Tag Archives: Campaigns

The Campaign Is Over, What Now?

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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!

Define Measure Analyze Improve Control

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.

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

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There’s no such thing as a surefire winner in Affiliate Marketing. That hot campaign that you have making $1,000 a day right now? It won’t last. The vertical that you have been tearing up for the last two years? It won’t last. Markets change. Audiences get wiser. Traffic sources dry up. There are about a million things that could go wrong at any point in time in this industry, and if you don’t have your income diversified, you will get stung sooner or later.

Are You Diversified?

If this is your business strategy, you are in trouble.

Diversification is something that you hear a lot about in the Investing world. Your broker will tell you, “You don’t want to put all of your money in stocks, or in bonds, or in cash alone. You want to have an even mix so you are both protected against loss and also maximizing your gain.”  Truer words were never said for Affiliate Marketing as well.

The absolute worst position to be in is one successful campaign on one traffic source.  That is an empty bank account waiting to happen.  Most affiliates know well enough that they shouldn’t just sit back and be lazy with one campaign, but I know at least some don’t. Avoid this at all costs.

Another thing you need to watch is when you are running multiple campaigns, but they are all on the same traffic source.  At least you are safe if one of your campaigns goes down. But what if the traffic source dries up?  Then you are back to square one.  Many affiliates were really slammed when Facebook tightened up their restrictions, you can learn from that.  Don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket, the Google basket, or even the PPV basket.  What if your network suddenly tells you that they aren’t going to accept any PPV traffic anymore on any campaigns?  These are tough questions that you need to be asking yourself on a regular basis if you want to survive in Affiliate Marketing.

The best thing that you can do to protect yourself from a bad situation is to build up an asset that belongs to you completely.  Create a content-based website in a solid niche that’s been around forever, or just that you can get a lot of traffic from a certain demographic and then sell the traffic.  Or you can build an email list.  An email list is an asset that you can take with you and keep promoting to no matter what happens to your offers, your networks, or other traffic sources.

The number one thing to remember here is that when you are buying traffic from someone and then selling it to someone else, you are the most vulnerable link in the chain and you can be replaced or eliminated at any time.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have job security by arbitraging, even for one second.

The Secret To Getting Killer CTR

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Let’s face it: Click Through Rate (CTR) can either make or break your campaign. Whether you are doing PPC, PPV, or especially with CPM & Media Buys, your CTR is often the determining factor in whether you make money or not. Since this is the case, it never ceases to amaze me how many affiliates (myself included) forget to put hard work and thought into the #1 thing that affects your CTR: your ad copy.

Putting together a campaign usually goes something like this:

  • Spend several hours doing niche research
  • Spend a couple of hours finding the best keywords
  • Spend a few more hours creating your landing page
  • Ready to launch!
  • Oh wait, I have to put some ads up here… I’ll just copy & paste what the other guys or doing, or just throw in some text off the top of my head

And then you wonder why nobody is clicking through to see your awesomely designed landing page and your super-targeted offer… Guess what?  Ad copy has a massively huge part to play in your campaign’s success. Coming up with consistently killer ad copy and images is probably the most important skill you can have as a marketer. If you can’t do that, then what can you really do? Copy campaigns? Put tracking together? Load keywords into Google? That’s great, but that could all be outsourced to a monkey.

The real value that affiliates bring to the table is in our creative approach to campaigns and ad copy. You think that the company whose service or product you are promoting hasn’t tried direct-linking their website on the major search engines for their primary keywords? They have. They either have that on lock and therefore have those keywords blacklisted from you, or it doesn’t work and they turned to CPA Networks and Affiliates to think outside the box and get them leads from sources that they don’t know about or don’t understand well enough to do themselves.

Take some time to educate yourself on the basics of sales, marketing and advertising. All of the knowledge you can get from studying the fundamentals will go straight to your ad copy, and your CTR.  Even if some of the principles were created for print advertising, it still applies online. I don’t care if it seems like homework. If you want this to be a serious business for you then you need to treat it like one.  Read some books on marketing & advertising. There are literally thousands of them written. You will not regret the time you put into bettering yourself as a marketer.

Here are a few of my favorites to get you started (not affiliate links):

Read These Books

Day Parting & Campaign Caps with Zango

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Have you ever been testing out a new PPV campaign with a budget of $25 a day and found that it’s all used up before 5pm?  This is one area that PPC withGoogle AdWords has spoiled us: you can choose whether you want Standard or Accelerated ad spend, and with Standard it will evenly price out your clicks through out the day.  Most PPV networks do not do this.

Today I noticed that with Zango you can actually do day parting, which is choosing which hours of the day you want your ads to be displayed.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend turning this on right away if you are testing a new campaign, but it certainly is handy if you are blowing through your daily budget without getting any conversions.  In many verticals, it is not until the evening hours that they really start converting.  People are home from work, kids are home from school, people are surfing the net without worrying about the boss looking over their shoulder.  Besides, it’s more likely that the home computer is where the AdWare client is installed anyway.

To do this in Zango, just login to your account, click on the campaign name you want to add day parting to and click Edit Campaign.  Right above the Save Changes button you will see a new link called Advanced Options.  Click this and it will pop up a window with all the different days of the week and hours of the day.  You can also turn specific days of the week off, like if you only wanted to run your ads during the weekend.

Along with day parting, there are also Campaign Caps on this menu.  This will let you set a daily budget for specific days which overrides the Campaign-level daily budget.  This is great if you are finding that certain days provide a large amount of conversions, and you want to crank up the ad spend to take advantage.

It may not seem like much, but little tools like this can really help you optimize your campaigns and squeeze every last bit of ROI out of your PPV traffic.

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

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Edit 12/21/2010: The information in this post is outdated. For an up-to-date and complete guide to setting up your PPV campaigns with Prosper202, download my free eBook, “PPV 101”.

Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT.  Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202.  Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time.  Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.

The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202.  With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy.  Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.

The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it””s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools.  What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network.  By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202.  When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:

yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=

You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”.   You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.

First, download John Hasson””s JAH Simple PPC tool.  It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:

JAH Simple PPC

It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs.  Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC.  Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations.  Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.

With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form.  Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form.  Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form.  The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name.  Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).

Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go!  If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form.  Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.

Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5