All posts in Affiliate Tips

You can make a very nice living off of strictly affiliate marketing alone, but in some cases there is a “next” level to everything – and that next level I’m talking about is being an advertiser. First I’ll just make this point: when I talk about being an advertiser, I’m not specifically talking about owning/producing your own product…in my case I’m talking about getting a service direct through somebody like Mobile Messenger and brokering it out to affiliate networks. What are the perks to being an advertiser?

1) You get your own custom built offer where you get to host everything, and do whatever you want with the data (ie collect emails and use those to make money). You can optimize it however you want without having to wait for days for affiliate networks to contact the advertiser and finally get back to you.

2) You’re going to get a massive payout boost. If I told you some of the verticals and what going direct paid vs. going through an affiliate network…would make you sick.

3) You get not only yourself – but affiliates on affiliate networks to promote your service. This is hugeeeeeee…they do the work in getting leads for you!

Those are just the main perks and while it does take work, there is a lot of money to be made being an advertiser. But you don’t just become an advertiser overnight, it takes a lot of things. My intention for this article isn’t to just excite everybody and get them wanting to be an advertiser next week – it’s to be realistic. Here are a few of the things you’ll need if you want to take it to the next level :

1) Cash. If you’re making $100/day from affiliate marketing, you probably don’t have the cash flow to become an advertiser. I suppose it depends on what type of advertising you’re doing. For example if you make a mobile offer and want to get it on networks, they’re done on a subscription basis. Most mobile advertisers don’t see a profit until 6+ months of recurring income. That’s 6 months you have to have millions of dollars to pay out affiliate networks and affiliates (depending on the size of the offer). You either need to get funding, or have horrible horrible payment terms where nobody will run your offer.

2) Expertise in your offer. You probably want to be doing high volume on your offer and know everything there is to know about it before you have affiliates running it. First reason is because you’ll be keeping your own cash flow alive. Second reason is because you’ll be able to know what converts on the back end, and what doesn’t. If you have affiliates sending crap traffic that you’re paying for, you need to know to cut them. If you’re going to become an advertiser in an offer, I personally wouldn’t do so until you’re making at least $5,000-$10,000/day from it at one point – because that will most likely demonstrate that you know what you’re doing in the niche.

3) Help. In affiliate marketing there is a front-end, and there is a back-end. The glorious front-end is all most of us affiliates see. We push our traffic to a simple form, they fill it out, and we get paid. A lot of affiliates (including myself) will hire help just to manage the front-end of things. Imagine how much goes on in the back-end. You have people canceling subscriptions, people calling customer support, traffic that is losing you a lot of money, and you have to make up for that traffic by monetizing the back-end as well. You can try to do all this yourself, but you’re probably not going to be able to do it. Again this depends on the type of offer you’re running, if you’re just running it through a merchant or something then they still handle the phone support and such.

4) Connections. The higher up you get, the more connections you’ll need. When we’re beginning affiliates we don’t have many connections…we have a list of offers and an affiliate manager. As we grow and start pushing some volume, we get more attention from affiliate managers as well as the advertiser. As you get to high volume, the advertiser wants to get you direct or offer you white-labels through the affiliate network. You make more friends that are pushing volume, meet contacts, network, and maybe even start partnerships. Then once you know enough people, new opportunities arise – including the possibility of being an advertiser. You gather some thoughts, make some phone calls, and see what’s possible.

5) A good offer. You have to give affiliates a reason to promote your product/service over the other 1,000 offers like it out there. Being affiliate marketers I think we have an advantage over some of the advertisers in the fact that we know how to convert our visitors. If you can offer the same payout but a higher converting offer, where will affiliates make more money? You have to give them a reason to break their relationship with the current advertiser they’re working with and come to you.

Aight not meant to be an amazing guide, just a few insights on maybe stepping up your game in affiliate marketing.

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So one of the big reasons the majority of affiliates fail is because they don’t really get serious. This could be because :

• They tried once and failed.
• They don’t have the time (between a “real” job, kids, etc).
• They don’t really believe a living can be made with affiliate marketing (believe it or not I could find hundreds of people who would call me crazy for saying you can make $20k/month with affiliate marketing).
• They’re simply not smart enough.

So what’s stopping you from getting serious? You have to believe that you’re going to succeed no matter how many times you fail to get there. Here are some ways to make sure you’re serious about making money with affiliate marketing.

1) Set a Serious Budget

You’re not serious about affiliate marketing if you plan on spending a $25 PPC voucher to test and calling it a day. If you want to be serious, you have to be ready to invest a serious amount of money. How much money is ultimately up to you, but I would try to save up at least $1,000 before you give affiliate marketing a real go. In many cases it can take much more than $1,000 to find something that’s profitable. If you take $25 and don’t find anything and stop, you’re just going to quit when the money keywords could be in the first $200 you spend. So start saving now, set aside a bit of money from each paycheck and start your own fund. Sell some of your stuff on eBay. Or do some grunt work for people to make some cash.

I personally set my budget to around $300/day and run it at that testing things until I get the campaign profitable (in which time I up the budget to unlimited).
 
2) Set Serious Time Aside

You’re not going to get any productive work done unless you set the proper time aside to do it. Despite how easy and time efficient affiliate marketing can be, these cases are ones of luck, very good connections, or knowing exactly what to do. This probably won’t be you, it’s not most people, so you have to make time to set up your campaigns, ensure you’re tracking EVERYTHING, and then constantly look over stats, test new pages, ads, keywords, anything.

Maybe you have a full-time job now and a family at home to take care of and time can be the hardest thing to come by. Just like with exercise or any other activity, you have to manage your time properly. Maybe it means cutting out your favorite TV show. Maybe it means (kindly hah) asking your spouse to cover for you for an hour or two every night, or in some cases maybe it means sacrificing an hour of sleep every night until you get things rolling. Either way, affiliate marketing takes time and is NOT easy money. But if you put the hard work into it, you can certainly reap the rewards.
 
3) Set Up Serious Tracking

Setting up a serious campaign doesn’t mean throwing together 5,000 keywords in a few semi-targeted ad groups and testing which ad has the highest click-through rate. As stated before, this can be done and is only successful in cases where you’re plain lucky. For the rest of us, we have to break down EVERYTHING in order to find out exactly what’s working and what’s not.

This means tracking :

a) Keywords – weed out the ones that aren’t converting.

b) Ads – test ads for the highest click through rate while making sure that they convert well.

c) Landing pages – test different button colors, headlines, page styles, etc. Track the CTR and the conversion rate of each page style and then decide the most profitable one. Once you know what “type” of page converts, start testing the smaller things like headlines, colors, content, and pictures.

d) IP addresses – block out IPs with multiple clicks to your ads. Google may prevent your ad from being charged, but if you have a ton of clicks from an IP it probably means it’s another affiliate, and by blocking them they don’t even see your ad up there anymore – making them not see your higher CTR ads and just preventing them from spying on you.

e) Offers – test out different offers from all networks, and then when you find the best converting offer, test that offer out between networks to see if there’s any shaving occurring. Stick with what works best.
 
4) Have Serious Faith

As with a lot of things in life; ya just gotta have faith. You’ve seen the big checks and screenshots from myself and others, and while I can’t promise you that all of them are real, I can promise you that all of mine have been real, and there’s nothing THAT special about me (aside from my devilish good looks and charming ways). There’s nothing stopping you from going out there and accomplishing your goals but you. Set a goal to quit your day job, to make a couple hundred bucks a week on the side, or to hit it big and buy your dream home with affiliate profits. No matter what the goal, just know that it is in fact possible, it just takes hard work and, you guessed it…getting serious.
 
5) Have Serious Common Sense

You want to know the best way to accomplish all your goals and hit it big in affiliate marketing??? Get out there and do it! This has been said a bazillion times before but I don’t care, if you want to be serious you have to have serious common sense. Reading a hundred eBooks, blogs, and forum posts isn’t going to deposit large wire transfers into your bank account. Creating campaigns and testing is going to do that. My free affiliate marketing tutorials will give you all the basic knowledge you need to get started. After you know the basics, just get in touch with your affiliate manager, pick out an offer together, and devise a small plan of attack. Then it’s all about YOU, and getting out there and testing properly.

Common sense also applies to your strategy. Don’t let a campaign get into your head…if you’ve spent thousands of dollars and tested out everything you could and couldn’t break a profit…accept it and move on. Only a VERY small fraction of the campaigns you test are going to be profitable, so the easiest way to find them is by testing a bunch out. I’m not saying spend less time on every offer, certainly take 1 offer at a time and put forth your greatest effort into it; but don’t keep believing you can make it work when the results and data clearly show you that you can’t.

Alright, this was my first lengthy “help” article I guess you could say in a while. Life has been nuts and I’ll give you all some updates on that soon, I just didn’t want to post that and have everybody complain about “no content is posted here any more you suck” blah blah. Tell me what to write about and I’ll write about it.

Night.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Just a couple random things I’ve learned through testing and experience, maybe they’ll help you.

• There’s nothing wrong with using dashed domains like This-Affiliate-Site.com. Everybody seems to like to tell people to stay away from them, but I’m using them now and it’s been perfectly fine for me.
• A cool domain “trick” when registering stuff. Register www-yourdomain.com. Note the dash after www, users can just overlook it and think it means yourdomain.com. You can snag some really good looking keywords that way and just redirect the www traffic to straight http://, so you can have things like http://www-dentalinsurance.com.
• I continue to make landing pages with little to no content on them and Google seems to not care. I haven’t been slapped at all lately knock on wood, so just letting you know it’s still possible to do well with thin pages.
• The whole “bid high and your bid prices drop naturally and position remains the same” isn’t always true I’ve learned. I’m some heavily oversaturated niches, you’re not going to see that much of a drop in CPC no matter how long you tough it out up there. At that point you just have to man up and accept the lower position and less clicks, unless you can do something to you page to get that EPC way up.
• I can’t stress enough how testing all different types of landing pages is so important. Test single pages, review pages, blog-style pages, news article pages, and test out all different setups. Landing pages can totally make a seeming bust campaign start rocking.
• Track the clicks you get to an offer. If you find a difference in the clicks you have vs. the clicks networks show, complain to the network and demand you be compensated. Sometimes the click differences can be huge and it’s money you’re missing out on that can ultimately destroy the campaign.
• I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again; keep your mouth SHUT when it comes to affiliate managers. AMs between networks are friends a lot more than you know, and they blab to eachother and disclose information that they are certainly NOT allowed to disclose. I know because it’s happened to me more than once. Cloak everything, and be as discreet and resistant to tell your affiliate manager anything. I don’t care if they want to help you, chances are you’re better at affiliate marketing than them anyways. You never know who they could tell. They can directly tell their affiliates to run this offer like that, or tell other affiliate managers who tell their affiliates, or tell AMs on other networks that then go and tell their affiliates. An affiliate manager of mine a couple weeks ago asked to see what my ad copy looked like and I just said “No”, and he was like “…uh what? I don’t get it”. They don’t have to get it, just zip the lip.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Things hot right now…

• Green Tea, Acai, diet rebills
• UK Crush
• Dating making a comeback (dating season about to start up)
• The usual saturation in financial offers
• Facebook (for the smart)

If you can’t make a profit in any of the above…affiliate marketing simply isn’t for you. Pack up your bags and go home.

Popularity: 5% [?]

So I guess a pretty big question when thinking about your affiliate business is what type of business do you want to start up. Do you want to focus all your efforts on a site that will bring in consistent money over the long term (6+ months)? Do you want to go on a super-hot tip and make a lot of money with a short term business (>1 month)? Or do you want to try to find what’s hot and run it for a couple months and then accept when it dies?

The inspiration comes from a campaign that I ran in the short-middle term range. I primarily want to talk about it because most “gurus” out there will tell you that it’s all in setting up the long term, “mini website” blah blah. That’s not the only strategy out there. I just got out a niche a couple weeks ago that made me $6,000 profit/day on average, but I only had it up for 17 days before it died. Although this only lasted barely 2 weeks, I still made 100k, which is a nice salary nowadays.

Another campaign I ran back in the day was dating…everybody thought they were cool because they though they found the only niche I ran. Well not the only, but dating was awesome for around 6 months (peaked around 20k/day for me…about 8k profit margins were lower).

After the dating buzzed died when spring rolled around, I broke into another niche and did 4-5k profit/day on that…that only lasted for around 2-3 months.

My point with all these examples isn’t to sound tough saying I made a lot of money, it’s to get the point across that running a long-term business isn’t the only way to make a lot of money. For the past year or so I’ve ran on short-medium term niches. Sure I have long-term sites that have been making less money but over a longer period of time. I’m actually in the process of building out a slower, more long term niche, so we’ll see how that goes and I’m sure it’ll do fine.

So when you ask your friend about this way to promote something and they say “uhh yeah that probably won’t last too long it’s probably not worth it”, that means they’re banking on it and you can hop on and ride the money train as long as it lasts…just don’t get upset when it dies.

Popularity: 5% [?]