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You’ve uploaded your ads. You are prepared to spend money testing your new campaign. You are looking for some epic data… but you’ve hit a wall. Most ad networks need to approve your ads before any start running. As one of my students asked – “What can I do other that sit on hands all day?” (actually it was a bit more graphic than that, but I’m paraphrasing). Good question – so we’ll look at some quick answers in this post.

Browse New Offers and Traffic Sources

This is something I do on a near daily basis. You never really know when a new, hot offer is going to come out. That’s why I find tools like Offervault and oDigger to be some of my best friends. Scrounging through the new offers listed there, I’ve found gems I would have otherwise missed, some that have given me exclusive 4 figure profits per day. You never want to keep all your eggs in one basket – basket referring to a single offer or campaign. If you’re always on the hunt for new offers, you’ll increase the likely hood of adding additional revenue sources to your business.

Likewise, it’s essential to be on the lookout for new traffic sources. Sticking with only Facebook my first year or two of affiliate marketing was a bad idea. Eventually, I was banned and back at square one. I’m back up on Facebook today, but I’m not limiting myself to it. I also run display, SEO, PPV and mobile campaigns across several offers and niches. If one basket gets crushed, I’ve got plenty of other places to put my eggs. Click here for a great list of traffic sources you can use. (Also, comment below if you have any traffic sources you can recommend to my readers!)

Competitive Research

If you are looking to boost your edge in your affiliate marketing efforts, there is almost no better way to do so than by examining your competitions ads. A lot of people take this out of context and think I mean “copy-pasta” their other affiliates’ campaigns. That is not what I mean. Not in the slightest. I do not copy other affiliates campaigns, and I recommend you all to follow suit. By copy-pasting other affiliates campaigns, you are largely digging into the likelihood that you will be able to create a successful campaign and one at a higher profit potential.

Instead, use competitive research and analysis tools to give you a heads up on what is working with whatever traffic sources. Then find a way to improve and destroy the competition. Write a better targeted ad. Use some of the basics of ad design to create a higher CTR banner. Implement a landing page if they are direct linking. Split test different offers. Do whatever you can to create a better campaign than them. Competition analysis is now a big part of what I do today due to the ease of it with free tools like Quantcast, the Google Ad Planner, Compete as well as paid tools like what is available at AffPortal and WhatRunsWhere.

Write/Design/Analyze New Ads and Landing Pages

All my testing is done in stages, and I typically test new ads and landing pages on a daily basis. Rather than sit on your ass all day waiting for new ads to be approved, get prepared for a second round of testing. Collect new ad images, design a new landing page, and write 20 new ad copies. Use this “downtime” to look over what you’ve done and how you can improve it. Can you tighten up your targeting? Could your ad use a slight revision to better reflect your targeting? Are your banners really hitting home for that targeting? Does the landing page copy or design flow together all the way from banner to offer page? These are all questions you can ask yourself while you wait and plan your next moves.

Write a Blog

One thing I love to do is to write. That’s why I started and still maintain this blog. I’m now almost at 500 posts! It doesn’t have to be on affiliate marketing, but you can pick any niche you’d like. If you are starting off in dating, write a blog about dating and drop some of your banner ads on it. It might not make any money now, but having that asset could prove to be a great thing to have in the future. Start SEO campaigns for it. Drop a link or two here and there for it. In a month or two, a decent campaign could be making you a couple hundred dollars per month with very little maintenance. Again, its important to have multiple sources of revenue. Even if all my paid advertising were to fail, my blogs and sites make me enough money that I could still survive at my current luxury rate and maintain a business, too. That’s an extreme case scenario.

Read a Book

Expand your world and knowledge with a selection of many of the top self-improvement, business and marketing books. “Eat That Frog”, “Cashvertising”, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, and “Outliers, The Story of Success” are just some of the best books I’ve read to date. This isn’t even scratching the surface. Some of these books have changed the way I look at my business, turning affiliate marketing from just another thing to do to make money, into a way to obtain and exploit financial stability and freedom.

So, I know some of you guys out there are already set up on some decent campaigns. What are your favorite productive things to do while you wait for a campaign to be approved.