A month ago on December 14th 2008 I blogged about how I captured so much traffic from a blog post about X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke that it broke my server. One of the comments on my post was from Simon who said it would be a good idea to blog again in 30 days time, when the Play.com cookie has expired and report on my earnings. So here we are, this one's for you Simon :)
Number of sales: 62
Retail value of sales: £1483.38
Affiliate commission: £22.58
OK I'm not going to be able to afford that white Lamborghini Spyder I had my eye on yet, but lets look at the figures a little closer.
As I mentioned in my original post, a lot of the searches were for people looking for free downloads. So I fully expected a lot of traffic with a very small amount of revenue. Then there is the fact that for the visitors who do fork out a whole 65p for the download, I only get 1p commission.
The £22.58 commission on £1483.38 worth of sales works out at roughly 1.5% commission. Lets imagine this was a product in the gift or gadget sector with a total retail value of £5k instead of £1483. And a commission rate of 15% instead of 1.5%, that would mean £750 in commission.
Or what if it was a lead based product? Maybe Sky TV or a credit card offer? Let's say commission was £30 a lead x 62 leads. That would make £1860 in affiliate commission - all from a post that took 2 minutes.
My point is that on the surface £22.58 isn't a lot of money. And let's be right, it isn't. But the lesson we should take from this is that by good timing and being aware of current topical events a blog post that put literally 2 minutes to put together brought in a ton of traffic as well as sales. If you can apply the same principles to other sectors, niches, topics etc. then it just goes to show that there are still opportunities and money to be made.
What I'm listening to right now: Dmitri from Paris - "After The Playboy Mansion"
So, how much money did Alexandra Burke make me?
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9 Responses to So, how much money did Alexandra Burke make me?
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about me
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I am the founder of ShareMyPlaylists.com, ContentNow.co.uk and some other stuff. I have no idea why I'm blue on this photo though but I like it!
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I found your whole Alexandra Burke experiment a really interesting and inspiring one Kieron. It made me stop and think about how important it is to make sure that you let what people are after lead what we write about, and not the offers that get emailed to us every day.
Reading that it sounds simple, but I think there are many of us who would admit it’s something that’s very easy to forget.
how many unique visitors did you get to that page. There has to be a percentage that liked the look of your site and bookmarked it and will come back at a later date and make you some more money.
Another way to look at it:
Post takes 2 mins and generates £22.58 which extrapolates out to an hourly rate of £677.4 – not bad!
Trevor – I have no idea but it was substantial. However your point is spot on, some visitors will have no doubt bookmarked the site or even browsed other offers and purchased. As a tool for generating traffic it was really successful.
Brilliant follow up post Kieron. Although it didn’t make you that much the potential especially being over the Christmas period could of been huge. i’m surprised it didn’t end up making more. Also you could of got a load of fresh links in to the post from forums and other sites on the night too which is also of some value
It just goes to show people clearly bought more than just download the single which was what the original post was all about, thanks:)
Great post Kieron, I used the X-factor final to blog about Amazon MP3 store on my Wii site. My slant was the ability to download the winners single, and hopefully catch some other traffic too. I didn’t get as many hits as you
But it worked out alright.
Dan
P.S. I had a few sales for the Hallelujah single which went through an Amazon third-party, it gave 10% commission. So 7p a sale, not bad!
I remember following that post with Simon, surprisingly I also had few sales as well with Hallelujah single – didn’t do well but I put it down to my server crashing at the peak of sales.
Great to see that affiliate can bring in some spare cash.
I thought it was a great experiment – what struck me is it hammered home the need to continually develop fresh idea’s. Probably like others, i’ve been guilty of coming up with a profitable niche idea – then sitting back until its died out, and then having to start from scratch!!!
Great experiment!