Even now, with all my success as a super affiliate, I feel a sense of anxiety when I launch a new offer in a new niche, especially an offer that my team has been working on for several weeks-developing the site, unique content, etc, etc.
What if I don’t make any sales?
Will this work?
Will Google slap my site?
Am I using the right approach in this market!?!
It all usually works out and the affiliate offer is a success (well at least 90% of the time)!
Anyway this anxiety I was feeling just the other day when I did actually launch a new offer really got me thinking about this whole process.
You see when I started affiliate marketing the success rate of my new affiliate campaigns/offers was about 10% (or less), and now my success rate is about 90%.
What happened? What an I doing differently? And most importantly what can YOU do differently?
Here’s a few tips that will help you out:
- Talk to Your Affiliate Manager – I always talk to my affiliate manager and make sure that the affiliate offer is HOT (conversions are good) and I always ask what the top affiliates are making with that offer, the bigger the number the better.
- Does it Work with PPC? – Make sure that whatever your promoting that it’s actually something that will convert well with PPC. For example, if the payout for the offer is $1 and the average CPC in that market is 0.50, then forget PPC. Your merchant or affiliate manager should able to tell you if the affiliate promotions is something that works well with PPC.
- Market Research – My team carefully researches a niche before we dive in. We look at what other affiliates & merchants are doing. What type of landing pages their using, what type of keywords their bidding on, and what style of ad copy they’re using. Based on this analysis we get a good feel for the market and an idea how to can add value by improving on what other affiliates are doing. We develop our plan of attack from there. (NOTE: We DON’T use a scraping program to do this market research, and we DON’T rip off & copy other people’s hard work, and YOU shouldn’t either.)
The key is to take sometime to really understand what you’re getting into if you decide to promote ringtones, pay day loans, or whatever.
Do your freakin’ homework and your success rate will go WAY up.
affiliate managers market research marketing success rate
I’m guessing he’s using Affiliate Elite (Project 2/3)
for competitive analysis.
It allows you to examine the keywords they use, see their ad copy, study the market as a whole.
Affiliate Elite is a great tool for market research (Surprisingly, not because of the “Find Products To Promote” feature)
Project 2 (Reverse Google Search) and Project 3 (Analyze competition) give you a lot of great data to look at when contemplating if the market can sustain an affiliate promotion via pay per click.