If you’ve ever spoken to me via social media sites or via Instant Messaging for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m not the type of person to say one method is better than the other.  Unfortunately in this business, certain methods work for some people, while completely different methods work for others.  There is no clear cut solution or any clear cut path to follow in order to succeed in affiliate marketing.

However, I received an email about two weeks ago with a very specific question about split testing.  I responded to the person with the same advice I’m about to talk about in this blog post.  The email asked…

I know split testing is important, in fact, from what I understand it may be the single most important aspect I can do in affiliate marketing to influence the scaling process of my campaigns.  However, I’ve seen several methods for split testing and I was wondering which method worked best.  Some sites I’ve read say that you should split test two versions of whatever your testing at the same time, while others suggest split testing one type one day and then another the next day.  Which method do you feel would have the greatest impact on my split testing efforts?

Now, when I started split testing, I always used the A/B method of split testing which means that you split test two variations at the exact same time giving both equal exposure.  In fact, it’s not something I have even really thought about thus my reason for never writing a blog post about it before now.  However, after thinking about it, I felt that it was worthy of a blog post because I do believe there is a very clear cut way of doing it that will yield the best results!

The other, most common, method you see affiliates use is the AB split testing method.  The only difference between the two is that with the A/B method you are split testing both things at the same exact time giving them both equal exposure.  With the AB method you are split testing them at different times, or days.  For example, you may split test a landing page on Monday, document the results, and then put up a new landing page on Tuesday, compare the results and pick the best one.

The downside with the AB split testing model is that unfortunately data can be very different on different days and even on the same day but morning vs. evening.  Some campaigns do really well during the evenings, but horrible during the mornings, if you are running one page in the morning and one in the evening, your better landing page may actually be the one that you are running in the mornings but because conversions suck for your niche in the mornings, it looks like your landing page doesn’t do well at all.

However, if you are using the A/B method you know that both items you are split testing are getting the same exact data.  They are sharing visitors equally and both are being displayed both in the morning, afternoon, and evening.  This insures that you aren’t receiving data that is skewed because of changes in the visitors you receive throughout the day.

Now, as I said in the opening paragraphs of this blog post, not every method works best for everyone.  There is one other method that I’ve found works decent and that is the ABAB method.

This works just like the AB method, but there is one major difference.  You split test landing page one on Monday, then landing page two on Tuesday, however, you then continue on giving each one more time.  So you’d split test landing page one on Wednesday for the second time, and then split test landing page two on Thursday for a second time.

Personally I still don’t believe this is the best method and when compared with the A/B split testing method, I’m not sure why you’d choose it, however, there are some that believe that the ABAB method is the best choice.  In fact, it is a common way of split testing in other fields like Pyschology.  These fields use the ABAB method for most experiments.

Ultimately the choice is yours, however, I’d highly recommend going with the A/B method or at the very least the ABAB method.  Using the AB method is in my opinion simply being lazy and it will impact your business in a very negative way!

A question I received a lot after writing that blog post was how you could tell what sites your ads were showing up on while running on the content network.  The reason so many people are curious about this, is because if there is a certain site that your ad is showing up like crazy on, yet you aren’t receiving any conversions, it will suck your account dry!

Now personally, I only mess with the content network with Google, so I’m only familiar with how to get to it from within their interface, however, I’m sure the basic procedure is the same on most networks if they offer the feature.

First, you need to log in to your Google Adwords account.  After you have logged in, you need to click on the Reporting Tab, then click on Reports.

Next, click on Create a New Report.

Going off subject for a minute, this next screen will allow you to select from a ton of a different reports that you can run, each on has a small description as to the info you’ll receive.  I’d definitely recommend checking out some of the other reports, but since this post is specifically about finding sites your ads are running on when using the content network, lets move on…

If you scroll down just a touch, you’ll notice that one of the radio buttons says Placement Performance.  Click on the radio button next to Placement Performance.

There are a ton of options now that you can select like level of detail, date range, etc.  Pretty self explanatory stuff, so I won’t go in to detail on all the settings.  If you want more details on all the different settings and stuff you can visit Google’s page about Placement Performance Report Help.

Once you finish editing the settings, you’ll come to the last section which is called Templates, Scheduling, and Email.  This place simply allows you to name your report, save the report as a template for running it again later, setting the report to run automatically every so often, etc.

Once you finish that last section, click on Create Report and voila your done!

After you click on Create Report, it will take you back to the Reports Tab Section within your account.  If can take several minutes for your report to be processed.  You can either wait or feel free to move around your account till it’s finished.  It won’t affect it if you leave the page.

After it’s finished the name of the report (whatever you named it in the last section) will become a link and you simply click on the link and you’ll see all the domains/urls that your ads have appeared on.

What’s the Difference?

One of the first questions I get all the time is what is the difference between the search network and the content network, so real quick, the difference between the two is that when you are strictly bidding on the search network, your ads show up only on search pages, which could also include search results of partners that the search engine may have.  When you are bidding on the content network, you ads may show up for any site that is signed up for their ad program and have ads on their websites.  If you are bidding on an ad for car parts, your ad may show up on a website about cars.  If you are bidding on the search network, you ads would only show up for keywords done about cars on the search engine.

Search Network

When running your ads on the search network, which is the most talked about method on this site, you are bidding on groups of keywords and when those keywords are typed into let’s say Google, your ads show up in the results.

So with the search network you are dealing with keywords, bid prices, and figuring out which keywords convert well.

Content Network

When you are running your ads on the content network, you are bidding on keywords that are related to your niche, but your ads will show up on websites that pertain to those keywords as per the example I gave above.  If you are bidding on keywords about car parts, your ad may show up on a website about cars.

With the content network, you are still dealing with keywords, but you’re also dealing with finding out which websites are converting really well and which ones aren’t, then excluding the websites that aren’t.  So it takes a bit more work, and you have no control where the ads are shown, so if the owner of the website changes these ads around, it could make a site that does great, go really bad.

Running Both?

Most affiliates start off running one or the other, but eventually, most affiliates start using both methods as a way of getting traffic to their affiliates sites, especially once they get a campaign that is doing well and their trying to scale it out.  They may get stuck on one or the other so try out the other in order to increase their traffic.

Personally, I recommend using both as both can be extremely profitable if done right, and both can drive huge amounts of traffic to your affiliates sites.  I know the search network is favored more, but honestly, I’ve seen the content network perform pretty consistently for me as well and sometimes even better in certain niches.  So by running just one or the other, you jeopardize your earning potential.

One Important Note:

This article isn’t really an article detailing exactly how to go about doing the content network, although if enough interest is expressed in the comments, I may write an entire article detailing how to use the content network, however, there is one very important point that I want to make to those that may be thinking about running both the search network and the content network.

The important point is that if you choose to run both, you need to make sure you create two separate campaigns.  One campaign that only runs on the search network, and one campaign that only runs on the content network.  These two networks are completely different and require totally different things in order for them to work.

In fact, most of the times, I even run separate domains and landing pages for my content network stuff and search network stuff.

Bottom Line:

If you’re not using both methods to drive traffic you’re really losing out!  They are both excellent methods of driving traffic, and I honestly don’t think you should only pick one, sure it’s more work working with both the search and content network, but it’s so worth it!

Affiliate Marketing is not easy to get started in, in fact, it’s actually quite difficult for most people.  Of course, there are those rare occasions where someone launched a campaign and see immediate positive results…(like me )  However, this is very few and far in between.  Most people start off losing money, that’s just me being honest my friends!

However, if you are serious about doing this and making a living by working from home online, then you can’t quit.  If you truly are passionate about affiliate marketing then again, don’t quit!

This business changes rapidly, in fact pretty much any online type business does, but it seems that daily there is something crazy going on in the affiliate marketing space.  You took all the time to learn, read, etc about affiliate marketing and if you “take a break” you are going to throw that all away.

Now I’m not saying if you run out of money to just keep charging away, but don’t stop reading, studying niches, etc.  Why?  Because if you do, you’ll come back later only to realize that you’re basically starting from scratch!  I’m not kidding, that’s how fast things can change in this field.  Of course, you may still remember the basics, but that’s about it.

There are new types of landing pages, new techniques, new search engine requirements, etc that don’t stop changing and evolving while you’re “taking a break” from affiliate marketing and when you come back it will suck having to relearn how to do affiliate marketing…

I’ve seen it time and time again and in fact one of the reasons for this post is because I just had someone that emailed me about a one on one counseling session and they had done just that and I decided to blog about it.  And the crazy thing is, it’s not something new, I’ve heard people tell me this over and over that have come to me for advice or counseling.

The bottom line is, even if you go broke and can’t run a campaign, keep up on what’s going on in affiliate marketing at all times…that is if you even think for a moment that you may try it again when you get some more money!

Anyways, while this won’t be an article that really lists tons of helpful advice, or give you a long list about some great things you can do in Bing, I would like to point out a thing I’ve been noticing with my own affiliate stuff lately…

The amount of traffic that I’m receiving from using the MSN Adcenter is growing and it’s particularly growing on with Bing.  It seems that more and more people are using Bing and the conversion rates for me are definitely higher on Bing than on both Google and Yahoo.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see my traffic coming from Bing continuing to grow in these last couple months and I really feel the need to blog about this and tell you guys, that if you’re not using Bing and you’re just promoting your stuff on Yahoo and Google, then you’re missing out on some great opportunities.

Of course I’m not saying that Bing is going to take over either of the other two search engines anytime soon in terms of volume and traffic, but I am saying that they are growing and getting in early in this business seems to never let me down!

I’d definitely recommend checking them out!  If you have any tips or experiences with Bing that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Too many affiliates are focused way too intensely on Google and it isn’t even their fault!  It’s our fault!  The so-called gurus of affiliate marketing…  We push and push and push Google Adwords and we are always talking about them, we talk about how big they are, how they control ~80% of the search market, our latest Google slaps, and more!  It seems like there is always something to say about the giant we all call Google.  However, even though they are the biggest and are extremely important to your business as an affiliate marketer, for some people (like myself) they aren’t even where most of their money comes from!  If Google was to go bankrupt tomorrow (just go with me on this…) I would still be okay!  Would you?

Another interesting fact about Google, is that out of the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Microsoft) they don’t even have the best traffic!  According to a post I was reading on TechCrunch, Bing users are twice as likely to click on an ad then Google users!

There are so many different companies and opportunities to drive traffic to your affiliate sites that it can literally drive you crazy trying to figure out all the ways!  Hopefully this post can give you a couple ideas that you may not have thought of and can help you break the curse of having all your eggs in one Google!

Search Engines Besides Google

There are several search engines besides Google.  The two most talked about after Google is Yahoo Search, and Microsoft Bing (formally known as live.com).  However, there are even more sites, now I must say that as you move away from the top three, things can get a little more tricky and requires a lot more patience, split testing, and time to get them right…and sometimes you never can get them to work for you!

Just to name a few of the other search engines that I’ve had success with in some niches are as follows…

• Ask
• 7Search
• Looksmart

Ad Buys

Ad buys are basically when you do some searches in a search engine for terms relating to your niche, then you go to some of the top organic results and see if they offer advertising on their sites and buy direct from them instead of through a company.

There are plenty of benefits to ad buys, first off, you can typically get the advertisements very cheap and get some very decent traffic if you keep your eyes open and do enough digging!  Secondly, and this is purely from personal statisitics, but I’ve always had higher CTR’s and higher Conversion Rates when I do Ad Buys directly instead of using content networks to do it all.  Not saying that I don’t use the content networks and that they don’t bring in some niche bling!

However, one of the big downfalls to Ad Buys is that it can take a lot of testing and money to find sites that actually produce results and it can take a ton of time doing it if you aren’t careful!  Although, it does become easier to spot good deals and websites the more you do it, so the time thing kinda pays off if you stick it out!

PPV (Pay Per View)

Another method that isn’t talked about as much, but can produce some great results is PPV aka Pay Per View.  Basically PPV is adaware, which means that the person that’s gonna see your ad, downloaded a program that was free that is supported by ads.  I could write a piece about this here, however, Bryn from Bryn.me did a great writeup about PPV and what it’s all about and he even listed some of the companies he uses.  Instead of just rehashing his stuff, or writing up my own long thing on this, I’ll instead point you to his post on pay per view advertising!

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is basically where you write articles that you end up submitting to article directories that either A.) include links to your affiliate offer directly or B.) links to an affiliate website you have promoting an offer.  The article you would write would be about the niche that you’re promoting an offer for, you’d stick in a couple of links to your affiliate site, and submit it to some article directories.  This is extremely popular with BANS (Build a Niche Store) sites, however, I’ve seen it work and I’ve personally used it with several other type of affiliate stuff!

Again, since I’m just trying to give you guys a quick description of all the possibilities out there, instead of talking too much on this one subject, I’ll point you to a post about article directories and article marketing from a friend of mine named Alan, from Affiliate Confessions.  Now, in this post he is using the example of a BANS store as I stated before, however as I said, I’ve seen article marketing used in a lot more ways then just for BANS stores.

Mobile Applications

One of the more recent ways we are seeing affiliate offers being promoted is by companies that create an application for a mobile phone like the Palm Pre, the iPhone, the HTC Touch, etc.  They are building applications around a certain niche, let’s say an application that has recipes for cooking and such and then they are promoting cookbook offers, learn to cook membership sites, etc…

This isn’t something that I’ve had time to fool with yet, however, I have two friends that have released free applications for mobile phones and they have both done fairly decent with doing so.  Do realize however that this is a much newer form of advertising affiliate offers, and there isn’t a ton of data out yet, so it’s a ton of trial and error, however, that’s almost always the perfect time to make it big with a new traffic source if you’re willing to put in the time, money investment, and have the knowledge to figure it all out!

Ending Statement

So, above are just a couple ways besides the normal traditional methods that I’m sure you’ve read about a hundred times and hopefully you’ll be able to use one of them to spark something new in your mind that can get you going in the right direction!  There are so many ways to advertise affiliates offers, and I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg, so make sure you keep looking for new opportunities and you’re sure to do fine in this industry!

First let me start off with the biggest pitfall that most affiliates fall prey to when it comes to offers that affiliates are promoting…  They quit testing new offers!

Affiliates find an offer that’s working, working well in fact, and they immediately stop testing new offers within their niche.  The reason for this is actually quite simple, they are afraid that they’ll find an offer that converts worse than the one they are using… and a worse converting offer means they lose money!!!

First, let me explain why it’s worth losing a little bit of money now or taking a chunk of your traffic and split testing an offer that may actually convert worse, sometimes…. a lot worse!

The bottom line is that things in this industry change, and they change fast!  Offers come and go and great converting offers sometimes become horrible converting offers.  This can be caused by several different factors, including but not limited to, too many affiliates pushing the offer (as an offer converts really well, more and more affiliates find out about that offer!), the advertiser changes their landing page too drastically, or other advertisers start promoting something better than what offer you’re running is!

So what do you do?  How can you test other offers without losing too much money?  I have to be honest, the main way is going to sound soo simple, in fact, many of you may simply be like “Duh!”, why didn’t I think of that, but seriously it’s not your fault!

Don’t split test 50/50 on your offers!  I know this is something that is drilled into affiliates heads from just about every blogger out there including myself, as it works for most stuff, however, there really isn’t much of a need to split test your traffic 50/50 to test out a new offer.  Instead, maybe try an 80/20 split, sending 80 percent of your traffic to the offer that you know converts well while only sending 20 percent to the new offer.

Secondly, don’t split test more than two offers at a time!  The more offers you’re trying to test at a time, the more you’ll have to split up your traffic in order to get a good read on each offer!

Thirdly, keep a close eye on the new offers, as soon as you feel you have enough data (clicks/leads) that have come in to get a good reading at how the offer converts, then move on!

Lastly, Talk to your affiliate managers!  Most networks have the average conversion rate of what an offer gets across the entire network, while this will change person to person, it can at least give you a starting point as to what offers to split test first!

I know these sound like some easy tips, and for my more advance readers, sorry, but I get tons of emails a day asking me how to properly split test offers, so I thought I should write up a little article on how!

At first when I started mentoring and consulting individuals, I thought to myself, well maybe they just don’t realize how important split testing is, but than I realized that just about every single affiliate blog out there talks about split testing ALL THE TIME!  In fact, I’ve talked about it in depth several times on this blog and touching on each aspect of split testing, whether it’s split testing landing pages, or split testing ads, split testing offers and networks, or whatever!

I’ve explained in these posts, why you need to do it, how extremely important it is, and what types of benefits it will have on your campaigns, in fact so have a ton of other bloggers like Chad from CDF Networks in which he wrote a post entitled Split Test Everything!  Jonathan Volk wrote a post on Increasing Landing Page Conversions where he talks about split testing and it’s benefits and why you need to be doing it!

I could go on and on with posts all over the internet that talk about split testing, yet there isn’t a need for me to, simply  go to any affiliate blog and type in split testing, you’ll see that it’s a subject that is talked about all the time, yet very few affiliates seem to be doing it!

Instead, they launch a campaign in a niche like payday loans, it isn’t profitable and they move on to another niche and so forth over and over wondering why they aren’t making money!  Instead, find out why you campaign is failing, whether it’s your ads, landing page, keywords, etc and split test them!  What???  You aren’t tracking each of those things to find out where your problems are?  Then you’re an even bigger idiot!!!

Quit being lazy, quit making excuses and start split testing…  I promise you if you do, you’ll drastically see increases in your profits as an affiliate marketer!

Sorry guys, I love you all, but really felt like I needed to be blunt with this one!  Hugs and Kisses!

Most affiliates are told by other affiliates (often time other new affiliates) that they should avoid these niches because there is too much competition in them and they are too saturated! This is completely and utterly false, thus my reason for this post today…

Long Tail Keywords actually have Volume!

Big niches are more saturated and there is more competition, but there is also a ton more volume and keywords that work in these niches.  In smaller niches, if you start getting into the long tail keywords of 3 or more words, you very quickly realize that you’re just not able to get any decent volume, while in bigger niches, you are able to go into these long tail keywords and still rake in the volume because there are just that many more people searching for these products or services!

There are also several other big advantages to bigger niches that most affiliates don’t take the time to think about…

More Offers to Split Test

Another great feature of bigger niches is the fact that there are tons more offers to split test within that niche.  The reason that this benefits you as an affiliate is that it allows you to have more companies that are competing against each other and really trying to make sure their offer landing pages convert really well.  Because of this, it’s very easy in these bigger niches to have Offer landing pages that convert extremely well!

In a lot of smaller niches there may be only a handful of offers and normally out of that handful of offers, there will be one big player and a couple small players in the niche.  This means that normally you’re running the same offer as most affiliates (the big player) and they have no real competition thus they aren’t constantly working on their landing pages to increase the conversion rates and stuff!

Higher Payouts!

Because most bigger niches have more advertisers wanting you to promote their product or service, the payouts tend to be quite larger than smaller niches.  This isn’t actually an advantage but what it does is that even though bid prices may be higher in “saturated” niches because the payouts are larger, it normally works out pretty decently, now I’m not saying it allows you to jump right into the short tail keywords and walk away profitable, but it does give you as good of a chance as anyone else entering the niche!

Long Term Earnings

Another nice feature of bigger niches is the fact that most of them have been around for a while, and they are going to continue to be around for a while!  Smaller niches come and go and sometimes they come and go very very quickly!  Bigger niches also tend to be a little more stable in terms of the profit they make then smaller niches for the most part!  Jonathan Volk actually wrote a little post about this today, so instead of talking about it a lot, I’m just gonna link to his post about how niches that have been around a while are longterm.

Conclusion:

So while, a lot of affiliates recommend to new affiliates to stay away from the big over-saturated niches, I say go for it, in fact, in my one on one mentoring sessions that I occasionally do, I almost always recommend new affiliates to jump into a couple big niches as their first niches!  I know you’re shocked…aren’t ya?

First off, realize that you aren’t going to become a millionaire overnight, in fact, you most likely won’t even make money for your first couple months of trying affiliate marketing…  I know that there are tons of products and services out there that promise to make you 5,000, 20,000 or even 50,000 dollars a month if you buy their product or service, but the bottom line is that most people will never make anywhere near that kind of money because they expect it to happen overnight.

When you are first starting out you need to sit down and make a plan, you need to make an ad spend budget and you need to stick with it.  You need to do some research, find out what others are promoting, talk to some affiliate managers, etc.  Basically get to know what it is you are going to be doing, because believe it or not, most people will simply sign up for a popular network like Market Leverage, pick an offer and try to promote it by throwing a ton of money into Adwords, Yahoo, or MSN.

Don’t fill up your ad accounts with credit cards, you are taking a HUGE risk by doing so, skip some of the extras in your life (five dollar cups of coffee) and use that money instead!  Once you actually get a niche making some solid earnings, then that is a different story!

You need to realize that you are probably most likely going to lose money for your first couple of months and you need to plan accordingly to that!  You need to come up with a budget of how much you can spend, even if means you can only spend a 100 bucks a month.  You have to start somewhere and build up!

You also need to make sure you understand and know how the niche you are promoting works.  How can you promote a product or service if you don’t even know what the heck it is or does???

Pay attention to what other affilaites are doing in a niche, if there are a billion affiliates using review style landing pages to promote weight loss and one affiliate using a fake blog, why in the world would you start with a fake blog as a landing page?  Pay attention, jot down what you see, and make a plan!

The bottom line is that unless you come spend some time figuring out where you want to get to and how you are going to get there and do some research and then make a plan, you will probably fail horribly in this business…