Everything You Need To Know To Kill It In AM Was Written 2500 Years Ago (Part 1) (9)
10-21-2016 10:33 AM
#1
caurmen (Administrator)
Everything You Need To Know To Kill It In AM Was Written 2500 Years Ago (Part 1)
Everything You Need To Know To Kill It In AM Was Written 2500 Years Ago (Part 1)
You'll hear a lot of descriptions of affiliate marketing.
Some people think of it as "a way to make a quick buck before building a real business". (I don't recommend that description.)
Others will hark back to the direct marketers of the '20s and say it's basically the same as selling via back-page ads in Roaring '20s magazines.
I've got a different description of AM.
For me, it's the best-paid branch of science in the world.
Great Scott!
Meanwhile, In Ancient Greece...
Science isn't labcoats, chemicals, and particle accelerators.
The very core of everything we call science - the Scientific Method - comes from 2500 years ago in Ancient Greece, and was largely created by the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. (That's a massive oversimplification - see Wikipedia but it'll do for now.)
And it's nothing more than a problem-solving technique.
But it's such a powerful problem-solving technique that we've yet to find any practical problem that it can't solve. It's solved "how do we get to the Moon?", "How do we eradicate smallpox?", and a host more.
And that includes the problem of "how do I make buttloads of money with this affiliate offer?"
When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer...slow, tedious lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's techniques, but you know in the end you're going to get it. There's no fault isolation problem in motorcycle maintenance that can stand up to it. When you've hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, "Okay, Nature, that's the end of the nice guy,'' and you crank up the formal scientific method."
from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintainance
from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintainance
Affiliates: The Best-Paid Scientists Ever
Almost all affiliates are already using the scientific technique, or most of it. We develop hypoetheses, we test, we record results.
For a great example of an affiliate using the scientific method to spectacular effect, read Stackman's "Guide On His Recent $X,XXX/day 2014 Mobile Campaign".
But if you only know half the Method, you're apt to make mistakes, take shortcuts where you shouldn't, or otherwise do something that means you don't get the full problem-crushing power you should be applying to a problem. And quite a lot of us aren't trained scientists (Zeno excepted).
So the rest of these articles will introduce you, briefly, to exactly how Aristotle and all the scientists after him have worked to create - well, basically everything in the modern world.
Problem 1: The Problem
A lot of you may now be thinking "OK, so he's going to start with hypoetheses, and...".
Nope.
The first stage of using the scientific method is to define the problem.
You need to make sure that you have defined the right problem, that you have defined it accurately, and that you have defined it completely.
Trying to solve the wrong problem is a very common issue. If you define the problem you're trying to solve as "have a successful campaign", for example, that's a bad start.
Example: Bertrand the affiliate wants to have a successful campaign. So he focuses all his energy on finding a positive-ROI campaign. Eventually, after a month of testing, he finds one with a +20% ROI - but it turns out to have an offer cap meaning he can only make $10 a day on it. If he'd defined his goal better, he would have rejected that offer immediately and spent his energy and his money much more successfully.
Why do you want a successful campaign? Largely, because you want money. So rephrase to "the problem is how, given this traffic source and this offer, I make money".
And now we get to part 2: defining it accurately. You want to make "money"? Great. So if you invest $100,000 and make back $100,001, you'll be happy with that? Probably not. How much money do you want to make?
Bear in mind that science deals with the possible. Don't overshoot. Define the minimum you want - more open definitions of the problem leave more space. But equally make sure you're solving the problem you actually have: if you're an affiliate looking to make the jump to $x,xxx a day and you already do $xxx a day stably, define your problem as how to make $x,xxx a day. Otherwise you'll end up solving for an outcome you don't want.
And finally, defining your problem completely. It's important to know what limitations you have. For example, if you're a new affiliate, work your budget into the definition. Work your timescale into this too. It's also important to think about other restrictions you might have, like ethical ones. For example, I'm at worst a light-grey-hat affiliate: so all my problem solving exercises include lines like "without lying or making fraudulent claims".
It's also worth limiting yourself in terms of how wide you're willing to cast your net at this point. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat of making money - limit yourself to "by buying paid traffic and showing ads" for now just to avoid getting waaaaaay too many ideas. I'll come back to this later in a section on "nesting" your scientific enquiry.
All this stuff is important for later stages. Creating hypotheses is a creative exercise, and creativity thrives on limitations. In addition, it's extremely important, given that the scientific method is hard, to solve for the outcome you actually want.
(Problems for the scientific method must also be *falsifiable. However, that's rarely a problem in affiliate marketing. "Will this campaign will make me enough to spend six months chilling in Koh Samui?" is a question with pretty definitely falsifiable answers.)
If you have accurately defined your question, you're already massively ahead of almost anyone else trying to figure out a similar problem.
Example: Hiran is a moderately successful affiliate looking for more success. Hiran follows the scientific method, and defines exactly the problem he wants to solve: his problem is that he can't create a campaign that scales to more than $xxx a day on mobile without going hardcore blackhat.
Because he knows his problem, he immediately discards all opportunities that don't solve that problem: blackhat or cloaking campaigns, offers with low caps, offers that don't have broad appeal, stuff outside mobile. And he focuses on learning only from case studies and spied landers that seem to have achieved that. This enables him to discard at least 50 potential campaigns immediately, meaning that he gets to the successful campaign that propels him to a $4,353 profit day about two months and $10,000 spend earlier than he otherwise would have.
Hypotheses: The Engine Of This Science Stuff
Next, the scientist starts thinking about how he or she is going to solve the problem.
What most people will do here is something like this: "OK, so I've got this iPhone sweepstake. How could I get it to work? Well, I could offer them an iPhone. Too obvious. I could say it's a beta test - that's genius! That'll work! Right, time to make up banners and landers and...."
NONONONONONONONONONOSTOP.
There is one ancient, universal truth at the heart of the scientific method, and it's this: the first idea you come up with probably won't work.
If the problem you're trying to solve is easy enough that you can probably solve it on the first try, then you probably shouldn't use science. Science is slow, grinding, and takes far longer than more casual approaches.
Affiliate marketing is not an easy problem. So Science is your best shot.
Example: Kim and John are both starting to test a hot new install offer that they're sharing a cap on. Kim just starts testing ideas as they come up, whilst John sits down and develops 57 hypotheses then ranks them (see below). John's able to test 18 potential campaigns in the time it takes Kim to test 3, because he deliberately started with the easiest, fastest ones first. That means he finds a successful campaign much earlier, and promptly scales it up to take the entire cap of the offer, leaving Kim with nothing for her effort...
Once we have a defined problem, the next step we should take as scientists is to examine the problem and develop a number of initial ideas on how we could solve it. We call these ideas hypotheses (singular hypothesis), because that's what the Greeks called them and we're pretty much ripping off their playbook here.
A hypothesis is pretty simple: it's a theory of how you could solve the problem. That' the key element: it must be complete description of a solution. "I could buy Facebook ads" is NOT a hypothesis appropriate to the problem "how do I make $xxx a day from this offer?".
"I could buy Facebook ads and show them a campaign focused on the angle of how this offer could get them an iPhone at almost no cost, then send them straight to the offer, at which point a significant enough fraction of them will convert to buy my first yauht" is a complete hypothesis.
Got one? Great. Whatever you do, DON'T START RUNNING IT.
Now, develop another one. Write it down. And another. Write it down. And so on. Get all your brainstorming tools going. Read "Lateral Thinking" (no really, do, it's great). Put on hats. Go for a walk.
Get used to that feeling that you're attempting to bash through a brick wall using the raw power of your brain: that's the science feeling.
Once you have a LOT of ideas - 30 or so - go through and catalog them on two levels:
- How likely you think they are to work.
- How much investment they will need to falsify. This includes time, money, and any other resource that you might spend. For example, if your partner doesn't love you running adult campaigns, the hypothesis that involves less T&A is the one that will spend less of the resource which is their patience.
Start by running experiments on - that is to say creating and running campaigns for - the hypotheses that are lowest-investment and you think are highest-likelihood.
In Part 2 of this series we cover measurement, conclusions, and the cycle of testing which leads to verifiable results.
Questions? Queries? Think I should be giving more weight to the role of Ibn al-Haytham in the creation of the Scientific Method? Post below!
This is awesome!
Can't wait for part 2!
Fantastic read! Thank you!
Outstanding!!! Looking forward for part 2 
Amazing, haha, thanks.
Originally Posted by caurmen
Is that
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lateral-Thi.../dp/0141033088
or
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lateral-Thi.../dp/0091955025
@thenjp Either are good, but I was thinking of Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity.
If you find that useful, I also highly recommend Six Thinking Hats. I've actually used that approach whilst teaching AM, and it works very well.
Bought all the books you mentioned and start reading already. BIG THANKS.
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