Patience is key in Affiliate Marketing

The Importance of Being Patient

As the May income report clearly points out, things don’t look too promising from a money standpoint right now. Operating at a loss for the month is never something you want to see, but when you are first getting started that is one of the realities of the business – especially when you are working on a budget.

The good news that isn’t quite as evident from the numbers in the income report is the progress that has been made over the course of that month. We started out with a couple of PPC campaigns that weren’t really generating the appropriate traffic and subsequently, were not converting and leading to sales. Thus, we were spending a god deal of money and getting mostly irrelevant clicks out of it. We stopped these campaigns and utilized these lessons in building our new campaigns.

As we progressed we refined our ad campaigns, creating multiple ad groups with a specific focus for our new campaigns and a couple of ads to split test for them as well. This led to more specific and relevant traffic and we saw our CTR increasing as were our conversions. However, we were still losing a little bit of money each day and so we went back to the drawing board again, taking the new lessons we had learned from our latest round of advertising.

In our most recent, and current, campaigns we have several ad groups clearly defined each with a strong quality score. We have tested several different ad copies and let the keywords run for awhile and now are in the process of eliminating the under-performing keywords, running only our best ad copy and increasing our daily budget to allow more clicks. Before these changes the campaign had been running about even, so we’re hopeful with these optimizations that we will improve upon that in the coming days/weeks.

Certainly, even if this campaign is profitable, we have a ways to go before we are seeing any sort of income out of this endeavor. However, over the course of the month we have progressed from losing money steadily on our early campaigns to one that is currently breaking even. Additionally, we have purchased some domains that we plan on utilizing for our marketing efforts that aren’t operational yet, but we hope will be contributing to our income significantly in the near future.

In the early going of affiliate marketing you have to be patient, because this isn’t an overnight process of making $1000’s/day. It takes time and energy, and yes, some losses up front. Most people who try their hand at this get frustrated quickly and give up if they haven’t started turning big profits in the first 4-8 weeks. That approach won’t net you any knowledge of the process or help you make strides towards your income goal. Patience and learning from your mistakes will, however.