How do you make paid traffic work? What do the Super Affiliates do?

Hi I have managed paid ad accounts and seen some super affiliate accounts. The issue is that a lot of people that are new to the game see super affiliates pull in impressive numbers and they want to replicate it. Worse still some sell you the dream that you can easily replicate their success.

What they are not telling you or what you are not seeing is the amount of money, time and effort they put into testing offers,landing pages and keywords as well as all of the tracking.

Yes the holy grail is putting in $1 and getting $2 back but trust me, it takes a mighty effort to get to that point. Yes sure you might get lucky, but who wants to rely on luck.

Further to that even if you were to copy a successful campaign it does not mean you will have the same results because there are too many variables.

You say you are getting 2 sales out of 50 subscribers. Have you split tested landing pages, headlines and colors etc. This is a very gradual process until you strike gold. What about rotating offers or adding more offers to the thank you page or back end ?

Does the offer have enough upsells, can you get some affiliate stats for your offer on how its converting generally and the average EPC ?

Do you know exactly what keywords are providing the sales and which ones are the losers as they will need to go.

The fact that you are in a testing phase and only losing 50 cent per subscriber is actually not too bad.

Finally what is your budget for this project, is it $1000 or $2000 plus ? This should be money that you can afford to lose. I used to always tell clients in the beginning that they were only paying for data and that is what you are doing, just paying to get a load of info on what works and what does not. I know that does not sound sexy or pretty like the sales pages but that's the reality.

You need to collect and analyze all the data you are getting now and use that to build a winning campaign.

I'm currently in the survival/prepping niche. And I'm thinking I should have went into one of the main three - health, wealth, or relationships. Because we all have problems in those three niches that we're willing to pay money for a solution to. Whereas in the survival niche, we're not as desperate for a solution. I think it's going to be harder to get a good ROI in this niche, don't you think?


I did try to use higher converting offers when I could, but I just don't think the urgency to buy prepping products is very strong.

I did learn how to split test my landing page. I tested a couple of things. I also split tested my ads and improved them.

I don't have any keywords providing sales. I don't send them to an offer, I send them to my landing page where I give them a free ebook in exchange for the emails address. Then I promote offers in the newsletter which currently has a 60% open rate. Do the super affiliates do it this way? I do target keywords with my responsive ads on the display network though.

Really, you think I should keep testing things and try to get my cost down? I don't think my open rates are going to get any better. And I don't think I'm going to find better products to promote. So they only way I could make this profitable is to get my ad cost down, way down. A subscriber is currently only worth a dollar to me, but their costing me like $1.60 per subscriber. So I would have to get my cost down $0.60, just to break even. And even then I wouldn't really be breaking even when you consider my other costs (internet service, hosting, autoresponder, domain), all of which add up to around $60/month.

You are spending $1.50 to make a dollar. Not bad for a new Marketer. The average new Marketer will lose a lot more than this and even quit.

What you may not understand in regards to 'super affiliates' is the fact that they have 'up sells' in their sales funnels.

They make profit on the back end.

They also cut advertising costs by utilizing 'FREE' traffic strategies.

Some use Only FREE traffic.

Now about key words...

Yes you should be able to track the keywords that are 'converting' for you by creating a 'goal'.

See your campaigns for further info.

You can optimize your ads by trying different target audience or testing different keywords. Also, you can use Bing Ads for cheaper option.

This doesn't fit with this:

You absolutely do, you just don't know what they are because you haven't learned to track all the way from ad through funnel.

Which KWs are producing sales? You don't know.

Which KWs are producing subscribers but no sales? You don't know.

You have a lot more learning and testing to do.

You are getting subscribers and making sales so you are light-years ahead of most newbies who lose all their money and give up.

Learn how to track conversions from your KWs.

I had an offer on my thank you page, download page, in my free ebook, and in my newsletter. Is that good enough?

A couple of you said that I need to track conversions and sells from my keywords. If I do that will it get my advertising costs down enough to make me profitable?

I'm wondering, instead of sending my paid traffic to a landing page that gives them a free ebook in exchange for their email. And promoting to them only after they've signed up. Would it work better if I sent them to a product offer right away? I mean you'd obviously get their email address first, but instead of selling them on your free ebook, you'd be selling them on a products. Seems like you'd make a few sells right off the bat since you're targeting keywords where the product would solve their problem. With the "giving away a free ebook" method you target keywords where your free ebook solves one of their problems. If you send them straight to an offer wouldn't you make some initial sells that could help with your advertising costs?

There has been a lot of solid advice been given out in this thread but I feel that your skirting around this and not grasping the fundamentals.

You keep talking about sales, profit and getting your advertising costs down which I know is important to you, but you have to lay the foundations first like building a house.

Let me stress my point again. In the first few months of any PPC campaign I used to tell clients to forget about sales and conversions, if they happen its a bonus.

The first few months are all about gathering data and testing what works and what doesn't. After that the campaign gets tweaked and optimised based on everything we did previously. That's when we start to look at sales and conversions.

This is something you must take on board.