Home > Affiliate Marketing Forum >

---

What It Takes To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing (8)

---

This is a post to all affiliates struggling to see some green with their campaign.

You know how this is:

AM is competitive. The barrier to entry is almost non-existent. All those guys are competing for the same limited attention span of the user.

On top of that, people are as sophisticated as ever towards advertising.

Low CTRs and CRs make it expensive to buy quality traffic.

How many affiliates actually succeed in AM? 1 out of 10? 1 out of 100?

Scary, right? The rest of them quit before they ever see profits.

But it really all comes down to a basic law of nature. Cause and effect.

If you want a different result. All you have to do is do something different.

If you want to see that green, you have to learn how to seperate your ads from the noise and cut through the clutter.

This post tries to show you how you can differentiate yourself from the affiliate pack and increase your revenue.

Click on the links to read the full post, or simply check the key points.

Here goes:

1) Understanding the market
Your market (the people seeing your ads) sees ads every day.

A lot of people spend a lot of money every day to make sure they see their ads. Just like you do.

Too often I see affiliates creating ads that say something like "win free iphone 6", completely neglecting the competition.

How many times do you think have they heard that basic claim? By now it will fall on deaf ears, and that reflects in the CTRs.

You have to know what ads are running right now and what has been running in the past. But don't worry, we'll cover that later.

Key points:
-It helps a lot to think from the perspective of the market, read on forums etc. what are people saying about your offer?
-Users are weary of ads, a lot of distrust is going on, the BS radar is very sensitive
-If you're new, chances are the user has more experience with the usual ads run by the affiliate pack than you

2) Understanding banner blindness & sophistication
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-down-and-down
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post273917

Key points:
-all ads "burn out" over time
-if you're not one of the first with a campaign, ie other people have been running it already, expect lower response
-the market gets more and more sophisticated over time due to frequent exposure to ads, you can't run an ad "win an iphone 6" because that is old news and not believeable today
-what you CAN do is "niche down" in sophisticated markets to avoid comparison to previous ads. -> target windows users and say "as a reward for being a loyal windows user, you get a chance to win an iphone 6"

3) Learning from the Pros: Super affiliate makes 300k in 45 days
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...it-on-Facebook

Key points:
-there is a lot of money to be made, opportunities are everywhere, just look

I usually don't see people talking too much about competition and sophistication.

Newbies are recommended to come up with angles, and test, and buy data, and test some more. Those are all important things.

But you don't succeed, doing what everybody else is doing.

Here's what super affiliate Tim Tetra says:

Tim combined a fresh offer with a new traffic channel. The sophistication was low and the offer had strong appeal. People went bonkers.

Thankfully, you don't have to wait for the next facebook to come along to make some monies. Read on...

4) Attacking them where they're weak

OK, you've read the recommended posts above, right? Great work!

Now is the time to put those principles into action.

You either want to promote an offer that is new and you think it is what people would respond to.

Or promote a proven offer in a new way, to either the whole market or a segment of the market by "niching down".

The point is you have to keep in mind their sophistication level and design your ads accordingly.

A "market" can be sliced and diced. Let's take the antivirus vertical for example:

-pops in germany, targeting Windows users (like mentioned above)
-banners in poland, targeting gamers
-native ads in france

As you can see, every geo is a new market more or less. Furthermore, we can drill down into specific segments or move horizontally to different types of traffic.

Within those targeting options, we have the appeal segments, which we try to hit with different angles:

-virus protection
-steam account protection
-whatsapp virus
-battery damaged by virus

Or for a weight loss product we can leverage demographic and even psychographic targeting (interests) like on facebook or ppc:

-weight loss for women over 50
-how to get promoted faster
-health problems

It is my experience, that the sophistication level drops if you niche down. It's still there but much lower than if you would target the more mature and broader market.

There are literally hundreds of segments within a market. Narrow targeting will usually allow for higher ROI but lower volume. Broad targeting for lower ROI and higher volume.

It all depends on where you spot opportunities in the market.

What have other affiliates not milked to death already? What does the market want or would respond to?

Can you take an offer that is "killing it" right now and move it to a market with less competition?

Can you niche down within the same market? Or could you target a different demographic, coming up with a unique angle connecting that market with your offer? (like in the "how to get promoted faster"->weight loss product example)

The important thing to keep in mind is that you want to attack them where they're weak, ie low sophistication and a strong, appealing angle.

Sometimes you can rip a campaign and profit if your target market is not yet saturated.

But by ripping campaigns, you will not only be dependent on the creativity of others, but also at least 5 steps behind.

Now, how do you find out the sophistication level of your market and your competitors ads?

5) Finding opportunity

Obviously, spy tools can help you a lot to gauge competition. By looking at how long certain ads have been running you can also get an idea of the sophistication level for that vertical/geo.

You can spy manually too, it just takes more time but is cheaper if you're on a budget.

The drawback is that you can't see ads that have been running in the past so you will probably have to spend more on testing to find out if people respond to your ad.

Keep in touch with what is going on in your market. Trends, news, technological advancements, etc. Now, virtual reality is becoming popular. How would you monetize that market shift?

Keep an eye out for offers that are proven to work, that became available in a new geo. Or for new traffic channels opening up. If you're quick and the offer is good, you can make good money before the affililiate pack catches on.

Swipe and deploy across different markets. Something is working on one traffic source/geo? Transfer the campaign to where there is no to little competition.

Someone is making a certain pin submit work? Try something similar! Or completely different!

Really I could write all day about how to find opportunity. At the end of the day it comes down to creativity and a lot of testing.

Personally, I launch way more failed campaigns than green ones. It's work.

But when I hit something, I usually hit something big because I tend to test stuff that has scale to it.

And that's about it. This post was written to increase your chances to hit that big profitable campaign.

Thanks for reading.


The End.

---

This is great information. After reading through all of the content linked I can say I have a better understanding of market saturation and how to overcome the obstacles of creating angles depending on the level of market saturation.

Thank you very much ebaskin!

---

Thanks, I'm glad you've found it helpful.

I updated the post with some more info to make it more clear. I'd consider it finished now.

If there is still something unclear, just ask in here.

Hopefully this will put an end to banners like "win $500 voucher click here"

...

---

5 things in my opinion.

Patience, Persistence, an Analytical mind, a good Sales Pitch, and last but not least, not being afraid to lose money

---

Good post!

---

This is a great information man!

---

This is a great post. I am fairly newer; as Finch says, I am in the newbie...losing money phase.

I got so much out of this post. One of which, the importance of testing, researching and drilling down on niches. Also, copywriting as the game changer; creating headlines that attract time but not the tired and lazy headlines like, "Win an Iphone" or "Make Money Fast" for bizop offers.

Thanks, I took notes

---

We should make the "Affiliate marketing bible... STM edition" And this should be the first chapter of it.

Amazing stuff always exciting reading these things. And tim tetra is a BEAST.


- Jeremiah

---

Home > Affiliate Marketing Forum >