{"id":489,"date":"2007-11-27T09:04:18","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T01:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/affiliate-marketing\/monday-question-stabilizing-your-affiliate-income\/"},"modified":"2007-11-27T09:04:18","modified_gmt":"2007-11-27T01:04:18","slug":"monday-question-stabilizing-your-affiliate-income","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/affiliate-marketing\/monday-question-stabilizing-your-affiliate-income\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Question: Stabilizing Your Affiliate Income"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the course of your Internet marketing journey, you might hit the occasional speed bump and find a plateau. You might identify with Josh who writes:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Hi Andrew,<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads.<\/p>\n<p>Lately, my sales have been stagnating&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>How can I ensure more stability in my affiliate income?<\/p>\n<p>Thanks.<br \/>\nJosh&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p><strong>My answer:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Having worked with a number of Internet marketing veterans, I&#8217;ve noticed a couple of best business practises that I&#8217;ve seen these successful and experienced marketers use.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> <strong>The Micromanaging trap<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There&#8217;s the Internet marketers &#8220;day trader&#8221; mentality that you&#8217;d want to avoid.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s something I used to do when I first started out &#8211; typically seen in behavior like staying logged in to your affiliate account all day and hitting the refresh button every hour to see if more sales have come in.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve looked at how <!--more-->stock day traders work, they&#8217;re like human rats sitting in front of their computers, waiting for the stock to go up (or down) 1 or 2 &#8220;ticks&#8221; (bids) and doing a buy or sell order. This isn&#8217;t any way to run a business and you&#8217;d be chaining yourself to your computer.<\/p>\n<p>If it&#8217;s a new campaign, you might want to check in once or twice a day.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve planned a campaign well, you can set it to run on autopilot and tweak it every day or 2 days.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Regularity and consistency<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s important to distinguish between revenue generating and non-revenue generating activity.<\/p>\n<p>Some marketers who spend more time writing ebooks than actually practising what they preach might give you advice that is highly suspect. Do your own testing and tracking.<\/p>\n<p>I have heard one highly experienced marketer suggest that you write and submit 20 articles to the major article directories and wait for the cash to come in.<\/p>\n<p>From actual practise, I&#8217;ve found that it pays to submit enough articles to establish a presence in your niche area (maybe 5-10 articles), then drip feed another 2-3 articles every week. This ensures that your traffic is more regular. (imagine the analogy of subscribing to a newspaper and getting 50-60 issues in a single day, versus getting an issue every day&#8230;it&#8217;s pretty much common sense, isn&#8217;t it?)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Testing and tracking<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You need to be able to analyze the data your sites are generating and go beyond just gathering a bunch of keywords from Google Analytics, awstats, MyBlogLog Pro Stats, or whatever other analytics package you are using.<\/p>\n<p>You need to intelligently put together a picture of your visitor profile, track where they&#8217;re coming from, and put together new traffic mechanisms, whether a new PPC ad group, to test that new channel.<\/p>\n<p>If anything, I think a lot of new marketers fall prey to the idea that you can just set up a PPC campaign, let it run on autopilot, never touch it again and expect cash to come flowing in&#8230;.nothing could be further from the truth.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>So your success in affiliate marketing has to walk a fine line between getting the urge to micromanage and fiddle with your campaigns every 5 mins, and the other extreme of setting it up, never doing further follow up and expecting something of a miracle.<\/p>\n<p>Following the mantra of &#8220;test, track, test, track&#8221; will bring your campaigns to the next level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the course of your Internet marketing journey, you might hit the occasional speed bump and find a plateau. You might identify with Josh who writes: &#8220;Hi Andrew, I&#8217;m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads. Lately, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[562,1064,534,663,142,737],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}