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Setting Up Your Affiliate Marketing Business and Building Your First Campaign
It is possible to succeed with affiliate marketing on a part-time basis or as a full-time job, but either way, you will be most successful if you treat it like a serious, formal business. You don’t have to hire an accountant or retain a lawyer on the first day, but you should not wait long after your first successes before following expert advice about how to structure your company legally and financially. Unless you have special training, those decisions should be made with the help of professionals.
Your job should be to focus on the work that is central to your business:
First, you’ll need to set up a web hosting account for your web sites. There are many providers out there, but you should ensure the one you pick has a minimum of PHP 5.2, MySQL 5.0, permission to set up cron jobs, and, ideally, cPanel. It is possible to expand or transfer to other hosting accounts later, so to begin with it is not necessary to get a dedicated server. A smaller package will do.
Next, even if you hope to use other traffic types mainly, you should sign up for accounts with the three main search engines.
Google Adwords Yahoo Search Marketing Microsoft AdCenter
Each system is a little different, but part of the signup procedures involves a brief tour during which you set up your first campaign. Unless you have a page and offer ready to go, enter any information you like and then pause the campaigns. It is worth becoming familiar with all three systems so that fundamental user interface questions don’t confuse you when setting up an already demanding campaign.
At this point you may be ready to purchase one or more domain names to direct surfers to your sites. You can gain a measure of advantage by picking domain names that help to sell surfers on your offers though, and that will require some setup and planning. That is, it is alright to use a generic (yourname-offers.com) or nonsense (4txlks8.com) domain name, but you can improve consumer confidence if you buy a domain name with some positive relation to your offers and your keywords. It can’t hurt to have a short, memorable domain name, although competition for those is higher. So if you have a plan and know what type of site you want to build, what offers you’d like to run, go ahead and buy a domain name, either at a domain name vendor such as Godaddy or Namecheap, or from your own hosting company (shop around – prices may vary). You may want to wait until you’ve selected some offers to promote and then make your domain name purchase in conjunction with your site design.
Now you have a way to promote offers (Pay-Per-Click via search engines) and you have a spot to host your websites. The next thing you’ll want to do is to pick one or more offers to promote. Just log in to your Affiliate Fleet account and go to the Offers section. Once you’ve settled on an offer (or possibly several related offers) you must form a promotion plan. The offer information page for each offer will contain a unique tracking link that you must use as the link for your customers to click through to the merchant’s offer page. Using this link enables Affiliate Fleet’s tracking system to credit you properly for any commissions as you earn them.
A very common, straightforward, and effective promotion method is to build a site around the offer you pick and then send pay-per-click traffic there. The web site should be designed with three things in mind. First, you only get paid when a customer converts (completes an offer), so the site must do everything possible to encourage visitors to click your affiliate link and proceed with the offer. Second, for some types of traffic, the big three search engines in particular, there are content guidelines and requirements for advertisers. The goal of these rules is typically to ensure a good “experience” for users of the search engines. The content of the landing page (page on the site where visitors land when they click your ad) should be as relevant as possible to the keywords used in the search. Someone who types in “baby carriages” is not expecting to encounter ads for snake charming. The third consideration is related to the second. Engaging in fraud is a big no-no. Not only will the search engines give you trouble for this, so might the network, merchant, customers and government agencies. Do not make unfounded or unproved claims about products. Search engines routinely flag certain words for review, such as “best,” “greatest,” etc. The perfect site for this purpose contains a good amount of true information about the product, but is designed to guide the visitor to obey a call to action (click here and fill out the orderform on the next page).
Finally you are ready to launch your campaign. You have an affiliate link to your offer on a website that will encourage conversions set up on the server of your hosting company. Your domain name is registered and properly set up so that it leads to your website. Possibly you have even installed tracking software to independently monitor your progress. Now you can go back to any of the search engines you enrolled with, or perhaps some other traffic source and follow their procedures to set up a campaign sending traffic to your page.
Sidebar:
The Domain Name System (DNS) offers s common registry associating the site name you prefer with the IP of the actual machine serving the pages of your website. For example, www.example.com translates to 208.77.188.166. When you “buy” a domain name, you are just paying a fee to enter and maintain that name to IP relationship in the DNS database for whatever period you determine.
Sidebar:
The network tracks any traffic that comes to it via affiliate links in order to maintain statistics and, in the case of conversions, to calculate commissions. If so, why is it important for you as an affiliate to establish some type of tracking as well? The simple answer is: testing. It is possible to set up a quick webpage containing an affiliate link to an offer and run a campaign that way, only monitoring events via Affiliate Fleet’s internal tracker. In order to adjust your web page, to tune it so that the offer converts better you need some way to evaluate, record, and compare changes. Setting up your own tracking system allows you to do this and to easily set up rotations, too. An independent tracker, like Prosper 202 will allow you to arrange and monitor banner ads on your site so that a given banner cycles through several ad designs and you can monitor which one is most effective. By altering one detail of the ad at a time and watching the statistics, you can find the ad that converts best for a given offer. Tweaking design, fonts, and colors can have a strong impact on sales.
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