TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Affiliate Marketing Update: 3 Months Later

I last posted an update on my own affiliate marketing campaigns exactly 3 months ago, on January 2nd, 2012.

In the post, I mention how I had set 2 new personal records. The first one was hitting 916 leads in a single day, and the second one was generating $1,500 (gross) in a single day.

December 2011 was my best month ever in terms of my affiliate marketing campaigns, however as I mention in the post, things started to die back down on Christmas Eve.

During the 22-day period from December 10, 2011 to December 31, 2011, my campaigns brought in a total of $13,983.18. However, only $3,106.48 of that was actually profit.

Still, that worked out to an average of $155.32 net profit per day, which is most certainly nothing to sneeze at.

So What Happened Since?

A lot.

Trying to cram the first quarter of a year, even if it’s just on my affiliate campaigns, into one post is a challenge, so bare with me here.

It has been a rollercoaster for sure. For your safety, please keep your arms and legs inside the cart at all times.

January 2012

To be honest, it’s a bit difficult to remember the details back this far back, but I’m looking through my income report stats history to refresh my memory.

January started off well. During the first 3 days of the month, I generated $2,038.75.

But then the advertiser of the main offer I was running wasn’t willing to stick at the same payout I had been getting previously. My margins were already somewhat low on the offer, and so I couldn’t continue running my campaigns on that offer.

I tried setting up a few other campaigns, on different offers, but they didn’t pan out. Actually, one of them had good potential, but the advertiser had issues on their end, and they have just never fixed it. It sucks because they had good creative and an awesome landing page.

In January, I also fired up the main AdWords campaign I had been running back when I was only using AdWords. I generated close to $2,000 in January on the campaign, but margins were extremely slim (I think I netted around $150 or so) on that offer.

With the success I saw in December, I hit up an old contact of mine, just to talk some affiliate marketing and see what was new with him. I was surprised to find out that he is now a crazy super affiliate who generates $xx,xxx a day on Facebook. Yes, $xx,xxx a day.

He urged me to try Facebook myself. I was reluctant, though, since I never had any success with it before. But his success with it encouraged me to give it another try, and so I set up a couple of campaigns on it in January.

Unfortunately, they all failed miserably. I’m just too much of a Facebook newbie still.

February 2012

In February I launched a lot of campaigns, using the shotgun approach. That is, running a bunch of campaigns and offers, hoping that one or two will stick.

In fact, I ran traffic to about 25 different offers.

Out of the 25 offers, 24 of them didn’t work. Most did okay, but I’m not looking for okay, I’m looking for great. I don’t want to waste my time optimizing campaigns that have a very low ceiling with no room to scale.

But 1 of those 25 offers did do great, proving the effectiveness of the shotgun approach.

It did great on two sources of traffic, and had a lot of potential. I did around $500 in the first couple days on the offer, but then had to pause while the advertiser looked at quality.

In February I also spent a lot of time looking for alternative traffic sources. In particular, I looked for lesser known, smaller networks, with the hope that they wouldn’t be completely saturated by big-brand advertisers. I probably ended up signing up to at least a dozen different traffic sources, depositing on them all, and testing them out.

They pretty much all sucked. In the majority of cases, their prices were rather ludicrous. But it’s still good to get out there and try new things – at least now I know which certain traffic sources are horrible so that I can avoid them in the future.

All in all, February was really one giant testing month. I tested a lot of new traffic sources and a ton of campaigns. Nothing really showed any potential save for that one offer which I was still waiting to hear back on in terms of my traffic quality.

March 2012

March was an extremely busy month.

In fact, the main reason I had been so slow in getting posts up in March was due to all the time I was spending on my campaigns.

When I woke up in the morning, made my coffee, and sat down at my computer, the first thing I would do would be to work on my affiliate marketing campaigns for 2-3 hours. I would also constantly check my stats throughout the day either on my computer or on my phone.

The month started off well. In the first week, I heard about an offer that was doing really well. I didn’t really want to run it because it didn’t look like the most appealing offer in the world, but was encouraged to try it as others were seeing enormous success with it.

So I decided to give it a try, as I have absolutely no problem throwing $50-$75 away to test an offer. It’s enough to know if an offer will work or not, and in the long run, that is money well spent, as it only takes one good offer to make up for all the bad ones.

It turned out that the offer was, in fact, awesome. The first day I ran it, I generated $800 on the offer. It wasn’t the best paying offer, but converted like mad. Unfortunately, I was only able to run it for a few days before the offer was stopped.

I kept waiting and hoping for it to come back, but quickly gave up hope as it didn’t look like it was going to.

The good news is that the offer I had been running in February (the one that I did around $500 on before it was paused so that the advertiser could check its quality) came back, albeit at a lower payout. It was a good offer, but had a lot of capping issues, meaning that I was only able to send in so much traffic to the offer. If I wasn’t limited in that regard, I could have probably sent in $1,000-$1,500 per day to the offer.

I ran that offer for the majority of the month, although limited by the cap, and ended up sending in a total of $3,166.40 to it for the month.

Unfortunately, at the end of the month the offer was taken down and it likely will never be back .

When one door closes, another one opens.

While that $3K offer was gone, the good news was that the offer I had run earlier on in the month (the one that I did $800 with on the first day), miraculously came back. I was surprised, but was ready for this moment just in case it did come back. Within a couple of minutes of hearing that it was back, I immediately flicked the switch on my traffic back on and had already sent in my first lead!

On March 30th I generated a total of $1,191.85, and on March 31st I hit $1,388.95.

This includes all of my campaigns (I’m always running a number of things these days), but the majority was from that one offer.

Unfortunately, the opportunity didn’t last long, and the offer was once again paused. Who knows if it will ever come back. It just goes to show how important it is to grasp an opportunity while you can; if I didn’t immediately jump on the offer and decided to wait a few days to get in on it, I would have completely missed out on thousands of dollars.

Sometime in the 3rd week of March I paused my AdWords campaigns for the offer they were targeting. Any miniscule margin the offer was making all but subsided, and I was breaking even at best.

All in all, for March I ended up sending in over a quarter million clicks, nearly 9,000 leads, totalling over $11,000.

Now that I’m beginning to become a little bit more experienced and somewhat successful in affiliate marketing, I have a bunch of posts planned in which I’ll share tips, techniques, and strategies I’ve learned from my own campaigns.

Stay tuned, as they’ll be coming soon, and there’ll be a lot of them.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately!