As affiliate marketers, almost every visitor that  comes to one of our pages is paid for.  Whether the cost is the bid click price that we pay on our PPC campaigns, the time invested building links and writing content for organic sites, or the programming and research that comes with automated systems, there is a solid investment in getting traffic to our pages.  Yet, the majority of marketers will simply attempt to convert these visitors once and chalk it off as a lead or bounce and be done with it.

I recently began targeting a demographic that was fairly uncompetitive and converted well no matter what niche I applied it to.  While porting my campaigns across different test niches, I realized that the keywords and targeting that I used were almost identical from campaign to campaign.  Chances are, a visitor that came to [demo] [niche] site a would also be interested in [demo] [niche] site b if I marketed it to them right.  So why was I paying for the same visitors (via PPC) more than once?

There are many ways that you can retain your visitors and market to them post lead/bounce.  The following are a few ways to squeeze the most out of every visitor and really make you investment go a long way. I’ve listed everything in the order of easiness.

Pop-unders, Back-button redirects and other ‘Bounce’ Catches

We all know how annoying it is when you try and close out of that Acai page and you get the Live Chat window, price reduction page and popup saying ‘ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT TO BUY?!!!” As much as these things are a pain in the ass, they do provide you with a second chance to capture a lead by offering the user an alternative to the original deal. While implementing a Live Chat system is pretty tedious, setting up a simple exit pop-under or redirect is just a matter of adding a few lines of Javascript triggered by the onunload event (you can grab the code from tons of merchant landing pages that implement this or just googling popup/popunder). I’ve setup popunder offers on the following type of sites, all with varying degrees of success:

Main Offer	Popped Offer
Clean Dating/Chat (True, SinglesNet, etc)	Adult Chat (fling, amatuer match)
Adult Dating/Chat	Clean Chat
Clean Dating/Chat	Crush Offers
Scholarship Offers (Long form)	Scholarship Offers (short form, email submit)
Acai	Wu-Yi (and vise versa)
Email Submit	Email Submit
Biz Ops	Adgridwork

Most of these had fairly low conversion rates, however, almost all of them would convert if traffic was thrown at them. It’s important to offer some type of alternative to the original offer. A scholarship to crush offer would probably do really poorly compared to a scholarship to student loan popunder. Also, (in my own tests) I’ve found that a popup/under when the user first visits the page will dramatically decrease main offer conversions.

Other things to check out are back-button captures (redirecting the page that the back-button directs to … (iframed version of the original referrer is fun) and idle-pages (adding timers to pages left open to popup offers if the user opens the page in a new tab/window and forgets about it).

Capturing the Leads Locally - Whitelabel, Prepop

One of the best ways of establishing a customer that you can market to over and over again is to move the lead capture over to your own servers. This will allow you to save all of the user’s information and later use that to market to them again without paying for additional PPC traffic, SEOing, etc. When most affiliates think about setting this up, they think that they need to be sending thousands of leads to the merchant, have fantastic quality and be able to code their own forms/api calls. This is definitely not true. While some of the bigger networks/merchants may not want to deal with the smaller fish, if you have a good relationship with your AM, you can usually get some type of Prepoppable, auto-submit form setup after demonstrating a decent volume, consistency and the desire to really scale up. Just frame your request in a way that is beneficial to all parties. “I’m doing 100 leads a day right now with a 20% conversion rate. I think that when I pass off the users to your page, WE’RE losing a lot of potential leads simply because of the change in domain/layout. If we could setup a simple prepop/whitelabeled solution, we could probably double the leads that I’m converting. This increase in EPC would also allow me to scale out more, increase bid prices and drive more volume much more easily.”

Setting up a prepop form is pretty trivial for their techs and sometimes they will just send you the form to use for anyone who’s not great with html/php. This type of setup works great for niche lead forms and allows you to start building a nice database of leads that you can market to again and again. Additionally, if you know how to code and design, you can supply the network with the forms yourself which will make them even more inclined to work with you.

So you have your own Leads…Now what?

When I first started collecting my own leads, I had visions of building up hundreds of thousands of qualified records, mailing targeted offers to them once a week or so, and making more money then I knew what to do with….Then I realized I had NO idea how to mail. I’ve talked to other big affiliates who didn’t want to bother with white-labeling because they also had no clue had to mail so what was the point of collecting leads?

After attending ASE and chatting with other marketers and networks, I found out how valuable a targeted, FRESH set of records is. Furthermore, I realized how valuable specialization is. If you’re good at PPC and capturing traffic and leads that way, stick to that and offload the residual mailings and marketings to someone else. There are hundreds of List Management companies out there (we’re not talking Aweber here) that will handle all aspects of mailing for you. From cleaning, to ensuring CAN-SPAM compliance, to matching the right offers/content with the right records, they will be more than happy to handle the mailing part of your marketing campaign for a 50/50 revshare. Most of them will allow you to API your records right into their system so the entire process can be automated and transparent. If you have a database of records just sitting around waiting for that rainy day when you’ll learn how to mail, why not just outsource it and start making money NOW with little additional work? At the end of the month, they’ll cut you a check for your share of the revenue. Can you say, free monies?

If you’re looking for an MLA to handle your mailing, good places to ask are the networks that your driving the most of your traffic to (most of them have inhouse mailing teams or at least know companies that they can recommend), Wickedfire or other affiliates (*cough* smaxor).

These are just a few of the ways that you can convert your traffic multiple times over. Some other ways off the top of my head are co-registration, adsense/cpm banners on exit/bounce pages, and even offline lead sales (your local insurance broker would kill for a few hundred insurance leads). Why settle for a single conversion when you can increase your ROI exponentially by establishing multiple streams of lead generation and revenue with a little extra work?

Just wanted to make a quick post that I’ll be in Boston this weekend for ASE. Looking forward to meeting up with the guys I’ve been working alongside this past year and partying it up in Beantown. If anyone wants to meet up, feel free to shoot me an email or get in touch on twitter as I’ll be checking that throughout the conference. I plan on heading over to the #cakes and the wf meetups and then doing the club thing at night with my AMs from Neverblue and CX. Hope to see ya there

Anyone who’s read Diorex’s Affiliate Playbook knows that one of the goals to aim for in affiliate marketing is a direct-to-merchant relationship. This allows you to work directly with the merchant who’s offer you are promoting and cutting out the network middle man altogether, equating to higher payouts and more transparency.

For new affiliates or affiliates pushing moderate volume and lead quality, this is most likely out of the question until you prove yourself. Or is it?

While doing some research on a few payday offers, I was checking out an offer run on CX digital (awesome affiliate network for anyone looking for some quality offers). The particular offer that I looked at is Accelerated Payday. Nothing stellar…however theres a few things to take away from this offer. The first is the redirect path. If you look at the status bar, or use LiveHTTPHeaders for Firefox or some other redirect following tool, you’ll see that your browser goes to incentaclick.com 0> adiclicks.com 0> acceleratedpayday.com. The adiclicks.com intermediate tracking url is what we want to look for. In this case (and most of the time), this tells us that our traffic is being forwarded through another network/advertiser in addition to incentaclick. Looking at the AcceleratedPayday page, we see a link at the footer to Affiliate Program which takes us to Commission Wizard which, sure enough, is another affiliate network. So not only is Incentaclick taking a cut of the original lead cost, but Commission Wizard is well. Moreover, we can safely assume that Incentaclick is simply another affiliate on the CW network and is getting a payout greater than they are offering us so that they can turn a profit. Thus we can go ‘pseudo-direct’ (lame term but it gets the point across) by simply signing up for commission wizard and running the offer through them. This will allow us to get closer and closer to the end merchant, cut more middleman out of the process, and make more money on our leads.

But what if the landing page doesn’t have a link to the parent affiliate company on it? Well, a lot of times, you can simply enter the redirect url (adiclicks.com) into google and it will give you the company that the tracking url belongs to. Another option is to put the tracking url into MyIPNeighbors and you will see some of the other sites on the IP address…this will more often than not have the affiliate networks page on it as well as a slew of other offers that this network runs. If nothing turns out at first with MYIPNeighbors, try incrementing the last octet of the ip address (if adiclicks resolves to 64.71.230.66, try 64.71.230.67, 64.71.230.68, etc). A lot of times networks own larger blocks of IP addresses so with a little snooping you can weed them out.

There are TONS of these offers out there across all of the networks. If you’re doing decent volume on an offer, but not enough to get the attention of the end merchant, see if there is a way for you to get closer to the merchant by chopping out some of the intermediary networks. Lots of times, you can get a few bucks more on your leads by signing up for another network and swapping out your affiliate links

Its pretty common knowledge among the affiliate marketing industry that you have to hide your traffic sources. Regardless of of the kind of relationship that you have with your network and affiliate manager, its bad business to expose all of the search terms, traffic sources and content that you are using to actively promote a given offer. Without going into too much of the specifics on this topic, I wanted to real quickly post the method that I use to scrub the referral data from my direct linked campaigns.

In a nutshell, the script works as follows:

PPC AD –|> Redirect Domain (with this script) –|> Offer

While a lot of people advocate the need for a double meta redirect, this is simply for a direct linked campaign so I really don’t care of the network figures out my redirect domain (as this page simply 301s to an offer page). If you have an LP that you want to hide or don’t want to expose the original redirect, then you can simply setup a double meta redirect, which I won’t cover here.

You can pass subid’s to the script by appending ?s=BLAH to the page. For example, I’d setup the link as follows: www.myredirectdomain.com/fathersday/index.php?s=men18t20

Anyways, here ya go and hope that some of you find this useful


<?
$offer = "http://www.incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=11323&cid=4339";
if (isset($_GET['s'])) $offer = $offer . “&sub=” . $_GET['s'];

// Way of keeping subids in tact … works for my setup, may not
// work for all … I setup my links as www.mydomain.com/?sub=blah
if (stristr($me, “?”)) echo “$me&go=1″;
else echo “$me?go=1″;
echo “\”></head><body></body></html>”;
}
else {
//No referer is set so no need to fuck with meta redirects.
//Simply forward the user.
header(”Location: $offer”);
}
?>