I believe very much in the power of online advertising, but in reality, the downside to advertising is significant.
I’ve often heard new marketers say things like, “If only I had a multimillion-dollar ad budget, I could be as successful as Amazon.” Maybe some of you have been thinking this. If so, stop it. You can’t expect miracles from any advertising service.
In the online world, the downside of advertising of any kind consists of three disadvantages:
- Ads do nothing to increase the trust that your audience may have. (Remember how trust is one of the three pillars of marketing?)
- Everyone seeing your ad knows that they are going to be pitched. Although it’s still possible to build trust from this mindset, it’s harder than building trust from simple curiosity.
- As soon as you stop paying for the ad, it stops giving you traffic.
If you want to overcome these problems, you need to do two things:
- Optimize all your ads for profit metrics, and
- Develop as much of a base of free traffic as you can
Optimizing for profit
To generate a profit from your advertising, you as an affiliate need to be offering upsells that you know to be profitable. The other things you need are the major metrics from the advertising service, which are:
- Your Click Through Ratio (CTR)
- Your Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Average value of a sale (probably from your vendor’s affiliate tracking software).
All this information is required when you want to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment) for your advertising spend, but it does not reveal the entire picture.
For example, you would expect a strong ROI to generate large volumes of traffic, have a high CTR, and a low CPC. That’s generally true, BUT many successful ad campaigns for high-ticket items end up having a smaller volume of transactions, a slightly lower CTR, and a slightly higher CPC.
The two most important things you can do after calculating profitability are to make sure that your user experience is clear, smooth, and engaging; and to make good use of your analytics software to track user behavior accurately.
Too much downside of advertising? Grow your free traffic!
The second part of overcoming advertising problems is not as difficult as it sounds, even if you are renting traffic to a sales funnel for your first offer, but free traffic demands free content, and that can be very time consuming.
The most widespread free content that small businesses use today is blogging, and that’s for a couple of reasons. First, an experienced writer can bang out a decent blog post fairly quickly, and second, blog posts are about the easiest thing to optimize for search engine keywords.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with YouTube videos or podcasts for delivering free content, although they tend to take longer to create. They do support keywords for SEO, of course, but a text-based blog is able to take better advantage of these.
Another way to generate organic traffic, although it’s likely to be in small amounts at first, is through social media. Many people like to follow businesses on Facebook or Instagram, so it pays to make your presence known.
Affiliate Swim is a teaching site for online entrepreneurs who want to learn how to launch affiliate campaigns.
You can study our free affiliate marketing course in the Coaching section. For additional support, you can join our Facebook group for free coaching from experts and other students, as our time allows.
Once you launch your campaign, check out the store, which has many different nice-to-have items for most online entrepreneurs.