I've been in the game for a while and have had great success recently, so I wanted to post this broad checklist that I use when setting up new affiliate campaigns. Some parts are more geared toward noobs, while others can be used by all. Of course in real life I go into much more in depth at each step, BUT this is a good start. I've broken the process down into a 3 Phase, 9 Step checklist. Phase 1: The Search a. Choose Your Niche: Where is your area of competence? What products/services are you most knowledgable in? What do you enjoy working 15 hour days on? What is there an online demand for? b. Find The Proper Affiliate Program: What is the best affiliate program combined with highest paying offer for the niche you chose in step a? c. Research Existing Sites In Your Chosen Niche: Be sure to check your competition that does well in PPC as well as SEO. This is very important. Research your competition inside and out. It'll save you a ton of time and mistakes. Phase 2: Mining For Keywords a. Demand Research: Is there a consumer demand for your service or product? Use Wordtracker, Wordze, or free tools (Free Wordtracker version, Overture, etc) for this research. b. Keyword Research: Dig up as many relevant keywords as you can think of for your niche. When you think you're done, you're not - start thinking outside the box and get more reach into related niche keywords. You can never have too many keywords. I call this Keyword Stacking. c. Create Landing Page / Site: You can create one yourself or hire someone to create a page for you. It's always best if you can do it yourself b/c then you can implement 100% of your vision onto the site. If you can't program (which I can't at all), then try to learn photoshop and at least design a layout or look and feel that your coder can go off. That'll save you money too. Don't stop at 1 page either. You can test with only 1 landing page, but once you're profitable, keep adding content and pages. Phase 3: Scaling and Making Money a. Optimize: Run your campaign for a few days and be sure you're using conversion tracking. That is a must! After you have enough relevant clicks and conversions, start optimizing. Even after a campaign is profitable, you'll want to optimize on a weekly basis forever. b. Scale Your Campaign: Most likely you will be limited by the number of impressions you initially get. Even if you're profitable there's still a big problem with this... You can't make the $1000's+ per day that you want to make. So the answer is to SCALE your campaign. You have to bring volume in order to make the big bucks. Don't stop at 5MM impressions per day, get 25MM impressions! Just keep going! c. Monitor: This is the ongoing process of monitoring your campaigns once their launched. The beauty is that after a couple of weeks you no longer have to be tied to your computer everyday refreshing stats, but you should glance at revenue and spending at least once a day. That's it for the 9 steps. Remeber that only 1 or 2 out of 10 campaigns you try will be long term profitable. That is still a great percentage. The above process should take no more than 3 days total. The key is to pump out as many quality campaigns as you can as quickly as you can. To make serious money at this, it's a full time job plus more, but can be tons of fun too. If you have any questions on more specific parts of the affiliate checklist, ask them here. Hope this helps.
People tend to be lazy and skip the steps, but I agree, if you do not hit on those 9 steps your campaign will suffer because of it.