Starting Affliate Marketing Campaigns
There are so many offers to choose from and you don’t know where to start. You can randomly pick an offer and see if you can make money off it. Will it work? Yes, but if you know how to make it work. All these offers do well and there is at least a few others making good money. If the offer really sucks then it wouldn’t be on the network. So how do you pick an offer?
1) Research. Basically just browse for possible keywords the offer might have. Say for example you want to do Scholarships. Well it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what types of keywords this might have. So I would go on yahoo/ google/ msn and type in. “free scholarships” “easy scholarships”, “college scholarships”, “scholarship grants”, “sign up for scholarship”. Etc.
2) Payout. Most of the time this is how I do it. I look at payout and offer and see if it is worth doing. Simple payouts like email submits or zip submits pay less but it has a high conversion rate vs. blockbuster sign ups. The lower the payout the easier to promote. This isn’t always the case but depends on the situation and offer. Sign up with different affiliate networks and compare which pays better. Always get the one that pays better. Or if you want, you can even ask your affiliate manager for a raise. Offers that are over $20 in my opinion is hard unless you have lots of money to burn and test.
3) Competition. Earlier I said research for keywords and search it. Most likely one offer with a bunch of ads are doing well. Ringtones is a gold mine.. or should I say WAS a goldmine. Search for anything and you get so much ads from affiliates like us. That means people are researching and giving you leads like crazy. But remember competition is a good and bad thing. For starters, competition gives you the impression that the offer is being searched and money is being made. But the bad thing is when there is too much like ringtones, we are all slapping each other in the face because we are bidding against each other. So ringtones.net is laughing at us because we are barley profiting and they are at 100% profit.
4) Testing. So you got the campaign and you are ready to test it out. I do most of the time is direct link for a day or 2 and see if I get leads/ searches. If I get a lead I know that I have to get tracking ASAP. If I get no searches then there is more work to be done. People have said to always use tracking in the beginning. I agree on this but for me in order to fire up my campaign I direct link and hopefully hit a lead.
5) Track keywords. Important. Very Important. So its up and running and you are breaking even. VERY good job if you hit the breaking even mark. Install some sort of tracking and figure out which keywords are converting. Pause the ones that are NOT converting and also add some more keywords. Just ADD, ADD ,ADD.
6) Landing page / Not to landing page. This is the most confusing part. I have seen people just direct link the offer with tracking and bam! it works. If the advertisers, landing page really needs a make over then go ahead and make one. Just BS your way in and make sure you get a nice CTR. What if the offer has 2 pages to it? I’m talking about having an offer that has a “click here” then traffic clicks and makes a lead by filling out the following page. In my opinion I wouldn’t make a landing page for this because traffic will have to click 3x to get to the offer.
Those are just some advice I can give for someone starting out. There is many more things to learn but that is as basic as it gets.
