Why Thinking Big Brought This Little Affiliate His First Ever Affiliate Incentive Prize
Super affiliates can look away now. Nothing to see here for you guys and gals. What you can do in a morning took me a month to achieve, but I want to share this with those new to affiliate marketing just to show that the little people can win incentives too!
And the good news is that it doesn’t involve spending thousands on a domain name either. This little success story was built on a domain name that was available to register just a couple of months ago.
It all started with an article on the Existem-AM website entitled Why Beanbags Make Excellent Christmas Presents. I came across it on the 9th of November and sent this message to Mark Russell who posted the article to the Affilates4U forum:
“Inspired by your post and my love of beanbags, I registered bigbeanbags.co.uk – look out for a micro-site going live this week!”
Well in my excitement I actually typed “lok out for a micro-site going live this week!”, but hopefully Mark got the idea.
The fact is I do love beanbags. I own two giant beanbags, I sit in one every night to watch TV, and even organised a van to cross three Spanish provinces for a secret rendevous at a motorway toll booth so that I could refill them earlier this year. And on the 9th of November I duly registered bigbeanbags.co.uk.
Beanbags come in all shapes and sizes, but to me big is best. And as with most of my sites, I like to have an angle. Niche is where it is at. Mine would be a website dedicated to just big beanbags. I was assuming there would be others out there who shared my love of big and who would use the search engines to search for and then buy “big beanbags” (and “big bean bags”) so I built the site around that premise.
I signed up to Beanbagbazaar’s affiliate program over at Affiliate Window and started adding beanbags to the website. For anyone new to affiliate marketing, any sales made by me would mean Beanbagbazaar would pay me a commission.
Now the site itself isn’t particularly big. And it isn’t particularly clever either. But it does sell big beanbags. And the old marketing principle, Keep It Simple Stupid, does work when it comes to websites.
I don’t do PPC so if it was to make me any money I would have to rely on search engine traffic for customers.
To get it indexed quickly by the likes of Google and Yahoo, I linked to my new site from the homepage of entrepreneur.co.uk which is crawled at least daily by the search engine gods. Getting a link from an existing website to a new site is the quickest way to get it indexed.
On the 17th of November, Beanbag Bazaar announced a Christmas incentive for affiliates. Deliver 15 or more sales between the 20th of November and the 20th of December and win a beanbag.
15 sales in 30 days seemed a tall order for me with a brand new site and next to no traffic, but it certainly spurred me on to add a few more beanbags to my website.
My first sale during those 30 days came on the 21st of November and by the end of the month I had made four sales. All thanks to search engine traffic. In fact during November I made those four sales from 261 unique visitors who came via Google and Yahoo for the most part.
By the 10th of December, I’d sold a further three beanbags, taking my total to seven with just ten days to go. At any other time of year I know I would have fallen short, but this was Christmas, everyone and his dog was using the internet to find presents, and I knew I was in with a chance. Fingers crossed!
Traffic during December was averaging around 25 unique visitors a day and by the 15th I had made a further six sales – 13 in total during the qualifying period. On the 16th I sold a Whopper Gigantic Solo Beanbag meaning I needed just one more sale to win a beanbag and my first ever affiliate prize. By now I was checking my sales stats about ten times an hour, hoping for that one more sale.
I had previously posted a comment on the Affiliates4U website to say that I was moving into beanbags and as something of an update I posted another message on the 16th to say that I needed just one more sale to win a beanbag.
And that’s when a fantastic thing happened. After seeing my message on Affiliates4U and without me knowing, Chris Clarkson of Sunshine.co.uk contacted Hannah Swift, who does a great job of looking after Beanbag Bazaar’s affiliate program for Existem-AM, asking for my affiliate code so that he could buy a beanbag and get me that 15th sale. I would never have known this if I hadn’t been chatting to Hannah on IM as that 15th sale came in and she then mentioned that Chris had been in touch.
So by the 16th of December I had my 15 sales and I was guaranteed an XL Faux Leather Bean Bag – not to mention the commission I’d pocketed by making those sales!
I’m obviously not going to be retiring any time soon from my foray into the beanbag market, but the fact remains that even from a standing start and with no budget beyond the time it took me to build the site and the cost of registering a domain name, it is possible to make money from affiliate marketing and even reach incentive targets (I already had hosting space available in one of my reseller accounts so the cost thjetre was neglible). That’s really what I wanted to say in this post.
Hats off to Beanbag Bazaar for offering an incentive that was well within the reach of even me, a big thanks to Hannah at Affiliate-AM for the help and encouragement during those 30 days, and to Chris at Sunshine, I hope to repay your kindness by developing one or two travel sites in the coming months so watch this space!
