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Those new to affiliate marketing get besieged by a surge of new information and wonder products that are told can make and break an affiliate’s career. Some of it can be helpful, while a bunch of it is no better than that Acai rebill I hit your mom up with last night. The goal of this post is to cut through the crap and to give a beginning affiliate tips that should really be useful to them.

Real Experience Above All

You’ve all heard of the Magic Bullet System. You’ve been spammed emails about business opportunities that can make you millions in weeks. And we’ve all seen ads saying this affiliate program is better than the rest. Honestly, the only real teacher you should be relying on in the beginning is yourself. You can pay for all the ebooks, coaching, and consulting in the world, but it means nothing if you don’t act upon it. This is why, I think, when you are just starting out, you’d be much better off just putting your money down on a server, some landing pages, and just going out and buying some traffic.

An ebook (or consulting, coaching, conversation, convention, report, case study, toolsets, spy trackers, whatever) can give you some insight, but it does not teach you experience which is absolutely necessary to understanding what makes a campaign profitable and why.

Always Keep Your Budget In Check

Simply put – if you don’t have the money, don’t put gamble it all on one hand of blackjack. You might come out twice as rich, but I’m gonna say you’ll fail the first 5 campaigns you set up. Make sure you have enough money to actually risk putting down to get your affiliate campaigns on their feet. If you’re in debt, don’t look to affiliate marketing to get yourself out. If you only have $100, don’t think tomorrow you will have $1000. Money is the name of the game we’re playing, and if you don’t have any, don’t play. You can find yourself in over your head in a very short time. This goes hand in hand with ebooks and coaching programs. Would you rather spend that $100 on some traffic or on an ebook with old tricks that are probably over-abused?

If you are in need of cash, work a second job and put all the money you make from that into marketing. Become a freelancer. I was a freelance writer and used that cash to get my first Facebook campaign set up and profitable. Sell off your knowledge or experience. Use SEO and free traffic to sell your own products or affiliate offers. Do what you need to do to get money in your bank account first. In the meantime, you can set up affiliate campaigns, study HTML, and read old posts on Wickedfire to help you prepare yourself for your affiliate marketing future.

Don’t Skimp On Your Server

Shared hosting is great for SEO purposes, websites that get less than 100 visits a day, and getting familiar with how hosting works. After that, it isn’t much help. If you are sending $50 of traffic a day, do you really want to send that traffic to a website on a server being shared by possible thousands of other sites possibly sending $50 of traffic to them a day? The answer is no. Shared servers are notorious for unstable up-downtimes, poor support systems, and very inflexible, especially for running scripts (like Prosper202) that needs a lot of database calls and memory to work fast. Do yourself a favor and get a VPS for $30 – 50 a month until you can scale up your traffic to where you’ll need a dedicated server. I recommend Wiredtree and have 1 server and 2 VPSs with them, but there are plenty of other hosts that have service just as great as them. Check out Web Hosting Talk for unbiased user reviews and specials from hundreds of hosting providers.

I remember talking to one buy about this. He had Prosper202 on shared hosting. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get a campaign profitable. I told him to check out his server data/stats. Ended up he was sending so much traffic that they were actually throttling the bandwidth he was using. Loading times were taking minutes rather than seconds. If you’re on a good VPS provider or dedicated server, this won’t happen. Fast loading times are key!

Being 100% Prepared

There is nothing worse you can do than going into a campaign unprepared. You might have the money to test your first campaign, but that doesn’t mean you should. Do you have Prosper202 set up? You NEED it. It is absolutely essential to the new affiliate marketer. It will be your number 1 source for click and conversion data until you can afford a custom tracking script (can cost upwards of $10,000. I have friends that paid $30k+ for theirs). A prepared affiliate marketer will have Prosper202 installed, setup correctly and tested to make sure it is working before any campaign is launched.

Also, are your landing pages looking correct in all major browsers? Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer all need to be tested. Are your tracking links rotating and going to their appropriate landing pages? Are your ads and landing pages typo-free and grammatically correct. Is your conversion pixel firing when the offer is completed? Did you double check all the above? If not, you aren’t prepared to launch a campaign yet.

One Traffic Source, One Campaign at a Time

Stop overwhelming yourself. You’ve got very little knowledge and personal experience as it is. Learn slowly and carefully by launching one campaign on one traffic source. Don’t switch traffic sources unless you feel it really wouldn’t be profitable in the long run (You can avoid that by sticking with the main traffic sources recommended by many sources – Facebook, TrafficVance, Media Traffic, PoF, Google, Yahoo, etc.).

Keep working on that first campaign. See what gets you a higher click-through rate on your ads and landing pages. Analyze what ads and landing pages give you a better conversion rate. Split test different offers on those ads. Your goal here is to collect data and gain experience, as both of those are more valuable than a profitable campaign without full understanding of what made it work. Unless you’re full of luck, your first campaign will more than likely lose you money. Keep the data, analyze it, and move on to your second campaign understanding what will happen from the data you just collected.

This should also help you understand your traffic source. What niches will work best? What is the minimum CPC and where is the optimal CPC – Clicks price point at? How can you grab the attention of the user and lead them through the conversion process? What are the limits of how extreme your campaigns can get with the internal reviewing team? How can you squeeze through those limitations?

One note, I’ll add to this post – Today is Freebie Friday. I’ll have another landing page ready for all my subscribers on my newsletter list. I’ll also announce the winners of this contest tomorrow.

Have any other tips you’d like to recommend to new affiliate marketers? Leave it in the comments!