I have seen that lot of webmasters, bloggers and site owners judge a website by its Alexa ranking or traffic. I was speaking to someone about a website which has its alexa ranking in 1,000,000′s. The guy did not pay attention and said why am I even bothered about a website which has so less traffic.
I was interested in the website because of its unique niche and its low competition sub niches. The website owner was also ready to give his 200+ customer list to the person who would buy his website. The person I was talking to about this website was not smart enough and simply ignored the site which was for sale at a very low-cost.
There are people who would use all the tricks to increase alexa ranking so that they can later sell the website or blog. The sad part here is that there are people who judge a website looking at its traffic and alexa ranking. People assume that more traffic means more money. I have seen people cry over low CPCs, traffic not converting etc. The problem here is that the traffic to the website is not targeted and is of less quality.
There is no doubt in my mind that earning online money with affiliate marketing is way more profitable than making money using PPC ads like Google AdSense. When we talk of making money online with affiliate marketing, we need to make sure that we are getting the right kind of audience to our blog or website. The people visiting our website need to convert in some way so that we get our commissions.
A single visitor can make you a minimum of $3-$4 depending on what you are promoting. Let’s assume that an average income from a sale or lead on a particular website is anywhere between $10-$15. This means this website needs just one visitor who can make $15 for the website owner while you might need 100 visitors to click your AdSense ads to make the same amount of money. Your website might have high traffic but who is making more money here?
The other best thing about affiliate marketing is that I can make multiple sales to a single person. So let’s say person A visits my websites and buys something through my affiliate link. As a smart marketer, I will take the contact details of my visitor and try to sell more products to the same person. This means a single visitor to my website can help me make hundreds if not thousands of dollars in a month.
A nice example would be my project on people who were looking for baby sitters. I created a nice looking page using the Affiliate Theme and advertised it on Facebook. People visiting my website were looking for a baby sitter from their area. A merchant at ShareAsale was paying me commissions if I send them people who are looking for baby sitters. I could have simply redirected the Facebook users to the merchant site but I did not choose to do it. I created a squeeze page using wordpress and the affiliate theme. I simply loaded my Aweber code on it with some content and the page was ready.
Now people clicking on my ads were landing on my page and were entering their details. After entering their details, they went to the merchant page and made money for me. The story does not end here. Now I have a list of people who have one or more babies at Home and have a busy lifestyle. I started promoting baby products to these guys and they were really appreciating it.
This way there was a bond between me and my customers and I am still making money through them. My expenses on ads have stopped long back because I don’t need it anymore. I don’t even care if my baby sitter landing page is getting any traffic. If I want to make more, I can also try promoting stress relief products, parenting ebooks and anything that relates to these guys. Now imagine the kind of money I can make with this list.
This is the main difference between people who work very hard to earn online money and people who work smart. Getting traffic takes a lot of hard work and/or money. No matter how much traffic you get, make the most of it by collecting the customer details. Don’t let them just go away. Building a list of people is easy and cheap. AWeber allows you to do that starting at $1 per month. If you are not building a list right now, you are losing lots of money. So whenever you think of traffic now, make sure you get the right traffic to make more money. It’s all about the quality and not the quantity.
