When you’ve got a hot campaign rolling, it’s the best feeling in the biz.  You are making money.  Your hard work is paying off.  Time to take it easy and spend some money right?  Wrong!  That’s what you might be tempted to do, but in fact it’s time to buckle down.  Sooner or later you are going to get that dreaded email from your network: “The offer is paused”.  But how could this happen?!? It happens to every campaign sooner or later.  If you are lucky, there are other offers in the niche that you can switch over to.  With ringtones, for example, there are always a bunch of different offers to test against each other.  But if you are in something very specialized, then you might not be so lucky.  So since you need to get the gears turning again, let’s see what we can do to find the next campaign.

1. Ask your AMs for Advice

Affiliate Managers can be a huge asset to you when you are open to new ideas.  They will be far more helpful when you approach them looking for suggestions.  They don’t just want to sit there all day pushing offers to non-interested affiliates.  Put them to work! Tell them what you’ve been running.  Not everything of course, but tell them what offers are working so that they can give you more suggestions.

2. Test, test, test

This is where you put all of your inhibitions aside and try out things that you were too scared to try before you had some success.  You’ve had at least one successful campaign already, so there is nothing stopping you from doing it again.  You would be surprised how many of the most profitable campaigns came from things that marketers just tried on a whim, not thinking that they would be successful.  You can never predict what’s going to hit and what’s not.  Be a little more creative, think outside the box, try it out!

3. Find new Traffic Sources

There are so many traffic sources out there you would have a full time job just trying to test them all.  This might be a good time to try your hand at one or two new ones and see how they work.  You never know, maybe something about it will open up a whole new niche or campaign for you that had previously stumped you.  Different platforms have different targeting options and possibilities for you to exploit.  This ties back in to #2: be creative with your Traffic Sources as well!

4. Analyze your success

What was it about that successful campaign that made it a winner?  At what point did you really break through?  Was it profitable from the beginning or did you have to tweak it?  Did you use a landing page or direct link?  Where did you hear about that campaign?  Did you think it was going to be successful when you tried it?  Asking yourself these questions will bring you to some very interesting answers.  A lot of times you will completely forget how you actually stumbled onto a profitable campaign and just how easy it was to do.  There wasn’t anything magical about it.  In most cases you were just following a simple process of testing and exploring that led to a profit.  The good news is, this can be repeated!

The Six Sigma DMAIC Method applies to our industry perfectly

This should all encourage you to put yourself out there and try new things.  The best part of being your own boss in this business is that you can do whatever you want!  Try new campaigns, try more of the same campaigns, try anything that strikes your fancy.  Just make sure that when your hit campaign dries up, you will still have a paycheck at the end of the month.