Any Advice would be GREAT! Thanks

[LiveFast]

Hello my name is Anthony and I am entirely new to the affiliate world.

I am reading as much as I can on the topic and trying to get as much advice from you guys as possible.

My website is done, and my product is an energy supplement (I created it, its a legit one!!) and I am still in college. I would like to get this affiliate thing together before I graduate!

I have set it up with 1shoppingcart as a two tiered program, is this a good idea?

Also, where/how do I go about finding quality affiliates that would be interested in my product?

May I post my website here for you guys to give some constructive criticism?(I do not want to break and rules so I thought I would ask first)

Again, I am entirely new to this world so any and all advice/mentoring/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Anthony
LiveFast

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Anthony,

Welcome and thanks for joining us.

Before I start answering all your questions, can you tell me how many visitors a month you are getting and what your current conversions rates are? That will help me know the best way to help you and how to answer your questions.

As far as listing your site, that's not allowed in any of the main discussion areas. However after you have 10 posts and before you have officially launched your affiliate program you can post your site and ask for a review in the site review forum. That would need to be a review of your site itself and no talk about your affiliate program in that post as you would not have launched the affiliate program yet.

 

[LiveFast]

Thank you Linda, My site is brand new and I'm not too sure as to what my conversion rate would be. And I am not currently buying any advertising that would drive traffic to my site.

I do have everything set up though, and the website and affiliate program are operational.

So what would you recommend the next step being?

Thank you.

Anthony

 

[Linda Buquet]

That's what I thought Anthony, just wanted to doublecheck before I went off half cocked in the wrong direction.

The truth is you should not even be putting energy into starting an affiliate program yet, other than just starting to learn the basics.

If you don't have traffic yet and don't know what conversions are then you'd be doing affiliates AND YOURSELF a really big disservice to start an affiliate program before you start doing your own marketing, testing and conversions 1st. Read below and it will make more sense.

http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...t-affiliate-program-til-you-do.html#post35441

 

[mla16]

thats exactly what I was thinking when I read the post first..... learn to walk before you run my friend, get some good visitors to your website first and get your product known, only then should you be thinking about getting affiliates to sell for you

 

[LiveFast]

Uggh, not what I wanted to hear!! ha ha! but good advice. I will need to do that. I have been reading up on affiliate marketing and I kinda thought I was going to have to do this but I was hoping to get around it. I was doing ppc to the site but having a very difficult time with it. I would have to bid very high amounts for my keywords and my quality scores were very low and my ads would rarely show. I have read adwords books and played around with it for a long time and cannot seem to get it to run effectively, not to mention i'm a college student with a college students budget.

Are there any other strategies to come up with a conversion rate? I mean, I've sold some product on the site, so I technically have a rate, but its probably not accurate because it was not calculated with high amounts of traffic.

Oh yeah, and is there somewhere where I can post my site to be critiqued by others?(I wouldn't talk about the affiliate program or try to recruit)

Thank you guys very much

Anthony

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yes after you have 10 posts you can post in in the site review forum as long as you don't mention the affiliate program. Merchants aren't supposed to post in site review but if it's really for a site review and not a way to recruit I'll let it slide.