As someone who has mainly been involved in the online gambling industry, I have always wanted to branch out and get a hold of a few non-gambling income sources. Don’t get me wrong, I am not shying away from the gaming side of things at all… I would just like to diversify a little more and break into some other industries.
It’s been said many times before that poker affiliates are top notch marketers due to the level of competition in terms of gaining traffic. I like to think of it like walking around with a 500 pound weighted vest on for about a year, and then taking that vest off and feeling like you can do anything.
I haven’t really broken into other markets as much as I’ve wanted to, but I do feel confident that eventually it will happen.
Enter Forex
You just don’t know what is possible until you “test the waters”. Forex is a good example. While in Cyprus there was a lot of hype about forex affiliate programs, and people were buying domains and ranting about how easy it will be to dominate. Heh. So yea… I was one of those people, and I even went as far as developing a nice site with some decent content and doing some linking. I did some keyword research and found some terms that looked like they would be fairly easy to dominate based on the sites that were currently ranking.
Needless to say the site ranks for nothing except for it’s name. This is due to a few factors like not having many links, some links being low quality, and mostly because forex is a seriously whored out market. Try to find a good forex domain… I dare you. Chances are it has been registered by a domainer or a Digital Point member looking to build a MFA (made for Adsense) site.
The funniest thing about forex is that all of the successful sites use adsense as their main source of revenue (Hint: if the mega-authority forex sites use adsense this may be an indicator that the affiliate programs don’t convert). I know because after becoming frustrated with not being able to outrank even the crappiest of forex sites I resorted to Adwords. My quality score was excellent, but it was still costing more than $1 for a click. I then resorted to using site-targeted campaigns. What I did was pick out all of the forex sites that ranked for the terms I thought would work well, and I tried to get my ad to display on their site. This strategy was totally bunk as well because I had to pay upwards of $2 to knock out the top guy and get my ad to show.
Long story short I scrapped the adwords plan since it generated ZERO conversions despite testing different placements, ads, offers etc. (Note: Also tried on facebook and got plenty of clicks with ZERO conversions)
My advice on anyone wanting to “MAKE MONEY IN THIS AMAZING UNTAPPED MARKET WOO HOO!” would be to build a content driven forex site (probably the most boring topic ever) that can rank well and then simply run adsense on it. With the amount of search volume involved with forex it shouldn’t be hard to make some decent money since the clicks are $2 and up. The only hard part is getting your site to out rank the old, crappy sites with backlinks from ezinearticles.
In my opinion it is not worth me putting valuable time and resources into a project that cannot make me at least a few thousand if not five figures per month. I just don’t see that happening in forex without serious effort and patience. Not to mention that I would rather have a tooth pulled than write anything about forex again!
Conclusion
Forex sucks so far.
- The serps contain some really bad sites, and I have no clue how they even rank at all. I am even more baffled that my site, which has equally shitty backlinks, doesn’t rank.
- It is hard to sign someone up for a trading account with a web page.
- Forex sites make majority of their money from adsense.
- PPC cost is high.
Maybe selling a how-to ebook on forex would be easier. Rant over.
PS any forex affiliates out there please drop me a line for some link exchanges 
2 Comments
It’s indeed very hard to make decent revenues of the forex business. And yet, the forex industry is blossoming all over the world. Let alone the US market, you can see the middle east, europe, england, russia, australia… Forex is everywhere. So how do they get their traffic? how do they manage to make money through web advertising/affiliate marketing?
It took me a while to get my business up and running, but now it’s in the good direction.
Forex is not for everyone. Unlike blackjack or roulette where the learning curve is nonexistent, forex requires a certain level of interest, education and skills. It’s a tough market where even the biggest traders can loose fortunes overnight. so imagine the first time traders?? they fight in a 3000 billions/day market and have literally no control over what’s going on. so it takes time to convert a demo trader to a live trader.
i don’t know how your site looked like, and how you presented the brokers, but some of our affiliates (tradetnt.com, forex.fr) have done quite a good job and generate some good revenues.
Being successful at any affiliate program is a gamble and you have to stick with it, I understand why with forex you chose to leave it - all the best for your other affiliate websites