Confessions Of A Super Duper AffiliateAffiliate marketing information, help, reviews, and tips.

So we all know that Prosper202 does an awesome job at providing free affiliate tracking.

But if you could build your own tracking system, the perfect tracking system, what would it include? What would it do? I want to hear your thoughts on this. A few points that I’d include :

• First thing is connecting with the Adwords/Yahoo/whatever API so we can do lots of things.
• Grab the real cost data (I know P202 is working on this).
• Automatically detect click fraud and block the IPs.
• Edit PPC campaigns from the program and post the changes without going into Adwords.
• The usual graphs and whatnot.

Those are just a few things off the top of my head, I’m curious as to what you guys would include/deem necessary.

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The title of this post is simple and straightforward enough : be unique.

A textbook way of looking at affiliate marketing is “look at what everybody else is doing, if it’s been up there for a while then it has to work, so I’ll just model my campaign/landing page after that.” There’s nothing wrong with that and most times there’s truth to it. But sometimes also you can find greater success doing something unique, something that everybody else isn’t doing.

When you decide on what campaign you want to run and work on, the question is “what offer am I going to promote?” Once you pick the offer, you build a landing page for it and add some keywords into Google or whatever and just start tweaking the LP. Before the building phase ask yourself another question : HOW can I promote this offer?

Are you going to just making a landing page, or would a review page work better comparing other products? Do you want to collect their email before they go to the offer so you can hit them up every few days and try to sell them? Instead of just selling one offer, do you want to introduce a “succession” of offers and cross-sell? What about the demographics of your offer? Should you build a page just for women?

The biggest guys in the industry are the biggest guys because they were unique. They were the first to come up with an idea how to promote an offer, and then everybody followed them. Last year I was one of the first guys to have the True page with the big pink “enter chat rooms” button. I was #1 for chat terms for maybe a month before everybody and their mom had that page. If you went into Copyscape and typed my site it, it was crazy how many duplicates spawned so fast. Nobody was really doing it, we started doing it, and soon after everybody was doing it.

Same with the acai berry blog pages, I remember seeing the first couple guys that did it. Now there’s probably 500 pages exactly like it out there. He was unique, he raped and pillaged the towns and left them with acai berries to eat, and then everybody followed suit.

What’s the next offer you’re going to be unique on? And let me know so I can be one of the first ones to copy it :p. Kidding.

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Just something I’ve been thinking about lately and thought I would share.

One thing you eventually have to accept (or not) in affiliate marketing is that you most likely are not going to be everything. Some people are awesome programmers. Some are awesome designers. Some are awesome at Adwords. Some are awesome at media buying and bizdev. You have to realize your few strengths and let it ride. Or even better, use your strengths and hire out what your weaknesses are. I’ll go into detail about myself…

So it’s taken me 2 years to realize this, but I’m probably not going to be a programmer at the moment. I always thought I was decent at getting traffic and design, but I really wanted to be an awesome programmer like some guys I know. Eventually I realized that it just didn’t make sense to dedicate my time programming when I could be using my strengths to make more money.

Instead of trying to learn how to program a sweet automated tracking system that could do WHATEVER I wanted it to do, my job is to do some simple split testing and find out what’s profitable. I’ll use the Google Website Optimizer to split test a few landing pages…find the best one. I’ll track to the keyword level which is super easy…delete bad keywords. I’ll make a simple script to rotate offers and find the highest converting one…stick with that. Once I find what’s basically the most profitable, then I do what I’m best at - getting more traffic. So instead of trying to learn how to program and optimize and increase my margins, I keep my margins and work on making more profit by getting a lot more traffic in any way I can.

Now in comes my faithful employee. We’re actually pretty even on a design and coding level, so I can trust him to design me landing pages and banners. I was slow at design anyways so BOOM - I know have a lot more time to get more traffic. Uploading banners and creating ads is simple enough, just time consuming so BOOM - he does that and it frees up a lot more time for me to research different ways to get traffic.

In the 2 years I’ve been in the game, I’ve learned some very valuable information about affiliate marketing; but I’ve also learned very valuable information about myself. I’m good at getting traffic, and I’m good at managing things. I need to play to those strengths and right now work on getting more traffic to my offers and having Matt set them up. The next step is hiring a sweet programmer to come work for me too, I’ll probably try and snag one out of college this summer. It’ll step things up a notch if I do do that, as 3 people in 1 small office is kind of a lot so I’ll probably have to get an office.

Just some food for thought : play to your strengths boys and girls and make dat money.

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Just a heads up it looks like almighty Adwords changed something.

When you create a new campaign, the default targeting is now United States AND Canada. I think it used to just be US, so now if you’re running a US only offer, make sure to un-check those bloody Canadians. Oh also…

Dear Google,

When I’ve spent 5 minutes writing ads, picking placements, and adding keywords, please don’t ask for my bid, and then when I click continue log me out of Adwords and log me back in. I lose everything I just did. And it happened to me about 5 times in the last hour. Plz fix this <3.

kthxbye,
uber

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Ok reading and listening to things out there regarding the US economy is starting to get kind of old. I hear the exact SAME thing over and over…

The rough economy will affect affiliate marketing. People won’t have the disposable income to buy products online that they did before. We’ll see a massive drop in online sales and affiliate marketers will suffer. BUT, offers like payday loans and credit offers will do better than ever because people won’t have money and will need it.

We’ll get over the first quick thing - people saying how payday/credit offers will do great. Well first off congrats on making the GENIUS assumption that if less people have money and have to pay bills, they may be more likely to look at a payday loan. Sheer genius there I would have never thought of that myself. Expect a massive increase anyways because Q4 is king for affiliate marketing.

Next is this crazy thought that affiliate marketers will suffer and see revenues drop. Three points I want to make :

1) We’re in Q4 and like I said, affiliate marketing kicks ass over any of the other quarters.

2) People are still going to be spending money, there will always be consumers (unless we go into a depression, which we will not.

3) The vast majority of affiliate offers are shady anyways and the consumer doesn’t actually think they’re going to spend money.

Furreal, what are the biggest offers? Ringtones…dating…acai/green tea…credit reports…mobile, etc. In all of these offers the consumer is usually blind to the fact that they’re going to be charged. They either think what they’re getting is free, or they just have to pay $2.95 for shipping.

We’re only going to see affiliate marketing tank if everybody goes poor and has to sell their computer, and that won’t happen.

So let’s quit crying about the economy and go make some more money, eh?

P.S. I haven’t seen my own personal stats suffer at all.

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