From 1-5 Sales Per Day Down to 0 and Back up: What I Did That Counts

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I'm always doing experiments. Some work and some don't. The good part is when I experiment, I also learn what works.

My Goal since Coming to WA

Since coming to WA, my #1 goal has always been to promote my own products. I love affiliate marketing as an added way to make an income. I understand that you don't have the customer support and other components as much as an affiliate as you do as a product developer or service designer, but it's always been what I want to do.

In fact, before I came here, I had 15 products and I haven't promoted them since coming here because I've been focused on mastering the skills here. It's always been my goal to come full circle though and to promote my products and others'.

Where Affiliate Marketing Fits for Me

I look at affiliate marketing as an additional full-time plus income opportunity that I'll be using, but creating my own products is definitely my ultimate goal. With that said, I created my website using the Online Entrepreneur Certification and somewhat a hybrid version of the Bootcamp too.

I didn't know the traffic generation best practices until I came here. I was able to get people to my website thru social media, but I wanted more sustainable methods, and SEO has been just that! Since, I've had traffic on my site, it's been all about experimenting with conversion optimization and scaling the traffic even more.

As a result, I wouldn't recommend you expect the same outcomes to these same experiments with a low traffic site (less than 200 visitors per day). Add content, build up the traffic, then work on conversions from there.

A Little Background on my Niche

My site has the entrepreneur niche instead of being an affiliate marketing niche site, make money online site, or online marketing niche. My niche has definitely had it's ebbs and flows as I figured out how to be relevant to entrepreneurs as a whole while becoming better as an affiliate marketer at the same time.

Added to that, I completely believe and see how affiliate marketing is something all entrepreneurs should be learning, but I never wanted to have a site that gives expectations thru the name and branding that it doesn't fulfill with the content. In other words, I didn't want to have a site where people are expecting to learn how to start and grow a business that only talks about affiliate marketing because I knew that would disappoint in the long run. It's been tough to figure out the flow of relevance and how to position offers sometimes.

Even with that, I've managed to figure out how to position and sell many things from my site, and I felt confident that I have proof of concept and a pulse on what visitors are looking for. With that insight, I decided to really build out the How to Entrepreneur brand and start working on products that will deliver consistent with the brand promise "to help entrepreneurs grow a business from idea to enterprise".

Ebbs and Flows of Promoting Stuff on my Site

Unfortunately, over the course of figuring out how to promote affiliate offers and prepare to create and sell my own products on my site, I've crushed my conversions more than once. The first time, I decided to try making my obvious conversion goal point to my email list.

I've seen this work great for many websites, so I thought, if the email list is a good primary goal for 7 and 8 figure websites who have their own products and affiliate products, then why can't it work for mine? I created an email course as a lead magnet and started sending majority of my traffic to the offer.

Unfortunately, what I found is that by adding a hello bar, popups, and buttons into my posts that redirecting traffic to my email list, I could grow my email list, but I also distracted attention away from my sales conversion goals--this wasn't good because I don't have products yet so growing my email list wouldn't make me any money until I was selling something there.

The Goals of my Promotions

Also, I don't want my own products to take away from the promotion of other solutions on my site. My products won't be created to compete with my other affiliate offers, so I wanted to promote them that way.

Also, while I was emailing my email list, I was feeling like I'm talking to crickets rather than my #1 goal of email marketing which is to build a tribe or community. The silence is partially because the list was small and needed some work, but still...

Tweaking the Flow of Relevance

I decided to pull back from building my list like that, and to rework my plan. I know since my site addresses affiliate marketing issues as well as issues that aren't directly answers to someone looking to learn more about affiliate marketing, then I wouldn't get the highest conversion rates to affiliate offers (like WA) if I position that offer everywhere. The flow of relevance would be off.

For example, if I write a blog post that is a review of a payroll software, and I have a popup to WA, it wouldn't be directly relevant, so the conversion rate would likely be low. I've tried making WA the universal offer and making my email list the universal offer, and neither worked all that well.

What's Worked Best for Me

Instead, what's worked best is to categorize subniches on my site, and create very relevant offers for each subniche. For example, let's say we have a MMO site and we have reviews of freelancing courses there. WA may be relevant, but what about the people who KNOW they want to do freelancing and aren't interested in affiliate marketing right now, should we miss out on the conversion opportunity? No.

If their goal is to find a freelancing course, it would be best to present a freelancing recommendation and WA as an alternative. As a result of offering more relevant alternatives, I've had increased conversions overall: here and elsewhere. This means I have recommendations on several subniches that are relevant for entrepreneurs, and it also means I had to do research to find pain points, to find relevant advertisers, and to create relevant content.

Following What Works

Added to that, I followed the template of other large sites who sell their own products and other people's products. My menu reflects my brand conversion goals. My popups and hello bar presents an offer that's the most relevant to the largest population of my site, and my in-text calls to action present an offer that's relevant to the subniche. I'm still building this out fully, but it's working!

I'm now getting steady affiliate conversions and steady conversions to my support community! I had been getting a pretty steady 1-5 sales per day in August and September (aside from my PPC campaigns) and thru my experimentation, it completely dropped to 0--that was a little scary. I had to let the experiment sit until I knew for sure it resulted from my new experiment. Once I was clear that my experiment caused my conversions to collapse (which took 8 days without WA sales), then I made a new hypothesis and tested it out.

Now that I've proven what works on my site, it's all about amping things up. Optimizing other posts for utmost relevance, and continuing to send out value upon value, meeting more and more people, and growing the business to serve entrepreneurs best.

If you haven't already, definitely check out my 20 month video case study as well as my other training. I share my experiments in video and you can see what I did and how they worked for me.

You can also stop by my site to see what I'm doing and get ideas, but don't copy please. Modify it for your brand and give credit where credit is due. The information is on my profile.

My Questions to You

Have you done any similar experiments?

Have you ever crushed your conversions and got them back up? What did you do that made the difference?

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Recent Comments

36

Hello,
I am new here. I love what you are saying, but it is a little over my head. I had started a website, I am at the stage of writing my first post. It is focused on one of my passions, which is food related. I see that you focus on making money. I am curious if I should rethink just focusing on food. I am a little confused. The training videos made it seem simple to just pick a niche that I like...I am wondering if I am wasting time on a niche that may not be big enough.
Any advice?
Thank you

This post was written well after my first post, so I can see how it would confuse you. Sorry for that.

I’m all for choosing a niche your passionate about, but the money shouldn’t be an after thought.

Food is quite broad and competitive of a niche, if that’s your passion, I’d choose a subniche (or smaller audience) within the food category. Take a look at some food affiliate sites and see if you can pick up a few nuggets from there.

Be careful because some food blogs don’t make money from affiliate earnings—following those could confuse you even more. Make sure to find a few food affiliate sites and observe them.

I have been curious how your PPC campaign has been working out.

It would be disappointing to see the sales plummet. I would rather them plummet when they did rather than over Black Friday sales week.

Recently, I realized that I need to adjust my target audience. As the market has changed and evolved over the last couple of years, my niche became too narrow to. Or too small for my income goals.

I think that being willing to monitor and adjust is key to growing and maintaining a business. Best wishes!

Thanks Sondra. I don’t think PPC is bad but I decided to prioritize paying myself and manage my expenses a little better. I still get sales without PPC so it was never the main driver but who knows I may go back sooner rather than later.

Thanks a lot for the helpful insights.

May I ask...

I have a pop-up on my site (one general pop-up ) that leads visitors directly to my WA page. Is that okay or I need to lead them to my email list and then redirect them to the WA page.

Please advice...

Great post Tiffany. Your website is excellent.

Thanks. Built one keyword, page, and post at a time. Hahaha.

Wow, what a powerful post filled with a ton of information.
Thanks
Joe

I’m glad Joe!

“Feed and grow your Talent, then surprise everyone, even yourself.” Tom Short.

“All things are possible when you work the impossible.” Tom Short.

“Your ways in life will only attract those who like your way of life.” Tom Short.

Thanks for your time,

Tom.

Great quotes Tom!

Hi, Tiffany! It's excellent seeing you experiment. I learn interesting ideas for the future. That being said, I don't run experiments yet because my traffic is usually pretty low still (3-4 month old site), with the exception of one post I had that kind of went mini-viral on FB and brought me 1.5k visitors over 4 days. My traffic still isn't back to normal yet. But it'll be interesting to read other people's conversation rate experiments!

You can experiment with building traffic, different content types, etc. I’m all for experimenting but I said that because it’s so common to see people looking at methods for conversions before having traffic.

Oh, I experiment with building traffic by content types, minor ad experienments, etc. I was talking about conversion experiements this time. Plus your experiements are way ahaead of my level right now. That's what the 'for the future comment was about. ^_^

I’d love to hear about yours. Traffic is something you really never stop building in business.

Wow! I envy your knowledge & enthusiasm!

Wow! Thanks

Love reading about your experiments, gold nuggets in every post of yours :) You’re rocking it as always, Tiff!

Thanks so much Zarina!

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience. Tom

You're welcome Tom!

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