Bad Economy Great For Affiliate Marketing

While companies trim the fat off their marketing plans in attempts to survive the tough economy, one segment of their ad budget is increasing. Pay Per Performance marketing spend is up as big business is starting to understand how simple it is to leverage huge bases of skilled affiliate marketers.

The ROI driven mindset of the affiliate world is providing traditional media advertisers with a simple way to run and scale effective campaigns to the 36,000ft level.

As companies shift spend from “Branding” spend to “Performance Based Spend” they suddenly end up with a magical row of numbers at the bottom of their advertising spend report – Profit per Dollar Spent – return on ad spend in black and white. Finally something we can graph, optimize, and improve on.

Because advertisers only pay affiliates when a certain set of actions are completed by a surfer (submit contact form, place an order, etc), money is only spent when a sale or lead is generated, something most ad executives still can’t get their head around.

Publishers (websites, blogs, etc) stand to benefit as more advertisers shift into pay per action models. New ad networks for publishers that self optimize ads to your content based on profitability are on the way. Profits will drive progress in the technology. The difference between the have and have nots will start to become more clear as complex traffic management will be required to optimize earnings on the affiliate offers you’re promoting.

For Advertisers to properly leverage affiliate marketing, business owners need to determine their own internal cost per sale first. If you find it takes you $50.00 of combined effort and marketing spend to generate $100.00 of profit you should be happy to pay me $45.00 for every sale I can generate. If I can generate 10 times more sales than you because I’m a professional affiliate and you’re a professional widget maker, you can focus on your new clients widgets and I can focus on driving traffic and sales.

The key to scalability in your marketing plan is finding 5 – 10 – or 100 affiliates just like me who can provide the volume necessary to meet your revenue and profit goals.

The Affiliate Marketing world has taken control of almost every ad platform. Having an affiliate program is not just about scalability – if you aren’t using affiliates who are competing against each other to market your products, you’re effectively competing against the whole world alone, and you will not win. Take advantage of the competition between affiliate marketers and only spend money for profitable sales.

Maybe it was Etology Ripping me off.

I am not sure the exact moment when the thought of joining some new PPC advertising network made me need to puke, but I am pretty sure it was Etology not sending a tiny $80.00 check for a small text link I had running on Sitesled.com earlier this year that actually got me to stop giving away my traffic for free. The problem is 9 out of 10 of these network’s sole existence relies on them never paying a majority of people who send traffic.

It was May 2008, my birthday month, and I had been ripped off more times than a blind cashier by one too many hotshot online adbrokers… and I had just had enough. Stan over at etology told me to send him a record of the traffic we sent him. I replied with the records, but he had added my domains to his spam filter. That day I decided to try a few pay per lead programs after making some phone calls and spending a lot of time over at WebHostingTalk.com.

Now 5 months later, I have decided to build a site to document and discuss my journey as a publisher into the online pay per lead market.