HELP : Newbie Starting out and Wants Advice

[toptips]

I'm looking for some advice BEFORE I start to nut out the problems with my plan of attack. I have done research so I am not coming into this blind but I have no experience with any of this.

Here is my Business Plan for Affiliate Marketing.

Offer Type
- What :Sales of Information Products
- Why : Easy to find offers. Commissions range between $2 and $20. Easiest to understand.

Affiliate Networks:
- What : I have been accepted to WarriorPlus.
- Why : Easy for Newbies to sign up to.
- Still to do : Sign up for other affiliate networks

Traffic Source:
- What : CPC Paid advertising. Most likely Bing.
- Why : The big players in the industry making lots of money are generally using CPC, PPV or CPM models. I don't have the experience to do PPV or CPM as my landing pages will generally be crap to start off. So CPC can be used to quickly collect data and optimise the landing pages.

VPS :
- What : DigitalOcean seem to have a good VPS server for $20 a month.
- Why : You need a VPS for tracking software and website hosting. They offer a by the hour model as well which could be useful to shutdown when not testing campaigns.

Steps to complete
- Choose An actual offer to sell
- Signup to VPS
- Install Database
- Install webserver
- Install Wordpress
- Install Tracking Software
- Sign up to CPC network (Bing?)
- Develop landing pages
- Research Demographics (possibly use facebook for this)
- Create campaign
- Analyse Traffic
- Optimise campaign


- How is optimising useful on free traffic ? I didn't go down the free traffic path because it takes too long to generate and it doesn't seem like the data from that would be useful for ramping up your traffic.

- I get the impression with CPC advertising you really need to convert your clicks. If you are promoting something which generates $2.00 in commission and your click cost is $0.20 then you need to be selling at least to 10% of your traffic in order to break even. But if you are promoting something that generates $20 in commission then you only need to sell to 1% of the same traffic. Does anyone have some general rules about minimum click cost to commission percentages to target ?

- I know there is direct linking and landing pages. Why would you not use the direct links? I assume that Bing/google does not allow direct linking anyway so you need to go to a landing page. But why else should you send traffic to a landing page first? I assume to allow testing of different offers, collect email addresses, etc.


- Optimising campaigns is where the art of the whole CPC affiliate process is. Does anyone have any general guidelines on how much to send to an offer before optimising? I have heard that about 3 times the offer price should be used before analysing the campaign data. If there are no sales in that time then the campaign is a bust.

I intend to get this all moving in the next day or so. Any answers to my questions would be great.

 

[Ink57]

The only way you can tell if it's profitable for you is to figure out three things.
Average revenue per visitor minus Advertising Cost per Visitor equals Average Gross Margin per Visitor.
Campaign Costs divided by (Impressions multiplied by Click-through rate) equals Advertising Cost per Visitor
Conversion rate multiplied average sale per purchase equals average revenue per visitor

Then put it together (Conversion rate multiplied by Average sale per purchase) minus (Campaign Costs divided by (Impressions multiplied by click-through rate)) will equal your Average Gross Margin per Visitor.

Depending on your numbers, it might be profitable if your two dollar item sells a really well. But you might need to add an item with a higher commissions. Typically, there should be three ranges of commissions to optimized all the customers.

The reason you have to be careful with links is because it will cause trouble with your AdSense account, if you have one. It affects how Google finds your website and rates it.