Affiliate Marketing its easy and anyone can do it, can’t they?
Chatting to a couple of business associates this morning about my current income streams(web design, tuition, Marketing) and we got onto Affiliate Marketing.
After outlining what it was and briefly whats involved, they turned around and said, and I quote “You must be minted then, all that easy money”.
So this post is for them and for anyone else that thinks Affiliate Marketing is easy.
Guess what?, it isn’t.
Well not entirely true, if you want to cover costs of hosting domains and have a few quid then no problem, you only require a relatively small amount of traffic to earn enough. This is where i’ve been for the past few years, having fun, covering costs, but never really dedicating enough time to earn anything decent.
If you want to earn a living from affiliate marketing then you have a lot more work to do.
The biggest part of affiliate marketing is a numbers game. If you have 1000 visitors to a site and 1% click through your advert and purchase:
1000 visitors 1% = 10 Purchases
average sale £20
Commission 5%
thats £10 commission per 1000 visitors to your site. If this traffic is based on organic listing then all well and good but if your promoting via PPC then you have that cost to take off.
Assuming that all your traffic is generic and free then to earn a wage you would need 30,000 visitors to your site to earn £300.
Which isn’t a huge amount in the grand scheme of things but you’ve got to retain those numbers on a monthly basis. So you’ve got to get the same people back buying something else or you’ve got to attract new people. Keeping a site up to date and fresh attracts new visitors and retains current so this is a must.
Is 30,000 people hard to get to your site? maybe. So what i’m doing is creating more sites in different areas this allows me to distribute the traffic I need across different sites and different subjects. So instead of 1 site requiring 30,000 visitors I will have 10 sites each requiring 3000 visitors, a far more achievable target in the short term.
But, 10 sites all requiring maintainance and content and ads placing and researching is 10 times the work of 1 site. I’m sure with practise and the right tools you can cut down the time required for each site but if we bargin on 10 sites 2 hours each, 20 hours per week then if we get quicker we use the same time and just create a new site.
So earning a wage via affiliate marketing is doable but like anything you only get out what you put in, sticking a site on the internet and expecting the cash to roll in won’t work.
How many sites did I say I was going to do? i better get to it then.
andy
