Golden Goose Marketing

One of the most challenging skills for a new affiliate is to learn how to look at an affiliate marketing program and figure out if it has a good chance of being profitable.  Although it will take some trial and error to become reasonably accurate in your judgments, there are a few things you can do to shorten the learning curve.

• Decide what promotional method you’ll be using. If you’re using SEO or social media, the “cost” of a conversion may actually be quite low in terms of money spent.  On the other hand, if you’re using AdWords, it’s going to be very difficult to profitably promote $1/lead offers without losing money.
• Determine how competitive the niche is. Competitive offers can be more expensive to promote, since other advertisers drive up the advertising costs.
• Come up with an estimated cost per conversion. This is where it gets tricky, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.  Figure out approximately what you’ll expect to pay per click (even if you’re advertising on a CPM basis), then try to get a realistic idea of the conversion rate you can expect.  In per sale situations, 1-3% is a good place to start your estimates.  For per-lead offers, try 10-15%.  The exception would be if you have extremely targeted traffic, and in those cases your conversion rate might be higher.

Even though your initial guesses are probably going to be wildly inaccurate, you’ll get more and more accurate as time goes on.  Learning to evaluate afiliate programs ahead of time will save you a lot of money in the long-run, though, even if your accuracy is less than perfect.