Whilst there is a lot of trial and error involved in understanding a market, the good news is that you don’t need to understand all these aspects before you start. By doing, you’ll see things you’ll never see by standing back.
Treat your first few weeks as a training period. Accept that this training period will likely cost you money in the form of bids – but you are buying data cheaply. It need not cost you much, and you may well make a profit, but try not to put pressure on yourself to achieve this goal during the training period. Your first goal is to understand the tool and the PPC environment.
Did you know that a lot of affiliate marketers aim to break even on new campaigns?
Yes, you read that right – break even!
By breaking even, it signals that the area being targeted has potential. Affiliates then refine campaigns until they move from break even to profit. Chances are if a merchant is paying $50 per lead, they know that is costs around $50 for you to get that lead, too.
When choosing a product or service to trial whilst you are learning, look for low payouts – say, $3. Why? It’s far cheaper to make mistakes! Remember, the merchant is signaling that they think they can get the lead for around $3 if they did it themselves.
Your aim is to break even at $3. If you go over – say to $9 – without getting a conversion, you haven’t blown too much money. The same cannot be said if you were targeting a lead that pays out $100!
If you spend $50 on a $3 dollar per lead pay out and have a cost per conversion of $5, you can pause the campaign and examine what went wrong. Were you getting click-thrus, but losing people at the landing page? Your landing page and offer needs work.
Were you receiving few click-thrus? Refine your bidding and ad text. Re-nenable the campaign.
This time around, you may get down to $4 before you get a conversion. Refine, then re-enable.
Down to $3 yet? Great! You’re at break even, and you’ve still spent less than $100 testing a market. Get down below that $3 and you’re making money.
If you can’t get down to break even, even after a lot of tweaking, quit and move on. The market for that product might be so saturated that the margins are virtually non-existent.
Look for sweet spots – areas in which it is easy to break even, and then refine into profit quickly.
Treat your first few weeks as a training period. Accept that this training period will likely cost you money in the form of bids – but you are buying data cheaply. It need not cost you much, and you may well make a profit, but try not to put pressure on yourself to achieve this goal during the training period. Your first goal is to understand the tool and the PPC environment.
Did you know that a lot of affiliate marketers aim to break even on new campaigns?
Yes, you read that right – break even!
By breaking even, it signals that the area being targeted has potential. Affiliates then refine campaigns until they move from break even to profit. Chances are if a merchant is paying $50 per lead, they know that is costs around $50 for you to get that lead, too.
When choosing a product or service to trial whilst you are learning, look for low payouts – say, $3. Why? It’s far cheaper to make mistakes! Remember, the merchant is signaling that they think they can get the lead for around $3 if they did it themselves.
Your aim is to break even at $3. If you go over – say to $9 – without getting a conversion, you haven’t blown too much money. The same cannot be said if you were targeting a lead that pays out $100!
If you spend $50 on a $3 dollar per lead pay out and have a cost per conversion of $5, you can pause the campaign and examine what went wrong. Were you getting click-thrus, but losing people at the landing page? Your landing page and offer needs work.
Were you receiving few click-thrus? Refine your bidding and ad text. Re-nenable the campaign.
This time around, you may get down to $4 before you get a conversion. Refine, then re-enable.
Down to $3 yet? Great! You’re at break even, and you’ve still spent less than $100 testing a market. Get down below that $3 and you’re making money.
If you can’t get down to break even, even after a lot of tweaking, quit and move on. The market for that product might be so saturated that the margins are virtually non-existent.
Look for sweet spots – areas in which it is easy to break even, and then refine into profit quickly.
