To find success in the world of affiliate marketing, you need to follow a strict process before simply choosing an offer, putting together up an ad campaign and then throwing money at it and hoping for the best. This might have worked in the past when there was a lot less competition in affiliate marketing and back when advanced tracking systems weren’t in play — however, today it’s a totally different game.
In this post we are going to break down the 5 Steps to Creating a Successful Affiliate Campaign —Â based off the original infographic below and first affiliate campaign guide provided by AdsBridge.
Follow these 5 Steps to Find Success with Affiliate Marketing
Find an Offer or Niche to Promote
With thousands of affiliate offers available, how are you supposed to know which to are the best? This is simply a process of elimination and testing what’s out there. It’s also good if you have experience in a specific industry or niche and also know the thought or buying process of the customers you are trying to reach.
No matter what type of affiliate offer you plan to promote, the good news is that you can start small and scale it out over time and you figure out how to make it profitable.
Create a Landing Page for Your Campaign
AÂ landing page is simply the best way to make your campaign profitable. Instead of sending traffic directly to your advertiser page, you can create your own landing page to pre-sell the user and grab their interest. This type of marketing works extremely well in the online dating space, which uses geographic targeting and demographics to hit their exact audience before sending them to signup at a specific dating site.
Be sure to view our landing page optimization guide for more tips on how to create great landing pages.
Setup Your Campaign Tracking
Without the proper campaign tracking, you are just begging to lose money. Affiliate networks can provide you with generic stats like clicks, conversions and payouts, but understanding where those leads are coming from and why is much more important.
For example, if you were running traffic to your landing page from pay per click in search, social media ads and media buys, you would want to be able to track each of those traffic sources differently and seeing how they convert on your site. You could probably do this through multiple affiliate links, but it would be a huge headache. Using a tracking platform like AdsBridge would not only make the process seamless, it would also allow you to track every aspect of your campaign.
Split Testing Your Landing Page
Once you have a landing page and tracking system in place, it’s time for you to make a few changes to your page so you can split test performance. For example, how much of a conversion swing might you see if you change a green submit button to an orange one? The results might surprise you!
This can all easily be done through a platform that integrates your landing pages and tracking together. It’s not just about testing color changes, it’s also about playing with your ad copy text, images, placements throughout your site and much more.
Split testing is one of the best ways to increase conversions and get the most out of your campaigns in months to come.
Optimize and Scale!
After choosing a great affiliate offer to promote, building out your landing pages and having a solid click tracking platform in place… now it’s time to focus on how you can effectively optimize and scale your campaign over time — such as bringing in new traffic sources, mixing it up with new ad copy or demographic targeting and figuring out new untapped markets you might be able to benefit from.
At the end of the day, finding success with affiliate marketing is all about building campaigns and tweaking them until they are profitable. Not every campaign will be a big hit, but when you do find a winner, it can make up for all of your failed campaigns combined!
Infographic below by AdsBridge.com.
