Am I In Denial? Or Just Too Naive?

Someone I know and respect asked me today what was my biggest mistake online.

And I failed to come up with an answer. Because I can't think of any major mistakes.

I can think of a whole bunch of small ones:

I have launched many campaigns on Google that bombed. Some for failing to attract clicks and others for failing to generate commission. ThomasCook was one of them.

Had I studied the website a little before signing up I would have noticed how heavily it was promoting their call center number. The copy on the site was directing the users to do one thing:

Call them!

And would I get paid for those sales? Nope. It's what Perry Marshall and a few others would call "leaks".

So not checking for that before launching a campaign would consitute a mistake. But I learnt to check for leaks.

I tried promoting an unknown supplier in a rather crowded and shrinking market with great failure. Cost me alot it did too as the clicks came at a price. But I learnt to back the leader. And logically I knew I should have. why?

If you want great affiliate commissions, in my opinion, there are 3 things to do to evaluate them:

1. Check that the commission will cover your advertising costs at the minimal Click to sales conversion rate ( i guesstimate around 0.5 % which means one sale in 200 ( worst case scenario remember ))
How: take one example from a fixed payment loan provider who pays £12 per approved application.
divide £12 by 200 and you get just under 17p - that is the max you can pay per click and break even, if your conversion rate is one in 200.

If I think that looks realistic move on to two:

2. Is the company a market leader?
Don't be a salmon and swim up stream - if there is a clear market leader in the market or niche, chances are most people looking for their products

- Know of the company
- Like the company
- Are open to buy from the company

So if you are trying to buck the trend and tell them of a better deal, chances are they'll ignore you simply because they would rather do business with the leader. So if you want to make money in that niche you need to back the leader.

3. Does the affiliate agreement open you up to "leaks"?
What I mean by that is, will you get paid for every sale made from the traffic you are sending them? Chances are - no. But you have to evaluate if the company website is working against you or with you. It is in their interest to try to help their affiliates as much as possible but some companies still don't get that. If the website is geared to generate the type of leads that they will pay you for then that's fine. Just watch out for those that don't.

The final mistake I am willing to admit to today is that I sometimes get caught up in chasing more clicks, when the company will only pay me for sales. I changed one word on an advert and it increased my click through rate by 25 %.

But instead of continuing to make one sale per 23 clicks, It dropped to one sale in around 100 clicks. Changing it back and the magic worked. Even though the click through rate dropped right back down again to what it was before, the all important sales rate is right back up again - to around one in 30.

But major mistakes? To me that means somethign that was difficult to recover from, and those I haven't made yet. Although the author of Rich dad, Poor dad suggest that I should aim to fail as quickly as possible because it's the best way to learn it:

EARLY!

Cheers,
Jon ( still progressing )

=Every Day In Every Way, I'm Getting Better And Better=