5 Years Worth of Aggregate Affiliate Marketing Notes

Over the years I’ve kept a running log of notes from blogs, forums, or conversations I found useful or wrote to myself. It’s about 70,000 words in a word doc. 9,000 in a Workflowy list.

And I’ve distilled the most evergreen among them – about 2400 words – to share with you here, now.

(Where I have the source I’ve cited it – most of this is not my work. But I never took notes with the intention of republishing them so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Apologies in advance.)

On Starting

* Build a game plan and stick to it. Take action Every. Day. Your level of effort is almost directly proportional to your income. The more you work, the more you make.

* Learn by doing, not by reading.

* “Commit to making a certain number of campaigns a day. This self-corrects most issues. If you make 3-4 campaigns a day, there is a fair chance you will hit something and go big.” – Adam Bunch

* “It’s strictly a mix of taking action, working your ass off, and networking. That’s the recipe. Without getting too technical, thats really all you need to do.”

* Again – Just take action.

* *focus*. You’ll fail at it all until you become a pro at one thing. Don’t do anything else or you’ll spin your wheels.

* “The path from 5k/mo to 20-30/mo is much shorter than 0 to $500.” – @Smaxor

* If cashflow is an issue, get to weeklies as quickly as you can. Weeklies means you can reinvest profits on a weekly, rather than a monthly, basis – allows you to scale 4x faster.

* Must read 1: Charles Ngo’s Campaign Blueprint

* Must read 2: Lifecycle of an Internet Marketer

On Picking a Vertical/ Niche

* Someone is making the offer work or it wouldn’t be there. Your job is to find out who it is and to do a better job than them.

* Focus your efforts on a single vertical at first. Do your research but keep it concentrated.

* Work in a large/ evergreen vertical – don’t fear the competition. It means there’s money to be made.

* Do your homework. Research landing pages, offers, traffic, contacts. Absolute fundamentals you must understand: the intent of the user when they see your ad, how/ when the offer converts, and how the offer is being monetized by the end advertiser.

* First mover advantage is huge- first movers are market makers. They will reap the largest share of profits.

* Never be the last one in or out of a niche. Get in hot niches before the margins dry up and the market becomes saturated. Get out before too much heat is on or margins get ridiculously slim.

* Alternative perspective: “Pick offers that not a lot of people are running or have access to and have a limited cap where, if you fill it, no one else can compete.”

* “I stopped running every offer. I used to run 4-6 verticals at a time, now I focus on 1-2 and make them large. Once I started doing this (I was a 1 man operation) I was able to scale my verticals much bigger than when I was trying to focus on tons of campaigns. I contend it is better to be one of the top players in a niche instead of being a small to mid-size player in several.” – Brandon Adcock

Competitive Advantages

* “Be prepared to strike up a line of communication with the merchant, or your affiliate manager, so that you can establish which SubIDs are backing out at the merchant’s end. It’s such an easy email to send, and yet so few affiliates actually do it. This is one variable that dictates whether you have a future on the offer. Why would you hide from it?” @FinchSells

4 Major Competitive Advantages / Moats:

1. Network / Advertiser Relationships – having access to higher payouts, higher caps, and exclusive offers.

2. Traffic Source Expertise & Relationships – expertise on a traffic source, credit lines, access to exclusive placements.

3. Teams & Systems – increases your speed of execution and ability to scale.

4. Better Technology Infrastructure – less click loss, faster rendering LPs convert better.

^ Equally important: creatives are not a competitive advantage. They’re the easiest part of your business to replicate by competitors.

On Creatives (Ads & Landing Pages)

* Host your landers with a CDN for faster load speeds. Speed is really, really important to your conversion rate. Here’s why. And here.

* If you need to use php for your lander host on a server as close to the intended visitor as you can. Ex: European offers on a DE server; Asian offers on a SG or AU server, etc.

* Affiliate Marketing rule of thumb: keep it simple. Simple (and even ugly) converts. Complicated stuff, hardly.

* Split test lots of ad copy vs lists. (Across a few thousand lead gen campaigns lots of ad copy has been the consistent winner).

* “Use flags in your ads and landing pages. People in foreign countries see un-targeted ads and offers all the time. If someone is in Russia and the ad has a Russian flag, it lets them know the ad is for them.” – Charles Ngo

* “Typically the smartest person in the room at something is the person that tested the most things.” – @Smaxor

* Imitate, then innovate.

* “If you’re beating the competition you should innovate to hold your dominance. If you are being beaten, you should steal to catch up.” – @hlyghst

* Try to rotate 2 winning landing pages at all time. Introduce one new landing page per week to gather new data and introduce a surprise into the market.

* Banner / Design TIp: Have a person/ people on your page have them looking at what you want your user to do. Ex: looking at the button you want the user to click.

* 24 Ad Design Split Tests to try [Infographic]

On Traffic

* “Just being efficient with your traffic will give you a huge edge over your competition.

* >>Use Exit Pops

* >>If your bounce rate is 60% you aren’t monetizing 60% of your traffic.

* >>You can get a lift of 10-20% with an exit pop. Send them to another landing page that compliments the one you are running. Or go directly to the offer when they try to exit.

* >>Test pop-over email opt-ins vs sidebar email opt-ins.

* >>Use georedirects to match a user’s location with an applicable offer.

* Upsell existing customers. Many times there are offers that will compliment the one you are running, why pay for traffic to get a user to complete 1 action when you can get them to complete 2 or 3?” – Brandon Adcock

* “If you can use and control a lot of high quality traffic you can always find something to put in front of it to make money.” – @Smaxor

* Once you have the spend, focus on traffic sources that required less oversight/ daily optimization and yield much higher sales volumes. Blacklisting placements / sites is tedious and time-consumptive. If you focus on spending money with large inventory networks where less oversight is needed – you free your time to pursue other large impact opportunities.

Expanding your Margins

Increasing conversion rates (reducing drop off) at several points along your funnel (offer+banner+LP+path) will have a compounding effect.

Things to fix in your offer+banner+LP+path campaign:

* narrowing down and improving CTRs on best performing banners

* narrowing down and improving CTRs on best performing pages

* narrowing down to the highest performing offer with which landing page version

* getting a bump on the offer payout

* getting a special bump due to quality / volume performance

* lower traffic bids

* find cheaper traffic

* targeting only the best performing ad units and ad placements

* day parting and or week parting the campaign

* tighter targeting options from the ad network

* Don’t be afraid to trade Net$ for Scale

On Scaling

* “I want to test spend $10,000 – $20,000 looking for the golden goose. Them, when I find it, I want to be able to spend $100,000 – $150,000/ day to make $10,000 – 20,000 per day.” – Smaxor

* After you find traffic sources that work for your campaign, your goal should be to minimize competition and maximize exposure. You want to find ways to keep your competition out and scale your campaign to get maximum volume.

* Make multiple accounts. On some self-serve ad networks you can make multiple accounts and run your ads simultaneously, forcing out competition.

* Outbid your competition. If your ROI is very high, start bidding a little higher to get more volume and force competitors out.

* Prebuy the adspace. If you are buying reserved inventory and it is working out, start locking it down by purchasing more and more of it for future days.

* Ask for exclusivity. When you find a place that works, say you will pay more, more frequently, or prepay if they don’t allow anyone else to advertise what you’re advertising with them.

* “It’s better to dominate one/ a few very large traffic sources than run a little bit on every source you can find. Play around with some ad platforms, get good at them, choose the ones you like, and then figure out the tricks to dominate them. There are so many places to purchase ads right now, it is a matter of find what works for you and scaling.”

Vertical vs Horizontal Campaign Scaling

Vertical

* Increase budget on your current campaign (assuming there’s inventory). Outbid the competition.

* Roll out more campaigns (new angles/ creatives) on current traffic source

* Create more accounts on this traffic source

Horizontal

* New traffic sources

* New markets (geos)

* Related Tip (c/o Zeno) -> Drop a FB conversion tracking code on… anything. Will help you identify what traffic sources may be appropriate to target next to reach lookalike audiences (Facebook Audience Insights is a wealth of demographic data).

Easy way to find more horizontal display inventory once you have a working creative / offer combination

* Head to Alexa’s Top Sites by country identify the top X sites in your geo with lots of display ads.

* Install / Load Ghostery [Chrome] [Firefox]

* Load the top sites in that geo with the extension/ plugin activated. Record ad networks running scripts on site.

* Super easy way to discover niche in-country ad networks (with much less expensive CPMs, in some cases) you wouldn’t otherwise know about.

Payments & Money Management

* The lower your testing budget the fewer the available variables you can test.

* Get on weeklies with your network as soon as you can. If you can’t, keep trying. Find an offer on a network or direct that will pay weekly.

* Figure out how much money you need to float you until you’re getting paid (10 days = weekly payments = 7 days of traffic +3 days to get paid out, or 45 = 30 days of traffic +15 days waiting for a check). This at least gives you a good baseline of how much you really need.

* Always do direct deposit where possible or wires (there are fees). Even Paypal (expect 3 day delays between money going back and forth with your Paypal).

* The faster you get paid, the smaller your cash flow problems are.

* Get a CPA, don’t be cheap. You get what you pay for and a good one will pay for itself very quickly.

* “Getting rich isn’t so difficult. But if you want to stay rich, then pay your taxes and don’t milk the cow without reporting it. End of lecture.” – “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis

* “Don’t try and be a baller, save your money. Bank hard now, save, and then live the rest of your life off the interest your savings earns. This means that you should try and live below your means. It’s okay to reward yourself – just don’t do it all the time and don’t do it when you can’t afford to.” – Brandon Adcock

On Outsourcing / Systems

* Focus your time on high value tasks. Automate. What you can’t automate, outsource.

* Tim Tetra on 80/20’ing your time (from 13:20 on in the vid)

* ^ “Never do anything that someone else can be doing who values their time less than you.”

* Step By Step Guide to Outsourcing by Bbrock32

* “I would rather earn 1% off 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.” -John D. Rockefeller

On Risk

* Risk (taking and managing them) is what separates the largest players in the industry {screenshot from Brandon Adcock’s now defunct blog}:

* What will you do if the traffic source dries up, or if the offer goes down?

* >>Have a backup plan.

* >>Know how to make or acquire multiple accounts (FB, etc.)

* >>Get a proxy / separate VPS / computers

* Pick a vertical to become an expert in that has several offers you can rotate in case one goes down.

On Media Buying

* Facebook is easily the best tool for learning demographic data. So important, and so useful, before you do large I/Os and private site media buys.

* Take some time and build your company a professional site. Having a professional business site / LinkedIn profile massively helps for direct site media buys.

* Focus on the Alexa Top 500 sites for finding inventory in your target country.

* Media Buys are always negotiable. Prepaying or signing a larger I/O is an easy way to get much cheaper rates, as much as 50% off. Ask for a 48 hour out clause and if the traffic sucks, exercise it. If it doesn’t – you got a cheap rate.

* To win direct-site buys, fire out a lot of emails, but always follow up with a phone call. Making a personal connection/ building relationships is how you’ll get discounts.

Deeper Cuts / Final Notes

* Jason’s post on how to work a tradeshow (to find traffic) is five years old and still relevant.

* Finch’s Premium Posts are the best TL;DR on what’s working now if you want to come up to speed without reading an entire forum.

* Affiliate marketing isn’t the end game for most people, but beyond the near-term income, it is an extremely valuable skillset for whatever business you end up building down the road. Ian Fernando does a good job of explaining why in this 8 minute vid.

* Mr. Green dispenses great advice on how to turn your business into a saleable asset in this thread. [See also: just about everything cmdeal has ever written – but start here.]

* “There’s a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It’s a nonrenewable resource. Once you’ve spent it, and if you’ve spent it badly, it’s gone forever.” – Neil Fiore