IISFS Experiment Part 6: It’s A Negative

Well I tested the affiliate program I’d planned to promote, had 200 clicks and no sales – boohoo!

Incredibly, I was denied from another three affiliate programs for various reasons, so the original inventory of products I’d planned to promote are basically all canceled out!

I guess you’d say that site was a failure – welcome to the world that the guru’s don’t like to tell you about

Perhaps the most important takeaway here for you is a reader is to realize that that you learn more when you fail than when you succeed. So let’s look at what’s been learned here:

1. I think the biggest mistake was the mistake of choosing a product that has to be touched before it can be bought – info products are great to promote for this reason. If someone knows what they’re going to learn in the book, they don’t care if they can’t touch it before they buy it. Not all products are like that. Other products like the one I chose aren’t the same.

2. The second mistake (it’s one of the ones I recommended you NOT to do) was to order the articles before my affiliate program approvals came through – I can still utilize the content (we’ll get to that soon) but that’s not the smartest thing to do, particularly if you’re strapped for cash.

3. The final mistake I made kind of ties in with the first, and that was that I DID choose a high selling product – but I didn’t choose one that I knew was selling high ONLINE. I had a suspicion that it might, but rushing into it, I overlooked that.

There’s some important lessons there.

Since we’re here, let’s also look at the good things that came out of this:

1. Most importantly I SAW first hand, that the affiliate program wasn’t going to convert. Yeah I spent about $75 to learn that, but I tried and failed as quickly as I could. I didn’t waste three months trying to get search engine traffic only to find that it wouldn’t sell. The TURNOVER rate of your failures is an important factor to your success.

2.  I learnt the important lessons above which improves my own niche marketing in the future.

3. I can still do things to make this site profitable

What I thought I’d share next is some things you CAN do with a niche site that you’re left with, that didn’t turn out quite as you’d hoped.

Here’s what I’ll be doing.

First, I’ll flick over to Adsense as my monetization model.  The affiliate programs aren’t going to convert so hunting for clicks is the next best option.

I’ll get Adsense in some prominent positions, in each post content, in the header, and sidebar and I’ll let it run.

I’ll take the articles I had written, and post them as I had been doing, with 1 every three days until they run out.

Importantly, I’ll use a plugin like related posts, and I’ll make sure in every post, I reference at least one other post with a link to it’s url on my site – to get my deep linking happening.

I’ll spare a few articles for submission to ezinearticles.com, just to get a bit of extra spider activity happening too.

I won’t be expecting a tonne of traffic from this, but perhaps a few rankings for some of those uncompetitive keywords, just from my on page optimization, my posting and pinging, and deep linking (with the keyword as anchor text by the way).

Other than that I’ll leave the site running. 30 articles 1 every three days will make it flow for three months.

After perhaps two months I’ll check on the traffic. If there’s any pages that are getting decent traffic I’ll look at the monetization again to see if anything more could be done with it.

After that I have many options.

1. If the Adsense is ticking over I’ll just leave it. Even if it’s a $1 a day, it’ll pay for my months worth of Red Bull Even if that means it takes a year to pay back the money I spent on it.

2. I might also consider selling the site for cash. I might have picked up some links and some PR by then – I might have a decent base of 100 visitors a day, I might be making $1 a day from Adsense.  Plus I’ll have 30 pages of unique content. All factors which could influence the value of the site for a sale. I don’t see why the site couldn’t be worth a few hundred bucks by that time. If not I’ll wait a bit longer until my SE rankings are a bit more aged – more value again.

3. If the site is really sucking beyond belief, I could take the article content and sell it as PLR content in the Warrior Forum – I could probably recoup the few hundred dollars and then some by doing that – However I’m expecting that it won’t get to that point.

I did mention the nugget about failing faster as the most important takeaway from this experiment but I changed my mind: HERE’S the most important takeaway.

The most important thing to note here, is what I’ll do AFTER I fail (if you want to call it a failure).

The answer is I’m straight into my next niche and my next site! No pissing around, crying that it didn’t work, spending years analyzing my mistakes, wondering if the method is the right one…

Just straight into my next site, fixing the things I did wrong last time…

And I’ll be telling you about that very shortly