A friend of mine has been making some progress in his quest to generate meaningful affiliate income. Me? None whatsoever. I just checked my stats at Clickbank to see what had been going on. In the last 30 days, I generated over 100 clicks or more but not a single sale. And that’s been like that for several months!

This closely corresponds with my failure to generate sales in most affiliate programs. The only exception to that has been the Amazon Affiliate program where I achieved respectable revenues and CTR rates. Without exception, the other products I have promoted have singularly failed.

And I have tried a lot of programs: including hosting, advertising programs, services, products, booklets, software and more… Generally, it’s a big fat zero. So I’m clearly doing something wrong.

Affiliate marketing efforts do generate success. I can see the clicks coming through for my efforts, but they do NOT translate into sales of any kind. Which means either my customers are not purchasing or they are not well suited? I think it’s the latter.

Steve from Agentschat has been sharing his pearls of wisdom on AM, and I’m beginning to understand how things work. It’s really quite obvious when you think about: step 1. find a suitable product; step 2. find a suitable market; and step 3. bring them together!

So I’ve done quite a bit of reading, have several domains that aren’t doing much business and would be WELL suited to re-targeting. I’ve also been exploring how article marketing works well even for low-traffic sites.

So right now I have two aims: 1. market our school site using ezine articles and try to gauge the traffic it generates; 2. turn one site into a type of review site for ESL related products – something I know about and can write well about.

Let’s see what we can pull off. There is one significant point of departure: I will be using WordPress for my affiliate sites since it’s quick, easy and powerful. I will need to choose some affiliate-friendly theme, and tweak the install properly. I remain convinced it’s a very viable alternative to handcoding sites, though the resulting hit on CPU dents its efficiency.