Targetting add-on products on TurboBikeTrainer.com
Turbo Trainers are the primary focus of TurboBikeTrainer.com, it makes sense. However, there are plenty of additional ways that this site could make money. It is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the people on the website have at least some interest in cycling and/or fitness in general. This is why I have a Deals and Offers section that has all sorts of deals related to cycling in general rather than just turbo trainers. There was one other product more directly related to turbo trainers though that I always thought I should put on the site, and that was training videos specifically related to turbo training.
One issue I had was that these videos were relatively low cost, which meant the commission I would get was also low. It therefore never really made it to the top of my list of things to do across all of my websites. My mood changed slightly though when a Black Friday promotion caught my eye from The Sufferfest, who make downloadable cycling training videos. I had some contact recently with the guys at Minoura, who make turbo trainers, when I was writing the Minoura buyers guide and was doing some research. Minoura have links with The Sufferfest, and I was offered a free download. I of course accepted and downloaded one of The Sufferfest videos and checked it out. Anyway, Black Friday….
If you want to see what these training videos are click on the image below.
Which Affiliate Network?
I had my Deals and Offers section on the site already, so I put this Sufferfest Black Friday deal on there. At the time I had no affiliate program with The Sufferfest, so I found out which affiliate network they went through, which turned out to be ShareaSale.com. As a bonus and which is normally the general way with downloadable media, their commissions were higher than commissions are on physical goods. The Sufferfest paid out 15% commission on any sales, which is 10%+ more than I get with the actual turbo trainers themselves. However, at a cost of $12.99 (~£8) I was not going to make that much. I included the affiliate tracking code to the Black Friday deal and I also placed a logo in the sidebar on TurboBikeTrainer.com just to see what happened.
Was it worth it?
After a week or so, to my surprise, I saw $15.42 in my ShareaSale.com account. Closer inspection revealed that I had indeed made some sales through The Sufferfest. I was a little confused, because I had only made 1 sale but this was for $102.82. I looked at The Sufferfest website and saw they did packages for all of their videos, and this was considerably more expensive than just single videos. They also sold other things like cycling gear, so maybe The Sufferfest was a good affiliate to promote. I therefore decided to write a proper article on the website to make more site visitors aware of these training videos. It wasn’t a review or my opinions, it was just an overview of the training videos and what kinds of things they covered.
You can see this article here, and I also put an area on the homepage to make it more obvious to site visitors. Hopefully I can make a few more sales, and if I do I will have to research other add-on products to include on the site.
Have you got a website focused around a niche product? What are you thoughts on this?
