When it comes to choosing an offer, a common pattern I've noticed is that many successful performance marketers:
1. Always talk to their affiliate managers about an offer before testing. That is, they grab something that has already been proven to convert, plus whatever else the AM will give them..
2. They also use their spy tools to collect proof on that the offer, then rip their creatives, tweak and improve or use them for inspiration..
If {many|most|all} successful performance marketers work this way, then who are the pioneers risking their money on new and unproven offers?
Is this a case of having the experience of knowing a good offer when one stumbles upon it, despite not having any data/proof to back it up?
I get the feeling success doesn't happen by stumbling upon offers...It comes from due diligence...
Curious to hear what your thoughts are..
Gene
Its true that many affiliates want to see/know and offer really works before testing, but plenty are also trying out new offers.
I guess it depends on how confident the affiliate is and how experienced he is. Because if an offer is working great for 1 affiliate - there is no reason it wouldnt work for others.
But if an offer is yet to be proven - who knows if it can perform well at all, right?
In my mind - wrong.
If there is a new offer that seems interesting, has a good looking LP then affiliates shouldnt be affraid to test it. Promoting a new offer can be profitable even if you dont do the best of jobs as its still "fresh" to users.
Promoting something that already works will probably need you to be better then the competition from the start (dont have to be better than everyone of course) and that takes skills as well.
And although due diligence is always good, some affiliates do just "stumble upon" good offers without much knowledge of them to begin with. They dont have to know the offer itself but they know the vertical/geo/traffic source/target users...
Or they just get really lucky :-)
Otherwise we really would see the same offers being promoted over and over again.