Gadooney.com

(Sorry for the relative lack of posts this week but things have been pretty crazy hectic.)

I’ve talked a good bit about imagining your audience while building sites, as far as taking advantage of all the myriad ways that you can crack the affiliate marketing nut and make some money. The sky really is the limit, as far as the actual form and tone your site takes.

If you strip away all of the confusing crap, affiiliate marketing is simple: people have questions and you answer them. There’s a gap in their knowledge and you fill it. If you can do that consistently, you’ll make a lot of money.

One of the biggest obstacles to people starting out in the affiliate world is the proclivity to fiddle. They want their site to look perfect and to have all sorts of cool bells and whistles, so they constantly adjust the layout, the font, the colors, add forums, chat rooms, you name it. They fiddle and fiddle and fiddle. Then they fiddle some more.

I’m not going to ban you from fiddling, but I think much of that springs from a source that’s not readily apparent, and a misconception that many people have about the nature of affiliate marketing. Quiz time.

What’s better, an audience of one or an audience of millions, as far as traffic to your site?

The obvious answer is an audience of millions, and while I’m not going to try to argue that it’s the wrong answer, I will argue that it’s actually not as clear-cut an answer as it might seem at first glance.
Many people start out with the preconceived notion that successful affiliates have sites with huge traffic, and that the way to make money is to build a sticky, awesome site that will attract visitors like fat kids on cake. And sure, affiliates with sticky, awesome sites with heavy traffic do often make tons of money, but it’s probably the exception to the rule, as far as what’s the bread-and-butter for most affiliates.

You don’t need to build a community of returning, happy surfers to your site to make money as an affiliate. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your success or failure as an affiliate depends on whether you build attractive sites that are useful to surfers, and wow them to the point that they’ll bookmark it and return frequently, because of its awesomeness and utility.

If you have a site like that (or can quickly build one), congratulations, you kick much ass. Just keep in mind that there are many, many ways to make money from a site, and that the site you build should depend on your personal skills, and not so much on achieving the ideal site mentioned above.

Some affiliates specialize in banging out five or six page sites, focused on incredibly narrow micro-niches and built around Adsense or other PPC ads, which might never get a return visitor in the entire lifespan of the site. Yet these can be very profitable sites, if you choose your micro-niche well, and you can make many grandusands of American dollars if you build a ton of similar sites.

Their audience is effectively one, as the goal is to pick up clicks on the ads surfer by surfer, as they find pages of the site in search engines, click through to the site, and hopefully click on an ad, never to return. They not only don’t build up a community of users over time, but sites like that are in essence anti-community, from their very conception. Hit it and quit it, from the perspective of both the affiliate who designs the site and the surfer who finds it through search engines.

Does that mean you should avoid building affiliate sites that might draw a crowd? Of course not. Both approaches work, and all I’m really after is trying to deconstruct the idea that many people bring to the process of building sites, which is that in order to succeed, they must concoct and build a site that people will love, bookmark, link to, and recommend to all their friends.

Sites like that are great but they’re hard to build, for all the obvious reasons. One of the reasons that I recommend you try all sorts of things when starting out (as opposed to focusing all your efforts on one project) is that it lets you do exactly that, try different things. Maybe you find out that you have no desire to bang out mini-sites that add little value to the Web as a whole, and that what really gets you going is building a community site about quilting, where people can get together and talk hoops, share patterns, chat in a chat room, etc. Maybe you find out that you’re better at building blog-style sites on topics near and dear to your heart. Maybe you enjoy banging out 182 five page sites a week, taking the volume approach.

All of those can be profitable and you never know what works for you until you try. Too many people approach the affiliate world in too rigid a fashion, on both sides of the equations. People looking to make money as an affiliate often want a checklist of things to do to make cash, to simply be told how to mint money, in ABC fashion. Too many affiliates who dispense advice on the Internet tubes get locked into the mindset of what has personally worked for them, without recognizing the fact that everyone is different and brings different skills to the table.

Try it and see what happens.