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One thing that you will hear in the affiliate and internet marketing industry is to never keep your eggs in one basket. If that basket drops, your eggs break and you are back to square one. I’ve been there and it wasn’t fun.

I was only just starting to get into affiliate marketing when I finally had a decent campaign running. I had it up for a month, and all I would do was sit on those eggs and try to optimize my ROI. I learned a lot about optimization from it, like how I could gain an extra .5% on conversions. While I was doing that, I could have been breaking into another niche, not worried about that extra .5% and probably have made more profit with two different campaigns. In the end the campaign I was running was dropped from the network and I was pretty screwed. Back to square one.

So we all know that you need to break in to multiple niches. But one thing a lot of people don’t talk about too much is splitting your traffic across multiple networks. Most of the time, people will do this to see which network will give them the best conversion rate, and I still do this at the beginning. Most of the time, I find there is never really much of a difference (but if there is I knock that network out of my rotator, of course). If not, I’ll always keep rotating. Why?

You need to keep your eggs in multiple baskets. The basket is the network, and networks like to do weird things. Sometimes an offer will be pulled from a network while you are sleeping. Leads get capped and your clicks get redirected to another offer that might not convert so well. Sometimes the whole damn network goes down (CX Digital anyone) and sometimes, the tracking provider of 100s of networks decides to go down, as well (DirectTrack!).

There are countless things that can happen. If I keep my clicks going to different networks A) I can constantly split test different sources B) I can constantly keep at least a few of my affiliate managers happy with a decent amount of traffic C) If one network takes the offer down (or the network goes down completely) while I’m not around my computer, I can still probably break even driving the traffic across a few other networks D) Who doesn’t love getting 5 wires in one day to their bank account?

Of course there are cons to what I do. Wires cost you money, and getting 5 wires might cost you 50 – 200$ depending on your bank or where you are. You might not be making enough to get wires if you aren’t sending enough traffic to each network (most require you make $1000 a week to get weekly wires). Also, it can be kind of time consuming to manage so many links and all your accounts.

What do you think about splitting your traffic like this? If you could get the volume, would you take 100% of your traffic and give it to the best converter despite the risk, or split it and perhaps lose 5-10% off your daily ROI (That’s what I am guesstimating I’m losing by doing this).