Affiliate Mire - I'm Stuck!
I few months back I was sailing through training. Some training I understood and other training built on that, like SEO and keywords. So I was all excited about generating content and getting traffic. And that's what I wanted to do build a site that had good content, interested people and generated traffic. And then I ran into the affiliate marketing training. Which I need to learn but I am not ready for.
Those mega affiliate sites overwhelm me. Here's the list from my training:
(1) Commission Junction
(2) Awin
(3) LinkShare
(4) ShareASale
I do not have any regular traffic to my websites. I can not even begin to think about affiliate marketing. I can only deal with a small personal affiliate program that has products I know and trust and some of which I use.
I need to know how to build a list, create a capture page and make my website pop. I need to know how to navigate all the website templates - there are no categories like fun, travel, newsletter or religious. I'm stuck in the affiliate mire and the water is rising,
Will somebody please toss me an idea!?
Recent Comments
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My advice may be different from what someone else might say, but I think you should wait with your list building and capture page for a while. Get your main website humming with traffic before you start a list or try to capture emails. Lists cost money. Wait until your site is making just a bit of money before reinvesting it into a mailing service.
To get your website going with traffic, you really just need to write. And write well. From your post here I can already tell you can write in a way that people will actually read what you write. You're articulate, spell well... and honestly, those 2 things will help a lot.
As for making a website "pop"... just keep it simple and clean, seriously! Don't get stuck in the "what it looks like" funk, with all the bells and whistles and competing colors. People tend to like simple and easy to view pages. I am currently using "Spacious". It's simple, clean, has options, and is easy to navigate. Maybe it'll work for you (I don't know your niche).
The Mega Affiliate Sites question: yes, you can make more money on some of those sites than on Amazon, but I'm assuming here that you're new to this... if you can (depending on where you live and what your niche is), just stick to Amazon for a while until you're making some money and have experience doing this under your belt. Amazon is easy, they are reputable to the majority of the world, and they sell pretty much everything. Once you're farther into this, spend a bit of time digging around just 1 of those big sites... instead of browsing THERE, look up who has ___ store that you're wanting to promote products from. Ex: if you're doing kids stuff and want to send people to "Pottery Barn" instead of Amazon, look up where Pottery Barn has their affiliate stuff and go THERE. Hope that makes sense.
Hope this is helpful! You can do this... keep it simple, keep writing instead of working on how pretty it looks, and keep it going for at least 6 months (most sites start getting more regular traffic around then).
Good luck!
Thank you for your advice MarlaineB. I will be taking it. I will also be checking out "Spacious" thank you very much for that. I read that you had a milestone month in May. Clearly you are doing things right. I was most impressed by your 80 -100 organic visitors. If you ever blog about doing that let me know I would love to read it.
You are ready for the next step while, I am no doubt building the big site that makes no money. I say that so you can know where I am in this process. Thanks again I will be reading your comment again later to take in every piece of your advice and appreciating it more with each reading.
If it helps, the site I'm working on is my 2nd site. My first one was HUGE but just got NO WHERE... so I know what frustrations you're talking about. My chief problem was that my first site was focused on a niche that sold cheap products that people didn't really need to blog about. Kids dress up clothes. Who (honestly) wants to read a blog post about different options? No one. They just want to go to Amazon and buy. I had a TON of pinterest traffic of course, but very little organic traffic after 80-90 posts.
My second site took what I learned from my mistakes in the first one. Promote expensive products that make the commissions worth your while. Kids dress up clothes made like $0.40 commission. My new product niche makes $20-40 per item sold. BIG difference. Makes all the work much more worth it. Key words are all "selling keywords". Not products people google, but "best ___" or "top rated ___". Stuff like that. WAY more organic traffic because of that I think.
I'm not actually planning to move away from Amazon for quite some time yet, until I find I have a need (a product I want that ISN'T on Amazon). My chief reason is that I learned the hard way that having too many things and accounts on the go makes it too complicated and I got stuck in "Analysis Paralysis". Checking everything every day instead of building content. Streamlining is good.
Marlaine :)
Take a deep breath, Kundi...that's what I had to do. What I've learned is to look for affiliate programs that don't require X number
of sales by a certain time. For instance, you might want to avoid signing up with Amazon until you are further along and have more traffic coming to your site, b/c of their requirements.
Keep doing the training. It will all work out. :)
Colleen
Thank you, Colleen for your help both in your comments and the PM you sent. A deep breath is exactly what I need. And then back to the training. :)
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Just take it easy... step-by-step... resolve one issue and then move to another... Don't get overwhelmed...