Planning and Executing Your Campaigns
Once you have the appropriate background knowledge and understand the “lay of the land” within affiliate marketing, the next step is to plan out a campaign for an offer that you want to promote. This is important to being as thorough as possible with your marketing initiatives and allows you to make execution second nature. When I started out with affiliate marketing, I realized one of my largest problems was that I would always “hope” for my campaign to convert and be successful by clicking the stats refresh button every 5 seconds. Do not follow that approach, instead follow some general guidelines that will allow you to know that conversions will come, instead of simply hoping for the numbers to appear. Sort of like making your own luck, not relying on being lucky.
Before you even go searching for a hot offer to promote, I recommend that you do market research by reading the MediaTrust weekly intelligence report by Trip Foster. He’s done all of the up to date research for you and written it out in an easy to understand debriefing of current trends. This will help maximize your chance for success by educating yourself to pick an offer that satisfies a current need, want, or demand in our society. (The more the better!)
When you are initially planning out your campaign, it never hurts to quickly take a pen and a blank sheet of paper to write down the key elements to your campaign that you may forget later on. So, with a pen and paper in hand, get out your phone and dial the number for your affiliate manager. Be sure to ask your affiliate manager for the following:
- Top 3 offers in the vertical.
- Street payout and high volume payout.
- Whether or not other affiliates have had success with the offer.
Next, write down a short list of potential traffic sources that comply with each offer’s terms. (Try to keep it to only 2-3 sources when testing.) Then you need to chose which demographics/pyschographics that you will target with each traffic source. Try to target age and gender at the very least. Targeting is directly related to your campaign’s ROI. The more targeting you have will result in a higher chance for maximum ROI with your traffic.
Once your campaign’s traffic is taken care of, get in touch with a trusted designer that has worked with direct response advertisers before. If you do not have the creative expertise, you will need he/she to design creatives that you can use for your campaign and a landing page if you chose not to direct link your traffic. Going back to the sheet of paper, ask for the following information:
- Delivery date. (Shouldn’t take more than 1 week.)
- Cost for initial designs.
- Cost for future design variations to test against.
Next, you will need to chose a tracking tool that is best able to optimize your campaign. Tracking202’s free self hosted Prosper202 tracking platform is with out a doubt the most popular among affiliate marketers.
With all of your data in hand on potential offers, traffic sources, and creative logistics, you will be able to execute your campaign fast and efficiently by crossing each item off of the list. The chance each user converts in your sales funnel is largely in your control. Be sure to plan your campaign, it will help to make as many users convert as possible. For the most part, the days of arbitrage and simply throwing up banners to see if they stick are over. So, stop wasting money with antiquated internet marketing methods. Let me know if you have any tips or suggestions…
Post any questions or comments below!
