More Amazon Armageddon
By: John Elder posted in Affiliate Marketing
Hello good people!
Yesterday I talked about how my amazon.com affiliate earnings were zero for the day before. Well, I woke up this morning and checked my stats and guess what? They were zero for the next day too!
That’s two days in a row where I didn’t make a single penny in amazon affiliate commissions. That’s absolutely never happened. Ever.
It’s especially weird because my 300 sites had about 1,900 visitors yesterday (and $50 in adsense earnings). Both of those figures is less than normal on account of the recent Panda update from Google, but it’s still more than enough traffic to generate some decent amazon affiliate sales.
In fact, it was enough to generate 124 clicks on my amazon widget from 111 different people. But none of them bought anything.
Is it the economy?
I don’t want to keep harping on about this, especially since I just wrote about it yesterday…but patterns like this intrigue me and I can’t help but keep thinking about it over and over again till I figure out exactly what’s going on!
Is Google sending me visitors who aren’t buyers? I’ve always sort of thought there are two basic types of searchers; those looking for information and those looking to buy stuff. I’ve always designed my sites so that Google sends me people who are looking to buy stuff. (I do this with some onpage SEO and keyword research).
Why? Because I figure that people who are looking to buy stuff are more likely to click on an Adsense advertisement selling the thing they’re looking to buy, or better yet…click on my amazon widget and simply buy the thing (earning me a commission).
But I don’t know if Google is sending me “information searchers” or “buyer searchers” because clearly 111 people DID click the amazon widget…so it’s a puzzle.
It might just be that the economy is crappy right now and people aren’t spending money. It might be that people are researching for the upcoming Christmas shopping season and holding off on purchases till then. It might be a million other reasons…and we’ll probably never know…but I’ll keep worrying about it *L*
Is the end near?
I’m still not terribly worried about it…as I’ve said before, these things fluctuate. And I expected a period of instability ever since the last Google Panda update.
In fact, I’m already starting to hear reports that Google might be pulling back from the Panda as they realize what a botched job they did this time around. Often after major algorithm updates, we see Google scale back a little as they tweak it in the aftermath of destruction. That’s normal.
My strategy hasn’t changed. I’m going to keep building sites and monitoring how they do in the new Google index. If they continue to generate lackluster traffic like my last 300 sites after they were penalized by the Panda, then I’ll start rolling out new site designs until I find one that Google likes.
And then money will fall from the sky again until Google decides to change their algorithm again, then the whole ridiculous process will repeat itself. But that’s the game!
In the mean time…keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool
