10 Step Blueprint For A Profitable Affiliate Marketing Campaign

Some people feel that they can find a product from an affiliate network or program and send traffic to it hoping that they get sales and the money rolls in.

I have news for you. This is not exactly how it works.

Affiliate marketing is like any other job or business. You need the skills and you should learn the skills before you start it.

So this is where you get lucky and where I will take you through the ten steps that you should be considering when launching and running an affiliate marketing campaign.

These steps are all crucial and it is important that you understand each one of them and why you need to do them.

Affiliate marketing is not easy if you do not know what you are doing but today I want to take you by the hand and give you an idea of what you should be doing.

Hopefully by the end of this post you should have some education to at least get you started with your first affiliate marketing campaign.

Here’s what you will learn:

• Research and choose your product
• Decide how you are going to promote your product
• Get your marketing tools
• Design your landing page
• Prepare your email sequence
• Add your tracking pixels
• Create your ad, decide who your target audience is and launch your ad
• Split testing your ad creative and landing pages
• Analyse your data
• Scale

Before I continue I would like to point out that whilst I will give you a guide, there is so much more depth that you need to go into to understand and apply these concepts.

I would therefore recommend taking an affiliate marketing course to give you more value and show you everything that you need to do to be successful.

Also if you are going to read these principles you will never get any results if you do not take action.

So once you have gone through this guide be sure to implement it immediately. Apply it to whatever product you are promoting and remember everything will not happen overnight. It’s a matter of failing a few times before your success appears.

With that little motivation out of the way, let’s get right to it.

Research And Choose Your Product

You can choose whatever product you want to promote but if you want to promote a product that is likely to convert well, read my article 6 Most Profitable Niche Markets For Bloggers and Marketers for ideas.

There are three ways that you can decide whether a product is worth promoting:

• Popularity
• Reviews
• Your intuition

But I will tell you this. Once your intuition tells you go for it, do just that. Go for it!.

Don’t spend a lot of time deciding whether to promote a product or not. You will only waste time.

Let’s go a bit further with each point.

Popularity

Some affiliate networks will tell you how popular a product is. For example Clickbank helps you judge the popularity of a product by giving you a gravity score

The higher the gravity score, the more popular it is.

Related Article: 

• Make Money With Clickbank – The Ultimate Clickbank Affiliate Guide 

Amazon Affiliates tell you about the popularity of a product based on the number of sales or reviews it has.

Share A Sale uses Power Ranks to categorise the popularity of a product.

So whatever affiliate network you decide to join be sure to look out for its popularity points to help you decide on which product is the best to promote.

Reviews

You can also decide on whether a product is worth your time by looking at reviews. Look at both positive and negative reviews.

You can easily do a Google or YouTube search for the product you want to promote. See what other people are saying about it.

Here’s a quick Google review search I did on the Fat Burning Kitchen product from Clickbank.

Click Here To Learn How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

If you do not trust internet reviews then you can purchase the product, test it and review it yourself. This is the best way as it lets you see the product firsthand, it allows you to try the product for yourself and helps you make a good decision as to whether you want to promote the product or not.

Sometimes it may not be practical to buy the product yourself but this is the safest way to decide whether it’s a product that you will be happy promoting and attaching to your brand.

At the end of the day, people trust other people’s judgements so if you promote a product that you have not yet reviewed which then leads to a bad customer experience, you can lose the trust of your audience and your own credibility.    

Your Intuition

Finally your gut instinct will tell you what to do.

Sometimes people overthink an idea when their thoughts are speaking to them and telling them to go for it.

This only leads to procrastination.

So once you have chosen a product and something inside you makes you feel good about it, then just promote it.  

Decide How You Are Going To Promote The Product

There are many ways to promote a product but you must decide exactly where you are going to promote it.

This usually involves looking at traffic sources such as YouTube, Facebook, Bing Ads or Google Ads.

There are other traffic sources like Pinterest, solo ads or ad networks that you can try and it will be up to you to research which traffic source is best for your offer and provides the best results.

The only way you can really do that is by testing each traffic source.

I would however highly recommend using Facebook as your first attempt. Facebook is a very intelligent and super powerful platform that allows you to promote the right product (see Facebook’s Advertising Policies for confirmation that your type of product is allowed on its network) to its audience.

Facebook can produce successful campaigns because of the overwhelming amount of data it collects about its users.

But producing a successful campaign takes time and patience because you have to test different demographics, see how the ad performs on different devices, placements, which country the ad performs better in and other variables.

Split testing all these variables play an important role in determining whether you will have a successful campaign.

It will also be useful and helpful to you if you learn how to use Facebook Ads before you start any ad campaign so you can get better results.

Right now the best Facebook Ads course that I have seen on the market today is by Jon Penberthy and Jubril Agoro who have made millions of dollars with Facebook Ads. They have a free webinar where they teach you the number one strategy that can help you increase conversions in your ad and boost your business.

Click here to view the webinar.

If you do not want to use Facebook then you can use other platforms like YouTube Ads and Google Ads.

Sometimes an offer works better on video so you can trial your efforts to see how it works with video marketing.

Sometimes your target audience may not actually be on Facebook, but may be on YouTube.

You may also get better results by putting an ad in front of people who are actually searching for your product as with Google.

Wherever you decide to promote your offer remember that your goal is to get as many people as possible to see your offer.

The more people that see your offer, the more profit you can make.

Related Article: 

• 6 Great Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Links

Get Your Marketing Tools In Order

To promote any affiliate product you need marketing tools. Marketing tools will help automate your affiliate marketing campaign and streamline the process so you can accurately track whether the campaign is successful or not.

The most essential marketing tools are: 

• Landing Page
• Email marketing software
• Tracking software

|Landing Page

The first thing you will need is a website that will talk to your audience about the offer.

You can either have a large website like mine where you promote many different affiliate products or you can have a small website solely for the purpose of promoting a single affiliate product.

For the purposes of this post, I am going to speak about using a small website to promote your product. This website is what is called a landing page but to promote the product you will be building a sales funnel.

The sales funnel is simply a series of website pages that introduces the product to your audience. It starts with a landing page, goes to a bridge page then the affiliate product sales page.

There are many landing page builders that you can use to design your website and which help you build sales funnels.

I prefer LeadPages because of the ease of creating standalone websites and building sales funnels. It also has drag and drop features and awesome customer service. LeadPages offers a free 14 day trial so you can check them out if it interests you.

Other landing page builders are Clickfunnels which also has a free 14 day trial. I recently discovered BuilderAll which is actually new to the market. I have tested it but I did not like its usability. You may decide otherwise so feel free to check them out by using this link. They offer a free 7 day trial.

Related Articles: 

• 4 Awesome Landing Page Builders You Must Use For Marketing or Blogging  

|Email Marketing

Email marketing software helps you to grow your email list and communicate with your leads to remind and educate them about your product.

This software helps take out the human element meaning that you don’t have to personally follow up with your leads.

The automated sequence of email marketing does that on your behalf.

For your email marketing you can try MailChimp which allows you to store 2000 leads for free before you are upgraded to the paid option.

I use Aweber because it is the only software that helped improve my email deliverability. This ensures that my emails get to my leads’ inbox instead of to their junk mail. Aweber offers a 14 day trial which you can access by Aweber.

Another email marketing software is GetResponse.

Related Article: 

• The Ultimate Email Marketing Strategy For Marketers And Bloggers 
• How To Build An Email List From Scratch 
• How To Get Email Subscribers As A Newbie

|Tracking

It is very important that when you are running any affiliate marketing campaign, that you track your progress.

The reason why you want to do this is because it helps you to see what is working and what is not.

For example if you are testing how two landing pages perform against each other, you can use a tracking software to tell you which landing page your audience prefers.

You can also use tracking software to help you understand which demographic resonates with your ad and consequently which ad is performing well.

This will help you save money so you can cut any ads that are wasting money and save those which are producing results.

Most Ad platforms like Facebook, Google and Bing have pixels which is a piece of code that you can place on your website to track data. This tracking helps you to optimise your ad.

You must also optimise your website and so a tracking tool like Clickmagick helps you to do that by giving you a piece of code to place on your website so you can track which landing page performs better if you are split testing.

Design Your Landing Page

This is where most people get stuck because they do not know what to put on their landing page.

And this is what I tell most people. Stop trying to figure things out on your own.

There are people who have already figured out what works so why not use their success and imitate what they have done?

For example, Sue is promoting a law of attraction affiliate marketing product on Facebook but does not know what to say on her landing page to attract her audience.

The first advice I would give to Sue is to see whether there are any affiliate tools for the product. Most affiliate programs provide already-made landing pages for their affiliates.

So instead of reinventing the wheel, use those landing pages for inspiration. Here’s the affiliate tools page for a program that I am promoting.

Here’s a pro tip! Do not use the actual landing page provided by the affiliate company, because there are many, many amateur affiliates who are already using those landing pages.

As a smarter affiliate you want to stand out. Therefore create your own landing page but model after the one you are given.

For example, change the background image, text and call to action of the landing page.

If the affiliate program does not offer done-for-you landing pages then spy on your competitors. See what is already working and try to produce similar but improved content.

Never, ever copy your competitor’s content as you will lose your credibility.

Going back to Sue’s example, to spy on your competitors you can use a tool like AdEspresso. AdEspresso helps you to create and optimise your Facebook ads easily, but it also helps you to see what ads are already performing well on Facebook.

So by using AdEspresso together with my keyword, law of attraction, these are the results I come up with.

I can take this a step further by honing on the ad and seeing what links the advertisers have in their ads.

If I click on the link I am directed to their landing page and this is the landing page that I can model after.

To make this work successfully pay attention to how much engagement the ad gets. If the ad has a lot of engagement it means it was successful so you can model after the ad creative.

If there is little to no engagement, it means that the ad was not successful and therefore will not be one that you should model after.

Keep searching until you find one that satisfies the above criteria.

Prepare Your Email Sequence

After you have designed your landing page you need to create your email sequence. Plan your email sequence strategically so you can build a relationship with your leads sufficiently to turn them into customers.

When writing my email sequences I keep a few things in mind:

• Length of sequence
• Value
• Pitch
• Bonus

|Length of sequence

When preparing your sequence you want to it to be long enough to get across your point but short enough to keep your leads engaged.

I always find that an automatic sequence of five to six daily emails is good enough to make an attempt to convert the lead to a buyer. When I have sent my sixth daily email I switch to broadcast emails where I follow up with my leads weekly.

By following up with my leads weekly I make sure that they still have that reminder about the product.

You can also keep track of those leads who are no longer engaged and remove them from your list.

|Value

Every email that you send to your leads should be filled with value where you teach your lead something about the product that will help them.

For example, you may do a product review, you may show how the product can help them solve a problem or you may write a blog post about other products like it but still include yours in the post.

This shows the lead that they have options instead of always shoving your product down their throat.

|Pitch

Sometimes it’s ok to sell to your leads.

If you don’t you will never make money and when promoting a product that is the ultimate aim.

But there are ways that you can sell to your leads.

Do it in a way that promotes value. Explain the benefits and features of the product. What’s in it for your lead?

Include a strong call to action in your email pitch and tell the lead what to do.

For example “click here to get 60% off the product” or “click here to join this limited time offer today”.

|Bonus

Bonuses are additional strategies that you can use to entice your lead to take an action.

This makes you stand out from your competitor.

Tell your lead what you will give them or help them with if they place an order through your link.

Your email sequence will determine the number of sales that you can make on the back end and should be carefully thought through to ensure the best conversions.

Here is what my email sequence for one of my products looks like.

Want to see exactly what I write? Then opt into my list here and check it out.

Add Your Tracking Pixels

Depending on your landing page provider, you should be able to add tracking pixels to your website.

To add tracking pixels sign up for Clickmagick. Clickmagick offers a free 14 day trial.

Once you’re in Clickmagick click on Links then Create New Link.

A tracking link lets you measure the number of visitors that are going to your website where TC means total clicks or visitors and UC means unique clicks or visitors.

It also tells you whether any robots have tried to access your site where FC means fake clicks or visitors.

As a marketer this is important for you if there are any disputes about whether your ad network provides human visitors to your websites or robots. If you have run an ad campaign and there are no unique clicks but plenty of fake clicks, this tells you that the type of traffic provided was not genuine.

You will then be able to use this as proof to file a complaint or seek a refund of money for any purchased advertising.

After clicking on Create New Link complete the required fields by naming your tracking link and adding a link ID. This helps identify the tracking link for your reference only.

Add the URL of the landing page that you have created then click Create Link.

If you are split testing two landing pages then click on the gear icon.

Next click on Split Testing.

Add the second URL of your landing page in the space provided. You can split test up to three landing pages with Clickmagick.

Once your tracking link is finalised click the gear icon again then this time select Track Conversions.

This is where you will build your pixel to add to your landing page.

Select Conversion Tracking Method #1 then select Step 2 to use the Pixel Builder.

For a generic pixel follow the selections as in the below image. Your pixel will be built for you and is the final HTML code that you see in the green bar below.

Copy and then place this code within the opening and closing body tags (<body></body>) of your landing page.

Create Your Ad, Decide Who Your Target Audience Is And Launch Your Ad

Creating an ad is the easy part.

You can use any of the platforms I mentioned before to get your product in front of people but I would strongly recommend starting with Facebook because that is where I believe you can reasonably get a ton of success if you play your cards right.

If you already have a Facebook personal profile you will need a Facebook Business Account to get started.

Never run Facebook ads on a personal account as you risk having your personal profile being disabled. If your personal profile is disabled then think of all your friends, posts and pictures being lost into nothingness!

To start a business account click on Create Account.

Click Here To Learn How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

If you already have a Facebook profile simply log in. If you do not have a Facebook profile then create a new one.

Once you have logged in click on Create Account and go through the steps of providing a Business Name and Business Email Address.

You will then come to a screen that looks like this.

Click on Create Ad Account as to run an ad on Facebook you must use an Ad Account. You can create up to five ad accounts in advance.

Complete the required fields by naming your Ad Account, time zone and the currency you want your ad account to be in.

Click Create Ad Account to finalise the process.

When you have created all ad accounts it is time to start running ads. But before you do that, if you have absolutely no idea how to run an ad on Facebook, how to optimise your ad and analyse the data then I would strongly recommend learning from someone who has had success with Facebook Ads.

I learnt everything I know about Facebook Ads from the Social Traffic Blueprint course by Jon Penberthy and Jubril Agoro. So if you would like to master this before you place an ad on Facebook this is where I would suggest you start.

If you don’t want to use Facebook Ads for whatever reason then your options does not stop there. I have tried Bing Ads before and gotten great results.

There is also Google.

But the number one advice I would give you before you start any type of advertising, is to learn how to use them by taking an appropriate course. Do not be selfish with yourself. Invest in yourself and your education. 

Deciding Who Your Target Audience Is 

Your target audience will depend on the product you are promoting.

To find out who your target audience is with your product in mind, there are a few tools that you can use to identify who your ad should be directed to.

The first tool if you’re using Facebook is their Facebook Audience Insights tool.

This tool gives a breakdown of Facebook’s users according to their interests. So let’s say you’re promoting a weight loss product.

From within your Business Manager account click on the three lines in the top left hand corner, then All Tools then under Plans click on Audience Insights.

When you get to Audience Insights select Everyone On Facebook.

Then pay attention to the left column where you will enter your search criteria.

If you are promoting your product to the USA then leave the location as is. Other countries like United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have less data available so I would recommend leaving the country as USA for every product that you promote.

Next go to the Interests tab.

This is where you need to think about the type of interests that your potential customers like.

I have used the keyword weight loss as I am using a weight loss product example.

When I type in weight loss Facebook gives me the demographic of my audience on Facebook.

As you can see from the results my target audience is predominantly men and women aged 25-54 who live in the US. I usually choose an audience where the percentage of people are over 20.

If you are using Google Ads then you can use their Think With Google Insights Tool.

From there scroll down and click on Shopping Insights.

This insights tool will allow you to see the shopping behaviour of consumers on Google.

Enter your search term. In this case we are searching for weight loss and I have selected the most searched for item related to weight loss which is weight loss pills.

Google will then provide us with data and we can look at our demographics to see who our potential consumers are.

From here you can see that the average age for shoppers who purchase weight loss pills are 37.4 and are both men and women with a 1% difference.

Whilst you can target both men and women on Google, you may get better results when you target only women or only men. It will be up to you to test which ad directed to which target audience converts the best.

Launch Your Ad

Once you have created your ad and researched your target audience you only need to launch your ad and wait for the results.

Here are a few expectations that you should have:

• Your first ad probably will not work
• You have to test many different ads before you get a winner. That may involve launching 10 different ads and studying the results to see which one gives better sales conversions.
• You have to let your ad run for at least 2 to 3 days to get some data. So be patient.
• You have to allocate a decent budget to your ad in order to be successful with your affiliate campaign. How much this budget is depends on the ad network you are using as some networks are more expensive than others.

Split Testing Your Ad Creative And Landing Pages

Split testing is the best thing that a marketer can do because it helps them save money.

The reason why you want to split test your ads and landing pages is because your audience may resonate with one ad over another.

You may also get better responses on one landing page over another.

It is therefore imperative that to run a successful affiliate marketing campaign, that you have to do as many of these tests to see what works.

This is the frustrating part because it takes time, it takes focus and a lot of creative thought.

Some things that you can split test include:

• Your ad content
• The image on your ad
• Whether the ad is a video ad or image ad
• The headline on your ad
• Your affiliate product
• Your landing page background image
• Your landing page headline
• Your landing page text
• The call to action on your landing page.

If you are not prepared to split test, then prepare to fail. It’s that simple.

And this is where newbies give up the fastest, because they do not understand that split testing is part of the process.

And with split testing you are bound to lose money. Again it is all part of the process.

The good thing is however, by split testing you are improving your ad campaigns which will eventually lead to brilliant results. 

Analyse Your Data

As I mentioned before allow at least 2 to 3 days to accumulate data from your campaigns and study them.

See who is responding to your ads. What age groups and which gender.

When you do that you can start optimising your ads.

So for example you can run an ad only to the age groups or gender groups that are engaging with your ads.

Study the click through rates of each ad. Here you will look at those ads that are getting high click through rates at a low price point.

Which ad is making you money. Although an ad is making you money you still need to consider whether it is profitable, most important.

There are so many variables to consider when analysing your ads in order to make your campaign better.

Scale

Once you have analysed your data and know what is working, by now you should have a profitable ad campaign.

From here you now need to scale your campaign to make more money.

Scaling your campaign will involve:

• Scaling out to different countries.
• Increasing your budget
• Using different traffic sources. So if you are using Facebook can you use Google or Bing? (they may not perform better but go for it and test).
• Get an increase in your affiliate commission. Do you think you can approach your affiliate manager and ask for an increase in your commission rate? Of course you can.

Wrapping Up

So I have laid out for you the basics of creating and launching an affiliate campaign. These are the skeletal parts of what an average affiliate campaign looks like but like everything it may appear simple on paper but there is a lot more fine detail that is involved which you can only uncover when you actually start doing it.

At least you have a bare bones blueprint to follow when you decide to take massive action and implement.

You learn the best by always doing and then seeing what works.

If you have any questions be sure to leave them in the comments.

Cheers,