Making a living by guiding web visitors

Charles and his colleague have worked up an affiliate site in the personal finance segment, which today generates a nice, solid income to them and a couple of associates.

"As a new affiliate, you can look forward to a very stimulating job. You'll always have a huge amount of ideas that you think would increase the traffic or the conversion or both..."

How did you get started?

We looked at the task in a completely unprejudiced way - "where is there a lot of money to be made?" We started by analyzing existing markets, searching for segments with high liquidity and good outlets for leads. We also looked closely at the competition in different segments.

Often, as a starting affiliate, you already have some ideas for suitable niches, such as a personal interest or an area where you have some kind of prior knowledge. This is a good start, and then you'll just have to find effective ways to capitalize on your interest.

Many affiliates try to find a niche where the competition isn't too hard, which is usually smart thinking. But we chose instead to go for a segment with a really big turnover and said that "we'll simply have to beat the competition." Which I think we are doing well.

What factors did you look at?

Well, there are several important levers to pull at in this business. Basically, the affiliate process looks like this:

Fig. 1 - How you convert web visitors to dollars

Your resulting income during a certain time period is the product of these three factors. To increase your income, then, all three areas are eligible for improvements.

However, it's essential to go at the right one first. Say for example that you could make an effort and increase conversion with 30%. To negotiate the same increase in the payment step would probably be very hard, so you can exclude that option. On the other hand, if your present traffic is low, maybe you could double it by the same effort. Then this would naturally be the most effective improvement at this stage.

Which steps did you focus on?

Our entrance point to this business flow has been to attract "organic traffic". That is, we tried to promote our site into the search results at Google and other search engines. This means putting a lot of effort into the first step, building a very strong site that can attract a lot of web visitors. Of course, we also wanted a high level of conversion of the incoming visitors.

What are your experiences as an affiliate?

Well, of course it's been extremely satisfying to see our site grow and become a serious business. Being an affiliate means a flexible life with a high degree of independence.

What you should know though, is that this is a very young industry. You'll often be making business with people you've never met, and you might be in for some bad surprises when it comes to keeping agreements and delivering payments.

As a new affiliate, you can look forward to a very stimulating job. You'll always have a huge amount of ideas that you think would increase the traffic or the conversion or both. If you could just find the time to implement them all.

This is what makes the affiliate business so much fun. Plus that it can be very lucrative, obviously!