Change Your Thinking to Profit in 2013
One of the most common questions I get from our publisher partners revolves around testing offers.
What budget do I need ?
What CPC to start with?
Where to buy cheap traffic?
My answer is ALWAYS the same… and you’re not going to like it. My answer is “It depends…”
Lots of factors can effect the answer to these questions including, how much can you afford to test, how many creatives are you testing, how many traffic sources, are you rotating offers from various networks and more!
Let me explain to you how I view affiliate marketing and hopefully this will change your thought process and help you succeed in 2013.
Thought 1
Digital media sold is just like any other marketplace. There are sellers and buyers. The more buyers buying from a certain sellers the more competitive the environment. The more people competing the more likely that the price is going to be as high as it can be making it difficult for new entrants.
Thought 2
Media buying affiliates job is to find market inefficiencies. With all the talk of RTB, SSP, DSP and other technologies designed to help the market find more efficient pricing there is still huge inefficiencies especially in mobile. Your job is to find those inefficiencies and make profit on the spread, not to come up with creative non-compliant strategies to scam a profit margin.
Thought 3
All you need to do is find traffic that generates you a higher EPC than your CPC. It is really that simple! All these other factors like Click Loss, LPs, Conversion Rates, etc are just indicators but at the end of the day you want to generate more revenue than your ad spend. I don’t care if the traffic costs .15 CPC and you’re generating .20 EPC or traffic is .02 CPC and you’re generating .03 EPC.
Thought 4
You need to become traffic and offer ambiguous. What I mean is let go of your assumptions like “I run dating” or “I only do push” your job is to find traffic and plug in whatever hot offers are around to find what generates you profit. For example if traffic source A doesn’t back out for your offer then keep plugging in offers until you find out what will make you money, and vice versa with offer, plug different traffic to see what sticks.
Affiliate marketing is an arbitrage business and doesn’t need to be complicated with things like ad copy, landing pages, tracking etc. At the end of the day just find traffic that backs out to the offers you’re working with and watch your profits grow in 2013!
