This is the first in a series of educational post about getting started as an affiliate marketer. Whether you’re new to the industry or have some experience under your belt, you should get more tips and strategies to enhance and improve your campaigns.
What’s Affiliate Marketing and CPA Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a channel or method where advertisers (also known as merchants or product owners) recruit partners to help them:
Generate prospective customers OR
Pre-sell them on the idea of buying the product OR
Getting involved in the sales process themselves
Depending on the advertiser you’re working with, you might be known as an affiliate/affiliate marketer/partner/associate/reseller.
You might be paid on:
The number of prospects generated (lead generation) OR
The value of products bought (revenue share/pay-per-sale) OR
On an ongoing basis receiving regular payments as long as the customer continues the product/service. (continuity/rebilling/subscription)
CPA marketing or Cost-Per-Action marketing is primarily focused on the lead generation aspect of the business. You might receive a $30 payout on a $4.95 trial by the customer. The advertiser is able to recoup their commission payout to you by selling a premium product on the backend (as a product upgrade), or enrol the customer in a monthly subscription.
Hence, for many new affiliates, the CPA route (more…)
I first got to meet Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman (right) on the internet marketing forums more than a year ago. He got some attention as an active poster on the Rich Jerk forum, and for blog posts on his CashTactics blog, such as the one where he mentioned making more thant $159,000 from one of his sites. (From about 17 hours of work).
Since then, he’s published more posts related to PPC traffic generation and CPA affiliate marketing. If you’ll read some of his posts like his Questions and Answers post:
His reply to the question about what he should have known as an internet marketer starting out is frank and uncensored: “That 99% of marketers writing ebooks to sell to other marketers are nothing but forum slime who copy other people’s ideas and steal the glory to make a penny. Had I known that when I started I would not have wasted a shitload of money”
Instead, the foundation of how he determines what works and what doesn’t isn’t by reading an ebook, but by testing it out. And it’s not just posts about how he made big money either. In an update to his testing, he removed the entrecard and scratchback blog widgets because they weren’t performing.
One major lessons that internet marketers wanting to be successful from their efforts is to continually research, test, analyze new campaigns and products and services. “Failing” once does not put you out of the game.
The other point is that blogging about the experience (good or bad), helps you (more…)
Market Leverage ranks as one of the networks which effectively uses its marketing and branding budget to devastating effect. By contrast, I work with several networks with great affiliates managers, and one corp comm/PR person who isn’t really empowered to do much and/or doesn’t have any real budget to work with.
As networks see affiliate acquisition as part of the affiliate management success formula, doubtless there’ll be more resources channeled towards building a quality affiliate base.
I appreciated Market Leverage’s Digital Media Relations specialist Debby Phillips arranging a discussion with Market Leverage’s founder and CEO Mike Jenkins.
Mike’s certainly savvier than the average network owner (who’s typically a successful affiliate marketer turned network owner). Conducting some research, I’ve found that Mike has been involved in the business management aspects for a number of pretty large listed firms too.
I especially like how he’s constructed a holistic business ecosystem under his PrecisionPlayMedia group – with 3 components – DigitalLeads (an in-house offer production/packaging subsidiary), Market Leverage (the CPA network arm) and InboxBeyond (an email publishing arm) – which is how the top tier CPA networks structure their business.
During the discussion, we also touched on, but haven’t fully resolved the issue of whether the community-building /relationship-building approaches of social marketing via blogs,video will eventually clash head-on with the current incarnation of affiliate marketing, with the mostly shorter emphasis on one-off lead acquisition payout.
It’ll also be interesting to track Market Leverage’s upcoming announcements in the next 2-3 months.
One of my friends mentioned that he’s built a list of 10,000 opt-in members into his mailing list within a period of 7 days…so what’s he supposed to do now, he asks.
I don’t think any responsible email marketer will give advice before finding out more information.
For example, how was the list built? Using PPC? Expired domain traffic? Co-reg traffic? Via opt-ins through Squidoo or HubPages? Via an article directory? As a result of a follow up/update list after buying a product (either an affiliate product or your own product).
Each of these channels comes with it’s own level of permission – and if you’re a permission-based marketer, you’ll realized that someone who’s just bought something from you has a higher level of loyalty and stickiness, compared to someone who’s just downloaded a free report off your site.
So back to the 10,000 mailing list – determine the source of list/lead generation is important. Are they emotionally invested in you? Have they spent money purchasing something you offer? Called into one of your teleseminars and stayed the full duration because they found the information compelling? Are they merely curious strangers? Or evangelists for your brand (also known as “raving fans”).
Once you’ve sorted that out, you need to figure out the demographics of your list too. What’s their (more…)
One of the issues that has been bothering me since I started out as an affiliate has been “why do affiliate and CPA networks pay out such miserable recurring payouts for sub-affiliates”?
If you’ve checked into an affiliate or CPA network control panel, you’ll typically see a “Super Affiliate” or “sub-affiliate recruitment” link with payouts ranging from about 1% to 2% of commissions generated and if you’re lucky, you’ll sometimes see 5% or 10%.
At those levels, is there any real incentive to go out and recruit affiliates/publishers for your network, aside from wanting to build goodwill and possibly a couple of bucks for a nice Friday night dinner?
I understand that margins can be pretty thin, especially since a number of CPA networks are the ultimate traffic arbitragers – they “buy” traffic from you at $1-$1.50 per zip/email submit lead, and attempt to upsell them into an affiliate offer or merchant-direct offer on the backend.
Granted, I haven’t seen the financials of one of these networks yet, but I’m wondering that if you are already relying on affiliates to generate your sales…why not go the extra mile and incentivize them to go out and recruit more affiliates for you? Especially with a decent payout. (we’re not even considering networks which pay you $3 or $5 to recruit an affiliate…).
But I think the game of getting top affiliates is like going out on a fishing boat. You cast your nets and get a whole bunch of prospective affiliates, but you won’t know who’ll be a top performer until you haul in your catch and sort everyone out.
On that basis, the less-skilled affiliates will weed themselves out and a higher payout won’t matter anyway. On the other hand, a better performing affiliate will be motivated to go out and get results.
“I see several options to run web advertising on my websites, and it looks very easy compared to affiliate marketing. Wouldn’t it be easier to make money this way?”
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That’s a good question.
Your internet income is determined by your effort.
The level of engagement (the time and effort you put into your marketing efforts) generally determines the type of return you get.
Here’s a listing of different monetization techniques with payouts listed from lower returns to higher returns:
Web advertising -> CPA (cost per action) marketing -> pay per sale (or what’s traditionally known as affiliate marketing) -> product creation
Web advertising refers to programs like the Google AdSense publisher program, Yahoo Search Marketing ads, WidgetBucks or programs like Chitika and Kontera.
I first got to meet Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman (right) on the internet marketing forums more than a year ago. He got some attention as an active poster on the Rich Jerk forum, and for blog posts on his CashTactics blog, such as the one where he mentioned making 
Florida-based CPA network Market Leverage has generated a fair amount of buzz with it’s 