Video Advise To New Affiliates Pending

Mark over 45n5 has posted a video question to Shawn Collins in which he asked Shawn to give an advise to those who are new to Affiliate Marketing. I am anticipating with great interest Shawn’s response, and if you are interested in Shawn response I advise you to keep an eye on both Mark’s and Shawn’s blogs.

On my part I would like to lightly contribute to the conversation, although I am very behind when it comes to vblogging. (Sorry Mark, I do not even have a camera to do a video response).

In his video Mark asked Shawn variety of questions, which I think any one who is new to affiliate marketing would ask. One question in particular caught my attention was about how to choose for example a merchant from Commission Junction merchants.

I am sure Shawn is going to give more detailed and probably more insightful response. But here are my two cents…

When I joined Commission Junction just about over a year ago, my approach to choosing merchants was generally based on EPC (earnings per 100 clicks). I thought that the higher EPCs are the better chance I will have to earn better commissions in return for my efforts. Just take a look at the picture below, you can see that some of the merchants EPC look very attractive:

While some of my choices prove to be good, majority was not. Since most of the traffic to the landing pages I have created for these merchants was driven via PPC campaigns, I soon learned that in choosing a merchants EPC figures are simply not enough. I found myself often setting up a page/website, creating a PPC campaign and only after those two steps would I research many other factors. One being the general competition in a particular field or industry, another the competition for certain keywords I would use in my PPC campaigns.

The other shortcoming in my approach in choosing merchants was that I was unfamiliar with products or services those merchants where offering. So my suggestion to all new in the affiliate marketing would be not to be deceived by EPC. From what I understand these figures in some cases are based on top affiliates for that particular merchant. I believe that if a merchant has let say 100 affiliates and only 10 top affiliates have extremely high converting campaigns the entire EPC figure can be inflated due to the performance of those 10 top performing affiliates (this is only my own opinion, correct me if I am wrong).

So I guess when you are new to the affiliate marketing the best choice would be choosing a merchant whose products you have used in the past or are using currently, without regard to EPC. You may be able to earn more money with merchants that have much lover EPC comparing to the rest of merchants.

Once again, keep an eye on Shawn’s Blog, who I believe will give much better and more insightful answer to the question I tried to address here as well as to other questions posted by Mark.

UPDATE: Shawn responded to Mark’s question. You can watch the video on Mrak’s blog as well.