Flippa Website: Looking at the Numbers
This article discusses the affiliate strategies implemented on thacash.com at the time we took ownership and what we would need to do in terms of traffic and sales to make good money.
Spoiler alert: we need to do a lot of work!
The next article discusses how we are going to improve the existing approach.
This article is a follow up to our previous articles:
Inherited Affiliate Strategy
The website thacash.com promoted itself as an online magazine, and it used three main affiliate strategies to make money.
coupon code for referring customers to Cash App,
selling sponsored ads
affiliate links
Read below to learn more about all three.
Coupon Code
The affiliate website was earning cash mostly from the coupon code for the Cash App. The coupon code earned $10 per referral.
To make $5,000 per month by earning $10 per referral, the site would need to achieve 500 successful referral per month.
That seems like a lot of work.
Especially given crowded competition from other affiliates for this concept. Plus, Cash App could change their reward policy.
In fact, Cash App did, and I discovered it in my due diligence before buying the site.
Although the Flippa listing and the affiliate website itself described the coupon code as earning $10 per referral, I noticed before buying the site that the Cash App reduced the reward to $5.
So an already-low reward was actually even less. By half.
This highlights a few important things:
a need for a variety of income streams, not just one main stream
the benefit of selling higher-value items — fewer sales required
the value in driving a lot of quality traffic from and to diverse places
Therefore, pumping the coupon code alone is not a great money strategy, especially given our low traffic. More on that topic below.
Sponsored Ads
The site also sold sponsored ads. You can sell sponsored ads for $20-$300 depending upon certain things.
You can sell them for much more too, but sites selling above those prices are exceptional.
You usually get sponsored ads through people reaching out to you and asking.
Selling sponsored ads is a bit tricky because you want to put quality content on your site, but it can be challenging to find people with quality content that fits your site and who also are willing to pay prices that make it worth it to you.
To earn $5,000 per month by selling $150 ads, the site would need to achieve 34 ads sales per month.
Sounds like a great revenue stream if you have a steady flow of good advertisers who want to pay your prices. But for that to happen, the site needs tons of traffic.
To earn $5,000 per month by selling $300 ads, the site would need to achieve only 17 ads sales per month.
Sounds even better, but you need even more traffic.
For a site with the traffic like the one we bought, sponsored ads are not a realistic way to support the site financially as the primary source.
Sponsored ads are, however, a decent supplemental revenue stream we can grow as our traffic grows and eventually could become a solid income source.
Other Affiliate Links
The site also had affiliate links to a variety of sports-betting products.
Check out this video we made showing the affiliate programs on the sports betting blogs article on the site.
The affiliate payouts range in value and totally depend upon the affiliate program.
One of the newly added affiliate programs to the site was for ZCode Systems, a company that sells sports-betting products.
For instance, their VIP Club Pass offers fully automatic sports picks, access to a community of experts, and other sports-betting tools.
One of the ZCode Systems tools is a Scores Predictor. The tool tries to predict not only the winner but also the score and the spread.
According to ZCode, it averages $673 per sale and awards 60% to the affiliate seller.
That is $400 per sale for the affiliate. Very high for affiliate programs.
ZCode Systems says it has a 5% conversion rate. This means 5% of the traffic you send ends up in a sale.
By that math, out of every 100 visitors to the affiliate website who click on the affiliate link, on average 5 of them will buy the ZCode Systems product.
Plus, the product offers recurring revenue for their customers who stick. So making one sale could result in multiple months of revenue for the affiliate from that sale.
The trick then is to try to drive as much traffic as you can to the affiliate website where those links are posted.
In particular, drive traffic consisting of people who are into sports betting.
Please share this article with your thousands of sports betting friends!
To earn $5,000 per month using a $400 per sale affiliate program, the site would need to achieve 12.5 successful referrals per month.
With a 5% conversion rate, the affiliate site needs to send 250 people to ZCode per month.
Now we are talking!
Those numbers sound easier to achieve than the Cash App and sponsored ads numbers.
How many visitors does the affiliate site need per month in order to send 250 per month to ZCode?
It depends. The affiliate needs the right kind of traffic. Visitors who are interested in and motivated to buy sports betting tools.
For sake of discussion, assume a 5% conversion rate on the affiliate site. That means 5% of its visitors click through to ZCode.
The affiliate site needs 5,000 visitors per month to its pages with the ZCode affiliate link to send 250 people to ZCode to result in 12.5 people buying their product.
Bottom line: 5,000 monthly visitors to the affiliate site’s ZCode links correlates roughly to $5,000 in monthly affiliate income.
Not totally crazy.
Wait, it would be totally crazy if 5,000 peopler per month read this article. Do you want to help me do something crazy?
But that picture is probably too optimistic. Cutting the 5% on the affiliate site in half to 2.5% , or even down to 1%, is probably a more realistic place to start until knowing better how the affiliate converts.
The Traffic at thaca$h
At the time we took ownership of thaca$h.com, the traffic was low. Nowhere near the numbers we need to make money that gets us excited.
Check out this video we made showing our traffic on Google Analytics in the first two weeks we owned the site.
In the first two weeks post-sale, we monitored the traffic. We had roughly 170 visitors in that time. So around 350 monthly visitors.
That number is a little generous because I account for some of it and some other manufactured traffic came in due to the transfer.
A more realistic number is probably 250 monthly visitors.
The visitors were primarily going to the Cash App review page and the home page.
We made three Cash App referrals, but we did not earn the reward because the people we referred did not send cash or add a debit card within the required timeframe.
We had one company reach out about our pricing for sponsored ads. But we did not make the sale.
We quoted $300 per add with a 10% discount for purchases of 3 or more ads at a time.
We had 0 sales from the other affiliate links.
It takes a lot longer than 2 weeks to rehabilitate an affiliate site. So while these numbers seem non-existent, they do not signal failure.
They do, however, highlight that this passive income strategy is not passive to start. It takes a lot of work and time to get the traffic necessary to sustain passive income.
From my research, it would probably take a year to start selling enough ZCode Systems products consistently to make significant money.
A year of hard work. Maybe not a full-time job, but definitely a significant effort researching, writing articles, and implementing smart SEO strategies around sports betting and tools for that.
The New Strategies
The idea of devoting a year to promoting ZCode systems and similar products does not sound terrible.
But I was not jumping out of bed to do it.
That was one of the signs to me that I needed to change it up some.
Instead of relying on an affiliate strategy alone, we are changing the focus to selling our own products, like club memberships, access to tools we build, a subscription newsletter, merchandise, and more.
We still need high-quality content, but now we can be more diverse and have more control over what we promote and earn.
What gets me jumping out of bed is making things and generating content around what I make. So I think we are more likely to succeed in terms of fun and money this way instead of the other.
Look out for our next article to learn about how we are going to monetize the things we are making at thaca$h to get us jumping out of bed in the morning!