What can make your affiliate marketing successful? Contrary to popular belief traffic = money, it depends. And traffic is just only about 60% of the total formula to make your affiliate marketing campaign a success. Always remember that 80 - 20 rule. In any business, there is 80% chance to fail and 20% chance to succeed. Its also true in affiliate marketing. Out of 100 campaign that you might crank up will only lead to 20% of them making profit. But what good about this is eventhough you did not profit on the remaining 80, all the profits from the 20 campaigns is enough to cover your loses and will prove profitable.

This is my mindset when I started. I created 100 sites knowing only less than 20 of them will make money. It is a lot of work and not for the faint of heart, but I like the adrenaline rush and the thrill of not knowing what lies ahead. But it proved to be a profitable venture for me. And in turn taught me a lot.

Keyword Research

First of all, to make an affiliate marketing campaign a success is “Keyword research”. Just because everybody you know targets make money online or pinay scandal, you should join the bandwagon to get some money. That’s not the case. Most of the time, following the crowd will only lead to financial losses. What you’ll do is work harder to keep up with everyone and it will only burn you out. And will stress you even more when you arrive at the end of the month is still not profitable.

Affiliate marketing is not a plug and play business. Its not as easy as you think like creating a paypal account. You need to think. Be a contrarian. Challenge every idea. Think smarter not work harder. Underwork your competition. Why would you want to target a keyword that is known by all? Why would you want to create a site about a subject that is talked by all? To get traffic? Yeah that might work. But before you go ahead and make a site? Can you consider this? Do you want to work harder than your competition or to work less but earn the same as him? You can do so by targetting a less known keyword that will give the same amount of money with less or no work. But of course, qualifying a keyword can tell you different kinds of things such as the quality of traffic which brings me to my next point.

Quality Traffic

You notice how I put “Quality” in it? Getting traffic is easy. Trust me. You can buy a traffic of 10,000 visitors per day for only $15 and there are lots of services like that floating around. But I would choose 100 visitors if it converts 50% of the time compared to 10,000 visitors which converts 0.0002% of the time any day. Traffic is easy to get. But quality traffic isn’t. Just because you can use twitter, facebook and stumbleupon doesn’t mean you’ll gonna get rich tomorrow when you wake up. People who use social networking sites are more tech savvy and in return use them only for fun and not really to open their credit cards and give you money. In other words, most of these social traffic are junk. If you want to be famous, these are great by the way. That is why a list bloggers like them. But for people who wants to make money. Stay away from social media, at least for now.

Also, in terms of SEO. Quality traffic often leads to the kind of keyword you target. Don’t get me wrong, if you have a nice keyword that gets more than a thousand hits a day from search engines, it is a great keyword. After all, if people came from the search engines, most likely they are willing to spend money. What I’m trying to tell is that, most of the time, high traffic keywords are more competitive and needs a lot of work to rank at. So learn to pick keywords that are a little long tail that expresses a need. For example: “restore bad credit score” is better than “bad credit score” as it expresses the need to fix a problem. Then you put up your affiliate site that offers solving bad credit scores.

Landing Pages

Landing page design are the face of your campaigns. If you’re gonna make money in this field, you need to have a nice, at least decent design to compete. If you’re gonna do it yourself and don’t know how to do it, do not be surprise if you’re not making money. At least learn how to design or hire someone with experience to do it. For starters, have at least 2 landing page design so you can test. Then you will try to beat the best converter with a new design until you settle with a conversion rate that is suitable to your taste.

Tracking

Track. Track. Track. The only thing that you should be addictive to is stats. Learn to track your affiliate campaigns. From PPC keywords to organic searches, use tracking software like google analytics, prosper202 and crazy egg (I use them personally). Google analytics offers great conversion tracking for its PPC campaigns while prosper202 offers great tracking for postbacks. Those 2 will give you detailed information such as, what link they clicked, where they come from, how long did they stayed on your site. Information such as these are crucial especially when you are purchasing your traffic such as ppc or ppv.

Split Test & Optimize

Split test is like a branch of tracking. This way, you want to maximize your earning potential from the site. So having 2 designs of the landing page is great to test them with each other. Sometimes you need to edit little things on your landing page to covert better. Landing pages are not the only thing you need to test, you also need to test different offers. Different merchants and different affiliate products. Do not trust cpa networks. Trust no one in fact. Sometimes, the same offer is available to different cpa networks but only one of them converts better. It is because CPA networks (sometimes) shrug money from you. One word to describe is “steal” the affiliate commission from you. Some networks do it aggressively, some conservatively. It is present in all networks you just have to settle for the lesser evil. Don’t trust anyone and test test test.