Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

This may sound simple and it is, but it seems to me that learning how and when to take risks is the biggest separator between unsuccessful and successful people.  Very few people are successful in life that don’t take risks.  Me personally, I am naturally risk averse when it comes to money/business.  I don’t always play it safe, but I am rarely the one that goes for the home run.  I have found this to be good and bad.

After going to Ad Tech in San Francisco, I realized that the biggest difference between myself and the affiliates that are larger than me, is not that they know more or have access to information I don’t have, it is that at some point they took some big risks.  Now I am not an advocate of taking risks that don’t make sense, but there are times when they do make sense.  Whether it is doing a very large media buy, doing a homepage takeover, starting your own product, or taking heavy losses on a PPC campaign to break into a market, there are times when you have to take risks.  Assuming your risks make sense, the rewards can be huge.

In regards to affiliate marketing, you can’t just immediately take risks when you start.  You need to learn the ropes, save a little cash, get a feel for what works, then you can take some risks.  There comes a point in time when in order to reach the next level, to be the best, you have to start signing insertion orders for $1M, $2M, or more.  Right now in affiliate marketing, unless you’re doing mid to high six figures a day, you’re really not one of the biggest players.  The way these guys do it is by taking risks and spending a BUTTLOAD of money each day on ads.

So if you want to be average or middle of the road then it’s fine to play it safe, but if you want to be the best or in the top tier, you eventually have to start going for the home runs and hope they work out.

I am going to preface this post by saying 2 things.  I’ve had good success doing small and mid 6 figure buys, but I’m not the best at media buying.  Secondly, when I say media buys, I mean purchasing ad space through a network or large site, on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or dCPM (dynamic cpm) basis.  I do not consider Facebook, Adsonar, Adsdaq, Pulse360, etc. to be media buying for this post.

After having spent a lot of money doing media buys, i’ve learned a few things:

• Rates are almost always negotiable.  Either sign a larger IO or offer to prepay and you will almost always get a lower rate.  Lower CPM pricing can make or break a media buy
• Just cause you see someone’s ad in a media buy doesn’t mean it is profitable.  I make this mistake often.  There are lots of variables as to whether you can make it profitable such as their CPM cost, their payout, but also they could also be running negative.
• Know you’re target market before you do a media buy.  You should know your target demographics before you contact the network/site.  Don’t rely on your rep to tell you what ages to target, often they just want to make the sale.
• Test the offer on Facebook first.  I have found running an offer on Facebook first gives me a great idea if the landing page is good and what ages to target.  Better to learn this info on Facebook than during a 6 figure buy.
• Make sure you know when you’re out clause is.  Ask upfront before you sign the IO, you never want to get stuck in a bad buy you can’t get out of.
• I’ve never had success with Right Media.  I have found on multiple buys that the traffic quality on Right Media is bad.  I would just stay away from it.  Yahoo properties and their Comscore 250 are a different story, but smaller right media sites tend to be bad.
• Don’t expect every buy to have ridiculous ROI or be wildly successful.  My first buy tanked.  My second buy tanked (lost like 25k), my 3rd buy rocked (like 400% roi), but every other one has usually been modest 10-25% roi.  When doing big media buys, you usually have smaller margins and make up for them with volume (there are exceptions to this obviously).
• Do not sign an IO if you don’t feel comfortable with it.  Trust your instincts, typically you will know more about your offer/landing page than your ad sales rep.  If you don’t like the targeting, make them change it.  If you really think the CPM price is too high, don’t sign it.  Bottom line is don’t let someone badger you into signing an IO if you don’t want to.  It will rarely ever work out in your benefit.

That’s just a couple of tips for media buying that i’ve learned from successes and failures.  Also, don’t think you have to do media buys to be big.  I know really big affiliates who never do media buys, but I also know guys who almost only do media buys.  There are tons of traffic sources out there, some will work for you, some won’t.

I read this somewhere a while a back, but I don’t remember where, so I’m just going to post my own rendition.  If you use Prosper202 or Tracking202 for your affiliate tracking software you’re well aware of the tracking string that is added to your URLS, it usually looks something like “?t202id=32254&t202kw=”.  While this part of the URL is really important since it will track everything, it is also ugly for users and can also giveaway info about your campaign to other affiliates.  There is a way to strip all this out and still have it track correctly.

What you have to do is setup a new redirect file, name it something like redirect.php or tracking.php and inside of this file put this html code:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<script src=”http://yourtrackingdomain/tracking202/static/landing.php?lpip=1303″ type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”> window.location=’http://www.clean-url-users-go-to.com’;</script>
</body>
</html>

After you’ve set this file up and uploaded, you take your orginal P202 tracking string, “?t202id=32254&t202kw=” and add it to the end of this newly created redirect file to look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.php?t202id=32254&t202kw=.  Now what you’ve done is send the user to this redirect file, which contains your Prosper202 landing page javascript to track the user (which will track against the URL parameters you added), counted the user in Prosper because the javascript was triggered, then your users will be sent to a clean URL.  On this clean URL you will still use your outbound Prosper PHP redirects as normal and it will still count your click throughs.

It will inevitably happen at some point, your tracking server will go down.  It could be anything from you accidentally shutting it off, blocking traffic, data center loses power, who knows.  But the good thing is that there is a very simply trick that will save you a lot of down time.  When you setup the prosper202/tracking 202 redirects, they will look something like:

<?php

// ——————————————————————-
//
// Tracking202 PHP Redirection, created on Sun Feb, 2009
//
// This PHP code is to be used for the following landing page.
// http://youraffiliatedomain.com
//
// ——————————————————————-

if (isset($_COOKIE['tracking202outbound'])) {
$tracking202outbound = $_COOKIE['tracking202outbound'];
} else {
$tracking202outbound = ‘http://www.yourtrackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/lp.php?lpip=232′;
}

header(’location: ‘.$tracking202outbound);

?>

That is the standard redirect prosper will spit out to you.  It basically translates to, if the user has cookies enabled, call the tracking domain and subid from the cookie.  If they don’t have cookies enabled, here is the direct link to the tracking domain redirect.

Here is the real simple fix, instead of using your tracking domain link in the “$tracking202outbound = ” field, but in your direct affiliate link at the network of the offer.  If your tracking domain is down, PHP won’t execute the redirect from the cookie, so it will redirect to whats in the “$tracking202outbound = ” field.  You might as well put your affiliate link there anyway, because if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled, their subID won’t be tracked.

Hope this made sense, because it has saved me a lot of headache.  I edit all of my redirects to do this.