Recovering from an Affiliate Storm

I gotta tell you, it’s nuts down here in South Florida, people are stocking up and preparing for what could be a category 1 Hurricane, Hurricane Fay, hitting us hard. Shilpi and I are ready-well as ready as well ever be for our first hurricane.

Now how do you prepare when your affiliate sales get hit by a storm? What I mean by that is your affiliate sales take a major beating between Google slaps and market slowdowns.

I know for a fact a lot of affiliates are hurting right now. My affiliate sales have been particularly slow this time of the year. I’ve seen market slowdowns before but this is NUTS. Don’t feel bad for me, overall, my affiliate profits are doing very well, thanks to some new offers I launched earlier this year that are picking up the slack of the other offers I’m running.

Will the market rebound? Most certainly, however, my philosophy is to leave NOTHING to chance. When sales slow down I get busy.

Here’s an action plan :

1. First lower your bids on your existing campaign using advanced ad scheduling. The idea is to improve your profits and ROI while the market is down.
2. Start researching more keywords for your niche – I’ve found this to be one of the most effective ways to breathe life into an apparently dying campaign. Time and time again I’ve been able to recover lost search volume and sales doing this.
3. If your offers are all running on Google, start testing Yahoo and MSN, and vis versa. If you’re doing Google Search only, test Content Network as well, and vis-versa. Get busy testing more and more avenues of traffic generation.
4. Launch more offers. I know, this one’s a no brainer. It’s also a good idea to WAIT until the market begins to turn around (Sept, Oct, etc) before you launch a new affiliate offer. However, you can start setting everything up now and even upload your campaign paused into Google, ready to launch at the click of a button!

Recovering from an Affiliate Storm is actually not that hard, the hard part is keeping your emotions in check.

Don’t freak out! Remember if you’re seeing a seasonal downturn your sales WILL GO BACK UP, even if you do nothing.

Remember ultimately YOU are in control of your success and your future.