The 20% Rule and Affiliate Marketing

Hands up who else hates rules?

When writing business books, ebooks or blog posts alot of ‘rules’ seem to appear.  Rules about how to run your business and when.

There is a 20% ‘rule’ in business that is applicable to affiliate marketing. As I have said I don’t believe in hard and fast rules applying to a very diverse business such as the affiliate empires that many of you have built. But it is a good guide line or just a concept you should bare in mind.

The basics of this ‘rule’ are that:

No more than 20% of your business should come from one source

and

No more that 20% of your supplies should come from one source

Well for the first point you may think. “I have thousands of visitors and hundreds of them carry out transactions each month”. But you should be thinking “oh, 80% of my thousands of unique visitors come from google”.

Short term this may not be a problem. The amount of traffic an affiliate can gleen from google can line the pockets of many. But one day things may change so enjoy it while you can. I had a site generating £300 (nearly $500) a day then google did one of its shifts (google dance if you like the term) and for the next 2 weeks generated about £1.50 ($2).  It took months to get the site back to a stage where it was turning a reasonable monthly profit.

If you are getting a huge amount of traffic from google and nice fat affiliate commission cheques on tha back of it use this as a grace period and start investing time (and maybe money) into other traffic sources (PR, PPC, Social Networking, Other search engines and directories).

On a similar matter do not rely on one revenue source! Amazon is great, eBay is fantastic also. But a change of terms, move of links can have a huge detrimental impact on the best of affiliate sites. Spread the load, use different merchants, different affiliate networks. See here for a list of Key Affiliate Networks.

Just a little food for thought there.

More coming soon.

February 26th, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing, google | one comment

Tracking Affiliate Sales and Tracking Them Right

Quick warning to any new affiliates out there, something I as an ageing affiliate wish I had drummed into me while I was young. USE SUB TRACKING IDS.

This includes any sub accounts, extra keyword tracking, campaigns, tracking IDs or whatever the affiliatenetwork or affiliate program you are getting commissions from call it. Don’t think ill do it later, if you are linking to a website using an affiliate tracking url/code set up the site/page specific tracking perameter there and then.

I built a number of niche focused affiliate sites using a piece of software using PHP, that mashes together amazon aws affiliate web service feeds with ebay results, presenting a broad range of specific products to the user at great prices. (yes it is a bit like this script but no nice interface, and alot less of the customisation power)

Now I have dozens of these niche sites, generated in place of any standard domain parking, as they give content to the website and generate a bit more revenue than a standard ppc domain name parking.

But in my haste I duplicated the standard tracking ID and didn’t give each site its own. Now I am finding that one or more are making some money, and I cannot tell which. Part of the joy of using the system was to test which domains and designs converted, but now I cannot. I have money in the bank but still feel some time has been wasted.

Now I have to go back and change the link urls (just one config file for each site, but it is still work) and then wait another 6 months to regain the data I should have been sitting on.

Oh well, such is life.

February 24th, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing | no comments