10 Unbreakable Rules in Affiliate Marketing Part 1
Everything in the world is changing rapidly, and in Affiliate Marketing too. It’s hard to say what will be a trend in affiliate marketing in 5 years, but we can say for sure what will not change: the amount of advertising will not decrease, people wouldn’t want to get bad products for a higher price and robots are unlikely to start coming up with creatives.
This article contains 10 Affiliate Marketing rules that are likely to be relevant in 5 years, just as they are today.
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First rule: Do not work with “dead” offers.
Launch for smartphones in 2010 and now, do you think there is a difference?
All offers have a “life cycle”. Which can be roughly divided into four stages:
- Starting stage
- Rising stage
- Recession
- Decline
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Starting stage
The moment when a new offer, product, platform or vertical appears – Starting stage
At this stage, there is no opportunity to spy on creatives or approaches, affiliate marketers take the risk and run tests, the result of which can be either a huge profit, or a lost budget, but experience anyway.
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Stage two
Stage two – Rising, the moment when you can get a good profit. A new platform or product has already been tested for performance and is generating income.
Here you need to act quickly, while the competition is not high and scale profitable bundles.
Remember: not only solo affiliates are launching offers or teams of affiliates created by advertisers are doing the same only on a much larger scale.
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Third stage
It is possible to start work at the third stage of the “life cycle”, but you should not expect a big profit.
You will have to come up with new approaches and creatives, and this can be worth a lot of effort.
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Stage four
There is no point in trying to enter the market at stage four.
There are several reasons for this:
Firstly, the audience is “burned out”, there is little to no reaction.
You can read about base burnout here.
Secondly, over time, more bureaucracy and restrictions appear on any traffic source: thousands of new rules that change and tighten so quickly you won’t even have time to refresh the page.
06
Second rule: A correctly chosen offer is half the battle.
Successful campaign and getting profit — it is a component of many parts.
Thinking about how much marketing knowledge and skills you need to sell your old Sony Ericsson phone?
And what if an offer suddenly appears with a self-charging smartphone or battery that heats up on it’s own and does not require any energy?
Do you need to come up with complex marketing approaches or creatives in these cases? I don’t think so.
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How to find the “right” offers?
Whenever possible, you need to test everything that is possible to test. Sometimes a product or offer that may seem unpromising or ugly can show a good result during tests, precisely because of their “unsightliness” they haven’t been thrown at everyone a million times already.
If you find a good offer, try to get exclusive rights to it, or at least part of it, e.g. so that only you can launch it via Facebook or email, etc.
Personal communication with advertisers will help to get such exclusive rights.
Build connections at conferences and other events. Do your best to keep the advertiser happy, because getting a good offer is half the battle.
07
Third rule: Speed matters
If a page, image, application, or whatever loads for longer than 3 seconds, the user closes the page, presses the back button or scrolls further. So speed matters.
Think about what servers and domains you use for your landing pages and pre landing pages. Also, pay attention to numerous guides and articles such as “10 Ways to Increase Your Page Loading Speed” etc.
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Fourth rule: Only experience matters
That’s about 6 hours every day or 40 hours a week for 5 years.
In affiliate marketing, it doesn’t matter how many books you have read, or how well you did on your math tests. Experience is all that matters.
The only way to gain experience in affiliate marketing is through trial and error, moreover your own, study and testing.
Learning new skills in Affiliate Marketing is invaluable. New trends, rules and opportunities appear every day, one of the aspects of the work of an affiliate marketer is to keep track of many things and keep abreast of events – for this you should at least use Spy services, talk with managers and representatives of affiliate programs and CPA networks, affiliate marketers on various online platforms and forums, attend conferences and other offline events.
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Fifth rule: A small budget is not the end
In today’s Affiliate Marketing market, there are more and more large companies that have an impressive budget, who can launch offers in large volumes and have decent work experience.
Of course, you might think – why start at all, if there is already so much competition and so many “pros”. It’s worth remembering that every super affiliate marketer started out as a beginner at some point.
How can a solo affiliate with a small budget compete with big corporations and companies? Directly, no way.
The goal of companies is to launch on a large scale and thus make a profit. They are less likely to focus on certain segments of the target audience, and this is one of the keys to the success of an affiliate with fewer resources.
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For example:
You can launch an offer, making a common creative “for everyone” without focusing on a separate segment or a separate “pain” of a potential lead. Thus, there are still unexplored segments on which to concentrate.
The second example, you see that a large company is successfully launching an offer, of course you will not be able to compete with it in the same market, but if you take their ideas/bundles and launch them on the same or a similar offer in another GEO, it will yield its fruits.
Scale does not always mean big profits, you can make money with a smaller budget – experience, knowledge and creativity are the most important here.
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P.S.
- Do not work with “dead” offers.
- A correctly chosen offer is half the battle.
- Speed matters.
- Only experience matters.
- A small budget is not the end.
We did not invent the bicycle, nor did we come up with these rules, they are known to everyone involved in affiliate marketing.
You can read the second part of the article: 10 Unbreakable Rules in Affiliate Marketing Part 2
