Confessions Of A Super Duper AffiliateAffiliate marketing information, help, reviews, and tips.

Here is one of the top 10 runners up for my MarketLeverage “affiliate mistakes” contest.

Let’s just get straight into it (the list is in no particular order) –

Mistake #1 - Refreshing your stats page every 2 seconds (heck I’m still guilty of this from time to time.) This is what happens -

You get 3 leads from 8 visitors and you get super excited so you up your bids by 300% only to beat yourself about it later. You guys know who you are… In fact, I’m sure many affiliates start out exactly like that.

The cure is to check your stats as few times as possible. So you don’t make decisions based on emotion and statistically insignificant data.

LET THE CAMPAIGN RUN! I’d say let it run a week before you make a decision because an offer might perform differently on different days. Perhaps your offer will do VERY GOOD on the weekends, for other offers it might be during weekdays at work-hours. TEST & FIND OUT!

Mistake #2 – Not bidding high enough-I’m now getting more and more aggressive with my bidding.

This has been beaten to DEATH on this blog. Don’t fear to bid high.

Now before you go off and do something crazy – let me tell you how to do it.

By bidding high, you can do high volume. You then ask your affiliate manager to set you a goal/target to achieve for the month. And if you achieve that target, ask them to retro your previous leads at the new payout.

For example, I promote a $4 offer and generate 100 leads for it every day. That’s $400 a day… But I’m spending $500 to make that $400. That’s a loss of $100 every day.

Ask your aff. manager that if you’re consistent and do 100 leads everyday for that offer this month, then s/he should retro you $6.

By doing this, you’ll have end up making a $100 profit everyday for the entire month.

Why is bidding high so important?

Mike Reninings from ‘The Coming AdWords War’ report (http://www.thecomingadwordswar.com – read page 47-48) did an experiment where he had 2 identical ad groups – one with low bid and the other with high bid strategy. The results were interesting –

In terms of conversions, he found the difference was 53 to 1, that is an improvement of 5,300%.

I’m not doing justice to the report. Please go and read the report in its entirety to get the full picture.

Mistake #3 - Not networking enough- I’ve been trying to figure things out myself using different online blogs, help articles & trial and error. I haven’t networked at all except through IM (with very few people but that’s not the same as meeting someome in person.)

I’ve already had little success with networking. A while ago, I was looking for a cheaper alternative to GoDaddy because they were charging an extra $8 or so to keep my WhoIS info private. I asked this affiliate dude that I knew and he told me about Google’s domain registration -

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/domains.html

You get charged $10 for a domain and it includes whois protection.

Once I’ve registered 100 domain names, that’s a saving of $800 compared to domain registration on Godaddy.com.

Paul himself has attributed a large part of his success to networking so it’s something I must do and you guys reading this must also.

Mistake #4 – Not starting with Yahoo! sooner.

Currently, I’m running a campaign on Yahoo! & Google and Yahoo! is pulling in more leads for me than Google. (This reminds me that I need to set up an account with MSN too and test my offer on it.)

Mistake #5 – Not tracking aggressively some times.

Get a tracking202.com account. I usually only use it for the keyword data. That stuff is invaluable!

(TIP: On one particular offer, I used it to track keywords from 2nd tier PPC engines and I looked at keywords that got conversions. I further researched into that keyword and saw potential so I expanded my keyword list and put it up on Yahoo! & Google. This way you are only paying $0.10 per keywords on 2nd tier keyword and finding the converting keywords. Once you found those keywords, you can expand on them and add them to Yahoo! & Google to get the best volumes for those keywords.)

Mistake #6 – Spending A LOT of time setting up a campaign without doing a quick test to make sure that offer converts.

Once, I made a whole Powerpoint presentation for this one particular offer and then recorded the presentation using Camtasia and finally wrote some copy to complement the video which took up a nice chunk of time… Only to send a few visitors to the page and stopping altogether. BAD BAD BAD!

I should have at least tested the offer by aggressively direct linking and seeing if the offer converts. But then again, back then I had very little money and I couldn’t afford to do any aggressive bidding. And it didn’t help that it was a competitive niche.

So I understand the situation some of you guys with no money might be in – to people like these I strongly recommend getting a job and living on minimal expenses. Earn the money and then invest in campaigns. I say invest for a reason (and not ‘waste’)… Even if you lose money, you learn SOMETHING. Always ask – WHY DID THIS OFFER NOT WORK?? Did you pull it too soon? Is the landing page just PLAIN horrible? Are your keywords not targeted enough? etc. etc.

Mistake #7 – Giving up on a campaign after hitting it from one angle only. As I type this, this one particular offer comes to mind that I want to go back and give another try. After running a few clicks to it, I just gave up on it. BAD, BAD, BAD!

If direct linking doesn’t work because the merchant is advertising on PPC, try setting up a landing page. That doesn’t work? Try having an opt-in page strategy. That doesn’t work? Did you try the content network?

Mistake #8 - Not keeping up with the industry. Just drifting to different blogs and trying to pick up tips & news here and there.

Get a Google Reader account and subscribe to all the top industry blogs out there. I’ve just started doing this and I’m already seeing huge benefits. Like for example today I found out a site to get a free £30 Google voucher (http://www.here.org.uk/2008/06/free-google-adwords-voucher-30-free-online-advertising-voucher.html); another thing I found out is the new feature of Google trends that compares website’s traffic (read more here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-layer-to-google-trends.html). And finally I’m writing this article because my Google Reader updated to Paul’s latest post about getting entries in before the deadline.)

Mistake #9 – Not starting sooner with PPC to CPA marketing. Start small but do start! Skip eating out in a restaurant this month – throw that money into different offers and find out what works.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have questions, I might do a follow-up.

Signing off,

‘Aff. X’

Ok, you guys made it WAY too hard to pick a winner. I just spent the last 2-3 hours reading every article, and trying to narrow it down. I started with the 45 or so articles and narrowed it down to 10. That was hard enough in itself, so imagine how hard picking 3 out of the top 10 was.

Anywho, I’m going to announce the winners in individual posts. I’ll announce the First Place winner today and post their article, then Second and Third the following 2 days. After that, I’ll still post all the other great entries, because we can all learn a lot from them. Even if some of the points are repeated, that just means we’ve found a common point and should really learn from that mistake. Now onto the winner…

Drumroll please…

The first place winner is…William C. I loved the message behind this article and it’s so true, really a great read. Congrats William! Here’s the entry :

Mistakes Made And Lessons Learned

Affiliate marketing, Few know what it is, Yet so many wish to become one. Lured by promises of the get rich quick dream, Many Will try and few will succeed. It is A True test of determination and Will. Affiliate Marketing Is not for the weak and fearful. Mistakes will be made and lessons to be learned from it all.

Wither or not you succeed with Affiliate marketing, the mistakes you make and fix along the way give you more experience in marketing and business than most people could ever dream of. There are only so many things books can teach you, but one thing you will never get out of a book is experience, and to me that’s all that matters in the business world.

Growing up my parents would pound the phrase “you’re going to college” in the back of my mind any chance they got. I didn’t grow up in the best of conditions but I always made best of what I had. Through high school I got side tracked with a few bad influences in my life and ended up dropping out and getting my GED and heading straight for community college. Not long after that I dropped out of College. From the day I dropped out of High school I vowed to never work a 9-5 job. All my life I Had heard how the only way to succeed was through college. I disagreed. I felt school was never really my cup of tea. Although I did enjoy learning and the school life style, I just never really got in the rhythm of it.

In my late years in high school I had started working small operations online through websites like digital point. Building small sites selling them back, running proxy sites you name it I’ve probably done it. For my last two years in high school I was working from my room making more money than my friends working 30 hours a week at star bucks. I loved it. The whole idea of working from home making more money than the average Joe was a lifetime goal of mine and I was doing it. Telling myself I would be happy with 3,000$ a month I continued to work toward my goal awaiting that day I would reach my goal.

Then one day a good friend of mine who I had not talked to in a good while told me about affiliate marketing and how he was making hundreds a day. Obviously this intrigued me and soon enough I followed suit. My first market was Ringtones. The dreaded saturated market in which every Noob should stay far far away from! Either from sheer dumb luck or past experience my first run with ringtones was an automatic profit. From day one I profited, Now really intrigued by the potential I continued deeper and deeper into the ringtone market. I had my share of bumps in the road but all learning experiences.

Next thing I know I am making 3,000$ a month profiting 100$ a day every day. Not even realizing that I had reached my goal. All I had time to worry about was improving and pushing harder. 4,000$, 5,000$, 6,000$ I had doubled my goal amount by 2x and I was making more money than both my parents combined. Falling off the horse a few times but always getting back on I ventured farther and farther into the ringtones market. I had something to prove to everyone who ever doubted me. That was all the motivation I ever needed. I pushed forward until one day I sat down looking at my monitor at 4pm in the afternoon and seeing for the first time, my first 1,000$ day. Not only had I accomplished my initial goal, I had bested it 10x over. A High school and college kid drop out. Three years of Online experience has brought me 30,000$ a month in revenue. I had proven all of my doubters wrong. And now I achieved a income even most college graduates would dream of. I had succeeded in my lifetime goal at the age of 18. I never stepped foot in a real world job, I never plan too. Entrepreneur Is the only title I want.

Now recently hitting my 2,000$ a day mark I look back and reflect on the mistakes and lessons on the road to where I am now. The biggest mistake I’ve been making is not taking the time to look back on all my failures. Nobody wants to acknowledge failure let alone reflect on it, But the lesson to be learned from it is that mistakes are success in a nutshell. You can learn to look at mistakes as failures and shrug them off and never think about it again or you can look at mistakes as experience gained and a lesson to be learned with each mistake.

The best piece of advice anyone can ever give you in business is to take the time to stop. Reflect on your mistakes, Write them down, in a journal if you want and figure out the reason why you failed. Don’t brush it off without knowing why you failed in the first place, The same reason why some people never succeed is because they never learned from their mistakes and its an endless cycle of failure. Don’t be afraid of failure, You can’t avoid it so when you do fail approach it as a learning experience and knowledge gained from it. The more you fail the more experienced you become. I would seek advice from people who have multiple failures than people who have none. They know what not to do, and that experience will always be with them and they can only get better from it.

So take the time to analyze your failures when and if they do happen. Write them down in a notebook to record it for future preference if need be. Tossing aside your mistakes will be the biggest mistake you will ever make. So learn your lesson now before it becomes a huge flaw in your business model.

I hope you enjoyed the read.
Thank you,
William C.

Most of the time when we evaluate ourselves, we ask “What is keeping me from making that $100/day?” Why can somebody else make $1,000 per day and I’m struggling just getting to $100? There are a few common reasons that I can think of, and maybe some of them apply to you.

Reason #1 : Fear

Probably the most common reason people don’t succeed, is because of fear. They don’t believe that a person can make $1,000/day online, and don’t want to risk their hard earned salary in taking a chance to do the impossible. How many times have I said on this blog that you can’t be afraid? Many. You need to stock up some cash, and just go for it. Go all out, bid high, test keywords, test ad copy, test landing pages; and see what works. That’s the hard part, after that you just take what works and keep optimizing it to be more profitable, it’s all gravy baby.

Reason #2 : Cash Flow

I see this a lot in e-mails or on forums, a complaint is “I keep running out of money so I have to pause my PPC campaigns.” I always say the same thing to people…CREDIT CARDS! Get the most simple Amex, something like a Blue Cash (that was my first card), and if you can’t get approved with Amex try and get a MasterCard or something with a decent limit. This way you can spend money and not have to pay until the end of the month. Just make sure you either have enough money in the bank to cover it, or are profiting with the campaign.

Step 2 to this equation is getting better payment terms from your affiliate networks. Just explain to them that your cash flow is tight, and in order to continue the campaign with them you need to be on bi-weekly payments at least. As long as you’re making more than $5/day, they should be able to help you out because they want your business.

Reason #3 : Payout Problems

Many times the thing keeping your campaigns from profiting is the payout on the offer. Networks take a lot (20% on average) of the commission that you’re earning for them, they ALWAYS have room to increase your payout when you first start an offer. Negotiate and explain to them how much more you need per lead to be profitable and keep the campaign running, and you’d be surprised at how much they “can do for you.”

Reason #4 : Improper/Lazy Tracking

I’m even subject to this a lot, I start a campaign and I’m either too impatient or too lazy to set up proper tracking. I just let it rip and lose $1,000 and don’t even know what keywords converted and what ones didn’t. Don’t be lazy in getting your campaign set up, take your time and make sure you’re tracking everything. The “successful affiliate marketing formula” is really pretty simple, launch a test, track which keywords and ad copy convert, and get rid of the crap ones while optimizing the profit/breaking-even ones. So make sure before you launch a campaign that all your pixels are placed and other tracking things are in line.

Reason #5 : Distractions Distractions

I’m not gonna lie, right now you’re being distracted from directly working on your campaigns and making money. Things like reading blogs, visiting forums, blah blah. All these things can take up a lot of time, time that you could be spending making more money. I’m not going to write a story about this one, because I’ve said it a million times along with everybody else out that that’s ever given advice. Keep the distractions to a minimum and just focus on testing, tracking, and pulling out the trends.

Are you victim to any of these things?

One of the popular email questions is always, “How did your earnings shoot up so much over just one year?” If you remember, I posted My One Year Anniversary in affiliate marketing. I did have some pretty awesome growth in my first year in this industry, and I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished. The main reason I started this blog was to share my trials, failures, and things I’ve learned in the past year, while also doing things like posting my earnings to motivate you guys and show everybody that success is truly possible. In light of that, I’d like to share some of the reasons why I think my growth happened as fast as it did.

Motivation

This is probably the main reason behind why anybody does what they do. You have to be motivated to have success online, it has to be something you want to do and strive to achieve in every day. Without motivation you’re not going to be productive or profitable. My initial motivation was to make enough money to quit the horrible part-time jobs I worked while going to college. Once I succeeded at that, my motivation was to make enough to be able to be a full time affiliate marketer once I got out of college. Once I got to that point, my motivation was to make enough to just put a hold on school and make as much money as I could, as fast as I could. That’s still the driving factor that motivates me to this day. It also leads to my next point…

Goals

The best way to accomplish something is to set a goal, and then work towards that goal. My first goals were to just make enough money to pay for gas. Once I achieved that, I set new goals and worked towards those. Back in the summer I told myself I would take a year off of school, and if I wasn’t making $100,000/month revenue by June I would be going back to school. Now school just isn’t for me, so I wanted more than anything to accomplish that goal. Because of my motivation coupled with the goal I set, I was able to completely smash that goal with well over 6 months to spare.

Fearlessness

I set some pretty aggressive goals for myself. I was a FLAT BROKE college student who in less than a year wanted to quit his part-time job, drop out of college, and run a multi million dollar business. If you have similar goals and want to be serious about them, you have to just let go of everything and run your business with no fear. In the early stages I was down to -$300 in my only bank account because I had overdrawn on my debit card to pay Yahoo. It was stressful, definitely. But I didn’t panic and just pay off that debt and then quit internet marketing. I sucked it up and gave it another go, and eventually I built up some savings. This again happened many times, and happens to this day. Things are great, and just like that they can really go downhill. A couple months into it I was doing pretty well, and my main campaign almost completely died out and started losing money. I could have very easily just called it a “good shot”, and walked away with the few thousand dollars I had made in that couple months. I wanted to achieve my goals though, so I had to be fearless and think of another way to make money.

Networking

Networking is definitely a major reason I’ve had success. Without networking, I wouldn’t have met/spoken with some of my biggest contacts. You could go back in my networking time line, and if you cut out one person here or there, I could be making only 5% of what I do now. Networking was suchhh a big reason I had as much success as I did. That’s why I strongly advise to hit up events like Affiliate Summit and ad:tech no matter what income or skill range you’re in. The contacts you can potentially make are absolutely invaluable…simply can’t put a price tag on it.

Time

I don’t even want to think of how much time in the past year that I’ve stared at a computer screen. For the first 6 months I was on a computer from the moment I woke up, until the moment I went to bed. I’d wake up and head to college…all through classes I’d just be sitting online on my laptop. During breaks I’d be on my laptop. I’d get home and work on my laptop until 3 in the morning. The only tangible thing in my life at that time was my girlfriend. Now I don’t spend as much time, but I do spend a lot of time working. I’m on the phone all the time with people now, and now it’s more of a communication game. I have the skills to crank out whatever I want in a pretty short period of time, it’s just making the connections to really turn those skills into results.

Blogging

I do attribute a lot of my affiliate success to blogging. It’s proven to be a great networking tool, and as stated before; networking is key. Instead of always having to go out and find contacts, because of my blog they know who I am, and can come to me. It also gives me some credibility so that when I talk to people, they know I’m not some newb looking for bread crumbs to fall from the table. It’s a bit blunt but true, people treat you differently.

My Girlfriend

AweeeeeeeeeeeeeeEeEeEe!

Seriously though this one is true. There were more times than I could count where things were too stressful for me. Trying to get online to make money is hard sometimes when you know you have -$300 to your name. My girlfriend was someone to talk to and help keep me together during the many times life was too stressful. If you don’t have one (or wife), I recommend you start looking. I’m always here for comfort if you’re losing money, but unfortunately I can’t be there to snuggle with you unless you’re willing to fly me first class.

Family/Support

Family was also key in my success. My parents were indeed upset when I had no money but kept telling them to have faith, and that I knew what I was doing. But they still were able to front money here and there to pay for my broken down car repairs as well as giving me a place to live. I would have been in some financial trouble if it hadn’t been for my parents. So family is an important factor, whether it be your blood family or friends that have become your family.

I’m sure there’s more to it, but that’s all I could come up with. This late night writing makes me ready for sleep hah, but hopefully this gives you guys some insight as to how I’ve grown so quickly over the past year. It’s not saying “Well I did it because of [this] campaign using [these] keywords…” That would obviously be stupid on my part, but all of what I said was true, and these were all the factors that made all my campaigns and keywords possible. Do you have the mindset of a millionaire?

Have a good one.

Why is it that when we read around all these forums, eBooks, and blogs, that everybody is always saying, “yeah affiliate marketing is easy, you can get a profitable campaign running in no time.” Maybe I’ve been victim myself to saying it somewhere. Here’s the reality of it : affiliate marketing is not easy. I know there are many people out there who have read all the top blogs and bought a few eBooks, yet still can’t seem to get the hang of affiliate marketing. I know because I was one of those people. I scraped all the top blogs and read every popular post, read hundreds of forum posts, and asked people for advice. According to everything I had read, I had all the information to make an easy $250,000/year. Yet still I tried campaign after campaign with no success. If affiliate marketing were easy, you wouldn’t see the hundred posts a day saying “why am I not successful?” If you’re one of those people who just can’t “get it”, or blow your campaigns through the roof, I’m going to try and outline some of the possible reasons why.

 
Reason #1 : Information Overload

Especially when just starting out, I think too much information can be a bad thing. While everything in this blog is pure gold and you should read it, sometimes it can all be too much. If you spend a month reading every single archive of every single affiliate blog out there, you’ll end up :

1) Confused with all the different strategies to use.
2) With a month of time that could have been devoted to testing campaigns.

Sure you’ll know a hell of a lot about affiliate marketing, but the trick here comes into actually putting what you’ve learned into good use, and how to do that. Go to my affiliate marketing guide and just read the general guides. You can learn some general techniques that you should then go out and test right away. Don’t try to use every strategy in that guide at once…you’ll be in over you head which sets yourself up for failure and all the things that come with it.

Reason #2 : Nike is Right : Just Do It

I can’t even guess how many times this has been said/posted, but it needs to be said again. Just get out there and do it already. Read some general guides on strategies, and then test them right away! Research and pick a campaign, research some keywords, write the ads, get a landing page up, and click ‘Activate’! You can spend months researching and reading and learning and you’ll be a genius at affiliate marketing…a broke genius. By just testing things on your own, you’ll find out so many things that people aren’t telling you, and even things that people aren’t aware of.

So pretty please, if you want to start making money as fast as possible, stop wasting your time posting at forums and reading every blog out there. Some of the most popular blogs contain the least amount of actual useful information…

Reason #3 : Fear

Fear may be the biggest leading cause of Affiliate Failure Syndrome (AFS). If you’re afraid to take two steps backward in order to take 10 leaps forward, then the game just isn’t for you. Don’t be afraid to bid aggressively – you should be doing it at the start of a campaign anyway. One of the dumbest things out there to do is bidding your minimum bids on every keyword. Here’s what that will get you :

1) Bad volume.
2) Longer delay in building up stats.
3) Low revenue.
4) Discouragement from seeing no volume and no money.
5) Quitting.

Bid aggressively, start pulling in some nice numbers, and pull the data and learn from it. If you want to be an uber affiliate, DO NOT be afraid to lose a couple thousand dollars on a campaign. If you don’t want to risk your bank account cash you have now, go out and make a lemonaid stand and lace it with crack or something so people keep coming back for more, I don’t care – just get some money.

Reason #4 : Not Thinking Outside the Box

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my experiences, is that there’s so many ways to make money off affiliate marketing that people don’t talk about. Just because everybody has their blog about PPC marketing doesn’t mean it’s the only way to make good money. Sure I have methods that I don’t post about in this blog. Think of a way to make money from your affiliate offers and test it out. If it works, don’t tell anybody, why should they know?

You can also think outside the box when it comes to PPC marketing. Think of some crazy strategies and test them out. I recently tested a pretty unorthodox strategy with a campaign, and it worked out really well. It’s actually funny because now I see that a VERY large affiliate has adopted the same strategy. I was like what in the, that bastard is using my uber idea.

Reason #5 : Not Attending Events

This isn’t by any means necessary in order to make money, but trust me, it’s worth the investment. Go to a conference for the networking. Nobody knows that you’re not that good at affiliate marketing, and you aren’t planning on telling them that (although it’s a great ice breaker, “Hey, my name’s Paul. I suck at affiliate marketing and can’t seem to make any money. Interested in doing business?”). You’ll be able to chat with people in the industry, and most will at least talk about information that you can use to start making money (ie telling you a niche that’s converting particularly well, or a random tip here and there).

Reason #6 : Starting a Blog

Haha, if you want the most time to work on your campaigns, don’t start an affiliate marketing blog…trust me. Really though, a blog can be a great networking tool and they can be really fun, but when you’re starting out, focus 100% of your time on your campaigns. Wait until you’re successful and then start a blog, most people like reading that kind of stuff anyways. Most people start the “Hey I’m just starting and I’m broke, watch me on my journey to make money” blogs, and nobody really reads them until they’re like “well I just had my first $1,000 day today”. Save yourself the time and wait until you have your $1,000 day before you start a blog.

 

So yeah, if you’re stuck on campaigns and don’t know why, maybe give this post some thought. Take some information, learn from it, and start testing out things until something really sticks. Good luck and Godspeed.