Are you letting FEAR control YOU?

Do You Have Super Affiliate Nerves of Steel?”

I just received this article by Amit Mehta.

It gives you the tips to be mentally prepared to start and continue a PPC campaign.

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You know, there are so many aspects of PPC affiliate marketing that are incredibly simple, yet the average affiliate continues to mess them up. Let me give you an example: here’s how EASY it is to optimize your bid prices (once you have Google’s Conversion Tracking in place):

1) The first step is to know your average commission per sale (let’s say it’s $20 for this example).

2) Now, if you want to achieve a 100% ROI, you want to watch your Cost / Conversion, (that’s the last column you see in Google AdWords). The Cost / Conversion, is how much it cost for each sale you make and is the KEY METRIC you want to watch. If you want a 100% ROI and you get $20 per sale, then you want your Cost/Conversion to be $10.

3) Now, after you let you campaign run for a while, and get proper statistics, then you can adjust your keyword/AdGroup bids higher or lower based on their Cost / Conversion. If their Cost / Conversion > $10, lower the bid by some set amount, let say 10%, and lower it by 20% if Cost / Conversion > $15 (just an example). This will reduce the ad position and click costs of your poorly converting keywords.
Now as your ad position drops, not only will your click costs drop considerably, but your conversion rate will go up, since you’ll have less “tire kickers” and more serious visitors coming to your site.

4) On the other hand, if the Cost / Conversion is well below $10 then you can increase the bid by 10% or more; this will increase your traffic and profits. Your Cost / Conversion will increase a bit, but your profits will jump substantially, especially if that 10% increase takes you to the first three positions.
Sounds pretty simple huh? But do you know what’s really shocking?
Most affiliates, especially newbie affiliates, fail to follow the simple steps above and as a result their campaigns fail. The mechanics of optimizing your bid prices is SIMPLE, but again, affiliate marketing is not about mechanics, it’s about thought process.

Here are some typical scenarios that many affiliates go through, tell me if any of them sound familiar:

1) The trigger-happy affiliate: This is the affiliate who adjusts his bid prices EVERYDAY. If he has a good day, he’ll shoot his bid prices up, if he has a slow day, he’ll slash his bid prices way down. The problem with this, other than the fact it’s a freakin’ full time job, with little time left to expand, is that his/her decisions are based on statistically insignificant data.
If you make a decision on too little data, it’s as bad (or worse) as making no decision at all. Affiliates who engage in this type of trigger-happy approach often wonder why their sales and profits are stagnant and not moving up.
Here’s a tip: You can’t make a decision on how well a keyword/AdGroup converts after 30 clicks. You need at least 300-500 to make an accurate determination.

2) The scared affiliate: I see this all the time. An affiliate has one bad sales day and they PAUSE their campaign for several days!?! If you ask me this is about the stupidest thing an affiliate can do. Your sales will fluctuate (sometimes wildly) day by day, week by week, and month by month, depending on the market.
If you have ONE slow sales day, it does not mean the next 3 days will be slow as well. You miss out on sales and profits, and even worse than that, you are losing data you could use to make rational, statistically relevant decisions.
As long as you let one day’s stats scare you, then you won’t have the confidence to build a large profitable affiliate marketing business.

3) The REALLY scared affiliate: A lot of times you’ll have to lose money in a market for a while before you go from losing money to making money. The REALLY scared affiliate will walk away from a campaign if it’s not profitable right off the bat, in stark fear that he or she is losing money everyday, even if their daily budget is set at $10 a day!

Here’s the key: you ABSOLUTELY must be unemotional
about the decisions you make when adjusting
bid prices and optimizing your campaign.

You have to understand that just like the stock market, your sales will fluctuate up and down, erratically and unpredictably. Sales can also be stronger one month compared to another.
In order to get an accurate gauge of how well a keyword/AdGroup converts, and what its actual Cost / Conversion is, you have to let the keyword/AdGroup accumulate AT LEAST 300 to 500 clicks, before you decide to pause it completely, or bid it up or down.

FINAL THOUGHT:
If you let fear control you, and control your decision making, than you’ll NEVER become a Super Affiliate until you overcome that fear.
Fear is what keeps most affiliates from entering the big leagues with the Super Affiliates, in the same way fear keeps so many people enslaved to a job that they hate. When there’s ample opportunity to start their own business and quit their day job.
Until you learn to control your emotions in regards to money, money will ALWAYS control you.

Are you letting fear control YOU?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

puravida

 

Excellent excellent article. I hope others read this and apply.

 

Yeah, well-done. Anyone having less than great success with PPC should read this one.
- Russ

 

Good articles -- success is based on business sense not on day trading.

 

You make some extremely valid (and valueable) points. But I have to wonder, based on the statistics courses that I took in college, that your claim that 300-500 observations are necessary in order to make an informed go/no-go decision. Isn't it true that with 20-30 observations of most any behavior that one can make a probabilistic decision at the 95% level of confidence? If that is still true, then 10-15 times that number of observations should certainly raise one's level of confidence in the outcome, but the cost of those additional observations may not be worth the additional certainty.