I'll say it straight out: You won't become wealthy as an affiliate site. If you approach this with a level head, however, you can generate a respectable stream of revenues. You need to set realistic goals.
The potential of your revenue stream is directly related to four things:
•Impressions: How many visitors saw the offer?
•Click-throughs: How many visitors clicked on the offer?
•Sales/leads: How many visitors made a purchase or fulfilled the lead requirements?
•Value of transaction: How much will you make from each sale or lead?
The amount of traffic your site generates is of utmost importance. The affiliate program signup forms often ask for monthly page impression counts and unique visitor estimates. Both figures can be ascertained by analyzing your Web server logs. The number of page impressions is the number of HTML pages served (image hits, such as GIF and JPEG graphics, are ignored). The unique visitor count is calculated by counting the number of different clients who access your server. Some affiliate programs may reject your application if your site traffic is under 10,000 page impressions per month.
The click-through ratio relates the number of link impressions to the number of times the link is followed. For example, if a link is shown 100 times and it is followed 5 times, the link is said to have a click-through ratio of 5 percent. Click-through ratios vary widely. The effectiveness of your links cannot be understated. You won't strike it rich when you throw up a page full of banner ads. It just doesn't happen.
The conversion of click-through to sales or leads is a key point. The relevancy of your site content to the affiliate offers is crucial. Don't attempt to sell cosmetics or panty hose to truck drivers. Send potential customers to your merchants. Don't focus just on traffic; instead, focus on quality.
At this point, you might be asking yourself, "Well, that's all great, but how much money can I really make?" I can't answer that with a generalization. Your site is unique. You're the one who has to decide how much money you expect to make. The approach you take and the tactics you use are infinitely variable and we’re going to discuss them in the next article.
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