Handsome Logic

This is the second installment of Why Most Affiliate Marketing Arbitrage Newbies Fail. The idea behind this series it to identify common reasons why most new PPC Affiliate Marketers have limited (or no) success. If you haven’t read Part 1, check it out.

Selecting an offer

Lots of PPC Affiliate Marketing newbies get their network membership approved and immediately sort the list of campaigns by highest CPA. Those who joined with the intention of pushing a specific offer or niche are probably heading right for the ringtones section.

I’m as guilty as any. When I started in AM, I was promoting ringtones, even though I’ve never downloaded a ringtone in my life. The market was saturated then and it’s over-saturated now. Is there still money to be made? Of course!

But wouldn’t I have been better off to choose a niche I actually knew something about? Maybe a niche where Shoemoney hadn’t already broadcast to the world how much money he made in it?

I tried investing in the stock market for a while and lost money because I knew nothing about stocks. It occurred to me to take some online courses, read some books, and try again. Instead, I chose to focus my efforts (and my money) on things that I already knew enough about to make money with them. Why pay to learn more if you’re not already capitalizing on what you know?

Some of the best money I’ve made in affiliate marketing has come from offers with absolutely meager payouts. But because I saw the angle or was able to catch the offer before everyone else on the network beat it to death, I was able to drive enough volume of quality traffic to it to turn a nice profit.

Examine the niche before you examine the payout. Colon cleansing may not be the most attractive niche in the world. But if you give people the option of buying the product online instead of having to stand at the supermarket checkout counter surrounded by other shoppers and a snickering 17 year old store clerk… cha-ching!

Listening to Gurus

First a disclaimer: There are some affiliate bloggers out there who are genuinely selfless with what they give to the newbie affiliate marketer and the community as a whole. There is good information to be gathered on the blogs of so-called “super affiliates”. However, there comes a time where you have to close your feed reader and learn for yourself.

Affiliate bloggers did not make their money by creating competition for themselves. Certain bloggers, who I won’t mention by name, will pitch crap offers to you that they would never run themselves. Why? Because if you sign up through their referral link, they get a commission of your revenues whether you profit or not.

The next time some super affiliate tells you to punt a mesothelioma affiliate offer, reevaluate your RSS subscriptions.

These are the same people telling you to do direct-to-merchant PPC. Let me clear the air on this one…

Direct-to-merchant PPC with an CPA network using a jumplink is a risky, short-term strategy. You killing your AdWords account quality, having your campaigns deactivated, or losing your account altogether holds absolutely no consequence for the person whose referral link you signed up through. It also doesn’t matter to them that, in most cases, the advertiser can simply check their referral reports to see all the keywords you’re bidding on and what sites you’re sending traffic from.

Think about it…

Can we agree that most affiliate marketing newbies fail and/or quit? Ok.

My belief is that most fail or quit because they don’t know how to do it properly. I think that’s a safe assumption.

So what makes more sense from the standpoint of an affiliate blogger?

1.) Reveal current strategies you yourself are using and create huge amounts of competition for yourselves for a lousy 2% commission on what the new affiliate you refer earn.

2.) Churn and burn the newbies. Get them signed up, take a percentage of what they generate, and wait for them to drop of the game. Free money, minimal threat to your business.

Relying on Affiliate Managers

You are alone. Just like with your Google or Yahoo account reps, the biggest fish get the best managers.

Unless you have already made a name for yourself in affiliate marketing or have a history of superb performance with another network, you’re not going to be assigned to the top affiliate manager in the company right off the bat.

Your AM works on commission. This commission is a percentage of your revenues, not your profits. Now, it’s in your AM’s best interest to help you make a profit so you don’t up and leave the network — but they get paid either way.

The top affiliates are not sharing their secrets with their Affiliate Managers, because they don’t want those managers sharing the secrets with their other affiliates. More money for their other affiliates equals more commissions for the AM equals more competition for the original affiliate.

The Affiliate Managers who do know some “secrets” are also not sharing them with other Affiliate Managers in the network. If they have a top affiliate who is totally cleaning up on a certain offer, they’re not going to tell every new employee to get in on that offer. That would create competition for their affiliate, thus threatening their commission.

I had a few other points to cover but don’t want to overload one post, so perhaps there will be a Part 3.