Posts Tagged ‘payouts’

*question* "How can I get the highest payouts?"

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

“How can I get the highest payouts for my offers? If I could make more money, I’ll be able to do more business altogether.”

-Josh S.,
Grand Rapids, MI

This is a great question.

Keep in mind that everybody and their brother wants higher payouts for the offers they’re running. Your Affiliate Manager is the one to approach with this question, but you want to be careful how you phrase it. Simply asking him “Can I have a higher payout for this Free Credit Report offer?” isn’t going to get you very far. This is what has worked for me in the past:

Affiliate Managers earn commission off of your sales, so they like it when they’re affiliates are driving lots of traffic for these offers, as it only puts money in their pocket. If you play on this idea, and emphasize volume, you’re likely to get a higher payout.

Here is the pitch I give when I need a higher payout on an offer:

“Mr. AM, I’ve been testing this campaign for a week now, and it seems to have potential. I’m driving $XXXX worth of sales to this offer now daily, but I’m just barely above break-even with my costs. If you could give me a payout of an $XXXX% increase, I’ll be able to produce XXXX% more traffic for the offer, and we can work more off of a volume model that way. What do you think?”

Usually, this approach works very well, and they grant me my request. Granted, you now have to follow through somewhat with what you’ve told them, but if you can get the increase, then you’ll be more likely to be successful with the offer.

*question* Choosing Offers

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

“What is your best advice for choosing offers that actually work?”

-Stacey K.

This is my guide for choosing offers:

1) I look at how good the offer looks. If it looks good and it’s something that would catch my eye and I would respond to, then the offer catches my attention.
2) I look for how many fields it has (if its a pay per lead offer). If it’s asking for name and email and pays out $10, I like it. If it’s asking for full name, address, phone number, and email, and payout out $2, then I definitely don’t touch it.
3) I compare the offer against other similar offers. Does it pay out more or less? If less, then does it have the same amount of steps a user has to go through before I get paid or more? If less, then I look deeper.
4) If it’s going to my user base for media I’m purchasing, then I don’t accept the offer because I’ll end up spending more money to replenish the user base at a later date.
5) Are other affiliates and advertisers likely to be running the same exact offer? If I think so, then the offer is saturated, and most likely not likely to perform due to user fatigue of that offer. So super popular offers are like a double edged sword: good to run because you know they convert, or bad because by the time you find out, the offer is saturated in the network and you lose money trying to make it convert because the users on the network are seeing the ad 100 times a day.

*question* Converting Offers & Strategizing

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

“How much money should I invest to see if an offer converts?”

-Jackie T.

This can be a very intricate question, depending on what category the offer falls into, payout, offer history, etc. But I have an easy formula that served me well when I began running affiliate offers, and I still to this day stick to when testing offers:

Take the offer’s bounty (CPA) and double it and that’s your testing budget. If it’s a $10 offer, I’ll spend $20 to try and make it convert. If it converts at $20, I’m comfortable enough in my optimization skills to know I can optimize that down to $7 or so and earn my margin. If I have to spend any more than double my payout to make it work, it’s just not that worth it to me.

At the end of the day there are plenty of ways to structure new offer testing. But if you have 10 new offers to test at the same time, this is the way I’d recommend setting things up.