Our monetization for WHO is going to be plain vanilla affiliate commissions. Why? No customer service. No overhead. We’re the invisible middle man and we love it that way.
It’s not like we’re the only affiliates in this industry. We’re going to need to bring something new to the table. We will. It’s going to be high-quality, never-done-before, link-attracting content. The same old rule applies: Give visitors value and they will love you for it. I’m talking about the kind of content where one article takes 12 hours to research, write, and pull together.
The big question isn’t whether we can deliver great content–we know we can. The real question was the traffic. So we dug in to Google’s keyword tool and found a breakdown of traffic based on first-page rankings.
The competition is fierce, so we’re looking at our worst-case scenario: ranked 9th.
At the 9th ranking we’d be bringing in 1.45% of searchers for our most competitive phrase. What is that in absolute numbers? 26,000 visitors per month (I rounded down slightly). This includes no long tail and no other competitive phrases at all. Yes, that’s completely unrealisitic ,but this gives us a conservative number from which to base our decisions. We obviously hope for more upside, but would be happy with even our lowest estimate working out. This tells us we can proceed.
We know we can convert between 1-2% of visitors into an affiliate commission, and we know that affiliate commissions in this industry run between $100-$125. So we’re looking at these ranges:
$100 > $26,100 – $52,200
$125 > $32,625 – $65,250
So, we can base our income estimate on one key phrase, converting at an abysmal one percent, at the lowest affiliate commission available making us $26,100. If we were to actual hit our ranking target here, the real income will be triple that.
That’s quick and dirty, but that’s all that’s necessary.
Adam can write about all of the prospecting he did. He found two potential candidates. It’s too soon to tell, but I think we’re going to get one to bite on an offer. If not…we may need to keep prospecting.
5 comments On Monetization Strategy. Is the Traffic There?
I’m still watching! On the train soon. ;)
I’m new to the affiliate marketing area, and I’m learning a lot from your site. It seems like there are two parts to projecting revenue. The first is the click rate onto the sales page which I’m guessing might be 1-2% of total site visitors, as you say. The second is the conversion rate of people landing on the sales page, which I suppose would be 1-2% as well. So shouldn’t you be taking just 1-2% of 1-2% for your rev projections? In other words, aren’t your projections an order of magnitude higher than they should be? Or am I making some incorrect assumptions?
Hi James,
You’re referencing clickthroughs, but I based my analysis on visitors that would hit the site. The clickthrough is already factored in to the number of visitors to the site.
You know the beautiful thing about going after a $60,000/month niche? If you don’t hit your goal, you still have a nice $10,000 per month site :)
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
Quoted: Brian Littrell
Awesome goal! Still doing this project?