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

Novel Use Of Adwords

Getting your message across may not just be about advertising a product or service.

I have had my own problems with PC World and at least one other major Computer supplier.

Fortunatly not this bad, Jules I hope that they grovel at your feel appologising for how you have been treated.

Read the full story here: http://www.affiliatewidow.co.uk/2008/02/poor-service-from-pc-world-business-wwwpcworldcouk-the-tech-guys.html

February 15th, 2008 Posted by admin | google | 2 comments

Google Checkout - too good to be true?

The old adage has it - if it is too good to be true - then it probably isn’t.

Google came pushing it’s google checkout. Free payment gateway! Too good to be true?

Well it appears that it is.

Firstly we have the absolute disaster as it is poorly compatible with a number of affiliate networks. Well my first response is that the tracking is the responsibility of the merchant - not the payment gateway or the network.

But the big problem is that google checkout does NOT redirect the customer back to the merchant website once the transaction has ended. This is bad for the merchant - no second chance for a second impulse buy, and secondly the affiliate - as more often than not the tracking script is placed on the ‘checkout success’ page, so if there is no user visiting the success page - there is no tracking of the sale.

Google has its own solution for this, but it requires the merchant or affiliate network to be approved. This is basically a pain to all involved. More info on this see a4u forum

Also something to remember - google is not a bank! Just because google is the biggest internet company doesn’t mean that it’s payment solution will do everything and do it free. Paypal has only just really been accepted as being a bonified payment gateway and not just an ebay payment system.

I was originally tempted by GC but I am now treading with caution.

There are also alot of people worried about the amount of information that google is collecting - just in time for launch of its own CPA / CPS affiliate style model. Not sure if this worry is just or not.

I am sure that time will tell

April 30th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, paypal, google, Networks | one comment

Google Everywhere

Last weeks big news is that google had announced their CPA network, this week Google Checkout reached the shores of the UK.

Rather quiet launch - no big fanfare on the main google site, nothing on the google blogs, but the BBC were quick to pick up on the story: BBC News Story

Checkout will compete with both the mainstream card processing services used by many online merchants and auction site eBay’s Paypal service.

It is designed to boost Google’s core money-maker, the selling of online adverts, by offering cheap order processing for its advertisers.

It competes rather well with paypal from the word go, free untill Jan 2008

PayPal = 20p +3.4%
Google= 15p +1.5%

Prices per transaction - basic prices quoted - paypal fees get less the more trade you do with them. Correct at time of writing.

The other big advantage for google checkout is the fact that they are using their dominance in PPC to get the merchants on board

If you are an AdWords advertiser, you are eligible for free transaction processing for some or all your Google Checkout sales each month. For every £1 you spend on AdWords each month, you can process £10 in sales the following month for free through Google Checkout.

This is a big move for Google - some big merchants are already taking them on board.

April 13th, 2007 Posted by scifind | ecommerce, google | 2 comments