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.
The less complicated the conversion flow, the higher the conversion rate since the visitor does not have to do as much work. SOI type offers will have the highest conversion rate, but the lowest pay-out.
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).
When running a campaign, you always want to test multiple offers instead of relying on just one. The performance of each offer will vary greatly regardless of the pay-out. A low paying offer might be a lot profitable than the high paying one. The same offer on one network might perform completely different from the same offer on another.
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.
