I have to say that this is quiet true. If you don’t know how to strategize and play the cards well, then you really cant move a boulder. To move one, you have to sometimes take risks and sometimes drastic changes to determine the factors that can affect your success. Great post however I have to agree with Joshua Wexelbaum. Before you try to start a campaign, make sure that you are ready and prepared of what is to come.

This is crucial. Every campaign fails for a reason or several reasons. It’s very important as affiliates that we figure out exactly what happened to make the campaign fail.

Here are a few of the common themes on a failed campaign:

1) You are targeting the wrong keywords. The keywords are too broad, unrelated, or not targeting ‘buyers’.

2) Your ad copy is not relevant to the offer, is inaccurate, or is targeting the wrong type of person.

3) Your landing page is not persuasive or is not the optimal way to design a landing page for your niche.

4) Your bidding too low and your ads are appearing in too low a position for the high converting keywords.

5) You are bidding TOO deep and not broad enough to cover a lot of different types of keywords.

I understand how it can be tougher for someone who has a day job. It might mean less time with the kids, watching TV, relaxing during weekends, less sleep, etc.

I gave the number of hours as a an example. In addition to the amount of time, what you do during that time determines your success too.

I would say that the first couple of campaigns might require some DIY. Once it gets going however, other options like automation, using templates and outsourcing are options to reduce the amount of development time required.

Re: testing new niches – Testing involves launching smaller scale landing pages to determine the niche viability (I believe Amit has mentioned this before).

If you send 200 clicks (as an example) to the site, and it proves viable, then you build it out to a full site.

It helps to have a gameplan in mind.

Anyways good stuff

Not everyone can work 4 hours a day on their affiliate campaigns. If you don’t have a day job I can understand then. Thou I make more with my affiliate business than what I make at my day job but someone of us like to keep our day jobs as well for one reason or the other, therefore, can’t spare more 2 hours after work which I think should be enough.

And I believe you really don’t need to launch 5-6 campaigns every week. But if you mean scaling you existing working campaigns further then that make sense. But if it means throwing incomplete campaigns in difference niches every time and not focusing on what you having going right now then its a waste.

Gagan

If you listen to the interview I did with Amit, he was saying to be aggressive you launch 6-8 campaigns per week.

Here it’s 6-8 per month.

If you can’t launch 6-8 new ones plus optimize your old ones working 4 hours a day, 25 days a month (100 hours), you need to improve your time management.

That’s the real bottleneck for beginners in my opinion.

Good post. Can you please change your picture on the blog?

My biggest challenge is finding the funding to do this. I have launched campaigns before and had small success but without a larger budget I am often times forced to stop the campaigns. The idea of taking out a credit card to do affiliate marketing scares me, but I guess that’s what its all about, getting over the fear and making that move.

Thanks,
Marko