Profiting from selling leads gained from a website?

[cluckcluck]

The initial message was deleted from this topic on 04 August 2015 at 10:17

[Hoofy]

Of course they do. The issue is the industry. You could set up a website selling paperclips via Amazon's affiliate programme and make 1p a day. On the other hand, target gamblers and link to William Hill...

[Hoofy]

From my understanding of things, you have two options:
1) Do lots of SEO including black hat stuff that will likely not work in the long term and/or get your site banned but you grab lots of leads and monetise them quickly before creating another site in a shoot-and-move kind of way.
2) Establish a well-used website (like PH) and monetise the site via affiliate links.

[illmonkey]

Hoofy said:

From my understanding of things, you have two options:
1) Do lots of SEO including black hat stuff that will likely not work in the long term and/or get your site banned but you grab lots of leads and monetise them quickly before creating another site in a shoot-and-move kind of way.
2) Establish a well-used website (like PH) and monetise the site via affiliate links.

2. I have a forum that does this, it makes some dosh, but not enough to quit my day job. Maybe with 10 of them I could, but that'd be a full time job anyway!

[Hoofy]

cluckcluck said:

RE 1: that's an option, but is a hard model to sustain as you have to stay on top of the game and re-invent yourself constantly, altho i'm sire once you get in the swing of this practice it's fairly managable. Plus for that kind of game and essentially becoming a spammer of google, id want a decent income of at least 40K/year so i don't know if thats possible?

RE2: exactly this point - does anybody actually make any real money off affiliate rates/leads that they can easily live on without owning an established and large website?

Tip: don't make a website about low cost paperclips.

[illmonkey]

cluckcluck said:

RE 1: that's an option, but is a hard model to sustain as you have to stay on top of the game and re-invent yourself constantly, altho i'm sire once you get in the swing of this practice it's fairly managable. Plus for that kind of game and essentially becoming a spammer of google, id want a decent income of at least 40K/year so i don't know if thats possible?

RE2: exactly this point - does anybody actually make any real money off affiliate rates/leads that they can easily live on without owning an established and large website?

To be blunt, that's a stupid question. How do you expect to make affiliate money without a big site?

You need to work hard to make money usually, not just buy a domain and put adsense on it.

[illmonkey]

cluckcluck said:

it may be, but i am wondering if anyone has / its possible to make money out of leads etc without just happening to have a massive site or by using dirty seo tricks.

i've researched if people can make money from leads buy doing PPC or Facebook ads or by getting people to their site some other way such as viral campaigns.. but a lot of the good stories regarding these methods i don't believe.

It's either a pyramid scheme, or bks. Direct links to affiliates on FB won't last 2 seconds.

Again, how do you make money if you don't have the traffic. I get something like 20p a click. and the CTR is 0.15%. To make £10, you'd need 35k page views.

[Hoofy]

cluckcluck said:

Hoofy said:

Tip: don't make a website about low cost paperclips.

Difference being that that site isn't making money from affiliate marketing but by actually selling stuff.

[jammy_basturd]

KFC does this.

I think the premise is, figure out which market you'll enter. Build a fairly simple, but well written website. You should be able to get away with a one page website with a form for the visitor to fill out. Website requirements will vary depending on market, product, service.

The key is to SEO/PPC better than the next guy.

Have a look at KFC's post history and you should pick up enough advice to get started.

As others have eluded to though, for the biggest revenues you have to be comfortable sending people to pay day loan companies, betting shops, etc.

[Hoofy]

Price - how good is your SEO? how good is your Google AdWords?

[KFC]

illmonkey said:

Again, how do you make money if you don't have the traffic. I get something like 20p a click. and the CTR is 0.15%. To make £10, you'd need 35k page views.

The amount you're going to make per visitor will massively fluctuate depending on what topic you're targeting, and the commercial intent on the keyword.

Extreme examples I know but 'debt consolidation loans' traffic will be worth 1000x the value of 'paperclips' traffic. And if your traffic is from searches like "how can i avoid paying my debt consolidation loans" then its worth very little (you'd need to have them click an adsense ad and make monetizing the visitor someone elses problem). Whereas "apply for a debt consolidation loan online" would be worth a fortune per visitor.

If someone tells you you need eleventy billion visitors a day to make money, just ignore them from now on.

Here is traffic/income from a site I own, all numbers from the month just finished :

traffic:


income:

[illmonkey]

You're the dude in the 'make &1500 a day' ads , aren't you?

[KFC]

illmonkey said:

You're the dude in the 'make &1500 a day' ads , aren't you?

I would avoid all of these lame scams if anyone reading is considering it!

Its absolutely possible to make that sort of money with the right skills, some investment and a large slice of 'right place, right time'.

But nobody actually doing it, is going to sell you the inner workings of it all. It would be madness and commercial suicide. The obvious answer there is they're only selling it because it no longer works (or never worked in the first place).

[allergictocheese]

As has been said, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We work with financial services (not debt or loans), supplying national companies with leads. Their cost per lead varies from less than £100 to several thousand on back-end deals. Our largest client spends 6 figures per month with us. We don't really use affiliates except with some lower value stuff that we can QC before presenting to our clients.

There will be plenty of profitable opportunities for transient, small or one-man-band style operations to attract consumers and sell their details on. Making it into a scalable and sustainable business that works in partnership with its clients rather than merely supplying a commodity is a another thing.

Companies or individuals who are entirely reliant on PPC are, by their nature, limited in potential.

[KFC]

cluckcluck said:

So all thats left is very clever marketing / SEO with little to no budget?

The "no budget" part could certainly be a problem. Its basically impossible to carry out clever / sustainable / profitable seo with a tiny budget, moreso if you're a beginner and have no real clue what you're doing. If you do try and target William Hill / gambling stuff then the likely outcome is almost certainly miserable failure. You'd be competing against professional spammers, criminal hackers and 'white hat' seo's with absolutely massive budgets. You don't have a snowballs chance in hell.

cluckcluck said:

Sounds fair enough, targeting high value payouts. i guess the ideal would be high demand product/service and high affiliate payouts.

Yes the ideal would definitely be a niche with a massive number of people searching for it, and a large payout per affiliate deal done. But with no knowledge and no budget, its near certain that these are going to be out of your reach for the time being. Its very important to target things that you can successfully rank for in Google with your skillset/wallet. If you try and go for "payday loans" and end up ranking on page 8, its a failure and will make no money. 95%+ will not visit page 2... if you're not page 1 you don't exist. Realistically you need to choose a topic where you can compete, rank and make £30 a day, then reinvest that in a new one to make £50 a day... etc etc. It will let you learn as you go and you hopefully won't end up out of your depth skill or budget wise. If you set out going for a £500+ a day one then I'd say you'd be better off spending your budget on lottery tickets instead.

illmonkey said:

2. I have a forum that does this, it makes some dosh, but not enough to quit my day job. Maybe with 10 of them I could, but that'd be a full time job anyway!

Forums are notoriously bad for monetising. You're getting the same people using your site over and over and over and they just become blind to the adverts you're trying to get them to click on.

cluckcluck said:

Plus for that kind of game and essentially becoming a spammer of google, id want a decent income of at least 40K/year so i don't know if thats possible?

£40k a year is buttons, absolutely possible with the right work ethic, skills and working budget.

cluckcluck said:

i've researched if people can make money from leads buy doing PPC or Facebook ads or by getting people to their site some other way such as viral campaigns.. but a lot of the good stories regarding these methods i don't believe.

A lot of these good stories are just from some get rich quick scammer wanting to sell you his method. Avoid like the plague... common sense should dictate that if you have a way to make £1000+ a day then you're not going to share how it works with others. Bear in mind if tactics get widely known, scaled up and generally abused, google will stop them from working any more. So the only people selling you this st, will sell you things that no longer work any more (or never worked in the first place).

jammy_basturd said:

You should be able to get away with a one page website with a form for the visitor to fill out.

This is almost certainly going to be a bad idea. I bet you can't find any genuine online businesses that only have 1 page, so why make your affiliate site like this and have it stand out for negative reasons? I'm not saying you need dozens or even hundreds of pages, but there won't be many real businesses with less than say 10 so try and fill your affiliate site out a bit. Content is relatively cheap (either outsource the writing, or time to do it yourself) so don't cut corners here and do this properly.

[quote=cluckcluck
I'm thinking i should seek out and contact companies directly that way avoiding the mass entry routes for every other affilate offer. if they have a structure for this great, if not perhaps i offer them n amount of leads based on their critea for free, then charge once their satisfied?

This will not work. As it stands right now, you're a guy who's heard about affiliate marketing but doesn't really understand it. You can't contact companies who don't have affiliate programs and try and convince them to create one just for you. You're not going to send them any sales for months and they're going to give up long before you manage to get things going.

Really you need to just sign up with already in place affiliate programs, as there is no time/cash cost for them to let you on the program. So you can learn at your own pace, and send them £100 of sales for £5-20 of commission monthly if thats all you could manage.

[topgunkos]

KFC, you seem to have a lot of experience in this sector. What in your experience are the most profitable lead tracking sectors?

Payday loans, insurance, debt management, mortgages?

You mentioned that it is better to start off with the 30 quid a day niche first, are you able to say what sector that is?

[KFC]

topgunkos said:

KFC, you seem to have a lot of experience in this sector. What in your experience are the most profitable lead tracking sectors?

Payday loans, insurance, debt management, mortgages?

Yes, all of those and similar type of niches are big money ones. But generally the difficulty goes up alongside the money involved.... you need to find one at a level you can compete in.

topgunkos said:

You mentioned that it is better to start off with the 30 quid a day niche first, are you able to say what sector that is?

You could make £30 a day in basically any niche. Selling music downloads, pet food, hair extensions, etc etc. There must be 10's of thousands of them.

[twoblacklines]

illmonkey said:

It's either a pyramid scheme, or bks. Direct links to affiliates on FB won't last 2 seconds.

Again, how do you make money if you don't have the traffic. I get something like 20p a click. and the CTR is 0.15%. To make £10, you'd need 35k page views.

The only bks is your misinformed sentence. You can even cloak FB traffic if someone wanted to promote say, nutri on FB.

[twoblacklines]

topgunkos said:

KFC, you seem to have a lot of experience in this sector. What in your experience are the most profitable lead tracking sectors?

Payday loans, insurance, debt management, mortgages?

You mentioned that it is better to start off with the 30 quid a day niche first, are you able to say what sector that is?

Something like "desktop sized mouse mats" is a £<100/day idea. Niched enough for low comp, but enough buyers. So you make a wordpress review site based around the best xxl sized mouse mats, you write or have written good 1000 word+ articles, using on site SEO to rank for that keyword. Then you throw in some aff links to your content (I don't do this, Google no likey) or (better) you get people to join your email list and there you give them something big like a book you wrote on it, along with offers.

Will take a lot of work but that will make you around £100 a day or so eventually.

Then you do another.