The 80/20 Rule
The Pareto principle doesn’t have a lot to do on the surface with affiliate marketing, but there is a pretty close parallel, as far as the majority of your income usually arising from a relatively small number of your sites.
Don’t get locked into thinking that all of your money will come from one big, great idea, and that your success or failing rides on this project, or that project. Yes, indeed, most of your income will come from a handful of sites, but it’s impossible to ever have a handful if you don’t try a lot of different things.
One reason I recommend throwing a lot of affiliate sites onto the wall and seeing what sticks is that even with lots of research you can’t always predict what sites will be profitable, and to what degree. Some projects just never really go anywhere, despite your efforts, while other forgotten ones suddenly wake up and start ranking well for search terms that actually turn out to be quite lucrative.
So trying lots of stuff is good, as is being flexible with the sites, once they’re rolling.
Many affiliates make the mistake of trying to steer their sites too directly, stubbornly sticking to their pre-conceived notion of what the site should be. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “By gum, this is going to be a site targeting sports and nothing but sports” but if the traffic that’s coming in is all sex-related and searches on female athletes, well, maybe you need to refine your pitch a bit and stop running banners for StubHub or other ticket-buying sites.
One of my more successful affiliate endeavors started out as a site that was geared towards people looking for insurance in assorted cities, with pages created to target specific searches such as “Austin life insurance”. So I built some pages for all sorts of insurance products, tied them to specific cities such as Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio, and completely forgot about the site.
A few months later I noticed I was getting a ton of traffic to some pages, and it was all from people searching on things like “Austin Mazda” or “Dallas Kia”. I went back and poked around on the site and discovered that for the car insurance pages I’d actually created a few test pages to see if I could get any traffic from people looking for car quotes, too, and those pages were at the very top of their respective search results. I went back, rejiggered the ads on the site to feature the free online car quotes that you can get by email, from the comfort of your home (which paid me $1-$3 per lead). I ditched the original idea and ran with what was working, building pages for cities across the US that were geared towards encouraging people to get free online car quotes first before visiting dealerships, and ended up making a ton of money.
Could I have kept trying to crack the competitive insurance niche? Sure, but it’s a lot easier to swim downstream, and my ultimate goal is to make money, not prove that I can out-think the competition and make anything that I set my mind to work. If you’re a generalist and try many different things, you’re going to fail. A lot. So what? Keep working hard, stay smart, and the ones that you knock out of the park will more than make up for all the misses.
One cool thing about pushing content out into the Internet tubes is that it’s actually a fluid, dynamic world. It pushes back. You can either be stubborn and let it slap you in the face or slide down seductively to your crotch and slip a dollar in your g-string.
The 80/20 Rule and related information can be found in Getting Started