How do I pick and Affiliate Offer to run?

Ubaidabcd from http://www.wickedfire.com forums wrote saying he was having some issues finding offers that worked on the affiliate networks. I started to respond on wickedfire then decided I needed a new blog post.

Bottomline – is a LOT of offers SUCKKKKKKK. Think about this. For most affiliate companies, all you have to do to run an offer is put up a small retainer even if they don’t know you at all. Now anyone can put up and offer, can you think of how many people might try that? What skin is it off their neck to just throw up and offer? Talk about the greatest opportunity for online marketing there is this is a guarantee’d ROI. You don’t pay unless you get something you’re going to make more money on. Now don’t get me wrong there’s definately some fraud in CPA offers, but that’s not the focus of this post. What I’m saying is you have thousands of people trying to make money as affiliates but only a few actually are good at it. The same thing is true for people running offers.

Just for fun lets take Payday Loans as an example. This is a high competition niche and there’s a million offers out there for it. I’ve run most of them, at one time or another, at least as a try. With varying payouts from 14$/loan to 56$/loan. And I’ve seen varying conversion rates from .5% to 18%. Now think about this for a second often times people talk about payout, payout, payout. Well payout is only one part of the equation. Conversion combined with payout is what you’re looking for and to be honest most offers landing pages just don’t convert. Then you get to something like payday loans and there’s another variable to the equation, you typically don’t get paid on most offers unless the lead sells on the backside. Now this happens instantly and most affiliates never see this and a lot don’t even know this is happening. Often times you’ll get a nice conversion on the landing page to an application. However the loan doesn’t sell on the backside for some reason which means you don’t get paid. But this is just another variable in the equation.

I’m no PPC pro but I’m starting to run it more and more. Typically what I do, to find offers is run some blackhat traffic to it which is free for me. Then I test all the offers I can find with random split testing. Then after I’ve run enough traffic to it I just go with the best performing offer and move on to PPC and growing a blackhat/greyhat network for it.

Learn what to look for and know what converts and what doesn’t. Study landing page methodology. Look at the big, highly competive niches you hear about because if you’re not good in these niches you die. Then compare that to the offers you’re looking at. Ask yourself would I buy from this page?

If you don’t have simple split testing code here you go. This will just randomly go through your affiliate urls. Then track your offers at your destination for clicks vs. conversions.

<?

$urls = array(
“http://www.affiliateurl1.com”,
“http://www.affiliateurl2.com”,
“http://www.affiliateurl3.com”,
“http://www.affiliateurl4.com”);

$url = $urls[array_rand($urls)];
$destination = “Loation: $url”;
header($destination);

?>

Also if you don’t want to redirect you can just replace that last line with an iframe and remove the destination line.

The iframed version:

<?

$urls = array(
“http://www.affiliateurl1.com”,
“http://www.affiliateurl2.com”,
“http://www.affiliateurl3.com”,
“http://www.affiliateurl4.com”);

$url = $urls[array_rand($urls)];

echo “<meta http-equiv=’refresh’ content=’0; url=$url’>”;

?>