Anxiety when Launching a New Affiliate Offer?
August 7th, 2007 by 
Amit
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
Posted in Competitive Analysis, Market Research, affiliate marketing | 
Great Minds think alike.
I was thinking the same today when i started a new campaign.
One side of me was saying this is not going to work, and not sure why it was not going to work.
Other side, was so what it might fail, if so no problem. move on and find something else.
Result made one sale in fist hour, mind at rest now, till tomorrow.
KEEP SMILING
Kevin
UK
Excellent advice Amit.
Tomorrow i launch my first adwords campaign and i looked at around 10 different niches (and a few subniches) before finding one that i feel would have a chance at being profitable.
I spent 4 days doing Market research then Keyword development then another investigating the type of landing page that should be used.
Im finally there but kind of worried to start it but it’s all for experience right.
Hi Amit
You’re an absolute inspiration.
I’m so excited about getting into affiliate marketing, I can hardly breathe!
Please keep up the posts - we all need a pep up when things seem hard.
Once again you educate and inspire. Would you also say it’s true that just going after the higher payouts and commissions on certain offers isn’t always a better strategy? Some offers seem to pay less but convert better so you actually make more, no?
Interesting article.
I found point #3 particularly telling.
However the note has me confused.
- You don’t scrape
- You don’t use a program
- You don’t steal
It’s a strange perspective. One could say if all that were true, you wouln’t be looking at their keywords, ads, landing pages etc.
By doing so, you ARE in fact taking advantage of their hard work, as you call it, by gaining competitive inteligence and profiting from their trial and error.
But that’s fine by me, it’s how business works.
In which case, what’s the ethical case for doing it manually rather than programatically?
It’s slower and bulkier and costs more?
This is not much about “new campaign anxiety” but rather about having a team. In your post you say you’ve got a team studying the market and all.
My question is how do you go about building a team? I mean, do you have employees or do you work more in a partnership kind of way? I always feared that employees could end up “stealing” my ideas or niche.
What do you think?
Hi Stephane,
Amit, Melanie and I are partners. We each bring our own expertise and experience to the table. We don’t have employees, but work with talented freelancers when needed.
Building a team is as easy as finding people that have a valuable skill and simply asking. I initially hired Amit
for consulting, then he requested services from me. We partnered up and found a good writer who already had a developed team (Melanie) and partnered with her as well.
Thanks,
Thomas
I was at your Miami session and you recommended we use KeyCompete to find keywords, is that considered scraping or is the data gathered some other way?
I can definitely relate to this. Over the past couple weeks I have been testing ppc like crazy. I setup a few campaigns today and just got back tonight and checked my account. Finally, I hit one and the margins are big! PPC and dedication really pay off!
I think once you finally done the campaign its even worse, most newbie affiliates check the sales screen every 5 minutes.
The releif when you see a sale is good then catch 22 you think forget it now and look at end of day, but your mind is saying all the time, hope I sold something else so you check again. And you get back into the 5 minute check routine.
Keep smiling,
Kevin
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.