Achieving success in affiliate marketing is a two-step process. The first step actually consists of four activities: Get your foot in the door; become proficient at writing ads; identify some affiliate programs that are in demand and that you show some proficiency in promoting; and develop some successful search marketing campaigns for those programs. The second step is to those successful campaigns and to grow them. Exactly how to take that second step and to make your business grow successfully is the subject of this article.
SEARCHING FOR NEW OPPORTUNITIES
The Internet is still the modern gold rush of our time, and it promises to remain so indefinitely. Affiliate advertising and search marketing are, in my own opinion, the easiest way for anyone with a computer to share in the almost limitless opportunities that still abound online. But you will have to search for these opportunities and recognize the ones that hold the most promise for you as an individual. Recognizing these opportunities will bethe key to your success.
While a small number of readers may experience instant success with the first campaign they try, most will struggle through several or more before fully developing the skills they need to recognize which campaigns hold the most potential for them, personally, and to unlock that potential. Whether you struggle for a while or find success quickly, remember to always keep searching for the next successful campaign.
When you have been in this business for a few years, as I have, you will learn that even the most successful campaigns can dry up, suffer from program changes and cancellations, or be overtaken by a skilled competitor. The key to long-term success and security is the steady addition of new successful campaigns and new revenue streams to replace those that you will occasionally lose.
Your first big success may bring with it the temptation stop the tedious search for new campaigns, but you will put yourself and your career as a search marketer in serious jeopardy if you give in to this temptation. The almost inevitable end to most campaigns, when they come, is hard enough to face. But without other successful campaigns to ensure your financial security and maintain your confidence, the loss of a really successful campaign can be a terrible blow both financially and emotionally. You have a responsibility to yourself to mitigate this possibility by continually seeking new affiliate program opportunities.
Expanding Existing Campaigns
It’s tempting to sit back once you have had a little success. You’re making a few dollars, you’re getting a few checks in the mail or deposited directly into your bank account and it’s easy to justsit back and watch the money roll in.
But in many ways, the thing that separates successful marketers from the just so-so ones is persistence. Just because your existing campaign is already a success does not mean that it cannot still be a source of additional revenue. Once a campaign becomes a success, it deserves some extra attention, as it is now a proven revenue generator. Can you think of additional keywords to add to appropriate ad groups within the campaign? Are you marketing all of the affiliate program’s products and/or services?
Can you create additional ad groups to market these other products and services? Some of my most successful campaigns started relatively small, with modest returns, and grew only when I began expanding the overall campaign with new ad groups to promote additional products and services I had not yet advertised. If you are meeting with some success promoting a few products for, as an example, Amazon.com or eBay, why not take advantage of their broad range of products and proven earning potential and try to advertise additional items? These affiliate programs have performance tiers that pay higher commissions for higher levels of volume, and adding additional ad groups can often have an exponential effect on your total return.
Revisiting Failed Campaigns
Early in your search marketing career and perhaps even later in it you can be expected to fail with some campaigns that your developing skill set might someday be able to turn into a success. When you abandon a campaign that you failed to make profitable, you should never consider that campaign forever retired.
From time to time, as you judge your skills to have improved significantly in one or more areas, you should reexamine your old campaigns to see whether you can make successes out of some former failures now that you possess the knowledge and skill that you were then lacking.
If you recognize a campaign that failed for some reason unknown to you at the time but that you now think you understand by all means resurrect the campaign to see if, in fact, you can now make it profitable. For example, as you look over your old campaigns you might notice an ad for downloading software that you failed to mention was free.
The power of the word free (when appropriate) in paid search advertising may have been unknown or underestimated by you when you first wrote this ad. Restarting the campaign with a new ad highlighting “Free Download” might be all it takes to turn an old loser into a winner. Perhaps you will notice baseball equipment keywords that failed to maintain high enoughclick-through rates to remain active on Google.
Your more experienced eye might recognize that keywords like bat, glove, helmet, and so forth are far too general and should be changed to batting helmet and baseball bat.
Perhaps glove could be expanded into several more-descriptive phrases such as batting glove, ball glove, and baseball glove. Negative keywords, like souvenir, might weed out people looking for small souvenir baseball bats that your affiliate program doesn’t sell at all.
The point is, many of the things you will learn as you grow your business will be lessons that could save some of your earlier campaigns if applied to them. Make a habit of spending a few hours every three months or so to reexamine your old campaigns with an eye toward finding one or two that might have failed for lack of some piece of knowledge or skill that you now possess. Try to restart or rebuild those campaigns using your new talents. Sometimes, the rewards will surprise you.
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