Affiliate Snippets of Knowledge

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.