Affiliate Marketing : Play the Game

I see affiliate marketing as a game. The goal is to win the game, but as with most games, the person who has the best strategy wins. Just as with a normal game, affiliate marketing is the same way. The ones making the most money have the best strategy. The ones with the best team win the game. If you’ve ever watched any sports or played on a sports team (or Halo team lol I don’t care), the best teams have great teamwork, and the really great teams have great teamwork plus a superstar – you.

Sure you can have good success by designing your own pages, programming a tracking code here and there and then plugging away with PPC (note here I am talking about BIG time affiliates – with some hard work it’s pretty easy to make a 6 figure income on your own). But if you want great success (uber affiliate success), it’s best to set up a team. I remember hearing at Affiliate Summit that the term “super affiliates” are now changing to basically “mini affiliate networks with awesome teams”. Meaning, the best affiliates out there have the best teams. I’m going to go through some of the positions of team players, and maybe after reading this article you’ll go out and draft your own Uber Affiliate team (which I’m describing in terms of a hockey team more or less).

I’ve drawn up a basic game plan. Note that my goal here is to leave you completely confused after looking at that picture, because I don’t even know what the hell it is.

I’ll describe the game plan and maybe you’ll understand it a little. The two red guys start with the puck, the designer and content writer put together a page for you. They pass you the puck, and you take a shot at the affiliate offer. That offer is going to come back at you with tons of data. Good thing for you, you have a programmer to sort out all this data and relay you back the information. You figure out the offers weakness, and then you go back and attack the crap out of it. I’ll describe a bit more about your team :

The Center : You – The Marketing Genius

You’re the main man of your team (aside from being the GM). You center and lead the whole team because you’re the one that drives traffic and gets everything else to do it’s job. You’ll study market trends, research long-tail keywords, write the ads, and guide the rest of the team on what they’re doing. This is probably the most tricky aspect, because it’s what you’ll be doing (you’re the expert in this area). You’ll take what your programmer gives you and analyze it, and then make the changes that will drive up both revenue and profit. You’ll eliminate the bad keywords, increase bids on converting ones, change landing pages and create endless ads that are constantly fighting each other for a better CTR.

Right Wing Offense : The Designer

This dood makes you the landing pages convert at 75%+. You tell him the niche you want a page for, terms you want included in images (eg. “No Charge”, “No Spyware or Adware”), what type of call to action you want, etc. They’ll put together at least 2 designs and propose them to you, and then you tell them where you’d like it tweaked. You’ll take these landing pages and then split testing them, looking at EVERYTHING. What colors convert, what call to actions, what words, what graphics. Everything matters.

Left Wing Offense : The Content-Creator

This is the guy that’s going to help jack up your quality score, and write NATURAL content that turns your simple landing page into a mini-site in cognito. They’ll be writing anywhere from 10-100+ articles to load into your site. Make sure you tell your writer to make the content natural, as people do read the articles believe it or not. They’re not going to be the main focus as you’re trying to just shovel them to the merchant, but there are people who explore the whole site.

To find my writer, what I did was post a thread at DP saying I was looking for a full-time writer who would be able to commit to very large projects and give me great quality. I had maybe 15 writers show me interest, so I asked them all for a sample of their work and what they charge. I got pretty lucky in finding a great writer at cheap cost. If you go along the same route and get interest from a bunch of writers, make it very clear to them that if their work is anything less in quality than the sample they give you, you won’t pay them a penny for their work even if they write 50 articles.

*we’re skipping defense. we’re going all-out offense here and attacking the offers*

Goalie : The Programmer

You are going to need some defense, and you can find all of that in a good programmer. If you can, learn as much php for yourself as you can, but it won’t be a replacement for having a professional programmer. Shoemoney always talks about the great relationship he has with his programmer Dilsmack – programmers can be awesome. The things they’ll do for you are countless and endless, and they will increase your profits exponentially guaranteed. Some of the things a programmer can do for you :

• Tell you what keywords are converting. Like that helps…
• Split test landing pages and tell you which one has a better CTR.
• Tell you which ads have a better CTR.
• Add in a bunch of cool things that will increase conversions and increase user trust.
• Keyword replacement, geotargeting dynamic text, build you keyword tools and any tools you want to make things easier and faster for you.

Now putting a killer team together can be a little costly, but compared to what you’re going to be making – it’ll pay for itself x100. These are the “core” components of a great affiliate marketing team, and will help you increase your profits.