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Add me on SphinnI was going to finish off the series with talking about getting money from biz dev guys, but all of the points I wanted to make are very similar to the post on getting money out of affiliate gurus. So instead I’m going to talk about luck when it comes to affiliate marketing.
I’ll answer a couple basic questions first, and then expand. To become a super affiliate, do you need any luck on your side? No. Are some super affiliates where they are because of luck? Yes. Now the point is arguable whether or not it did take some skill to “stumble upon” something lucky in the first case, but some affiliates simply found the right thing at the right time.
I’ll start off with an example of luck…me. Back in the day when I had first started (I’ve talked about this before), I started with ringtones. I saw a different offer that wasn’t ringtones, and thought “Hm, maybe the keywords for this offer would work for ringtones”. I tested some things out and voila, they keywords were pretty great. 0 competition and $2.00 EPCs. Now I did have to have some skill to put the campaign up and then expand on my keywords…but I was a noob and I got lucky. Without the money I used to make from ringtones (that doesn’t really exist anymore), I was able to fund further projects and exponentially skyrocket my income. If I hadn’t found those keywords and made some money, would I have found other ways to make money to get me where I am today? I don’t know really, I probably would have, but at the time I couldn’t get anything else to work other than my lucky ringtones. Did I get super lucky? Yeah. Would I have made it big time without those keywords? I think so, but we’ll never know.
Where is your golden nugget?
You may be the next one to find a lucky batch of keywords for the right offer. You never know until you think outside the box. I’m talking to the point where you can’t even see the box. Think crazy, brainstorm ideas, and then put them to action.
I can’t get lucky and don’t want to.
Most people don’t get lucky and find that golden niche. Does that mean there’s no chance of them being a super affiliate? It sure as hell doesn’t. Generally speaking, the higher up the affiliate tier you rank, the less luck there is involved. High octane campaigns require loads of research, testing, tracking, and loss. You can certainly make more money off of strategically approaching your campaigns. Here are the general outlines of strategically setting up a large scale campaign :
1) Research and find a potentially profitable niche. For some, potentially profitable may mean making $100/day. For others, potentially profitable may mean $100,000/day. Either way, you have to find a niche where there is money to be made.
2) Research what networks carry what offers, and start discussing payouts and payment terms. The next thing I’ll do is shop around for offers. I’ll tell my affiliate manager a niche I want to enter, and tell them to give me the top 5 offers. EPCs, conversion rates, payouts, and what payout I can get. I’ll then boil it down to 1-2 offers from a couple different networks (different networks have different tracking systems that “magically” shave leads).
3) Research what other people are doing in this field. I get ideas for landing pages, call to actions, colors, themes, etc.
4) Research what sorts of keywords I’m planning on bidding on, and what position I want. I need to know how much volume to roughly expect, what negative terms to bid on, and how much I’m going to be spending.
5) Set a budget. I’m launching a campaign in the next month or two where my starting budget is going to be $5,000/day. I have to make sure I have the money set away so I don’t run out of money.
6) Get the landing page built, keywords set up, and all my tracking set up.
7) Launch the campaign at midnight and let it run throughout the day. If anything is seriously wrong, fix it. If not, keep letting it run to pull data.
8) At $5,000 spending/day, I can compile a nice amount of data in a week or two. Then it’s time to analyze what’s converting the best, and what isn’t profitable.
9) Split test until I’m blue in the face. Ad after ad, landing page design after landing page design. Getting the best CTR and conversion rates possible.
10) Scale and enjoy. Once you have the optimal ad, landing page, and keywords, it’s time to scale and test out different traffic sources.
That is a very rough guide to setting up a campaign, if I went into detail I would be here writing all night long. The point I’m trying to make is : luck can be great and can kickstart you into profiting, but it’s certainly not necessary if your goal is to become an uber affiliate. Now it’s time to go play some Halo 3…if any of you guys play leave your gamertag in a comment and I’ll friend you.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Yeah, I have definitely not had any luck, even though I’m in a pretty profitable niche. At this point I’m not even sure what to do. People tell me not to give up, but is it worth it?
November 27th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
So, lead shaving is going on in the big affiliate networks. I used to run adult sites in 90s and that was the the biggest complaints we had against the large adult sites that were providing streaming videos to smaller paid sites. Welcome to the world of online money
November 27th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Since you use Azoogleads, has your affiliate manager been helpful in any way to find niches suitable and profitable for you? The fact that you get your own affiliate manager particularly attracted me to them. I’ll probably hold off though until I build up enough of a budget for PPC marketing, then sample whatever affiliate products are recommended to me and see how well I do.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
I think the luck component is what people *hope* for… because most of us don’t have $5000/day or even $5000 to start off and we’re thinking “OK, I can put $500 into this…”. In those cases I think the strategic approach is even MORE valuable since you have less money to waste/lose. You can make $50/day go a long way if you’re bidding on terms that will drive traffic at $0.10 per click and you’ll get enough clicks to be able to spot the same trends. After all… if you’re getting 500 clicks per day over a M-F week you have 2500 data points. Yeah, you could have bit $1/click… but then you’d have 1/10th the data points to analyze and you couldn’t optimize as easily or maybe even at all since you might not have enough samples to attain statistical significance.
Most of us are unlikely to move from $25 or $50 per day to $1000/day revenues in a month or two… but look at it this way – if you can make $50/day on your $50 per day spend… that’s $1500 in a month… that you didn’t have before. Reinvest that $50 at the same margins… and it’s $3000 per month… Keep that going and you hit revenues that are very significant to an individual pretty fast.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:38 am
you maybe are an uber affiliate but are you uber halo player? :D
We will have a game some time: ambienc3
btw, you have cod4?
November 28th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Hey glad you plac H3 too :) My gamertag is ricdes :)
November 28th, 2007 at 1:06 am
so much hype around cod4. Im sure its butt awful.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:25 am
well you would be wrong elpen. Its a great game. How can u think a game is awful when there has been so much hype around it?
That really makes no sense…
November 28th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Paul,
What I am sometimes wondering is with big ppc affiliates how they were able to build those big amounts of money in order to spend on a daily basis let see $ 5,000 for ppc advertising? I mean $ 5,000 means that you need a spending capital of $ 150,000 per month. That’s an insane amount of money!
In your case for example, you didn’t start long ago doing ppc & you very young as well!
> You just re-invested 100% of your network earnings without taking any profits?
I can’t imagine that people are willing to take loan because they are confident that they will succeed in ppc advertising!
How were you able to build this capital to spend on ppc per day in a relative short time frame?
Thanks!
November 28th, 2007 at 5:25 am
I believe in this.. the harder I work, the luckier I get ..
November 28th, 2007 at 5:30 am
cod4 is very good. we should play some halo 3: blazers01
November 28th, 2007 at 7:41 am
I think the only ‘luck’ you need is to get into something that works well enough for you that you’re motivated to work even harder. Once you make some money once on something you’ll have the faith that others don’t have who have only met with failures so far.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:37 am
people do not like to lose money or in general even spend it. so the luck helps the motivation and encouragement, in the same way a blog like this does, you know it can happen to you.
“In those cases I think the strategic approach is even MORE valuable since you have less money to waste/lose.”
I would just change the “waste/lose” to say “research” no matter what you do you should stand back from it and analyze it to see what you could have done better and do better in the future. Some lessons are more expensive than others, but you learn a lot that way.
Paul, why not post some of your biggest f’ ups… Maybe we can learn from your mistakes. ;) You might be able to give details on those.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Yeah, the problem is that you’ve got to have a stash of money at your disposal for this and if you don’t know what you’re doing, your “testing” could run your bankroll right into the ground before you get to first base.
It’s not for the weak of heart.
Vic
November 28th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Great advice as usual. It all boils down to testing and perseverance. You will eventually find something that works.
November 28th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Here’s a new twist to those trying to make money online:
Follow the non profit homeagain.com and create a Charity Affiliate Shopping network.
The affiliate shopping market is flooded, but there are other rivers you can paddle. People love to make a difference and help humanity, and by creating a non profit shopping site you create value on a personal and spiritual level.
The way homeagain operates is with a standard affiliate store but they give away 75% of their affiliate earnings to charity. They still make money and shoppers feel good about making purchases, knowing that they are making a contribution to others.
People are much more likely to click on affiliate links/banners/ads if part of the proceeds are going to charity.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Kinda reminds me of two legendary stock traders – Jesse Livermore (made $100M crash of ‘29), and Nicolas Darvas who turned $36K into $2M in 18months in the 50’s.
Both men were very cool headed and calculating. They did not throw dice and hope. They were very cool and level headed, and gradually increased the size of the sticks they swung with each swing.
I’m just fascinated by the similarities in mindsets.
Thanks for the peek,
Suzanne.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Luck.
Or as it was once put to me. Luck is just “Opportunity that meets preparation”.
In other words it’s hard to get lucky, if you have no idea what you’re doing. But if you do something over and over and over and over. And know EXACTLY what you’re doing. You’re bound to get lucky.
HEH.
Gamertag: I am Pig Benis
(It used to be Pig Benis, but it got banned.)
November 28th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
This is a great guide of the basics! Thanks man. :) It’s essentially what I do.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
maybe crysis is better hmm?
November 28th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
He’s back!
hey, you know what would make a good post? Critiquing other people’s landing pages. :)
November 28th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Paul,
You might also mention if they want more detail to check out diorex’s most recent post on scaling a campaign
November 29th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Blah Blah post was really designed to mine people’s gamertags and everyone seems to have totally missed that.
My gamertag….give ya one freaking guess… friend me up :)
Best part of making up your own word – i almost always get the username i want…
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:46 am
[...] Super affiliates and super luck [UberAffiliate] [...]
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:28 am
Thomas Jefferson
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
December 8th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Let’s play Team Slayer!
GT = xHOMICYDALx
December 30th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Most people don’t do, they are just waiting for gold to walk into their pockets. You’re absolutely right, kudos for the 10 step guide.
January 4th, 2008 at 8:23 am
Can you write a little more about some of the niches that you have tried and how you got started? I would love to just come up with a list of 10 niches that you have dabbled in. Also, what networks do you get your offers from?
January 24th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
[...] It seems like super affiliates are getting younger and younger. [...]
February 9th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Good outline plan. Should work well for most people. Yet another informative post. THanks man!
-Dave
February 27th, 2008 at 5:59 am
If you are great in what you do, have lots of experience, then often you can creat your own luck or it comes by itself. Just a matter of time!