Last Friday at Mediatrust, Peter Bordes reported on some fraud that was being perpetrated on job bidding site Freelancer.com. To their credit, the crew at Freelancer.com was responsive and quick in deleting the scam–although new ones continue to crop up daily. Regardless, it’s yet another where transparency among affiliate marketers triumphs.

Having been around performance-based marketing for about three years now, I’ve seen some pretty amazing–and amazingly stupid–things within the industry. This morning, while speaking with an affiliate who was diving headfirst into performance marketing for his first time, I realized just how daunting it could be. So in wanting to break down the mystique around affiliate marketing, I’ve compiled a list of Dos and Don’ts for affiliates. I’m not re-inventing the wheel here, just establishing ground rules for the newbies.

Do…

- Maintain contact with your affiliate manager, they’ve got a ton of knowledge and historical data that can help you find the right kind of offer.

- Find the best type of medium for you – have a knack for data analysis and optimization? Then search is the way to go. Or do you have the ability to create great content that brings tons of visitors to your blog? Display might be the right arena for you.

- Spend some time testing, once you’ve figured out what you’re going to do, perform some A/B tests, optimize results, making some money is good, but maximizing revenue is what your after.

- Learn your acronyms. The world of internet marketing loves acronyms (CPA, CPL, CPC, CPM). Everyone loves throwing them around, so the more you know the the better you’ll sound in a conversation. I hear at least one new acronym a week.

- Research and then research some more. Are you getting the best rate for an offer? What are other affiliates doing? Does the offer convert on the second or third page? Know everything about the offer you’re about to spend your time and money promoting.

-Attend Trade shows when you can. Affiliate Summit, LeadsCon and AdTech are all great resources to put names to the faces you’ve been working with and meet new people you can learn from.

Don’t…

- Jump into affiliate marketing until you’ve decided you’re serious about this. In many ways it’s a full time job, or at least a time consuming hobby.

- Take it all on at once. Baby steps is key, start with one campaign and one method of promotion then once you’ve got it down start expanding into more offers – more promotions.

- Get into black-hat/deceitful tactics, your reputation is on the line here, and it’s a small industry. Why ruin your name chasing some extra bucks?

- Get discouraged. This industry will knock you down, especially when you’re learning early on. Take your lumps, learn from them, and come back as a more productive affiliate.

- Ignore the competition, especially true in search, saturated verticals leads to expensive bidding, it’s never a bad idea to create your own trail and work within a less popular vertical.

But this list is only the tip of the iceberg–with experience you’ll be drawing your own lists of good practices and bad habits and learning how to distinguish between the two.

If done right, Affiliate Marketing is a great way to earn a living. You can work from home, wear a bathrobe to work, and make a great deal of money.  It’s essentially the pinnacle of the American Dream™. Unfortunately, countless people with dollar signs in their eyes jump in without any sort of game plan. And while some people do get lucky, you’re not likely to succeed in the long term without some sort of strategy. Although there are many tricks of the trade–perhaps too many to keep track of–I feel like a lot of people overlook the fundamentals. Some of those basic rules:

1. Make a list and check it twice. If you’re an email marketer, you’re going to need a big list. It’s also important to have some idea of who’s on that list, rather than spending a ton of money on a list of random emails. An excellent way to generate a list is to offer a free newsletter, in exchange for an email address. This allows you to dictate who signs up for your newsletter/blasts so that you can send offers that will speak to your audience.  Also important: To make sure that your audience is legitimately interested by implementing a double opt-in process. By sending out a confirmation email to your list and asking them to confirm their signup by clicking on a link, you’re not only filtering out bad addresses and dummy accounts, but you’re also complying with CAN-SPAM laws. This can save you a lot of headaches down the road.

2. Engage your audience. If you’re creating a website, invest in a domain name. It’s easy to use prefab platforms with site-building tools like Blogspot. but it’s also easy for search engines to gloss over long and complicated extensions associated with such sites. Figure out what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. Create the catchiest, shortest domain name that you can, and whenever possible, make sure it ends in “.com”. Another tip here is not to make your site a giant commercial. It’s important to have content on your site that will draw an audience and keep them coming back. A good way to think of this is Infomercial vs. TV Show. You’ll watch a TV show and put up with a commercial or two every so often. On the other hand, I don’t know anyone who has voluntarily sat through an entire infomercial. With repeat visitors, you can rotate offers and help to build a constant revenue stream.

3. Strategize with your Affiliate Manager. No matter how you’re driving traffic, take advantage of your Affiliate Manager. If you’re not sure which offers to run, ask which is converting better. Two offers that may look very similar on paper may be performing on completely different levels. Let your Affiliate Manager know what you’re doing, who your audience is, and what offers are performing the best for you. They can use this information to help determine which offers will make you the most money. That’s why you’re doing all this in the first place.

2009 is over. Gone. Done. Kaput. Hello 2010 – dare I say, the year of affiliate marketing? It seems as though when January rolls around, everyone becomes a visionary, predicting their internet marketing trends for the upcoming year. Everyone’s got a list, and they’ll be the first to tell how “x” marketing is completely done for, and how “y” marketing is the wave of the future (and we should all be riding it). Well if everyone jumped off a bridge, I’d probably consider it, so here’s my take on 2010.

2010 is the year of affiliate marketing. Am I biased? Yes. Will 2011 be the year of affiliate marketing too? You betcha. Sure, everyone’s speculating about twitter and facebook, and their business models, but weren’t they clamoring about that last year as well? (And the year before?) It’s easy to get stuck on panache of social media or the mystique of mobile marketing and forget about the ease and relatively straightforward concept of performance based marketing.

At the end of the day, advertisers can spend their money across whatever medium they choose. Affiliate Marketing gives them a fairly straightforward equation for what they’re in store for. It’s a simple concept at the heart of it all: you get what you pay for. If you spend “x” dollars, you will receive “y” leads. At the end of the day, advertisers know what they paid for, they have actual evidence of their advertising dollars at work. Publishers (both individuals and networks) are happy because of the ease of entry into affiliate marketing, and the relative straightforward nature of it. They know what they’ll get paid, given a course of action by a consumer.

Is affiliate marketing the end-all-be-all I’m probably making it out to be? Well, no, but it’s certainly a highly effective piece of any online marketing pie. Go ahead gurus (I said I was biased from the beginning), make your predictions, tell us what we should focus on in 2010. I’ll be here, sticking to what works.

Dear Mr/Ms. Affiliate,

I find it puzzling that once you have been approved to be a part of our network, you all of a sudden mysteriously become unreachable. My emails go unanswered and my calls are almost guaranteed to go straight to voicemail. I understand that for the most part networks are self-service and that you don’t really need anyone to tell you how to pick up offers for the umpteenth time. But believe it or not, I am not calling you to tell you something you already know.

The reason I call is because I want to work with you in figuring out how I can make it easy for you to generate substantial revenue with our network. I can tell you details about an offer that’s not written in the campaign description – like how one offer performs when promoted via search versus email or which creative is performing the best. I can tell you the brand newest offers on the network before they even go out on the affiliate newsletter, where everyone will see them and will want to pick them up.

Heck, I’ll even go so far as to cater our calls so that if you tell me you only want to hear about diet offers, you won’t hear anything but diet offers. Every now and then though, I will be brazen and tip you off that an education or financial offer or some other vertical is performing extremely well and worth looking into. Rest assured, I only do this with your best interest in mind.

I wish I could say that one phone call translates into dollars, but sometimes it takes several phone calls and even more phone calls and a few emails back and forth to get you paired with the right offer. This is why I call you more than once – not to annoy you, but to figure out which offer you can work your skills on (within compliance guidelines, of course!)  to take you into super affiliate status.

So the next time you see my number pop up on your caller ID, give me a chance and pick up the phone. It could be the 5 minute conversation that changes where the commas fall on your affiliate check when affiliate pay day rolls around.

Sincerely,
Your Affiliate Manager

Blue Phoenix Media