Picking Offers - High Payout or High Volume?

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wdmny

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Jun 27, 2006
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I have done some testing of ~$1 lead offers on Copeac - there are a lot of them. It has been profitable, although not that impressive on total. I have about $40 in commissions on $10-20 in ad spend.

The questions I present are to people making real money doing affiliate marketing. Do you go for volume and promote as many of these easy leads or do you just go for the higher payouts?

When I research the ad market, it seems like all the high payouts are saturated to the point where the cost to compete erases the higher potential upside. In fact, I am seeing that there is a high barrier to entry because many of the established guys are paying less per click as well as getting paid more because of preformance. Is it possible for new entrants in a saturated niche like finance?

I have no problem spending real money to make money and I would rather go after the higher payouts, I'm just wondering about getting there from here. Few niches with high payouts or many niches with lower payouts?

Comments?
 


I've got a friend making serious bank of email/zip submits... think about it... if you can double what you spend, in a few months you'll be making several grand a month. It's not that hard to just keep pumping money (which = volume) into various campaigns, and just keep increasing earnings. I mean it'll get harder as you make more, i.e. to double 10,000, but hey, even if you get 60% return on 10k, that's still 6k... not bad.
 
I understand that. What I am finding is that my reach is limited (even with Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN) so I would need scores of offers to make it add up. I can keep plugging away at it as long as it is profitable, I was just wondering if the only way to make it big is to aim at higher paying offers with more competition.
 
Personally, I stay away from $1+ offers like ZIP/email:

Paying 5c per click with Adwords or MSN Adcenter, you must be lucky to make some profit... In that case you could try 2nd tier engines and buy cheaper traffic, but how much traffic you can expect then in order to make a few bucks? :)
 
is it best to send straight to offer or create a landing page with banners for the offers? any tips - i've tried with little success so far.
 
It is a tricky question. On testing we have made 400% ROI on $1.50 type payouts, but we cannot deploy a large enough investment to make it worth our time to develop and monitor.

At the same time, the absolutely highest payout has several things going against it in many instances.
1. It is typically somewhat saturated and the opportunity for your cookie to get overwritten or never sticking is higher than a less saturated offer.
2. The person trying brute force affiliate marketing as a merchant very rarely understands the nuances of landing page and conversion and thus the conversion rate may not be there.
3. The high payout might make the offer less attractive, you get $X more per sale but the customer does not get free shipping or some other add on perk that makes it worthwhile.

Bottom line for us when we make decisions is opportunity for very high volume and an attractive ROI. Testing is the only way to prove what works. Shoe says it and I agree wholeheartedly - "I am willing to test just about anything"
 
Unless you have an unlimited budget for promotion, you have to become smart about how you spend your money or you will end up leaving a lot of money on the table. While it might seem okay to say as long as it makes me money I should keep doing it.. in reality that can cost you lots of money you could have made doing something else.

I have a budget every month for how much I am going to spend, sometimes I exceed it depending on circumstances, other times it is not possible to really exceed it. Depending on my mix of offers I am running I will cut some offers that are making me money in order to invest my budget in areas that make more money.

When you are first starting you want to find those areas that make money, but as you get going you will realize you sometimes have to pick and choose.

ROI is the most important thing to me.
 
As everyone is saying, don't focus on the payout. It's totally irrelevant. Checkout the search volume for the keywords in the niche and the roi. Those are the keys.
 
Diorex's post is right on with what I am seeing. Everyone has made some good points. I'll just keep testing offers until I get something to take off.
 
I was making a bundle with affiliate/datafeeds until the beginning of this year. One by one, my price comparison datafeed niche sites started dropping out of the Organic listings... so I cast about for a new approach and settled on CPA with.

Custom built a new site, nuce admin backend so I can load offers, track clicks etc. Launched it about 2 months ago.

Right now I'm making ~35% margin, but am still floundering when it comes to trying to find a good offer. You can get some decent converts on the zip/emails at .80 to 1.25 a click, but you goot push A LOT of those to make any money. Problem with that is you get 30 - 40 PPC campaign going on AdWords, MSN, Yahoo and Miva, and suddenly you really have 120 - 160 campaigns to manage. Yuk. When an offer gets canceled or expires I have to go to all those places and shut down the PPC. What a pain.

I haven't had any real success in psuhing higher payout offers (yet) but I am still trying. I'd rather run < 10 high payout offers than 30+ low, even if the low convert well.

Key, I think, is finding a keyword niche related to the product that hasn't been exploited yet, which is hard to do, because there are a lot smarter guys out there than me.

Still experimenting with landing pages too. Problem iwth not being able to drive direct to CPA is your custoemr is 2 clicks (click on ad to your site, click on your site to offer) away from sign-up rather than one... and I know that huirts conversions.

I'm all ears if anyone wants to share some offer suggestion methods....
 
Dont worry about volume or high priced. The higher the price, the harder it is do get the lead (on average) and is the reason they pay that amount. If you can pioneer a method to get medium to high priced offers to convert cheaply you can hit a gold mine. There is money is email/zip submits as well if you can get can very cheap or targeted traffic. And finally YES, there is some serious money in affiliate marketing. If you campaigns are profitable WHY would you only spend $10-20 per day? Its a no-brainer once you get a profiably campaign there is not limit to you daily expense. Its reasonable to say after a year in search or ppc you can easily make $1,000+ profit/day.
 
YMMV, but here's my observation on gift card and gift certificate offers after about 4 months of pushing various ones.

First off, they don't convert as well as you would think. Wouldn't everyone want a free $100/$500/$1000 gift card? Well, yeah, but I think these offers have been out there so long now that the consumer knows it's a semi-scam. Here are my conclusions and the solutions that so far are working for me:

Skeptical surfers: Most surfers lcking through know they are going to have to jump through some pain in the ass hoops to get it. (Complete 2 gold, 2 silver, 4 platinum offers and eat a dog turd to claim your card!). So by the time they hit your offer, they are already skeptical. The way around this is to look at the target audience. I'd say the 20 - 40 crowd are the hardest to convince. I have an offer for a clothing store that targets young that is doing very well... because they don't know any better. I have another offer that targets retired also doing well, again, because they don't know any better. So know, for offers I might actually do PPC on, I ask myself what the target audience is. If it's young or old, I'll give it a try. Another segement that seems to work well is the female in relation to designer shizit, but that's a pretty saturated field. If you find one that work's for you, milk it as fast as you can because everyone will be on it soon enough.

More is not Better: I call this the 'yeah, right..." response. The card or certificate amount has to be enough to stimulate interest, but not so much as to strain credibility. $10 Target card? Who cares? It costs me that much in gas to drive there. $50 Barnes & Noble? Hmmm, I'm interested. $1,000 Home Depot? Yeah, right.... The card amount also has to have some correllation to the store. $50 at Barnes & Noble is pretty good - I can buy a few books. $50 at Pier 1, not so great. What can you get at Pier 1 for $50? Not much. $100 at Pier 1? I'm more interested. $250? Getting near the edge of credibility.... $500? Yeah, right.... So look at the amount, and look at the store. If your personal reaction is 'yeah, right...' that's probably the same reaction your audience is going to have.

I've found I need to do at least a 20% conversion rate to make it worth my while, and that's a min bid of .10. If I have to bid more, than I better see more conversions. I'm very aggressive about wacking offers that don't perform. If I don't hit 20% within the first few $$$ of spend (and I mean only like $2-3), I kill it. If have one that does more and there's room above me in the SERPS, I'll put up the CPC and see what happens.
 
ImagesAndWords said:
I'm not quite sure what you meant by this.. Could you please elaborate?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

What I meant is that the people and companies who approach affiliate programs with the attitude that "I am paying the most money, therefore that will drive volume" often fail to recognize that the conversion rate of the page is far more important to their volume than the amount of the payout.

Think as if you are the merchant....
If you assume that you are paying $XX per conversion, but you are profiting $XX+$10, and you are then getting tons of visitors per day to your page, none of which you pay for unless they convert.

Then you as a non-internet savvy marketer are likely to try to drive more traffic by upping the payout. This is what the sales reps at CJ are suggesting if you want more volume.

It is amazing how often the landing page is the first and only page ever used for a site. Most firms are not savvy enough to understand that they can actually pay less per sale, if your landing page converts better.

Extreme Example - same product - $10 payout vs $5 payout
First one converts at 2%, second one at 5%.

Send 1000 visitors to each site. Cost is about the same either way.

Program 1 = 1000*.02*10=$200 in revenue for affiliates, $200 profit for vendor.
Program 2 = 1000*.05*5=$250 in revenue for affiliate, $750 profit for vendor.

Getting merchants to understand that conversion is the most important factor, not payout, should be the job of the affiliate networks, but in general they drop the ball here.

This is why as a White label affiliate I create the conversion, I control the process, and I can send traffic to the merchant willing to compensate me for volume. In essence I get the 5% conversion rate & the $10 payout.
 
Diorex said:
This is why as a White label affiliate I create the conversion, I control the process, and I can send traffic to the merchant willing to compensate me for volume. In essence I get the 5% conversion rate & the $10 payout.
Click to expand...

I like the white label approach, but what does it take to get that? Are you searching out these merchants or is it because you push enough volume you can ask for it?
 
Can someone explain why those zip/email submit sites pay the affiliate just for getting someone to fill in a zip/email? I don't see the value to them. I would think they wouldn't pay the affiliate till the person filled out all the registration forms.
 
Its about demographics, maybe they want zipcodes so they know where to advertise in certain areas of the country.. For email addresses, maybe they want to build a database.. So they pay out.
 
You should be focusing mainly on conversion and EPC (how much money you're making per click). A lot of our email/zip submits do great with PPC, but there are definitely higher paying offers like Blockbuster (~1.50-3.00 EPC) and True (~.60 EPC) that can't compare to the .10-.15 cents submits get. It's all about niche though, if you target correctly you will make lots of money with anything.
 
ZIP Submits

The concept for zip submits is simple: The advertiser is paying for an "active" customer. That is they propose an offer and they advertiser pays on an action, knowing that if a user enters their zip code a high percentage will MOST LIKELY continue with the process. This model simplifies the payout process and makes the payout easier to track for affiliates. It works better than saying well pay $7 for a fully registered user, or $45 when someone buys. The advertiser could care less about their actual zip code, they are NOT paying for the zip code. Another trick thats involves the user is for loan or other offers with zip submits is geo-targeting. Once the user enters the code it dynamically implants the user's city and "We offer payday loans in New York City." This strategy has proven high conversion rates.
 
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