Blogging Tips

5 Warning Signs Of Overselling

Written by Ramkarthik from Blogging Tune

One of the bad things about affiliate marketing is, people start to oversell when they start to see money from their sites. Few bloggers, not all, have a misconception that if they have many affiliate links, they will earn more money. It’s the opposite once you reach a certain limit. The more affiliate links you have, lesser the money you will earn. I’m probably confusing you here. Let me give you an example to make my point clearer to you.

You visit a blog, they have two banners and a couple of affiliate links that goes along the content. You visit another blog, which has more banners than content and every link that goes out of their blog is affiliate link. Which blog would you prefer to buy products from? Will you go with the former or the latter? I will surely buy from the first blog. The main reason is that they link to only few products and especially those that are really good. Some people will disagree with me in this point. In fact, I would get negative comments for this post. But it is your opinion and you have every right to disagree with what I am saying.

I know I have given you a good introduction and if you want to know more about overselling, you can read my last post on “Are you overselling to your readers?”

Now let me tell you the 5 warning signs of overselling.

1. Drop In Subscribers Count
If you are having more ads and very little information, only a few people will bare with it. I’m not one of those and I’m sure most of this blog’s readers are like me. Let’s consider the top blogs. How many affiliate links or banners do you see in problogger or in [your favorite blog here]? Don’t be surprised if I say this is one of the main reasons why people don’t unsubscribe from the top blogs.

2. Lesser Page Views
The ones that remain as your blog’s subscribers, even if you have ads, will be the ones who read blog posts in the feed reader itself. This decreases your blog’s page views or unique visitors. In feed reader, people don’t see your banners and they will be happy reading your blog in the feed reader. Now you see my point?

3. Decrease In Number Of Comments
When people are not visiting your blog, how will they comment in your blog? This is simple logic. No visitors will mean zero comments. Many people post in forums that their blogs don’t get the number of comments they deserve. This is mainly because you are overselling in your blog.

4. Less To No Affiliate Sales
If people don’t spend time to comment in your blog, they will not spend money. Leaving a comment doesn’t cost anything and yet your blog readers don’t comment in your blog. Will they take money out of their pockets to buy something you are selling?

5. High Bounce Rate
People won’t stay in your blog for a long time if your blog is full of ads and affiliate links. This is not something that is going to bother you much. But if you want to have increase in all the above four listed points, you should see to that your blog’s bounce rate is low. You can track the bounce rate using google analytics.

Do you agree with all the points? Let me know which points you have experienced as a result of overselling? Please share your opinion in the comments.

Written by Ramkarthik from Blogging Tune
Posted on October 18th, 2008 and filed under Blogging
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9 Responses to “5 Warning Signs Of Overselling”

Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts author in the comments

Hussein says:

October 18, 2008 at 10:37 am

Oops. I think I am overselling coz I got too many ads in my blog. But I still have good number of comments and page views. But I actually have less affiliate sales and high bounce rate. Maybe I have to work on with this problem.
willbill says:

October 18, 2008 at 11:25 am

I think you’re right that overselling will really drive readers away because when I entered to a site overcrowded with ads, I immediately goes away Sometimes, I don’t even bother looking it the content is valuable. I just hope I won’t fall in this temptation as I grow my blog. Thanks for the reminder.
Wesley says:

October 18, 2008 at 4:15 pm

I agree with the first point, however I think Problogger is a terrible example. I used to subscribe but there were way too many ads so I stopped because it was getting really annoying.
Rajeev Edmonds says:

October 19, 2008 at 7:51 am

Unfortunately, a large percentage of Affiliate Marketers never take the pain to visit their own blog/website as a reader. Once they do that, they will immediately catch the problem.
Mike Huang says:

October 19, 2008 at 1:17 pm

I have simply moved away from blogging because of all these new blogs in the blogosphere just overselling themselves. Money makers like John Chow are just teaching strategies that is ruining everything.

-Mike
Affiliate Marketing Guide says:

October 19, 2008 at 4:08 pm

Overselling is the biggest reason why I would stop following a blog. It gets particularly bad when the blog’s articles become geared towards selling – either through recommending products which really aren’t that great or writing paid posts. If affiliate links can be added naturally that’s ok but not when articles are written solely to promote a certain affiliate product.
Codrut Turcanu I Start Blogging says:

October 26, 2008 at 1:34 pm

I think that when you publish a post and no comments show up within 48 hours, there’s something wrong with it.

If your post did not intrigue at least one folk to give you feedback, then you should write a controversial post… or simple offer an incentive to get comments.

It works in 9 out of 10 times!