Do you know where your website visitors are coming from? If you do not have this metric accurately captured, you will be wasting a lot of dollars. We learned this lesson the hard way.
As everyone knows, today it is possible (and cost effective) to measure the geographic location of your visitors with a high degree of accuracy. It wasn't so just two years ago and whatever tools were available were unaffordable by small businesses like ours.
Being an English language website we attract visitors from all English-speaking countries and to a small extent even from non-English speaking countries. While US has always been, and still is, the largest market for us, MYNIPPON is very popular all over the world. However, visitors from other countries can rarely purchase the products that we recommended (as part of our affiliate programs). The result: While we attracted a lot of visitors and had an impressive click rate, our conversation rate was pathetically low because these visitors could not purchase these products for a variety of reasons (shipping cost too high, lack of US$ denominated credit cards, prices too high, etc.).
Message to you as a content-based business entrepreneur: If you have a lot of non-American visitors, most affiliate programs will not work for you. So first invest in a web analytics software to get a good understanding of visitors to your website and only then pick affiliate programs. Many companies have warehouses in many locations and often ship free anywhere in the world (e.g. Strawberrynet).
If not, Google AdSense makes most sense because with this advertising program you can show local products to your visitors which they can actually afford and buy.
Related article: Google AdSense is a serious threat to affiliate programs
As everyone knows, today it is possible (and cost effective) to measure the geographic location of your visitors with a high degree of accuracy. It wasn't so just two years ago and whatever tools were available were unaffordable by small businesses like ours.
Being an English language website we attract visitors from all English-speaking countries and to a small extent even from non-English speaking countries. While US has always been, and still is, the largest market for us, MYNIPPON is very popular all over the world. However, visitors from other countries can rarely purchase the products that we recommended (as part of our affiliate programs). The result: While we attracted a lot of visitors and had an impressive click rate, our conversation rate was pathetically low because these visitors could not purchase these products for a variety of reasons (shipping cost too high, lack of US$ denominated credit cards, prices too high, etc.).
Message to you as a content-based business entrepreneur: If you have a lot of non-American visitors, most affiliate programs will not work for you. So first invest in a web analytics software to get a good understanding of visitors to your website and only then pick affiliate programs. Many companies have warehouses in many locations and often ship free anywhere in the world (e.g. Strawberrynet).
If not, Google AdSense makes most sense because with this advertising program you can show local products to your visitors which they can actually afford and buy.
Related article: Google AdSense is a serious threat to affiliate programs