My next victim in the “One Question” series is Isiah Pohlert, whom I had the pleasure to “formally” meet in San Diego during the Traffic & Conversion Conference. He is super nice and has been the affiliate space for several years since 2009. He started with SEO and gradually transitioned to paid traffic. In Nov 2014, he lost 5k to learning how paid traffic works only to profit exponentially greater the next month. Paid traffic has now become a true passion of his; looking at the numbers, identifying trends, optimizing landing pages, and split testing lander elements have now become his livelihood and thanks himself everyday for taking that leap into the paid traffic space. 🙂
My question to him obviously revolved around Media buying. It is probably one of those advanced topics in the affiliate marketing industry, because you need a big enough budget if you want to get started. That being said, the amount of traffic you can generate is literally unlimited. Therein lies the dilemma, what is the best way for someone to get started? What are some tips and tricks that may come in handy for someone getting into media buying? His answer below:
Getting Started
For someone getting started, I’d recommend starting off with the mindset that you are never losing money, you are gathering data. Start of by investing in a solid tracking solution like Thrive. Their reporting is the most robust of any platorm that I have used and the segmentation of campaigns/landers/offers/rotations are what make it a great tracking platform as opposed to the others that I have used. Having solid tracking in place is essential! I’d get started with lower tier network first like YARPP or Pleeko if your budget is extremely constricted. If not, I’d recommend starting with something like content.ad or revcontent.
Tips/Tricks
- Depending on what ad network platform you’re using, always make use of their tokens! Some allow state/city targeting and some allow domain exclusions. If a campaigns dips in ROI, I look at which domains/states/cities/etc are performing poorly in my stats and exclude them from my targeting.
- Always be testing, test new headlines! That is singlehandedly the most important test to perform as it frames the offer for the prospect. I have increased conversion by up to 50% on some campaigns by simply testing variations of the headline. This doesn’t mean to test just the headline, you should be testing all elements on the lander such as images and website layouts. Blog style landers with multiple columns typically work best, at least for me, nowadays. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test a single column layout.
- Once you find a profitable campaign, if cash flow gets in the way of scaling, ask your ad rep for a credit line. Some networks might be willing to extend a line of credit.
