Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

About 6 months ago I left my cushy corporate search marketing job at a fortune 50 retailer to do AM fulltime.  When I quite, I had no real campaigns setup, only ideas, confidence, and a blog that was making enough to pay the rent/eat.  Shortly after I quit my job, I was dropped from the affiliate program that was my main earner for the blog.  I was pretty much left stunned and confused.  I spent a few days being pissed off and worried, then i just decided to put up or shut up.  I knew that I was very good at search marketing and that all I needed to do was parlay that into different affiliate offers, people were making big money so I knew that I could too.

Flash forward 6 months later and I am incredibly glad I quit my job, by far the best decision I have ever made.  Not only the best decision financially, but personaly as well.  When I was at my job and wanted to test new traffic sources, I would have to write something up to justify it and then request approval.  Now, I just do it.  I used to have to be at the office at 8, now I sleep till 11.  I used to have 3 or 4 levels of management, now i’m my own boss.

Being completely in charge has tought me a lot.  Some of the biggest things are:

• My level of effort as an affiliate is almost directly proportional to my revenue.  The more I work, the more I make.  It’s a great feeling, whereas my pay at my old job was always the same, no matter how hard or long I worked.
• Test everything.  If you find a new traffic source, test it.  I am testing out networks I never heard of 6 months ago and many of them are great
• Diversify your offers.  Don’t put all your eggs into one basket, because if an offer or niche gets cut, you don’t want to be SOL (i.e. credit cards).
• I did my first media buy, but make sure you have an out clause.  You don’t want to get burned from shitty traffic and not be able to pull out.  Also, make sure there is a designated spend pattern, don’t let a network jack spending up in the final days just to complete the IO.  If you had asked me 6 months ago if I thought I would be doing 5 or 6 figure media buys, I would have laughed in your face.
• Never be the last one in or out of a niche.  I really learned this over the last 3 months with Acai.  Get in hot niche’s early before margins dry up and the market gets saturated, and get out before too much heat is on it or margins get ridiculously slim.
• Google Content network can be awesome when done right.  When I was at my corporate job we never used the content network, I always read and was told that it was terrible traffic.  Was that ever wrong.
• Be efficient with your traffic.  If 70% of your traffic leaves, do something with it.  Send them to another landing page, or directly to the offer when they try to exit.  Upsell your customers.  Many times there are offers that can compliment the one you’re running, why pay for traffic to get a user to complete 1 action, when you can get them to complete 2 or 3.  Also, don’t send non-cookie enabled users to cookie only tracking networks, their leads won’t count.  Being efficient with your traffic gives you a huge edge over the competition.
• Find individuals you can trust and bounce ideas off of.  I’ve been lucky to become friends with 5 or 6 other large affiliates and it has really helped me. In the sense of sharing ideas, getting someone else’s perspective, ethics check, coding help, but also to realize that everyone has good and bad days.
• But the biggest thing I learned is to believe in yourself.  If you honestly think you can do it, you can and will.  Everyone goes through periods of doubt, i’ve had great days where i felt like I won the lottery with a campaign, and i’ve had terrible days where I couldn’t believe I lost several $k on a campaign.  But at the end of the day, believe in yourself and your abilities.