Launching an Affiliate Offer: From Zero to Profitability, Part I

Going from zero to profitability can often be the most frustrating part of launching an affiliate offer.

Now I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of finding a good offer or testing an offer. I’m going to assume you’ve found a good offer that:

Other affiliates are having success with, I always go with offers with proven track records
That has substantial profit potential, if I can’t potentially make several $1000 a day profit with the offer, I don’t waste my time with it
The next step is to find a good list of keywords using tools such as Wordtracker, Google Keywords Tool, etc. There’s dozens of keyword tools on the market so take your pick!

And no, the secret is NOT in the keyword tool you’re using.

Make sure you do a thorough job with keyword research, read this post of mine to get some insights on how to do that.

Now Once you’ve done your keyword research, & setup your Adwords campaign (tightly targeted Adgroups with relevant adcopy) you have a decision to make:

Do you make a landing page for this offer or do you do Googlecash?

I would strongly recommend making a landing page. However, if you’re still testing the offer, the best way to do that is to buy a domain name and do a framed redirect to the affiliate site.

Google doesn’t allow this, but they won’t catch on for months. It’s just for testing, so no worries.

If you’re serious about the offer then construct a landing page. If you don’t know where to start regarding your landing page design, I would recommend doing a little market research by studying what other affiliates are doing, what elements are similar in their landing pages.

And then construct your own UNIQUE landing page.

I know some of you have a hard time with that part, but trust me, if you only rip people off you’re only cheating yourself-you won’t learn anything and you’ll ultimately limit your own success.

I would recommend using a good split test program to set up a split test url for your Google campaign right off the bad.

Also, make sure you have your affiliate manager install Google conversion tracking and your split test tracking code on the thank page, and if they refuse drop the offer and move on.

You always want to do an A/B split test on your landing page AND use crazyegg to determine how many people are clicking through to the affiliate offer, and what affiliate link they’re clicking on.

Test the colors, headline, graphics, anything you can think of.

TEST!

Once you’ve launched your offer you want to carefully monitor it. The first sign of a healthy launch is if you break even or are just slightly negative right off the bat. Then your job is to optimize your campaign

Now there are several other scenario you can hit:

You’re getting barely any traffic, but the offer is converting! You need to bid on more keywords or increase your bids if your bid position is low.
You’re getting lots of traffic, but no conversions. You’re either bidding on the wrong keywords, or have a poor traffic source (such as some smaller ppc search engines or the Google content network, etc)
You’re getting lots of traffic, have conversion, but your ROI is low. Your either bidding too high, and if that’s not the case then there’s a problem with your landing page, I would revamp your landing page.
No matter what scenario your campaign ends up in the key to success is persistence.

Think about it, if other affiliates are succeeding with the offer, then it’s only matter of getting the right traffic to a landing page(s) that converts.

You have to have the mindset: I’m going to keep testing different landing pages, ads, keywords, and traffic sources until I get this offer profitable.

Once you’re at the point where you’re getting decent traffic and your landing page is converting, albeit you may still be breaking even or slightly negative, then you’re ready to go on to the next step, optimization, which I’ll discuss in the next post.