Have you ever tried using a pay per click search engine to promote an affiliate program? I’ve tried it before. Long story short, it has never worked out in the end. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I simply don’t recommend it for several reasons. Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you find an affiliate product on ClickBank to promote. The amount you get after a 75% commission is $30. You’ve now set up your pay per click campaign, so you drive 1000 visitors to your website for a reasonable .50 cents per click. You’ve now spent $500. You made 10 sales. Congrats! That gives your page+the owners product page a 1% conversion ratio. But it doesn’t seem all that great once you calculate your profit. You’ve just lost $200.03. Not only that, the other $299.97 will arrive as a check hopefully after a month, if you’re lucky.
On the other hand, if you were promoting your own product, you have the ability to adjust some of those numbers. Let’s say you were promoting the same product, but you owned it. You now have the ability to modify the sales page. That means you have control over its conversion rate. You can install multivariate testing software on your website and test a number of variable versions. You can also adjust the price of your product.
Lets look at those numbers again. Since your testing experiment is new, lets just pretend that you actually added more profitable variable versions and now your page converts at a 1.5% conversion ratio. At this point, if your product was only $30, you would still be losing $50.05 using the same numbers. But since this is now your product, you’re making $65 dollars per sale. Suddenly, you’ve now made 15 sales, and your profit is now over $165.
Now, since you are testing your sales page and know it converts well enough to make money, you can increase the amount of traffic to your sales page. If all the other numbers stayed the same and you sent 10,000 visitors to your sales page, your profit would be over $1,600. And if you increased your conversion to 2%, you’re almost at the $4,000 mark. And of course, if you optimized your campaign, you could eliminate unprofitable keywords and ads and increase those numbers even more. There are a number of ways to make your own product. There are also a number of other products that other owners don’t want to promote, or don’t know how to promote. Know you numbers, and keep testing.