The “Next Level” of Affiliate Marketing (and how to get there)

You can make a very nice living off of strictly affiliate marketing alone, but in some cases there is a “next” level to everything – and that next level I’m talking about is being an advertiser. First I’ll just make this point: when I talk about being an advertiser, I’m not specifically talking about owning/producing your own product…in my case I’m talking about getting a service direct through somebody like Mobile Messenger and brokering it out to affiliate networks. What are the perks to being an advertiser?

1) You get your own custom built offer where you get to host everything, and do whatever you want with the data (ie collect emails and use those to make money). You can optimize it however you want without having to wait for days for affiliate networks to contact the advertiser and finally get back to you.

2) You’re going to get a massive payout boost. If I told you some of the verticals and what going direct paid vs. going through an affiliate network…would make you sick.

3) You get not only yourself – but affiliates on affiliate networks to promote your service. This is hugeeeeeee…they do the work in getting leads for you!

Those are just the main perks and while it does take work, there is a lot of money to be made being an advertiser. But you don’t just become an advertiser overnight, it takes a lot of things. My intention for this article isn’t to just excite everybody and get them wanting to be an advertiser next week – it’s to be realistic. Here are a few of the things you’ll need if you want to take it to the next level :

1) Cash. If you’re making $100/day from affiliate marketing, you probably don’t have the cash flow to become an advertiser. I suppose it depends on what type of advertising you’re doing. For example if you make a mobile offer and want to get it on networks, they’re done on a subscription basis. Most mobile advertisers don’t see a profit until 6+ months of recurring income. That’s 6 months you have to have millions of dollars to pay out affiliate networks and affiliates (depending on the size of the offer). You either need to get funding, or have horrible horrible payment terms where nobody will run your offer.

2) Expertise in your offer. You probably want to be doing high volume on your offer and know everything there is to know about it before you have affiliates running it. First reason is because you’ll be keeping your own cash flow alive. Second reason is because you’ll be able to know what converts on the back end, and what doesn’t. If you have affiliates sending crap traffic that you’re paying for, you need to know to cut them. If you’re going to become an advertiser in an offer, I personally wouldn’t do so until you’re making at least $5,000-$10,000/day from it at one point – because that will most likely demonstrate that you know what you’re doing in the niche.

3) Help. In affiliate marketing there is a front-end, and there is a back-end. The glorious front-end is all most of us affiliates see. We push our traffic to a simple form, they fill it out, and we get paid. A lot of affiliates (including myself) will hire help just to manage the front-end of things. Imagine how much goes on in the back-end. You have people canceling subscriptions, people calling customer support, traffic that is losing you a lot of money, and you have to make up for that traffic by monetizing the back-end as well. You can try to do all this yourself, but you’re probably not going to be able to do it. Again this depends on the type of offer you’re running, if you’re just running it through a merchant or something then they still handle the phone support and such.

4) Connections. The higher up you get, the more connections you’ll need. When we’re beginning affiliates we don’t have many connections…we have a list of offers and an affiliate manager. As we grow and start pushing some volume, we get more attention from affiliate managers as well as the advertiser. As you get to high volume, the advertiser wants to get you direct or offer you white-labels through the affiliate network. You make more friends that are pushing volume, meet contacts, network, and maybe even start partnerships. Then once you know enough people, new opportunities arise – including the possibility of being an advertiser. You gather some thoughts, make some phone calls, and see what’s possible.

5) A good offer. You have to give affiliates a reason to promote your product/service over the other 1,000 offers like it out there. Being affiliate marketers I think we have an advantage over some of the advertisers in the fact that we know how to convert our visitors. If you can offer the same payout but a higher converting offer, where will affiliates make more money? You have to give them a reason to break their relationship with the current advertiser they’re working with and come to you.

Aight not meant to be an amazing guide, just a few insights on maybe stepping up your game in affiliate marketing.