Here’s something I posted recently to the spectacular AffiliIt Affiliate Marketing community. It got a lot of positive feedback and I just wanted to pass it along because it took me so long to get my own thinking to this point… hopefully it can save a few new affiliate marketers some pain.

First, here is the process a lot of new affiliates go through when they’re picking something to promote:

1. Look at your network’s offer list and pick something that seems like it’d work well on a traffic source somewhere.

Now, here is how a pro does it:

1. Pick a vertical that you have the most experience/interest with.
2. Contact your most trustworthy AM on your favorite network and find out two things: A) what are the hot/breakout/high EPC/high conversion rate offers on his network within that vertical; B) which traffic sources the volume for these offers is coming from.
3. If the AM will not give you that info, find a new one, and/or contact some of the most promising advertisers directly for it. Advertisers LOVE to give you this sort of info along with lots of campaign tips.
4. Go check out the ads running on the traffic source, to verify that people are really running this vertical on it. Make a scrapbook of the best ads you see for offers in your vertical. Microsoft OneNote works great for this, Microsoft Word works just fine too…
5. Now it’s time to build your campaign on either the recommended traffic source, or a similar one. Start by creating ads similar to the best ads you’ve seen for similar products. The best ads are usually the ones getting the most premium inventory (e.g. on PoF, the first ones that show up when you log in).

Do I take my own advice every single time? No But it’s saved me hours of time and thousands of dollars in testing when I have.