Black Or Red - Affiliate Marketing Roulette
Thursday, February 14th, 2008This business is really not for everyone. After being a long time member of several webmaster forums you start to see the same type of people, the same type of questions. One of these people is the small - medium affiliate who has money to invest back in their business, but just can’t pull the trigger. If they knew 100% they would succeed and have a positive ROI then they would definitely do it. That is just the wrong attitude.

Affiliate marketing is a lot like roulette. In it’s most simplest form you have red and you have black. And in business you have black for profits and red for losses. Either way, you can’t win if you don’t place your bets and once you do it will either be red or black. You can’t make money if you don’t take a risk. And it’s true, even if you want it to hit black every time you place your bet, eventually it will hit red and you will lose. It’s all part of the game.
Investing your money into affiliate products or websites is easy when you break it down.
1. Choose your affiliate product. If you are going to be promoting an already existent website of yours make sure your lead gen page is optimized for conversions.
2. Hypothesize where the best place to invest money in that you think will produce a positive ROI. Do your research, take some educated guesses and don’t think about the possibility of losing your investment.
3. Do it. Wait for the results and you will see it - red or black. Make sure you are tracking properly and efficiently.
4. Trash the campaign if you missed and it’s clearly losing. Tweak if you are making money or just leave it running and start new campaigns targeting something else.
5. Pump more money into what you know works and keep on doing it until the well runs dry.
If you are still in a mindset that you are afraid to invest money to make money then you have forgotten the cliche “It takes money to make money”. The thing about cliches is a lot of them are true. Your web presence simply cannot grow naturally as fast as it can if you are investing money into it.
Take PPC for example - many top PPC affiliate marketers spend thousands of dollars which they KNOW they are probably going to lose at first. They just want to see what works and what doesn’t, gather more information, etc. They know that once they figure out where to put the lion’s share of their money, the losses won’t matter anymore. Then it’s like they can cheat because they know it’s going to hit black every time so they bet bigger and bigger until it finally hits red again and they back off still up thousands. That’s the name of the game, because at the end of the day affiliate marketing is a numbers game.
Unless you’re the luckiest horseshoe in the world you will inevitably lose some money while trying to find what works by yourself. I don’t care if its a CPM un-targeted mass buy, PPC campaign using long tail keywords, CPA ads or promoting poker portals - Once you find your own little spot that nobody else has found you can milk it for all it’s worth. If you are still thinking you just can’t risk a loss and couldn’t stomach and ad campaign that didn’t make you money, I do wish you good luck and hope I don’t hear you one day saying “Do you want fries with that?”.
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