If you are not familiar with affiliate marketing it is basically just a process of promoting someone else’s product on your own site, and if you can convince someone to buy something from their site then you get paid. Some people/sites will pay you a percentage of the overall sale while others will just give you a flat price regardless of how much the person spent. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn a little extra income but there are people out there who make full time income just from affiliate marketing.
I had never tried to do any affiliate marketing before but I finally decided to give it a try after reading Karol’s blog post, how to spot opportunity. Before reading this awesome post, earning any kind of passive income just seemed like a pipe dream. It was something that I have been thinking about a lot over the past few years, but I never could get myself going to start actually making some money. But that post inspired me and it even gave step by step instructions that I could follow. So now I’m going to tell you exactly what I did, what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned from the whole experiment.
But first I’m going to give you a quick summary of the post that I read so you will know the basic instructions I was following. If you want more detail Karol does a great job of explaining everything in full detail on his blog. (see link above)
Basically the idea was to find a an event, be it a sporting event, concert, etc, that was sold out and the only way you could get tickets was through online ticket retailers such as stubhub. Once you find the event that you want to target then you must set up a website with a landing page that trys to get the visitor to click an affiliate link that takes them to stubhub where they can buy a ticket. But how to I get people to the site? I set up an adwords campaign that would direct people to my landing page.
I chose the NBA All Star Game. Here are the keywords I used for the adwords campaign:
“nba all star game tickets”
“nba all star game ticket prices”
“nba all star game”
“the nba all star game”
“nba all star game 2009″
“nba all star game 2010″
“nba all star game dallas”
“nba all star game in”
“nba all star game at”
the 2010 nba all star game”
“nba all star game 09″
“dallas all star game tickets”
So once I had my adwords campaign set up and my landing formatted I was ready to go. I elected not to add a mailing list like Karol’s post explains, mostly because I did not want to pay the monthly fee that awebber charges. If i decided to try something similar to this again I will probably set up a mailing list as well.
So here is what you are waiting for. The results:
Total spent on adwords campaign: $74.04
Total Sales: $0
Profit: -$74.04
Ouch. That sucks. A total failure. Well not completely.
Yea I didn’t make any money but I learned 2 very valuable lessons
1. I learned to create an effective landing page, at least for this type of project.
My conversion rate of people that came to my landing page to people that clicked through to stubhub was ~50%. Having no prior experience in creating a landing page I didn’t know if this was good or not, but after a little research I realized that it was at least average, if not above average.
For my landing page all I did was get the official logo for all star game and put that at the top of the page. Then there were two sentences that called for an action of clicking on my link. All of that information was above the fold and then right below the fold I had the official promo video of the all star game that I just embedded onto my site from youtube.
2. I learned this is a way to make a passive income.
But you said you didn’t make any money? Yes I know I didn’t make any money, but you have to analyze why you didn’t make any money before you can write something off as an unsuccessful way to make money. Was I not attracting the right type of customers? Was I giving the customers the wrong idea of what kind of price they were going to get? I just couldn’t understand it. But finally after a discussion with Karol, after my affiliate marketing experiment was over he offered up the advice that the ticket exclusivity was probably not high enough for there to be a high demand for the tickets.
This took me a little while to understand. When I was getting ready to start this experiment I looked up the average ticket price on stubhub for the previous years allstar game. Last year the average selling price on stubhub was around $700. So I thought I was golden. All I had to do was sell 2 tickets and I would at least make my money back.
What I didn’t take into consideration was this was the first all star game ever that was held in a football stadium. This meant that there were roughly 70,000 more seats available than a regular all star game, but unfortunately I didn’t figure this out until after the game was over. So this was just basic economics. Huge supply and way less demand. No one wanted to buy tickets, and the people that did want tickets were not paying a premium price for tickets. After a little bit of research, after the fact, I realized that lots of people were even selling their tickets below face value.
So if I would have picked an event where the demand was higher then I believe I would have definitely made money. Affiliate marketing is a legitimate way to make some passive income online. I just have to learn to implement the strategies more effectively. After the lessons I have learned here I know that I can do it.
Now it’s you turn. Read this post and read Karol’s post (link above), and get out there and try this for yourself.
If you have any questions, fire away in the comments, and if you have tried something similar and wouldn’t mind sharing your own experience please share it as well.