If you have worked and worked and finally got your first campaign profitable, congratulations! Now it’s time to work some more. You might think that just because you have made more money than you spent for the first time, you can sit on your butt and profit. That’s one option, but that’s not the one that you should take. You can do better than that.
Now it’s time to optimize that campaign. What’s that you say? It took optimization to get it profitable in the first place? That’s great. But now it’s time to optimize it some more. If you are direct linking, it’s time to test out a landing page. If you already have a landing page, it’s time to change up some elements on your page, or create a new page altogether. I don’t care how much ROI you are getting on that campaign. You can do better than that.
Little things matter. On your landing pages, the color of the buttons matters. The little picture in the corner matters. The headline matters. The body copy matters. Also, test out a completely different look and feel on your landing page. Start from scratch and do a new one with a completely different design style and concept. Test this against the one that is already working. If you are making money, don’t send all of your traffic to it, or even 50%. Test it small with 10%-20% of your traffic. If it beats your main offer (the “control”), then you swap it in and start the process all over.
One of the big things that separates the Super Affiliates from the little guys is that they spend a lot of time continuously working on their campaigns that are already making money. Think about it, would you rather spend time getting more money out of a campaign that is already performing, or testing out 10 new ones to find that one that is going to make money at all?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should never test out new campaigns. You don’t want to have all your eggs in the same basket either. What I am saying is that no matter how well your campaign is doing, you can do better than that.
Go get it.
Good post Josh. It's easy to feel like it is "mission accomplished" when a campaign becomes profitable. But, that's when the real fun begins in trying to make get it to perform even better. I know one affiliate who told me he loves it when he first gets a campaign to generate $10 in profit a day – because he knows he can multiply that performance by 10, 100, or 1,000 when he really digs in and optimizes. That is definitely one thing that separates the Super Affiliates from the rest.
very true, I find myself wanting to take on a new campaign every time I get a campaign profitable, and leave the first one to die off slowly.
like Mario says, "if everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough"
Some smart testing advice here. Sending 10%-20% of your traffic to test against the control…
Also, I think you hit the nail on the head with creating the radically different landing pages to test. That's actually the first thing we do.
So you mean that to create and compare campaigns you need to have multiple domain names or just use internal landing pages? Does it matter if one is in the root dir or a few folders down?
You don't need multiple domains. Just use internal landing pages. And no, it doesn't matter what dir they are in.