Affiliate Money Maker

Those who are more or less familiar with the affiliate scene know that some affiliate programs such as MoreNiche have a tradition of choosing the affiliate of the month. The criteria for the AOTM include the affiliate’s performance, being active and helpful in the member forum, etc. This month’s affiliate of the month at MoreNiche is Ricki a.k.a. Casual Riches who has been a great inspiration to me since I joined MN. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for this blog.

AMM: I have read that you’re pretty new to the affiliate business - can you tell me how you first got into it and what made you consider this way of making money online?

CR: Well, I have actually been making money online for a while off and on. I started out getting sucked into buying e-books from so called “gurus” and trying to be an affiliate for them. It didn’t work out as well as I thought it would so I decided to look for something else and that is when I found MoreNiche. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

AMM: I see you’ve only started promoting MoreNiche products recently - did you expect AOTM to happen so soon for you in MN?

CR: I wanted it to happen but I didn’t think it would. I thought it would have taken quite a bit longer.

AMM: You’ve been very active in the MN forum, for which I personally am very grateful to you as I learned a lot from your posts - how important is it for an affiliate marketer to participate in a community?

CR: I think the community is one of the most important things of any affiliate program. The amount of support and help that newcomers can get is excellent if there is a good community behind them. It definitely increases sales.

AMM: Being a good affiliate marketer takes a lot of knowledge and experience in many different areas. What are the most necessary skills for an affiliate marketer, in your opinion?

CR: The most necessary skill for any affiliate marketer would have to be just having the drive to succeed. The reason that most affiliate marketers fail is because they think it is a “get rich quick” scheme and end up giving up. If you are willing to learn and put in hard work then that is the most important skill. The rest will fall into place for you.

AMM: I guess to be successful you need to have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve in the long run. What is your personal goal in the affiliate business?

CR: My personal goal in the affiliate business is to be able to make a living on the income that I bring in from it. It might seem like a dream but I believe I can acheive this goal.

AMM: Building a downline: some affiliate marketers are all about it, while others think of it as building your own competition. What are your thoughts on it and what do you do about your own downline?

CR: I think it is a good idea but I do also think that it does make you build your competition. Although, if you work with your downline closely then it can be a very good thing for everyone involved.

AMM: And finally, what is your advice for those willing to make money as affiliates?

CR: Learn as much as you can, set goals, create plans, act on them, and never give up. It is simple if you put your mind to it.

Thanks for your time Ricki!

Ricki also has a blog at Making Myself Richer where he shares his experience as an affiliate marketer.

I haven’t done this in a while so it’s time to post about my progress and results so far.

Earnings:

I’ve had a sale of ProSolution gel (WN) yesterday - the commission is $53.97.

Conversion rates:

Here are the conversion rates for the products that work best for me so far.

Lovecentria (for which I recently had my first sale) - 1:39 so far, considering the averages reported by otehr affiliates there can be a new sale any time.

VigRX Plus (LEC, in Spanish) - 1:272, that’s even a bit better now than what I had previously (the rate is all the traffic I ever got divided by all sales I ever made). I must say I started testing the French speaking market for this product recently, no sales yet but I will be reporting my progress, will be interesting to compare the conversion rates with the Spanish speaking market.

ProSolution Pills (WN) - 1:32

ProSolution Gel (WN) - 1:90

I’ve also started getting traffic to Ultimate Stretcher, a new product by MoreNiche that I recently mentioned on this blog - no sales so far but I’ve only got a dozen clicks so it’s still too early to tell anything.

Downline signups:

Here’s what I have by now:

• Leading Edge Cash - 6 people in my downline
• MoreNiche - 6 people in my downline
• WorldNiche - 3 people in my downline
• GenBucks - 2 people in my downline

Others are without change just like I reported here.

I can say I am happy with my progress so far. I know I need to be sending more traffic really to see better results but I am getting there, I am currently in the process of building a few more sites and after that is done I will mainly concentrate on increasing the traffic volumes to them all and that’s when I should start seeing some really nice results. In the meantime, these initial sales show me that the products work for me and sell so there is an incentive for me to keep working with them.

Moreniche has just announced the launch of the new product for it affiliates to promote. The product is called Ultimate Stretcher and it’s a penis enlargement system. What’s interesting about this product and what puts it apart from all existing similar products is the price - it is the cheapest penis extender ever, priced under $200. Clearly, this is a great selling point and helps us as affiliates a lot. So jump on this offer now and make the most of it!

Yesterday my recent site building efforts brought nice results. I made two sales within just a few hours! The first one was Lovecentria at MoreNiche, actually my first sale ever at MoreNiche. The site that brought me this sale has only been up for about two weeks since they sent me the templates for it and I built it - very encouraging!

The second sale was ProSolution Pills at WorldNiche. What’s interesting about it is that I didn’t even have a site for ProSolution Pills! How I got this sale is through a lens I made about ProSolution Pills on Squidoo.

I’ve been using Squidoo for a while already. Whenever I have no time to put up a complete site I just throw up a quick lens there. Squidoo lenses tend to attract a lot of traffic quickly and if done right can easily replace a proper site. The only drawback of Squidoo lenses is that you don’t have complete control over what you do with it - they place their own ads on your lens, if you are not being careful you can get spammed by others, etc. However, as a quick solution, it works just fine.

I intend to work further on my sites and see if I can improve them and also drive more traffic to them. Hopefully I’ll be seeing more sales soon!

Just thought I’d post here that I got my $10 bonus from MoreNiche - this one is for driving traffic to the sites. This is the final part of the $45 MoreNiche gives the new affiliates - first $15 for signing up, then $10 for putting up a site, $10 for 50 posts on the forum (and the blue leather wallet for 100 posts!), and finally $10 for driving traffic through your sites. No sales yet but hopefully I’m getting there!

If you are wondering why I haven’t posted anything here for the last few days, I can explain. I’ve been busy developing my affiliate sites - infact I have built several new sites over the last week or so.

If you are like me your daily affiliate routine probably consists mostly of promoting your existing affiliate sites for whatever products or market niches you are working with. You do not normally build new sites every day, right?

Neither do I. What forced me to build these sites recently?

Several things. The first site I have built was to promote sex guides - a number of affiliate programs I am a member of have these as their products. Why have I decided to do it? Because I got an offer from the affiliate manager of MoreNiche - an offer I could not refuse. I got a complete site that I could tweak to my liking and use for promoting their product - Lovecentria. Infact, I even got 3 different variants of the site of which I chose one. Who can resist this? I am already getting traffic to that site, and hopefully will soon see the sales.

The second site I have built is for HerSolution Gel - a product offered by WorldNiche. Why? Well, because it is a new product and WorldNiche has announced that  the commission for the affiliates is 60% for the first month - I mentioned it here earlier. I like to jump on new offers as early as possible while the market is less competitive so of course I couldn’t pass this one.

The third site I have built is for weight loss products. While I was eyeing this niche for some time already planning to work with it at some point, what pushed me now was the announcement by MoreNiche about the free trial offer of their weight loss product Proactol. Again, this was too good to miss - and I do not regret building a site as the market is indeed very interesting.

So, this post is actually a tip not only for affiliates but also for affiliate program managers -  affiliates often need a push to start acting. The affiliate program that offers such push  will benefit from increased affiliates’ attention - and of course as a result, more  product sales!

MoreNiche has just announced a new marketing opportunity for its affiliates promoting Proactol. Proactol is a weight loss product that I have previously reviewed. Now you can offer your customers a free trial of the product and still get the commissions for it! Hurry while the offer is active.

Here’s what’s been going on lately:

• I got one more downline signup in Moreniche
• and one more downline signup in Worldniche

Too bad these programs do not notify by email about new downline signups like some other programs do. Anyway, a downline signup is a downline signup and they are cool in any case

I’ve been busy building a website to promote Lovecentria, a product by Moreniche. I got 3 complete web sites from Moreniche for this just because I said I’m interested in promoting the product and their affiliate managers are really helpful and answer all my questions I have in the process of tweaking the site. I’ve selected one of the sites to use on my domain and have been tweaking some things on it. Once I complete this one I will probably look at their other products as well. Considering the recent news of increased conversion rates, I can’t wait to try my hand at promoting them.

Since I’ve been talking about my conversion rates in my posts about my affiliate earnings, I thought I should explain how to calculate them correctly.

Generally speaking, a conversion rate is the corelation between the overall number of clicks  on your affiliate link and the number of sales that happen.  Some affiliate programs will provide you with the overall conversion rate for your account on your home page as you log into your affiliate control panel - but this one is just good for satisfying your curiosity and maybe for the affiliate program itself to estimate the overall performance of all their affiliates.

What’s wrong with this overall conversion rate for you as an affiliate promoting particular products on particular sites is that it doesn’t give you any idea of how well each of your sites performs and what and where needs to be improved.

The conversion rates that are really useful for you are:

• conversion rates for particular products you promote
  • over all the time you’re working with the product
  • monthly conversion rates compared
• conversion rates by site - if you have several sites promoting the same product (you need to use tracking codes in most programs to do this)
• conversion rates by banner used - to calculate these, you will need to set up separate tracking codes for each banner you use - I mean to do a tutorial on setting up tracking codes.

Calculating the conversion rates for a product over all the time you’re promoting it will let you see how much traffic you need to get at average to make a desired number of sales. Mind you, however, that the quality of traffic should be the same to achieve the same results.

Comparing the conversion rates by month will let you see how the quality of your traffic changes. If you get more traffic but less sales this month as compared to the previous month it means your traffic has become less targeted and you need to work on improving your traffic quality: review the keywords you’re using (this makes sense for both PPC and organic traffic approach), try to identify what people who actually buy the product search for and pursue the best converting keywords.

Monthly data, however, can be skewed: if you are looking at monthly stats for the current month before the end of the month and you’ve  had sales in the beginning of the month your conversion rate will appear better than it actually is.

Analysing the conversion rates by site for different sites you use to promote the same product will show you if any of your sites perform worse than others and indicate that they need to be reviewed and improved.

Good affiliate programs normally test the performance of their banners that they provide for the affiliates to use - but you never know which banner will work best for you. By analysing the conversion rates by banner, you will easily see it.

The most important thing to remember about conversion rates analysis is that it’s not just some data to play with - this analysis is supposed  to help you improve the conversion rates. The better your conversion rates are, the less effort you need to invest to get sales and the more sales you can get with the same effort. Once you’ve analysed your conversion rates, act upon the results and it will pay back.

I have to report one more Vigrx Plus sale - my 7th sale of this product over all the time I’ve been promoting it (approximately 3 months).  This is still the Spanish speaking market, and still the first-time customer. I’ve yet to see the returning customers getting their refill orders - but when I do this will be the beginning of the truly passive income That’s where the real beauty of LEC and other similar affiliate programs is - the biggest difficulty is in getting started,  but once you got the ball rolling those sales will just be happening without much effort on your part.

As for conversion rates: I have previously reported my progress with improving conversion rates here but that was based on the monthly data. Today I have looked at my total number of clicks vs. total number of sales during the whole period I’ve been working with this product - the current result is 1:231 as opposed to 1:300 I used to have earlier. Well, the key to more sales now is sending the same kind of targeted traffic (or figure out how to make it even more targeted) in even larger volumes.