Gimme a Big Wet Sloppy Kiss, Failure
posted in Adwords, Getting Started |It’s pretty easy to chalk up any self-helpy lingo about “embracing failure” to out and out loser talk, but it’s pretty hard to succeed in affiliate marketing (or life, for that matter) without falling on your ass from time to time.
If you subscribe to the notion that experimenting with different types of affiliate content, models, and sites is a good thing, it’s inevitable that some don’t pan out. You wouldn’t know that from perusing most of the affiliate guru sites out there, where people effortlessly crank out sites that make $192,026 within the first sixty days, but the reality is that for every successful profitable site you spawn into the world, most affiliate folks in the trenches have five or six stinking corpses of sites, which actually cost them money.
I’ve been dabbling in the semi-sordid waters of eBook promotion (cough, outright shilling, cough), and had pretty surprising success so far. I wasn’t entirely convinced that people would really fork out cash for eBooks, especially some of the more outlandish, over the top titles out there, promising all sorts of things, but lo and behold, people do seem to actually buy them.
What with my tinkering with Adwords of late, I thought I’d take the eBook promotion to the next logical step, and buy targeted, related keywords. Based on the conversion rate so far from the natural organic search traffic I was getting, it looked like I could make a little extra money from buying clicks through Adwords.
$100 worth of Adwords traffic later and I had exactly 0 eBook sales to show for it. Umm, yeah, nice work. Go, me.
There are lots of moving parts to the above equation, so there’s really no conclusion to be drawn as far as the ultimate potential for sending Adwords clicks though landing pages for eBooks that you’ve created, but for the time being I’m sticking to what’s worked, which is simply going after search traffic the old-fashioned way, with no purchasing of keywords.
Simply put, you don’t know until you try. And the fact that you’ll have four or five failures for every success isn’t a reason not to try. If anything, it’s the best reason to try, as you’ll likely never get very far in the affiliate world if you stay in your comfort zone, exactly copying other approaches that you’ve read or heard about.