February 2nd, 2007 by James Omdahl
Whenever I explain what an affiliate marketer is to friends and family I am often asked to describe what an average affiliate marketer is like. Usually, this leaves me at a bit of a loss since the affiliate marketing community tends to be fairly diverse. And these days the industry seems to be getting even more diverse (especially when it comes to gender, thank goodness).
I ran across this post at Shawn Collins’ affiliate blog that talks about a recent survey that tried to get a grip on who affiliate marketers really are. The survey was conducted with 1,500 UK affiliates and asked questions like gender, average income, employment status, and main method of marketing.
Since the actual survey is password protected (so uncool), I will point out a few of the more interesting stats and let you check Shawn’s post for more:
83% of affiliates are male
27% of affiliates said that affiliate marketing was their day job
10% of day-job affiliates rake in more than $1.4 million a year (WOW!)
74% of affiliates used SEO as their primary method of driving traffic (WOW AGAIN!)
Those last two really surprised me. While I figure the sample of affiliates might have been weighed to more towards larger affiliates, I still think it is crazy that there were so many people making that kind of money. Good for them, eh?
I was also surprise to see SEO being the primary method of driving traffic. I know in our industry most affiliates use paid-search to drive their traffic. I guess this must have something to do with insurance being so competitive…but still, that is a lot of people out there fighting for rankings.
What are your thoughts on this survey - do the numbers seem right or do things look a bit fishy? Let us know in the comments!
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February 2nd, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Well, Im a girl (an older girl) and I just woke up on Monday morning and decided that affiliate marketing was my day job! Thanks to Insureme for providing a substantial chunk of the incentive for that decision.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 am
I do have a comment about adwords. For an average affiliate (not a 2 million dollar earner, but somebody earning a living) the way to get adwords to work with affiliate programs in a very competitive market is to approach the issue a little sideways.
I got very frustrated using adwords on obvious keywords for insurance. The bids are just too high, no matter what your quality score. Even if your pages convert at 20 - 25%, if you have to bid $2 a click, thats too big of a risk. If you guys have pages that covert at 100% I guess you dont have a problem, but I considered 25% a decent conversion ratio.
What I found are some related but less obvious subjects that are cheap to bid on (like .20) a click. My pages werent exactly targetted to insurance leads, but to a related keyword. (Making your ads match your keywords is a whole nother subject)However, if I had the script up in a prominant place - and even with conversions dropping to five or ten percent, I could make a good profit. And yeah (heresy) I stuck an adsense line down at the bottom to capture a substantial amount of the “looking for something else” people.
After all, Yahoo shows insurance lead scripts on tons of pretty unrelated pages, and they must make money.
This plan has helped increase my overall revenue, and my insureme revenue (and profit). So it works for me.
This isnt a get rich quick tip, but something that can be made to work with lots of research and work.
Im sure if somebody has a more magical secret than this, they wont share it.
February 5th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Hey Mar! Thanks for being so open and sharing that with us. It is a great example of how thinking ouside the box a bit can make the difference between losing money and making money.
Great stuff!
February 6th, 2007 at 9:09 am
I hope I didnt just violate Googles TOS by mentioning theoretical bid prices. Hey I was just kidding….oh no, men in black coats are at the door…
LOL. Anyway, thanks James and April for taking so much time to help me!