how much time do you spend on setup when launching a new campaign?

[Andy Haskins]

Hi Charles,

Firstly, thank you for agreeing to partake in the Affiliate Marketing Expert week, it's a great feature and it's off to a great start.

My first question to you is a little wide open and tailored more to opening up some answers for newer industry individuals but here we go:

I think a lot of newbies can get caught up in tailoring a campaign that THEY are happy with instead of letting their audience decide, I know I did when I started out.

So with that in mind, when initially launching a campaign is there anything in particular you do to 'save time' and test the potential before spending time diving in and scaling out? I.e. do you direct link to get a feel for the traffic , keep your demos broad and bid high etc or do you prefer lay the foundations first (get x amount of landers ready to split etc)

 

[charles_ngo]

Probably my favorite question so far.
Thanks, glad to be here!

The little story reminds me of Henry Ford's quote "You can paint it any color, so long as it's black." Sometimes you have to let the ego step down a bit if you want to make money.

The mistake that newbies make is they try to get too creative and come up with their own campaigns. I prefer to take campaigns other people are making money on, and improve upon it.

Imitate, then innovate.

Some tips
- Look at REVENUE reports of affiliate networks (not EPC). If an offer is doing high revenue at a network, that means people are making money
- Reverse engineer / competition research. I see what my competitors doing. If they are running everywhere, that means their ads / landing pages / offers work. My goal now is to improve upon their work.

I highly suggest picking up the boot "The Lean Startup". I've incorporated some of his principles into my campaigns such as Minimum Viable Product.

An example is say you're starting with adult dating but you don't know what country. What I would do is setup a $100 test for 10 different countries, direct link, and see which one makes the most money, and then focus on it.

After you're making money then you can start working on some passion campaigns for fun.

Most people would pick a country randomly…build a lander….run….lose money. Quit adult dating.

I prefer making decisions off of data, rather than guesses.