This guest post is brought to you by Jitendra Vaswani, digital marketing practitioner & international keynote speaker.

Getting started with affiliate marketing seems like an easy job, but it is not. If you are not stepping into affiliate marketing without any kind of preparation and knowledge, then you are most likely to fail. So the question is how to structure affiliate marketing campaigns?

In case you too want to get started with affiliate marketing and want to promote your product, then I am here to help you out. In this article, I will be talking about the necessary steps that you must take to get started with affiliate marketing.

So here we go: How to structure affiliate marketing campaigns?

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Decide What And Where To Promote

The first step for you would be to decide what type of product you are interested in promoting and which platform you are going to use. Like what would be your traffic source and what kind of medium you are going to choose to promote affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing 101: The Easiest Verticals to Start With

For example, if you want to get affiliate sales by writing review articles, then SEO is the best option for you. In this case, you will need to create your website and publish content and optimize it. On the other hand, if you are promoting any dating website or some other kind of offer, social media advertisements are the best thing you can do.

Propeller: it’s not always easy to promote dating on Social Media, we have a guide here.

However, while you choose a product to promote, you must go through competition research. Like how many people are there who are promoting the same product as you are? You can also talk to your affiliate manager to get more information about different products. Also, you should always focus on the latest trends and buzz.

Moreover, while choosing an affiliate program, you should target less competitive GEOs like Latin America and Southeast Asia. Then you should test 1 to 3 products and see how they are performing for you.

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Research the offer

Without proper research, you should not choose a product. And there are quite a lot of ways that you can use to research an offer. For example, you can use spy tools. So you can figure out what other affiliates are doing and what you can do to get more and more leads. For spy tool recommendations, you can also check out tools like WhatRunsWhere and SocialAdsNinja.

You can also consider talking to your affiliate manager. Affiliate managers are extremely knowledgeable. As they have great insight into the industry and other affiliates.

You can also research ads on the web by keeping an eye on your Facebook and main sites to see what your competitors are promoting. Or you can go for manual spying by changing your IP address using a VPN.

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Planning

Planning is one of the essential parts when it comes to structuring affiliate marketing campaigns. You should not launch an affiliate campaign without any plan.

Instead, you should set your goals and create a plan and execute it. Also, you should gather as much information as possible and re-evaluate the data and repeat it. 

Also, you need to ask yourself certain questions. Like:

• How much budget should I have to run each test?
• How long should I run a test?
• What are some rules for cutting Landers, placements, offers, etc?

Once you have the right action plan, it will be easy for you to manage everything and get better results.

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Creative Brainstorming and creation

What most of the affiliate promoters do is that they copy creative landing pages of their customers. And if you are doing the same or thinking to do the same, then you should not.

Instead, you should create your own creatives and landing pages. As it will keep you 5 steps ahead of your competitors.

However, coming up with creative’s and landing pages can be challenging. Hence, you should brainstorm angles, headlines, and ad text. Also, you should find shocking and attention, grabbing images to use and build templates for banners and Landers. So you can easily adapt them to new campaigns.

Also, if you have a team backing you, then do discuss with them to come up with great ideas to make creatives and landing pages. 

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Campaign Setup

The next step is to set up a campaign. So the first thing that you will need is a domain name for your website. And the second thing you will is a web host. However, when choosing a web host, I would always recommend you to choose VPS. As it can offer you better performance and handle a lot of traffic. 

Then you should set up a tracking server. As it is extremely important that you track every data on your website. To track data, you can use websites like Voluum or Thrive. 

Finally, you must have landing pages. Also, it would be a good idea to keep landing pages to a separate server than your tracking server. This way, you will be able to enjoy a better page speed.

After that, you should create ads and fund your traffic source and monitor everything whether you are getting sales or not.

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Launch and data collection

Next, you will have to launch your campaign. While launching your campaign, I would suggest you create a new campaign with a really small budget. And increase the budget where conversations are tracking. Also, make sure that all your tracking links and conversion pixels are working properly.

Plus, you should stick to your plan only. You should run your campaigns based on your planned budget and timeframe and collect data. 

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Split Testing

Once you have run your campaigns successfully. You must start by reviewing the stats to see campaign performance and calculate statistical significance.

Then you should cut out the worst performers and repeat the campaign to make sure your data is significant.

Automate! Cut the worst-performing ad zones with Target CPA

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Analysis

The final step is to analyze everything. You should analyze details like log detail records of daily profits, exact spend, clicks, and revenue. Also, you should turn the data into charts and analyze patterns and identify the variables that can be changed to make the most impact. Also, you will need to ask yourself certain questions like:

• Like what placements are more profitable? 
• What angles are working?
• What times of the day converts the best?
• Should I keep this campaign?

Based on your answers, you should make changes to your campaigns. Also, you should scale up your best performing campaigns and analyze their data to figure out what types of campaigns are working best for you.

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Final Words

SO that was the answer to your How to structure affiliate marketing campaigns question. By performing the above-mentioned steps, you can structure your affiliate campaigns.

However, from time to time, you will need to focus on split testing ads, landing pages, and offers. And keep an eye on your competitors as they are always behind you, and you should not let them win. Also, you should learn more about the niche so you will be able to tackle larger traffic sources. 

So that was all the tips that I could share with you. Now go ahead and check out these steps and see how they are working for you.

Also, if there is anything you would like to ask, then do feel free to comment below.