Its a tried and tested rule that Adult traffic is hard to convert. Its true, thats not the issue but many people will try and tell you they are getting earnings from stats that you know cant be true.

So to debunk some of the BS you hear from these people I thought I would run through some real stats for you.

First off a disclaimer:

1. I don’t do Adult as a rule but I have some traffic that seems appropriate so thats where I sell it to.

2. This is traffic that is harder even than normal to convert but the main points still apply.

Here is the expected stats for the Adult site I am sending to (I have blurred the actual sites)

Now you may be shouting at the monitor (Why by the way, I cant hear you) that I should be using the top site as it has the best conversion rate. I feel that the site I am sending to will beat that for the traffic I am sending.

These figures mean that they are getting 1 signup per 756 clicks

Imagine if you had to reach that level on all your affiliate stuff, we would all be begging for scraps on the street by now!

Now I also have the problem of not being able to send the traffic straight there as I have to pre-qualify the visitor slightly.

The visitor to my site has to arrive, click any link (they all go the same place) and then when on the Adult site sign up for me to get paid.

This is how the maths work out for me here: -

I get a 37% click through on my site
I need 756 of THOSE PEOPLE WHO CLICK THROUGH to make a sale

So I get 1 sale for every 2041 visitors to my site!

If I get say $30 for each signup (I do a bit better than that as I get a percentage of recurring bills too)

If I was a BS merchant I could pretend that I was earning $4500 a day from the traffic I have but in reality I am getting far less.

I am not complaining here and this site has enough traffic to make it well worth my while keeping it around but I do like to inject a little reality into things every so often.

Remember the rule, work out your numbers based on the full path of the visitor. Dont just multiply your raw traffic by some industry average and think your the big man.

Li pointed me towards a great new service from Pierre which helps solve what should be (But never is) a simple problem.

Cligs

When you want to drop in an affiliate link somewhere out on the web often you will find that many of the people who are exposed to that link are from a location that the merchant doesnt want traffic from.

You know the kind of thing, you are promoting a UK offer yet if you drop the link in facebook you find a large percentage of the people who click it are US based and so the network tells them they dont qualify for that offer and sends them somewhere pointless instead.

Cligs helps solve that problem by allowing you to still have an innocent shortened URL whilst allowing you to send the traffic to different places depending on where they are located.

So UK people get the UK offer and US people get something equally tasty.

Simple ideas are often the most useful

I have been playing with a few new networks and some new places to promote affiliate offers of late and something has become painfully clear.

To rely on the stats given by the network is the same as dangling your cash in a shredder and flicking the on / off switch.

Typically the logic goes something like, lets have a look at the EPC for this offer and to start default bids on traffic at about a qtr of that until we get enough data to refine that.

This is the result from a new network I am trying (Not naming which one)

Quality I am sure you will agree. In my defense I was on holiday and didnt stop the test when I should have but it was a brief test at low value.

So in future I am going to use the following method for setting my default bids. (New network only)

Work out what a 2% ctr would provide me and set my bids appropriately. So if I know that the offer I want to test is going to give me $10 per conversion on avg then I will need 500 clicks to get that and 500 clicks cant cost me more than 2cents each, run away run away….

I would therefore conclude that its best not to PPC test this offer but to throw some cheap organic seo traffic at the offer to see what their data integrity looks like instead.

Anything else is burning cash until you know the network better or you get data to support theirs.

I did a little bit of work on my Affiliate tips forum Affearners today to give the theme a bit of work.

I dont know if your like me but I am starting to think that most of the forums I go to all look a little confusing and loud. I have toyed with the idea of taking the whole thing over to a forum like Beast but I am not happy that its good enough from a features perspective yet.

So in the meantime I have stripped out most of the colour and made the whole thing look more minamalist. Let me know what you think.

Next on the agenda we will be adding a way to see the ‘Best of Affearners’ and ill post the code I wrote for that. Then soon after we will be adding some conditional stuff to try to increase signups from guest users.

I have had a few problems with people dropping links in their posts or signatures over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners so I decided to check a few of them out.

One really nasty one went to the sort of porn that nobody should be interested in and we also had one that went to a site that tried to install some malware on my computer. So enough is enough, had a chat to a few people to run some ideas around (Thanks to JasonD and Perk in particular) and came up with the following plan: -

All links going off site would be intercepted and run through a jumper page to check the link out first.
Any links that were tagged as approved would then pass on and work as normal.
Any links that hadnt been approved would simply be displayed on a page for people who really wanted to go to them to copy and paste into their browser and leave.

So how to do all this on SMF?

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