What's The Best Overall Strategy To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing? (28)
What's The Best Overall Strategy To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a marathon effort - not a quick sprint.
When you're getting started, once you have mastered the very basics and run your first couple of campaigns, it's vital that you have an idea of the big picture.
Key Campaign Elements: Traffic Source, Offer, Angle
There are three things that will make or break each campaign you run.
This doesn't mean they're the only things you need to get right. You'll still need good banners, bids, landing pages, and so on to make a profit from your campaign.
But if you don't have these three things nailed, it doesn't matter how brilliant your landers are - you still won't see positive ROI (Return On Investment).
Experienced affiliates believe that once you know what you're doing, these three things in combination are responsible for about 70% of your campaigns' success.
Traffic Source
Fortunately, we can choose a good traffic source straight away.
Our recommended traffic sources are huge and have space for hundreds of affiliates. That means that affiliates are much more willing to share data on the good ones, so you can choose one that is known to be high-quality.
Over time, you'll probably want to experiment with other traffic sources, some of which won't be as high quality. Knowing and running on a smaller traffic source can be a great competitive advantage.
However, when you're getting started, you need to learn and find a good combination as fast as possible. So start with a traffic source that's definitely good, and avoid that uncertainty.
Once you have chosen a traffic source, you should spy on it extensively - see What Software, Hardware, and Memberships Do I Need? - to get a good idea of what offers are working on that traffic source. You should also read success stories, guides and follow-alongs focusing on that traffic source on STM - you'll get invaluable information that way.
Offer
The most important thing to do in your early affiliate career is to find a good offer.
This isn't easy to do. You can ask for recommendations, but any offer that your Affiliate Manager recommends or that shows up in Affiliate Network newsletters is likely to have a lot of other affiliates running it too.
That doesn't mean you can't get it to work, but it will be harder. On the other hand, unknown offers can be very hit-and-miss - often they won't convert at all.
The best approach is to test a lot of offers, and to alternate between testing recommended offers and offers that you've found in your networks' offer selection which don't have much data.
That means that you'll test some real turkeys, but you'll have the best chance of finding a gem.
You should mostly stick to the type of offer that you've seen working on your chosen traffic source whilst spying. Occasionally it's worth trying something different, but particularly when you're beginning, most of the time you should stick to what you know works.
Don't stick to an offer forever. Even if other affiliates are making it work, if you run a few campaigns with distinctly different angles and don't see promising ROI, drop it and move to the next one.
It is also very important to split-test offers amongst all the networks that run that offer. The same offer running on two different networks can vary in conversion rate by 50% or more: testing the same offer from multiple networks is one of the big keys to success. This sounds crazy, but it's absolutely 100% vital.
Angle
The angle is the unique spin that seperates your campaign from everyone else's. It's the benefit you show or the story you tell that makes your offer appealing.
For example, an obvious angle for a battery saver mobile app is to ask users if they're tired of their battery running down. That might work, but users will have seen it many times before.
A less obvious angle may work better - for example, choosing a specific situation where a battery running down is bad. "Don't Lose Power Just As Your Tinder Chat Starts" is likely to stand out. It might work, it might not - but it definitely means that your campaign is different to the crowd.
Particularly on more crowded offers, the angle you choose can be the difference between success and failure.
To learn more about angles, read Create At Least 21 New Angles For Any Offer In Under An Hour.
Generally, one campaign will focus on one angle. It's very hard - and usually not a great idea - to run multiple angles in a campaign.
However, you can run multiple offers in a campaign, and pick the best, if they all work with the same angle.
Stages Of A Campaign
When you're running your campaigns, it's important to understand when you should and should not make changes.
You MUST understand the concept of Statistical Significance. It sounds complicated - and it's not super-simple - but it's a scientific concept that affiliate marketers use to not waste money. IF you don't understand it and follow it, you will throw money away.
Once you understand that, the next thing to understand are the stages of optimisation a campaign goes through.
Stage 0: Preparation
This is the stage where you create all the assets - usually banners and/or landing pages - that you'll need for your campaign.
If you are new to affiliate marketing, you are likely to find it hard to create high-conversion landers or banners at first. Create some banners or landers that are extremely similar to the banners and landers you already see via your spy tools, and test those. Whilst it's unlikely that you will end up running them, they give you a "benchmark" to beat with your own landers.
Stage 1: Blacklisting
If you're running on a traffic source where all the traffic comes from a single, trusted site, and you're not running on mobile, you can skip this stage. Facebook would be the classic example.
Otherwise, this is where you remove the absolute crap that would otherwise drag your campaign down:
- Placements - the sites or apps you're advertising on - are probably the biggest thing to clear here. Rules vary by traffic source, but in general you should drop any placement that has received more than 2x - 3x your payout in spend without a conversion. Some placements can be really, really terrible, and you just want to get rid of them as fast as possible.
- Handsets - If you're on mobile, you'll want to watch out for handsets that don't convert. It's unlikely to be as big a problem as the placements, but sometimes a handset can't display your offer or won't let a user complete a conversion. Again, 2x - 3x your payout in spend is a good general guideline.
- Carriers - It's rare that you'll get a spectacularly bad carrier, but sometimes you may. This can be mobile or desktop, but is more likely to be mobile. Weed out anything with 6x payout and no conversions.
At this stage you may sometimes also spot spectacularly good placements or carriers, which you will then launch a new campaign around. This technique is called whitelisting, and is more advanced. In particular, it's important when whitelisting to be very careful to only do this with placements or carriers that have a large potential traffic volume, or you'll end up spending hours optimising campaigns that will make cents.
If you're new to affiliate marketing, you will probably find that in the beginning, nothing converts. If you're in that position, don't blacklist anything unless you have a single placement that's taking over a third of your spend. Move on to optimising your banners and landers, and come back to blacklisting once you have creatives that convert on at least some placements.
Stage 2: Initial Optimisation And Campaign Promise
Once you have eliminated bad placements, you then start to eliminate ads and landing pages that show the least promise, and replace them with new ones. Read When Should I Cut Ads and When Should I Cut Landing Pages to know more about how and when to do that.
When adding new ads and landers, it's very important to explore as wide a range of possibilities as you can. Don't just stick to one source of images, one design of lander, or one set of copy text. Within the angle you have chosen for your campaign, you should explore as widely as possible, both mimicking what you see working in other peoples' campaigns and trying entirely new ideas and approaches.
Once you have gone through your first round of optimisation, you can then decide if the campaign is worth continuing. Be ruthless about cutting campaigns! Hanging on to campaigns longer than you should is one of the major mistakes made by new affiliates. Read When Should I Cut A Campaign? for more information on that.
Stage 3: Split-Testing To Profit
In this stage, you test new ads and new landing pages until you either reach profit or conclude that you should kill this campaign and move on to another.
The process is very similar to what you already did in initial optimisation: add landers and ads, wait for them to achieve statistical significance, then choose whether to keep or kill them.
If the campaign gets into profit, you move to Stage 4. If not, you should kill the campaign. Again, the key here is not to spend forever testing one campaign - see When Should I Cut A Campaign?
90% of your campaigns will probably not reach profitability - but it's the other 10% that will pay for that 90% many times over.
Stage 4: Scaling And More Split-Testing
Once you have a profitable campaign, the next stage is to scale it up as much as possible. It is far easier to scale up a profitable campaign than to start a new one and make it profitable.
Part of this is continuous split-testing. Even once you're profitable, you should always be testing new ads and landing pages, looking for options that beat your current best. Read this case study from Maynzie (NSFW!) to see how much difference continuous split-testing can make on an already profitable campaign.
Beyond that, you will also expand your bids as much as you can, test in new countries, with different audiences, and on different traffic sources. You'll also probably test strategies like duplicating campaigns. Read How Do I Scale My Successful Campaign? to get more detail on how the scaling phase of a campaign goes.
So What's The Best Overall Strategy To Succeed?
Bringing all this together, here's what we at STM consider the best strategy to succeed in affiliate marketing in 2016 and beyond.
- Pick one vertical and one traffic source to begin.
- Sign up to as many affiliate networks as reasonably possible to give yourself a wide choice of offers.
- Spend a couple of days spying on your chosen vertical and traffic source before you begin launching, in order to understand what's working for other people.
- Follow our guide to software, hardware and memberships. Don't try and "save" money on hosting or tracking by using cheaper, less effective options - it will cost you 10x that in the long run.
- Choose a mixture of offers - some recommended by your AM or your networks' newsletters, others that you find in your networks' offer selections that aren't already popular.
- Research each offer before you begin developing angles. Learn about its audience, what it offers, and what angles other people are already using.
- For each offer you choose, develop 2-4 different angles. Create each of those angles as a campaign.
- If possible, always split-test an offer across as many networks as have it available.
- Focus on launching as many campaigns as reasonably possible whilst still doing a good job on each one - research, original ads, etc.
- For each campaign, start by testing 8-12 banner ads (if appropriate) and 1-3 landing pages (if appropriate). Don't test a lot more than this unless you're running pops or another source which is landers-only, in which case test about 4 landers initially.
- Learn about and use statistical significance calculators to know when it's appropriate to cut or keep ads and landers. Alternatively, follow STM guide rules on when to cut ads and landers. Cutting ads or landers too early or too late is probably the #1 cause of wasted money in campaigns.
- Follow our guidelines on when to cut campaigns. Don't stick with a campaign unless it's showing promise.
- If you don't have success with an offer after 4 angles maximum, move on to a new offer.
- Don't change vertical or traffic source! If you feel like you absolutely have to do so, ask on STM first to get advice on whether it's the right move.
- Once you have something that's working (in profit over several days), focus 80% of your effort on scaling that, launching new campaigns with the same offer, and generally milking it for all it's worth. Make hay whilst the sun shines!
- Remember that affiliate marketing income fluctuates - don't immediately quit your job after your first $xxx day! Think stability and long-haul.
I hope that was helpful! If you have any questions or comments, ask 'em below!
Thanks Caurmen - another brilliant post, yet again - spesh for a newbie like me 
No worries - glad it helped!
I should also give a shout-out to mods kepe95, hlyghst and vortex on this one - they're the people who suggested the skeleton of this post and its contents as a great addition to the 2015 Strategy Guide 
"you should drop any placement that has received more than 2x - 3x your payout in spend without a conversion. "
Maybe a dumb question: if a conversion pays $2, I should black list a placement if I spend more than $6 there?
Thanks for a great post!
@harryc - yep, that's correct. If you've spent more than $6 on the placement and you've not seen a conversion, drop it.
The only time this doesn't apply is if you're very new to AM. In that case, see the paragraph beginning "If you're new to affiliate marketing" in the Stage 1: Blacklisting section.
Thank you, sir!
Thank you Caurmen!
Definitely a must read for newbies and not so newbies! Hah!
@Caurmen strikes again. Thanks mate for the post, it is definitely an eye-opening for newbies.
Sometimes (and i do it alot) re-reading is super usefull! and i learned testing is super important.. what i learned today is that cutting APPS/WEBSITES is super super important! when you cut cariers etc there is a good change you dont have any impressions left!
The day before yesterday i was done with my offer (first offer) so i decided to just milk it a bit and true that learn about cutting bad placements... BEST CHOICE EVER! I am talking pennies here but i dont care... this was a freaking big learning curve for me... i think what a lot of newbies are noticing is there's so much information that its hard to absorb all and make small stupid mistakes...I did! so now i have 2250 impressions / 11 conversions and slowly going! (i am starting to believe in this offer again). People here say cut your loses and go to a other offer, but i dont think thats always the right way... I am doing mobile sweeps on POP and i read somewhere and heard from a lot of people that almost every offer can convert... I think thats true! Also because "lead gen" companys live on this shit and know there shit!
Originally Posted by spartanen
The day before yesterday i was done with my offer (first offer) so i decided to just milk it a bit and true that learn about cutting bad placements... BEST CHOICE EVER! I am talking pennies here but i dont care... this was a freaking big learning curve for me... i think what a lot of newbies are noticing is there's so much information that its hard to absorb all and make small stupid mistakes...I did!
so now i have 2250 impressions / 11 conversions and slowly going! (i am starting to believe in this offer again). People here say cut your loses and go to a other offer, but i dont think thats always the right way... I am doing mobile sweeps on POP and i read somewhere and heard from a lot of people that almost every offer can convert... I think thats true! Also because "lead gen" companys live on this shit and know there shit! You will learn to make the right decision as you run more and more campaigns.Now about cutting apps/sites/spots, you got it right, its always better to start with small changes when optimizing stuff, such as blocking the obviously bad sources. Cutting the entire carrier is a really big move, and should be only done after you really tested enough banners and have cut the most shitty sources.
An insightful article! It opened my eyes to fix some details of our strategy.
Wow!!!!! Gold!!! Thanks to everyone who contributed to this post!
I'm Kinda Confused and would like to Clarification On This.
The Thing I'm Confused about is should I be rotating 3 Different Offers, With 8 Different Ads, and 3 Different Landing Pages At The Same Time?
How do I approach this?
Or Should I only Be Testing 1 Part of a campaign at a time.
For example, First I find the best offer by rotating 3 Offers Against 1 Ad and 1 Lander, And Then choosing the best offer
Then, I find the Best Ad . Rotate 8 Ads against 1 lander, Pick 1 Ad.
Then I Find the Best Landing Page, Rotate 1 Ad against 3 Landers.
Then I Start Cutting Placements.
Can anyone suggest which route to go?
Ok I've Been Talking to a couple of people and I've narrowed down my optimization Process.
1. Always be testing Offers(The Most Important Thing In a campaign) until one reaches statistical significance.
2. First Thing You Should Find Is the winning Angle(2nd Most Important)(SideNote: Angle is an Unique AD + Lander). Find the Best Angle after Statistical Significance. I test 3-4 Angles.
3. After the Winning Angle For me since I'm Doing Search. I use the Winning Angle And Test
Ads Next(3rd Most Important) . (Ads are more important in search)
4. After I find The Winning Ad Find The Best Landing Page Variation(4th Most Important).
4a. LP Headlines
4b. LP IMages
4c. Whatever Else
As soon, as I find the best Angle+AD+LP variations I will Start Cutting unprofitable placements, because this campaign is optimized to convert. Start Cutting Placements.
Start Adding More Keywords To scale
Launch A New Campaign To Compete With Your Old one. Rinse and Repeat
Above Steps.
Feel free to message me on skype edric2233 and we can talk as well =). About Campaign Optimization.
@edric2233 - provided you are running a consistent angle across all ads and landers, and your offers are similar, if recommend testing offer, lander and ads all at the same time. That's just a much faster way to find out what's working.
Other than that, though, looks like you have all the details correct!
So Basically Run 5 Angles At A Time, Each Angle Has 8 Ads + 3 Landers + 3 Offers Rotating.
Ah Thank you so much For Clarifying Caurmen, That Does Sound Like A faster way to collect Data! HAHA
Money Likes Speed Appreciate your input!! 
So when you are testing offers...
Can you first direct link to the offers to see if they will convert? Before adding landing page testing?
@lloydmc - Yes you can, although be aware some offers convert much better with a lander. I'd usually test side by side, direct link and a lander, just in case the lander I choose initially really sucks for that offer.
Sounds like a plan, thanks.
So I'll just rotate 2 Landers and an offer
When you say launch a campaign with same offer - It just means new Angles With new Ads Pretty much?
Running Search, Going Really Broad Targeting random unrelated keywords. MY campaign is profitable. I was wondering when to pause Keywords? After how much Spend? Spending about 1k a day
Doing Around 30% ROI,
I haven't really Optimized much only Tested 3-4 Ads, Also Added in 5 new Offers Today.
Should I Start Pausing Keywords now or wait until I have a fully optimized Funnel before Pausing Keywords?
Originally Posted by edric2233
Thank you Caurmen for the post. It's very helpful as I am new to this industry.
I knew I would have to spend some time digging in and reading here to find the good stuff.
After my first day, this short summary doesn't disappoint.
Great stuff, thank you!
Originally Posted by caurmen
Reverse-engineering successful affiliate campaigns, is the SINGLE MOST POWERFUL THING YOU CAN DO!
You can learn EVERYTHING YOU NEED about affiliate marketing (and business in general? hmm...) from simply REVERSE ENGINEERING what is successfully working for other people.
This space, like ANY, will continually adapt.
But the one element that makes it so easy to be successful, is that every single element about an affiliate campaign is DIGITAL, and is ON DISPLAY for ANYONE to see....
Sure, there are some pieces of data and optimization that can be extremely important to turning a campaign green, but this industry has such low barriers to entry, and anyone can get 90% of the way towards success simply by spying, and reverse enginniring other affiliates funnels.
I know this is kindof a taboo subject on this forum, but I believe an entire section devoted to reverse-engineering affiliate funnels would be a great addition to the forum, and help people get their paws around things more.
Elon Musk calls it JIT learning (Just In Time); looking at the mechanics (the targeting, the ad copy, the lander copy, the lander programming, etc), and then building skills JIT.
Its what he based his school around. (look up Ad Astra, his schools name, to learn more about elons theories on education)
There are like 100,000 + posts in this forum... way too many for your average person to get through, especially if they havent made the leap out of their 9-5 job yet.
But by focusing on REVERSE ENGINEERING affiliate funnels, then figuring out what skills you need to learn from that standpoint, makes the whole ordeal go a lot faster.
My path to success only really started when I got going through the follow-along section in this forum.
I had tried to employ all these methods and tricks I found mentioned online for a while, but it always felt like I was trying to fit square pegs in round holes.
When I came across the follow-alongs, it was different though.
I started looking at REAL campaigns, and I would pore through that users past posts to figure out what sub-forums they were hanging out in, what threads they were reading, etc., and that really helped me get an idea of where people came from, and learned to launch the campaigns.
How affiliates code their landing pages...
...what scripts people are using
...how people are writing their ads
...how people are writing their landers
...what sites affiliate ads are showing up on
...what pixels affiliates are placing on their landers (this can reveal so much)
...what niches are being advertised on what ad networks
...etc
Lots of spying, and reverse-engineering also forced me to put on my problem-solver hat, to figure things out for myself.
So, if any newer affiliate is reading this, again, I emphasize you to REVERSE ENGINEER as MUCH as possible
...and then go to the specific sub-forum in STM that has the information that you need to learn!
^ This.
When I started out, some years ago, guides helped, but what really let me get things started was exactly the same process as John mentions: going through Follow-Alongs, looking for the inflection points where things changed, figuring out why, and then applying that learning to my own campaigns.
Obviously the STM moderator team try to simplify this process, extract the nuggets of insight from what we see on the forums and present it as guides or as replies to threads, but everyone has different stumbling blocks and subtly different approaches - nothing really substitutes for doing this analysis for yourself.
I would like to emphasize to start with your own common sense/creativity and "just do it" mentality. You learn a lot more with testing, optimizing and and fail a lot instead of stealing ads/creatives/landers from others which already have been tested most of time.
For sure. Its all about testing, testing, testing and even more testing!
Viuda with the oi
Home > >