Have you ever run affiliate marketing campaigns using paid traffic?
I think it’s best way to become a better marketer in the shortest possible time.
Why do I say that? Isn’t the best way to just buy the right courses and study for months while you learn and take notes?
Well, no. Just the opposite is true. Marketers who are doing well will inevitably encourage you to get started and learn as you go.
Having ‘studied only’ for far too long when I was starting out I can assure you that is good advice. Everything changes when you get skin in the game–I mean in terms of both time and money.
By all means read and learn all you can, but do not read blog posts without actually getting started with something or worse, let it become an excuse for not taking action at all.
But why do I say that affiliate marketing using paid traffic is the best way to get good relatively quickly at online marketing generally? Why not dive into SEO or e-commerce or some other discipline?
Simple: I’ve never done any kind of online marketing that required that I up my game in so many different ways, so fast. My goodness. I was confused all the time! And of course, that’s how I knew I was learning.
Especially putting together my first campaign, but even after that, for a long time I can’t say it was easy–I was learning so much every day.
And it had to be this way.
I’m talking about diving into spendy native advertising clicks, or buying tens or hundreds of thousands of impressions per day on mobile or desktop and testing affiliate offers to try and create campaigns where the cost of the your ad spend plus your expenses is less than the affiliate commissions you are able to generate.
There are a lot of moving parts, and even if you will eventually start to outsource some of the necessary tasks, you need to know how everything works yourself first.
To do this you need a good grasp of some of the following skills, and I mean a better than basic functional abilities too: Copywriting, basic html/CSS, web design, conversion rate optimization, tracking (shout out to tracking tokens!!!), money management, outsourcing, learning about affiliate networks and negotiating with ad managers for better payouts etc., understanding how ad platforms work, e.g. Google Adwords, Facebook, and many, many smaller traffic sources ready to sell you all kinds of traffic from every corner of the world, each with a different interface and quirky algorithm you have to get a feel for if you want to optimize your bidding properly (which frankly you have to do to compete with other affiliates and companies with far deeper pockets than you have..), understanding spy tools, and other skills.
It’s Internet marketing alchemy.
I’ve tried to crack this kind of affiliate marketing a few different times, with limited success. I expect I will try again, because I’ve learned the game now, and things get easier, and faster for me the more campaigns I run. Like anything else I suppose.
And I’ll admit it, I’ll try again also because the potential payoff is enormous. People make a million bucks on a single campaign if they can really dial it in.
Here’s one thing I can say with total certainty though: in this game you need all the help you can get, and that means having the best tracker out there. When I was running traffic I used the Voluum tracker, as did most of my friends and my mentors. (By the way, ironically enough that wasn’t an affiliate link I just posted; I’m just pointing Digital Media Minute readers at a tool I believe in wholeheartedly.)
Anyway, I just heard that Voluum is releasing a new version of their tracker, and this version supports native advertising too. If you’ve been tempted to try affiliate marketing using paid traffic I’d start with Voluum.
You’re going to have enough confusion and ‘moving parts’ anyway, as I say. This is a tool that will reduce the time it takes you to get up to speed.
It will give you quality results that give at least one critical part of your business the professionalism you have to have as you work to improve other parts of the job, and get your campaigns positive.
