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6 Reasons Why Campaigns Fail (And How to Fix Them)
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Dear Affiliate, Are You Made Out of Sheep?
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How to Turn $5,000 in to an Affiliate Business

6 Reasons Why Campaigns Fail (And How to Fix Them)

It’s 300 years since alchemy went out of fashion, but some affiliates still believe in the principle of a philosopher’s stone:

A magic formula that can turn very average materials in to gold.

It’s catnip for affiliates.

“What one technique can I inject in to my marketing for transformative results?”

Be careful with this mindset.

My view is that pragmatism will bring you closer to success.

I believe ‘getting it right’ is less a pursuit of magic formulas, and more a game of cutting out enough mistakes to understand simply what is.

In this post, I have listed six reasons why campaigns fail.

We’ll start with the very obvious…

#1. You bypass research and the process of idea elimination.

If you skip research, you will launch half-baked campaigns.

Research can be as simple as asking your account manager whether an offer has received traffic from other affiliates.

“Did it convert for them?”

If the answer is no, or more likely — a polite deflection, and a suggestion to run Offer Y instead — consider that an important insight.

Many campaigns avoid failure if subjected to criticism before your mind has raced away with the imaginary profits.

I often tell affiliates to stick to one traffic source.

A good reason for this is to develop your understanding of the platform’s ecosystem.

  • What is a good CTR?
  • What is an average CPM?
  • How high do I have to bid to get traffic?
  • How much traffic can I get in this country?

By focusing your efforts on a single platform, you will establish baseline performance metrics.

This information helps you eliminate dozens of campaign ideas where the maths are stacked against you.

How fast you eliminate bad ideas is a key factor of success.

Before launching any campaign: detach yourself as the author.

Imagine you are vetting it for a complete newbie.

Now, unleash the cynic inside.

Establish the key assumptions that must be proven true for the campaign to succeed.

“He’ll need a CTR of at least 30% to break even.”
“If he’s direct linking, he’ll need to convert at 3%.”
“He’ll need enough margin to bid $1.50 if he wants traffic in Germany.”

Then ask yourself:

What evidence do I have against this amateur bumberclart succeeding where others have failed?

If you can’t find any, steal his campaign.

#2. You run too many campaigns.

How many campaigns are you juggling today?

Dunbar’s number: By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, Dunbar proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

What?

WHAT?

Eat a sack of my balls, Dunbar.

You think affiliates give a shit about brain capacity and human limits?

Most of us are too busy launching a blitzkrieg across seven new traffic sources on four different continents. Are we discomforted? — yes. But only by the factory line of ripped banners spilling out of our pants.

And that is the point.

Many of us are too busy to question the wisdom of our ways.

My bet is that for every 10 campaigns an affiliate tries to manage, he loses 50 stable relationships.

Resist the temptation!

Covering so much ground creates an illusion of progress — especially if you pick up some profitable campaigns along the way.

But having equity in so many territories makes all of them harder to defend.

You’ll spend the best part of your career extinguishing fires.

Before running any campaign, ask yourself: “What is the best possible outcome of working on this?”

If the answer can’t pay for your career all by itself, keep looking.

#3. You compete in a crowded market without a competitive advantage.

What distinguishes you from every other affiliate promoting the same offer?

What is the USP of your affiliate business?

If you don’t have a competitive advantage, you have something entirely less constructive: a headache.

Understand that larger, bitter-fought markets do not weaken over time.

Many affiliates stroll on to the battlefield thinking their energy and optimism is enough to disrupt rivals who have been scrapping fiercely in that market for many years.

Energy and optimism are great traits; but so is realism.

If you are entering a crowded market, the first step is to submit to your ignorance.

Resist any suggestion that you know what you’re doing, and simply observe:

  • Who are the major players?
  • How are they succeeding?
  • What are their strengths?
  • What are their weaknesses?
  • Is there any part of the existing market they are failing to serve?

Arbitrage is a brutal game.

The only way you survive is by carving out a competitive advantage.

That could be an exclusive offer, a higher payout, better technology, the ability to monetise non-converters…

What you don’t want to rely on is your ability to work harder than everybody else.

This advantage is only viable in the short-term.

It is blunted by time and success.

A good plan is to build structural advantages in to your business.

These are advantages that cannot be replicated while you sleep.

#4. You lack judgment with your blacklisting and whitelisting.

The heart of optimising a campaign is learning when to blacklist, when to whitelist, and when to shut up, stay patient, and do nothing.

This is something I talked about extensively in Premium Posts 2015.

Blacklist: to block placements, devices, ads or other targeting criteria from your campaign.

Blacklist example: SiteABC.com is unprofitable so you blacklist it and prevent your ads from appearing there.

Whitelist: to allow a pre-defined list of placements, devices, carriers, etc.

Whitelist example: Nokia is your most profitable device, so you whitelist it and show your ads only to Nokia users.

Affiliates are notoriously trigger-happy with blacklisting and whitelisting.

Understandably so.

It’s their money at stake.

Larger companies, and brands, are embarrassingly slow.

“Hey, I need to set up a meeting with John from Marketing. It’s about our blacklist.”

“Shit, you mean we don’t have one?”
 
“Yes… next Friday is fine.”

Your optimisation philosophy will define the type of career you have as an affiliate.

Will you soar to dominate mass-markets with gentle use of blacklisting and offers that appeal to the mainstream?

Or will you whitelist your way to profit using obtuse targeting combinations that deliver healthy margins… at the price of scalability?

What I see all too often is affiliates choosing strategies that do not align with their goals.

My view is this:

The big money is made with a blacklisting approach.

The seed money, on a tight budget, is made with a whitelisting approach.

No money will be made if you adopt either approach before it is merited.

Mastering this feel for optimisation is essential for any marketer who wants to pay for advertising and remain solvent.

#5. You spend too much time looking for cheaper traffic.

I often get emails from affiliates asking if Traffic Source X is ‘cheap’ compared to another, or if $3.00 is a good CPM for Country Y.

My first response is obvious: “I don’t know. And until you run the campaign, neither will you.”

But I can see how this mindset is fed.

An affiliate enjoys some minor success on Platform A; makes some money, then gets driven out by rising click costs.

He turns his attention to Platform B.

“It’s 20% cheaper and converts just as well,” he says, “I’m back in business!”

This model — a form of cruising the advertising world for ever cheaper clicks — is not fit to sail.

It ignores the elephant hanging from the mast, which is this:

A competitor who can muscle you away from one platform, can do the same on another. And another. And another.

The solution is not to run towards cheaper traffic.

(Your competitors will find that too.)

You must build slack in to your campaigns instead.

That means increasing the revenue from your funnel to above the market average.

Until your campaign is inherently ‘better than average’, it will always be next in line to turn red.

Costs will not stay the same whilst mediocrity = profit.

The guy who has slack will pay more to take that profit away from you.

Stop looking for cheaper traffic.

Aim to squeeze more revenue from what you already have.

#6. You are competing fairly in a market that resembles the Wild West.

I hear industry veterans preaching that success is created by sacrifice and hard work.

Whilst this is partly true, the reality is somewhat less marketable.

Many of the top affiliates earn their money using techniques considered misleading, or disingenuous, or quite simply — a bannable offence from the platform where the advertising is placed.

What does this tell you?

It says that risk aversion and moral disposition may be slightly more relevant to success than often credited.

It says that behind many an affiliate’s Success Story lies an equally sizeable Confessions page.

I’m not here to lecture on whether this is right or wrong.

It is reality.

There is a clear correlation between how far an affiliate is willing to push his creative license, and how many opportunities are open to him in this industry.

For every step you take away from the grey lines of affiliate marketing, you will have to work that much harder to catch up.

Remember: the prices you pay are controlled by who can profit the most.

Who has the most slack?

It shouldn’t take a genius to see how the methods that work so well for some, may be untenable for others.

This bears consideration in your choice of niche.

Are you muddling through a market that has been cornered by wolves?

Barring a spectacular effort, you will find yourself out-gunned by affiliates who could not give a solitary shite what a ‘T&C’ stands for.

The only response is to focus on markets, platforms and specific offers that are well regulated.

(Don’t be surprised if you find yourself naturally gravitating away from CPA at this point.)

Conclusion

These 6 reasons for failure are a constant threat to your affiliate marketing career.

They are regular circuit-breakers.

They can strike at any time.

Knowing that there’s so much you can’t change about our industry, make it your mission to cut out the unforced errors instead.

I believe it’s true that while most campaigns do fail, it is not for a lack of creative spark.

(There’s very little true innovation in affiliate marketing.)

They fail because you commit a fundamental mistake.

The market punishes this mistake.

The market will continue to punish this mistake until you address it.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

By deconstructing the way that you work, by questioning the processes and beliefs that you routinely follow on auto-pilot, only then can you succeed in changing them.

RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK:

  • In case you missed it, my brand new 2015 edition of Premium Posts is available now. Need a recipe for affiliate success in 2015? You won’t find a single resource that covers as much ground as this. 375 pages of my very best tips and strategies.
  • The Premium Posts 2015 Edition is sponsored by Adsimilis. You know all about Adsims, right? They are one of the best CPA networks in the business. If you run any kind of mobile, dating or sweepstakes… then sign up an affiliate account, ca-ching.

P.S. You can read 40 pages of Premium Posts 2015 for FREE by opting in to my monthly newsletter below:

Dear Affiliate, Are You Made Out of Sheep?

Are you an expendable affiliate?

Or a great affiliate?

Only two steps separate you from the best, or the worst:

Step 1: Deliver more revenue than you take in commission.
Step 2: Generate this commission at a profit.

An affiliate offers no value if he neglects Step 1.

His business goes broke if he neglects Step 2.

Every day, hundreds of new affiliates conspire to cheat this founding principle of performance marketing.

And every day, they fail.

Like a herd of hopeless sheep.

If you want to become an indispensable affiliate, there’s one thing you need to understand.

The Value Chain

Affiliates who are capable of delivering paying customers, whilst sustaining their own margins, are a dying breed.

Seriously, newbies…

The numbers are against you.

The majority of affiliates fail to turn any profit on the leads they generate.

They lose money.

A small percentage go on to turn some profit — for themselves.

(Their paymasters are unable to translate those leads in to sales, so the affiliate is cast aside and banned from sending any more. Forever the bridesmaid.)

A tiny percentage of affiliates succeed in producing profit for both parties.

They are the affiliates who understand the Value Chain.

This post is to explain how you can become one of the lucky guys.

The Problem with Optimising For Leads

There are three main models you can use to make money.

PPL — Get paid per lead delivered.
PPS — Get paid per sale delivered.
Revshare — Get a percentage of the customer’s lifetime spend.

By far the most popular model is PPL (pay-per-lead).

Why?

It’s simple.

And easier to optimise.

Leads are faster and cheaper to attract than paying customers.

Breaking the long list of 0s from Conversions adds some signal to your data.

Unfortunately, this signal is what leads so many affiliates astray.

A lead is only ever worth $0.00 — unless it becomes a sale.

Optimising… for LOLs?

Log in to Voluum, or Thrive, or whatever tracker you use.

What do you see?

You see your total revenue generated for the day, and hopefully some profit.

If you are promoting PPL offers, this information is purely theoretical.

But that’s not how most of us treat it.

We treat conversion events as gospel.

They are not merely ‘leads’ to us.

They are hefty transactions where value was added, our methods were vindicated, and everybody got a little richer.

Except that’s rarely what happens.

And too often our leads are about as valuable as a fart in the Hadron Collider.

The truth is…

A business model focused on optimising for leads will only last as long as you can find new suckers to sell them to.

“But Finch! A birdie told me my lead quality is awesome! The advertiser wants more leads!”

Whilst this is great, uplifting news for any affiliate to hear — it shouldn’t be such a surprise.

It certainly shouldn’t be the Email of Reckoning that it is for so many.

You should know exactly how many sales you are delivering.

Because it should be the only campaign variable that makes a difference to every single decision you make.

You have to measure sales.

(I’m afraid this may appear comical advice to anybody but affiliate marketers and Silicon Valley.)

Sales has to be the primary metric that governs how you optimise your campaigns.

That banner with the insane CTR and twice as many leads as your next best creative?

It could be horse shit.

If it doesn’t lead to sales, it’s even worse.

That placement where you’re pausing after 24 hours at a -50% loss?

It could be gold.

A lead priced at $2 might actually be worth $XXX — if it produces a sale.

Most affiliates swear by their data, without asking:

HOW FUCKING USEFUL IS THE DATA?

If that data reveals thousands of conversions with a lifetime value of $0.00, and no way of tracking the sales, then you have to question what exactly you are truly ‘optimising’.

(Because it sounds like choosing whether you want to face left or right, whilst buried firmly in the recess of your own dark arsehole.)

Let me ask you:

  • Are you busy optimising your landing page for more leads — instead of better leads?
  • Are you obsessed with attracting a higher CTR to your banner — instead of more paying customers?
  • Do you cull placements because they have a higher cost-per-lead, regardless of any sales they might produce?

If you answered YES:

How will you ever know that your To Do list is actually worth doing?

Let’s go back to basics.

Step 1: Deliver more revenue than you take in commission.

You can’t measure an increase in revenue if your currency is the theoretical value of a lead.

I’m stating the obvious, but acting on this can have a profound effect on your bottom line.

If nothing else, you will escape the herd.

The irony is that Step 2 — Generate this commission at a profit — will become a lot clearer once you start measuring the correct data.

And so will the sense of control you have over your work.

RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK:

  • In case you missed it, my brand new 2015 edition of Premium Posts is available now. Need a recipe for affiliate success in 2015? You won’t find a single resource that covers as much ground as this. 375 pages of my very best tips and strategies.
  • The Premium Posts 2015 Edition is sponsored by Adsimilis. You know all about Adsims, right? They are one of the best CPA networks in the business. If you run any kind of mobile, dating or sweepstakes… then sign up an affiliate account, ca-ching.

P.S. You can read 40 pages of Premium Posts 2015 for FREE by opting in to my monthly newsletter below:

How to Turn $5,000 in to an Affiliate Business

Here’s an interesting question I received from a reader:

Say you are starting affiliate marketing today with a $5,000 budget — what’s the best way to turn this type of budget in to a long-term affiliate business? And how long would it take?

I see this dilemma often.

“I have XXXX in the bank. My skills are A, B and C. Please tell me how to turn the above in to an affiliate machine that prints money.”

The obvious answer is that there is no obvious answer. But I don’t think many people are satisfied with that, so let’s try and piece together some rough strategies you could follow.

$5,000 is a pretty decent budget.

First of all, some key assumptions:

#1. The $5,000 has to be completely disposable.

If you are intending to draw down the $5,000 to cover living expenses, or to rely on as savings, then it isn’t a genuine budget. It’s a package with emotional strings attached.

It’s better to start with a $1,000 budget that you can afford to lose, rather than $5,000 that you’ve mentally invested elsewhere.

#2. Your living expenses are paid for until the affiliate business has succeeded.

$5,000 is a nice amount for testing campaigns, but it’s not enough cash to run a successful long-term affiliate business.

We’d have to assume that your living expenses are covered by a secondary income and that you won’t be drawing down any profits until you have a successful business in place.

Where to Start?

Let’s run through some of the popular affiliate verticals, as well as some other well known money-making strategies.

The question here being, “Which strategies are suitable for newbie affiliates with $5,000 to burn?”

‘Go Mobile’?

When newbies ask for guidance, what’s the recurring piece of advice you hear?

“It’s 2015, buddy. Time to go mobile…”

Mobile offers are all the rage these days.

That’s nice, but it’s pretty bloody useless as career advice.

When was the last time you heard an affiliate say, “There’s money in Desktop”?

The thing is, there is money in traditional web-based ‘desktop’ offers — but nobody phrases it like that because to do so would be to completely miss the point.

‘Going mobile’ is a term used by many affiliates seeking the next big trend, but until you can actually pinpoint what market you plan to serve, it’s the equivalent of a Walmart Wannabe deciding to ‘go retail’.

There are four main models we can attack in mobile marketing:

  • App installs
  • Pin submits
  • Mobile lead gen
  • Pay-per-call

For somebody with a $5,000 budget, this is how I would rank them:

1. App installs — These have low payouts (cheaper testing), with simple conversion flows, and they are available in many different markets including some that are unsaturated. You can test these offers cost-effectively. A good choice.

2. Pay-per-call — Second best bet. As I explained in Premium Posts 2015, it’s difficult to make a huge loss promoting pay-per-call on AdWords and Bing. The metrics are simple. You can cut your losses fast. There’s much more signal in the data with these offers.

3. Mobile lead gen — Mobile lead gen offers pose the same challenge as those on the web, although quality issues can be difficult to predict. This isn’t a bad starting point, but it’s probably not the best while advertisers are still coming to terms with monetising mobile users.

4. Pin submits — By far the toughest nut to crack on a $5,000 budget. Pin submits generally have higher payouts and higher testing costs. Finding a winning formula can be obtuse, to say the very least. You are tied to mobile carriers, and they are notoriously up-and-down. I recommend you avoid them on this budget.

Once you decide to ‘go mobile’ and focus your efforts on one of these four models, there’s still more work to do.

Ideally you should be narrowing your search to a single market or region (preferably one that isn’t saturated), and a single vertical that operates under your chosen model.

For example, you could choose to focus on:

  • App installs > Utility apps > South East Asia.
  • App installs > Gaming apps > DACH
  • Mobile lead gen > Dating offers > AU/NZ.

In short, one does not simply decide to ‘go mobile’ on a $5,000 budget and live to refresh his stats happily.

You need a strategy that cuts much deeper than simply: “Hey, you know what? I’m sick of desktops. All these bastards using their mobiles? I shall convert them starting Monday.”

CONVERT THEM TO WHAT?

Facebook

To succeed on Facebook in 2015, most affiliates rely on three structural advantages:

  • Excellent cloaking.
  • Access to accounts (infrastructure).
  • Cashflow to hit a winner hard while it lasts.

$5,000 doesn’t buy you even one of the above.

It’s not a traffic source I can recommend to newbies.

Adult Dating

Networks like TrafficJunky, ExoClick and TrafficForce provide easy access to the big money adult dating vertical.

It’s a popular starting point for newbie affiliates, probably because so much of the vertical is, err, graspable at first sight.

In truth, adult dating traffic has become so fragmented that you’d do well to blow through $5,000 without learning a lot along the way.

That’s unless you were to do something stupid — like place top bids on Xhamster in the United States.

The problem most affiliates have isn’t losing money, it’s not making money. There’s a huge plateau of adult affiliates stuck perennially at break even.

If you want to grow your $5,000, you’ll have to focus on out-working the competition by scalping pockets of profit that are ignored by larger advertisers.

Or you can tackle Tier 3 countries where low volume still trades for a decent ROI.

Avoid advertising to Tier 1 countries with a $5,000 budget.

That’s not to say you can’t strike success, but the ROI will be much lower than if you execute the same strategy on a less saturated market.

PPV

Pay-per-view networks (PPV) exploded back in 2009 and 2010.

They have declined in popularity since then.

HOW IT WORKS: PPV networks serve ads to users who have installed third party software (usually a toolbar) on their computers. The advertiser can target users based on their current browsing activity. For example if you were browsing Pets.com, I could target you with a pop-up saying, “HI PETS LOVER, PLEASE LIKE & SHARE MY DOG.” In reality… I probably wouldn’t do this.

Even TrafficVance, the crème de la crème of PPV sources, just recently ditched its long standing requirement that new members must have a referral in to the network. It’s a pretty open playing field these days.

PPV networks may offer a shrinking audience, but that audience is large enough to make good money from.

Some of my highest ROI campaigns in 2014 came from combining PPV traffic with pay-per-call offers, often under dubious circumstances (See Premium Posts 2015).

The precise nature of the targeting means you can easily find small volume campaigns with high ROI that are perfect for growing capital and cutting your teeth in the business.

On a budget of $5,000, PPV is a good choice.

Plentyoffish (POF)

Another traffic source that was massively popular 2-3 years ago.

It’s unlikely you’ll stumble in to the same $1000/day campaigns that were bread and butter back then, but POF remains a good choice for high ROI, low risk profiteering.

The amount of targeting available means that you are unlikely to miss the mark so badly that you’d blow through a $5,000 budget.

I just read a success story on STM of a guy who only started on POF in October 2014, with no formal experience in ‘web stuff’.

He’s now making a comfortable $500/day profit, whilst building out a team of employees to help him scale.

His budget getting started? $4,000.

Whilst these success stories are reasonably common in affiliate marketing, that does not mean that ‘anybody can do it’.

When you read through the actual follow along, it’s clear that his success = application, hard work and the ability to think like an affiliate.

In short, the guy earned his success.

As for POF?

There’s always money in the—

Pops and Redirects

If you have success with broadly targeted PPV campaigns, the natural progression is to move on to pop and redirect traffic.

Here you get access to a lot more volume because the ad is triggered by JavaScript (or a redirect) rather than third party software.

I had some major successes with pop traffic in 2014.

You can get started on a tiny budget using networks like PopAds, PopCash or AdonNetwork.

One thing to note is that while every other traffic source mentioned here (except PPV) can be targeted on shared hosting, you would be a bloody fool to try your luck with pops or redirects whilst HostGatoring on your technology.

Your server has to be lightning fast and able to deal with hundreds of page loads per minute. This will eat up some of your initial $5,000 budget.

Pop traffic comes with a big learning curve, but redirect networks like ZeroPark are easy for newbies to master — and they have good targeting options.

Again, a good choice for the mid-range budget.

Invest in Web Assets

The guy who sent me this $5,000 question already had a rough idea of how he wanted to invest the money.

He wanted to buy a site that he saw on Flippa, in an industry that he was familiar with.

The site was producing around $400-$600 revenue per month, and it was selling for $4500+.

There aren’t many businesses you can buy that pay for themselves within 10 months (and a suspiciously high percentage of them find their way on to Flippa).

That is always my concern with sites that are put up for sale.

The most important thing you can find out is why sell?

If you are looking to invest $5,000 in to an existing website or app, the golden rule is to know your market better than the existing owner.

I think many wannabe site flippers overestimate growth potential whilst dramatically underestimating the work that would be required to break the plateau and flip at a profit.

If you want to do this well, you have to almost reverse the equation and greet every site-for-sale with cynicism.

In this case, I told the guy to go right ahead.

He said he knew the industry and saw an opportunity.

Well, that is a simple recipe for success that has no comeback from a crusty old affiliate like myself.

Good luck to him.

Launch Own Product

Can you design, create, launch and market your own product — one that turns in to a sustainable long-term business — for $5,000?

Yes, you can.

If you understand an industry and spot an opportunity.

A lot of affiliates try to execute this strategy and get it tits-up, for one of four reasons:

  1. They don’t actually understand their chosen industry.
  2. The opportunity that exists doesn’t translate in to paying customers. (They misinterpret the non-committal “Sounds like a good idea“)

  3. The market simply doesn’t scale in to a big money business, either in the size of the transaction, or the number of paying customers.

  4. The product never reaches the market.

My advice, before you spend $5,000 on a product or website that isn’t proven to work:

Design just the sales page, then run a PPC campaign to test that people are willing to buy.

You don’t need to have an actual product.

Only the sales page.

Verify that real-life customers are willing to read your pitch, and then click the buy button at the end of it.

Once they click to buy, you can announce — COMING XXX 2015 — and place them in to a mailing list.

And then build your product.

You can do this several times on a $5,000 budget until you find a product that people are actually willing to pay for.

Managing Cashflow and Scaling

If you decide to focus on arbitrage — buying traffic, sending it to affiliate offers — then it’s important to manage your cash carefully.

A budget of $5,000 offers some slack, but the reality is that industry margins are shrinking.

$5,000 won’t go as far as it used to.

Your first objective must be to increase the amount of capital you have at your disposal.

Back in the days where 100% ROI was second nature, you could turn $5,000 in to $10,000 in the space of a week.

It only took 3-4 weeks of concentrated scaling and suddenly affiliates had budgets where previously they only had their parent’s money.

These days, if a newbie does very well and secures a 20-30% profit margin, on weekly payments, whilst utilising his entire $5,000 budget, he can expect to add $1,000 to it each week.

One of the reasons why it’s so important that you have a secondary income outside affiliate marketing is that you want to keep any profits inside your business.

Turn $5,000 in to $6,000.
Turn $6,000 in to $7,200.
Turn $7,200 in to $8,640.

Money in the bank is so important for affiliates.

Not least because you will experience down times, but also because a bank balance heading in the right direction is a massive psychological boost when it comes to exploring new traffic sources and investing in data.

Two of the big mistakes you can make at this stage are:

1. Spreading your commission across too many networks.

It’s better to work with one network that pays you weekly, rather than three networks that pay you monthly.

To get paid weekly, you usually need to send at least $1,000 in commission for that period.

Working with multiple networks will spread your money in too many different directions and increase the time it takes you to bank it and reinvest.

2. Spreading your ad funds across too many traffic sources.

I’ve lost count of how many traffic sources I have sitting there with unused ad funds.

Just last week I stumbled across a PPV network I haven’t used since 2011 holding $750.

Needless to say, if you are sitting on a $5,000 budget, you have to make that money work for you.

Avoid spraying payments all over the place.

Inject those dollars in to the campaigns with the highest ROI.

ROI = GROWTH

If you get lucky and have Campaign A producing a 30% ROI, vs. Campaign B producing a 50% ROI — you should be pausing Campaign A and loading the funds in to Campaign B to maximise your return and capital growth.

When I hear stories of affiliates spunking through their monthly budget in 3 days, I can’t help but think:

“Why the hell were you bidding so high?”

If you know that you have $X to get you through the next 30 days, and you have a profitable campaign that is rapidly guzzling the funds, then your next step should be:

1. Lower bids to decrease volume (and raise ROI).

or…

2. Day-part aggressively to run only at the most profitable hours (once again, raising ROI).

What you shouldn’t do is treat all profitable campaigns the same.

Cash is king.

Whatever strategy gets you more of it, banked quickly, is where your attention should lie.

(And yes, for many aspiring affiliates, this may be your existing day jobs!)

In Conclusion…

I know most affiliates aspire to run gigantic campaigns that print money by the hour.

Hey, it’s nice to be ambitious.

But unless you have the budget to match, you are going to have to get practical and hustle your way out of the basement.

With $5,000 in your pocket, it’s about learning to walk before you can run.

In that sense, there is no use in copying super affiliates.

They are on a different playing field.

For further reading, here are 5 things I would do if I was starting affiliate marketing today.

If any of you have managed to turn $5,000 in to a well-oiled money printing machine (and I know many of you have), feel free to explain your strategy below!

RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK:

  • In case you missed it, my brand new 2015 edition of Premium Posts is available now. Need a recipe for affiliate success in 2015? You won’t find a single resource that covers as much ground as this. 375 pages of my very best tips and strategies.
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