How To Be an Affiliate Marketer in 2012

If you plan on sticking with affiliate marketing for the long haul, it is always important that you know whats on the coming horizon. Fall behind and you won’t be prepared to change and adapt your business and marketing tactics fast enough to keep up. I saw a lot of affiliates struggling after a successful 2009 moving into 2010, and the same for those that started in 2010 moving into 2011. A lot has changed since I started about 4 years back, and I can’t say many parts of my business has stayed the same. We’ll be seeing a lot of changes in 2012.

The death of the average affiliate on Facebook is upon us. I know lots of us love Facebook, and lots of us have a burning desire to take a boot and shove it up the internal ad’s team ass over there. What we’ve seen that past year on Facebook ads are lots more banning from better tracking on Facebook’s end, and lots of changes to the system that tailors Facebook ads to small business, service, app and game owners. Rules have gotten stricter and there seems to be a 1 strike and your out rule applied. A hidden account quality score is almost certainly in place, meaning the better your score the more impressions you’ll get, along with cheaper clicks. And affiliate’s are getting categorized with a lower QS. On top of that, we’ve also got ads, like dating, with impression caps… either that or it is so bogged up with dating ads that there really aren’t enough impressions to go around.

Despite all the bad things I’ve listed above, hope is not lost for the ol’ affiliate on Facebook. Facebook Pages and Groups have become an amazing source for contacting and growing out subscriber numbers. On top of that, they generally seem to be cheaper overall. I suppose this has to do with the fact that the traffic stays on Facebook through the whole process. My plan for Facebook is to start researching what people are buying, learn how to target people that are buying information on that stuff, then to create subscription sites based around this while using Facebook pages and groups to build demand for my sites. I had a recent chat with someone doing this in a wild niche you would never think could make any money – Try 1000 subscribers at $40 a month each in a niche that is ridiculously easy to target on Facebook, not to mention cheap. I’ll keep the details private, but this is a simple form of adapting to the trends of Facebook just generally hating on us affiliates.

PPV. Another traffic source people either get along with off the bat or can never seem to get to work. We’ve seen a surge of tools that spy and autobid pop up lately. This isn’t good for the new affiliate, as it generally just teaches an affiliate how to steal landing pages and target lists, and then get in out of control bidding wars for those that don’t have access to the tools. Pop costs across the most popular traffic sources have been bumped. Less and less offers are actually accepting pop-traffic, and I don’t always blame them. From my internal testing, the overall quality is very low.

PPV isn’t all bad and blah. There are lots of niches and campaigns that still work, you just need to work a little harder to bump quality if you plan on running anything more than a couple weeks there. Make sure you are really preselling things hard if you are taking creative angles, because if there is one thing an advertiser hates, its gotta be the leads that were pre-sold illegitimately.

We’re seeing the return of the rebill these past couple months. That’s great because it’s easy money, but didn’t anyone learn their lesson the last time rebills blew up? A whole lot of Oprah and the FTC killing some affiliates and networks operations is what happens when you start pushing too much volume and fake testimonials. Until someone can find a way to sell these without being a complete joke and a lie, you’re going to be walking into unsteady territory. Hell, even Clickbank is cracking down on how Guru’s sell their bizops.

One strong note for the next year – MOBILE! Mobile is absolutely blowing up and is something you’ll want to start getting your ass on ASAP! We’ve got amazing technology that is making some smartphones more powerful than some notebooks I’ve seen on the low-budget market. With faster connectivity and dropping bandwidth costs and the constant need for many to get information on the go, mobile platforms will soon surpass online surfing time from PCs. More mobile ad platforms are slowly popping up, and WAP offers are killing traffic sources after a small amount of testing and optimization. Mobile is like Facebook ads 5 years ago – extremely cheap and very easy to game. Jump on it before the rush!

Of course, whether or not affiliate marketing survives depends a lot on the global climate and economy. I’d be an idiot to give a factual rundown of what is actually going on, but from what I gather, the US is headed for a zombie apocalypse, China will eventually being running child labor factories in western-developed countries, and the polar ice caps are melting. Now if any of this happens, big changes in affiliate marketing will come. If your main targets can’t afford to buy anything, you’re going to need to find a new market. The main idea here is that if there is a large social, economic or political collapse in any country you run traffic through, you can expect to lose a lot of revenue. If you aren’t a multi-national traffic buying machine now, get into the swing of things and start doing it!

How do you expect to survive 2012? What do you plan to do differently next year that you didn’t do this year? Have you packed up your zombie apocalypse survival bag yet? How will you be an affiliate marketer in 2012?

Article From:justindupre.com