I was thinking back over the past 10 years trying to figure out what kind of websites, marketing campaigns, projects, etc. that have been successful for me. As I look to the future I think it is always good to learn from past failures and successes. I am not gonna go into the failures here, just the types of sites and projects that have been successful since I started this internet marketing and affiliate marketing thing.
When I started in this business I was doing SEO for clients. We partnered up with a dude from North Carolina and in the first year we did over $1,000,000 in revenue which is pretty good for a first year company. This was back in the late 90’s when SEO mainly consisted of throwing up a bunch of doorway pages loaded with keywords. Generally speaking we would deal with contracts in the $1,000-$5,000 range and we would get a set number of first page listings for their list of keywords over about 10 different search engines. We are talking Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. Google wasn’t really around yet. Our biggest contract we had was $160,000 from one of the top telecom companies but for the most part we dealt with smaller mom and pop type sites. As the search engines evolved and the industry grew we changed our methodology a bit to keep up but little by little it was getting harder and harder to achieve top rankings for our clients. We were still able to do well for most of them but we were getting sick of clients so we started getting rid of most of them. We kept a few of our better clients around for a while but eventually got rid of them also. This lead me into affiliate marketing.
My first major success as an affiliate marketer came when one of our clients that dealt with Orlando and Walt Disney area hotels decided he didn’t want to work with us anymore. But I was able to talk him into a new business model where instead of paying for rankings he would pay us for traffic. So I built a bunch of sites, started working with GoTo (the predecesor to Overture, the predecesor to YSM) and Adwords (way before the PPC model. This was when it was still CPM). I was driving decent traffic but eventually the customer decided to go another way and I was stuck with a handful of sites that were getting some decent traffic so I converted them over to affiliate sites. I drove the hotel traffic to Lodging.com and we did a fair number of bookings a day. Nothing too amazing but I think it was bringing in around $2K a month or so.
As I started getting more and more involved with Disney stuff I saw there was a big market for the Orlando area theme park tickets so I built some sites dealing with those, found a ticket seller in Orlando to work with and pretty soon I was sitting at the top spot in Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines for keywords like “disney world tickets”, “discount disney world tickets”, “orlando theme park tickets” and stuff like that. Problem was the margins on the tickets are very low so for a $300 ticket I would only make around $10-15 or so. This Disney stuff ran well for a couple years but then the mouse decided it didn’t like my walt-disney-world-hotels.com, walt-disney-world-tickets.com domains and all my other domains using “disney” in them. So that business started drying up.
We also had a client that dealt with sports jerseys and licensed NFL, MLB, NBA, and NCAA apparel. Out of nowhere they decided to shut their site down so I had some domains getting traffic for those related keywords and also their main site was getting good traffic. We bought their site and that started me down the path of selling football jerseys and the like. I was looking for a good affiliate program and stumbled across Football Fanatics and I have been working with them for about 7 years now. My main site has some great rankings in Google and it has been pretty solid at the top of the SERPS for a number of years now and has been a fairly consistant revenue generator. I think I have about 10 different sports sites right now with plans for many more this year.
Another success story: Around 1999 I bought my first DVD player and found this great service called Netflix so I signed up. As I was looking on their site I saw they had a link to their affiliate program at the bottom of their page. I thought this would be a great program to promote so I signed up and built a few sites dealing with DVD rental. They were paying $9 with some other tiers for more sales but I was making a few hundred bucks a month and I thought it was all good. Then I got a call from a company (Adteractive was their name) saying they saw my site, saw that I was a Netflix affiliate, and said they could pay me $32 per signup. Let me think… $32 vs $9… No brainer. I started sending them traffic and thus begins my entry into the world of CPA networks. I also started crunching some numbers and saw that every visitor to my site was worth about $1.20 or so. How can I get more traffic to my site so I can make $1.20 a lot more times a day? So I jumped into the world of PPC. I was buying traffic to my site and it was converting so my total profits and revenue went up. AWESOME.
I started looking at the other offers Adteractive had and saw a mortgage offer where you just fill in 5 little drop downs and I get paid $7. So once again I built a few sites, got some natural traffic, and started getting PPC traffic. This page was converting at around 20-30% I think so every visitor to my site was worth over $1.50 to me and I could buy traffic for much less than that. Keep in mind this is back in 2004 (only 5 years but that is an eternity in web time) and there wasn’t much competition for stuff like this. I also started promoting some of the ZIP offer that paid $1.25 or so just for someone to submit a zip code. Other CPA networks were starting up and they started contacting me so I signed up and started promoting more and more offers. For the most part I could take an offer and make some decent money before the competition caught up.
Then in 2005 I saw some offers promoting ringtones so I looked into them. A lot of the payouts were around $3.50 and I was able to squeeze out a few conversions a day and turn a profit. Out of nowhere I saw a ringtone offer that was very similar to the one that was paying $3.50 and they were offering $11 or so. Sounds good to me. I gave it a shot and it actually converted better than the one paying $3.50. At this time I was probably bidding around .20 for my PPC traffic and my EPC was round $1.25 or so. I was only getting about 5-10 conversions a day so I decided to try something. Let me bid $1 and see if I can go for more volume, less profit per conversion, and see what happens. Success!!! For 6 months or so the ringtones cranked away very nicely. My strategy was a bit different than most of the other people promoting ringtones. They were going for more general ringtone traffic, sending them to a page where they picked their carrier, and then on to the merchant. I bid mostly on carrier specific keywords and sent the visitor directly to a page dealing with that carrier. I think my best month with ringtones was around $80,000 in revenue (I think $50,000 in profit). Then for some reason people decided they had a different definition of “free” than I did. So I had to change all my landing pages, my ads, etc. The revenue started sliding downward but it was still OK. One day I try to log into my account at one of the networks I was working with and they said they received a call from the Florida Attorney General and they were told to disable my account. As the regulations in the ringtone industry grew stricter and stricter my revenue dried up more and more so I decided to get out of that rather than fight it.
Not too long after that I got a call from one of my affiliate managers at one of the CPA networks telling me about this new campaign they had for some chinese diet tea with a weird name. I blew it off but then one day on a whim I decided to see what it was all about, set up a PPC campaign, and the sales started coming in for Wu-Yi Tea. For a couple years now that stuff has been selling. I also have done OK with some colon cleanser products, acai berry, and similar offers. But I see an end to these forced continuity programs coming fairly soon. I don’t do any of those fake diet blogs or anything like that. I am sending traffic for these offers direct to the merchants.
So there you have it. Those are few of the more successful projects I have worked on over the years. There are many more small sites and PPC projects I have worked on also that have made some money but these ones I listed are some of the bigger ones. Now, how can I learn from my past successes, learn from them, and move forward with more success?
Anyone else want to share some success stories? Leave a comment.
