Hello, there!

Being an Affiliate Manager, I was to watch the same picture all the time: some of the beginners in Affiliate Marketing succeeded, others failed. Some of the neophytes reached their first payments from a network easily; others got disappointed having not received even a minimum payment.

Such disappointed marketers become those ones who claim that there is no money in CPA-marketing.

Most of them failed because of a critically simple mistake – they had chosen a wrong offer. Let me explain: most of the offers in CPA look similar to a beginner. A newbie doesn’t know that two equal and similar offers may perform principally different conversion rates being promoted equally (e.g. at the same sources of traffic). I mean, the beginner does not even suspect, that behind the offer is an advertiser with his own troubles, such as conditions, terms, landing-pages, tracking software, and so on. These troubles influence real conversion rates very much.

So, one group of newbie affiliate marketers is lucky to choose a good offer – they reach their first positive results quickly and easily. The other group of neophytes fails, as they are not lucky with the offer.

To succeed in Affiliate Marketing, one should be choosing an offer very carefully. You need to analyze a lot of stuff not to make a mistake.

Read the following step-by-step manual in order not to fail when choosing an offer.

1. Ask your AM for detailed descriptions of the network’s offers. Ask him to tell you about the most popular offers at the moment. Request the list of the most usable actual offers, not a top-list of them.

Every Affiliate-Manager has the access to overall statistics: the amount of leads an offer daily receives, the real conversion rates, the real EPC and other values.

Most networks form their lists of top offers according to EPC of the offers. In most cases, the number of leads delivered to an offer is not counted. That is why such TOP lists are far away from reality and some of the offers in the lists may not be profitable in fact. By the way, AdCombo usually make their TOP list of offers according to all the metrics the offer has. 

What is more, there is one more metric you should pay attention at in AdCombo. It is the approval rate – a percent value demonstrating an average rate of conversion from delivered leads into real sales. As you know only real sales are to be paid for at the model “Cash-on-Delivery”.

2. Stay informed by the affiliate manager with the real conversion rates (ratio), the real EPC and the amount of the leads received by an offer on a daily basis. Also, request the information about the offer’s age and the advertiser’s payment discipline (if he pays in time).

Your AM sometimes will not disclose the exact number of the leads, but he may provide you with approximate information such as 100+ / 500+ / 1000+ / 10k+ leads daily. The more conversions an offer has – the better it works. And this is a good idea to try with a 10k+ offer.

In case if an offer has pretty good statistics (adequate EPC and conversion rates, high volume of leads, moreover, the offer stays in the network quite a long time), that means somebody is making good money on the offer, and you can make money on it as well. Such offers are a good to start with.

Sometimes AM denies disclosing any information about the offer. Several reasons may cause this, but generally they refuse to give any information because they have none. It happens when nobody works with the offer and there are wooden nulls in statistics. Never mind, you’d better skip such an offer and search for a better one.

3. Ask your AM to give you any information about the advertiser: for how long the advertiser collaborates with the network, how many offers he has and what his payment discipline is.

If the network promotes its own offer – you may send the traffic to it without worries. If the network resells an offer of another network – you’d better forget about it once and for all. If there are extra parties in the relationship – the quality of an offer is extremely low.

Often, affiliate managers send the publishers to new offers without any statistics and adequate feedback from an advertiser. Newbies are not advised to work with that kind of offers.

4. Lay aside your own expectations when you are working with traffic. Good offer conversion is not only beautiful and well-structured landing page. It depends on many factors which are inconsistent with ordinary people’s usual idea of a good advertisement. Numbers speak louder than words.

Landing pages and offers can be flawless, but offer’s performance quality (leads’ tracking, leads’ recording, call-center’s efficiency, content) is poor. All these factors relate to an advertisers and affiliate networks. Affiliate themselves cannot influence them anyway, although they suffer the most.

5. Start working with the light offers, where conversion is high, and the lead costs less than 10$. Try to work with those offers where the result can be seen immediately.

Getting the results when you work with the topics such as microcredits and insurance takes some time. In this connection, an affiliate cannot assess his own quality of work until he gets all the information about the traffic. A different matter is offers which pay for the software installation, applications’ downloading (with no condition concerning the return of the attracted user), gift cards’ give away and etc.

Simple example of using the same offer from different advertisers:

• A large-size advertiser promotes offer with the help of e-mail submits in order to enlarge the amount of subscribers. The advertiser accepts only unique addresses, filters suspicious e-mails and doesn’t pay for doubles. For all the offers there is one and the same list (base) of subscribers. If one e-mail made it into the base relating only to one offer, the conversion on all other offers won’t be taken into consideration. An advertiser has managed to get large base operating for so long time.

• An advertiser that launches new product/service and arranges new base list of subscribers. All the e-mails are accepted, and there is only one condition: the lead should be done within needed geo.

Both of offers will have the same landing pages and the same conversion conditions (e-mail and submit). At first sight, a newbie will consider these two offers as completely the same. The main difference would be:

Using the first one it will be difficult even for a mature affiliate to make money.

Using the second one even an amateur affiliate will be able to get leads.

In conclusion:

The newbie’s success at least 50% depends on the good choice of an offer. I am not joking, 50% – the offer itself, 50% – the right scheme and the traffic source.

If you have chosen the wrong offer – all you efforts will be pointless. In order not to fail – ALWAYS, in 100% cases you should specify all the information concerning the offer before you start sending the traffic to it. Follow these simple rules and you are not going to fail that much. And remember, affiliate marketing is all about ups and downs. There is no way to get 100% profit every time. The strongest survive. So be strong.

Bye.