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

One good thing that every affiliate marketer does is test. We test landing pages, keywords, ad copy, offers, everything that can possibly make us more money. I always talk about how dropping a lot of money testing is the real way to hit it big in a niche. But just because I suggest to start with a decent budget, doesn’t mean you have to utilize it poorly. Here are a few different tips when starting to test a campaign to help manage your cash flow and cut losses down.

Start WIth Yahoo/MSN, Move To Google

You’re most likely going to get cheaper clicks with Yahoo than you will with Google. So use Yahoo as your building block to find the profitable keywords. Add a ton of keywords into Yahoo and make sure you’re tracking everything. Let it run for a few days and then pause the campaign. Find all the keywords that are profiting (or breaking even), and put them in a new, more targeted campaign in Yahoo. From there, work on optimizing the landing page, ad copy, and offer for the highest possible profit.

Now simply just take this campaign and import it into Google. You’ll get a ton more volume but eliminate the high deficits that come with it.

Budget Yourself Accordingly

Just because you have a $5,000 budget doesn’t mean you have to spend $5,000/day and blow through it all in a day or two. Set $250 daily budgets and tweak a little each day, and really draw out the time-frame in which you have to test.

Get That Higher Payout NOW

Don’t wait until you’re doing 100 leads/day on the offer to ask for a payout increase. You can ALWAYS get a bump before you even start running the offer, usually a pretty good bump. I just recently got a $4.50 bump on an offer before I even send a dimes worth of traffic. That really helps cut my losses down when I’m initially testing out the offer. So don’t wait for it, tell your affiliate manager you need a higher payout to start testing or you have to look elsewhere.

Track, Track, Track

The best possible way you can make the best out of your testing money is by tracking everything. If you get a ton of data out of your tests, it is well worth the investment you make. You don’t have to pay thousands for the “latest ppc software” out there either, there’s plenty of free affiliate tracking tools out there like P202.

This is basically a no-brainer. Test out keywords and weed out the ones that aren’t profiting. Test different landing pages and send the most possible clicks to the offer. Test similar offers and see which ones have the highest conversion rate. Just don’t stop testing.

Use PPC Coupons

There’s always a YSM coupon floating around there somewhere, sometimes they can be great (highest I’ve gotten was $200 in free clicks). These things are great for testing because you don’t really care what happens with the money as you didn’t actually buy the clicks in the first place and everything is profit. People tend to be a lot more conservative when it’s their own money, and naturally so. Having a $200 free budget one day can make you just go all-out, and then you’ll realize how valuable doing that was; as long as you tracked properly.

Alright just a couple random tips that came to mind, hope you enjoyed.