An SEO’s journey into Affiliate Marketing

Well, as per my New Direction for Xenyo, you are at the start of a journey. I think we’ll call it ‘An SEO’s journey into Affiliate marketing’. This post is the first of the new category in which I’ll start with a bit of why we are launching this new category and then a review of our current affiliate marketing position.

An SEO’s journey into Affiliate marketing
I think this title explains nicely what this is about and what position we are. We hope you will follow our (actually, I will be using I, me, mine more from now on for that personal touch) journey from being an affiliate marketing newb to someone making a lot of money with affiliate marketing. I’m sure you’ve heard that ‘we learn from our mistakes’ , well, you can learn from mine without losing the cash and time….. You also won’t get my money from my successes but thats not the point here.

OK, so why and SEO’s journey?
We are not actually complete newbs in terms of marketing, in fact we are pretty well hitched up with regards to Search Engine Marketing. This means that this journey will be fast paced as our projects should get to the market pretty quickly. Its also an excuse so that I don’t have to write many more SEO blog posts that have already been covered by the numerous SEO blogs out there - any that I do will be put into our Search Engines category.

Our claim that we are affiliate marketing newbs is not totally true as we have already started a few projects, so let me bring you up to speed.

Our total affiliate monthly income currently stands at a staggering USD100 for July!!!! This all(apart from the few dollars mentioned below) comes from Commission Junction for selling Cafepress T-shirts on our T-Shirts Site.

We have also joined Linkshare, Shareasale, Clickbank and Chitika to get a feel for affiliate networks. We haven’t done much on them yet apart from having an affiliate datafeed script which I think will take advantage of Shareasale’s free merchant datafeeds. Commission Junction charges affiliates USD200, which isnt much but CJ also limits the number of merchants to 5 in the beginning so a bit restricting for our testing purposes.

Besides the networks, we also had a play with Googles referral 2.0 and Amazon Associates. Admittedly, we just threw their contextual links into our articles directory, which isn’t the best method by any means as most of our visitors to our directory are looking for information rather than products.

I didn’t really like Referrals and think it needs a bit more development time and better merchants so i have since taken the code off the site after only making one sale in 8 days - a grand total of 2.88USD income.

Amazon, I thought would do better after 4 sales on the first day of putting up the code. However, 2 weeks on and 836 clicks later, I am still stuck with those 4 buys - 0.48% conversion and 3.28USD richer.

I think they are telling me that article directories do not convert well. However, I will not go down this easily (poor guinea pig article directory!) and have told our developers to knock up a nifty affiliate code allowing me to choose products to display on individual articles. As I know what keywords each article gets hits from, this hopefully will improve my conversion with a bit of work - additionally, I think that its beneficial for our visitors.

I’ve dragged on a bit so I’ll stop and think of milestones for the next post.