Your offer is the most important part of your campaign. If your offer is a dud, nothing else will make the campaign profitable in your funnel and it will all be a waste of time.
If you log in and explore an affiliate network, you will see thousands of offers from different verticals. But remember, not all offers are created equal.
Generally, the country that an advertiser permits traffic from is in brackets or clearly stated somewhere. Most offers will have different pay-outs. Do not just pick one that pays the most and run with it!
Lower pay-out offers might convert 10x better than a higher pay-out, generating a much better ROI.
But when it comes to anything Affiliate Marketing, do not make assumptions. Be a scientist. Test everything first. Data is key.
I highly recommend choosing Sweepstakes as your vertical to promote for beginners. The first step is to ask your Affiliate Manager for a list of top performing offers on the network or recently converted sweepstake offers.
If offers are showing as already converted, it means that they must work reasonably well for someone else. Do not go into the New Offers and test those as a beginner. You can do that later on.
In the beginning, you NEED offers that you know work for a fact. If only one out of two or three offers that you are testing work, the data from your campaign, such as landing pages and placements will be skewed.
Once you get the list, sort through it, removing the verticals and GEO’s that you are not interested in for now. For a beginner I suggest choosing Tier 3-4 vertical, as there is a lot less competition, traffic costs are cheaper, and it will take a lost less to make a campaign profitable. Tier 3-4 offers are the best ones to learn affiliate marketing on, since the strategy and concepts are exactly the same as with Tier 1-2, but you don’t need to invest as much money upfront.
Ensure to ask for lead generation sweepstake offers (SOI preferably) and not credit card submit sweepstakes (CC).
HERE ARE SOME DEFINITIONS:
SOI (single opt-in): The visitor only needs to enter their info on the offer page for you to get the conversion.
DOI (Double Opt-In): Same as SOI but with an addition step. After the visitor enters their info, they would need to confirm in some way – by clicking on a link in an email, or by entering a code into a data field on the offer site.
CC Submit (Credit card submit): This type of offers require visitors to submit their credit card details.
Once you have a list of all the potential offers, go ahead and apply to all of them in your Affiliate Network’s interface. Once approved, go through each offer and load the offer’s landing page in your browser by browsing to your affiliate link. If you’re not surfing from your target GEO, use a VPN. Make sure you end up at an offer page instead of being redirected to someplace else (e.g. another offer).
Although not necessary, as a beginner it makes sense to collect offers that contain the same prize (ex-iPhone or Samsung Device) and preferably the same language. Yes, you can run English landing pages on pretty much all offers, but your conversion rate will suffer as a result. German language landing pages can be run in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; Spanish, in Spain, Argentina and Mexico… you get the idea.
Have a plan and segment your offers. This will make your life a lot easier in the long run. I personally have run exclusive iPhone sweepstakes offers for the longest time, on the same landing page, translated into multiple languages. Once you find something that works for one GEO, there is a good chance it will work for all others.
