Scoop

A number of factors play into how well you do in affiliate marketing. First and foremost is your experience in the field. How much marketing experience did you have coming in the door? Did you have automation or programming skills? Your available funds play a role as does your business model. If you have worked as a webmaster in a corporation, you will be better off, and the same is true if you worked in search engine marketing. The same is true if you have a budget that will allow you to try different traffic generation forms.

#1 Find the right offer.

Most people  new to this field tend to try their hand at a lot of opportunities. When you do this though, you will find that you are spending a great deal of time trying to manage them all. It is best to find one or two opportunities where you can make it big and stick with them.  A focused mind is a productive one.

 #2 Understand Your “Group of People”

Speaking clearly to a target demographic will do wonders for your conversion.  Who are they? What are they like? What problems do they have?  How do they talk?  Where do they hang out?  When you can answer these questions you’ll have a solid grasp on your market and you’ll be able to communicate with ease.  This is one of the hardest lessons to learn.

#3 Make use of a wide variety of traffic generating methods.

This is one of the most important tips you can make use of.  Keep in mind that when you purchase traffic from established websites or search engines, you will bring in faster traffic than through social networking, and or blogging.

#4 Keep a “White Belt” Mentality

In martial arts a white belt is a beginner with a world of learning to do.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Often you’ll hear black belts mention how they still feel like a white belt.  By keeping your mind open to learning at every level you’ll continue to learn and improve.  Don’t scoff at this.

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Over the years of teaching, coaching, and consulting I’ve done picking a niche has been one of the most common stumbling blocks. It makes sense. It’s the first big decision to getting started you have to make. People put this tremendous weight of all their hopes and fears on this one decision.

“What if it’s a bad niche? All of my work will be for nothing.”

It’s understandable. Although I can tell you that this fear has a lot more to with your metal readiness than your ability to succeed. Even if you picked the best niche on the planet there’s a chance you will fail. Does that mean it’s not worth trying?

Something to think about…

Anyway – I’ve got a few of my favorite techniques for finding a good niche below. Good luck and good digging!

1. The Good ‘Ol “Go With What You Know” Angle

Some “gurus” poo-poo this idea. There is some merit to it though. Here are a couple of thoughts on why

A – It’s most likely a niche you’ve spent money in.

Think about that. If you’ve spent money someone else has too. That proves the niche has products that people buy (proving it’s commercially viable).

B – It’s a niche that you’re intimately familiar with.

This gives you a huge advantage. Helping people in your niche solve problems becomes infinitely easier when you KNOW what problems they have. You’ll know because you’ve been there, you’ve used the same flawed software they’ve used. You know what works best and what’s a waste of time. This instantly makes you an expert. This instantly makes you a valuable resource for others in your niche.

Here’s what you do.

1. Make a list of 10 Problems, 10 Fears, and 10 Passions you have. Guess what…these are all niches (I bet you’ve got at least 1 killer niche in there too) For now, avoid anything related to “making money.” There are lots of reasons why I’m suggesting that but let’s just go with it for now.

2. Narrow the list down to 10 total.

3. Do some keyword research. Plug these potential niches into a keyword tool and do a quick analysis. See some keywords you could rank for? See any really high CPC (cost per click) keywords? This can be a good thing even if it’s not ideal for PPC. An ideal niche will have 10 or more keywords will acceptable competition numbers with good traffic numbers.

Pat over at SmartPassiveIncome.com has some really great thoughts on this process.

I was originally going to do a tiny product niche site, with a keyword and domain name that matches the product of choice 100%. These are the type of niche sites that I’ve been doing lately, and they seem to work. I started with researching the product first, and then comes the keyword research behind it.

The reason I’m steering away from a specific product niche site now is because the earning potential is far less than targeting an actual market, and because this is a competition I want to bring out the big guns. By targeting a market that involves a passion, problem and/or fear that I or someone I know has, I can be sure I’ll be interested in it enough to put forth the extra effort needed for it to become a potentially high profit site.
source

By the way – Product specific niche sites are an awesome affiliate marketing strategy. We’ll discuss this again in the future. Don’t disregard that strategy because of Pat’s comments above. He’s absolutely right in what he’s saying, he just happens to be working on a different strategy.

2. Go Where The Money Is

Google did $9 Billion in revenue last year. 96% or more of that came from PPC advertising. Think there’s some valuable data in there somewhere?

Wordstream.com recently posted an awesome infographic showing where/how Google made $37.9 billion last year. The top 10 industries spending money were:

1. Finance & Insurance
2. Retailers & General Merchandise
3. Travel & Tourism
4. Jobs & Education
5. Home & Garden
6. Computers & Consumer Electronics
7. Vehicles
8. Internet & Telecom
9. Business & Industrial
10. Occasions & Gifts
source

Hmm… pretty interesting data. Now we know the top 10 most competitive markets online. And because we know competition only exists where people are making money, these are good starting points.

Would I suggest you build a campaign or site targeting “Insurance.” Absolutely not. These are just markets to get your creative juices flowing.

Take these markets and drill down. Stop by one of your favorite affiliate networks and look at products in these verticals. Are you finding products that are selling well? Who do those products target?

Remember You’re looking for a niche of passionate, dedicated people within that overall market. I’ve even heard of this referred to as “hair on fire” niches.  Another term is finding the “desperate buyer.”  It’s not about exploitation.  It’s about service to a group of people looking to be served.

Many of the products you find will be targeting a very specific niche within an overall market. Do a little keyword research. See any with low competition and high search volume? How about the product name – think you could rank for that? You may have just found your next niche if you answered yes.

If you’re a paid traffic affiliate you could use this list to find sub niches. For example, traffic costs would be too high to advertise to “gardeners.” And why would you want to anyway – that’s too general. All kinds of problems arise when you don’t know who EXACTLY you’re speaking to (I mentioned that twice for a reason).

Building a funnel for Organic tomato gardeners is where you want to go with this. It’s a sub niche within gardening that you can speak to directly. Products that sell well in the networks and marketplaces (like amazon) will reveal these sub niches to you.

3. Site Selling Marketplaces

There are several site buying/selling networks now. Flippa.com is probably the most mature and trusted of the lot. These marketplaces are a treasure trove of niche ideas. Nay, they are a treasure trove of proven niche ideas.

Here’s a list of a few networks

• flippa.com
• buysellwebsite.com
• buywebsite.com
• websitebroker.com

Search these networks for the most recently sold sites. Most marketplaces have a handy filter option to narrow it down. Then take a look at the sites that sold for the most amount of money. Boom! You’ve got an instant list of hot niches.

The sites that sell for top dollar have proven track records. Sure stuff can be faked but buyers are more educated and savvy than ever. There is a very high chance that those sites are legit and worth competing with.

If you’re an organic guy or gal you’ve now got a site to reverse engineer. Keywords, products, and monetization strategies that have proven to work are all yours.

If you’re a paid guy or gal – you’ve got verified evidence that a niche makes money. If it’s an affiliate site (not adsense) you’ve now got a product that you know converts. And on top of all that you’ve got a great site to examine and learn what makes the people in that niche tick. Their fears, their hopes, their dreams.

These are my most effective niche finding tactics. The site selling network strategy itself has made me six figures. All have proven effective (for me anyway).

So what do you think of those tactics? Spark an idea? How many of you have used these before? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Is your backend as sound as your front?

Having the right systems in place before you start a CPA campaign positions you for more opportunity and success from the start! Regardless of offer type (lead-gen, trial, straight-sale) the most profitable and lasting advertisers have already set up their data management, domain hosting providers, responsive customer service departments, tracking software, suppression file solutions and creative programmers that can constantly optimize landing pages and creative assets. For trials and/or straight-sales, you’ll need merchant processors, shopping carts and product manufacturers that can keep up with demand.

Creative 101

Before you approach a CPA network with your offer, make sure you have all the creative assets ready. Most networks have email, display and search traffic sources so make sure the applicable assets are on hand. When designing creative, speak to the target audience; otherwise the offer will have limited opportunity in any given network. Creative messaging needs to be clear and cohesive with your product/offer. Make sure to highlight consumer benefits and have an immediate call-to-action so you can maximize that small window of opportunity you’re given to capture that audience. Display and email creatives need to have consistent messaging, easy to read fonts, visually pleasing colors and always have a clear call-to-action. Remember, you only have about 6-7 seconds to capture the consumer’s attention.

1. Email: Provide HTML and text backups for all versions. The text version is for consumers that do not have HTML enabled browsers. To give your offer the most potential, you should create both HTML-only and hybrid text-HTML assets.

2. Display: Also called onsite and banner advertising, make sure you’re set up with industry standard banner sizes (300×250, 728×90, 160×600, 120×60, etc) and can build out additional sizes with a quick turnaround. The more variety you have, the more opportunity for success there is.

3. Search: Ad copy should be a short description of the landing page. Using keywords from the landing page in the ad copy will help optimize the campaign.

Landing Pages

Make sure visual and copy elements from the creative are mirrored in the landing page, otherwise you could create consumer confusion and potentially lose that lead. Important information should always be above the fold so the consumer doesn’t have to continually scroll up and down. Make sure the consumer can easily identify what you need them to do so you earn their conversion (ex. complete form fields, enter credit card information). When applicable, use legitimate consumer testimonials and highlight recognitions from consumer watchdog companies (ex. Better Business Bureau).

Testing Your Offer

If you’ve tested internally, it’s in your best interest to share the information with your network partner. Providing information about top performing creatives, landing pages and/or subject/from lines will help set up affiliates with the best tools to ensure a successful launch.

Getting Started With a CPA Network

Expect to be asked how your data is monetized on the backend, CPA amount, allowed traffic types (email, display, etc), geo-targeting (US, UK, etc), demographic targeting, amount of monthly volume you can handle, when the pixel fires, cost-to-consumer, etc. It’s in your best interest to provide the landing page and creative samples so your offer can be better evaluated. The more information you provide, the better. Regardless of offer-type, a good CPA network will ask questions to determine if your offer has potential for long-term success. Don’t take it personally if they don’t think it’s a good fit, they’re doing you a favor by not wasting your time. Instead of trying to find another network that will accept your offer, work on strengthening it. Ask questions about what you can do to make your offer competitive.

Post-campaign Launch – What You Need to Know Ahead of Time

As a CPA advertiser, expect to constantly optimize creatives, landing pages, copy points and publishers. Once the campaign is live, don’t just sit there and hope for the best. Provide the CPA network with optimized landing pages, like eliminating 1-2 form fields or adding some elements to capitalize around the holidays (Easter, anyone?). Updating creatives and copy points every few months can lead to increased conversions and keep your offers fresh, as any advertising campaign can become stale after time. Continually monitor publishers running your offers and determine which are backing out the best and which aren’t. Be proactive: don’t wait on your account rep to request fresh creatives and ask how publishers are performing. Information sharing is critical because the CPA network cannot optimize traffic if you don’t share it. The longer you do nothing means your offer is probably doing nothing too.

Finally, plan ahead!

Think about your product in the current and future markets. How relevant is your product to the current and future consumer? What are your long term goals? What are foreseeable changes and how will you respond to them? Can you maintain profitability year round, or does your campaign need to be tweaked to account for seasonal changes? These are important questions to ask yourself throughout the entirety of your CPA campaigns. How you respond will ultimately drive your offer performance, and lead to long-term growth and success.

About the Author:
Jenna Dietz, Clickbooth Advertising Consultant

Jenna Dietz graduated from Indiana University.  Before coming to Clickbooth, she worked as a Media Buyer for a full-service advertising agency where she specialized in planning, buying and optimizing CPM and CPC campaigns for her local, regional and national clients. As an Advertising Consultant, Jenna specializes in education, health care and survey lead generation. In her spare time, Jenna is an avid sports fan, specifically IU and KU basketball and Colts football.

If you’ve just got some extra cash that you’re looking to put to work, or planning to make a career change, the world of Affiliate Marketing can offer a wealth of possibilities for those who know how to work it.  It’s not an easy field to be successful in by any means, but if you’re a hard worker and are able to quickly adapt to changing trends, the sky is truly the limit.  The different traffic sources through which you can partake in affiliate marketing are email, search, media buying, contextual / ppv, and on-site.  The first step toward getting started is identifying which source will work best for you, and then maximizing it.

Email Marketing: Do you run a website where users input their email addresses to subscribe to a newsletter, or run a business where you’ve accumulated a large number of email addresses?  If so, email marketing is a great way to get started.  When monetizing your list, it’s important to start out slow and keep it relevant.  The last thing you want is for your lists to obtain a poor reputation for sending out offers completely out of their demographic.  If you run a home gardening tips website and newsletter, you probably wouldn’t want to promote “male enhancement” pills, no matter how high their payout is… unless, maybe, it’s a “gardening tips for unsatisfied wives” newsletter.

Looking to purchase a list of email addresses?  While this is a great way to quickly break into email marketing, the buyer truly needs to beware.  Ask the right questions from the seller to be sure it’s a quality list.  Is it single or double opt-in?  Double opt-in will yield a higher return rate.  What ISPs does it consist of, and how is it segmented?  Certain offers perform better on certain ISPs, and the more demographic information you know about your list, the better you’ll be able to monetize it.  How many buyers will have access to the list, and can you run a test before purchasing?  Ideally you want to be the only person with your respective list, and if the list is high quality, the seller shouldn’t have an issue with you running a small scale test drop to verify.

When choosing an email platform, be sure it has all the functionality you’ll need to maximize your list.  An “over the counter” system is fine to start, but as you grow your list and business, most of the biggest email publishers will design and program their own platform tailored specifically to their needs.  From here, you need to calculate your cost to perform a drop, and figure out a revenue goal for each drop to determine its success.

Search Marketing: If your budget is tight, search marketing is a great way to start out.  You can set a daily spend cap, and closely monitor your bids to ensure you’re getting a good return.  You can also run long-tail keywords to more directly target users and keep your bids down.  It’s never a bad idea to pick a vertical that you’re familiar with to start out.  Work in the auto industry?  Try car insurance campaigns.  Fitness fanatic?  Consider promoting diet or muscle-strengthening products.  Running something familiar to you will help give you insight about what keywords and ad copy to start out with, but you need to be constantly testing and optimizing.  Focus on Earnings Per Click, or EPCs.  You can calculate this by taking the total amount you’ve earned divided by how many clicks you paid for.  If your EPCs are higher than your bids, then you’re in good shape. Now you can start cutting out the keywords and ads that aren’t working, while scaling up and expanding upon the ones that are.

Media Buying: Very similar to search marketing, the statistics for media buyers are almost identical.  You can bid on placements on certain websites that your ad will appear, either on a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) or CPC (cost per click) basis.  Always gather as much information as possible about what demographic your offer is targeted to, and buy space on websites frequented by the same group.  If you do media buying on social networks, such as Facebook or Plenty of Fish, you can get very specific on targeting to ensure your ad is only shown to people in the product’s key demographic.     While media buying does generally take a larger budget to be competitive (with the exception of most social networks), it also offers almost limitless volume potential.

If you have experience in web design, building out a quality landing page to provide more information about the offer you’re promoting before linking to the offer is a great way to improve conversions, but keep an eye on your statistics.  If you’re getting a ton of clicks to your landing page but nobody is clicking through to the offer, you need to optimize your page.  If a ton of people purchase the product after your landing page but you’re getting very few clicks, you need to improve your ad-copy or increase your bids.  A great way to see what’s working is to look at what the top results are on major search engines, or popular top tier websites.  If you see an ad in a premium placement for a long time, you can be sure it’s working.

Contextual / PPV Traffic: Contextual traffic, or PPV (Pay per view) traffic, is essentially pop-ups served through adware software on a person’s computer. Not to be confused with malware, which is malicious software, adware usually comes in the form of a web browser tool bar or other user-installed software which will allow an ad to pop up when the user inputs a certain search, or visits a website which you have bid on.  Again, the statistics are very similar to search or media buying, but you’re simply paying for your ad to appear, regardless if a user clicks it or immediately closes it.  Demographic information is, again, very important to make sure you’re only bidding on sites frequented by the proper groups.

Onsite Traffic: If you already run a website which gets a significant amount of traffic, adding CPA ads is a great way to begin monetizing that traffic.  Just like media buys, you need to ensure the ads you’re promoting are related to the content on your site, or appeal to the target demographic which frequents your site.  Keep it relevant.

Choosing Offers: When deciding which offers to run, it’s of course important to select ones aimed at appropriate demographic for your traffic, but you should also consider the payouts.  If your budget is extremely tight (under $250 per day) you probably want to stick to offers with lower payouts, as these generally convert much higher, and will allow you to better and more quickly optimize your campaigns.  While it would be great to jump straight into the $90 payout offers right off the bat, if you’re only spending $50 per day on search or media buys, realistically you may only see one conversion every day and a half, and you’ll have very little data to analyze and improve upon.

Try starting out with offers that pay out around 10% of your daily spend.  This should get you approximately 10 or more leads per day (expect a few less before you begin optimizing), to provide you with data on what’s working best.  Cut out what isn’t working, and scale up what is.  If you’re looking to grow your traffic over time, be sure to re-invest in yourself and increase your future daily budget.

 Affiliate Marketing is a fast-paced world, which is constantly evolving. Always be ready to change your strategy since what works one day may not work the next.  The entire industry is based on fickle consumer tastes, so be sure to stay up to date with emerging trends and jump on them quick!  Be sure to hit up your Affiliate Manager as they have a birds-eye-view of what’s working and can help recommend offers appropriate for your traffic.  Put in the time, don’t get discouraged if a test doesn’t pan out every once in a while, and you’ll eventually see your conversions climb and your bank account balance along with it!

This Article Brought to you by: Mike Story, Affiliate Strategist -Cickbooth

Mike Storey graduated from the University of Florida.  He has worked in Media Buying, PPC Advertising, and Email Marketing.  As an Affiliate Strategist, Mike specializes in Media Buying, Contextual Traffic and Emailing.  In his spare time, Mike is a NAUI Scuba instructor, an avid runner and craft beer connoisseur.

At this point you should have a basic demographic profile of the type of person you are looking to get your ad and offer in front of.  You should have information like:  gender, age, race, education, income, etc.

After my last post, I got a ton of questions about the basics of demographic targeting and exactly what info we are looking for and how we are going to use it.  So I’m going to take a step back here in post #2 to provide a clearer picture as to what we’re trying to accomplish and how it will directly impact our cash profits.

The goal in building out a demographic model is to utilize demo information to get the opportunity to scale your sales and conversions in a much larger way than you would be able to if you didn’t build out a demographic profile.  What do I mean by this?

Well let’s take a look at an example.  Let’s say that you are promoting a zip submit offer for a Mac Cosmetics gift card.  If you limit yourself to buying traffic of people that are specifically looking for Mac Cosmetics, you’re only tapping into a tiny fraction of the potential leads that could be interested in a Mac Cosmetics gift card.

Once you have tapped out all of the very specific traffic of people that are directly searching for Mac Cosmetics, Mac Cosmetic specific products, or are browsing a mac-specific site…you’re profits are capped.

We don’t want to cap out our profits!  Hence the need for putting together a demographic profile and getting your ad and offer in front of a much larger, but still relevant audience.

So let me break this down step by step for you.  We’re going to pick an offer through the Offervault offer search and then begin to gather the information necessary to make our demographic profile.

Step 1 – Pick the Offer

As I mentioned previously, we are going to choose the Mac Cosmetics gift card offer which is a zip submit that is paying $1.85.  After a quick Offervault search for “Mac Cosmetics” I found the below offer.

Now it’s time to figure out the audience we need to target to get conversions.  But not just the very specific and smaller Mac Cosmetics audience…we want to make a LARGE amount of money with this offer.  In order to do that, we need to get the demographics for the typical person that would be interested in this offer.

Step 2 – Research: Quantcast, Alexa, Ad Planner

I normally start with Ad Planner and quantcast.  No specific reason, it’s just the way I work.  So I’m going to head over to both Ad Planner and quantcast and do a search for maccosmetics.com and begin there.

The goal is to gather a few pieces of key data:

1 – Basic demographics

2 – Related categories of interest with high affinity

3 – Related Sites

4 – Related Keywords

Step 3 – Spy Tools

After I start to build out a decent list of the above information I’ll then head over to some of my favorite spy tools to begin planning and building out the actual campaigns.  I always assume that the traffic sources and campaign types I need to build out are going to be:  PPC, Display buys, and CPV.  There are of course other types of traffic and sources, but these are the bread and butter of most top affiliates.

Step 4 – Run the Campaigns

It’s not time to run the campaigns and enjoy the fruits of your scaling!

If you have not watched the video for this post, it is highly recommended as there is a lot more information contained in the video than what I could possibly type in a single post.  Be sure to check it out.

To quickly summarize:

1 – Choose Your Offer

2 – Do the research required to pull out:  basic demographics, categories, sites, and keywords

3 – Use the basic demographics, categories, sites, and keywords you found in your research to build out the campaigns utilizing the spy tools

4 – Run the campaign and make a LOT more profit

As affiliate marketers, we have to make significant investments on promoting our campaigns on advertising platforms such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Each platform has its own way of determining how ads are ranked as well as determining the user profile so that the ads delivered are as contextually sensitive given the users current Internet surfing activities.

Have you noticed that key Internet search properties are now matching users with the more specific advertisements? Most of these firms use psychographic mapping to produce advertising results in line with content delivery.

Psychographic profiles are used in market segmentation as well in advertising to better manage user activity, interest, and opinion (AIOs), user attitudes, and user values. Of all three areas, the one affiliates often capture most often is the AIO’s because those are keyword driven. But how does one capture the attitudes and user values. This is where strategic placement and profiling your campaign is critical.

Let’s assume you are looking to promote an affiliate campaign focusing on Candy. Who and when would you promote a campaign on candy? Two possibilities are Valentines Day and Halloween. An alternate answer is not focusing on seasonality but on what activity is related to candy such as Couponing. Using Offervault, you would complete a search on the word “Candy.” The result set that would come up is:

As one can see from above, the results set either points to seasonal opt-in offers (submits) or offers that require a user to regularly go to a Website for downloading of coupons and provide a customer profile. Both of these items are forms of permission-based marketing (PMB). Clearly, the more information that is provided in a submit or a profile, the greater the contextual marketing is for the end user after agreeing to the opt-in. But determining how to get the user to click on the advertisement let alone give you permission to send further mailings out is the real challenge.

Let’s take a look at the campaigns that are associated with Couponing campaigns titled “Coupon Alert.” As an affiliate, we don’t want to spend more money scaling campaigns than we have to. So here are some things to consider:

• Do your research on who actually are the heaviest users of coupons.
• Focus your target market area;  will be exclusively on campaigns in the US and the UK.
• Next determine what promotion methods the offer allows. This is critical to ensure you aren’t wasting money promoting a campaign that will yield bogus leads.
• Form factors are critical for retaining and having customers return back to continue their transactions. Will a user stay on a site once they submit the information or will they exit? For example, smartphones are quick-response platforms so to assume a user will stay on a page for minutes is foolish. This may be the case for tablets, but not for smart phones. So for this kind of campaign – smartphone targeting is out.
• Third, understand your competition and review other sites that provide couponing relevant content. Who and what is the target?
  Finally, focusing in on an ultra-tight theme requires developing the psychographic profile. Determining where you will promote the advertising is secondary. Questions you would ask yourself include:
  • Would you promote an affiliate campaign for couponing on LinkedIn  – probably not because it’s a professional services platform and most users that go to LinkedIn are not looking to save money, they are looking to make money.
  • Would you promote an affiliate campaign for couponing on Facebook – absolutely! Why? You can do ultra-tight contextual targeting. One can profile the users based on geography, age, gender, income, interest, and even products. But, is this type of campaign useful for mobile? No, because Facebook doesn’t offer mobile psychographic advertising functionality just yet for feature and smartphones. So if the goal is to develop a campaign for mobile – Facebook is not the place to focus ones energies.
  • Would you promote an affiliate campaign for couponing on Bing, Google, or Yahoo and scale it for Internet and Mobile. You sure will and can. Question is, how?

Using the US consumer as an example, here are tactics to use in building an affiliate campaign for traditional Internet and mobile Internet. Concepts to consider when writing your ad copy:

• It is common that women use coupons far more than men to shop.
• Women who have children use coupons more than women who are not parents or married.  Women who are single or do not have children often use coupons for beauty products.
• The average woman who uses a coupon is between the ages of 25-40.
• Women in large cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami) are not as likely to go to a grocery store and use a coupon. Think about how people use their times. City living is equated to hectic lifestyle. Couponing is often a suburban mom activity. Think smaller metropolitan cities and suburbia.
• Women whose average gross household income is less than $75,000 often use coupons.
• The most common products that women use couponing for are beauty/bathroom products and baby products. Why? Because these two product classes have the most impact on a families budget.

If you can answer those questions and get to that level of data granularity, you have yourself a solid understanding of how to develop a psychographic profile and strong affiliate advertising copy.

Let’s now translate this visually assuming the user is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma and has two children aged 6 months and 2 years old where the family income is $50,000 per year:

If you look above, there is no way for the typical affiliate to know most of those details. A typical affiliate would promote purely on keywords or use location in the context of their advertisements. Search engines; however, do know more about the users than you think. For example, if you have a Gmail account and are searching Google, your email is actually analyzed as well as your search history (location of search, how long you searched, what you searched for, your conversations among friends, what links you clicked from Google search) to paint a picture of the user associated with their email account. Similarly, Facebook allows for targeting of campaigns based on the things you like, the words you put in your statuses, your life events, and the advertisements you click.

In our example above, we can easily pair down the search parameters to a very focused target. Even though there is an estimated 800 million users on Facebook, there is no reason to target all 800 million users. In fact, you can target a very small user base. Using the data above, the Facebook campaign has been scaled using the psychographic factors. The result: a target of 1340 potential Facebook users.

A combination of all the factors described plus other psychographic terms associated with the description above yields this very targeted campaign where quality clicks and user conversion are more likely than if you use broad concepts and cast a very wide net to target users for your affiliate campaigns.

Bottom line: psychographic research is critical to deploying effective affiliate campaigns. The more contextual your PPC copy is or the more granular one can get with their audience targeting, the greater the chance will be to get solid click-thrus and conversions.

For the last few years, PPV traffic has been really popular with affiliates. There are some good reasons for that.

1)    There is a lot of traffic to work with

2)    The PPV networks are really open to affiliates. No quality scores, etc. to deal with.

3)    Both direct linking and landing pages work great

4)    It’s a good traffic source to learn paid traffic with.

A lot has changed over the last few years though. Here are a couple of tactics that work great with PPV marketing today.

1. Build an email list

PPV traffic is great for building an email list. The basic idea is to have an opt-in form on your landing page (aweber, etc.) and offer the visitor something in exchange for their email. In the Aff Playbook forum we did a case study offering a free ebook in exchange for an email.

This worked great for two reasons. First, the user gets some value (a reason) from giving up their email. Second, we can actually monetize the ebook by putting affiliate links in it. You can take this one step further by sending them to an offer wall (a landing page with multiple offers) after they opt in. Combining all these strategies gives you multiple chances for a conversion. You could get a conversion after someone submits their email and completes an offer from your offer wall. You could convert from an affiliate link in your ebook, or from the follow up emails you will send. You might even get multiple conversions per opt-in, which makes it easy to see how 1 opt-in could turn into hundreds of dollars in commission.

2. Run CPA Offers

These are the most popular types of offers to run with PPV traffic. Some people don’t find it quite as easy when they can’t use advertorials (like they used to with rebills) but you just have to work smarter. A couple points on how to run CPA offers successfully on PPV traffic.

A)    Always start out with split testing 1 landing page vs direct linking.

Affiliates usually test way too many things at first, which leads to confusion when they try to analyze what’s working. Don’t split test more than 2 things at first, especially if you are on a limited budget. Remember, the more things you split test, the higher your testing budget needs to be.

B)    Always, and I mean always split test your CPA network

This is one of the biggest areas I see that newer affiliates could improve in. They get loyal to one network because it seems like everyone is running offers there, or they aren’t a member of any others. There can be a night and day difference in conversion rates (on the exact same offer) across CPA networks. This is due to a variety of factors like tracking platform, whether the offer is brokered or direct, and the scrub rate. I’ve seen affiliates go from not getting anything to work to profitable just from switching networks.

C)    Try to mimic elements of the offer page on your landing page

Try to make your landing page have the same look and feel as the offer page. You can match colors, button styles, logos, etc. You want to make it seem like one seamless conversion process from your landing page to the offer page. I also want to stress that you should never assume an offer would do better with or without a landing page. Even simple submit offers can do better with a landing page. You never know until you test, which is why I recommend point ‘a’ above.

People are still going to say ‘yeah, but I don’t need to build a landing page for a submit offer’. Let me explain why you should still test it. When a visitor lands on the offer page (direct linking) they are immediately presented with a form to fill out. When you present them a simple landing page, they get an idea what the offer is about and click to see more. Once they have clicked (interacted) on your landing page, you already have them involved in the conversion process and they are much willing to then type in their email. This doesn’t always hold true of course, but it’s definitely worth testing.

PPV is a versatile traffic source. There are many other opportunities in addition to what I’ve presented here. The key is to be creative and figure out how you can best leverage the traffic. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to answer.

 - David Ford – AffPlaybook