Ask An Uber Affiliate – Round 8

Frank E asks…

You mentioned the importance of finding a business partner to grow your affiliate revenue. I chat up established affiliates all the time but they never give me the time of day, because I have nothing to offer them that they dont already have. I even met a few in person at ad-tech NY, but still no luck in any partnerships.

So how does a new affiliate go about finding a business partner?

 
Instead of looking to partner with someone larger that already knows everything you do, try and partner up with somebody in the same shoes as you. Perhaps you’re having moderate success with affiliate marketing. Find someone else at the same level as you, and then suggest that you should both run some campaigns together and have 10x the success. Also don’t ask them to partner within 5 minutes of meeting them. Hang out for the day and maybe even another day and get to know eachother, and that’ll even give you a better idea if the partnership would even work.

Andrew Payne asks…

I know there are many variables involved but out of your experience what seems to be the most important strategy or step to bring an unprofitable campaign to profitability? and if you don’t mind going into a little detail.

 
Really hard to say on that one, as some changes may have bigger impacts than others. If I’m running a campaign and driving 2,000 leads/day, getting an extra $2 on the payout is going to put an extra $4,000 profit/day into my pocket. A campaign can go from zero to hero just from that. If I’m working on a smaller campaign with say 50 leads/day, increasing my landing page CTR from 50% to 65% can bring more profit than just an extra buck or two on the offer. And then even at the ad level, doubling the CTR of an ad will bring in twice as many clicks and if the campaign is profiting, twice as much profit.

ykw asks…

When testing a new offer…

-> do you use direct linking or put together a simple 1 landing page website? you use Yahoo for that initial testing?

Your most profitable campaigns…

-> tend to be comparative landing pages or specific offers?

 
1) Neither. I always put at least a few pages of content on each landing page I test.

2) Specific offers, although I did used to profit a lot from a review-style page.

airbball23 asks…

what host would you recommend to host landing pages? Where do you get your images from? Do you scrape them from flickr or buy royalty free pics?

 
1) I’ve actually hosted landing pages on shared hosts and haven’t noticed a difference when moving over to dedicated. Hostgator is classic shared, Mediatemple is midrange dedicated (what this blog uses), and something like Rackspace is pretty expensive.

2) I’ve done both, and other times I just rely on wherever the designer gets them from :).

Aaron asks…

1. Which method of advertising through PPC do you find more profitable – Adwords or YSM?
2. Do you like to promote high volume/low commission items, or do you look for high commission items that may not have as much volume (but with the goal to move a lot of volume)?

 
1) As far as being profitable, Adwords because of the much higher volume. YSM is still profitable as well.

2) I say in the low-mid range commission items. None of my campaigns are higher than $40 right now, I might test out DentalPlans.com which would be the highest payout I’ve gone for. Oh yeah I tested out Forex leads which pays $200/sale and that sucked for me.

llya asks…

Can you show us at least one of your profitable landing pages?
Or, if not, can you explain how you take a campaign to the next level/scale it out?

 
1) Nope.

2) Maybe if you read my blog I will :).

dkhiani asks…

I can’t find the post now, but I read either on diorex or CDF blogs that for campaign testing purposes you could :

(1) put the url of a relevant content site in your adwords ads and have adwords give you a good quality score on that.

(2) Then immediately after that you go in and change the urls in the ads to the actual landing page that you want (that you know wouldn’t quality score well) so you could start off with reasonable click costs.

Is this true? can this be done ? I think google would catch on too soon before you got enough clicks to establish profitability.

 
Not exactly sure to be honest. I just build sites that will get a good quality score on their own, and try to build a really good domain history with my own domain in Adwords.

Investsting & Passive Income asks…

what are the best ways to monetize my site?

I’m trying aff links but so far the income is ZERO from them. any suggestions or resources?

 
Well it’s a blog, so try paid advertising and Adsense and see how that works out. Offer reviews as well.

Tihomir asks…

I am doing PPC since a few months but I find it difficult to scale. Most of my campaigns make me some profit but I have no idea how to expand them. My eCPC is pretty low so I cant afford to bid higher.

How do you tweak for higher eCPC ?

 
I think I’m going to fall asleep when I keep posting…this……link………

Richie asks…

Have you tried http://www.ppc-coach.com/ ?
What do you think about it ? Would you recommend it to PPC newbies?

 
Can’t say I have, haven’t heard anything about it either so I can’t really give a valuable opinion.