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Anyone had any success with using "hosting" offers as part of their AM campaigns? (5)

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Hi STMer's,

I've been doing some researching inside the forum and noticed most of the results for "hosting offers" seems to be returning results for recommending hosting solutions to run affiliate campaigns, such as Beyond hosting.

I'm wanting to find out if anyone has had any case studies or earned $x,xxx with hosting offers as part of their affiliate marketing strategy?

I personally have seen Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com achieve $xx,xxx per month with recommending Bluehost on his website, though he hasn't revealled where his traffic sources comes from. As this is one example, I'm looking to see what strategy others have with hosting and if it's vertical that will work?

Any thoughts, examples or case studies would be appreciated.

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The issue you'll have with hosting is that it's a CPS (cash per sale) vertical. That means high payouts - I think Bluehost are something like $70 per conversion - which means you need a high testing budget to reliably test campaigns.

See http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...e-Often-Better

There's a second issue as well - most hosting offers are going to primarily be a B2B (business to business) offer rather than a B2C (business to consumer) offer. That means that you'll need to look at different traffic sources from the normal ones affiliates use - obviously promoting a web hosting company to everyone looking at a big social media site won't work. You have to go where the customers are. That's not necessarily harder, but it does mean you need to think outside the box on traffic sources, which means more testing as there are less guides and follow-alongs to learn from.

All of the above is why most affiliates pushing hosting offers will be using an SEO approach - SEO-based affiliate approaches tend to work well for CPS offers as they produce very purchase-oriented traffic. Pat Flynn's definitely doing that - to the best of my knowledge, all his traffic is generated organically from his own site, which has great social, SEO and referral traffic.

However, none of the above means that hosting offers can't work with paid traffic - and if you get a campaign working, it's likely to stay profitable for a good long while. (That's one of the advantages of CPS offers - more expensive to get rolling but they tend to be more stable). You just need to be aware of the risks and differences.

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Hi Caurmen,

That's awesome. Thanks for the great feedback.

I was also wondering what your thoughts on choosing a vertical that you may know well, compared to starting in a vertical that you've not had any experience with? What are your thoughts?

(e.g. I know a lot about the different Internet marketing offers but I have no idea on mobile offers. What concerns me is that I don't really know what I would be doing in mobile offers and how long it would take me learn about it to get started. Though as you've mentioned it's possible to start off with a lower budget which is why it's easier to get into..)

I'm just thinking through the pros and cons of this.

Thank you

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Depends very much on your other limiting factors. If you have a small budget, tailoring what you do to that is probably the most important. If you have a larger budget to play with, then experience becomes more key.

Don't forget to think about your experience in other areas too. Do you speak another language besides English fluently? If so, advertising in geos that speak that language may be a good idea. Familiar with a subculture or a country that others may not be? Advertising with them or in that country is a good idea. And so on.

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Exactly, what Pat Flynn built is a classic BIZOP empire running on word of mouth traffic, refferals, social love and great SEO - no paid traffic as far as I know too. Im following his site for a few years already, checking his income reports from time to time and its amazing how much the bluehost commisions alone make up for. He did a few genius steps, somehow he was lucky to rank a small site and make a blog about it, then massively utilized "the niche site duel" to get free high value incoming links as everyone and their moms were blogging about it. If you look closely at what he did, he basically wasnt even able to replicate his own success with ranking the site - the second attempt at building a similar site took him a year or more and it kinda failed ... but blogging about it and giving people the hope to do something similar is still fueling his blog and it runs like crazy

It would be quite a task to replicate this, it took him years and it cannot really be done in any other way

But as Caurmen mentioned, hosting or any other service/product can be promoted with paid traffic if you choose the right approach. Pat isnt directly marketing hosting for example, he sells the idea of running a passive biz and hosting happens to be a mandatory part of the setup. This is an absolutely awesome way of selling something, it doesnt scream advertising, its simply something you have to buy when you want to run sites. What you can do is create for example a hosting review tool, and advertise the hosting reviews angle - people looking for such info are guaranteed buyers.

Or think about services like uptime monitor, speed tests ... build a list of top hosts according to the meassurements done and sneak some affiliate links in the toplist

Generally speaking, any service for webmasters should pull traffic that could turn into hosting customers

Long time ago, I had a few webmasters pages for traffic trade partners and I was able to sell a hosting package with it from time to time, even tho I didnt event try much

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