All posts in Affiliate 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’

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When I made my post announcing the MarketLeverage contest, I said that I would be writing a post of my own mistakes as if it were an entry.

Even though I’m becoming more and more experienced in affiliate marketing, I still make PLENTY of mistakes. Some mistakes I’ve been making since the very beginning.

Mistake #1 : Distractions

An oldie but ah, such a goodie. I’m constantly distracted by AIM, my phone, xbox, forums, blogs, and other nonsense that does nothing but hurt my productivity. In a recent attempt to cut the biggest problem out (AIM), I’ve stopped going on. Ever since I stopped wasting my time with 20 IMs at once all day long, I’ve spent a lot more time working and I have been making more money. At the least you should be going invisible so people aren’t IM’ing you. Distractions absolutely KILL you, trust me.

Mistake #2 : Campaign Overload

Another huge mistake I make is overloading my campaigns. I hear so many things from people and affiliate managers on offers that people are killing on, so I want to start everything. I end up starting 4 niches at once and it just becomes a huge mess. Niches seem hot and I always feel like I have to get on every one of them at the same time, because soon they’ll be gone. I would have made a lot more money in the past month if I had just focused on 1 of the new offers I’ve started, instead of working like a madman on 4.

Mistake #3 : Straight Up Laziness

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m one of the most lazy individuals on the planet. I think it’s why I landed in the position I’m in right now; I was looking for a job that involved doing nothing but laying in my bed butt naked. Recently I’ve become a little better at cutting out the laziness and actually doing some work, and lo and behold it’s producing results.

Mistake #4 : Neglecting Yahoo/MSN

There can be some mad money and volume in YSM, and usually all I focus on is Google. Stupid me.

Mistake #5 : Not Split Testing

This goes along with the laziness one. A lot of times when I get a campaign profiting I’m too lazy to continue to split test landing pages and ad copy. An extra 5% CTR here and there can go a long way over the long term and put a lot more money in my pocket. Never stop testing.

Just a few mistakes that I’ve thought about recently and still made. There’s seemingly nothing “special” about them because you probably do one or more of them right now. Fix the simple things and you’ll start making a lot more money.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Congrats to our 2nd place winner, Richard.

The 6 Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made – And What You Can Learn From Them

I have been affiliate marketing in one way or another for several years now, mainly using minisites in combination with search engine optimization (SEO) in order to drive traffic.

Because of that time I’ve probably made just about every affiliate marketing mistake possible but looking back there are 6 “biggies” that I’ve made that i think could have made a sizeable difference to how quickly I started to see results and the speed at which those results grew.

Since I started to fix these problems i have seen my results increase substantially so I’d encourage you to read on, honestly compare the mistakes I’ve made over the years with how *you* market affiliate programs online right now and as a result hopefully make a few changes to your strategies that will lead to a significant boost in results for you.

1) putting all my eggs into one basket

one site, one main affiliate offer, one search engine and one primary keyword worked for a while but when google changed it’s algorithm i sure felt like a chump as my income virtually dried up overnight. and that’s not an exaduration. putting all your eggs into one basket can lead to a very unstable business.

whether it’s getting hit with a google slap, dropped out of the search engines or having a merchant partner refuse to pay you for whatever reason if you haven’t got a backup plan then your affiliate marketing career cut be cut very short indeed.

even if you decide to specialise in one niche such as dating or credit cards, consider how you can diversify such as by using a few different affiliate offers, programs, websites and traffic strategies so that if one stops working you’re not going to lose your business overnight.

2) not testing different affiliate promotions

when the good times roll it’s too easy to see the commissions rolling in without trying any other offers. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

well, not quite in my experience.

i have had a couple of occasions where the checks kept coming and i put my feet up and took life easy for a while. then the sales started to dry up, or the promotion ended or they changed their terms and suddenly i was *forced* to find a new offer. next thing you know you find the new offer that you chucked online in next to no time is outpulling your old one by quite some margin and you have to wonder – how much more money *could* you have made if you weren’t quite so complacent?

the lesson here is clear – even if you have an offer that works, check with your affiliate manager on what else is converting well and split test them. sometimes you will pick the top converting offer in one niche and then weeks or months later a competing offer will come in that converts even better. or the same offer is runnig on another network, but with a better payout. except either your affiliate manager forgets to tell you, or you simply can’t be bothered to make changes to a campaign that’s already profitable.

be willing to put that extra effort in to tweak your marketing campaigns and achieve the very best results possible. it doesn’t just mean more potential profit for you – it also means if necessary you can afford to pay more for traffic and still stay in the black – which allows you to outcompete other, less careful affiliates.

3) getting the balance of analysis wrong

too many people, myself included when i first got started, suffer from “paralysis through analysis”. there is so much to think about, so much to learn and get right when you’re starting out that it can be hard to know where to start. so sometimes you don’t do anything at all. which obviously isn’t going to be earning you many commissions!

what seems to work better is just to jump in at the deep end. throw together a site. gather some links. buy some ads. and then analyse the results, and use these to improve.

most people do the analysis at the beginning and then next to none once they’ve launched a website or campaign. i’m suggesting far more the opposite. get started, then do your analysis to see which keywords are working, which offers are converting, what helped your search engine positioning, what was a waste of time and so on so over time you can develop your own “sixth sense” about what will work and what won’t.

you’ll also pick up business intelligence on things that work specifically for your niche that somebody new trying to enter it wouldn’t know. that’s valuable information and will help you keep ahead of the game.

another example of missing out due to lack of analysis *after* launching a site would be the one i built that was running smoothly on autopilot for months sucking in traffic from the search engines when i suddenly noticed i hadn’t made a sale in weeks when normally 2 days would have been unusual. it turned out that the merchant i was sending traffic to had changed their affiliate tracking software, and with it the url i was using to send them traffic so none of my conversions were being recorded.

luckily i had a good enough relationship with the merchant that they paid me a mutually-agreed sum to make up for it but it just goes to show how taking your eye off the ball can lead to frustration or even failure.

4) not knowing when to quit

we all know that quitting too soon can lead to failure but my problem has often been the opposite. i have been guilty of carrying on with a project working 12 hours a day to try and get something working long after i should have admitted defeat and tried something else.

some niches are just harder to make a go of than others. some buyers are particularly difficult to convert. some markets require pockets deeper than you may have to get a foothold. equally, you can fall into others where it seems so easy you can’t believe it. so make sure to give each marketing technique, each website, each affiliate offer a fair chance, but don’t be afraid to move on to greener pastures.

5) not scaling up a successful affiliate promotion

when i have found a niche that suddenly works well for me, i have been guilty of seeing the checks coming in and wanting to move onto the next thing rather than trying to scale up my results and become a major player in that field.

however, if you’re willing to take the time to do so, you can often negotiate higher commissions, recieve preferential treatment from your affiliate manager and find out about new promotions or conversion techniques that are working well before other smaller affiliates (if they find out at all!).

with the effort that you’ve put into finding the right keywords, ads, offers and so on aim to capitalize on that knowledge and try to wring every last cent out of a niche before moving on to your next victim!

6) neglecting the networking

there is a surprising amount of help available to you in the form of affiliate managers, informative blogs, forums, private mentoring and so on yet i have found it too easy in the past to focus 100% of my time on building pages, gathering links, testing offers and so on (the “mechanics”) that i’ve ignored the networking element.

paul has mentioned on several ocassions how much importance he puts on networking and how instrumental his blog has been in helping him succeed. it’s not just a matter of learning the ropes from others – though this can often help to cut short the learning curve by quite some time. it’s as much about learning what your target market is like. what keywords do they really use? what colors do they like? what “trust” factors can you add to your site to increase conversions? what sites do they hang out at that you could buy advertising on?

getting a deep understanding of your chosen niche from both ends – the leads you’re trying to attract – and the affiliate manager who is trying to help you convert them – you can attack the problem from both ends and really maximise the results you generate.

all the best,
richard

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’m not going to post a mega tutorial that will hold your hand and help you make thousands, but I do want to hint at you guys.

There are A LOT of ways to get free traffic and send it to affiliate offers. This idea is not new, and has been used for years. People made a killing spamming Craigslist and Gumtree (classified ad sites). Those aren’t the only 2 places people interact for free.

Think about forums for example. There are THOUSANDS of forums on the web that people interact in, and most forums are niche forums. Find forums that have the potential to sell a product in, and test it out. Just thinking from common sense, the best way to actually get conversions is to be legit – which takes time. Post for 30 minutes or so and get a bunch of posts in, let your account sit for a couple weeks so it doesn’t look like you’re a brand new member, and then pitch your offer like you’ve used it yourself. Find a forum about cars or something and say that you got a great auto insurance quote for free…could be easy money there.

I’d test something like that out but I’m way too lazy haha, so a small tip like this may be better in one of your hands. I’m more of a throw some money into ppc and let it run by itself kind of guy. But the traffic we’re talking here is 100% free, minus the time you spend on it.

There’s other sites out there where people are interacting and you can join in and pitch your product…just have to do some outside of the box thinking ;).

Popularity: 4% [?]