YOUR PRACTICAL

GUIDE
TO AFFILIATE MARKETING

$
 Well hello there!

Thank you for downloading Voluum’s Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing.

We hope it will get your new career started in no time!

And also – congratulations!

Affiliate marketing is definitely a good choice and you won’t regret giving

it a try.

Right now, you must be torn with millions of questions like “How do I get

started?”, “How much money can I make with it?”, “How much money do

I need to begin with?”, “Is it all really worth the trouble?”…

Just breathe. You can relax now.

For you’re holding the answer to all of these questions and more right now in

your hands.

Now, here’s how it’s going to work.

Below you will find a very detailed outline of every single aspect about

affiliate marketing (AM) you may be struggling with at the very beginning of

your journey. Scan it through, pin-point the parts you’re particularly curious

about, and – most importantly – put all the advice you find here to practice!

Knowing + Not Doing = Not Knowing

Sounds cool? Awesome. Let’s dive in!

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Table of contents
1. AFFILIATE’S GLOSSARY 4

2. THEORY 101: What Is Affiliate Marketing? 14

2.1. Here’s how it all works 16

2.2. Affiliate Marketing Process: Key Elements 19

2.3. Affiliate niches & verticals 21

How to choose the right niche 22

2.4. How do you get your first offer? 24

Affiliate Networks 25

Affiliate Programs 26

2.5. Choosing the right traffic source 28

Types of ads for affiliate marketers 30

3. PRACTICAL PART: How to Start? 33

3.1. Find your first offer and match it with the right traffic source 34

3.2. Prepare the creatives 35

3.3. Create a landing page 36

3.4. Opt in for an ad tracker 38

3.5. Always be testing & optimizing 41

BONUS: How to Make It Profitable - EXPERT ADVICE 43

1.
Affiliate’s
Glossary
Let’s start with the basics.

As any industry, affiliate marketers LOVE using their very own

kind of slang. Here are some of the most common terms and abbreviations

you will be likely to engage with on the everyday basis.

Read it, learn it, print it, and adore it. Or update it if you happen to find we’ve

missed something!

And if you feel comfortable with the basics, jump right to the next chapter,

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

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Ad – an ad is a creative way to advertise an offer. There are various ad types
(push, pop, search, interstitial, native and more. You can read about there

here).

Ad network – a.k.a. “ad exchange”. A platform that connects publishers

with advertisers. This is a type of a traffic source (more on traffic sources

here).

Advertiser – any person who promotes an offer using traffic in exchange

for a payout. With a bit of luck, that’s you!

Affiliate marketing – the process of promoting someone else’s products

in exchange for a commission. Affiliates usually use paid sources of traffic.

Affiliate network – a platform that connects offer owners and

advertisers. This is where you can find offers to promote.

Campaign – an organized effort to promote offers. A campaign can have

several ads, landing pages, or targeting options, but usually everything is

thematically related. Within one campaign, you use one type of ads inside
one specific GEO.

Campaign funnel – a complete visitor’s journey, from an ad, through

a landing page or pages, to an offer.

Click ID – a unique alphanumeric string used to identify a click. Traffic

sources, trackers, and affiliate networks have their own click IDs to track

concrete visits. Passing a click ID within a token is commonly used to

authenticate a conversion within a tracker or a traffic source.

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Conversion – any user-generated event deemed valuable by an offer
owner. A purchase, newsletter signup, app install, credit card submit are all

the examples of a conversion.

Cost models – methods of paying for traffic. The main cost models for
affiliate marketing are:

CPA – Cost per Action. This is when you pay for traffic only if
a visitor undertook a certain action, usually a conversion.

CPC – Cost per Click. This is when you pay for each click on
your ad.

CPM – Cost per Thousand (thousand in latin is mille, hence

“Cost per mille”). This is when you pay for a thousand ad views.

CPV – Cost per View. This is when you pay for a single ad view.
CPV times a thousand is CPM.

Revshare – This is when you pay a set fraction of your payout.

Creative – a piece of text or an image that appears in your ad

campaigns, offers, or landing pages.

CTA – Call to Action. Usually a button placed on a landing page. It directs

a visitor to an offer page. The same landing page can have one or more

CTA buttons leading to the same or different offers.

CTR – Click-Through Rate. The main indicator of your landing page’s

performance. It describes a ration of people who have clicked on the CTA

button VS the number of people who have visited the landing page.

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Direct Tracking – a.k.a. cookie-less tracking, redirect-less tracking, zero-
click tracking. A method of tracking that relies on scripts (often referred

to as pixels) implemented on a web page and making requests to a tracker

when a specific event occurs. This method is faster than a redirect tracking,

as there is no redirection in the middle, and more compliant, so you can

use it with Google or Facebook. The downside is that you have to edit your

landing page’s code to implement this script.

DOI – Double-Opt In. A type of a conversion flow that requires a visitor to

perform two steps before a conversion can occur (e.g. submitting credit card

details and confirming a purchase).

DSP – Demand Side Platform. This is a type of a traffic source which offers
traffic not from single publishers, but from various ad networks in one

place.

E-commerce – one of the major verticals related to buying and selling

products online.

GEO – a term describing geographical targeting details, such as tier,

country, state, city.

Impression – a metric describing a single ad view.

Incentive – any advertising technique that offers something to a visitor in

exchange for an offer. This may include rewards such as virtual currency in

games, small payments, exclusive offers, discounts, etc.

Interstitial – a kind of a full-screen ad that covers the whole app or page

when loaded.

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Lander/Landing page – any web page that goes between an ad and
an offer. It provides additional product information, convinces a visitor

to purchase, or presents alternative offers. Having a landing page in

a campaign funnel usually increases chances for a conversion.

Lead – any piece of user information that offer owners deem valuable.
This may include email address, phone number, or credit card details.

Leadgen – a type of offer where the main purpose is to collect leads.

In reality, most offers are leadgen offers.

Macros – see: token

Native – a type of ad that tries to mimic the surrounding content. These

ads look like genuine news articles and are often visible on news pages in

sections such as “You may also like” or “Related content”.

Niche – a subcategory of a vertical. Describes the category of products and/

or services promoted.

Nutra – one of the main verticals related to health and nutrition products.

Offer – a product or a service that an advertiser can promote in exchange

for a commission, called a payout. Offers can be found in affiliate networks.

Pixel – this is how a tracking script is usually called. A pixel implemented

on a landing page reports visits to this page, whereas a pixel implemented

on an offer page reports conversions.

Placeholder – see: token

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Placement – a part of a web page where an ad is placed. Information about
placement is often tracked and used for campaign optimization.

Pop – a type of ad that launches your landing page or offer page in the
background (pop-under) or in front of the currently visited page (pop-up).

Postback URL tracking – a method of reporting conversions, also known

as server-to-server (S2S) that uses HTTP requests to pass data from an

affiliate network to a tracker or a traffic source. The tracking is done without

using cookies.

Publisher – a person with an advertising space to sell, such as a web-

page or an app owner. Publishers use ad networks to offer their ad space to

advertisers (you!).

Push – a type of ads delivered directly to a visitor’s desktop or mobile. Push

ads aim to act like genuine notifications. Displaying them requires a prior

consent from a user, which pre-qualifies visitors and usually means higher

chances of clicking.

Redirect tracking – a method of tracking that relies on redirects through

a tracking domain to correctly record visit data. It usually looks as follows:

1 A visitor clicks on an ad;

2 This visitor is redirected through a tracking domain to a landing

page;

3 Once the visitor clicks the CTA button on this page, they are

redirected through a tracking domain back to the offer.

It is considered a default tracking method in affiliate marketing and is very

easy to implement.

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ROI – Return on Investment. How much you have earned VS the money you
have spent.

If it’s positive, you are earning money.

If it’s negative, you are losing money.

You can use this formula to always calculate your ROI:

Total revenue [$] - Total cost [$]

ROI [%] = x 100%
Total cost [$]

RON – Run on Network. It is a type of a campaign where you target all

traffic coming from one or many countries.

Search – a type of ads that mimics the search results displayed on

a search engine result page (think: the promoted content on the top of

Google search results).

SOI – Single Opt-In. A type of a conversion flow where it only takes one step
for a visitor to convert. This usually means agreeing to add a price of

a purchase to their phone bill. The easy conversion flow often means higher

conversion rate. The SOI offers are very popular in tier-3 countries.

Sweeps/Sweepstakes – one of the main verticals related to competitions

and quizzes. It is stereotypically associated with the “You won an iPhone!”

type of ads.

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Tier – a group of countries similar in terms of advertising techniques and
payouts. The division depends on when a given country has been connected

to the Internet.

Tier 1 are developed countries. They are familiar with many affiliate

techniques and the market is very saturated. However, offers in this

Tier have the highest payouts. Some of the examples include Australia,

Canada, Western Europe, the UK, and the USA.

Tier 2 countries were connected to the Interned later. Competition

there is smaller, yet it is still noticeable. Consequently, the payouts are

lower. Tier 2 includes China, the Caribbean islands, some of Eastern

Europe, Turkey, UAE, etc.

Tier 3 consists of developing countries that got the Internet

connection just recently. Offer payouts are the lowest there, but so is

the competition. More importantly, the sheer size of a market allows

newbies to find niches for themselves. Some Tier-3 countries are India,

Vietnam, Nigeria, Georgia, and others.

Token – an automatically replaceable placeholder that is a part of a

redirection URL used to pass information between platforms. This

information usually includes placement name that a visitor has clicked on,

country of origin, device type, etc. Each platform has its own specific tokens

and you need to pay close attention to them when building your campaigns.

Tracker – a software designed to track affiliate visits, clicks, and

conversions and analyze the recorded data.

Tracking – a process of recording various visit data using either redirect or

direct tracking method. More on tracking can be found in our lists of reasons

why you need a tracker.

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Traffic – a stream of visitors, either paid or organic. A place you can get
traffic from is called a traffic source.

Traffic source – a general term describing any place that you can get
traffic from. This includes ad networks, DSPs, Google, Facebook, and many

others.

Vertical – an offer category. There are plenty of various verticals, chief

among which are dating, nutra, or sweepstakes. Affiliate networks usually

specialize in one or few verticals. You have to decide which vertical you want

to work with before you launch any campaign.

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2.
THEORY 101:
What Is Affiliate
Marketing?
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It’s a big question. I know. And it’s time you get
your answers!

This is a professional guide, after all, so you’re waiting for some kind of

a definition. Well, here goes:

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in

which a business pays third-party publishers
to generate traffic or leads to the business’s
products and/or services.

Okay, that’s the gist of it, but in reality affiliate marketing is a lifestyle.

It’s your one-of-a-kind opportunity to quit your 9 to 5 job and become your

own boss, a freelance entrepreneur who can work from anywhere in the

world and has to report to noone but themselves.

An affiliate’s job is to act as an intermediary between visitors and offers on

various websites (usually at the same time). You need to know how to show

the best matching offers to the visitors most prone to convert.

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2.1. Here’s how it all works

Tommy has 6 apples

he doesn’t need.

Jenny needs 4 apples

for the pie.

In a perfect world, the two meet, Tommy shares his apples for a sincere

“thank you”, and they live happily ever after.

In a slightly more realistic world, they still meet, Tommy sells his apples for

whatever price he finds reasonable, and everyone is satisfied.

But here’s the rub: what if Tommy and Jenny don’t know each other, live across

the world, and don’t have the slightest intent to ever meet at all?

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 Enter – Johnny.

Now. Johnny doesn’t have a single apple

and, frankly, he couldn’t care less about the

pie. Instead, he knows Lisa who has a quite

popular blog about pies Jenny happens to

follow. So, Johnny’s plan is to ask Lisa to

promote Tommy’s apples on her blog for

Jenny to see and buy.

And then they (Johnny and Lisa)

share the profits.

Johnny is an affiliate!
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Well, okay, maybe it’s not quite that simple.

Instead of just delivering the apples from the product owner (Tommy) to

the buyer (Jenny), an affiliate’s job is to find yet another intermediary –

the publisher (Lisa). Both the affiliate and the publisher profit from the

commission, rather than the transaction itself. The product owner receives

the money for the transaction. And the client receives the product.

rd
It doesn’t have to get more complex than a 3 grade math problem!

Everybody’s happy and nobody’s left forgotten. And affiliates are the heroes

who make that happen.

Moving on to the second course!

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2.2. Affiliate Marketing Process:
Key Elements

This is where it gets exciting.

At its core, affiliate marketing is still just another form of digital advertising.

And you’re definitely familiar with affiliate ads, probably from the user’s

perspective. So let’s change that!

In this part you’ll learn what the four key elements of affiliate marketing

are and get a step-by-step cheat sheet on how to get started with your first

affiliate campaign. You’ll no longer be on the receiving end of advertising –

you’ll join the family!

Generally, affiliate marketing comes down to three things:

offers (the products you’ll be promoting);

traffic (the websites where your ads can be published);

landers (web pages that redirect your users to the offers); and

The offer doesn’t need to belong to you, a landing page is not exactly

a website, and there is a gazillion of traffic sources out there, including your

all-time-favorites Facebook and Google.

Combine those three together and you got yourself an affiliate marketing

campaign. Sounds cool, huh?

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What’s even cooler is that it’s always up to you to decide what kind of

campaigns to run and what kind of deals to promote.

You are your own boss and no one can take that away from you.

That’s exactly why, before jumping onto your very first offer, you need to

evaluate what niches and verticals you’re most comfortable working with.

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2.3. Affiliate niches & verticals

The very first thing you’ll need to do on your way to affiliate success is to

settle for a direction. You’ll have to find your marketing niche.

Niches are subcategories of verticals with

a distinct internal vision. They represent a segment
of the whole mainstream market that you will focus
on to discover your ideal audience.

There are several general categories, called verticals, that should help you

start.

The proven list of verticals for affiliates usually includes:

Dating Adult

Finance Sweepstakes

Wellness & Beauty (called “Nutra”) eCommerce

Online Gaming Travel

Found anything you like? See, it wasn’t that hard! Now would be the time

to select your niche. Ideally, the niche you select is already your area of

expertise. You feel comfortable there, you know the people, how they think,

what they like. You live for those 3-day hikes with your buddies every other

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week? Promote some camping/hiking-related products! This way you’ll be

able to advertise your product frankly and, more importantly, convincingly.

Yet, for most people, the way to go is to find a promising niche and then

master it through growing their marketing skills. You learn by practice. That’s

exactly why we recommend sticking with just one niche - there’s a lot to learn!

Some of the bonuses of choosing one particular segment of the market and

growing your business there include:

Competition is lower in specialized niches.

You start understanding your audience and your affiliate offers faster.

You gather valuable leads for future remarketing all the time.

So you see, choosing the right niche can be crucial. That’s why there are

some things you should keep in mind before you settle for something that you

can truly relate to.

How to choose the right niche

There can be niche products and niche audiences. The first ones come

and go, while the second ones tend to stay for a little longer.

Let’s take the Healthcare industry as an example.

Niche audiences in a health vertical are, for example, nicotine addicts,

diabetics, receding hairline, and so on and so forth. Some of corresponding

niche products are nicotine patches, acne cures, anti-hair-loss wonder

pills – you name it.

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You see where this is going, right? Your goal is to match a perfect niche

product to a perfect niche customer and – voila – you’re all set!

Your niche should be narrow. Specialized. Full of passionate people with

problems that your offer will help solve.

The only problem is that you need to be able to tell a profitable niche apart

from a failing one. And – mind you – you’ve got to keep up-to-date!

But to make things a little bit easier for you in your search for a perfect

affiliate niche – here’re some indicators of a healthy market:

Lots of easy-to-find customers. You know what they read, what

online places they frequent. You know where to place your ad.

Plenty of information on SERP, monthly searches (2000 a month

is a good start), blogs specific to this topic, Facebook groups, related

hashtags and other signs of online presence.

Competition. This is a good sign, contrary to what you may think.

Every niche has already been discovered, it is really unlikely that

you will be the first one. But if no one is marketing in that niche, it

may indicate that it cannot be profitable.

A stream of new offers is appearing all the time. Make sure you
have a choice and a new offer in store in case the old one dies out.

Okay, once armed with the niche of your choice, you’re ready to start

searching for your first offer.

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2.4. How do you get your first
offer?

Just by selecting a specific niche to focus on will make things tremendously

easier for you. There are lots of offers out there. It means that you don’t have

to jump on every opportunity to promote any product available on the great

web frontier.

Select your offers mindfully.

An important moment here is for you to find a perfect balance between the

offer you personally feel comfortable with and the most profitable ones.

Long story short, if just thinking about one of the adult websites makes you

blush – perhaps running an ad campaign for them is not the best idea even

if they’re willing to pay more than that online casino.

And two of the best ways to ensure you have access to some of the trendiest

offers out there are to sign up for an affiliate network or an affiliate program

of a bigger business.

This is the fool-proof method for the beginner affiliates because in order to

choose the best offer by yourself you’d have to have some data regarding the

performance of similar offers. The easiest way to get is to run a couple of

affiliate campaigns yourself. That sounds an awful lot like a “getting hired/

lacking job experience” kind of a dilemma.

So affiliate networks and programs might be your best shot to start with.

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Affiliate Networks

Let’s imagine that the product owner has never been introduced to the

affiliate in the first place. The entire deal goes south. It would be much

easier for the two to find each other (or rather each other’s deals) through

the affiliate network.

An affiliate network is a group of associated

(or affiliated) companies that sometimes offer
compatible or complementary products and
will often pass leads to each other.

Think of them as databases of different products waiting to be promoted.

Usually, the offers and the affiliates associated with the network seem to be

more trustworthy and, thus, stand a better chance at generating high-profile

conversions.

Some of the affiliate networks you could check out right now are:

You can find much more of them here.

Go ahead and see how it all looks right away! This guidebook won’t go

anywhere.

25
Affiliate Programs

If neither finding individual business offers nor spending hours on affiliate

networks searching for the one offer that will stand out to you seem

attractive – there’s one more thing you can try.

Affiliate programs serve as additional sales channels for big companies.

People can just sign up, get a link, and convince others to click it on their

blog/videos/review sites.

You can identify these links because of the ‘ref=’ or ‘referrer=’ part embedded

in them. This parameter tells the product owner who they owe this sale to.

The commission itself is usually a percentage of a sale. On some occasions,

especially for web hosting products, the commission is a fixed price per

sale.

There may be several additional factors that shape your

commission:

The commission may increase if you sell more.

There may be some promotions for new program joiners.

The commission rate may be different for each product

within one program: harder-to-sell products may have

a higher commission.

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Below are some of the affiliate programs you could consider signing up for

(mind that more often than not they’ll have a plenty of offers from seasoned

affiliates, but it most certainly doesn’t hurt to know what you’re dealing with

here!)

… and many – MANY – more.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As sweet as affiliate programs tend to

be, you’ll need experience first. And you’ll get it. Eventually. As for now,

staying on top of the offers from the top-performing affiliate programs may

give you some valuable insights regarding your own advertising strategy.

Use it wisely!

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2.5. Choosing the right traffic
source

Okay, now that you know your preferable niche and may have already

searched for one or two offers, let’s talk about where this offer would go.

A traffic source for affiliates is a place where you

get traffic (e.g. Facebook, blogs, forums, etc.)

There are plenty of traffic sources available today, which is why you need to

choose them wisely.

For starters, there are free traffic sources, and paid ones. As good as free

traffic sounds, there are certain pitfalls there. It is pretty hard to actually

reach the point where you can earn significant amounts of money from your

own (i.e. free) traffic source is hard. You’d have to fight for the high ranking

in search engines, get attention of the potential customers, and scaling tends

to get tedious.

That’s why most successful affiliates eventually

opt in for paying for their traffic.

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Here are some of the things to look for in a perfect paid traffic source:

Low prices but high conversion rates

Adjustable targeting (you’ll need it for campaign optimization)

Reasonable initial deposit

High market credibility (stay off shady deals, especially in the

beginning)

The rules and regulations match your needs

Run a quick research, brainstorm your ideal traffic source, map down the

bare minimum of the criteria, plan your budget – and off you go!

Your choice of a traffic source will heavily depend on the types of ads you’ll

decide to work with.

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Types of ads for affiliate marketers

There are six types of advertisements for you to choose from. Each has

their pros and cons, which is why it is very important you weigh all ins and

outs before jumping on a native Instagram ad for your first-ever affiliate

campaign.

Native Pop

Native ads match the look, feel, and Pop ads are simple, cheap, and eye-
functionality of the media format in catching. The only problem is that users
which they appear. You can find them from Tier 1-2 countries have developed
on social media feeds and high-quality banner blindness against pops, and the
pages, such as CNN.com. Native ads payouts for Tier 3 geos are… less than
require more effort on your side, but perfect. Still, pops are a great starting
they also offer high payouts. point for beginners.

Price: High Price: Low

Experience: Expert Experience: Beginner

Push Display

Also good for newbies! Slightly more Display ad is pretty much a blanket term
challenging than pops, push ads require that includes every visual ad placed on
you to show some creativity when it a website. You can find them anywhere
comes to content. They appear only on the Internet, unless there’s AdBlock.
to those users who already agreed to These banner ads in a graphic or text
receive notifications. The catch is that form are simple and often flashy.
with push advertising pre-landers and
langers are a must.

Price: Low Price: Low

Experience: Medium Experience: Beginner

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As you can see, the possibilities are endless. You just need to try and see

what types of traffic seem to work best for you and your niche. The world is

your oyster!

People seem to know where an advert is likely to be and the low-quality ads

result in people having negative connotations with banner adverts. As users

know what’s coming and where, they ignore it or avoid looking at these

areas. Ad blocking software doesn’t make it any easier for advertisers, as it

directly prevents these ads from even being displayed.

One way around banner blindness is using only CPC, CPL, and CPA cost

models (at least you won’t be paying for nothing). But an even better solution
is native advertising. It does take a bit longer to master, but the research

shows, the ROI is worth the time.

Bringing your first-ever ad campaign to life is a precious and overwhelming

experience. So naturally, you’d want everything to go perfect.

A campaign is where all the elements from the

above tie together. Basically, it is everything you
do to direct traffic from a particular source to
your offer.

At this point you have probably figured it out – it’s all about creating

an effective ad that will bring a customer to an effective landing page.

Does the product itself matter? For targeting and optimization – for sure.

For the performance of your campaign – it still does.

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Sure, a really talented professional can try and make even the least

appealing product look desirable. But at the end of a day, it all comes down

to testing various offers to see which ones are more likely to resonate with

the potential buyers.

And yes, your job is only half-way done. See you in the next part!

Looks like you’ve got some notes to take!

32
3.
PRACTICAL PART:
How to Start?
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Okay, by now you should be feeling like you know a thing or two about the

exciting world of affiliate marketing, so it’s about time we put that knowledge

of yours to practice! Yes, my friend, practice. This is a do-it kind of a guide,

not a read-it. So, buckle up, open this guide in one window and prepare to get

things done in another one - it won’t be boring!

3.1. Find your first offer and

match it with the right
traffic source

Let’s hope you settle on a niche you like the most (if not, go back to the part

where we’re talking about how important that it and make up your mind!)

It means that you’re ready to actually go and select your very first offer to

promote!

Try checking one of those affiliate networks and/or products mentioned in

the previous section of the guide and find something that speaks to you. This

way you’ll get both the offer and a traffic source covered in one sit!

Apply to join the network/program of your choice. We have

a separate guide to help you with that. Just check it right here.

Keep in mind that sometimes it will take a lot of time for you to get officially

approved, but don’t let that discourage you! Rome wasn’t built in one day

either.

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3.2. Prepare the creatives

Don’t just sit there waiting for the reply from your dream affiliate network -

put that time to a good use instead! Start working on those creatives.

This may easily be the most important part of your ad campaign creation.

A good selling copy, an attractive graphic to catch attention, a landing page…

Oh, right. A landing page!

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3.3. Create a landing page

Don’t freak out. You don’t need to have any IT skills in order to be an

affiliate. They would be a nice addition to your professional profile, but by

no means are they a must.

You don’t need a website to do

affiliate marketing!

What you should consider getting, however, is a landing page (a.k.a.

a lander). It may seem counter-intuitive, as you’ll be adding an extra step

to your sales funnel, but landers have been proven to significantly increase

conversions. They add this extra level of credibility, education, and realness

most of the customers are looking for. So, what is a landing page and how to

create a good one?

Think of it this way: if your ad is a window in a store, the lander is the first

conversation with the sales assistant. You want it to be friendly, polite, and

yet intriguing enough for you to be willing to go for a test-drive or straight to

the cash desk.

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Having a landing page is entirely up to you. But if you feel like giving it a try,

here are some of the best tools on the market that will the process as easy

and fun as can be:

Make sure to also check out this landing-page builders ultimate review

to find the perfect solution for yourself.

I need to find
the perfect solution

37
3.4. Opt in for an ad tracker…

… Like Voluum!

As soon as your campaign will go live you’ll be introduced to the

mesmerizing world of neverending data. Having a tracker is a nice and

easy way to store, analyze, and manage all of it, as well as to keep your

campaigns neatly organized in the process.

Ad trackers are implemented on the offer

page or the source code and they run on the
background collecting and analyzing user data.
Like cookies!

Ad tracking creates a short detour for your traffic. It will now go from your

ad through the tracker to an offer, and all it takes is a quick setup. The

affiliate tracker then will look into traffic and derive additional layers of

information from the visitor’s IP address or user agent.

This way, the tracker gets all the necessary information to help you find

underlying patterns or direct visitors to the most appropriate offers

for them. It may even employ state of the art AI to optimize your traffic.

If you’ve ever had a chance to work with Google Analytics – you get the

picture. Except for ad trackers give you the information about third-party

websites, not your own. And this kind of data is much – MUCH – harder to

come buy on your own!

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You can read more about different types of trackers and how to find the best

one here.

You may think that investing in an ad tracker at an early stage of your affiliate

career is a waste. Well let me stop you right there! Here are 10 reasons why

you’d better get one before it’s too late!

1. Know everything about your performance – record every

impression, click, and conversion.

2. Manage all your campaigns in one place – stop jumping

between different platforms.

3. Use automation – save hours on manual work using AI to

auto-optimize your campaigns for you.

4. Know everything about your audience – no more guessing!

5. Get actionable insights on your performance –base your

decision on real-time data.

6. Test your campaigns effectively – know where to make

changes for improved effectiveness faster.

7. Get expert support – Account Management will be a great help,

especially if you are a newbie!

8. Monitor your performance wherever you are – use your

tracker’s mobile app to check your campaigns on the go.

9. Stop wasting money on bots – use an anti-fraud tool to clear

your traffic.

10. Keep your costs low and you’ll grow – yes, it rhymes.

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Truth be told, there are many ad trackers out there. But only one of them we

can vouch for.

Are you ready to earn

your first $$$?

Sign up now

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 3.5. Always be testing &
optimizing

We’ve already established that it is crucial for your success to find the golden

mean for the offers you are going to promote. It sounds pretty simple in

theory. Find a nice offer you like, make sure it will pay off, and promote the

hell out of it.

And it may work just like that. As long as you’re super lucky and the very first

campaign you’ve ever launched turned out to go exactly as you expected it to.

You guessed it right – it’s not how things usually go.

Learn from your mistakes!

Instead, you’re given an opportunity to learn from your mistakes. But, let’s

be honest, no one likes to be wrong. So, to bring the number of inevitable

mistakes to the minimum you should test which combination works best!

of offer + traffic source + lander works best.

Offer A + Traffic Source B + Lander A

Offer B + Traffic Source A + Lander C?

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You won’t know for sure until you try!

Technically, you could go about a career in affiliate marketing without

a single cent. But the result wouldn’t bring you much money either. Which

is why if you want to make some actual profits, you need to prepare to invest

some.

You will need around $500 for traffic to test

different approaches.

It’s time to put all that information you got thanks to the tracker and your

own testing to good use!

You need to be ready that something that seemed to work just fine one day

will become completely obsolete the other. And you need to know how to

use it for your advantage.

The key to a successful campaign optimization

is finding that perfect ration between the
traffic, creatives, landers, and offers.

The best traffic sees the best-fitting ad, which sends them to the best-matching

lander and ends with conversions from the best offer. If one part is wrong,

the whole stack can collapse.

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BONUS: How to Make It
Profitable - Expert Advice

Well, let me congratulate you!

You covered all the main basics every beginner affiliate should know.

But that’s not all!

You need to understand that we don’t want you to be just an affiliate. There are

enough of them out there. We want you to be a successful one. Which is why

in this final part of the guide we’ll share the tips and tricks from the brightest

affiliate marketing experts!

We asked the cream of the crop in the affiliate world just one question. Because

it's really all that matters. Check out what affiliate marketing gurus have to say

to you!

What a newbie needs

to do to become
a profitable affiliate?

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aaa

Amy Cheung aka Vortex

Senior moderator @ STM

A whole book can be written to answer this question! But I’ll be brief and

only point out the most important factors I’ve found, based on personal

experience and having guided many newbies that have joined STM in the

past 5 years:

1 Don’t focus on profits while you’re learning the ropes.

Define your goal as „I will SPEND $xx/xxx every week on testing”

instead of „I will make $xx/week in revenue/profit”. The former is

100% within your control. The latter is not.

2 Be bold in testing extensively!

There is no way around that. Every single successful affiliate I know

has done that and still continues to do it. As mentioned above, set

a target weekly/monthly test budget, then spend it as intelligently as

possible. Write off your test budget as a loss in the first weeks/months

so that spending money would keep you from testing as much as

needed.

What can you test? OFFERS is the big one. Landing pages. Ads/

creatives. Angles. Targeting options. Bids. Placements. Traffic

sources. Etc...
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3 Spy extensively.

Whether manually or by using spy tools. Look for trends. Narrow

down the amount of stuff you need to test, THEN do the extensive

testing. Testing extensively but blindly can bankrupt you before you

make your first dime.

4 Spend time analyzing stats

You’ve paid a pretty penny for them, so learn all your can from them.

Veteran affiliates may be able to take one look at stats and know

what’s going on, but as a beginner, you need to spend time to even

figure out what to look for.

5 Run low-payout offers in low’ish-competition geos to start

When you’re small, you don’t try to challenge Godzilla! Try targeting

developing countries where possible. And running low-payout offers

will allow you to collect stats and optimize your campaigns much

faster and on a much lower test budget than high-payout offers.

6 Networking is important!

Go to meetups and conferences, reach out to other affiliates online,

chat with different affiliate networks and traffic network reps, buy

people coffee, send people gifts. One casual tip from one person can

contribute to your success. And if you like to work in groups, joining

a mastermind would be a great idea!

7 Try to have fun!

There will be good and bad days, and more bad days than good when

you’re just starting out. But if you don’t keep things light and fluffy,

and your mind curious and inquisitive like a child’s, you won’t survive

the bad days. Remember the initial excitement that got you hooked on

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running campaigns in the first place, read some success stories, and

try some more. Success is inevitable as long as you don’t give up. All

„failure” is, is just someone giving up before he succeeds. You must do

what others don’t, to achieve what others won’t.

Hope that helps! Hang in there!

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 Servando Silva
Affiliate Marketing Expert

You need 3 things to become a profitable and a full-time affiliate when

you’re getting started: budget, patience, and time to test things.

It’s important to have a proper budget or you won’t be able to understand

what’s going on. Make decisions based on data.

Also, you need to know that affiliate marketing isn’t a quick sprint, but more

like a long-run marathon. It could take you several weeks or months of being

unprofitable to learn things and finally achieve that green ROI.

Finally, time is important because you’re going to launch a ton of campaigns

during the first weeks. You should put as much as you can in learning and

implementing fast. If you’re doing this as a side hustle, set aside 1-2 hours per

day and don’t forget to implement and test what you learn. There’s no better

way to learn than testing things and seeing how everything works by yourself.

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 Luke Kling
Founder of AffLIFT

There are 2 key factors to becoming a successful affiliate: motivation

and patience.

Most people who start affiliate marketing are very motivated. They’ve

read the threads on forums like affLIFT where other people are making

thousands of dollars a day. All of the sudden you’re dreaming about buying

a fancy car. But with all that motivation comes huge disappointment when

you’ve spent $100 and not made a penny back on your first campaign.

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? WHY AM I NOT MAKING MONEY?

Well, the answer is simple.

You simply have not learned how to properly run an affiliate marketing

campaign and you have not invested enough yet to find a profitable

campaign. This is where patience is required. If you are profitable on

your first campaign then it is simply because you were lucky. Becoming

a successful and profitable affiliate in the long term takes patience and

learning.

If you surround yourself with other successful, knowledgeable, and

motivated people, you’re bound to succeed!

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 Neill Burton
Head of Account Management @ Zeropark

When you’re starting out in affiliate marketing, it is very important not to

underestimate your budgets. There are many courses and books online that

promise instant riches with little work. But unless you were born as

a member of the royal family or a lottery winner, you will know earning

money in any job takes skill and practice.

Your first campaign should aim to make a slightly

negative ROI, this may sound counter-intuitive
but you are building the foundations for a better
campaign.

You take this campaign that has - 30% ROI and you analyze it. You cut out the

bad sources, optimize the bid on the working ones and run again. -10% ROI

the second time and so on until the campaign becomes profitable. So although

you have planned a 200$ budget for the campaign it may take a couple of

times before the campaign starts earning.

When it does, then it’s time to make your testing budget back.

49
 Maxime Bergeron
Sales Director @ CrakRevenue

There are certain things needed to become a good affiliate marketer that

cannot be denied by any of the big wigs.

1 First and foremost: Get Traffic.

You need to have people coming to see what you do every day. The

good news is that traffic comes in many forms. Facebook likes,

Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers. So before even considering

doing affiliate marketing, you will have to think long and hard on
building your following base.

2 Have strength.

..And get ready to screw up. . . A lot!

Your ability to stay strong when a certain brand recipe or offer mix

doesn’t work will define your success. To become a successful affiliate

you will have to crack a whole lot of eggs. It is just the nature of the

business.

As a newbie, the most important thing to work on is your mindset. You will fail.

But that is O.K. Just remember that the strongest knight is not the one on the horse

but the one who falls off and gets right back up.

50
3 Open your mind.

Learning and listening will become extremely important. Newbies

should spend many hours reading forums, watching tutorials, and

applying all they learn there to their reality.Fill your brain up with

every idea, trend, and environmental factor that might help you

understand aff lingo, techniques, and best practices.

4 Get s business partner quickly

As an affiliate, your workplace boils down to you and your computer.

However, this is where your CPA network comes in.Take the time to

pick a network YOU like. These networks are the closest thing you’ll

get to a business partner. Remember, they do not make money if you

do not make money. There is no better place to get insights, in-depth

stats, new promo info and even advice than from your new best friend,

your affiliate manager.

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 João Aguiar
Head of Online Marketing @ Mobidea

1 Start by mastering one thing at a time

To put it simple, you gotta have a plan.

Sure, you could try to read everything you can get your hands on and

bulldoze your way through countless gurus’ courses. Kudos for that.

Unfortunately, more often than not, this strategy will leave you more

confused than when you started. Instead, pick one thing and start by

making a detailed statement of what you wanna achieve in the 30-days

time frame. Here’s just a few examples of areas you might wanna start

with:

Media buying

Facebook and social ads

Promoting sweepstake offers

Running traffic to adult offers

Getting started in push, pop or native ad campaigns

2 All of these things present unique and exclusive challenges, so set

yourself up to do something you know you wanna achieve and stick to it.

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2 Test & track everything

Learn the tricks of the trade. For that, you need to analyze every

single offer you promote, its performance, and its conversion rates.

So, yeah, choose your offers wisely. We recommend joining an affiliate

network. It might seem odd, but if you’re new in the business, we truly

recommend you to check Mobidea, as you can get fast approval,

weekly payments, experienced AMs, spy tools, and much more.

When you start running your campaign, try to keep track of its every

element. You never know which part of your setup is a gamechanger

unless you keep a close eye on all of them.

3 Keep the positive mindset and stay focused on your goals

Mistakes will happen. It’s OK. Just keep your eyes on the prize.

You need to remember that every problem can be turned into the

opportunity with the right mindset, so don’t let some setbacks

discourage you. Affiliate marketing is all about trial and error.

Learn from your mistakes.

4 Start small and gradually work your way up

And more importantly, start small. You’ll have time to join the

big league. Don’t choose a highly competitive niche for your first-

ever campaign. Instead, settle for something less popular (i.e. less

profitable) but master it and grow your affiliate business from there.

Everyone has to start somewhere.

Good luck!
 The golden rule in affiliate marketing is you won’t know until you try.

It’s a trial-and-error kind of business and you need to trust your gut. But the

payout… Oh, the payout is worth the stress!

This guide alone won’t guarantee you affiliate success. But use it wisely, search

for additional resources, and try, try, try…

You got it.

And with us you’re one step closer to greatness already.

 The Guide
was created by:
Voluum Affiliate Tracker Marketing Team

Content team: Kamila Luksza, Anna Kvasnevska

Design team: Mateusz Bryk, Malgorzata Kocznur

Partner communications: Artur Kaczmarczyk

We also want to THANK

all our guest contributors for their

advice and support in creating this guide:

Amy Cheung | STM

Neill Burton | Zeropark

Luke Kling | AffLIFT

Maxime Bergeron | CrakRevenue

João Aguiar | Mobidea

Servando Silva

www.voluum.com