So I could really use help if you guys could chime in on a matter that I'm working on.
I just started advertising on FB with a personal account. I've been testing for about a week now. I'm up to almost $135 in adspend and have sent 177 clicks to my landing page. I'm using one of my best friends' offers who has his own small affiliate network. I'm running a landing page that he runs for mailing. With 177 click throughs, I have not had one conversion. The payout is pretty good considering my friend is working out a deal with me until I become profitable. He's never done any traffic from social networking.
So, in general, is it difficult to convert payday? Should I pick a new vertical? I've even switched offers to an action conversion that converts after email and zip are entered. Still, no luck. Is my landing page not working for me? Or is it just the level of difficulty to convert? Any ideas or directions on where I should go would be great.
payday loans is one of the most competitive niches around, and is a high stakes game.
it is not the right place to start for anyone new to affiliate marketing.
on the search / seo side its as bad as viagra - ie people that are good at the "dark art" of getting sites hacked and ranked tend to get involved in this space.
it requires big budgets and big balls.
I recommend you start with something simple.
Exclude Credit, Payday, Health (not talking about beauty), Gambling for the beginning. It took me around 1.5 years to get a solid spot in the top5 for casino keywords in Germany and checking up the difficulty scores of these keywords on google, no matter US / DE / whatever, they are all similiar in terms of difficulty.
Beside that, in these niches you're competing against people who aren't a 100% on ROI focused. I know from another guy running casino traffic through paid channels that they are targetting for volume rather than ROI with campaigns, as with a backup of years in players generating revenue share for you, you increase your margin (in that niche) by pushing even more volume rather than focussing on ROI using paid traffic. ROI is of course important, but then again you got agencies paying 3x / 4x of what you pay just to get the traffic.
One more fact you gotta include is that in those niches, you'll experience competitors attackign your sites through DDoS attacks heavily since you enter the top spots. It's a public secret everybody's doing that and has to deal with it, which again, is on the shady side of the business and requires pretty much a decent amount of cash to at least try to compete.