Parker7 – I’ve only been doing this affiliate stuff for a few weeks now, so take this advice however you like, but I have done a lot of research and starting to feel comfortable with everything… so here’s my thoughts.
I agree the type of programs you’re refering to are a complete waste of money… maybe not complete, but pretty close to it – possibly the only way that you could get any decent traffic from them would be to create a new landing page for the campaign, that is extremely fast loading and entices them to come in and have a proper look at your site… this effectively reduces it to a banner advertising campaign though and whether it’s cost effective or not, I don’t know (I don’t plan on trying to find out either, much better ways to spend your money)… there are a few other posts on this forum that warns about this type of traffic buying… I think it’s good advice and I can’t see any reason to dispute it.
The best way that I can see of buying quality traffic is PPC search engines… I’m just getting my feet wet with them at the moment, but I’m already getting excellent results, I can see nearly all of my advertising budget going into these month after month. They take a little bit of time to set up properly, but well worth the effort.
The one thing I don’t get, is how some affiliate sites can afford to pay insane amounts per click… just doing a search for ‘online casinos’ on overture, shows many affiliate websites paying around $12 per click, with one guy (and many casinos) paying around $35 per click! How the heck do they make money? their advertising bills must be massive… say the average purchasing player is worth $200 to you – at $12 per click, that would mean you need to produce 1 purchasing player for every 16 visitors to your website – just to break even (not to a casinos website, to yours!)… how can they pay that much? anyone know?
(I have a theory, but I’m still not convinced that it makes sense for them… I’m guessing these affiliates already have a lot of players built up over the years, and they effectively use the revenue generated from them, to offset the advertising costs of bringing in new traffic and hence keeping the cash flow moving. It’s the only thing I can think of, but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense).
Anyway, if you use PPC search engines, it’s very important to know things like conversion rates and customer values in order to make sure you’re not paying too much for each visitor (as in the example above)… this is something that I’m currently watching closely, but I’m being very conservative at the moment, and still seeing good results.
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