Become an Affiliate Marketer | Finch Sells

4 Processes That Make Money for Affiliate Marketers

May 23 2012

If you’ve read Premium Posts Volume 5, firstly, congratulations. You have some mighty fine taste. And secondly, you’ll be aware that I’m a big fan of focused concentration when it comes to getting campaigns launched.

At the very start of Volume 5, I made it clear that you should avoid spending a single dollar on affiliate marketing until you can answer the following questions:

What niche am I going to work in?
What traffic source am I going to use?
What demographics am I going to target?

These are three pivotal questions. Answer them correctly and you’ll avoid the rather severe strain of throwing-shit-at-a-wallitis that most of us seem to be suffering from.

If you can’t answer these questions, you are committing the same madness as a businessman without a business plan. It may work for a small handful of Delboys, but for most of us, unfocused concentration is a recipe for mediocre results.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a skill in its own right. I prefer to think of affiliate marketing as an umbrella term for a group of professionals who are great at getting their noses dirty in other people’s business. Our defining quality is that we do a better job of generating customers than the companies we work for. That’s our ‘value creation’, our gift to the world.

So, being honest with yourself, how much do you know about the companies you work for?

I bet you know their payouts and EPCs, right? But what do you know about their customers and products? What do you know about their current marketing efforts, and most importantly, what can you do to help them?

I believe success (or failure) depends on your ability to really nail the following processes:

Demographic research – Understanding the people you’re marketing to.
Offer research – Understanding the offers you’re promoting.
Technical research – Understanding the conversion flow.
Platform research – Understanding the traffic source.

Finally, throw in a helpful dollop of good old fashioned common sense and basic maths.

Note: Taking maths seriously will save you a lot of money in testing. When you can rule out campaigns by knowing intuitively that the maths don’t work, you’re doing it right.

Let’s take a closer look at the four key processes above.

Demographic research

Are you the kind of marketer who slings products to fratboy college kids on Tuesday, only to be cold calling retirement homes on Wednesday? How many different demographics might we find in your crosshairs?

The reality of understanding a demographic is that unless you are that demographic, you’ve got a lot of work to do.

If you want to sell products to a foreign demographic, one that isn’t directly compatible with your own life experience, there are two ways forward.

1. Use audience measurement tools to gain a better understanding of the demographic.
2. Spend time in the trenches getting a feel for the demographic.

Audience Measurement Tools

I’m sure you’ve heard of these, right?

They are crowbarred in to practically every conversation about affiliate best practices.

Google Ad Planner – Yes, it belongs to Google. And yes, we still hate Google. However, bitchiness aside, Ad Planner is a pretty badass demographic research tool. Use it to dig under the fingernails of an affiliate offer’s existing audience.

Quantcast – Affiliates love this site almost as much as they love talking about it. Quantcast has some excellent insights in to what a site’s audience might be interested in.

I particularly like this example for Plentyoffish.

What are POF.com users interested in? Oh, you didn't know?

So, pretty much every niche in affiliate marketing…

Compete – Kinda like Quantcast, but with the full honeybadger makeover. Pop-ups and upsells all over the shop. There’s good data nonetheless.

Spending Time in the Trenches

As much as I enjoy squirreling through small mountains of data, I believe the best kind of demographic research involves putting faces to percentages. You can’t hope to understand the mindset of your target audience if you haven’t looked beyond cold numbers.

I know that most of the offers I’m likely to promote are either riddled with scandal, or part of a niche that has previously been riddled with scandal. It’s just the affiliate marketing way.

Love it or hate it, you can learn a lot about a target market’s mindset by looking at the devastation of what has converted before.

I guarantee that by spending 30 minutes checking out sites like Scam.com, your inpiration palette will be overflowing with juicy consumer concerns and possible reflex psychological triggers that stand in the way of a conversion.

I know we’d all love to believe that our target market is a gigantic field of lambs waiting to be slaughtered, but these lambs have often been burnt before. Many times over.

Those working in the weight loss niche know full well that the number one concern is how to distinguish yourself from the hundreds of other solutions that didn’t work.

How do you manage such a feat? By spending time in the trenches!

Use forums like Scam to gauge the public sentiment towards certain websites and verticals. Draw up a list of the primary concerns and make those points your challenge to rebuke. Your landing page should be an island of reassurance.

Alternatively, for a really effective prod at your demographic, ask a friend or relative (one who ticks the right demo boxes. obviously) to take a look at your ads and landing page. Take notes on how they react to your creatives, where they click, where they stumble…

Note: Don’t try this shit if you’re working in the adult dating market. Nobody reacts naturally to porn with their nephew taking notes behind them on a clipboard.

Offer research

I dedicated 25 pages to my process of offer research in Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s something you should take very seriously if you’re on a small budget, or… you know, if on some basic level, you value your money.

Offer research involves scoping beyond the usual affiliate concerns. Yes, it’s nice to have payouts and EPCs documented in a spreadsheet, but understanding ‘what’s in it for me’ is not going to get you any closer to understanding the offer itself.

If you get too creative with your campaigns, you may find yourself selling an angle that simply doesn’t exist – or isn’t compatible with the offer itself.

All those “Would You Date a Soldier?” ads are redundant if you promote a dating site that has nothing to do with the military, especially if you make no attempt to bridge the angle on your landing page.

Before promoting any offer, bombard your affiliate manager accordingly. Find out any information you can about the merchant. What types of leads are they looking for? Is there a certain demographic that is deemed ‘quality’ traffic? Does the merchant run any offers that you’ve already promoted?

Grab the bigger picture by the balls. Just by looking at a campaign through the eyes of the merchant, you can focus your creativity on angles that are going to be viable for all parties concerned. This in turn will boost your quality score. Your value as an affiliate will increase tenfold.

I don’t like wasting my money. Who does? Unfortunately, you will almost certainly spunk dollars up the wall if you fail to research your offers properly.

Technical research

Many affiliate marketers are speculators. They base decisions and optimizations on what sounds plausible in their heads. They turn a blind eye to the technical side of what is happening once their ads turn green.

What happens when a user arrives on your landing page? Can you script the entire process from initial click to conversion?

Understanding your conversion flow is priority number one if you hope to advance beyond speculation. How can you even begin to make informed decisions about a campaign if you can’t grasp the fundamentals?

What page does the conversion pixel fire on?
Do you get paid for a single opt-in? A double opt-in? A profile photo upload? A download, installation and ‘first play’?
What steps/interactions are required for the user to qualify as a lead?
Are there are agent-specific limitations on your campaign (e.g toolbars that require a certain browser)?

If you can’t script your campaign from click to conversion, it’s time to bust out a notepad and make understanding the conversion flow a priority before you spend any more money on traffic.

Platform research

If you are new to affiliate marketing, or maybe just floundering hopelessly, here’s a simple pointer: commit to a single traffic source and stick with it. That traffic source might be Google, Facebook, Plentyoffish or an obscure platform that nobody gives a damn about. It doesn’t really matter.

Once you commit to a platform, understand that it’s your duty to learn that platform inside out.

If our jobs were limited to understanding somebody else’s product, we would all be out of work. It’s our knowledge of traffic sources and how to generate leads cost-effectively that keeps us in hot demand.

Here’s a simple question. Where do you spend most of your advertising dollars?

Got the answer to that? Now tell me why you’re better than 98% of the other advertisers using that platform.

If you can’t claim to be in the elite 2% with a straight face, then you haven’t spent enough time researching, testing and understanding the platform. Until you make that effort, your net worth to the industry is microscopic.

Mediocre knowledge of an offer + mediocre knowledge of a traffic source
= Not going to be working in 2013!

Excellent knowledge of an offer + excellent knowledge of a traffic source
= Congratulations, you stand a chance. Not an entitlement to success, but a chance.

Recommended This Week

Make sure you grab your copy of the newly released Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s perfect for anybody wanting to crack this industry on a shoestring budget.
Also be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.

Statistical Significance vs. Affiliate Gut Instinct

Nov 22 2011

How much money are you willing to lose before striking profitability?

This seems to be the question that pops up on IM forums at least once per week, presumably because there is no set in stone answer.

Should I spend $50? $100? Two times the payout? Or should I just sling balls to the wind and let the campaign run for 24 hours?

Most of the advice given in response to these questions touches on the importance of statistical significance. Now, while in the real marketing world, budgets tend to permit the wisdom of waiting for statistical significance, I have to question the validity of the advice when you’re feeding it to a newbie affiliate with $100 in his bank account.

I had to look twice at a comment from one particular forum member stating that “it’s impossible to draw any reasonable conclusion from a campaign without 1000 clicks in the can“. Seriously, 1000 clicks? If I go 1000 clicks without a conversion, I have a fucking stroke and murder six kittens.

I admire the resilience, but I’m not going to lie, there have been many occasions where I’ve pulled the plug on campaigns after as little as 15 clicks. However, in these cases, it wasn’t a lack of respect for statistics that was pulling the trigger. It was a gut instinct.

Sometimes, no matter what the lab rats say, it’s possible to get a feel for an offer’s potential from a very limited set of data. There are several external factors that play in to this gut instinct.

The offer may have bombed in the past, or it may have been sitting on the network for months and yet never received a mention in the regular newsletters. Maybe – like myself – you’re simply not used to going 15 clicks without a conversion on a dating offer, and don’t like it.

You could also have many subconscious reservations about the campaign (“Hmm, well I’ve heard bad things about using Google Translate but I do want to get it live today…“), or simply the underlying feeling that the maths aren’t going to add up in your favour.

I will be the first to admit that adopting such a shotgun approach to managing campaigns has probably cost me money in the past. But it’s also saved me a lot of money that would have otherwise been splurged waiting for statistical significance to confirm what I already knew.

If you are new to affiliate marketing, yes, it’s true, you really do need to be serious about testing and tracking your campaigns. But you also have to develop a personal kind of AI – Affiliate Intelligence – which is an unfathomable knack for anticipating how a campaign will pan out before you’ve wasted the hundreds of dollars necessary to scientifically prove it so.

You also have to apply some good old fashioned common sense in how you’re actually spending your test budget.

While many of the biggest media buyers will be quite happy to spunk a few thousand dollars on display campaigns, I find the idea of testing and losing that much money on self-serve platforms like Plentyoffish or Facebook to be a major no-no.

I just don’t understand how it can happen.

Fair enough, if you invest $2000 and fail to break even, that’s an unfortunate but somewhat predictable plight. But if you invest $2000 and make practically zero in return, your problem isn’t a question of stumbling across the wrong campaign. Your problem is a monumental failure in finding the pause button. It’s inexcusable.

Nobody, and I repeat nobody, should be losing $2000 on traffic sources like Facebook or Plentyoffish. Investing $2000? Yes, perhaps, but losing it all? You’re doing it wrong. I can’t say what exactly, but you clearly took the advice of “not refreshing stats all day” too literally.

Recommended This Week

If you don’t have tracking software, I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of CPV Lab. We’ve been waiting on updates to the Lab for a while now, but it’s still a fine hunk of software that can only improve your chances of affiliate success. Just remember to heed your gut instincts too.
For those of you who advertise on Facebook, Premium Posts Volume 2 splurges over 70 pages of my tips, techniques and strategies for conquering Zuckerberg’s monster. Reviews so far have generally been that the Posts are better than sex, so please do check them out.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

My 1 Piece of Advice To New Affiliates

Oct 24 2011

“If you were just entering the affiliate industry now, knowing what you already know, how would you launch a successful business? Where would you start?”

This is a question I get asked time and time again, particularly by those looking to cross in to affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget. I understand the concerns. Not wanting to waste a single dollar is an admirable show of frugality, if hopelessly unrealistic.

However, condensing my hindsight in to a reliable plan for somebody else’s future is not particularly practical.

There are many things I’ve learnt by starting an affiliate business. Most importantly, the need to play to my strengths.

When you step back from the industry and forget that affiliate marketing exists, you can find a great deal of clarity by simply asking yourself: “What do I have to offer? What can I do for other people that would make some kind of difference?”

These are very fundamental questions, and probably not as appealing as the one push button formula that many optimists are craving to hear about.

But it’s only by understanding your strengths, by grasping what you have to offer, that you can possibly think about creating a business that will be valuable five or ten years from now.

If you fail to recognise your strengths and passions, I can almost guarantee that your success will hinge on chance. You’ll adopt the scattergun approach to Internet Marketing where projects look impressive on paper, but leave you feeling empty on the first day of production.

I could advise new affiliates to go and build a website about losing weight with the latest jungle superberry, because obviously there’s plenty of money to be made in that particular niche. But I’d be doing them a massive injustice.

You could expect those excited affiliates to go away, bust out their credit cards, snap up domains and hosting, and maybe even come back two weeks later with a shiny WordPress ready to sell some berries.

The problem is that most new affiliates are pretty uneducated when it comes to understanding and selling berries. More to the point, the reason they find to justify such a splurge of berry related research is that it could potentially make them money. They will build websites about random crap because there’s a bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. But where is the passion?

You can’t be passionate about money forever. It’s a paradox. Eventually you end up with enough of it to be back to square one.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt is that even if there is a bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow, even if your berries website does make you a great deal of money, it’s not going to leave you feeling 100% satisfied. The only work that will leave you feeling 100% satisfied is work that you actually care about.

This is a ridiculous argument for many affiliates to understand. Who needs to feel satisfied when the money is in the bank and you’re still in your boxer shorts at 1pm?

It’s not a question of failing to appreciate the money, but rather feeling comfortable with your objectives. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and so I use affiliate marketing as a mechanism to monetize the passion I have for writing.

My whiteboards used to be littered with whichever projects were likely to put money in my pocket, even if the thought of getting the work done was enough to make me strangle a kitten in my sleep.

Sooner or later, the mindset grows thin. You find yourself naturally gravitating to the ideas that stir an emotion or excitement more sustainable than the appeal of making money. You ultimately realise that easy, profitable and sustainable can never exist.

I hope that one day the Internet Marketing bubble bursts, and we’re all forced to abandon the ridiculous exact match domain projects that came about simply because we saw a micro opportunity, or the thousands of Ezine processed articles, written by experts who are only actually expert in the art of getting to an opportunity first.

My number one piece of advice for any affiliate looking to break in to the industry is actually quite simple.

Imagine you’re designing a business plan for a brick and mortar store, not a website that can be quietly consigned to history at the first sniff of a challenge. Then ask, “What can I see myself happily working on every day for as long as it takes to succeed?”

Nail down your passion, research the market, and then do a better job of servicing it than the thousands of Internet Marketers wearing ‘expert’ masks in disguise.

It might take a while for the industry to correct itself, but when it does, the affiliates who are truly passionate about their objectives will have a much greater incentive to stay ahead than Mr. Exact Match Domain who couldn’t give a shit.

Recommended This Week

Pick up a copy of Premium Posts Volume 1 if you like the content on this blog. For those of you waiting for the next Volume, well, keep waiting. I haven’t started it yet.
For those who need more hands-on info, check out the Stack That Money Forum. It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.