At the very start of Volume 5, I made it clear that you should avoid spending a single dollar on affiliate marketing until you can answer the following questions:

What niche am I going to work in?
What traffic source am I going to use?
What demographics am I going to target?

These are three pivotal questions. Answer them correctly and you’ll avoid the rather severe strain of throwing-shit-at-a-wallitis that most of us seem to be suffering from.

If you can’t answer these questions, you are committing the same madness as a businessman without a business plan. It may work for a small handful of Delboys, but for most of us, unfocused concentration is a recipe for mediocre results.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a skill in its own right. I prefer to think of affiliate marketing as an umbrella term for a group of professionals who are great at getting their noses dirty in other people’s business. Our defining quality is that we do a better job of generating customers than the companies we work for. That’s our ‘value creation’, our gift to the world.

So, being honest with yourself, how much do you know about the companies you work for?

I bet you know their payouts and EPCs, right? But what do you know about their customers and products? What do you know about their current marketing efforts, and most importantly, what can you do to help them?

I believe success (or failure) depends on your ability to really nail the following processes:

Demographic research – Understanding the people you’re marketing to.
Offer research – Understanding the offers you’re promoting.
Technical research – Understanding the conversion flow.
Platform research – Understanding the traffic source.

Finally, throw in a helpful dollop of good old fashioned common sense and basic maths.

Note: Taking maths seriously will save you a lot of money in testing. When you can rule out campaigns by knowing intuitively that the maths don’t work, you’re doing it right.

Let’s take a closer look at the four key processes above.

Demographic research

Are you the kind of marketer who slings products to fratboy college kids on Tuesday, only to be cold calling retirement homes on Wednesday? How many different demographics might we find in your crosshairs?

The reality of understanding a demographic is that unless you are that demographic, you’ve got a lot of work to do.

If you want to sell products to a foreign demographic, one that isn’t directly compatible with your own life experience, there are two ways forward.

1. Use audience measurement tools to gain a better understanding of the demographic.
2. Spend time in the trenches getting a feel for the demographic.

Audience Measurement Tools

I’m sure you’ve heard of these, right?

They are crowbarred in to practically every conversation about affiliate best practices.

Google Ad Planner – Yes, it belongs to Google. And yes, we still hate Google. However, bitchiness aside, Ad Planner is a pretty badass demographic research tool. Use it to dig under the fingernails of an affiliate offer’s existing audience.

Quantcast – Affiliates love this site almost as much as they love talking about it. Quantcast has some excellent insights in to what a site’s audience might be interested in.

I particularly like this example for Plentyoffish.

What are POF.com users interested in? Oh, you didn't know?

So, pretty much every niche in affiliate marketing…

Compete – Kinda like Quantcast, but with the full honeybadger makeover. Pop-ups and upsells all over the shop. There’s good data nonetheless.

Spending Time in the Trenches

As much as I enjoy squirreling through small mountains of data, I believe the best kind of demographic research involves putting faces to percentages. You can’t hope to understand the mindset of your target audience if you haven’t looked beyond cold numbers.

I know that most of the offers I’m likely to promote are either riddled with scandal, or part of a niche that has previously been riddled with scandal. It’s just the affiliate marketing way.

Love it or hate it, you can learn a lot about a target market’s mindset by looking at the devastation of what has converted before.

I guarantee that by spending 30 minutes checking out sites like Scam.com, your inpiration palette will be overflowing with juicy consumer concerns and possible reflex psychological triggers that stand in the way of a conversion.

I know we’d all love to believe that our target market is a gigantic field of lambs waiting to be slaughtered, but these lambs have often been burnt before. Many times over.

Those working in the weight loss niche know full well that the number one concern is how to distinguish yourself from the hundreds of other solutions that didn’t work.

How do you manage such a feat? By spending time in the trenches!

Use forums like Scam to gauge the public sentiment towards certain websites and verticals. Draw up a list of the primary concerns and make those points your challenge to rebuke. Your landing page should be an island of reassurance.

Alternatively, for a really effective prod at your demographic, ask a friend or relative (one who ticks the right demo boxes. obviously) to take a look at your ads and landing page. Take notes on how they react to your creatives, where they click, where they stumble…

Note: Don’t try this shit if you’re working in the adult dating market. Nobody reacts naturally to porn with their nephew taking notes behind them on a clipboard.

Offer research

I dedicated 25 pages to my process of offer research in Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s something you should take very seriously if you’re on a small budget, or… you know, if on some basic level, you value your money.

Offer research involves scoping beyond the usual affiliate concerns. Yes, it’s nice to have payouts and EPCs documented in a spreadsheet, but understanding ‘what’s in it for me’ is not going to get you any closer to understanding the offer itself.

If you get too creative with your campaigns, you may find yourself selling an angle that simply doesn’t exist – or isn’t compatible with the offer itself.

All those “Would You Date a Soldier?” ads are redundant if you promote a dating site that has nothing to do with the military, especially if you make no attempt to bridge the angle on your landing page.

Before promoting any offer, bombard your affiliate manager accordingly. Find out any information you can about the merchant. What types of leads are they looking for? Is there a certain demographic that is deemed ‘quality’ traffic? Does the merchant run any offers that you’ve already promoted?

Grab the bigger picture by the balls. Just by looking at a campaign through the eyes of the merchant, you can focus your creativity on angles that are going to be viable for all parties concerned. This in turn will boost your quality score. Your value as an affiliate will increase tenfold.

I don’t like wasting my money. Who does? Unfortunately, you will almost certainly spunk dollars up the wall if you fail to research your offers properly.

Technical research

Many affiliate marketers are speculators. They base decisions and optimizations on what sounds plausible in their heads. They turn a blind eye to the technical side of what is happening once their ads turn green.

What happens when a user arrives on your landing page? Can you script the entire process from initial click to conversion?

Understanding your conversion flow is priority number one if you hope to advance beyond speculation. How can you even begin to make informed decisions about a campaign if you can’t grasp the fundamentals?

• What page does the conversion pixel fire on?
• Do you get paid for a single opt-in? A double opt-in? A profile photo upload? A download, installation and ‘first play’?
• What steps/interactions are required for the user to qualify as a lead?
• Are there are agent-specific limitations on your campaign (e.g toolbars that require a certain browser)?

If you can’t script your campaign from click to conversion, it’s time to bust out a notepad and make understanding the conversion flow a priority before you spend any more money on traffic.

Platform research

If you are new to affiliate marketing, or maybe just floundering hopelessly, here’s a simple pointer: commit to a single traffic source and stick with it. That traffic source might be Google, Facebook, Plentyoffish or an obscure platform that nobody gives a damn about. It doesn’t really matter.

Once you commit to a platform, understand that it’s your duty to learn that platform inside out.

If our jobs were limited to understanding somebody else’s product, we would all be out of work. It’s our knowledge of traffic sources and how to generate leads cost-effectively that keeps us in hot demand.

Here’s a simple question. Where do you spend most of your advertising dollars?

Got the answer to that? Now tell me why you’re better than 98% of the other advertisers using that platform.

If you can’t claim to be in the elite 2% with a straight face, then you haven’t spent enough time researching, testing and understanding the platform. Until you make that effort, your net worth to the industry is microscopic.

Mediocre knowledge of an offer + mediocre knowledge of a traffic source
= Not going to be working in 2013!

Excellent knowledge of an offer + excellent knowledge of a traffic source
= Congratulations, you stand a chance. Not an entitlement to success, but a chance.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab your copy of the newly released Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s perfect for anybody wanting to crack this industry on a shoestring budget.

• Also be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.

It’s called Maximum ROI Marketing, and it’s available now.

Are you determined to make money online, but lacking the budget to compete with other top affiliates and big spenders? Maximum ROI Marketing is designed for you.

This is a comprehensive collection of tips and tricks for anybody looking to grow an online business on a shoestring budget.

Volume 5 reveals affiliate marketing strategies that are perfect for high ROI and rapid growth – from Plentyoffish and Facebook advertising, to the lucrative gaming market, to some non-affiliate ventures that are incredibly profitable. Maximum ROI Marketing will inspire you to get serious about turning your online dream in to a reality.

Volume 5 also marks the biggest release yet in the Premium Post series. It clocks in with 117 pages and 21307 words of explosive marketing content, and the now trademark no-balls-barred style that could only come from this horse’s mouth.

I’m excited for you to read it. I think there’s a little something for everybody, whether you’re looking for a trusted route in to affiliate marketing, or some inspiration to diversify your business and increase profits. Volume 5 covers a lot of ground.

For the complete content listings, ordering information and much more – head over to Finch Premiums and bag yourself a copy.

Important: Once you’ve placed your order, head to My Account and the file will be available for download. Not all emails go through straight away, but the file is instantly accessible from your account after payment.

Premium Posts Volume 5 is sponsored by Adsimilis, one of the very best affiliate networks in the business. I’m delighted they came onboard to sponsor the posts, and I suggest anybody who isn’t already with them, go get signed up now!

It’s one of the most popular research tools in the affiliate space. If you are involved with any kind of banner buying or advertising on the Google Content Network, What Runs Where is a one stop shop for all the campaign ideas you could ever need.

I gave it a positive review last year, but I had a few complaints about the interface. I saw it as unnecessarily complicated and confusing for a media buying newbie.

There was no shortage of mesmerizing data, but the software was low on shiny, whimsical bells and whistles. Presentation isn’t everything, but it certainly makes life easier when you’re plunging through mountains of data and numbers.

Well, it turns out the What Runs Where team has taken that complaint onboard. The software has recently been upgraded with a brand spunking new interface.

It’s looking really good.

What Runs Where now supports an additional three countries; Spain, Germany and France; to go with the previous collection of America, Canada, Australia and the UK.

The new targeting is particularly helpful for offers that dominate in European markets, like the Need For Speed example above.

Not only can you spy on prime sources of European traffic, but you can swipe readily translated creatives for your own testing purposes.

Of course, in the interest of not being a total dickbag, let me remind you…

Stealing is bad, kids.

Use What Runs Where to pinpoint the market trends, and then create something better.

Running the same creatives on the same traffic sources is only ever going to leave you two steps behind somebody much richer than yourself. That said, this is probably the single most effective tool for digging data from right under the fingernails of your competition.

Another welcome new addition to What Runs Where is placement suggestions. It’s the first in a series of so-called ‘actionable insights’ that will be landing in the future.

Placement suggestions sifts through what I can only imagine to be a nuclear-sized wasteland of data remnants. It looks at an advertiser’s existing placements and then suggests additional placements based on that data. I’m not sure how accurate – or how profitable – the internal algorithm is, but at first glance it looks very useful.

If I were to search through Christian Mingle’s placements, for example, I would find a huge list of sites that the merchant is currently targeting. By using placement suggestions, I can find alternatives – ranked by similarity – that aren’t currently being targeted.

This looks like a great tool for steering clear of competition. I’ve already found some niche, off-the-wall placements, that I’m in discussion to place small buys with.

What Runs Where is a data-beast. That much was known before. It’s encouraging to see that the team are taking active steps to turn their huge hoard of data in to insights and actual campaign suggestions.

I still think there’s potential to go further and give more meaning to the data. The algorithms are clearly powerful and effective, but little is said of how numerical ratings such as Similarity and AdStrength are calculated. I think it would be awesome if these terms were explained and perhaps graphed and documented to shed new meaning.

All things considered though, What Runs Where is still the honeybadger of all affiliate research tools. A must-have data slayer for anybody involved with media buying.

Recommended This Week

• Head over to Finch Premiums for 300+ pages of my affiliate marketing tips.

• I’ve just taken on modding duties over at the StackThatMoney Forum. This means I’ll be posting even more tips and advice over there, to go with the immense wealth of case studies and materials from the rest of the community. Sign up for access.

• New reader? Add me to your RSS, or follow me on Twitter.

I will be releasing Volume 5 of Premium Posts next week.

I’m excited to launch it, but nervous to finish editing. It’s the biggest volume yet.

In the run up to the launch, I will be putting Volume 4′s ‘Outside the Box Marketing‘ on sale for just $19.95.

If you haven’t read it, now’s your chance to practically steal the goodness from right under my nose.

When running media buys, around 15-25% of your traffic will Google your offer. These “due diligence” consumers search for an extra layer of validation due to their suspicious nature. Hence you want to make sure what they find is nothing but RAVING REVIEWS about the offer you’re promoting.

Here’s 3 tricks to owning page 1 of SERP results for your brands SERPs. By controlling the message, and listening to Finch’s tricks to affiliate marketing, you’ll see a significantly higher ROI on your buys:

1. Press Releases
Put out national press releases focusing on the exact match keyword in the title and strategically spread out throughout the body. Relate this news wire with something that’s important in your industry and try to tie it into national news.

i.e. I got a release listed on MSNBC last week, hence when people Google “Reputation Changer” they will see our reputation management brand has a listing from MSNBC ranking for it.

I suggest working with the following news wire outlets:

• PRNewsWire.com
• MarketWire.com
• PRWeb.com
• PR.com
• PRlog.com

2. Exact Match Domains With a Ratings Widget Installed

Buy exact match domains and install a ratings widget on them. Then recruit positive reviews and moderate them to show a 5 star rating in Google. Consumers will see this and automatically trust your 5 star service!

NOTE: Build links back to these sites, don’t buy links. Great ways to build links is via guest posts, press releases, and social media bookmarking.

3. Free Blog Sites

Deploy a number of free blog sites targeting the keyword that represents your offer. Here are some of my copy tricks when I rank blogs.

Here’s a list of 10 top notch free blog sites I target:

• WordPress.com
• Blog.com
• Blogger
• Typepad micro
• Jux
• Tumblr
• Posterous spaces
• Blogetery
• Weebly
• Livejournal

Finch: Some good ideas here. And particularly useful for those who have digital products and don’t want the first page of the SERP being dedicated to illegal downloads of their shit.

Recommended This Week

• Be sure to check out the Direct Response blog for a lot more from Rich. I like his posts. They’re just as angry as mine.

• Head over to Finch Premiums for the chance to save big on Volumes 1-4 of Premium Posts. Sale ends shortly when Volume 5 is released.

It’s the latest Google brainfart. And it’s doing the rounds on practically every content marketing blog in my reader.

Here’s an explanation of what AuthorRank does, straight from the horse’s mouth:

The identity of individual agents responsible for content can be used to influence search ratings. Assuming that a given agent has a high reputational score, representing an established reputation for authoring valuable content, then additional content authored and signed by that agent will be promoted relative to unsigned content or content from less reputable agents in search results.
- taken from Google’s patent

Skyrocket SEO did a fantastic job of summing up what AuthorRank could mean for content marketers.

Eric Nagel also wrote an interesting post from an affiliate perspective.

‘Changes to Google’ and ‘impact on affiliates’ are two phrases that we’ve grown used to interpreting in a negative light over the last few years.

So forgive me for asking what immediately springs to mind…

What is AuthorRank’s potential to mess with my shit?

As a concept, I actually quite like AuthorRank.

I like the idea of writers being able to lend credibility to their content through reputation alone. Yet affiliates have a somewhat mixed agenda…

Essentially, by using the rel=author tag, I could send a signal to Google that the person who writes this blog is the same dude that cranks out posts related to weight loss, dating, Justin Bieber and whatever other scumbag projects I might or might not be working on at the time.

That signal could be translated in to my gleaming face, and my social profile, sitting next to those links in the SERP.

Now, the dilemma for myself and many other readers, is do I really want the world and its dog to be able to see what I’m working on? Do I want my name attached to niche exploitation where my true expertise is little to none?

It’s a tough one. Our industry is still somewhat obscured by a veil of secrecy.

Affiliates rarely like to talk about their works-in-progress. If somebody comes along with a bigger budget and blows them out of the water, well, you get it. That’s bad business.

Many of us invest in private domain registrations, multiple servers and a crap load of pseudonyms to hide our footprint.

Personally, I feel that if a site requires the absolute top level of secrecy, it’s probably a good indication that I’m engaging in some murky shit that isn’t compatible with my long-term business objectives. Or that it’s porn. I try not to get too paranoid about people spying on my projects.

In reality, as long as you keep executing, you will stay ahead of those who keep chasing tails.

That said, I believe it’s important to lend an identity to every website I launch. It might not be run by ‘Finch’, but it has to have a name attached to build some vital bridges of trust. I’m a big fan of pseudonyms, and so AuthorRank is likely to require a new level of thinking.

Whereas in the past, I could get away with a pseudonym and a fake profile, I can see it becoming necessary to embrace those fake identities on a social level. Perhaps building author reputation will become as important as traditional backlink development.

I can’t imagine a situation where I would want to lend my real name to every affiliate project I work on. There are products I promote, and verticals I work in, that I certainly don’t wish to come back and haunt me over a dining table in the future.

However, if AuthorRank takes off in a big way – as many suspect it will – I would definitely look to exploit my existing assets by placing my name on new projects where I can justify an involvement.

This is one of the rare few Google developments that I see as a great opportunity for content creators. For those of us involved with affiliate sites, however, I see a lot of profile juggling ahead. Could it be time to think of a pseudonym for every niche you work in?

Okay, that’s probably a little extreme. But it will be interesting to see how Google evolves with this change.

Will you be making any preparations or changes for AuthorRank?

Recommended This Week

• Head over to Finch Premiums for 300+ pages of my affiliate marketing tips.

• I’ve just taken on modding duties over at the StackThatMoney Forum. This means I’ll be posting even more tips and advice over there, to go with the immense wealth of case studies and materials from the rest of the community. Sign up for access.

• New reader? Add me to your RSS, or follow me on Twitter.

A common problem I see with affiliate sales funnels is a lack of understanding for what constitutes a conversion. Sounds pretty obvious, right? “Duh Finch, I get money when another sucker joins True.” Well, that’s almost correct. Unfortunately, the ‘almost’ cripples many campaigns.

Before promoting any offer, you must take the time to research exactly when the conversion pixel fires. There’s no room for vague assumptions. “Joining True” paints a picture in my mind of the conversion pixel being fired as soon as the user selects a username and hits Next. Most of the time, this is not the case.

We have zip submits, single opt-ins (SOI), double opt-ins (DOI), questionnaires to answer, profile pictures to upload, applications to download, first orders to place… every offer comes with its own criteria for when the conversion should be fired.

The definition of “joining a site” is black and white. But your conversion isn’t. Don’t make the mistake of assuming they are one and the same.

Here are some general guidelines for how your landing pages can be adapted to suit each conversion type.

Zip submits

Generally seen as the easiest affiliate offers to promote, zip submits do exactly what they say on the tin. As soon as the user submits his zip-code, you get your conversion. The payouts on these offers are predictably low to offset the unpredictability of the traffic quality.

The golden rule of promoting zip submits is to hold the advertiser’s hand and give them exactly what they want. There’s no point in delivering poor quality traffic. You’ll be scrubbed to Timbuktu in no time.

Single opt-ins

A single opt-in requires the user to submit his email address. However, the conversion is triggered after the submission rather than at the point of confirmation. You’ll find a lot of single opt-in offers paying around $2-$3.50. It’s not big bucks, but it’s better than a zip submit.

In my opinion, the large majority of affiliates use landing pages that are aimed at achieving a single opt-in. It’s the standard entry point. But think about it logically. If the advertiser is paying out on a single opt-in, you can probably increase your traffic quality substantially simply by treating the offer like a double opt-in. Encourage and incentivize the user to confirm his email address. This may have to come at the price of one of our favourite affiliate tactics: completely bullshitting the real nature of the offer. “Hey, where all the single soldiers at?”

Double opt-ins

A confirmed double opt-in is worth infinitely more than a single opt-in. Your payouts will traditionally reflect this by offering double for the confirmed email.

Something to keep in mind with double opt-in campaigns, particularly in the dating vertical, is that it makes no sense to calculate ROI on an ongoing ‘live’ basis. A small but significant percentage of users will not confirm their double opt-in straight away. They will get busy, distracted, or otherwise torn away from their Gmail. This can lead to a small trickle of conversions being fired the next morning. Ever had 0 clicks and 3 conversions? Well, there you go.

However, if you’re monitoring your stats like a hawk, what are you going to think when you finish the evening taking a loss? You’ve probably already deleted the campaign by then.

Always let your conversions filter through before making any snap judgments.

Survey/questionnaire completion

Some offers require the completion of an entire questionnaire before the conversion is recorded. Now imagine you’re the stereotypical battering-ram of a publisher who cares not for such details. You design a landing page with a teasing call-to-action like this:

“Register in 45 Seconds or Less!”

Sounds nice and coaxing, right? In some cases this works as a great hook. But it’s a terrible call-to-action when the conversion pixel is only fired after a 15 minute questionnaire.

I see it happening time and time again. Affiliates go for quick dealmakers. They sell every offer with the brevity of a single opt-in, when they should actually be shooting for a solid incentive to complete Steps A, B and C.

In instances where the user is required to navigate his way through a complex 15 minute interrogation, your landing page has a duty to sell this process and make it seem worthwhile. How could you get a user to answer a questionnaire?

To give you an example, on dating sites, I use it to filter out the ‘bad dates’ that the user will be avoiding when she joins the new service. It’s quality protection, because she only deserves the best.

Profile photo upload

This is another common requirement on high-payout dating offers.

Offers that convert only after a profile photo upload would have worried the crap out of me 5 years ago. But now thanks to Facebook, even technophobic 75 year old grandmas have photos at their disposal.

The secret to nailing these conversions is to make a direct reference to the benefits of uploading a photo. If you’re branding the site as an unusual paradise where men actually receive messages from hot girls, you should make it clear that communications increase X% when the user adds his photo. Or say that members without a photo are being culled and will not qualify for the free trial offer. Whatever puts the thought in his head and safeguards your conversion.

Converts on download

There are many toolbar and gaming offers out there where the user is expected not only to sign up, but to download and sometimes even play the game for the first time.

For single opt-in minded folk, I like to call this the ‘minefield offer’.

It’s littered with so many what-ifs that the challenge is as much about hitting the right carefree demographic as it is selling the product. A golden rule that I’ve adopted is to avoid targeting users who are likely to be on their work computers. This crowd does not want to download and leave a trace. So you will need to day-part and keep a tight hold over your demographics.

There’s no point in trying to con the user here. Your best step forward is to sell the offer as a legitimate must-have and hope that the user’s interest is perked enough to follow the necessary steps.

For gaming offers, “Can you beat this ridiculous score?” is a winning hook.

So, how are your conversions today?

Take a look at your own sales funnels. Be honest.

Has it all gone slightly tits-up?

Your landing page must not only sell the offer. It must sell the required steps necessary to secure the conversion.

As I said on StackThatMoney this week, your sales funnel has to be designed to shove the user to the conversion pixel, NOT purely to get them to choose a username and press Next. Be clear with your objectives!

Recommended This Week

• Head over to Finch Premiums for 300+ pages of my affiliate marketing tips.

• I’ve just taken on modding duties over at the StackThatMoney Forum. This means I’ll be posting even more tips and advice over there, to go with the immense wealth of case studies and materials from the rest of the community. Sign up for access.

• New reader? Add me to your RSS, or follow me on Twitter.

Facebook has grown increasingly picky over the ads that it accepts. I doubt you needed me to tell you this. The endless stream of disapproval notices and the fist-shaped hole in your wall should be evidence enough.

While Facebook seeks to tighten its noose around the necks of certain rogue affiliates, many of these marketers simply can’t stand to give up the ghost. They are head over heels with Facebook’s enormous earning potential, and perhaps the knowledge that it made them good money in the past. So instead of playing by the rule book, they eat the rules and crap them out the window. Cloaking enters the equation.

Cloaking is the mischievous art of showing one page to the Facebook approvals team, and another to the unlucky guy who clicks on your ad. When cloaking Facebook, you can launch a series of pant-wettingly lucrative ads simply by ignoring the strict editorial guidelines that the rest of us are obliged to follow.

Naturally, Facebook doesn’t take kindly to having the wool pulled over its eyes. If you are caught cloaking ads, you can consider yourself banned, along with any other accounts that you may already be linked to.

It’s clear that cloaking on Facebook is a high stakes game. The need to avoid detection has led to the launch of several professional ‘cloakers’, which can cost from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. Most of these cloakers rely on huge databases of IPs, and the hope that Facebook doesn’t get any smarter than it already is (a flimsy leg to stand on, if you ask me).

I don’t want to delve in to solutions that are currently on the market. What good would it do for anybody? You need only sign up at a private forum, or pay attention to your email newsletters. They are not hard to find, although their degree of effectiveness can vary dramatically.

If you’re going to skimp on budget for your technology, investing in a half-arsed Facebook cloaker is probably the dumbest decision you could ever make. Well, almost…

My mind boggles at how many affiliates are still fond of the classic ‘bait and switch’ cloaking that was popular 3 years ago.

If you’re not familiar with the technique, well, there’s very little science to it.

Cowboy Affiliate #1039 submits an ad promising dramatic weight loss, while redirecting to an innocuous article on a reputable site. Let’s say “7 foods that will help you lose weight in 30 days” on Men’s Health Magazine.

Facebook follows the link, sees no harm, and approves it for public display.

Roughly 20 seconds later, Cowboy Affiliate is changing his redirect so that instead of the article on Men’s Health, the ad now routes through to a monster flog that’s painted in pictures of the 300 workout. Instead of 7 healthy ‘foodages’ (Thanks, Karl Pilkington), the user is confronted with 2 bottled health supplements, and a recurring billing cycle buried somewhere in the footer.

This classic form of bait and switch cloaking can be achieved without technology. You need only guts, balls and a heavy dose of naivety to get your first ‘cloaked’ campaign live and profitable. Facebook traffic converts so well that having the right ad live for a week can net five figures of profit quite comfortably.

Unfortunately, it’s also about as suicidal as affiliate marketing gets. If your business can only make money with such crash and burn methodology, it’s already infected with a terminal cancer. I give you about 3 weeks.

My recommendation is to avoid cloaking altogether. If you are in this business to make money over the long term, without burning every last bridge along the way, there is little sense in committing to a business strategy where the only person who wins is yourself.

In most cases, it would be more accurate to say that the only winner is your affiliate network. They enjoy the fruits of your traffic, without the risk of getting their Facebook accounts banned.

But there’s the catch. Not everybody is in affiliate marketing to make money over the long term. Some of you guys reading this now have no interest in being full time affiliates. Maybe you have day jobs or other business ventures, and you see cloaking Facebook as a funny little moneymaker on the side. “Hey, Mark Zuckerberg! Suck my berries…”

No words of mine will deter those individuals from investing in the technology necessary to cloak Facebook profitably. So to answer the question, “Is cloaking Facebook worth it?“, only you know the answer.

Are you trying to build a business, or are you trying to pillage quick cash like a bull in a china shop? Your answer should reveal the way forward.

Recommended This Week

• Head over to Finch Premiums for 300+ pages of my affiliate marketing tips.

• I’ve just taken on modding duties over at the StackThatMoney Forum. This means I’ll be posting even more tips and advice over there, to go with the immense wealth of case studies and materials from the rest of the community. Sign up for access.

• Facebook advertisers, take a peek at Lots of Ads. Spy on the best performing ads in international markets and learn from affiliates who are already making money. The tool now supports 21 countries, which should be plenty to keep you busy.

• New reader? Add me to your RSS, or follow me on Twitter.

This is a law of affiliate marketing that will remain true as long as the industry exists. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, or how ambitious, or even how lucky; if you fail to appreciate the importance of concentrated effort, you will forever be surrounded by mediocre results.

The law applies to monetizing traffic sources, succeeding in new verticals, building websites, running ad campaigns, as well as to learning just about any part of our craft.

If you don’t focus your efforts, you’re destined for mediocrity.

Ping Pong Marketing

Ping pong marketer is my friendly term for the many, many affiliates who are reactive rather than proactive. They get bounced around the online marketing table by two highly skilled players: the traffic source, and the merchant.

In the space of just 24 hours, the ping pong marketer may find himself smashed in to a corner by Facebook, only to be crashed back by a merchant that didn’t like his traffic. Then Google has a hissy fit, whooping him over the net (and banning his account), before Mate1 gets pissed with his leads, unloads a mountain of chargebacks and sends him scuttling once again.

The ping pong marketer is forever getting his business scattered across the table by other real players who know exactly how to use and abuse him. Eventually, the ping pong marketer is left battered, broken, and disregarded.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The ping pong marketer is often responsible for his own demise. He commits an act of affiliate marketing suicide, tightening his own noose while remaining blissfully unaware. Do the scenarios below sound familiar?

First degree suicide – Where you bounce from niche to niche, offer to offer, and traffic source to traffic source. Your guideline for launching a campaign is hearsay, or what a rogue affiliate manager from a network you don’t even recognise told you. Your attention span is so fleeting, your commitment so flimsy, that you rarely get out of the red before deciding to call it quits with your (many) campaigns.

Second degree suicide – If you swing too far to the opposite end of the OCD scale, you can ruin your chances of success by becoming a micro-management extremist. These individuals can’t go 10 minutes without checking their ad spend, or their clickthrough rates. They don’t focus on the end game. They focus on the emotional highs and lows of losing or making money, and they react accordingly. If you are not focused enough to reject short term decision-making that is not backed up by data, you will once again become the ping pong marketer.

The cure to ping pong marketing is to react less and plan more intensively. To bring value to a sales funnel – the primary job of every affiliate marketer, let us not forget – you must increase your level of knowledge and expertise. It’s all about mastering the craft of relating back to what people want.

How to ‘Master’ Any Part of Affiliate Marketing

Unless you are blessed with incredible fortune, the fastest road to success in our industry is to commit to a concept 100% and execute it better than your peers. The web is littered with half finished affiliate websites, and badly executed CPA campaigns. You can always tell the guys who attempt to master their craft from those who attempt to go live on every project within 15 minutes. The latter are rarely seen again.

So, how do we commit to a project 100%?

Besides the golden rule of taking immediate action, here are some important considerations.

Immerse yourself in the trenches.

If you advertise to 50 year old women on Plentyoffish, sign up on Plentyoffish as a 50 year old woman and take notes on the experience. What ads do you see? What messages do you receive? What is the typical user experience of a sweet middle-aged lady searching for love on the Internet? Until you know what it looks like on the other side of the fence, you can’t possibly hope to create masterful ad campaigns.

One of my favourite resources is Scam.com.

I know many affiliate marketers will shit bricks at the thought of visiting their own personal Ground Zero, but the information to be gleaned from what customers like and what customers hate is absolutely priceless. It helps that so many consumers are bordering on the retarded, happy to report companies as scams when it’s their own sense of judgement that should be brought in to question. Lemmings will be lemmings, right?

Use forums like Scam to search for similar sites in your niche, and particularly any undercurrent concerns that might be present when you bombard those same users with your ads. Dig under the fingernails of your target market.

Do you research your competition? Really?

We overestimate what we can achieve in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a year. This saying rings loud and true when it comes to weighing up our competition.

I sense that many affiliates commit the mistake of over-simplifying how easy they can replicate the success of their peers (see the number of ripped ads and landing pages?), while underestimating their own ability to create powerful engaging campaigns when they snap out of the short-term mindset.

When was the last time you spent more than 24 hours researching a campaign? Or more than 24 hours analysing the exact blueprints of the competitors you hope to brush aside in one swish of your mouse? Respect your competition but avoid an ugly case of ‘small man’ syndrome.

Elabourate sales funnels and sophisticated affiliate campaigns might not be executable by 5pm, but they won’t take the rest of 2012. Take your time to do the job properly, especially the pre-execution phase. Many affiliates end up with failed campaigns not because their execution was wrong, or because affiliate marketing is dead, but because their maths didn’t add up.

Leverage people wisely

When I say leverage people wisely, I don’t mean sign up to the first thousand dollar consulting gig that comes your way. You’d be broke before the summer. But rather you should be using your affiliate managers and traffic source reps as your eyes and ears.

If you want to master a traffic source, you should put the people who work for that traffic source on your weekly email hit list.

If you want to run bizopp offers, you should be making it clear to all your affiliate managers that this is your line of expertise. Make sure they know that you are their man (or girl) when a hot bizopp comes through the gates. It sounds like a mute point, but simply establishing yourself as a specialist at X gives you a much greater chance of monetizing the hottest offers before they become saturated.

Don’t brand yourself as a ‘bits and pieces’ marketer. You’ll find your inbox full of more bits and pieces than you could ever shake a stick at. Make your speciality clear. Tell everybody you work with that you are focused on X, and you don’t want to be tapped up with a thousand distractions per minute unless they are directly applicable.

Even if you are running zero traffic through a network, it will instantly elevate your credibility to have these clear expectations in place. Good business minds know exactly what they want, and they leverage their people wisely.

Are you committing your resources and efforts wisely? If not, how can you fix it today? The heartening flip-side to this post is that you can – and will – master a hell of a lot by committing 100%.

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