Affiliate Summit East 2010

Processes for Building Profitable Affiliate Websites

How to navigate from a website concept toa live and profitable business earning revenue from affiliateoffers.

Ryan WilsonSVP, Intela

Colorado – Maroon Bells (14,156’ above Sea Level)

Accept that most of our good ideas will FAIL, those failures are a normal part of the process, and by acceptance of our failures as part of the process we increase our chances for success

X Failures (87% of total):• My Financial Plus, Holiday Prize Draw, Plant it Forward, Collateral Exchange, Sex Tips, Solar

Charge Me, Trip Rabbit, Shop Craftmatic, Try Collagen, Access Legal, Injury Claims Survey, Get Accident Advice, Lasik Today, Personal Injury Advice Online, Dream Holiday, Short Sale Agent, Today's Life Insurance, Debt Management Source, Pay Day Loan Source, Corner Stone Auto Warranty, Auto Warranty Pro, Edu-Gate, The Foreclosure Insider, Unsecured Loan Source, USA Remodeling, Get Dish Now, Your Fortune Predicted, U Spin the Bottle, Immediate Needs, Mortgage Loan Site, News Trivia, Spanish Holiday

Successes (13% of total):• UK Prizes• Aussie Prizes• Canadian Prizes• Je Joue Je Gagne• Juega Y Gana Premios

Mitigate Risk to Encourage Experimentation

Pre-Define Success Metrics

Iterate Through Ideas

Accelerate Failure

Pre-Define Success MetricsDefine why are you are building the website

• To build a marketing list• To generate a revenue

stream• To stabilize media buys

when ad spends change frequently across advertisers

• To provide value to and/or cross-sell an existing marketing base

• To build a unique offering for a publisher base

Competitive Analysis for your Verticals

• Understand exactly what you will have to pay for traffic • Target ECPM’s by traffic type (Search,

Email, Display, Social, etc.)• Understand exactly what you will have

to earn on the backend of your site in order to afford that traffic and necessary margin• Revenue Per User (RPU)• Landing Page Conversion Rates off

Clicks• Post Pixel Fire Conversion Rates off

Impressions

Iterate Through Ideas

Implement a prototype of the best idea as Quickly, Simply, and Cheaply as possible (emphasize

speed over perfection)

Test the site with live traffic and discretely track the earned revenue

back to your traffic sources.

Compare the actual metrics against your pre-defined success

metrics to determine the next course of action

Only after the site has shown potential to meet your metrics

should you implement enhancements

Brainstorm ideas

Accelerate Failure

Goal: Increase your ratio of successes over failures by learning from past mistakes and becoming more efficient at quickly recognizing failure

Recognize failure quickly, but don’t

condemn it

Learn from mistakes

Communicate those lessons

learned to entire team

Challenge:1. Come up with an idea for a website in a vertical that you have

experience with

2. Define what metrics that website would need to hit in order to be viable for you

3. Build a one page version of that website with advertisements to monetize the traffic

4. Set a small budget and buy one type of traffic to your site

5. Track and analyze your spend against your advertising revenue

6. Determine if you should revise the site and try again or cut your losses and try a new idea

Poll: Q&A for Processes for Building Profit...