PPC Marketing: Types of affiliate offers to avoid?


It's that time again - you are looking for new affiliate offers to promote via PPC Marketing (Pay Per Click Marketing) to expand your portfolio. It's easy to become lost in the huge market of affiliate products. Clickbank and Commission Junction have literally thousands of products you could promote. When looking for a new affiliate offer you need to do some upfront testing to find out if the product offer will eventually convert into sales. But which product should you choose to work with? There are several ways to get there. One is the rule of elimination. The following tips will help you to narrow your search down to a smaller list of products.

1. High competition offers. If you have read about it on a blog, or if it is discussed in forums, or if I hear it’s a “really hot offer”, I will stay away from it and keep looking. See rule #4 for additional information.

2. Seasonal offers. They are too much work in my opinion (with a few exceptions). I usually try to stay away from them. It takes a lot of time to set up a campaign properly. The season might almost be over when you are done fine-tuning your campaign. You will want something that is going to convert all year long, and not drop off to zero after a certain date or event. Unless you have organic traffic that you could use only very few seasonal items will work the same a year later.

3. Trademarked items. Does your Affiliate Program for this product come with a long list of restrictions and exclusions? These are tough offers to work with. The trademark owner is apparently very actively fishing in the same pond as you are. Stay away.

4. Super high $$$ payout offers. Blinded by big bucks per lead or sale? If you pick the highest paying offers, most likely everyone else will, too. This one goes hand in hand with rule #1. I'd rather fly below the radar.

5. Low search volume offers. Research is king. What good is a niche if there are only a few hundred searches a month on an item that pays $7.50 in commission? It’s important to do good research on the overall monthly search volume for any given keyword related to the product you are trying to promote. If the search volume is too low, it’s not worth spending the time building a campaign around it. Of course if you can dominate the niche and you can balance it properly, you can still have a winner.

6. Always question recommendations. You affiliate program account manager will always recommend specific products. Make sure you understand why a certain product is recommended. Are they not producing enough sales for their client? Maybe the final product landing pages do suck and do not convert. Why throw money at a product then? This rule also depends on how much volume you push with the network. If you are one of their top guys, this rule might not apply, but then you probably would not read this article either.

7. Research. Monitor trends and see when a trend turns into mainstream. Sometimes you can pick a product based on what is going on on the Internet and not the other way around. MySpace related stuff as an example. Yeah, now it is over saturated from a seller standpoint, but how about 1.5 to 2 years ago?! Early adopters were able to monetize that market long before MySpace was all over the place. You also need to reverse engineer this rule and stay away from these over saturated markets and products.