Ever had an experience where initially you’re thinking “that really sucks, and how can I recover from it?” only to find out that what you initially thought was a pretty annoying or unwanted situation actually turns into something really cool, and you end up counting your lucky stars that the so called “bad thing” turned out the way it did?

I’m pretty sure most of you will have had this experience at least a couple of times over the years, it seems to be life’s way of reminding us to be flexible, and look for the positive in situations.

I recently had one of these experiences regarding one of my niche affiliate sites.

The site I’m talking about here, is actually The first affiliate niche site that I ever built that became successful, and generated affiliate sales via a ClickBank product. This was built around May in 2008, and continued to make regular sales month in month out. While it didn’t generate a lot of money by my standards ($200-$300 per month) it was still free money as far as I was concerned, and not something I scoffed at by any means.

So, as you can imagine, with it being my first site and all (my little baby :) ) , I was a little bit disappointed and annoyed when I realized over the last 3-4 weeks the sales had finally dried up. It turned out that ClickBank had either banned this product, or the product owners had finally taken it down. This is the message that I got after testing the order link for the first time in 6-12 months:

Needless to say, if I wanted to rejuvenate this income stream, I would have to test a couple of new approaches. Well, initially I had no luck finding a similar product on CB, and so my site was just sending it’s nicely targeted traffic nowhere for a week, and any possible revenue was being flushed down the toilet.

After the initial week however, when re-scouring the ClickBank market place, I found a product that I had somehow missed before. It looked decent enough, worth testing out at least, and actually had a higher payout by $21 per sale. Pretty cool if it could convert I thought.

Well, 2 days after changing the offer round, and altering my pre-sell copy on the niche site to reflect the new product name and features – all of which took about 30 minutes, I had made my first sale! A commission of $66.54, which in my books is pretty decent for 1 sale on CB, especially considering that I had done bugger-all work in order to start making profit from the site again.

After checking my account again the next day, I was more than a little bit excited about this alteration, as I now had 3 sales within the past 24 hours! Whereas before, I might make 4-5 sales a month, at around $44 per sale, It now seemed that this alteration could actually prove to add thousands of dollars to my monthly profits :D :D

After realizing the potential of this new affiliate product, and how well it was converting, I have done some market/keyword research. It turns out that I am in a VERY strong position to take this revenue stream further, and potentially increase this little site into a 3-5 sale per day earner, which would mean $5-$10K per month! There are LOTS of keywords in this little niche that my site can rank for easily, and getting at least 3 or 4 times my current traffic should be very doable.

Also, not only can I increase the traffic, but also there are loads more things I can test in the conversion funnel. For example, I could do a video preview of me going through the sales page, and actually buying the product. I could also do a video walk-through of the actual product after I had gained access. Then there is the option of building an email list first, instead of going for the one-off sale. Something I definitely need to test. You know, the whole “the money is in the list” waffle. As you can imagine, testing all of these different options is bound to give me some great insights into what gains the highest conversion ratio in this niche.

So as you can see, testing not only for sales copy, conversion rates, but also the actual product that you are trying to pre-sell (if you’re an affiliate) is very very important, and can really make the difference between a small income stream and a very decent or even large income stream to add to your portfolio. So if you have any sites that are making a little bit of revenue, and are getting decent enough traffic to test different products, sales copy, etc, then by all means, heed the lesson of this article, test the response of different factors. By the way, this particular site currently is only sending around 200 people through my CB link per day, which goes to show, it doesn’t take that much traffic to test on, regarding testing and increasing your value per visitor.

Hope this has inspired you!

Take care for now :)

- Nick