Is There A Likelihood...?
 

I feel certain it's the same boat for most of us with respect to affiliate marketing, it's not the King's ransom that's for sure. I have a couple of sponsors who just aren't converting at all, and I'm talking like in excess of six month's or more with no sales. Here's what I find curious, I am getting consistent sales with a few other programs, and that's off of virtually the same traffic sources, and these are new sales and re-bills.

The long and short of it is I'm seeing significant 'join hits', but no sales. Now I know that during the recession there were several programs that were shaving, and I wouldn't want to point the finger, but it just doesn't seem possible to me that I would be seeing zero sales from certain programs. The other coincidence towards these programs is they've dramatically cut back on their production costs, buying content on the cheap and it looks perhaps as if they've gotten in a little in over their head from the standpoint of maintenance and operating costs.

Just curious, is anyone is noticing any similar situation to where you feel your traffic or promotions should be converting but they're not.

back in the old days when we thought we were getting shaved, we would get a friend to sign up and see if the sale went through ...

I'm seeing the same thing as far as join hits but no sales.

Shaving comes to mind but then I look at the couple of affiliate programs that I manage and I see the same thing and I know for sure that I'm not shaving my own traffic.

I think it is a combo of surfers afraid of getting their cards slammed, lack of money to spend on porn, and just plain bored with seeing the same stuff over and over again.

Thanks for the replies
My sense is surfers are largely bored with seeing the same stuff over and over again as you've said, but why the join hits? Personally I rarely use the join page link, except on some rare instances. I just strikes me as odd that the amount of join hits, but then again one of the mysteries of the universe. But again, I'm not surprised by the purchases surfers are making.

Agree with Cleo
She is wizard

Take a close look at the specific sponsors where you're seeing lots of join page hits but not actual joins. See if they're using a two-step signup where they ask the surfer to enter not only their choice for a username and password on the first of the two join pages, but also their email address.

If that's the case, then it may be that a lot of your potential signups are in fact signing up, but only later on, when they receive a follow-up email from the sponsor. The email may even have a discount price offer since the surfer didn't jump at the full price the first time.

Of course that email will have a link to the paysite that contains the sponsor's own affiliate code, but that's just for the sponsor's "internal tracking purposes" and the fact that it overrides the cookie you set with that surfer earlier is just an unhappy coincidence. But one that does result in you getting no credit for the signup.

So visit those sponsors and if any of them do use that kind of two-step join form, go ahead and enter an email you can track* so you can see what else they do with that email address later on. Don't finish the signup process and then see if you start getting emails from the sponsor and if those emails have links with affiliate codes that aren't yours. Also see what other emails you eventually receive at that tracking address so you'll know what else is being offered to the traffic you're sending to those tours.


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* a trackable email address is one that, for example, might have the sponsor's or paysite's name before the @ sign and will go to one of your domains that has a catchall email option, so that anything sent to that domain will be delivered to specific email box you've selected. For instance, for a sponsor named ShaveFreePorn.com and a paysite called WeOnlyShaveSluts.com, you might enter an email address like shavefree-shavesluts@yourdomain.com and then all those emails would wind up in your webmaster@yourdomain.com box or whatever catchall address you chose.

I was at the market today and on the way out I stopped by the watch and jewelry guy out front in the stores mini mall. I asked him to give me a new battery for my casio watch. He is older Japanese guy. Supermarket is Japanese. Bear with me there's a point.

While he was giving me battery and a new strap we started to chat. He had a laptop behind the counter and complained the main store would not share their wi-fi. I asked him what he surfed. He said all day he surfs porn. His favorite site was x hamster. |banghead| He said he was now obsessed with cock and wanted to know if I would show him mine in the bathroom. lol. Usually its Japanese girls asking. Sigh, I must be getting old.

I see the join hits thing as well. I believe Simon nailed it as far as I know.

In 2013 only my own sites make me some money, my dvd shop and 3-4 programs who are very very good at what they do. They shoot their own content and they are super fucking perv. I get one-2 signups a month with some other programs but they are working with content everybody saw 5 years ago. That and blurry, crappy amateur content from a few sites in asian niche and others have few takers. From my experience.

Thanks Simon, that is in fact how they have it set up. I will check it with my sign up as you've instructed, but essentially they're getting (assuming) sales without crediting me.

After checking through many of my programs, the majority of them use the two step sign up process. I would suspect there is a way to check the tracking code or modify it in some way once the customer gets to the check out, as there has to be some sign ups along the way. The 'join hits' and 'join submits' links in the stats pages are blocked out, there's no way to check the link on those pages.

I can trace this back perhaps a year ago, which is around the time sites started using this type of sign up, it's been about a year since I've had any conversions on some of these programs. When I started seeing more consistent sign-ups on sites that still used the old CCB sign-up scripts, I said to myself Hmmm. So in essence, affiliates are not so much sending sites traffic and potential customers, we're padding their e-mail list for their discount e-mail marketing schemes.

Might be technical glitches/setup probs - i naively think few would cheat on purpose these days ...

But equally, the same traffic will convert differently with different things - and ive never quite worked out the correlation exactly.

There's a scam on every block, in every facet of business and life, you're naive to think otherwise. It's become far more lucrative these days for programs to share, buy, or trade e-mail lists and promotions between themselves, than to worry about the nickel and dime affiliate. Programs will offer special promotional codes to aff's who are bringing in a lot of traffic, otherwise it's survival of the fittest.