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Here’s a quick thought for you :

PPC affiliate marketing is an much art as it is a science .

I talk a lot about :

1. Optimizing your bids
2. Split testing ads
3. Split testing your landing page
4. Setting up your campaign properly
5. And tracking your metrics

This is the scientific, or analytical, aspect of affiliate marketing. And as a former scientist I, no doubt, really like this aspect of the business.

Now here’s what I’ve realized : you can be a quiz at the analytical left brain aspects of this business and still struggle to make it work!

Why?

Because there’s a right brain creative aspect of ppc affiliate marketing that’s just as important as the analytical one.

So what’s the creative right brain element to ppc affiliate marketing?

1. Understanding the USP (unique selling proposition) of the offer you’re promoting
2. Understanding what the emotional hot buttons are in your niche
3. Understanding consumer buying patterns in your niche
4. Writing your copy so it speaks the language of your demographic, whether they’re new moms, single male yuppies, or whatever. Do you even know what your target demographic is?
5. Overall, understanding the psychology of your niche and getting into the frame of mind of the customer

By really doing your homework before hand (5 point above) you’ll be able to write really effective Google ad copy (that will get a high CTR) and landing page copy (that will get a high conversion rate), and even do much more effective keyword research. Just doing this will often spell the difference between success and failure.

Have YOU been doing your homework before you promote a new affiliate offer, or are you like most affiliates who just jump in a niche and throw up a campaign as fast as they can hoping it will convert?

Okay, I admit, my last post had no point at all!

LOL

I figured I’d give you a teaser before I dished out some real meat.

So here it is, some hot tips (as applicable to affiliate marketing) that I picked up at the Underground :

TIP #1 : EBEN PAGAN’S TIP ON TIME MANAGEMENT

This is a tip that I implemented right away.

I’ll give you the abridged version, since there’s lots of other tips I want to talk about.

The biggest thing that KILLS your productivity is multitasking & distractions, the key is to FOCUS on ONE activity at a time, in particular a productive active that will grow your business and increase your revenues and profits.

Here what you need to do first thing in the morning :

1. Turn off your phone, email, crackberry, pager, fax, beeper, instant messenger, bluetooth headset and any other potential distractions. I know for a lot of you this will be near impossible. Just do it.
2. Get a stop clock. Set it for 50 minutes. Work continuously on your MOST important money making activity for the next 50 minutes.
3. After 50 minutes take a 10 minute break. Stand up, walk around, stretch your arms, get a drink of water, and just chill.
4. Set the stop clock at 50 minutes again & continue working on your most important money making activity.
5. After your second set of 50 minutes are up take a 30 minute break where you eat something, take a walk, or even a nap. Basically you want to try to completely relax as much as possible.
6. During this process you’re NOT allowed to drink coffee, soda, energy drinks, or any other stimulants.

Just start by doing that everyday until it becomes a habit, and notice your productivity, focus, and mental energy SKYROCKET.

I’ve been doing this - well, partially anyway - I’ve faltered quit a bit but I’m STILL seeing a significant increase in my productivity.

In fact, I have my stop clock going right now, I’m at 12 minutes (started at 30 minutes though)!

Multitasking is an addiction, so it will take sometime to get into this new routine. Just stay persistent.

TIP #2 : GOING THROUGH THE NUMBERS

Here’s a tip right from Yanik Silver himself. Yanik btw is a very cool, down to earth guy.

He was talking about how to quickly test a market & a product before making a huge invest of time & money into something that may be a dud.

It’s essentially a numbers game.

Yanik finds that 2 out of every 10 products/markets he tests are a BIG success, 2 out of ten are total BOMBS, and the other 6 bring in a little bit of money.

So you want to go through the numbers and test AS FAST as possible so you can find those 2 winner.

How does that apply to affiliate marketing?

You want to test different affiliate offers as fast as you can to find the winners.

Here’s how you do that :

1. Launch multiple (5-10) affiliate offers at once using just direct linking. If any of your campaigns get Slapped, move it over to Yahoo and test it there.
2. Based on the search volume and conversion rate you get for each offer, you’ll know if it’s a winner or not.
3. Also, test search AND content.

The more I do affiliate marketing the more I realized that picking the right niche (and offer to go with it) is EVERYTHING.

TIP #3 HOW MANY GREAT IDEAS HAVE YOU LOST?

Let me rephrase that : If you had remembered and implemented every great idea you had about your business, how much more money would you have made?

Let’s face it, we frequently have great idea : in the middle of the night, when you’re driving in the car, when you’re in the shower, etc.

So what happens? It slips from your mind, right? You completely forget about it. I’ve had it happen to me countless times.

Here’s a great solution to catching all those ideas that pop in your brain and then disappear:

Get a small digital Voice Recorder and carry it with you everywhere. If you get an idea then just pull out your voice recorder and start recording.

Joe Polish claims this ONE idea generated him $10 million last year!

WOW!

I got my voice recorder right in front of me right now.

That’s all for now.

I’ll share more insights in the future, too much good information to cover in one post.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.