Are You a Scatterbrained Affiliate?

By Amit Mehta

Let’s say you launch a new AdWords campaign, optimize it and get your affiliate promotion to $100 a day in profit. WOW! That’s $3,000 per month in profit. You’re really excited!

Now, you have two choices:

1) You think to yourself, “Hey, if I do this in 10 different markets, I’ll make $30,000
a month in profit!” You decide to jump into a completely new market, one you
know nothing about, in an attempt to duplicate your success.

2) You think to yourself, “I’m just touching the surface of the income potential in this market!” Then, you decide to leverage everything you’ve learned in this market. You continue to expand your keyword list, take your AdWords campaigns on to Yahoo, and MSN, split test your ads and hire a web designer to make a professional site. You add more unique content to your site to improve your AdWords quality score, rigorously split test your landing page to improve conversions, start collecting emails and building a list.

Now, sadly enough, most affiliates will opt for scenario one, and the following is what will likely happen six months down the road.

Scenario One

This person, basically letting his $100 per day profit run on autopilot, now goes into 10 different markets, unfortunately, they all turn out to be duds (or only temporarily profitable) except for the seventh one, where again, he made $100 per day in profit.

However, by the time that happens, markets conditions have changed and more competition has entered into his first market. He starts to lose money on his first market.

Overwhelmed and distracted by all the markets he’s testing, he puts that market on hold and says to himself: “I’ll come back to that later,” knowing full well he never will.

He then gets an email from an Internet marketing ‘guru’ about how to easily make $50,000 a month with pre-fab AdSense templates.

Again, he thinks, “diversify” and says okay, let me do a little bit of AdSense while I manage my AdWords campaigns looking for a winner. So he devours the e-book, gets excited about it for a couple weeks, sees no results and then drops it.

And so far, in 6 months, this person is still at $100 per day profits, investing half of his/her time into testing new campaigns in different markets (instead of building up the one profitable campaign first) and the other half buying the latest money making get-rich-overnight e-books. Sound familiar?

Scenario Two

As you’ve probably figured out, this is the super-affiliate. Over the next several months, he continues to expand and build up the budding campaign that started at $100 per day in profit. He adds 5,000 keywords to the campaigns, expands on to other PPC search engines and tests out the Google content network. He improves & split tests his site and manages to increase his conversions over time by 50%.

Six months down the road he’s making $1,500 a day in profit from this campaign he started at only $100 per day.

Not only is this campaign highly optimized, it has a broad reach in terms of keywords exposure, search engines, content network ads, etc. This campaign will still be highly profitable, even if a lot of new competitors enter the market or the market enters a seasonal slow down (such as the summer).

Final Thoughts

Affiliate Marketing is about the thought process, NOT mechanics.

After an affiliate newbie has six months experience with PPC Affiliate Marketing, chances are that he/she knows how to setup a Google campaign, conduct keyword research, write a Google ad and select affiliate promotions that convert, etc.

However, your ultimate success or failure will be determined by the decisions that you make.

Are YOU making decisions like a super-affiliate or an average affiliate?

Are You a Scatterbrained Affiliate?