1 Not tracking
The first investment of every new affiliate marketer should be an affiliate tracking platform membership. Internet give us the opportunity to track all the steps of an advertising campaign, in opposition to offline advertising, and its worth to use. It is cool to generate a sale or a lead for the affiliate program you are promoting, but if you want to optimize your placements you need to know from which source this sale came, and invest more resources in there. The same happens for the sources that don’t perform, do you want to spend money in not converting traffic?
2 Too many Affiliate Programs
To determine the right number of affiliate programs you should be running is complex, probably there is no ideal number. New affiliate marketers tend to join every program they find and launch it to see if it works. This is not bad, but will probably lead you to have too much to deal with and loose effectiveness when optimizing campaigns.
3 Test before invest
We recommend you to establish a maximum budget to spend in a campaign to evaluate the performance. This budget can vary depending on the typology of the campaign (payout, vertical, etc.) but it is important to establish a limit. Once launching a new affiliate program in a determined source, this quantity will be your limit to evaluate the ROI of this placement and decide if it’s interesting to continue or not.
4 Optimize
Once you identify placements that have potential (positive ROI) it is really important to optimize the traffic source. Optimization techniques can change depending of the traffic source, but as an example you should analyze keywords from PPC search placements and pause the ones that are not converting, or stop mailings to specific segments from an email database that are not converting.
5 A/B testing
A/B testing is used to compare 2 or many variations of the same ad and find the most performing one and will help you when optimizing a placement. Try to find the most converting way to communicate to potential users.
6 Upscale
Related to the last point, it is important to upscale a placement, only after testing phase and optimization phase are done. After up scaling we will have to test again and optimize, so it’s a never-ending process!
7 Landing pages
Many affiliate marketers redirect the traffic they buy directly to the landing page of the affiliate program. This is a standard practice that has proven its effectiveness, but there are many affiliate marketers that create pre-landers. This practice is mainly used in sale campaigns with high payouts, were the users need to be warmed up before purchasing.
8 CPL or CPS?
Many affiliate marketers get attracted by the higher payouts of CPS affiliate programs, and don’t take attention to CPL campaigns. We recommend to new affiliate marketers to start with CPL programs. The payouts are generally lower, and this is due to the fact that the action the users need to perform (register) is easier than buying a product. Getting conversions is easier and will allow you to practice with placements that convert instead of getting stocked with CPS campaigns that don’t convert.
9 Buy good quality traffic
The brands that create affiliate programs to sell their products or get leads will analyze the traffic that the affiliate platforms send to them. These affiliate platforms generally identify their affiliates with a unique ID, so watch out what kind of conversion you generate if you want to continue working with them. The goal for every new affiliate marketer should be to generate trust with affiliate platforms and hence brands by generating quality conversions and become a valuable partner.
10 Diversify the products/verticals
Many affiliate marketers concentrate in a single vertical, an even deeper, in a concrete kind of product or service, in order to increase their revenue. This is not a bad strategy, but in order to get there this guys probably tested many different verticals and ended up specializing in the ones that were working better for them. We recommend to new affiliate marketers to test different verticals, and find the ones that fit their traffic the best.
If you want to have access to hundreds of affiliate programs, we recommend you to sign up to an Affiliate platform like Addiliate.com. You can get started by clicking here!
The first investment of every new affiliate marketer should be an affiliate tracking platform membership. Internet give us the opportunity to track all the steps of an advertising campaign, in opposition to offline advertising, and its worth to use. It is cool to generate a sale or a lead for the affiliate program you are promoting, but if you want to optimize your placements you need to know from which source this sale came, and invest more resources in there. The same happens for the sources that don’t perform, do you want to spend money in not converting traffic?
2 Too many Affiliate Programs
To determine the right number of affiliate programs you should be running is complex, probably there is no ideal number. New affiliate marketers tend to join every program they find and launch it to see if it works. This is not bad, but will probably lead you to have too much to deal with and loose effectiveness when optimizing campaigns.
3 Test before invest
We recommend you to establish a maximum budget to spend in a campaign to evaluate the performance. This budget can vary depending on the typology of the campaign (payout, vertical, etc.) but it is important to establish a limit. Once launching a new affiliate program in a determined source, this quantity will be your limit to evaluate the ROI of this placement and decide if it’s interesting to continue or not.
4 Optimize
Once you identify placements that have potential (positive ROI) it is really important to optimize the traffic source. Optimization techniques can change depending of the traffic source, but as an example you should analyze keywords from PPC search placements and pause the ones that are not converting, or stop mailings to specific segments from an email database that are not converting.
5 A/B testing
A/B testing is used to compare 2 or many variations of the same ad and find the most performing one and will help you when optimizing a placement. Try to find the most converting way to communicate to potential users.
6 Upscale
Related to the last point, it is important to upscale a placement, only after testing phase and optimization phase are done. After up scaling we will have to test again and optimize, so it’s a never-ending process!
7 Landing pages
Many affiliate marketers redirect the traffic they buy directly to the landing page of the affiliate program. This is a standard practice that has proven its effectiveness, but there are many affiliate marketers that create pre-landers. This practice is mainly used in sale campaigns with high payouts, were the users need to be warmed up before purchasing.
8 CPL or CPS?
Many affiliate marketers get attracted by the higher payouts of CPS affiliate programs, and don’t take attention to CPL campaigns. We recommend to new affiliate marketers to start with CPL programs. The payouts are generally lower, and this is due to the fact that the action the users need to perform (register) is easier than buying a product. Getting conversions is easier and will allow you to practice with placements that convert instead of getting stocked with CPS campaigns that don’t convert.
9 Buy good quality traffic
The brands that create affiliate programs to sell their products or get leads will analyze the traffic that the affiliate platforms send to them. These affiliate platforms generally identify their affiliates with a unique ID, so watch out what kind of conversion you generate if you want to continue working with them. The goal for every new affiliate marketer should be to generate trust with affiliate platforms and hence brands by generating quality conversions and become a valuable partner.
10 Diversify the products/verticals
Many affiliate marketers concentrate in a single vertical, an even deeper, in a concrete kind of product or service, in order to increase their revenue. This is not a bad strategy, but in order to get there this guys probably tested many different verticals and ended up specializing in the ones that were working better for them. We recommend to new affiliate marketers to test different verticals, and find the ones that fit their traffic the best.
If you want to have access to hundreds of affiliate programs, we recommend you to sign up to an Affiliate platform like Addiliate.com. You can get started by clicking here!
