Tag Archives: roi

You Can Do Better Than That

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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.

Key To Success

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.

Instantly Increase Your ROI By 2%

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I know what you are thinking.  A measly 2% increase?  What’s the point?  Ask anybody that is making six figures a month with Affiliate Marketing if they’d like an extra 2%.  Of course they would!  That’s an extra $2,000 in their pocket every month.  Sometimes in life it’s the little things that add up.

Possibly the most annoying post image ever

This trick only works with PPV.  And it only works with a couple of networks: Lead Impact and Media Traffic.  All you need to do is go to the Billing/Funding page in your account and switch on Automatic Funding.  This means that when your balance drops below a certain threshold, they will automatically charge a set amount to your credit card to refill your account.  For doing this, they will give you a free 2% bonus on the amount you deposited.

It’s free money, sweet and simple.  If you are worried about your card getting charged unexpectedly, just pause all your campaigns when you are getting near the threshold.  You can keep them on pause indefinitely until you are ready to run again.

PRO TIP: If you use a credit card that gives you cash back, you can get another 1% back for free on all of your traffic purchases on any network.

Testing Offers 101: From Red to Green

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One of the toughest ongoing questions for affiliate marketers is, “How do I know when I’ve spent enough money testing an offer?”  Everybody has a different approach. There are a couple of truths that we need to look at.

  1. It is very rare to find a campaign that is profitable right out of the gate. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it is very rare. In most cases you will need to test, optimize, test, optimize, then test some more before you really get it dialed in and profiting enough to make it worthwhile.
  2. Some campaigns will not work no matter how much testing and optimizing you do. There is nothing more frustrating than beating a dead horse.

Sound like a Catch 22? It all boils down to your tolerance for pain, or your willingness to lose (or I like to say “invest”) money in a campaign before it sees a profit. How do you test properly without blowing too much money, and still avoid dropping potentially profitable campaigns too early? Here’s what I like to do…

First of all, when you setup a campaign, you want to spend about 2x to 3x the payout of the offer for the initial test. If the offer payout is $5, then you want to spend approximately $10 – $15 on the initial test phase. This is the “gathering data” phase.

Stats

Green is good

Once you have done this, you will have some data to work with (assuming you’ve been tracking everything, with Tracking202 or a similar program). Here’s the type of questions you want to ask in order to evaluate your data:

Did it get any conversions at all? If so, what keywords / urls / referrers / ad copies / banners were they from? Did you make a profit? Would it be profitable if you bid on less keywords? Would it be profitable if you bid on more keywords for a cheaper price? The list goes on, but these questions should give you a start.

For me personally, after the initial testing phase, if I haven’t received any conversions at all, I usually dump the campaign. That’s -100% ROI, and that’s going to be hard to overcome without a drastically different strategy, and it’s probably not worth it. If you are anywhere from -50% ROI to 0% ROI, then you might be able to profit with optimization. Try using a landing page or direct linking (whichever you didn’t do the first time), try different ad copies, pictures, headlines, calls to action, etc. Use the data from the test to see what is working and what is not working.

However you got those conversions in the testing phase, focus on that precise set of circumstances and recreate them in greater volume. Once you understand how and why you got some conversions, you are well on your way to having an optimized and profitable campaign.

Now go make some money!

Breaking Down Your PPV Campaign

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So you’ve scraped several hundred urls, you have launched the campaign on at least one PPV network, and you have traffic coming in.  What now?  Well, chances are you are not going to be profitable right off the bat.  If you are then, great!  But there is still optimization that can be done.  If you are just under the line, even about -50% ROI, you can probably pull it up into the black with a little adjustment.

A lot of times you will find that out of those several hundred urls that you scraped, only one or two will give you the majority of the traffic right off the bat.  If it’s a site like google.com or facebook.com that slipped in there by accident, then you should just pause those.  But if it’s a site that is related to your niche that gets a ton of traffic, then it is time to break down your PPV campaign.

Breaking down the wall

Here’s what I mean by that: take out that #1 url, the one that is getting the most traffic, and make a new campaign just for that url.  Then, you want to create a landing page that is specifically targeted towards users of that page.  You want to match the style of it and the colors as well as you can, so that it feels like a natural extension of the site they are visiting instead of an intrusive popup.

If you can achieve this, you are bound to see a large increase in your click-throughs and hopefully conversions as well.  There are still no guarantees, but this method is one of the best ways to optimize your campaign and either get it profitable or squeeze even more profit out of it.

Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!