[dexepher]

(I know, those a buzz words in the title but they really do describe my current projects

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the board but have been in the online marketing space for over ten years. I got my start with Mosaic on Windows 3.1 During the day I work for a large online advertising agency working with the largest brands in the world.

Outside of my day job, I also run a popular green home building blog and up to this point have only ran adsense on it. I have been running this blog for almost five years now.

I have always had a real passion/interest in affiliate marketing and my interest increased when I attended the past couple of SES conferences and met some great people in the industry.

I joined the board today to finally dive into affiliate marketing and become serious about it.

For the past 10 days or so, I have began to further develop (and extend) a piece of software that was recently released by another advertising agency (not the one that I work with). It's open source software with a very open license. The software is a web2.0 - aggregation engine. The site works in conjunction with a number of robots that are programmed to seek out keywords in multiple sources (such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Blogs, Youtube, etc). It then combines them into one single page and presents it to the viewer as an auto-updating stream of information, specially focused on one topic/niche.

I have been able to use my SEO experience to kick 3 sites off and generate a bit of traffic. Without revealing URL's or niches here is a breakdown of how it's gone so far:

Site 1
------
Online for 4 Days
21,123 Hits
3,643 Pages
Avg: 910 Pages/Day
3 Affiliates / No conversions

Site 2
------
Online for 6 days
9,290 Hits
2,087 Pages
Avg: 347 Pages/Day
2 Affiliates / No conversions

Site 3
------
Online for 7 Days
19,299 Hits
9,998 Pages
Avg: 142 Pages / Day
Adsense only / low conversion

I'm trying to absorb and learn as much as possible about the Affiliate industry as fast as I can. My goal is to meet people and discuss what makes this industry great / not great. I'm so new to this that I also worry that I have started off with perhaps the wrong affiliates and so have started a spreadsheet of as many as I can find per niche. I hope to make an informed decision (with the advice of people I meet here of course on all future affiliate interactions.

Thanks everyone and as I said I really am going to try and make an effort to participate as much as possible on this board and meet as many people as possible.

--Ryan

[meadowmufn]

Automation is a wonderful thing and can really lessen your workload, but you do need to inject some good, original content on your sites. It was a little unclear if you're doing that or if it's totally automated.

My questions about your methods are:

- Is the page readable? (i.e. Is it presented in an aesthetically pleasing and easy to read manner or is it just a big busy and confusing page of disjointed keywords and phrases and other social commentary?)

- Is the content the page is presenting relevant to what you want your customer to do? Is this content attracting those just looking for info or those looking to buy?

Sounds like from your conversion rate that it's not attracting people in the mood to buy. If you're pulling from social networking sites, the content is more likely small snippets of mentions of various products or services within the niche and most likely will not do the job of warming up the customer to the thought of buying whatever product/service you're selling. A full review or short quotes from customers who've tried the product/service would convert better.

An interesting idea would be to use the aggregator to pinpoint actual users of products/services of which you could request a short testimonial to add to your pages. That would go a lot farther in pre-selling your customer.

Those are just a few thoughts I had. I'm sure I'll have more, but I hope those were helpful.

[dexepher]

Thanks for the reply and nice to meet you! That's some great insight and gives me some things to talk about.

One of the sites is directly tied to my blog, with lots of targeted content and a pretty good returning visitor rate. You are correct that the other two sites are pretty automated but are highly targeted to there specific niches.

I'm going to add some manual, targeted content to the other two and see if that turns people into more of a buying mood. I think you said it right, the rate of pages and no conversions is telling that something is not clicking with the viewers

Thanks again

--ryanj