How Much Money Are You Leaving On The Table?

How diversified is your affiliate marketing business?  Are you promoting a handful of campaigns, just one, or more?  The thing I’ve found over the years is that many affiliate marketers only focus on one or two areas leaving A LOT of money on the table.  For instance some affiliate marketers only run social traffic on Facebook and Plenty of Fish while others may run traffic solely on pay-per-click platforms such as Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter.  One way I’ve continued to grow and expand my businesses over the years is through diversification.  Far too often affiliates concentrate on one or two traffic sources and verticals and find their business with roller-coaster like growth.

When we started the IMGrind blog last June, we started posting a lot about lead generation arbitrage.  I strongly believe that this “shed some light” on some affiliates and let them understand that more opportunities out there exist besides linking out to an offer owned by another company.  If you’re going to be promoting other companies sales/services it only makes sense to eventually begin creating your own so you can retain assets and monetize for long term growth.  Some things you may want to consider:

Diversify Your Traffic Sources – Rather you run email, social, display or other forms of traffic, start branching out to more than one.  Don’t just be an expert at social media traffic.  Become an expert at more than one.  Apply the same concepts you’ve used previously and begin sending traffic multiple ways.

Diversify Your Campaigns – Don’t just promote one or two campaigns and call it a day.  Diversify your affiliate campaigns by running multiple offers on multiple traffic sources.

Explore New Areas – For many affiliate marketers this is mobile.  There is a lot of new traffic coming up daily, so spend an hour each day just focusing on getting stuff to work with it.  Ask you account manager at your favorite affiliate network what their top offers are and take things from there.

Don’t Get Complacent – By far one of the worst things I see in this industry is someone getting comfortable with their earnings and they quit developing new campaigns/projects.  When things are good are when you should be working the hardest.

Develop Your Own Offer – If you’re promoting other companies products/services with success, then its likely you know and understand how the demographic works.  Use what you know about promoting a 3rd party offer to create your own.  If the offer you’re promoting requires credit card billing, and you don’t want to get involved with that, consider making a similar offer that focuses on lead generation.

Always Be Testing – Keep testing new things.  Re-invest a portion of your profits every month to test new traffic sources, offers, and strategies.

These are just some things to consider when looking at your overall business model and making decisions for long term growth.  Don’t leave money on the table by not exploring new areas.  Remember there are only 24 hours in a day and one person can only do so much.  Use hand written lists to make the most of your time online.  Diversify your business and be here for the unforeseeable future!