A lack of effort and focus. This is the main quality of any failed affiliate marketer. The chances you are going to drop a couple ads you stole off a Facebook spy, take the exact images and ad copy and make $100 bucks, these days, is slim to zero. I try to teach my coaching students the best I can, giving them whole campaigns that are currently profitable, but after a few days of testing I always get this reply – “This seems like too much work. Is there any easier way to make money?”

The mindset that affiliate marketing is “easy” is a problem a lot of people are stuck with. Bloated affiliate network newsletters that provide very little details other than “This offer is generating huge EPCs for our affiliates across all traffic networks with an xyz style landing page” and lame informational products filled with misinformation, developed by those that don’t actually know jack$hit, don’t help with AM being perceived as “easy”. This is what I tell my clients when they ask that previous question:

“Sure, but it involves flipping burgers and dropping buckets of fries all day long.”

I imagine all of my affiliate marketing work as a large part of my business. Like almost any other business, it doesn’t just launch and blow up overnight. I’ve got research to do. I have to know what my target market wants and how they want it. I need to know how to deliver it before they get it. And then even when I know all that, I still need to test it and other similar variations to get in the black. There is no “easy” way to get around that. Even if someone hands a campaign to you on a silver platter, if you aren’t analyzing why it works and how you can improve it, you’ll always fail and end up back in square one.

You do need to focus, and put effort into building campaigns up, 1 at a time. Test 10 landing pages instead of 2. Test 100 images, rather than 10. Try 5 very different headlines, then test adjectives on your best performing ones. This extra effort and focus is what has made some of my clients $500 campaigns after 1 week of coaching, and I believe it is one of the redeeming qualities that has made me the marketer I am today.

Ahem – I’m sorry for the lack of posts here. You know how it is. We get busy, blah blah, not enough time, blah blah – but then I’d just be making excuses for myself. Time to get back to business with some regular postings again.

So today I’ve got a great video with an awesome new SMS-marketing tool from Leadsmob.com. This tool allows you to easily build landing pages, lists and send out emails and SMS to use with mobile traffic. It’s litterally an all in one spot to get your mobile monies on, and it really impressed me. Anyways – rather than me try to explain something I’m relatively new to, listen to Joshua Wexelbaum explain just how you can build a campaign using Leadsmob.

So some pretty cool stuff indeed. The ability to build a mobile optimized landing page, and capture all the data right there is amazing! I’ll be working more one-on-one with my homeboy, Josh, and Leadsmob so hopefully one of my later posts I can show you a case study on how I was able to integrate it into my daily affiliate marketing business.

Sign up to Leadsmob today and get some free credits to make some money with! If you need any help, feel free to contact me or Josh!

If you’ve been affiliate marketing any long than a few days, you probably know that frustration from the industry is nearly almost ever present. You campaigns aren’t converting, your ads don’t get clicks, click costs are too high, and a once great converting campaign gets taken down or starts shaving leads. These are just a few of the problems I deal with on a daily basis. Now if you are struggling to jump off the ground and make a real profit, read through the following tips and put them to use. Remember, I’m not trying to feed you bullshit – these are tips that I’ve put in to practice when necessary, and they help me get back from frustrating days.

1. Slow Down

Now, you might think that taking 20 campaigns and throwing up general campaigns at Facebook or TrafficVance might be the best course of action to find something that converts. Do 10 minutes of keyword and target scraping for each offer and you’re done! Great plan, right? Wrong. If you fail to even get a single conversion with this method, it wouldn’t surprise me. Launch carefully planned, carefully researched campaigns. Look at what others are doing first, why what they are doing works, and “borrow” if you have to. If you are outright stealing campaigns, failing to understand why things convert, you’ll always be relying on others to make money before you. The real big ballers are the innovators.

2. Target Tighter/Smaller

Broad campaigns are what everyone dreams of. Setting up a RON campaign to millions of people and making thousands a day in return. If you are new and struggling, this is most likely going to be cause for frustration and significant losses. Come of with an angle or a very niche offer that requires you to target smaller reaches and less populated URLs and keywords. While you won’t be making thousands with this kind of method, if I was new I would rather see $10 of profit per day rather than $500+ lost a day.

3. Work With One Traffic Source

Stop jumping around. Just because the first 3 campaigns you tried didn’t work out, doesn’t mean the next 10 will fail. Chances are, if people are talking about 1 traffic source and how they are making money with it, they probably aren’t lying about it. If they can get something to work, so can you.

4. Stop Hopping Around Different Offers

Just because your first ads didn’t profit, doesn’t mean it is a complete loser. This goes hand in hand with the above. If people are talking about an offer, there is most likely money to be made in it. Pick a few different offers, max, and make them work for you!

5. Work with Only a Few Smaller Networks

There are lots of large networks out there that have thousands of affiliates. These guys usually have a fantastic amount of offers, but support can be real hit and miss. When I was struggling to find new offers that worked, I would branch out to smaller affiliate networks and ask them what some of their strongest offers were. They are usually more willing to divulge inside info, as well as having much faster and better attended support. The more loyal you are in sending traffic to these small guys, the better they’ll come to treat you.

6. Get To Know Your AM

Affiliate Managers have access to a lot of data. EPCs, traffic sources, creatives, landing pages, etc. Again, we’re going to hold hands with the above point. The more loyal and talkative with your AM, the better you’ll be treated. Affiliate Managers are paid when we get paid, so if they aren’t helping us, they’re not gettin’ any money from me! Say hi and remind your AM you are around every morning and ask them about any new offers. Make sure they remember who you are!

7. Go Private

If you get to know your AMs a little better, they might be able to let you into the world of private offers. There is so much untapped potential here, because most people think that affiliate networks make all their offers public and requestable to everyone. Larger networks can have 100s of hidden offers that you might not know about until you actually ask to see them. These offers have less competition and shitty traffic squandering them, and you’re 10x more likely to draw a profit from them.

8. Always Track Everything You Can

You can use the free Tracking202, or upgrade to the newer and more frequently updated CPVLAB. Both are excellent and have some features that the other doesn’t. Use these guys to track all the data that you can and analyze it! What time of day did you get the most conversions? When are you getting the highest EPC? When is it the lowest? Which banner ad gets the highest conversion rate? Which keywords are only breaking even and is there something you can do to bump the CVR on those targets?

9. Try Landing Pages Out

I know you want the easy way out with a directly linked campaign, but in 90% of my campaigns, a landing page almost always converts better. That little added presell can help take someone not interested in what you are marketing, into a potential lead, and it helps build trust and flow with those already 100% ready to fill in the offer page’s fields.

10. If all else fails…

Get a coach/mentor/consultant to work with you. Yes, I know. Shameless self promotion. But there are people out there that are willing to give you genuine advice. Use them if you feel like you need a really big boost to get in front of the wolf pack.

Do you have any tips you can share from when you were a noobie affiliate? Drop them in the comments! And don’t worry – my 31 Campaigns aren’t going anywhere. You can expect a new one tonight, as well as a freebie Friday giveaway hitting your inbox tonight as well!

The email submit offer. I typically avoid these due to the atrocious scrubbing, but for those of you that need a quick buck, email submit offers can be great. They are simple, convert fairly well at the start of running any offers, and they don’t take too much thinking outside of the box to get started. If you are really struggling to get your feet wet, I suggest you follow some of the guidelines I am about to give you and put them to work.

The Offer

The key with email submits is to quickly test as many of them as you can off the bat. There are several NFL Jersey email submits that exist out there. Envyus Media, EWA, C2M and WolfStormMedia all have a selection of free NFL jersey email submits. Also, remember to split test across the networks once you find your best converting offer. It will help you maximize your ROI and keep the campaign up longer with a smaller scrub rates. Again, most email submits will start scrubbing leads very quickly unless you have amazing traffic. Finding that kind of traffic is not easy.

As far as landing page designs go, I’m a bit disappointed that I couldn’t find custom links for each team. This might be something you want to ask your affiliate networks about. Say for instance I wanted to target people back home, I’d want a page dedicated to getting a free Minnesota Vikings jersey featuring jerseys of the big name Vikings players. I haven’t actually cared much for football any time in my life, so I couldn’t tell you who they are, but this is some research you’ll have to do when we talk about landing pages.

Most of thee offer landing pages are pretty wide, which could cause trouble on PPV. You can try direct linking with all of these, but in the end you will still want to test out multiple landing page designs. Check for exit pops, as well. The first offer page listed up there had an exit pop meaning it would be difficult to direct link anywhere.

Research

I decided to do more broad research by searching NFL.com in Quantcast. Demographic and psychographic analysis won’t be super important here. You are obviously just looking for sports nuts and people into the NFL and their own home teams. You can see there are some good targets you might want to include in your targeting mixes near the bottom. These will be good for PPV and targeted display traffic if you can get that. Again, this is a simple offer and thinking outside of the box won’t go to deep here.

How To Run This Offer

There are a ton of choices here. For those of you that use free traffic, Youtube and Facebook Pages are an option. I don’t use much free traffic, but you could slowly build groups and videos about each team and from time to time drop your affiliate links in there.

The most preferred method available, though, would be paid traffic on social media, PPV and display traffic. Again, I would run this offer targeting one team at a time, or perhaps even by well known rivalries (Vikings vs. Packers – Which side are you on? Vote now to get your free jersey!)

On social media, you’ve got PlentyofFish and Facebook. Facebook might not allow email submits. As I haven’t tried an email submit on Facebook, I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not they’ll be cool with this. Before you go submitting 1000 ads, test with just 1 to 3 ads and see what they do. Anyways, on Facebook you’ve got some great targeting options. You can go broad by targeting everyone in a single state with an ad like: “Love the MN Vikings? – Show your support by claiming your free Minnesota Vikings jersey now!” (Targeting broad on PoF is how I would run this offer, as well), or you can simply just target fan pages and interests targeting the individual teams you’re targeting. This is plenty simple.

On PPV, you can simply collect targets based off your teams. Use PPVPlaybook to get a list of keywords related to your team, then run it through a wide scrape. Use both key phrases and URLs in your targeting to maximize your reach and earning potential. After testing target for 3 days, pause anything that does not have a conversion. This will help you save money on many targets that maybe haven’t reached the 1 – 2 times the offer payout, but might not actually convert if they get that far.

Now, you’ll have a hard time targeting broad traffic on display unless you can target down by state and in a sports category. There are some traffic sources out there that allow you to do this, so do some hunting. I think you’ll be better off targeting fan blogs and sites. I’ve found several Minnesota Vikings related blogs that were all just running Adsense by simply using the Google Blog Search. Email these sites and let them know you’ll pay them 10 – 25% more than what Google Adsence based off of their average sitely earnings. Try and get data from the previous year during the same months, as most of these sites will be rather dead in the off season, and more trafficed during the playoffs and super bowl.

Landing Pages

Simplicity is key here. Research top players from each team, build out custom landing pages for each, and test, test, test. Ad copy here can be simple. Something like “Click Here To Claim Your Free Minnesota Vikings Jersey” is fine and dandy. Also remember the “rivalry” type of landing page you could do.

Another great landing page to build would say something like this:

“Which team do you think will go to the Super Bowl this season? Pick your favorite and win a Free NFL Jersey of your choice!” – Below all this, you include all the logos of NFL football teams and make each one individually clickable. A broad landing page like this allows you to test out a few simple designs rather than building out individual landing pages for each team. This is simple thinking outside the box to do a good job over a wide range of traffic.

Difficulty: 1.5 out of 5

I give this a 1.5 because you still need to split test and rotate landing pages/offers. However, there isn’t anything that shouldn’t be too complex and you won’t need a boatload of cash to actually start making much money.

Final Comments

Again, this is a very simple offer and you shouldn’t have to spend too long figuring out how to promote an NFL offer to the right people. Get out there and launch your campaigns now before NFL high season picks up!

I know… I know. I’ve been really slow on pushing these out. I’m going to do my hardest to push more of these posts out and catch up this week. I’ve been caught in the middle of some personal drama and tons of business opportunities, so I’m a bit behind on the blog here. I apologize to all my readers for that! All I can ask is that I hope you forgive me, and hope these types of posts help you out.

So, anyways, today I’ve picked out an offer that’s been doing really strong. The gaming vertical is one that will always be strong as its so prevalent in today’s entertainment industry. With the advancements of browser based gaming and graphics technology, rather than sit and download a 10 GB game, we can just load them up in Firefox and play them right there. Battlestar Galactica is one of those games. Let’s get into it, shall we!

The Offer

Before you go balls to the walls on promoting something, it’s always a good idea to know a little more about what exactly you are affiliate marketing here. In this case, it is a game based off an original sci-fi television series. Wikipedia it up or go out and buy the blu-rays because BSG FRACKING ROCKS! Sorry… I let my fanboy out. The landing page is pretty big which might make it awkward for direct linking on PPV (AffPortal has got a great tool for previewing landing pages and offer pages). Plus, it’s got very limited info, so you’ll probably only get conversions on people looking to already play it, yet haven’t gotten an account, if you just direct link it.

The offer page on this guy might differ from network to network. I’ve seen some with no captcha like above, while others have captchas. That might be an offer-side action, though. You can bet your ass, though, that a non-captcha landing page would convert better.

Research

Have you wiki’d Battlestar Galactica, yet? Get on it. That will help you know a little more about the series. Obviously, targeting fans of the series is going to equal money, but you’ve also got a whole slew of other people you can target. In any case, we’re still going to be using a Quantcast to do a little more demographic and psychographic research

So, you can see, I put in two domains in Quantcast. The first site is BigPoint.com. BigPoint are the publishers of BSG Online. I also threw in BattlestarWiki.org. This site is actually quantified which means you get a real in-depth look at the traffic information there. So what that picture tells is is that we have a bunch of unemployed white and Asian nerds that are 18 – 34 years old, that live in their parents basements because they don’t have a job that pays enough money to repay the debt on their undergraduate and graduate school student loans. Or so it seems. Whether or not the income information is 100% accurate or not isn’t too important, as its pretty safe to assume high anyone that watches and still follows the series even after its end, is a total fracking nerd. That’s going to be our main demographic.

Also, important to point out that BigPoint publishes a lot of games, some of which will be perfect targets for us.

How To Run the Offer

This isn’t going to be a tough offer to test. PPV and Facebook are going to be excellent places to hit just the demographics and niches you want. Outside of that, your best bet will be direct banner buying from related web site owners. I think you’ll have a hard time finding a BSG related site that doesn’t have this plastered up and down the sides in every spot imaginable, but you might find some if you do some real digging.

Okay, so you’ve got the simple path. Targeting Battlestar Galactica related key terms and URLs. This is bound to get you mixed up in some bidding wars and hard entrance. If you have a small budget, this isn’t what you want to do. There is plenty of ways to go about this with having 0 to very little competition.

So lets go back to BigPoint games. There are a lot of games there, including another old gaming CPA offer that used to be pretty popular, Dark Orbit. This is one offer you can target. We’ve also got Deepolis and Nanofights which could also substitute for excellent targeting. I guarantee both of these have a following on Facebook and will have traffic on TrafficVance.

When you are writing ads for Facebook, keep in mind what nerds and gamers like about online games. Community, leveling up, getting powerful and enjoying a fantasy life they can’t have in the real world. Combine this with the nerdom of Battlestar Gallactica and you’ll be able to come up with some unique ads.

Cylon or Human? (or vice versa here! ALWAYS SPLIT TEST!) – Choose your side. Relive the action of the Battlestar Galactica TV show with the FREE online game! Play now!

Love BSG? – Play this fracking awesome game! Jump in your Viper, kill bad guys and become the top Ace on the Battlestar Galatica!

Fight for Survival – Help save the human race from extinction. Join the revolution in the Battlestar Galactica online MMORPG now!

Stupid and simple. If you are targeting some more abstract nerd topics, sell it a little more on the side of being an awesome game over the fact that its BSG. Some players may not be familiar with the series.

Landing Pages

A landing page for this offer isn’t going to be amazingly complex. The best thing to do here is to include some video from the series and or game, autoplay it where allowed and split test your ad copies and designs. There will be no formula for instant success other than testing. And always continue testing. Sure, that LP might be making you 100% ROI with a 10% CTR, but I know it is possible to have landing pages with CTRs of 20% and up over a broad range of targets. Always keep pushing yourself for more and more money. If you need some copy for your landing page, don’t think too much. The offer page has some you can rip, as well as the games info page.

Final Comments

This is a successful offer with a very niche following. You may be able to hit fans of the series currently following it, but chances are they’ve already seen the game and tried it. You’ll have a better chance of going outside the box here and broadening your targeting to those interested in other similar games, sci-fi television shows and movies.

P.S. I’m looking for an Asia based web designer to add to my team (S.E. Asians preferred). If you think you’d make an excellent addition to my team, contact me!

I recommend you guys save up a fair bit of bank before you start affiliate marketing. The more you have, the easier its going to be for you to make money. But I know that only 1 out of 5000 of you will have the patience to save up $5k or so. In that case, this little tip sheet is gonna be for you guys with less than $1000 to spare.

So the first step to any good affiliate campaign, especially when it comes down to breaking your bank account or not, is doing a bit of research. Now, this obviously includes demographic research on the offer you want to run, but it’s a lot more than that. When you are on a budget, you’re going to have a hell of a time launching 10+ campaigns to see which one works. That’s why its impertinent that you know which offers are really working. Sure, you can follow the lead of your affiliate manager, but sometimes they aren’t always out to really get you making money for yourselves.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to start socializing. Meet up with other new and experienced affiliates. Chat. Invite them out for a drink. Get coaching. Other affiliates know best from experience. You don’t need a plan laid out for you, just a hint in the right direction. Take that hint and do more research into ad networks, costs, what type of landing pages work best, how to write ad copy, and every other step of the affiliate marketing campaign building process. The more guesswork you take out of it, the less you’ll end up spending.

Bid low. This doesn’t always give you the highest quality traffic, or best ad placement, but lowering initial CPCs can keep you from blowing through your small ad budget off the bat. Assuming you read the first part of this post, and have things “pre-optimized” with those insider tips, you should be able to start seeing results. Up your bids little by little if you need more traffic. I know, for example, you can get decent US traffic on Plenty of Fish for as little as 20 cents. Not a lot, but it’s there.

Use unique angles. Unique angles provide you with something higher budgetted affiliate marketers won’t go after – small amounts of traffic. But you don’t have the budget to be targeting broad anyways. Find a unique way to sell that offer (a landing page helps). Black guys for Asian girls, or vice-versa is a good example with lower competition and a small to medium amount of traffic for the new marketer.

Learn some new skills. Outsourcing landing pages, banners, coding and writing can be expensive. Learn to do it yourself. There is a tool called Google with millions of free resources to help you figure that stuff out. Another benefit – you can sell your work. The way I used to learn was to take orders on designs and writing, then learn how to do them properly as I went. This will give you a boost to your limited campaign budgets.

Are any of my readers affiliate marketers on a limited budget? What do you feel helps you to work through that issue?

Welcome to class, students. Now sit down and shut up! Professor J. Dupre is going to be taking you on a crash course through writing a dating ad, and even throwing you a couple tested and working ad copies that are currently working. You’ll even get some targeting advice!

K.I.S.S.

First thing to keep in mind is that writing a competitive and good dating ad should not be a life-sucking, difficult experience. As you grow your affiliate marketing portfolio and business, you’ll start to notice that some of your best ads have been some of the most simple. Take a look at the following dating ad headlines:

• Want a Girlfriend?
• Meet Cute Asian Girls
• White Girls Love Black Guys

These are all simple ads that I run. Feel free to borrow from them if you’d like. K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid) works for dating, because lets face it – People that use dating sites are simple people. They’re in it to find a match, or a quick fling. You will want to change your message depending on who you’re targeting, but no matter what, a simple ad will always work and can be a great base to build your dating campaigns upon.

Some of my best performing ads and landing pages are simple one liners that follow this key rule.

Engage the User

You’ll notice my first ad above is a question. It’s a simple, yet effective way to engage a user, especially one that can answer the question to your benefit. Targeting plays into this game here, so if you were to use my first example here, make sure you are targeting single men that are interested in meeting women. Facebook makes this simple enough (and requires it), and the same can be said for Plenty of Fish. With other traffic sources, you’ll have to play around with the traffic before you can nail such a broad statement down. Try looking for demographics and psychographic targeting with younger middle-aged men that are stuck in front of their computers more than the average person. The lower their education level, the better! Remember to keep things simple!

Make Use of Variables

This is easy to do with Plenty of Fish. Let the user know you are addressing them as much as possible. With a PPV ad/landing page, welcome the user with whatever search term or site they were originally browsing. Let the user know that because they are xx years old, or because they came from xyz.com, they are getting additional benefits. Here are some examples:

• Jenny from xyz.com just joined datingsite.com. Meet her now!
• Women on datingsite.com are looking for 34-year old men from your city. Click Here!
• Are you a short guy? 1000s of women on datingsite.com love short men!

FREE!

Use that word. It will incur an increased CTR on your ad, although it might have an effect on overall lead quality. This is something you will have to test out on a offer to offer basis. Also, keep in mind that not all offers will allow you to use the word “free” in your advertisements.

Now then, if you have any questions on the above, want to drop your own advice, or just feel like spamming my blog, the comments section is below. Use them and abuse them!

Pay per view ads, cost per view ads, or pop-up ads – Whatever you want to call them – they’re a popular traffic source for affiliate marketers. The ad networks are less strict, you can get every sort of niche up and running there, and there is a good amount of money to be made on these PPV networks. Even so, I deal with a lot of people struggling to make their first buck with PPV. The following is a summary of some of the quickest and easiest suggestions any marketer can drop into their own campaigns for a quick boost of ROI.

Use a Landing Page

I know a lot of you want to go the easy route and build out direct linked campaigns all day. And in some cases it works. You get a $4 payout converting at 1%, making you 4 cents per click. That’s all fine and dandy, and if you are only spending 1 – 2 cents per pop up, you’re making a good chunk of money back, at least if you have the scale. But I’ve found in most cases, when I’ve direct linked, I can drop in a very, very simple landing page and double, or better, my ROI. A simple landing page for me has an interesting header, a few bullet points, a call to action/button and an image or video. K.I.S.S.

Get Rid of Everything

Well, not everything, but you know those 1000+ targets you added? How many of them are actually converting, and how many of them are just collecting 1-3 hits per day? Give yourself a time limit on how long you’ll run each target. A couple days is usually enough. After that time has passed, pause all targets that don’t have a single conversion on them. Chances are they’ll only pick up 1 or 2 conversions per month at that rate, but it’s more likely it will just lose money for you in the long run. On many of my campaigns this has taken me from a loss to a profit just because I was running on so many different targets that the 975 out of 1000 targets that weren’t performing kept dragging me down. In many instances, you’ll find maybe only 1 – 10 targets per 1000 make you any amount of money.

Double Check Your Targets

I shouldn’t have to tell you this one, but I run into it a lot. Doesn’t matter if you are pushing 10 or 10000 targets, always double check your list for odd targets. The way I do this is a drop my target list into TrafficVance first. I can then rank the targets by Activity which will give me a rough estimate on just how much traffic each target will give me. If it is full or close to full, I’ll always double check just to make sre that it is relavent and that its not a massive social media site or something I know won’t convert no matter how well I sell it on my landing page.

Silly claim, right? Well, lets get into the idea that marijuana is a gateway drug. I’m not going to argue about whether or not this is true because it’s being used for example’s sake. Once you get tired, burned out, or want to try something new, you take it to another level like ecstasy, meth, coke, x or y or z. Not everyone gets to x or any of the other Zs. While it’s not always a smart idea to start sniffing coke, if you aren’t already seeing affiliate marketing as a “gateway business”, you should be.

Affiliate marketing, for the individual, is a short-term business. At least that is how I see it. It’s an excellent way to take a calculated risk, invest some money into some campaigns, come out 100% richer, and abuse that system until you’ve got a heap of capital. Could I do this for the next 10 – 20 years? I suppose I could, but it’s not something I’d focus my money on for more than a few years. It’s time to start thinking long-term.

Lots of affiliates take this gateway opportunity to make their presence in affiliate marketing larger. Affiliate networks are a big step for hundreds of individual affiliate marketers. An even bigger step is owning and operating a traffic source. If you can build your reputation and cashflow up large enough, you’ve got many different choices. Consulting is an easy step for many, and one I’ve taken a liking to. It doesn’t have to be just to individuals, but you should now have the skills to move up to B2B consultancy. Some people take their money and buy a business.

The moral of this story is that if you aren’t thinking about your future or what you want to do with your money and skills once you get tired of the 20-hour affiliate hustle, you’re gonna be stuck doing just that.

Affiliate marketing gives you an excellent skill set, on top of financing. Analysis, research, data mining, communication skills and discipline are just a few of the things I can speak for myself on. Take them, use them, and build out an empire outside of affiliate marketing. All your eggs in 1 basket is an affiliate marketing killer. If for some reason I’m unable to run affiliate campaigns, I have a safety net of residual income from several different websites, services, skills I can sell, knowledge I can sell, physical manufacturing and product sales.

So, what are you doing with your affiliate marketing money? Are you building wide, breaking out of the gateway or stuck on your one campaign wonder? It’s time to scale outwards, my friends!

This question was asked by Kang. If you’ve got an affiliate marketing question you want an answer to, ask here, join the forums, or get some 1-on-1 consulting!

If you’re anything like me, there aren’t enough hours in the year to get 90% of what you want to get finished done. You’re on your grind 24-7, looking for new traffic sources left and right, setting up new campaigns, and doing a lot of research. In there, you’ve got a lot of tedious tasks you shouldn’t be doing. If you are at the point where you’re making a couple hundred dollars a day, it’s time to start outsourcing.

Adding an outsourced employee to your business can be a big step, and to those of you without any business college or real world management experience, you’re gonna be left in a big puddle of mud on what you want them to do. To better optimize what we’re having our contractors do, we need to realize what tasks are most important to us. What couldn’t we live without and how can we have someone else, at least, assist in building out that task?

If you’re outsourcing, you’re probably outsourcing to third world countries. The key here is to give your new contractor a slow introduction into what you need done, and keep all their tasks specific. Overloading 1 person with too many different tasks can be detrimental and will put a strain on how much they can get done for you. Think about it. You wouldn’t hire one person in-house to do your keyword research, build landing pages, and do your accounting, would you? Market researcher, graphic designer, and accountant.. 3 different jobs should be done by 3 different employees/outsourcers.

So where should you start? Hiring 5 different outsourcers might not be a path you can take off the bat right now. Start with one and work your way up with the cash flow. When I hired my first 2 employees, one stuck with graphic design. That was an easy title to give and he did all my landing pages, banners, and would make Facebook ad images for me. My second employee got stuck with my other menial work, which was a lot of simple tasks that I just didn’t want to do.

The most important thing for them to do for me was campaign research. Doing campaign research doesn’t mean you are giving someone the key to your profit source. A typical sheet of research from my employees might look like a list of thousands of keywords or URLs broken down into smaller groups, images of ad banners from competitors, or recent news in business/marketing that could affect my business.  Knowing how to use that information is my own job.

So a quick summary:

1. Identify the most important daily tasks you need to do to make money.
2. Find a group of tasks that is simple enough for someone else to do, and don’t overload your outsourcer.
3. Get rid of menial, boring tasks that allow you to do more of your important things.
4. Hire more in-house/contractors when your budget allows it.