16min chapter

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#319 - New Survey Reveals Exactly What’s Changed in Affiliate Marketing

Authority Hacker Podcast – AI & Automation for Small biz & Marketers

CHAPTER

Differences in Revenue Per Thousand (RPM) in Affiliate Marketing Niches

The chapter discusses the variations in revenue per thousand (RPM) in different niches within affiliate marketing and speculates on the reasons behind them, including the frequency of purchases and the impact of economic conditions. It highlights the high RPM in health and fitness, e-commerce, finance, beauty and skin care, and sports and outdoors niches, as well as the abundance of traffic in the home and garden niche despite its lower RPM.

00:00
Speaker 1
I mean, it's revenue per thousand. I was going to say because it's easier to get traffic in travel, but this is RPM. So it doesn't matter. It's tricky. I guess you're more likely, I guess you buy travel products more often than you buy financial products, maybe. Something like conversion rate might be a lot higher or something.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Something like this. Like you buy more trips than you buy. Maybe it's an economy thing, you know, the recessions and like people aren't taking out as much loans or maybe like holding back tightening up on credit cards and things like that. So be interesting to check that in a couple of years time and see if
Speaker 1
that that kind of has never been higher in the US right now. So I don't know about that. That's the other. Yeah,
Speaker 2
it's credit card debt. And then there's taking out new credit cards. Maybe
Speaker 4
you can't pick new ones if you have too much
Speaker 1
debt. People are tightening their belts in in 2023 for sure. Okay, then after we have health and fitness, e-commerce, finance, beauty and skin care are still pretty high up. Sports and outdoors is cool because sports and outdoors is still pretty high up. But also you can take many small niches there, like many small sports, many small. And it's like the revenue is pretty good. Like 126. I mean, it's decent actually. Then we have personal development, home and garden. So home and garden is like kind of like two cells down. But I think the trick is there's so much traffic in home and garden. Like it's so easy to get traffic in that niche that I wouldn't slip on it because yes, the RPM is lower. That's probably because people just write lots of like info keywords and put I don't know if they count like did people give just a fit revenue here or also?
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's just a fill. Okay, I
Speaker 1
mean, I guess we didn't check on everyone. Yeah. And so like, yeah, it's pretty low. But given it's super easy to build traffic there, you can do Pinterest, you can do all of that like it's it's really, really easy. And so like I still think it's a good niche. So it's like, this is interesting, but I would not fully rely on that same with like pets and animals like common, like I definitely have some stats in the industry. And that's the last one here. I turned $8. I can't get that correct. It
Speaker 2
should be averaged out by the fact that this is per thousand visitors. But I think if you look in the data, you find a disproportionate number of pets and animals respondents have less than a year of experience here. So they don't imitate as well. It makes sense. They're not in well, this is just affiliate
Speaker 1
networks. But you know, they haven't figured all that stuff out yet. They don't rank for the good keywords or something like that. And it's like that kills the RPM. Yeah, because I definitely have the RPMs in several of these issues. And I can tell you that we are a lot higher. Yeah. But one one interesting
Speaker 2
one here also quite low down is food and nutrition, which again, makes sense because you're aside from buying pots and pans and things like that, you go to the grocery store to buy groceries. You don't really buy them through an affiliate link. So yeah, tough stuff to
Speaker 4
be in. I think it's more ads. I think food and nutrition is like, right, a recipient and put that. Yeah, that's very fair. Yeah, I think that's more an adds niche. When arts and crafts could
Speaker 2
argue the same fashion as well. So we looked
Speaker 1
at the RPM. No, so I go
Speaker 2
ahead. Maybe that's an indication that, you know, if you're starting an affiliate site, some of these ads heavy niches aren't going to pay you decent money until you get over the kind of 50k, 100k thresholds for the bigger networks and can start making big bucks there. But for affiliate,
Speaker 1
I really think that what's happening is like these guys are coming in. These are comparative niches like pets and animals, food and nutrition, etc. And it's like these niches have like great keywords and trash keywords. Keywords where people don't buy anything and people keywords where people buy and the keywords we will buy a lot. They're taken by like the huge sites, basically. And it's like, it's very hard to take them. And so what's left is just easy keywords that don't necessarily drive conversions. People write for them because it's easier to rank, but as a result, the RPM is low. And so like it's more of a keyword selection such as even niche selection. And now you understand why the niche selection module is so long in your choice because of that, basically, because it's if you don't actually identify a lot of these things before you get started, you will get caught in one of these traps. And it can be a bad situation when you build a site, you put lots of time and money, and then you realize that you just can't convert a lot of traffic or make good money from the traffic. For a lot of people, I mean, starting over, you know, that's actually a very good segue. So, you know, if you want to learn more about
Speaker 2
you in the nation, you know, what to do and what not to do, head over to authorityhackertraining.com. And we actually have a free training video where we show you, among other things, how to pick an
Speaker 1
issue. And we looked at the RPM experience level as well. And what was interesting was the RPM for people under one year was very low at $46. Whereas when you jump to the one to two year bracket, the one just after that, it's $154 or three times more money. So again, there's probably an effect of these like low competition keywords, not not good keywords, and or not knowing how to put posts together to convert as well. I think there's
Speaker 2
a really good takeaway for that, because if you're six months into your journey here, and you know, you see yourself making 50 bucks or something, and you're like, wow, I had to get however many visits to make that. And you're doing the math, so I need to triple the amount of traffic to make triple that. Well, just know that you know, you don't need to like massively increase the traffic. I mean, you will need to increase traffic, but your monetization should, if you follow the law of averages, improve pretty significantly in the next few years. So it should make things a little bit easier.
Speaker 1
Yeah, after that, it kind of like stabilizes basically, except the guys who are like 10 plus years who jump another basically 25% from around 150 bucks for the previous brackets to 200 plus $208. So like, there is, and I think that's the people who actually have spent some time on CRO, like a 25% increase sounds like something that you did chief from like an average page to a great
Speaker 2
page, or negotiating higher commissions, or higher volume and these types of things. That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1
All just ranking for bigger keywords are like more monetizable keywords,
Speaker 2
because your site authority is higher, basically. What was interesting as well is we kind of broke all this down on a per traffic level, and there wasn't that much variation as a slight increase as you get more traffic, RPMs increase, but less than 10,000, the average RPM was still 153, whereas it was 160, when you have more than one million. So I think there's a lot of like,
Speaker 4
experience levels with like high low traffic, high value per visitor kind of blended in together here. So not really too much to take away from. Yeah, because there's some issues where like, you can drive lots of traffic early, so they're like beginners, but with high traffic.
Speaker 1
And then someone in a finance niche might not get lots of traffic, but like, complex, like crazy, for example. So it makes it okay. What's the next section?
Speaker 2
All right. Next, so we're looking at what affiliate networks are people using. And unsurprisingly, 58.5% of people are using Amazon associates. Didn't see that one coming. But what was interesting is we actually looked at this over revenue levels, right? And there's a slight decrease. So people who earn less than $100 a month, about 54% are using Amazon, then everyone from $100 to a month to 10k a month, it's about 60, 60, 62 to 67% of people are using Amazon. Then the people over 10k, only 48%, which, you know, makes sense because there's not that much money in Amazon per visitor. You really need to be pumping the volume in order to make a lot of money from it. But still it was much higher than I expected. I was thinking maybe like 30% of people would still be using Amazon at that level, but almost half of people use it. Even
Speaker 1
the high level people, like even the people who make more money, like it's I'm sure if you I wish we kind of broke it down for like higher revenue levels, because I think it might go down quickly. I guess the question is like seeing these stats, do you think that starting with Amazon is a good idea or bad
Speaker 2
idea? I maintain my stance that Amazon is the best everything else affiliate network and that doesn't matter what niche you're in, I mean, maybe digital marketing, like I think we have a few Amazon links on authority hacker for some books or something, but most like most physical product niches, there's just a lot of good stuff on Amazon. People have prime accounts, you know, there's low friction to selling stuff there. You get commission on the other things people buy. So it makes sense to do it, like, doesn't necessarily makes sense to push it as your best option always, but there's going to be some products when you
Speaker 1
think it's like you feel your random previews with like products three to 10 or three to seven or whatever number you put with Amazon stuff and or you put as a second buying option because Google wants to see multiple buying options. So you kind of like backfill with Amazon.
Speaker 4
What's your I
Speaker 2
don't want to stop you there. It's like what's your current thoughts on showing multiple buying options on an affiliate site because it's said that in the Google review guidelines. But I'm just not sure that it's a conversion. So
Speaker 1
you need to be smart. Here's the thing like you need to be smart with your design. I think the problem is like most affiliate sites are designed with a fucking Microsoft Paint, you know. And the thing is that you need to kind of like have your primary call to action button to like your high paying offer. That's like big and bold like like your main accent color. And then you need to kind of have these kind of like ghost buttons next to it or something. Maybe sometimes buttons that don't even have a border or a shadow or nothing is just text where it's a button still. That's like all get it on Amazon. And you can make it like those different smaller, thinner, etc. So that you can show alternative buying options. So you satisfy Google by the same time 99% of people are going to click on the button you want them to click on. So you satisfy both Google and users. So there's a lot of like, like it's funny because I'm taking like, don't ask me, but I'm taking lots of like new X video classes, etc. Now I'm kind of enjoying that. And it's like, it's one of the things that they play on a lot is like the font sizes, the font boldness, the font everything, etc. And then the usage of accent colors, but very little just when you need it just at the places where you need it. So like on a screen, like on the size of your screen on your laptop, you'd want one button with that red color you're using for your buttons, nothing else. Like you shouldn't have a title with it. You shouldn't have anything like that, etc. So that the attention goes all there. And your click story is pushed that way. So you can kind of like get the best of both worlds. If you do that, so I would still do it. But would be smart with design and think a lot about it. Okay, what about the other networks? Why is use the most by the effect marketers? And do we have a breakdown?
Speaker 2
Yeah, big, big drop off after average 58.5% are using Amazon. The next high set actually clickbank are all friends like what the fuck 24.6% are using clickbank. I think this is one of the ones though that when we looked into that over experience level, a lot more beginners were using clickbank than experienced people. So I don't read into that as you as
Speaker 1
you will. Let me just talk about clickbank for a second. Like clickbank is cool, but the promise clickbank takes 10% of your sales as the person who sells the product because they're basically your shopping cart. And it's like how freaking bad deal like if you're selling products, giving 10% to that network that mostly provides you with spammy affiliates, most of the time some products do well there, but you can probably count it on like two or three hands. It's a really bad deal basically. So most people who produce good quality products move off clickbank and run their own shopping cart because then they pay much lower fees on payment processing. And they can still run their own F8 programming etc. So they are good info products, but while at some point they were on clickbank like you know several years ago, I don't think that's very much the case anymore. I might be wrong. Actually, I should go and hang out a bit more there. So it's like I'm holding my hand up in case I'm wrong, but like that's my vision of clickbank. I think it's a if you sell it's a bad deal. And so good sellers are not on clickbank. I think
Speaker 2
the sellers who are on clickbank are really there for the the affiliates and there's only the top 0.1% of products on clickbank make probably 80% of the revenue on the platform just because of some of those those affiliates and all the upsells and things that they do. Yeah, it used to
Speaker 1
be cool. Like the upsell system was like so unique etc. And it was great, but like now everyone does that. Exactly. Like there's no there's no point using tickbank as a seller unless you you can get really good affiliates there, which I think they're awesome, but not
Speaker 2
many. And then if we go further down the list, we've got the more traditional affiliate network. So share a sale and commission junction CJ there. The two biggest among our respondents 20%, 21% there. Then the next category was up like 11% A win, 15% impact. And then everyone else is kind of a little bit further than Rakuten link share flex offers eBay event links, skin links. But
Speaker 1
from as it's and tickbank is quite reflective of the stuff we use actually. But also a lot of individual field programs, I would say like for us at least. I guess we should have asked as well for individual field programs that have been interesting to see. But still Amazon really strong sell it's like it's your back filler. It's but it's interesting. It reflects exactly what I was thinking of the market though. Anything
Speaker 2
else you want to say about networks? All right. So next we're looking at monetizing with ads and how many people were doing that. Bear in mind, this is an affiliate focused survey. So you didn't go into too much detail on this, but it was interesting. So 80.4% of beauty and skincare sites are using ads. 78% of digital marketing sites, which that was bizarre. Like why would you use ads on such a high RPM affiliate space? It's just that that was kind of a bit bonkers. But then when we go further down towards the bottom of the list, pets and animals, 66.9 food and nutrition, which remember, that was the one that we said, oh, they must do a lot of ads. Only 66.6% of food and nutrition sites are one size of
Speaker 4
that. I guess they don't. So personal
Speaker 2
development, 60.9, that actually does make sense. Yeah, there's a lot of courses and service.
Speaker 1
I was talking about opt-ins. That's why if I was doing this health 59, yeah, that's a little fashion
Speaker 2
58.3. Like, I don't know, I just presumed that there was a lot of ads in that space. I'm gonna make enemies,
Speaker 1
but I'm gonna say that like food bloggers, fashion bloggers, etc. They're clueless about how to monetize. Okay. All the geniuses are an immediate, like prove me wrong, please. Go ahead in the comments. But like overall, it's not looking good for these initiatives. Same with parenting and family, 56%. These are the niches where you would want to see ads because it's a bit more difficult to monetize with affiliate. And it looks like the basically people who make money, the people who have researched their niche thoroughly, didn't just follow a passion and apply the business, the business model systematically, both with ads and affiliate. And you can see that overall, like most affiliate sites use ads as well. That's an interesting one. I think that's established now. It's like, it's not just us who came out saying that we were not seeing a decrease in conversions on affiliate commissions. If we were on ads on sites, like many people in the industry now have come out saying that. So it's usually worth running a network like RAPTIVE or like media line on your site on top of running fit marketing, round of previews. That's
Speaker 2
true to a point, I think, but I still can't see a day where we put ads on the Authority Hacker blog, for example.

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