Sometimes, advertising and media buying as an affiliate is like trying to play major league baseball after one at-bat on your high school team. You may not be prepared, may not have the resources, and may not have the ability, training, or skill of the more experienced players. However, it is an illusion that the world is stacked against you and success it out there.
Be forewarned, the more competitive the environment, the harder it will be to succeed so it’s always best to break out with new products or a unique marketing angle. It can often take some time and patience to get things right no matter what you try.
Patience prevails in revshare, and it’s important to remember that your value in advertising and media buying comes from both the data and the sales, especially when you know you have a solid performing product. Too many people get hung up on not making immediate sales.
Some networks will take all the high quality, high converting traffic and provide it all privately to their most elite buyers. That’s not how things operate at JuicyAds, the Sexy Advertising Network, I founded a decade ago. Everything is available to everyone. You have the same chance as everyone else even if you may not have the same risk tolerance and bankroll as the big boys, but it will take discipline to make it happen.
As an affiliate for over 15 years, I understand that revshare is a long game and as a general rule “if your traffic is good, you want to be paid on revshare.” I still receive cheque from affiliate programs I haven’t promoted in years. When this happens on a larger scale, good things happen. Maybe you’ll buy that boat you always wanted!
In April, we started a campaign for a well-known (but will remain nameless) webcam product. Things didn’t look so good at the beginning of the managed campaign, and the traffic levels were low. So we changed it and expanded the traffic sources and sales picked up with the wider volume. Since then (without much optimization) the sales have continued to grow on revshare as more signups convert to members.
Now with data in hand over an extended period of time, it’s possible to do some very basic projections (see graph). By graphing the revenues over time and then projecting based on the average revenue, we can determine that the daily average revenue should double by late June or mid July if the current trajectory continues. That’s a great potential return to keep buying the traffic and reaching for success on a currently unprofitable campaign. Big rewards come from those who take big (calculated) risks.
To improve the results further with our data, we had tracking for each traffic source by using JuicyAds’ dynamic linking/macros. With this data it was then possible to calculate the average signup ratio and earning per signup then remove specific sources not performing within reasonable ranges in order to optimize the results. Notably, even at this point the pay per lead (PPL) would have yielded a far lower than the revenues on revshare. There was one website that stood out to me that was delivering good signups but no revenue, and I had intended to block it. It just didn’t make sense, but time passed and I gave it a chance to convert and it went from one of the biggest losers to accounting for a large percentage of revenue.
On the other hand, most of the big losses came from a single publisher who we simply blocked. Don’t let impatience ruin your chances of success.
Had the campaign been pulled from impatience after the first week or two it would have been a dismal failure.
Patience prevails in revshare, and it’s important to remember that your value in advertising and media buying comes from both the data and the sales, especially when you know you have a solid performing product. Too many people get hung up on not making immediate sales.
We will now watch over time that this campaign becomes even more profitable and has more room for risk and error. Also important to remember is that sales are not always consistent and can be influenced by many factors.
Even the best product will have bad days. Patience and the ability to adapt are key.
Juicy Jay is the CEO and founder of JuicyAds, the Sexy Advertising Network. You can follow Jay on Twitter @juicyads, visit JuicyAds.com, or like on Facebook.com/juicyads.
