Sometimes I read the success stories from internet marketers and wonder how everyone except me became an overnight sensation. The sales pages always highlight the incredible results. What they leave out is the graveyard of failed projects that came before.
The truth is that successful entrepreneurs fail constantly. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times. Michael Jordan missed more shots than most players ever took. And I once built a website about chicken coops that earned exactly zero dollars in revenue.
The Chicken Coop Experiment
Here is what happened. I was following along with a niche marketing case study and decided to test an article marketing strategy using a topic I knew nothing about: chicken coops. I grabbed a domain, hired a writer to produce some articles, had a virtual assistant submit them to article directories, and waited for the money to roll in.
The article marketing actually worked as a traffic strategy. I sent about 3,500 visitors to the site and got a respectable 11 percent click-through rate to the affiliate product I was promoting. On paper, that should have produced sales.
It produced zero. Not a single sale from 378 visitors to the sales page.
What Went Wrong
I spent a lot of time analyzing why this experiment failed. Here were my theories at the time, and what I have learned since:
- The traffic was not buying traffic. People reading articles about chicken coops may have been in research mode, not purchase mode. Traffic quality matters as much as traffic volume.
- The sample size was too small. 378 visitors to a sales page is not enough data to draw definitive conclusions about conversion rates, especially for a higher-priced product.
- I had no expertise or trust. I was promoting a product in a niche I knew nothing about, to an audience that had no reason to trust my recommendation. That is a recipe for poor conversions.
The Real Lesson
The most important thing about failure is not avoiding it. It is failing quickly, learning from it, and moving on. Every failed project teaches you something that your next project benefits from.
My chicken coop failure taught me that traffic without trust does not convert. That lesson saved me from repeating the same mistake on dozens of future projects. The cost of that education was a domain registration, a few articles, and some time. The return on that investment has been enormous.
If you are working on a project right now and it is not producing results, ask yourself: have I learned everything this project can teach me? If yes, document the lesson, shut it down, and start the next experiment. If no, keep testing until you have.
The path to success is paved with instructive failures. The only real failure is the one you refuse to learn from.
Thanks for the sharing the results to date Mark.
I doubt the gravity score is misleading or that Michelle plotted an evil plan to distract you, lol! I would have thought that the number of hops you had would be enough to get a reasonable picture IF the traffic was targeted enough. So the best guess is that the article traffic isn’t qualified. Not knowing the niche or the keywords etc it’s hard to say though isn’t it…. Maybe these buyers are hanging around forums on self sufficient farming etc and or reading hobby farming online mags.;)
Good luck if you continue in the chicken coop niche, I’m sure in this failure there are plenty of clues on how to be more successful with it next time.
If you are not failing, then you are not trying hard enough.
There aren’t many IM’rs that get where they are now without alot of failure.
So tweek and try again.
My thought is that people looking for chicken coop info know that there is tons of readily available free info out there already, and see no need to pay for it.
The traffic is targeted, but it’s information addicted traffic, not buying traffic.
JMHO
AL
I also had some experience with traffic from articles, and I want to say that the most convertible traffic is the search engine traffic, though – it’s always interesting to experiment, cause experimenting we are learning!
Hey your lucky, at least your getting order form impressions, I usually don’t even get those LOL! I get about 100 hops per week or more to various products, but not a single order form impression. I don’t know what you think, but I think this means the “sales page” doesn’t convert OR the traffic is not targeted. I tend to believe it’s a sales page thing because why would non-targeted traffic even bother to click a link?
Your not alone 🙂
Miles Hennis
Thanks for the share. Can I ask how many articles your va wrote that you then submitted through AAS?
I don’t actually see any failure in this experiment… So clickbank didn’t work! What options do you have?
What about free Chicken Coop Info via email sign up… After a few weeks / months / whatever of chicken building courses they could start being offered chicken supplies, wire, latches, hinges, chicken feed. A paid forum… An all in one chicken coop kit!
It may not make you rich but you got a fair amount of hops and I don’t think this is completely over unless you don’t want to work on it anymore.
I think more importantly is you didn’t give up after your…um…failure. I really believe failing early and finding out what doesn’t work is an important part of building your business. The tricky part is not giving up after the “failures”.
I think it’s the failure that makes it a great success. You can’t call it so unless you had a couple of these so-called failures.
Its a constant routine of trial and error. Right now I have only 1 out of 6 sites generating any traffic to speak of. Article marketing seems to be extremely time consuming. I guess its best for those full timers.
378 hops. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure. You need to know the niche more in depth and get more hops to take your final decision. I will check the video and see what’s going on.
I was considering this niche as well.
Franck
Maybe turn that website into an adsense site or put chicken coop ads from ebay on there.