Experienced designer/developer, noob affiliate!

[visua]

I've been designing and building websites for about 8 years. I've built and designed thousands of sites ranging from mom & pop's to fortune 500 e-commerce. However I never ventured into learning about affiliate marketing at all. I served on the internet marketing team as well, but we always stayed away from affiliate marketing because my boss thought it was all a scam.

I've been lucky enough to be part of a team where we have launched hundreds of extremely successful marketing campaigns. I have the knowledge and understanding of the marketing, as well as the development and design aspect of building websites and applications.

It looks like I find a product with a good niche market. Then I market that product leveraging my own cash for PPC, and time for materials, and based on the conversions I make, I get paid?

If my understanding is correct; I just need to find great products and a good network and basically act as a contingent marketing agency for that e-commerce site?

What are the legalities of creating imagery for ad's? It seems like much of this is ad-writing and text links, which has a much lower success rate.

Thanks.

visua

 

[jryan21]

Get in wherever you think you best know the user. For your ad copy, most of what you learn will come from split testing so you need to get set up to track things like that (could be something as simple as a spreadsheet when you start out).

 

[allco]

It looks like I find a product with a good niche market. Then I market that product leveraging my own cash for PPC, and time for materials, and based on the conversions I make, I get paid?

Yes

If my understanding is correct; I just need to find great products and a good network and basically act as a contingent marketing agency for that e-commerce site?

Yes

What are the legalities of creating imagery for ad's?

You can use royalty free/paid images or take your own. But I'm sure many just copy from other sites (your risk there)

 

[JarredLv]

Sounds like you're just the perfect affiliate marketing weapon. Sign up to a network, pick a product, build lander, get keywords, make ads, ?????, profit...

 

[visua]

Thanks for the great responses.

I do a great deal of marketing on the internet as it stands, but always for direct clients. This third party approach seems interesting, and I have full control over the budget so I'm excited to start soon. I'm just deciding what amount of capital to start with.

My major beef at the moment is the end site. If i spend time developing professional grade advertising and marketing techniques only to have users land on a shitty designed eCommerce site and blow the conversion, I've pretty much wasted my time. Our firm is known for developing online solutions that cater to audiences in the 200k+ salary, and have very high conversion rates (around 8% average). Maybe I am spoiled, but thats our quality standard at work. I understand I'll be working with a 1% - 4% conversion on most stores, which is unfortunate but the reality of most poorly designed experiences.

I guess only time will tell if it pays off in the end. It seems based on the buzz around the forum that people are doing this full time, and successfully despite low conversion rates and the hoards of poorly designed ecommerce sites.


Mike.