I didn’t truly understand what chemistry was. One woman described it as “butterflies” and despite great conversation and chemistry in many areas, she confessed that she didn’t feel those “butterflies” with me. Bummer. It took me over a year of endless (and depressive) dating to finally learn what chemistry really felt like. When it happened, I knew it right away and we fell in love immediately and I’m now married to Mrs. Juicy and we have a Baby Juicy now, too.
With that, comes my words of advice — don’t fall in love with the first offer that you promote. It’s just not always meant to be. If you’ve never found a really great offer that converted really well, then you just don’t know what it’s really like to find the right one. You’ll know it when you find it. Over my 18 years as an affiliate marketer (and that little advertising network I run called JuicyAds) I’ve managed a few campaigns. You know, one or two.
As an affiliate, without being the owner of an offer, it’s simply not possible to make significant changes to things like the website flow, the billing options, cookie storage and retrieval, or even broken links. Sometimes, it’s just not going to work out.
Adult is unique in that most companies have a direct affiliate program, making CPA networks less relevant than they are in mainstream. Regardless of whether you are promoting a direct offer or going through a non-direct network, they are not all created equal. For every offer there is, there are marketers that can spin it into gold, and even more people that can’t get it to convert at all.
It can be difficult to evaluate the value of an offer without testing it. Test as much as possible. The other issue is, you can have a great offer and poor traffic sources, which is why it’s nice that you can promote an offer across thousands of websites on a network like JuicyAds for example. If you can generate even just a handful of leads when you start your initial marketing push, it’s generally possible to optimize and scale an offer to profitability. It just takes time and energy. However, if your initial push doesn’t yield enough datapoints to really do any optimization, it’s time to make some decisions. If you know the offer is good, then the problem is the traffic. If you know the traffic is good, then the problem is the offer.
Recently, a potential client asked about promoting sex toys on our network. Many people think that sex toys are the perfect thing to sell online, but promoting a sex toy store online can be a long-term investment. Most people don’t buy a lot of sex toys, and they definitely don’t buy new toys frequently. So I recommended not promoting their sex toy shop, and saving their small budget for something else. It just didn’t make sense to try promoting something that wasn’t that special, with a budget that was too small to get any significant data with.
About a year ago, one of my clients and long-time friend showed me a toy-related website and I thought it was awesome. It was already getting a trickle of sales from very specific search engine type-ins. They had not promoted it much and I recommended we try it. After collaborating on some banner creatives, we set them loose on the world and waited for the sales to pour in. The only problem was — the sales didn’t come. The campaign generated almost no sales. Epic fail. I had fallen in love with the offer, our marketing for it, and ultimately burned a bunch of money promoting it and got nowhere.
It can be hard to diagnose what the problem is with an offer. There are an infinite number of landers, and it’s surprising sometimes what works and what does not. As an affiliate, without being the owner of an offer, it’s simply not possible to make significant changes to things like the website flow, the billing options, cookie storage and retrieval, or even broken links. Sometimes, it’s just not going to work out.
My client is a seasoned and well-experienced person in the industry, so as embarrassing as it was to have failed to deliver the sales and ROI we had expected, they understood the value of testing. He is always working on something new, and showed me another sex toy product that looked even better, especially after seeing it in person! Huge potential. When the promotion went live on JuicyAds we immediately started to generate leads and sales, it was not even comparable to the previous effort. We added more S2S postbacks to get deeper data to be able to optimize the sources, and we could also track the countries and specific images driving most of the sales. The ROI improved further, and now today we are continuing to scale it successfully.
This time it was meant to be, with chemistry at last. Had we stubbornly stuck to the first offer, we might have ended up still shoveling money into a bad campaign, trying to make it work. This is where a lot of people give up too soon after spending a small budget on one offer. Instead, experienced affiliates know to try something different (and we did). One of the biggest advantages of being an affiliate is that you can choose from an endless array of offers. You can be creative and add your own spin on it to make it convert better, but never (ever) fall in love with an offer if you don’t have the data to back it up. It will just break your heart when there’s no chemistry.
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.
