Stop Your Campaigns From Failing - Make Sure your Campaign is not a Fishing Trip.

Actually ensuring that your Affiliate campaigns are successful is a lot easier than most people think. The first thing to be aware of is that in certain circumstances what you think of as a marketing campaign is actually a fishing trip.

Let me explain. you have just purchased an e-book, for example Squidoo Queen 2008, you know it is the best on the market, you realise straight away that there is great potential for making money on Squidoo. You cannot wait to get started, and best of all its free and you can give half of your income to charity.

In fact it is so easy, you want to get started immediately. You open Google and type in "affiliate"and you immediately see the prospective sales, in fact there are 22,600,905 results for affiliate so it must be good. So you search around for an hour and you find a product which offers 70 percent on every sale.

Now that is marvellous, you can get seventy percent of every sale you persuade someone to make. However you cannot make the Internet your own personal cash point that way! So off you go to Squidoo and have a look at some of the other lens in that category. Making all that content is hard work right, it is much easier just to add a few modules. In ten minutes you can have someone buying something from ebay or Amazon and you get the commission.

What you have done is directed the traffic away from your lens and delivered it firmly on someone else site. It is possible that you may hit on the one deranged, drunken half wit which will buy a book immediately from your Amazon link. However on the probability scale it ranks about as likely as several million pigs flying around the universe to deliver you money from the planet Zog!

The second mistake you have made is to build a lens with no research go back and read the Squidoo Queen again, it contains pertinent advice, but living in cloud cuckoo land was not one of the excellent points listed. You have thought of a "keyword", and that is good because you brain has more power to think of keywords than any software that generates keywords. So now all you have to do is sit back and watch the revenue come in.

WRONG. A week later you check your page and three people have looked at it, so you think the method can't work and go off and buy another e book to change your life!

WHAT DID I DO WRONG?

THAT IS THE QUESTION YOU SHOULD BE ASKING YOURSELF.

Lens do not promote themselves, their is a lot of competition in a free market such as Squidoo.

Did these Internet marketers start with any research? No.

Did they do the keyword research? No.

Did they create some quality unique content for the lens? No.

Did they wake Google up by sending traffic to the lens with some good articles?

No. Why? Because they were simply testing the water! They were on a fishing trip, they ran the flag up the flag pole and see if anyone saluted it! A good Internet marketer gives their customers' what they REALLY REALLY WANT, while an indifferent internet market gives the customer what he thinks they really want.

You as the Internet marketer can be taught how to research keywords, find a hungry market

then and only then find the product that that market wants. Keyword research to get a good starting point should take you six weeks minimum. Once you have found the niche then is the time to create a quality lens and write the articles. A free resource to track keywords is wordtracker. A simple one word entry acne will present you with a hundred keywords if research is new to you.

I know that you wont always hit gold with the niche that you are working with, but if it's worth doing it is worth doing well. Failing to plan is a sure fire plan doomed to fail! learn to manage your time to give you an extra hour or two a week to promote your lens in forums, on blogs and submit your articles to directories, promote your work and make it more visible.

If it isn't working find out why ... Learn from it and work with it. Test your campaigns and see where there is room for improvements. Is your article getting clicks? Change the author bio, change a module. Whatever you do not give up. With a little time and effort you can make the Internet your personal cash machine.