toward) what they already wanted without really needing to persuade them to be interested in it. Somewhere along the line, I suspect you must be failing to do that. But without any more information, I can offer no more than this very general (and perhaps unproductive) observation; sorry.

If you're getting traffic but no conversions it could be your copy is not convincing enough. Without looking at your sites it's hard to say. Or as Alexa Smith suggested, maybe you're not attracting the right kind of traffic i.e. people who are researching, and not people who are ready to buy. Since you're getting traffic, though, have you considered adding a squeeze page in order to build a list? Creating a relationship with subscribers on a list is a proven way to get conversions.

These types of general questions are difficult to answer because one would need to look at your traffic sources, where that traffic was being sent to, what your marketing funnel looks like (if you have one), the sales copy (if appropriate), etc.

The single biggest mistake I see people make, irregardless if they're newbies or have been at it for years, is that they don't have a comprehensive marketing strategy. I could give about 50 examples, but let give you just a couple:

Marketer A joins a couple of CPA networks and then begins buying traffic and sending it to a few offers. They barely break even, so they give up and go onto the next offer.

Marketer B first researches a bunch of niches and analyzes them for profit potential. She finds a niche that she not only likes, but begins a self-education process of learning more about it. She starts off by identifying the top 3 competitors in her niche (she uses tools like Compete.com and Spyfu.com to analyze them).

Though this process takes a couple of months, she studies them closely, buys their products, subscribes to their e-mail lists (if they have them), and decides to create a series of 3 reports. She also finds 18 affiliate programs and 2 CPA offers that she can promote via her autoresponder series.

She also becomes a student of copy writing and begins to start her own swipe file. One of her mentors tells her to start her free education over at the Gary Halbert Letter, which is a great starting off point.

When I was heavy into affiliate marketing, I tested anywhere from 4 to 10 offers a month! I knew I would have to lose some money upfront to find out which ones had the best conversions (rarely does anyone share this information) and then I would ultimately put them together into one comprehensive back-end strategy.

So yes, affiliate offers can and do convert.

RoD

I think you're missing the human element of this industry. And you sort of alluded to this. Promoting anything that happens to be hot isn't going to gaurantee you success. In fact it may have just the opposite effect because you'll discover a lot of marketers will promote any garbage because it will make them money or they have JV with another marketer. So sometimes they can have some temporary success doing this.

But it's definitely not the way a newbie or someone trying to build a long term business should follow. Try promoting products you have actually tried or researched. Better still show people that have you used said product, service etc, with your own screenshots and videos. You'd be surprised how that sky rockets your conversions and it shouldn't be.

There are so many people that pump garbage when they find a website that actually shows that they talk the talk and walk the walk, there far more likely to trust your recommendations and convert.

But if you're just promoting anything, slapping up banners and links and not really building a relationship you're going to have a hard time converting. View this business like dating. Are you likely to continue to want see someone who during the first date didn't even take you dinner, but tried to make out with you.

Or would you prefer seeing someone who talked to you, asked you what you liked, took you to dinner, got to know you. I'm pretty sure you'd be happy to hear from that person again and eventually may engage in a relationship with them.

Well your marketing effort is the same way. If you think of it like that, I'm sure you'll be able to see where you've made mistakes on how to fix it.

Lastly, be sure you're in a niche that you really know and are passionate about. Like picking offers, don't pick a niche just because it's hot. Know your niche and be able to provide value!

Hope this helps.

Since you have started dipping your feet in the CPA waters I would start reading all the info you can in the CPA section on the forum. (My home lol)

CPA - can be extremely difficult to get conversions but this is true for any sale. Just like any online marketing efforts you need to do your homework and make sure you viewer is LASER TARGETED.

It looks like you have been promoting offers by doing some free work, which is great but you have no idea who is going to see your post and how long it may work for. I think most people would agree when I say "Typically Paid Traffic works best"

I completely understand your frustration, with so many people making it seem like IM is the easiest thing on the world and your guaranteed millions of dollars. While that may be somewhat true you need to remember it is a SALES PAGE!

CPA takes a lot of time to master and to be able to make a living off of but it can be done. If you decide to dabble into paid marketing try to follow this system.

Step 1 - Invest 25% of total investment to get data
Step 2 - Evaluate data and make an executive decision on what needs to be changed
Step 3 - Invest another 25% of investment to gather more data to determine if your changes have increased your numbers or if it made things worse.
(Typically by this time you should have a few conversions but most likely not enough to be breaking even yet)
Step 4 - Continue tweaking your campaign until you find working constants that allow you to create a profit.
Step 5 - Create a separate campaign for whats working and create another for you to test and play around with to scale up


For example I was making a killing doing pre orders for the PS4 from Amazon, you would think the keyword "pre-order ps4" would create a lot of conversions but I found that keywords I never would have thought of worked the best. Its all about testing & tracking

My thanks to everyone, I can't believe all the support. I've heard from several different people how much this forum can help. When I get more expertise I will try to help people too. Thanks to you all, Cory Please keep the advice coming...