One must agree that for affiliate marketing to be successful, you need an affiliate marketing plan. Most new affiliates seem to rush into the game, quickly pick a product and launch a fast traffic campaign without even thinking about it. Sure, they may hit a home run and make some sales, but chances are they’ll 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 a niche at first
Being too spread out at first is a bad idea. It’s good to focus on a niche at first so that your time and resources can be devoted to dominating that niche. It is much more difficult to master the complexities and nuances of many different markets. Start by understanding a niche, a market first before delving into other niches.
Step 2 – Choose High-Converting, Proven Products
If you’re going to spend a lot of time and even money on marketing campaigns to promote affiliate products, you’ll want to promote products that have been 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 that the product is a proven offer that will generate sales if it sends you targeted traffic.
Step 3: Have a focused traffic generation campaign
Focus on only 3-5 traffic generation sources at first that work. You can test 10-15 traffic sources at first and then narrow it down to the 3-5 you want to focus on. One way to look at this is by using the Pareto principle. The principle states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. So by focusing 80% of your time on the most productive traffic generating resources, you will get the most fruitful results.
Step 4: Optimize your campaigns
Once you have a few campaigns running that promote different products in the same niche, you need to further optimize them to make them more productive. Ways to accomplish this include tweaking and testing your ad copy, testing 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 large, responsive list, there is indeed a lot of money to be had in owning such a list. You may also consider building your own email list for your affiliate campaigns. Just send them to a simple web page with a signup form, collect their details, have the affiliate offer in the back-end, and then send follow-up promotions to your subscribers.
With this plan in place, you’ll never have to get lost when it comes to the big picture again. Focus on each of these 5 steps in your affiliate marketing plan and you too can become a super affiliate!
