Phase 1 of the WhoIsAndrewWee.com (sponsored by the Market Leverage affiliate network) ended on July 7th with unexpected results.
One of the risks in running a contest that’s specific to only one country (in this case, Singapore), is that you might end up with 0 participants.
In this case, due to compliance procedures by the applicants, none of them made it past round 1 to get their campaigns up and running.
So the $175 in gift cards will not be given out this round.
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Phase 2 is ongoing until 7 Aug, with a mini laptop and gift card going out to the winners.
You can check out the contest details.
If you’re a new affiliate, you might find the “Affiliate Marketing Tips” series useful for getting started. I’ll be continuing to add new content to the series each week.
The launch of the WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge a couple of weeks back has proven to be quite an attractive proposal for new and experienced affiliates.
With prizes like gift cards and mini laptops on the line, there’s been a long line of applicants to Market Leverage in order to participate in the contest. (Note: for this specific contest, you have to be Singapore-based in order to qualify).
The sticking point has been getting approved – to date, there’s only 1 eligible contestant in the contest.
One of the “risks” in making this contest only for Singapore-based affiliates is that there might be zero participants in the contest – not because there’s no interest, but because international affiliates in general have to take number of additional steps in order to get their affiliate applications approved, compared to their US counterparts (a point I highlighted during my appearance on Missy Ward’s TheSpew Episode “The SpewGirls Go Global” ).
Here are a couple of tips to be successfully approved as an affiliate (more…)
If you’ve read through the first part in this series “Affiliate Marketing Tips: The Industry and Getting Accepted“, you’re ready to look at the thousands of affiliate/CPA offers available and do your research on finding a winner.
“Everybody Knows” – Leonard Cohen
So everybody knows the high paying niches – payday loans, credit repair, weight loss, grant information, programs with a continuity/rebilling element to the customer (ie: the “Google” money making CPA offers). But just because you know an offer pays a larger upfront commission, doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to convert it into a winning campaign.
Just looking at the street (standard/baseline) payout doesn’t give you an idea of how well it will do, unless you have the offer conversion data.
Most affiliate networks will list their top offers, like Market Leverage does within their affiliate interface:
Picking an offer based on the highest payout is probably one of the worst ways to pick an offer – because there’re many more variables that affect the success of any campaign.
You might also look at the EPC (earnings per 100 clicks), which is in the form of a dollar value. Eg: $0.50 EPC or you might see $50 EPC. That means out of every 100 clicks sent to the offer, the average commission generated is the amount you see.
Take note though, these figures aggregate commissions generated across the network – you’ll have earnings data from PPC marketers, emailers, SEO affiliates, social media affiliates aggregated into a single figure. To have EPC be more useful, you should ask your affiliate manager for the breakdown and look at the average EPC for the type of traffic you’re generating.
As you’re looking at different offers, you might like to shortlist at least 5 to 10 different offers to research.
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Researching Your Niche
Although you might have a rough idea about what your niche is about (dating has something to do with people joining a dating service and the service provider pays you a commission for the lead), you should go a step further to look at the niches in greater detail.
Google News
One good place to start is Google News.
Google has an editorial review team that reviews news sources (including blogs) and includes them in the list of content providers for the Google News service. By checking out news coverage within the last 3 months (perferably within the last year), it’ll give you a sense of how well the niche is doing, and if it’s a niche with affiliate/CPA offers with a short lifespan, how long it’s been in the marketplace.
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Google Trends is a way to graphically see how the niche/offer has been performing over a period of time.
For example:
For a niche like college grants/grant information, the peaks for search volume (more…)
Finding difficulty getting started as an affiliate marketer? WhoIsAndrewWee.com has partnered the Market Leverage affiliate network to host the first Affiliate Challenge, which will provide education to help you kickstart your campaigns and promises prizes for participants.
I’m happy to announce that after a period of discussion, Market Leverage is the proud sponsor of possibly the first affiliate competition specifically targeted at Singapore-based affiliates.
So if you’re new to the industry and want to get your foot in the door, do take action by participating in this contest.
Here’s the WhoIsAndrewWee.com Affiliate Challenge format:
- The contest will be held over a period of 2 months (from 8 Jun – 7 Aug 2009)
- You need to apply through this Market Leverage affiliate signup link to be eligible for the contest.
- You need to be a new Market Leverage affiliate and based in Singapore to qualify for the contest. (future contests will be expanded to other geographical regions).
- The contest will have 2 phases – one at the midway mark (8 Jun – 7 Jul), where prizes will be awarded to participants. And one for the contest duration (8 Jun – 7 Aug), another round of prizes will be awarded then. so you’ll have 2 sets of chances to win prizes.
One of the goals of this contest is to increase the number of active Singapore affiliate marketers, especially since Asia is a growing region.
There are 2 categories of prizes available:
- Top Affiliates (determined by affiliate commissions generated)
- Merit Prizes for affiliates who put in the most effort in promoting their campaigns (determined by the contest panel)
Here are the contest prizes:
Phase 1: Start to Mid-point (8 Jun – 7 Jul):
- Top affiliate: $100 Market Leverage gift card
- Merit prize: $75 Market Leverage gift card
Phase 2: Start to End (8 Jun – 7 Aug)
- Top affiliate: HP Mini-Note or Asus EEE PC laptop
- Merit prize: $150 Market Leverage gift card
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Notes:
- You need to be a new Market Leverage affiliate to qualify for the contest
- Affiliates will need to provide official personal identification or business registration documents during their application and payments will be made out to the person or business entity used for the affiliate application
- Only affiliates based in Singapore (or are from Singapore) are eligible for the contest
- The judges decisions are final
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There’ll be a series of contest updates and tips to promote your affiliate campaigns over the following weeks.
In the meantime, apply to be a Market Leverage affiliate now!
[To get your affiliate applications processed faster, you are welcome to drop me a note via the blog contact form, stating your name, email address used in the application, so they can be reviewed by the Market Leverage affiliate review team more promptly]
