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

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.

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Sorry to make 2 posts in a row about the same garbage, but I LOL’d when I watched the 3rd Episode of the Top Affiliate Challenge. Jon Van Clute is bragging on how he gets 200,000 targeted visitors at a $2CPM, and then for those “uneducated” affiliates out there, the Top Affiliate Challenge shows us the math in calculating how much Van Clute spends.

They’re real geniuses, great affiliatez math sk1llz!

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Ok so I’m not sure if I’m the first one to write about this…but the Top Affiliate Challenge TV show officially sucks. It looked like it could be O.K. at best, but after finding out how it works and watching the first episode, I can confirm why I knew it would be a waste of time and money to audition and try to get on the show. Here’s why :

• Their whole “business model” for competition is stupid. The goal is to make “as much money as possible through affiliate marketing”. They look at revenue as making money, and not profit. So a team can spend $5,000 in PPC and only make $1,000 in revenue. That’s a $4,000 net loss but in the eyes of TAC, you just made $1,000.
• How do they expect you to learn and get a profitable campaign running in like 2 hours? The team that wins will simply be the team that takes a little loss and switches their campaigns over to the team’s affiliate link. I was working with Team XY7 a little and was about to move over a campaign that does ~$1,500/day (they would still fund it), but just thinking about doing something like that for this show is completely pointless. That’s totally against the point of having a challenge to find the “top affiliate”.
• The camera work looks like it was done with a $100 Flip video camera and edited by a 15 year old freshman in high-school. There’s cheesy ass hues on the border of the screen, ridiculous looking fonts, the whole thing looks insanely cheap. They’ll be talking and it will just break the frame and cut to a new one, it’s not smooth at all.
• The host looks like she just learned how to read and is reading the script off a piece of paper. Oh wait, you’ll see her looking at the ground all the time, and the awesome camera man has her script showing laying on the floor.
• The gurus pulled together their elite resources and drove a massive $200 revenue for the win on the first day.
• We have The Apprentice in NYC, American Idol is Los Angeles, Survivor on some crazy Chinese island, and Top Affiliate Challenge in…Nebraska. Could they have picked a more boring venue?
• I just skimmed through the second episode which leaked on Google Video. Team XY7 lost, so one of their teammates was going to get voted off. Then they had an individual immunity challenge, somebody from a different team won it. Why the hell would someone that wouldn’t get voted off anyways win an immunity ring? The guy is a saint though and ends up giving it to someone from XY7. The hostess then tells him it doesn’t even matter, because that person is safe anyways. Umm…pointless?

My prediction : many affiliates on the show will truly realize how pointless the competition is and when that happens, things will start to get really stupid and it’ll be funny to see how the TAC deals with it. That’ll at least be some entertainment.

I have nothing against Thor as he was nice to me when I chatted with him about auditioning, but the show is a complete mess. I can’t even sit through a full episode without being completely bored to death, the show teaches absolutely nothing about affiliate marketing, and since it’s not even entertaining it’s completely pointless to watch.

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One thing you can relate an affiliate campaign to is having a baby. First let’s look at what having a baby is like…

You’re all excited you’re going to have one. You get the baby’s room all ready and primped up, there’s cute crap all over, you’re telling all your friends about your baby that’s coming. You’ve invested all this money in your baby and pumped for it to come. Now after all this setting up and waiting, the baby has been born. Your first initial thoughts are “awe it’s so beautiful”, but you know that sucker is mangled and bloody when it first pops out. For the first month or 8 weeks or whatever (I haven’t had a baby yet), it cries, poops, keeps you up at night, and makes you a wreckless mess. It suckles from your teet (or your wife’s), and drains you of milk. Finally it starts to learn, optimize itself, and starts pooping in the toilet. We still have accidents, but it matures and eventually gets better. If you raise it right, you have a nice kid on your hands that grows up well, gets a job, and then takes care of you when you get old. If you raise it poorly, your child sucks and continues to wreak havoc on your life.

Now let’s compare it to affiliate campaigns. You get all excited when you first hear some good things about an offer, just like when you hear about having a baby. You invest money designing a page, getting content written, programming the tracking and everything in; all before the campaign goes live. Maybe you get excited and tell your friends you’re pumped about this new campaign you’re launching soon. Now it’s time for the campaign to go live. The first day it goes live, although you love the potential it has, it’s going to probably *look* like a mess. You’ll be testing out a ton of keywords and ad variations, and if you do it right you’ll be losing some money because not everything is going to convert. Now it’s time for you to become a good parent. You’ll go sleepless nights working on the campaign and it will stress you and keep you up. It suckles from your teet of wealth, and drains your cash. You need to spend time optimizing the campaign and making sure it grows and loses less and less money over time. If you optimize correctly, you have a great campaign that makes you money into your elder years. If you don’t optimize properly or the niche is a dud (ok comparing that to babies would just be mean lol so I didn’t), you’re out of luck and it does nothing but lose you money and cause chaos and depression in your life.

So what does any of this have to do with you? Well aside from a slightly comical comparison, the above is true. You’re going to lose money when you first start a campaign, and you need to realize that it’s just like having a kid. If you get through all the pooping and crying your campaign is going to do and optimize it right, you may just end up with a winner.

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Congrats to Aorson for coming in 3rd place. All these articles are awesome and I’m going to continue to post all the entries because we can all learn from them.

These five mistakes, once remedied, had the most immediate and/or dramatic affect on my bottom line.

1. Being too money conscious.

Whoever said ‘it takes money to make money’ hit the nail on the head. I am over conscious about debt and getting out of it < grumble, student loans, grumble > so for a long time I was really averse to spending more than a pittance on testing my adwords.

Big mistake.

The stats I was getting back for testing in the low-end of the bidding spectrum (roughly 1/3 of whatever the high bid currently is on Google) were unreliable and in the process I lost as much as a few thousand before turning any profit. Or, worse, I was completely off the mark about which ad was best suited for what time frame, which demographic, etc.

Investing heavily and slowly decreasing my bids (a tip I picked up Uberaffiliate, actually), tracking tracking tracking everything religiously, and tweaking on a daily basis has produced results, on average, 3 x faster (e.g. if it took me 3 weeks to decide before, it only takes about 1 now) and at half the cost I would have spent using my old risk-averse method.

There are no more surprises about ad performance anymore, to boot.

2. Being over-diversified.

In the ‘more is better’ theory of marketing, we assume that if we know Uberaffiliate has made most of his money in 4 or 5 service or product genres, then, by God, we’ll be able to get at least as far by doing 10. Or 15. 20, even! You get the point.

Having too many irons in the fire is a classic mistake, and one I fell face-forward into.

At first I spent far too much time attempting to monotenize landing pages in product genres I really had no knowledge of but saw a high commission on (which means you can expect it to be oversaturated). As soon as I trimmed the fat from marketing 11 different campaigns down to the 4 producing the greatest ROI, I reinvested the funds allocated for the 7 axed campaigns and saw a boost in profit within 48 hours.

It also upped my quality-of-life factor significantly. Trying to stay abreast of 11 campaigns and tracking them all is time-consumptive and exhausting. I was able to start getting six or more hours of sleep again!

3. Not preselling hard enough and/ or not referring to deep links.

As a n00b, I creating landing pages that referred either to the homepage for the entity I was marketing or to a sub page (like the “Rods” section of Orvis.com, for example). I did not do enough to refer to a specific product, or advertise the features of a specific service.

Internet users are also becoming savvier and avoid paid ads or anything that appears to be an affiliate or third party link. I was shooting my legitimacy in the foot with these referrals.

My network manager was the first to point out this error. When I changed things up by preselling the product on my landing page and connecting to deep links, it accomplished three things:

a)With persuasive content you convince someone of the ease and necessity of inputting their information or why they need of the product. Priming boosted my CTR.

b) The user is expecting to arrive at the page you direct them to- either a fill-in form or a product purchase page (this locked in both my page’s and the product/ service’s legitimacy); and

c) If they have gotten this far, they are ready to provide the info or whip out a credit card.

4. Having too many distractions outside of affiliate marketing.

When I first learned about affiliate marketing, I had just read The Four Hour Workweek and was inspired to get something going as soon as possible. It was also the beginning of the semester, and I was going to school 3 nights a week and Saturday mornings on top of working full-time.

Needless to say, I couldn’t juggle a full-time job, school, and a web venture. Guess which one lost?

I lost almost all of the money I invested when I was trying to squeeze affiliate marketing in during my 2-4 hours of free time a week. Though I could make more money (day job) to cover my losses, the resulting discouragement was a different beast entirely.

Fortunately, when you hate your day job as much as I do, you get 40 hours a week of motivational reinforcement.

After my too-many-irons-in-the-fire semester, I took the next one off and started affiliate marketing after work. I set some ground rules: after dinner until around 10:30- I’m at my computer testing a new campaign, creating new pages, tweaking old ones, or catching up on AM-related correspondence. There’s no TV, no radio, I’m not trolling WickedFire/ DigitalPoint/ Google Reader and I don’t take personal calls. This might seem a little much, but it works for me and my bottom line. Your mileage may vary.

5. Not doing something soon enough.

Affiliate marketing is a gyroscopic event.

Like learning how to ride a bike, the hardest part is just getting on. But once you get going- progress- like pedaling, gets easier and faster.

I spent far too much time trying to “learn” affiliate marketing by any other means than doing it. The hardest sale I ever made was my first, but by the process of getting to it, it’s also the one I learned the most from. Blogs, forums and even eBooks were all important to my familiarity in the beginning with the terms, process and basics about PPC and Affiliate Marketing, but I can’t credit any with ensuring my success.

If you want to learn this business, do yourself a favor and start now.

Really.

Now.

Go out and buy Adobe Creative Suite CS3 or download a “how to” .pdf on Wordpress/ Joomla et al. Research the products, services, and networks you want to work with- but understand that the majority of the things that will make you money are not things you will read about in a forum. Spending $29.95 on an eBook is not going to miracle any money into your Paypal account. You have to do it and learn it for yourself.

Every day I work I learn about another plug-in, another code, another corner to cut, another keyword or negative or space to add, another thing to tweak above the fold… the list goes on. All of it enhances my bottom line.

Anyone can do this, but no one will hand you the keys to the castle. You buy them with time and effort.

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