Building a Strong Affiliate Portfolio

Much in the same way as a stock trader builds a share portfolio by investing into a range of business sectors to spread their risk - I find its important to use the some of the same principles in affiliate marketing.
I’m sure most people have heard of the expression ‘ Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket’ 

Its important to be aware that there are many things that can have a negative impact on your affiliate campaigns. I have seen campaigns that I have set-up which have been running very successfully for long periods of time suddenly take a turn for the worse and the stream of commission can just vanish, sometimes even overnight.

The most vunerably are paid per click campaigns ( ppc ) which I run mostly on google adwords.
This isn’t a slur on google - Its just that google provides most of my traffic for ppc so the effects are magnified. There are many things that can happen to turn a good campaign into one that sees little return on investment (ROI)

The obvious ones include:

1. Increased competition in your sector or even more specifically the affiliate program itself with more affiliates taking up the action.

2. You may be receiving poor quality scores which will effect your keywords rankings which in turn decreases the amount of visitors you receive for your money.
Note : It is very important to try and keep your quality scores high otherwise google may impose higher bidding restrictions on your keywords ( also known in the trade as a ‘google slap’ )

The 2 examples above are probably the most common effects you will notice when running a campaign and you will have to battle with these constantly - thats just part of the job to ensure your keywords are properly targeted and your ads are created to market your merchants products/services effectively.

I don’t think there is any getting away from the fact that any campaign will have good days and bad days - thats just the way it goes - You should be looking at results over a longer period to get a true picture of how successfull things are going. I plan mine over monthly scale, I may have bad days or even the odd bad week but as long as the campaign has performed well for the month then I know I have done my job.

 So, how to build a strong affiliate portfolio :
First of all I wouldn’t advise anyone to start activating a series of online ppc campaigns without first ensuring you have gained the basic knowledge of managing one.
Its much better that you first focus your efforts on getting the basics ’down to a fine art’ first.

Its well worth taking some time when choosing which programs to promote - Avoid ‘the scatter gun approach’ as pointed out by Keith Bond - ( thanks Keith ) You need to be very selective to maximise your income and its security.

The strategy I use is to have only around 5 ppc campaigns running at any one time. Alot of my campaigns include alot of keywords so personally I feel that any more than this and I’d be missing some tricks.
I then have another 10 - 15 sat in the background which I keep working on until the time is right for them to go active. I can then switch these around if I have one that isn’t pulling its weight for what ever reason.
Now without giving too much away :)  the programs I have in my portfolio are all quite unique in that they don’t really have that much in common which each other.
I have carefully chosen these to be different in as many ways as possible.
Looking at their market sector I have spread into finance, gaming, business, the list goes on -
Also I bear in mind if any campaigns are effected by seasonal variations, for example gifts obviously have a roaring trade at christmas so I’m ready to push hard in this area when the time comes.
The recent sunny days means everyone wants to buy sunglasses or ceiling fans to cool down for example. But now the rain has returned I expect a downturn in activity and will switch to something like umbrellas or raincoats maybe lol.  You get the general idea.
I also mix up the commission structures to ensure I have a good balance of the campaigns that are currently active. Some will be percentage of sales which are smaller but more regular payments and others maybe high paying pay per lead programs which are great for profits but may not come so often. This helps keep a strong flow of income.
If your ultra cautious like me you may want to make sure you don’t just use one affiliate network so your not caught out if tracking issues arise ( It does happen on rare occassions)

The lists goes on to how the programs in my portfolio vary from one another but I think I’ve made the point without boring everyone with every aspect of it.

Basically the more versatile your affiliate portfolio is, will enable you to juggle your campaigns at the right times and enable you to brush off the unexpected google slap or change in uk gambling laws that maybe around the corner ( not saying there is ) and keep the money coming in.

Thanks for reading
Mike