5 Things I Didn’t Know about Affiliate Marketing
When I started affiliate marketing I knew very little. Since then I have learned a lot (and still have a lot to go) but these are the 5 things that I wish someone would have told me before I started.
1) Scrubbing hurts. Factor this in when deciding to run an offer.
How the hell could I have known that this would happen? Scrubbing is when a network or advertiser decides not to count all of the leads that you are sending them. One of my first highly profitable (3x ROI) offers became unprofitable after about a week when the advertiser decided to start scrubbing my leads. My affiliate manager wouldn’t tell me what was going on and I had to shut down my campaigns because of it. Although scrubbing is not as common as it used to be, it is still present today.
2) Ask for a higher payout before you start spending money on the offer
Always ask your affiliate manager if you can get a higher payout before you even start the offer. It really depends on the affiliate manager that you have assigned to you and they know you can send legit traffic… If you’re lucky, you might start off with a higher payout than you even planned when first looking at the offer. Worst case scenario is you can always run for a few days and then after your AM sees the traffic is backing out ask again for the pay raise.
3) Smaller search engines may have difficult to use UIs but can provide traffic 1/2 the price of Google
In return for dealing with user interfaces that are slow and confusing when compared to Google AdWords, the other search engines might have traffic at half the price of Google. A lot of affiliates start with Google and then if they want to send more traffic to their offer decide to use Yahoo or MSN — this means if there is a new offer you can totally own Yahoo and MSN before anyone else. Translation: you’re the undisputed king of 30% market share while everyone else is still battling it out. Don’t use anyone smaller than Ask.com for search traffic.. anything below Ask.com may send you questionable quality.
4) Don’t focus on what has the highest payout
Many newbie affiliates when they first log into their affiliate network will sort offers from highest to lowest payout and want to run one of the top 10 higher payout offers. Don’t forget that the reason these are higher payouts is because there are low conversion rates. It may take $1,000 before deciding whether an offer with a $30 payout is not going to turn a profit for you. Instead, a few hundred dollars on some zip and email submits with a $1 - $2 payout will be enough to decide whether this is an offer to continue running. Now you just saved yourself $800 learning many of the same lessons you would have learned with that Acai weight loss offer.
5) Join one good CPA network and go from there.
Start with a CPA based network such as Affiliate.com, Azoogle or Clickbooth. If they are a big network like these guys, you find the same offers that everyone else is running. There are some affiliates who suggest joining a smaller network but if you don’t know the space you might accidently join some shady network (I won’t name names) who doesn’t even have enough cash in their bank to pay all of their affiliates on time unlike the more established players such as Affiliate.com.
