Since last Friday (a week ago today), I have made a massive total of ……£0.00! After my best ever start to the month (almost as much in the first 6 days as the whole of last month) I was really excited about how much I could earn this month, but as I said, the last 7 days made me a grand total of zero!
I know Affiliate marketing will have peaks and dips, which is why Im not too bothered about it, however what is a bit concerning is that out of the 4 sites that regularly make sales (plus the A4U compeition), not one of them made a sale in an entire week!
The reason why the Gold Locket site didnt make any sales, was because it didnt have any traffic. Google decided to drop me for a week. I THINK the reason this happened was a massive surge in backlinks. I had done around 10-15 blog comments, however on 3 of the sites I ended up with site wide links due to “recent comment” blocks, resulting in around 2000 backlinks in a couple of hours! The day after placing these comments, guess what…the site dropped from the rankings! Last night I removed some of the duplicate content and replaced with unique content, and removed some of the keyword stuffing I had done. Today the number of backlinks dropped from 2000 to 1500 as the site wide links start to disappear and as if by magic, the site is now ranking back at 12th!
As for why the other sites have made no sales, I have no idea! One sites had the best month ever (again) traffic wise – but dropped from a 10% conversion rate over the last couple of months to 0% for a whole week. Normally the amount of traffic I sent the merchant would have resulted in around 20-25 sales, and a nice low £xxx in commission for me, but it didnt make a single sale, or penny in commission! The other sites are the same, decent traffic, but no sales!
Today however, the site mentioned above has made 2 sales from 3 clicks, another site has made a decent sale, my Gold Locket site is now back in the rankings and I have the next week off work – everything is looking up…again…for now!
Glad I’m not the only one! I’ve had a really tough week and much like you, my traffic numbers have reached record highs. I’d say that currently I’m about 25% behind my normal conversions, despite showing an increase in traffic of around 10-15%.
Maybe it’s the summer? I’m sure if this was in the high streets, the newspapers would be saying things like ‘High Street Sales set to Rebound’ and back it up by feeding us a story about how footfall in high streets is at the highest it’s been for the year but shoppers still remain cautious about their finances in the face of uncertain times of austerity ahead…
Applying this to our little world, maybe we should take the positives out of this and sit back, acknowledge that we’re doing good work to increase traffic and leave the rest, as they say, in the lap of the gods.
Revenue aside, the more people exposed to your brand, the better – especially if you do genuinely highlight some good deals now and then.
Good to see an update on here!
[...] more regular, with my seeming to start each month with a post complaining about my earnings (see here, here and [...]