Affiliate Marketing. Here's everything I'm doing. What else should I do?

BrotherSlug

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Hey Everyone, Started an affiliate site as a side project a few months ago and I've been learning a lot. I've see a decent bit of success, but I'm honestly just trying a ton of different things to see what sticks.

Really just looking for advice on any untapped areas that I should be focusing on or giving more attention to.

Site:

  • Platform: wordpress
  • Using content egg to pull in products from CJ & Amazon
  • Using NextScripts SNAP to autopost products to all social accounts
  • Rec'd around 1,600 site visitors in April.
  • Had around 350 affiliate link clicks with a 2.4% conversion rate.
  • Posting from Amazon and ThinkGeek. Got denied by Etsy twice. :mad:

Facebook
  • Got like per page to around .14 cents per like. Not sure if that's good or bad or somewhere in between. Stopped paying for page ads since engagement/reach is so poor for FB business pages. Not sure how to boost engagement or reach without paying for it.
  • I have over 1,000 page likes but most individual posts have an organic reach < 50

Twitter & Instagram

  • Using followliker to automate follows/likes. I'm being pretty conservative with it since my accounts are only a few months old. Not doing commenting, not running on a VPS. I know I can probably ramp things up, but everyone seems to have a different opinion about what is too aggressive vs conservative.

Social Competition Giveaways
  • I've also been running Gleam competitions for some of the products I post on my site. I submit these to contest submission sites and get a decent bit of traffic and participation to my site. I know many are contest squatters, but I'm at least getting a bit of social interaction and building my email list.

Review Videos
  • Along with the giveaways I've been making short light hearted review videos to post on youtube/fb to promote the product & giveaway.

Post frequency
  • Posting around 3 products a day

Gift Guides
  • Trying to post gift guides based on current events / holidays.
  • From there I plan to do a product collage of all the gifts for each guide and post it to pinterest.
Advertising
  • I've only really advertised on social for the competitions I'm running.
  • Had decent success with facebook, and youtube
  • Had terrible results with twitter ads
  • Had average results advertising on reddit. Too much money for how much traffic it generated
  • I feel like buying keywords on adwords is fruitless. Paying 20-70 cents per keyword click will never turn a profit with an affiliate model.
SEO
  • Pages just started getting indexed a few weeks ago
  • For each post I do a few seconds of KW research on KWfinder.com to try and find the lowest competition keyword I can find. However I feel like this is not worth it, and I should just focus on the top level category pages for SEO optimization.
  • Also I have no idea what type of keyword difficulty I should try to target with a domain that basically has no authority at this point.
  • I'm definitely willing to spend money on SEO, I just feel like I'm having paralysis of analysis. Do I get an SEO package, or focus on SEO link building? both? I will definitely be purchasing a service soon. There are just a lot of options on there. Which ones have you had success with?

What else should I try?

  • Any advertising goldmines I'm missing out on?
  • What other affiliate programs should I look at?
  • Is tumblr / delicious / stumbleupon / imgur worth putting time into? Any other submission sites I should look at?
  • Should I try to focus growth on any one social media platform in particular?
  • Any add platforms I should spend money on?
  • Any services on here that deliver large amounts of reliable traffic?
  • Is this something I just need to put like 6-12 months into before I hope to see any return?
  • Would love to pay someone for a keyword research / analysis / strategy.

:) WOW, you made it. You earn a gold star. I truly appreciate any feedback you guys give. If you're curious what my site is PM me and I'll shoot you over the details.

Thanks! :cool:
 
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Reactions: Lio
Try use free traffic promotion means suchs related forums postings, blogs commenting and related facebook submission.
 
You should try building an active email list. Ex. put a opt-in popup on your wordpress site like "signup to get notified of our giveaways" and collect emails. Shooting out newsletters is a great way to get fast traffic. Check out TEARcloud.com their CRM/Newsletter service is currently in alpha and they are launching into Beta on July 1st. They would be perfect for you to achieve this. And free =)
Cheers
 
Not sure what niche you're in but Reddit can be really great if you're in the right one.

Social media bots can also automate your marketing too so you can focus on other promotional methods which take more time to do.
 
I suggest that you stick with one method only so you'll become expert from it. Facebook Ads brings good results so you should read more about it. Best of Luck!
 
My question to you is, why do you think finding low competition keywords isn't worth it? For little guys like us, we survive by picking low-hanging fruit. How exactly do you plan on competing with industry giants for high search volume keywords with high competition? For SEO, focus on building up your on-site content via blog posts. If you have enough capital, you might want to consider outsourcing the content writing portion of your operations while you focus link building, videos, advertising, etc. Love seeing topics like yours. Keep up the good work! I'll follow your journey. :)
 
Currently have a decent mailing list on mailchimp, but this service sounds amazing. I'm going to check it out!
You should try building an active email list. Ex. put a opt-in popup on your wordpress site like "signup to get notified of our giveaways" and collect emails. Shooting out newsletters is a great way to get fast traffic. Check out TEARcloud.com their CRM/Newsletter service is currently in alpha and they are launching into Beta on July 1st. They would be perfect for you to achieve this. And free =)
Cheers
 
Yes, I definitely need to look into reddit more for different channels / threads that I can post to. Problem is, my account is so low on karma, I don't want to go in and get slammed by the mods cause they think I'm just self promoting. I've noticed a few services on here that look somewhat promising.
Not sure what niche you're in but Reddit can be really great if you're in the right one.

Social media bots can also automate your marketing too so you can focus on other promotional methods which take more time to do.
 
Yes, quality.
My friend, your texts are quality or no?

Definitely wanting to eventually hone in on a few methods that work, but I'm still trying to figure out which methods work best ;)
I suggest that you stick with one method only so you'll become expert from it. Facebook Ads brings good results so you should read more about it. Best of Luck!

Since my business model is an affiliate marketing site and my products are so varied, I'm not going to buy adwords for something that won't yeild a high CTR. I am starting to write a few blog posts / gift guides a week, and plan to purchasing some link building packages here shortly. Thanks for the shoutout man! I will keep this thread updated with whatever happens
My question to you is, why do you think finding low competition keywords isn't worth it? For little guys like us, we survive by picking low-hanging fruit. How exactly do you plan on competing with industry giants for high search volume keywords with high competition? For SEO, focus on building up your on-site content via blog posts. If you have enough capital, you might want to consider outsourcing the content writing portion of your operations while you focus link building, videos, advertising, etc. Love seeing topics like yours. Keep up the good work! I'll follow your journey. :)
 
Thanks for your sharing, i'm just starting to learn this recently.
Your journey gives me a good guide.
Thanks again.
 
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