The Affiliate Mentality Guide
We always post guides on how to use different traffic sources / run different offers, but a big part of affiliate marketing is also the mental aspect. Without the proper mindset, it is easy to get overwhelmed with all the information coming at you and get stuck spinning your wheels, so here are some things I wish I had known back when I started.
Don't be a perfectionist: Don't obsess over every last detail prior to getting traffic going, the big picture is what you're aiming for. I don't spend days and days designing banners or setting up one tiny little thing on a campaign. This is not efficient or practical in an industry where half the campaigns you build out end up not being profitable. You should be testing, testing, testing, this is the wrong industry for a perfectionist. You will drive yourself crazy and broke because you build 1 campaign that may or may not work in the time that other affiliates have launched 100. Also, some of the best banners are the crude, non-professional looking ones so all your effort may actually be hurting you.
Don't make excuses: You think the advertiser is scrubbing you? Send better quality traffic or run a different offer - have your AM contact the advertiser and work something out, that's their job - to help you make money. Also, every single other affiliate who is making money deals with the exact same issues, tracking discrepancies, advertisers, etc., and they're still making a lot of money. It's much better to work within the confines of reality than to waste your energy coming up with reasons why your campaign "can't" work. When you remove all excuses and realize that the only variable left is you - then you will be able to reach your full potential as an affiliate.
Volume is King: Would you prefer 100% ROI on 20 leads or 30% ROI on 500? Also, low volume campaigns can sometimes suffer from very inconsistent results as the sample size is just too small to return accurate results. This is why if you're only doing tiny tests each day, it may take you forever to find a winning campaign - you may have winning creatives that you think are losers because you haven't let them run out enough or some other variable isn't right. On any successful campaign, everything has to line up right - the creative, targeting, bid, etc., that's a lot of testing. If you don't do a thorough job, you may miss something and end up canceling what could have been a huge money maker. Here is an example dummy campaign setup of why it's important to aim for volume.
This is to drive home my point about letting things run and how you can have good / bad luck but when you run decent volume, these trends balance out. Chances are, a lot of people starting out might have a campaign like the 56 clicks 1 lead, or 160 clicks 8 leads, and think this campaign is hopeless. However, then you have the one with 124 clicks 14 leads on a $19.19 spend. So what's the difference in these campaigns? Absolutely nothing - these are all the same creatives, same bids, same targeting. Just some food for thought on why it's good to test a decent amount of traffic as you get a much better sampling. It's like sampling 25 people as opposed to 1000, you're going to get a much more accurate big picture from the 1000. If you test on too small a sample size, the results can get misleadingly skewed.
That being said, testing is a good way to limit risk / spend and even the biggest ad agencies out there always test on the thousands before they scale nationally to millions. However, if a campaign shows promising CTR / interest, don't be afraid to let it run out a little or tweak the bids / targeting. It's a lot easier to salvage and optimize a campaign that is teetering on the edge of profitability rather than to start all over from scratch. Also, not every second of every campaign is going to be profitable... it's just not realistic . Adjust your expectations and understand that there are humans on the other end. Some of my biggest campaigns started off very lackluster and I think many affiliates would have paused them when they didn't get a lead in the first 5 minutes. Give F5 a break for a few minutes and let the campaigns do their thing.
CTR: High CTR definitely helps - if you have the highest CTR on a target, then you can potentially outbid all your competitors and own that traffic source. I know it seems common sense, but this is how you throw up insane numbers, by being the best (someone has to be #1, why not have it be you). That being said, I also had a campaign that only got .080 CTR that I ran for 4 million impressions at 100% ROI so make sure you're optimizing based on your spend v. earnings, not just CTR. It's purely a numbers game, don't get too caught up on every detail. Once you start running volume and have lots of different campaigns / offers spread out, you won't have time to necessarily weed through every last little detail (unless you have a team). Look at the big picture, optimize based on spend v. earn, and then after you've gathered a few days to a week worth of data, go back through and cut out the bottom 70% of creatives and replace them with new challengers - rinse, repeat, bank.
