My First Affiliate Success

This is a guest post by Marc Kantoori from OnlineMoneyTip.com who talks about some of his beginning experiences and successes in affiliate marketing.

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Until 6 months ago I never tried anything with affiliate marketing; I was happy designing websites and optimizing Adwords campaigns for my clients. Of course I read stories about marketers making tens of thousands per month, but I didn’t really believe those stories. Most looked like ego maniacs, ready to make a quick profit selling bad quality ‘Make Money Easy’ guides.

But then a ‘nuisance’ called RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) came along and made me think harder about earning more money with less work. Of all the affiliate examples I had seen, one in particular had made me think: “Hey, could this work? It looks so simple. Almost too simple”.

I investigated it some more and found out that the main keywords involved were actually quite cheap. The lowest bid was $0.10 for position 2-3. So I designed a landing page and set up a campaign in Google Adwords. I was getting a lot of clicks and even a nice percentage of conversions, but after a month it turned out to be a ROI (Return On Investment) of 1:1 ($1 income for every $1 advertising costs). So, I gave up with this campaign. Too early, as turned out. More about that later.

Direct linking attempts, does it work?

Then I started trying out direct linking to several offers, as this can be set up very easily; often you can have a new campaign running within minutes. To be short: direct linking sucks! The only direct linking campaign that returned a profit was through promoting Amazon products. But it costs way too much time to research and select the right Amazon products to promote and the monthly profits were in the range of $100-200.

What makes it difficult with Amazon is that there is a load of competition. But the main problem is: you do not get a ‘cookie’ as an Amazon affiliate. This means that if the person who clicked on your affiliate link buys the Amazon product immediately, you get paid your commission. But when that same person, after clicking on your link, buys during a new browser session that day or a day after, you do not get paid a dime! Gone investment!

In the end only Amazon really profits … so I ditched Amazon too.

Anyone with better experiences with or tips on how to promote Amazon is welcome to send me an update !

Don’t give up too easily!

This was the lesson to be learned. After another 2 months of researching affiliate offers and reading affiliate blogs and forums, I had gotten a few other ideas about ways to set up a campaign. So I decided to go back to my previously described campaign that gave me a ROI of 1:1. But now I did some things differently:

  • I used Yahoo Search Marketing instead of Google Adwords
  • I stripped the landing page to its bare essence
  • I used ‘standard match’ with keyword bidding (same as ‘exact’ match in Adwords)
  • I turned to the european market instead of the US (less competition, I started with Italy)
  • I used 20-30 of the most common misspellings of the main product name and functions (because of Trademark issues in Europe)

After these changes to my old campaign, I started getting new and better results:

  • my CTR skyrocketed to around 20-30%
  • my conversion rate became a steady 15%
  • my ROI went to 1:10 (instead of 1:1)

Totally different results than with my previous approach. Instead of getting 1 dollar for every dollar spent, I suddenly got 10 dollars for every dollar spent. Whoohaaa! Finally I had a campaign that was working as a real ‘money train’. I then started to upscale this campaign to other products from this merchant and started advertising in other European countries. After 4 months of upscaling, this one campaign was generating $20-30,000 per month with an investment of 10% of that amount.

Marc Kantoori


36 Comments

  1. February 25, 2008

    Intrigued me enough to RSS you :)

  2. February 25, 2008

    For your campaign in Italy – did you write the ads in English or Italian?

  3. February 25, 2008

    Hi Marc,

    Were you promoting a “physical” product, or doing CPA like Paul appears to focus on?

    I’ve always wondered if promoting material products was any easier than sticking with CPA.

    -Eric

  4. February 25, 2008

    Wow, 20-30k a month spending only 2-3k is a ridiculous return on your money. I’m lucky to do 1:2 or 1:3, but any profit is profit in my book ;-)

    Also, direct linking doesn’t always suck. Depends on the product. I have a promotion going with an excellent direct to merchant landing page that make serious coin for me. I’m a bad boy though and use a masked domain to override Google’s one affiliate rule. Been going for over a year now with that campaign with no intervention from Big G. *Crosses fingers*

  5. MacG
    February 25, 2008

    Yeah ironically, my profitable campaigns have all been direct linking. But i’ll have to check out the italian traffice and see how that goes…

  6. February 25, 2008

    Great article. I am going to subscribe to your feed too.

  7. February 25, 2008

    Hi Eric,

    It is CPA.

    And I agree with you 1:10 is insane. I hope to find such a great niche once again, but I know 1:2 or 1:3 is usually something to be very satisfied with. Especially when you can do large numbers on it.

    Marc

  8. February 25, 2008

    That is an amazing success story. I am glad it worked out for you.

  9. me
    February 25, 2008

    another super-uber with blueprint, how-to or whatever guide to make money on noobs

  10. February 25, 2008

    Thanks for posting this. Any bit of info you can give the newbies here is greatly appreciated!

  11. February 25, 2008

    CONGRATS!

    And for those of you wanting info, even the smallest of hints can give it all away and ruin his profits. So, stop asking, and simply find a niche.

  12. February 25, 2008

    My italian isn’t that good ;) I hired someone at Elance.com to do the translation. Worked out great, I had it within 2 days.

  13. February 25, 2008

    And sometimes you get what you ask. Find out on my blog how to get the full blueprint of this campaign. For free!

  14. nm
    February 25, 2008

    What tool did you use for your keyword research??

    And did you just focus on Italian goods? or did you have to hire translators for 5 different languages/countries?

  15. Pete
    February 25, 2008

    Marc,

    congrats!

    3 quick questions for you:

    You said that you are bidding on, “20-30 of the most common misspellings of the main product name and functions”.

    Are all of those keywords in a single adgroup?

    Do they all point to the same landing page?

    Are you getting 5/5 bars?

    thank you,

    Pete

  16. February 26, 2008

    @nm:
    Here is one of the tools I use to find misspellings: http://www.searchspell.com/typo/

    And another: http://adlab.microsoft.com/keymut/default.aspx

    But I am sure there are even better (paid) ones.
    When your campaign starts running, you’ll notice soon enough which misspellings deliver OK traffic.

    @Pete:
    yes, they were all in the same adgroup, as long as they were directlty related to their parent keyword.

    And no, I did not have 5/5 bars, but that was mainly due to the fact that I had 200+ keywords (not all misspellings) in one adgroup. After a while I got lazy: the campaign was doing fantastic like it was …

  17. Gagan
    February 26, 2008

    Really good post. Got your brain thinking out of the box.

    Was the merchant page in English? Did you find that Euorpeans are scared to read english or if they see an english site thet turn the other way?

  18. Marc, great example to think global. We have are affiliate program set up for multiple languages and have scene that affilaites that focus on int. markets do really well.

    I always thought that we needed affiliates that new another language. But going to elance is a great way to build out additional target pages.

    good luck on global affiliate domination

    -Brian
    Affiliate Manager
    Pingo.com

  19. Gagan
    February 26, 2008

    Another question – did you bid on italian keywords or english keywords?

  20. February 26, 2008

    In the italian market the landing page was in italian and most of the keywords too.

    Most europeans can speak one or more foreign languages. I guess around 60-70% can speak english more or less fluently.

    But I think adressing them in their native language is a) better for traffic, as most of them will search in their native langauge b) will convert better because it is/feels more comfortable to them. Of course this also depends on the nature of the product you are promoting …

  21. nm
    February 26, 2008

    Hi,

    Thanks for your response, but I also wanted to know what tools you use for your original keyword research? since that is the most important thing in AM I assume.

    Also, what benchmarks did you use to figure out if there was demand for a product you were interesting in selling?

    Thanks

  22. February 26, 2008

    I think the good thing about your post is that we shouldn’t concentrate only on the US market. This is where most pay-per-click marketers are. The competition is huge in this market! It can be more easy to be succesful to focus on other markets as well…

  23. February 26, 2008

    FYI – just got this from Amazon:

    As a reminder, beginning January 1, 2007, your Amazon Associates payments will be monthly instead of quarterly, paid approximately 60 days after the end of each month. For example, referral fees you earn in January will be paid at the end of March, and payment of referral fees earned in February will be paid at the end of April.

  24. February 26, 2008

    Wouldn’t the auto translate tools be good enough? Great post and awesome job thinking outside the box.

  25. February 26, 2008

    Auto translate tools are really rough around the edges. They get the gist across, but ultimately if you want to get the highest conversion rates possible you will need to pay to have the translation done for you.

    Wouldn’t cost very much – a few hundred tops. I’ve had this done in a few of my niches and it’s proven to be very profitable – especially since the CPC for international traffic is a lot lower than for American/Canadian/UK etc. I’ve gotten 6-10 cent international clicks in markets where my US/Canadian traffic is costing 3-7 times more.

    Don’t be put off by lower conversion rates – the cheaper cost makes the ROI just about equal. And profit is profit.

  26. February 27, 2008

    Is it just me? Or these kind of blogs always tell what they do but not HOW they do it…? It’s like bragging…

  27. MacG
    February 27, 2008

    Nobody is ever going to tell exactly what they do, unless its no longer making them money.

  28. February 27, 2008

    Exactly my thoughts. I paid around $50-75 for the translation of 1 landing page.

    An important aspect of high converison rates is to portray an image of credibility and trust. The better you achieve this, the higher your conversion rate will be. A page with a lot of missspellings and wrong wording isn´t going to help you much.

    Try to use an autotranslate service to translate a spanish or italian page into english … you´ll have a good laugh!

    Marc

  29. February 27, 2008

    The point is to grab a few nuggets and essentially go off and do your own experimentation. If I spend hundreds of hours perfecting a campaign, it would be kind of silly for me to post it up on my blog for the world to see and essentially ruin any chances I would have had with that campaign.

    No one will do this for you. It’s all on you. Now get back to work ;-)

  30. JimBob
    February 27, 2008

    These blog “postings” are PAID advertisements and sales pitches for e-books and to drive traffic , 20-30K per month selling wrist relief to Italians? give be an FN break…. Wake up people…

  31. February 27, 2008

    I’m not a big fan of Amazon aff but I have made a few bucks and I’ll tell the new folks the way to do it, but it is a big pain in the posterior.

    Market a bunch of lower-end products as well that no aff marketers will bid on and break even so you can get your monthly order count up to the highest tier.

    Then you take all your sneaky “winner” products and squash your competition who can’t bid as high as you unless they were idiots.

    However, you’re going to end up with so much stuff running that unless you are coding up some things to monitor it all, it will take all of your time. Sweatshop marketing :)

  32. February 27, 2008

    Marc, where is your feed icon?

  33. February 28, 2008

    ASW was epic, that’s all I can say.

    http://flickr.com/photos/jared85/2296855811/

    WHAT? HOLLLLLA

  34. February 28, 2008

    Yep, I need to take care of that, I ´lost´ it somewhere last month, while re-arranging my site. Here is a link to my feed, although I won´t post much the next 2 weeks, because I´m on a holi-work-day to write my guide:

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/MakeMoneyOnlineWithOnlineMoneyTip

  35. March 2, 2008

    GREAT Post. Very helpful. Will apply this as I am getting into affiliate marketing as well.

  36. Matt A
    March 7, 2008

    GREAT POST. I just started getting into affiliate marketing about 2 weeks ago pretty frustrating yet fun! The postt was very helpful. Any info is better than no info. Keep it up!

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