Last year (2012) was a busy year. Between recruiting and managing some of the top affiliates while I was an affiliate manager with Neverblue and organising training events in Singapore as well as a very successful one in Thailand, I did not get much sleep.

It was a great experience working with Sam Brachat, then Michelle Reid from Neverblue, as well as a great time of account managers (who’ve a great understanding of how advertisers structure their offers and the best ways to provide great lead quality and get onto accelerated payments).

Tips for aspiring affiliates: Work hard and probably more importantly, learn from your mistakes.

Almost every campaign will start off as a loss-making one. Being able to pare away losing keywords and high volume keywords with don’t have a chance of recouping what you’re paying in ad costs will only bring down your campaign.

Having a Vegas mentality that after spending $100-200 on a single keyword or url target or demographic, seeing zero to a handful of conversions is treating your business like a lottery and won’t help anyone (except maybe the ad network).

Get a book on statistics, read up on statistical significance, split testing. Learning the business, rather than learning how to use spy tools will give you a better competitive edge in the long term.

Is everyone gradually moving from promoting casual dating offers via adult traffic to mobile offers? Should you blindly follow them?

Are you a sheep? Can you think for yourself?

There’re still relatively new affiliates (3 years or less experience) who’re doing 3- to 4-figure profit days consistently working relatively unsexy verticals, stuff that isn’t widely discussed on affiliate blogs or forums.

I had a conversation the other day with a newer affiliate who asked “Should I be considering these offers? It’s not mentioned on the forums or blogs.”

Here’s a tip.

If you’re making a killing with a particular method or offer, should you:

1) Tweet about it, brag about how much you’re making and how you’re going to spend your earnings?

2) Post pictures about what you’ve just bought, go to the network’s facebook page and say “Thanks ABC affiliate manager, I’m making a killing with XYZ offer.”

3) Shut up about it and bank in silence.

You go figure it out.

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Success has a lot to do with:

1) Figuring what works for you with the type of traffic you’re using and the offer you’re promoting

2) Coming up with a system to follow, so you’re going through a series of steps that make sense and maximise your chances of success and ability of scaling what you’re doing.

3) Repeating what you’re doing, being able to scale the traffic (at about the same quality level) that you’re sending to the offer.

The steps are easy, aren’t they? Being able to follow them is not.

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Back to 2013: The past couple of months have been a little busy for me, with my older daughter starting primary school (grade school to you yanks) and working a couple of consulting gigs that had been backlogged.

In the next couple of weeks I’m working on:
1) Launching a resource site that will be useful for affiliates and product owners

2) Developing/revamping and launching/relaunching existing and new products/services.

3) Publishing some stuff for Amazon’s Kindle platform

4) Publishing new blog posts (hopefully more frequently than once a year).

So what’s on your plate for 2013?

PS: This is a new blog template, not everything is fixed yet. It should be…any day now.

• Internet Marketing
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