March 2010 archive
A friend of mine had been generating 6-figs/mth consistently from rebill offers (using somewhat questionable landing pages) and had been banking pretty hard via media buys from early 2009 to around Oct. Since Wells Fargo and other payment processors have turned the tap off the rebill arrangement for many of these offers, the majority of them have gone down.
Are rebills gone for good? Not by a longshot, considering services like your utilities, sat TV, internet service and newspaper/magazine subscriptions all function on a rebill model. The offers that have gone to seed have primarily been in the weight loss, bizop, health/beauty niches. From about 5-10 offers in each niche, most networks are down to 1-2 “quality” offers. How long they’ll stay quality is anyone’s guess.
So back to my friend. He’s been doing tests focused on the US market and are seeing his campaigns at the marginal profit or break even levels. An even larger proportion are in red and chipping away at the nest egg he built over the last year. He’s been smart though, choosing not to blow his cash on a souped-up sports car or a pricey piece of real estate, so he could still coast by for the next 2-3 years even if he didn’t earn a single cent.
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Going forward
It’s unfortunate that most affiliates will not have built up a stockpile of cash to (more…)
If you’ve taken the path I suggested to create your own product/service and have a product in hand, you might be wondering what to do next.
The first and most common option is to promote your own offer – via PPC, social media, media buys, contextual/PPV traffic. In particular, I’ve recently met some affiliate who are pretty experienced when it comes to PPC and PPV, but they’re increasingly going the SEO/social bookmarking route and are getting very satisfactory ROI on their efforts.
Another option is to recruit others to promote your product (ie affiliate marketing). It used to be your primary options were to list it at Clickbank, Paydotcom, both of which cost about $49.95 to set up, or a site like e-junkie. Or you could list it on one of the big networks like Commission Junction (CJ), ShareASale, Linkshare – incurring potentially substantial setup/listing/operating fees in the process. You could also buy one of those $50 affiliate management scripts or another option is to sign up for a 2Checkout e-commerce account (which includes autoresponders, affiliate management modules, but lacks a merchant account). You could also buy a high-end standalone hosted package like John Delavera’s JVM2/Fantasos or similar packages which generally cost $2,000 and upwards.
I’ve tried most of these options and haven’t got the results I was looking for. The full featured self-hosted script frequently took a week or more to setup and required a heavy commitment to maintaining the systems, while many of the cheap options just lacked critical tracking features for affiliates, such as pixel placement, postback and API support – essentially affiliates would be marketing into an analytics blackhole. This is certainly not a pro-affiliate move.
So having decided to eat my own dogfood and applying the product creation strategies to one of the new projects I’m working on, I’m evaluating 2 affiliate management platforms which are new to me.
The first is HasOffers, a web-based web2.0-ish affiliate/CPA network solution which the now defunct TriFoxMedia used to run on. It’s gaining popularity as a few CPA networks have decided to migrate from DirectTrack to HasOffers. Definitely an improvement in my view. HasOffers has several tiers of services from hosted, self-hosted to managed solutions. The free version gives you 10,000 clicks a month and the next tier up gives you 250,000 clicks at about $100 per month. HasOffers has a similar set of shareholders as the owner of Tatto Media. As the owners already operate a CPA network, it’s not hard to see why HasOffers has support for affiliates to place their own pixels and access comprehensive campaign stats.
The other options is JROX Affiliate Manager, it’s free up to 50 affiliates and has no limitation on the number of clicks. The analytics and pixel support are not as comprehensive as HasOffers’, and you’ll have to contribute a fair amount of elbow grease to set it up and keep it running. Then again, your running costs will likely be lower too.
My strategy is to recruit a group of top affiliates, who’re focused in the niche my products are in and work with them closely to increase sales for my product. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need thousands of affiliates in your program to make it work (been there, done that). You need just a handful of top affiliates to see your product sales fly.
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For more info:
If you made the effort to head to Affiliate Summit, PubCon, AdTech or any of the other industry shows, you’d have had the opportunity to meet up with networks (affiliate/CPA as well as traffic), and fellow affiliates and marketers with whom you’d speak to regularly over AIM or on the forums, the question is aside from the tax break, what benefit have you got out of attention the event?
I’d started out with 6 possible projects following this past January’s Affiliate Summit West, and following up and following through with possible partners is part of the business.
About 3 are proceeding, with progress underway. If all works out, at least 2 of the 3 will continue growing till the next Affiliate Summit West at the Wynn.
I’ve seen potentially successful partnerships break up sometimes due to pretty trivial reasons. Here’re some of the most common:
- Investment of time and resources: While we’re all subject to a finite amount of capital, I’ve found that time is often the breaking factor, especially if one of the partners put in only 30 minutes a week. This is fine if the business is up-and-running and generating consistent projects. The reality is most new projects will end up being a timesuck, at least until they’re on their feet.
- Clear outcome and objectives: Document all discussions you might have, especially when it comes to roles, responsibilities, how much each partner is expected to put in in terms of time and capital and including exit clauses. Make sure all parties are agreeable to the terms and edit if needed. With a reference document, it significantly reduces any disagreements which may arise later.
- Partner selection: Although you can pick possible partners based on their reputation or your initial assessment of them, it’s not easy to understand how well you’ll work together until the project is underway. This also means that you could put in a significant amount of time and work and discover that the partnership isn’t going to work out. Rather than get angry, frustrated or feel upset about it, it’s in your best interest to keep moving forward.
If you’ve similarly got some followup projects post-Affiliate Summit, how’re they working out for you?
The newest monthly update for my internet marketing strategy site is up, and the topic is on product creation.
Some of you will be thinking “Heck no, I’m happy as an affiliate, I don’t want to have a product and deal with bad customers and worst yet, customer service!”
Hold up a second. True, there’s more effort involved in planning, research, creating and marketing your own product. The upside is that you’re building an asset that you can continue to benefit from for a long time to come, especially if you treat your customers well and implement emailing strategies effectively.
While I know some marketers have some “churn and burn” reports, videos and other products that pre-sell leads to a some shady rebills which subsequently burns the lead shortly, I’ve found that the customers on some of my lists going back to 2006, have continued to purchase the products and services I’ve recommended over the years.
On some of my lists, the average value per customer is in the $400-600 range (from a combination of affiliate products and courses/services that I own). The traffic source has primarily been through social media, forum and blog traffic, so the lead acquisition cost has been pretty low.
One of the reasons I’ve been moving increasingly into paid traffic (PPC, PPV, media buys) since late 2008, has been increasing the number of leads into the sales funnel. Moving from a situation of:
[modest leads] x [high value per lead] to [high volume of leads] x [high value per lead] is one of the strategies I’m focusing on this year (so you might see less frequent posts on here].
If you’d like to check out the update on product creation, be sure to visit the: Internet Marketing Cookbook. (the content will be available till end March, after which it’ll be replaced with fresh content]
As you can see from the last post, “PPV Case Study wrap up and conclusions“, things did not turn out as expected.
While some critics have chosen to say the case study was a failure, I consider it useful to have gained a couple of lessons in how Direct CPV works.
Yes, I’d stopped the campaign before the URLs had accumulated significant impressions – primarily because the URL targets were displaying content that would’ve been difficult for that particular offer to convert. The ones which were hypertargeted to the offer (about 1,000 from each keyword group) had impressions in the single digits.
In this case, it would have made more sense to switch to a different offer for the URLs which were getting traffic.
This is the first in a series of case studies, as they’re posted in real time, you’ll see situations of low impressions, high impressions with few or no conversions, as well as possibly a couple of winning campaigns. If you’re reading this and you’re hitting winners with every campaign, drop me a note and I’ll feature you in a future post.
Mike Chiasson posted recently about his keyword targeting trial on Direct CPV. You can check it out: here.
If you’re not failing often, you’re probably not trying hard enough.
