One should agree that for affiliate marketing success to happen, you need an affiliate marketing plan. Most new affiliates seem rush into the game, quickly pick a product, and throw together a quick traffic campaign without even thinking about it. Sure, they may hit upon a home run and make some sales, but more likely than not, they are going to crash and burn. Remember the old adage “fail to plan and plan to fail?” Make no mistake, having an affiliate marketing plan is better than not having one.
To avoid the fate of perpetual failure, here is your 5-step affiliate marketing plan for wild success:
Step 1: Focus On One Niche In The Beginning
Being spread out too thin in the beginning is a bad idea. It is good to focus on one niche at the start so your time and resources can be spent mastering that niche. It is far harder to master the intricacies and nuances of many different markets. Start out by understand one niche, one market first before delving into other niches.
Step 2: Choose Proven, High-Converting Products
If you are going to spend a lot of time and even money on marketing campaigns to promote affiliate products, you will want to promote products that are proven to convert well. This could mean promoting products that many other affiliates are promoting. However, if many affiliates are promoting the same product, it means the product is a proven offer that will bring in the sales if you send targeted traffic to it.
Step 3: Have A Focused Traffic Generation Campaign
Focus on just 3 to 5 traffic generation sources in the beginning that work. At the start, you can test 10-15 traffic sources, and then whittle them down to the 3-5 you want to focus on. A way to look at this is by using the Pareto principle. The principle states that 80% of the effects arrive from 20% of the causes. So by focusing 80% of your time on the most productive traffic generation resources, you will get the most fruitful results.
Step 4: Optimize Your Campaigns
Once you have a few campaigns running that are promoting different products in the same niche, you should optimize them further so they are more productive. Ways to achieve this include tweaking and testing your ad copy, trying out different products to promote and testing new sources of traffic.
Step 5: Build Your Email List
One of the most popular truisms in Internet marketing is “the money is in the list”. If you have a big and responsive list, there is indeed a lot of money from possessing such a list. You can consider building your own email list as well for your affiliate campaigns. Just send them to a simple web page with an opt-in form, collect their details, have the affiliate offer on the back-end and then send follow-up promotions to your subscribers.
With this plan in place, you never have to get lost again as far as the big picture goes. Focus on each of these 5 steps in your affiliate marketing plan and you can become a super affiliate too!
