Live Campaign Teardowns on Affiliate Campaigns: Secrets to Becoming More Profitable

Have you ever wondered what went wrong with your past affiliate campaigns? Were you bidding too high, or were you optimising in the wrong order? Or was there a blatantly obvious mistake you made, but you couldn’t see?

STM Thought Leaders Charles Ngo and Benjamin Yong team up to analyse past campaigns. Hear their insights on how to improve real-world affiliate campaigns through angles, landing pages, optimisation, and more.

Speech by Benjamin Yong (STM Thought Leader) and Charles Ngo (Affiliate Expert & CEO, AFFcelerator)

Benjamin Yong and Charles Ngo Speech Transcript

Hello, hello!

Wow, it’s bright. Alright, welcome everyone.

Thank you for coming. Thank you for being here. Thanks to AWA for inviting us to speak again.

So today’s campaign, excuse me, today’s speech is about secrets to making your affiliate campaigns more profitable.

So everyone here, hopefully by now, you are running campaigns and everyone wants to get more profitable because the more profitable you are, the higher you can raise your bids.

And as we know, affiliate marketing is becoming more and more competitive.

So the more profitable your campaigns can be, then you have a big nice big advantage.

So there are a lot of different ways to get your affiliate campaigns profitable.

Okay so, Ben tell them what we’re gonna cover today.

Spy Tools

Right, so first of all, what you guys can do obviously it’s buying because as the saying goes, “Good artists copy and great artist steals”

But I’m not asking you guys to steal. Spying can give you guys a lot a lot of inspiration.

Sometimes you are lost, you have no idea. Let’s say, what campaign or what angle should I be promoting? How should I use it?

Then you can go to the spy tool and then just browse around what people are promoting so that you can get a better idea on what is making money out there.

So today, we also collected a few campaigns. Specifically, 3 affiliate campaigns and we are going to break them down and tell you guys the step-by-step.

What are the things that we are going to do to improve the campaigns and how can we improve the conversion rate.

Spying On Affiliate Campaigns

Yeah, so to hop on what he said, is everyone — you know, you should be spying on affiliate campaigns because that’s competitive research. That’s not an affiliate marketing thing.

Pepsi spies on Coke. Samsung spies on Apple.

But what we notice is a lot of people think they can spy and then they can copy and paste the campaign and make $10,000 a day or something.

So what we did was, we collected a few affiliate campaigns in the wild and we’re just gonna go through and kind of tell you guys how they can improve.

Just one quick note is some of these affiliate campaigns, we just grabbed them from the spy tools. We don’t know who the owners are.

Some of them will probably make fun of them, so no offence if we actually grabbed your landing page.

So one request is, we were only requested to comment on white hat branded affiliate campaigns.

Some of you guys that want to know about neutra and sweepstakes, all that stuff, we got to respect anyway and we can’t get too dirty, you know what I’m talking about?

I know these landers are very familiar to you guys, but no, no such thing today.

And anything we say is our opinion, not of AWA. So let’s get started guys.

Make Your Campaign More Profitable

So you want to get your campaign more profitable? There are hundreds of ways to do that.

Here are a few examples. So those are some examples.

Number one is angles. They’re how you approach a campaign on a creative level.

Number two, ads. You actually have to have the headlines, the banners. The higher your CTR, the cheaper the CPC, right?

The third is landing pages. Landing pages, I think of them as salesmen that work for you 24/7. And they’re actually better than salesman because landing pages don’t get drunk, they’re always working.

Number four, you can cut site placements. You can cut different site placements to get them more optimised.

Number five, there’s different day parting, week parting. For those guys that don’t know, that is running affiliate campaigns only during certain times of the day.

Number six is scripts. So on landing pages, there’s a lot of different coding, a lot of different scripts that can increase conversion rates. For those you guys are doing like e-commerce or Shopify, there’s a lot of different apps out there that can improve your conversion rates.

Yeah and also the next thing is obviously if you are able to run a better offer like you send the same traffic to the different offers, split test it, do not be afraid of split testing.

Apparently, if the EPC is high enough, the offer is going to convert better and you are going to make more money from it.

Bidding

The next thing is bidding.

Bidding, if you talk about Facebook, we all know that like, raise your hand if you are using Facebook automatic bidding? Wow, okay.

So how about the rest? Manual bidding? No?

You guys gotta switch over to the pixel, right away.

No one is bidding? No?

Okay, yeah so by just playing around with the bidding, you can actually see like the difference on the traffic that you are getting and also the result.

So again, as the saying goes, you should always be testing, right.

The next thing is back-end monetisation. This is particularly true for lead gen offers. Especially the one in the US, they always have a lot of things to tweak at the back-end.

So sometimes these advertisers, they will require you to work with them. They will say, “Hey, why not send us 100 leads first and then we are going to tweak it.”

So that after a while, maybe initially you are going to suffer a lower EPC but eventually, if they’re able to tweak it, tweak the back-end for you to match the traffic, then you are going to see a higher EPC eventually.

And the next thing is very interesting.

Redirection Based On The Rules

It’s redirection based on the rules. I’m pretty sure a lot of you guys are very familiar with this thing. It’s not strange. Just basically the same.

Let’s say you are doing a media buying, let’s say it’s on a very big website, okay. And you have no rights or no control on what kind of traffic you are getting, be it iOS, Android carrier or whatever.

You can use all these rules to redirect traffic to the specific offer so that you can get a better EPC.

And the next thing, of course, is a faster funnel load speed.

So it’s not only your landing page. You gotta make sure that they ask you can load fast. Your landing page, you’ve got to optimise that. The images, you gotta cut down on the sizes.

And of course, on the final offer, you gotta make sure that it loads fast as well, like the overall funnel and etc.

Boost The Affiliate Campaign Profits

So basically there’s a lot of ways to boost the campaign profits.

My point is if you guys launch a campaign, it’s not making money, stop crying, stop complaining about the traffic source. You actually have to go through the optimisation process.

So the way I teach people, the way I think of it is, when I launch a campaign, I’m pretty much expecting it to lose money. And I go through a period where I consider it as collecting data.

You’re collecting data and you’re like a scientist. You have this data, you create a hypothesis, then you do the split test.

So we’re showing you guys there’s a lot of different ways to boost profitability.

Unfortunately, we only have 35 minutes left in this presentation, so we can’t cover like deep into everyone.

We’re gonna focus on number 1, 2, and 3. Mainly the angles, ads and the landing pages because we pulled a few affiliate campaigns from spy tools and stuff. We don’t know how they do their bidding. We don’t know how they cut their placements and stuff.

But with ads, angles, and landing pages, I mean, they’re super important.

And these are all the things that we can see from the spy tool, most importantly. And we can present it to you on the stage.

Trackr

So the first campaign we found is something called Trackr.

Trackr, a device that helps you find your lost belongings.

So the very first step, whenever we look at a campaign, you want to know what the offer is, as much as possible. For instance, Ben, if you’re promoting a mobile app, what’s the first thing you do?

Mobile app? Of course, I gotta look at the offer first right. I’ve got the first download it and then see what it does, so that I can come up with an angle and everything.

So when I promoted a Candy Crush, I actually downloaded Candy Crush and played with it. I’m not sure that was for affiliate marketing. That was for fun.

So with this campaign, we found in spy tools and — Okay, so laser pointer is not working.

Research The Offer

Okay, so we saw this campaign, we found it very interesting because it looks like the advertiser is promoting this. And we did see a few affiliates promote this.

And the first thing we noticed is the angles are just absolutely horrible.

It’s very generic.

It talks about cars, talks about a player, talks about baby.

Yep, so step number one, always research the offer. So we didn’t really know exactly what it was. We saw it as this tiny device you can put on different things, in case you lose them.

An example is if you put this on your keys.

So if you don’t know where your keys are, you can pull your phone out and then you can locate your keys. So we thought, okay this is pretty cool.

And we went to the website to get a better understanding of what it is. And if you don’t know what I offer is, you can always go to YouTube or something.

Improve Angles Of The Affiliate Campaign

Alright, so let’s focus on angles. So we want to improve the angles of this campaign.

And when it comes to angles, I know a lot of people are kind of scared of angles right?

Yeah, it’s like, hey what angle should I be using? Is this the best angle? What is the angle that’s gonna make me the most money?

And with angles, guys, with angles and ads you don’t have to be too creative, that’s the misunderstanding.

People think okay, you have to be super, super creative when you really don’t.

So we’re gonna teach you guys kind of like a framework and we’ll go through and brainstorm some angles for you guys.

Biggest Issue With Angles

So the biggest issue with the angles right now, is they were only using one angle right?

Like, find your missing car. So let’s develop some new angles.

The biggest value proposition is hoping that the user recovers a valuable lost item. So the most obvious thing is, think of other stuff that people would hate losing right?

It’s very simple.

So step number one, you want to set aside ten minutes of your time. Do some research, and write down every single valuable information that you can think of.

And then once you have the idea, the next step is you pull out Google, apparently.

And then go and research on the competitor products and what are some of the ideas, or some of the angles that they could be using to promote the products.

So when it comes to angles just set a timer, brainstorm. If you have media buyers, you have team members, then sit down and do it together.

So I find a lot of people don’t even do that simple step.

And when you’re brainstorm there’s no such thing as a crap angle. You just write down everything possible. That’s how the brain works.

Brainstorm As Many Angles As Possible

Then after I do this, I like to research websites through Quora, Reddit. I’m just trying to find as much stuff as possible.

So when we started brainstorming angles, we typed in, I was typing in like, what are the most common things that people forget on Google, okay.

Everyone’s always trying to find some fancy tools, just use websites.

Here are some of the angles we found.

Yeah and these are some of the things that people tend to lose all the time or they always forget to bring along.

So they have keys, phones, wallet, your pet, your purse, luggage, your kids, sometimes, and backpack.

Alright, so the next question I’m going to ask is, “Which one of these that you think, it makes sense for you to invest money in so that you won’t lose it?”

Yep, so basically at this stage just brainstorm as many angles as possible.

The next stage is okay, which angles do I actually test?

You can’t test everything. Why? It takes a lot of time and some of you may have a smaller budget.

Which Angles Will to Pick

So my suggestion is just to pick 3.

Which ones do you pick?

Number one, you got to pick which ones have the biggest pain point.

So I saw in Neil’s presentation and Hugh asked him about which emotion sells the most and he said fear.

Me, I like pain. A lot. Because pain, people don’t buy when they’re happy. They buy when they’re in pain.

So something I like to do with my angles is, if someone’s happy, I like to make them sad.

I like to bring out a pain point.

So we’ll show you some examples in the future. So one is, what are the biggest pain points?

Number two, what has a bigger audience? Because we could do something like purse vs. keys? I would do keys over a purse.

Why? Because a lot of men don’t have purses, except maybe in Thailand.

Number 3 is, which ones can you find some high CTR images for?

Remember, the goal, especially if you’re on native ads, you’re on Facebook ads, you need a high CTR. So for the angles, I’m always looking for what kind of angles can we have really high images or high CTR for.

So, Ben?

Three Angles To Suit The Product

Alright, so these are the 3 angles that we think is going to suit this product.

Number one, pet.

So who has a cat and dog? Wow, okay.

Would you be sad if you were to lose them? Yeah, right.

And your child? Who will lose a child? But it happens, trust me, it happens.

But is it’s just not common right? But it’s still one of the pain points because you see like I am a father of two right now, and I can relate to this a lot.

Whereas Charles, he actually disagrees on this point, but I convinced him.

I’ll think of how many kids I know of.

And the last one, the keys. So in other words, you’re gonna set 3 angles to test.

And of course, if you have a bigger budget, feel free to test even more.

You just gotta take note that you gotta spend more money on testing the angles. Yeah but this is our framework, like 3 angles to test first.

Bigger Budget. More Angles You Can Test

Yeah and once again, the bigger the budget, the more angles you can test.

For example, you know we have a pretty big budget. I’ll probably launch off like 5 to 7, if we have the manpower.

I think the bigger the budget, the more variables you can test. It’s kind of like fishing. If you have a small budget, then you’re kind of like catching fish with a net.

The bigger the budget, the more variables you can test. It’s kind of like I have a net with a speedboat.

It just increases the probability right.

So those are 3 of the example angles and then here are some other tips.

Angles Is Not The Ads

Number one, guys, the angle is not the ads, okay newbies? Angles is not the ads.

Angle is how you approach that campaign on a creative level. This means the ads, the landing page, the offer page, everything should kind of match.

So, what if you’re promoting an angle, an ad that says like, “Hey you lost your pet?”

And on your landing page, you talk about how you lost your car? It doesn’t match.

So, the second one is, remember to test the funnel profit and not just ad click-through rate. So here’s a huge mistake I see a lot of newbies make, they just, they’re split testing ads and they see one ad with a high CTR or low CPC.

They think that’s the best ad. When they don’t test for the profitability.

Why? Because I could just put some clickbait ad that has a high CTR, low CPC, but it’s not actually gonna make any money for my profit, for my funnel right.

So make sure you test those. So those are 2 big mistakes I see a lot of people make.

And once you have identified the best angle, then it is time for you to split test, to zoom in this particular angle, and look for the images.

What are the images that can best describe this angle?

And when comes to angles, Charles and I, we love to always stick to the angles that can relate to the pain, emotion, emotional. And you’ve got to find a few images for that.

So here’s an example, when I ever see some affiliates and some advertisers, their images are kind of kind of soft. They’re kind of like baby soft. It’s like you see something like that, it’s just very plain, very vanilla.

Weird And Emotions

So something we like to do, we’re all about two things, weird and emotions. I’m all about weird and emotions.

So right here, I just created that in like one minute.

Emotions, you have a woman who’s crying. And then we have a picture of a dog. Not just any dog. Remember I’m trying to make people sad, I’m trying to make them painful.

So what I’m doing is, I have a dog that’s like freezing death. Because I want this woman, I want you to think of your dog, think of him freezing to death, that you lost your dog.

So if you had this device though, you’re more likely to buy right?

So remember, always hit the emotions.

Ben? Yeah and that was an example for the pet. And the next one, we’re gonna talk about the kids.

And of course, I’m going to talk about it right.

So this is something that I thought of because you see, raise your hand if you have seen parents, they’ve bought their children a backpack with a leash.

And then when it’s in the shopping mall, they would just walk like that.

Have you seen that? No? Or is it not popular in the United States or in Europe?

Yeah, so the thing itself is actually, it is a big debate by itself because some people define it is good, it is fine because I do not care what people are gonna think about me.

Whereas some people think that, “Hey you know you’re actually treating your kids like a dog, like a pet, that’s so bad. You are humiliating your kids.”

Power In Emotion

This is a perfect example of a bad image. I mean, I hope the advertiser is not here.

Yeah but you see this ad itself, it just showed the device. And it tried to talk about a key, even a pet, or children, whatever.

But you see it doesn’t really trigger anything. What does this image got to do with what I’m going to promote?

There’s no emotion. Every single ad has to do some kind of emotion. So let’s make people cry. Come on.

Yeah and then this is what we came up with.

You see and the headline is like, never leash your kids like a pet anymore, or like your dog anymore.

Or you can spit test at the headline of course.

But you see, let’s say if you’re a parent, okay, and you have bought the backpack and this is some problem that you’re going to face right.

And you are actually in a debate also. Should I? Or should I not?

But hey, one fine day you’re gonna see this ad on Facebook. And go like, “Hey, it hits my pain point.”

Why? My neighbor’s they are criticizing me on this.

So like this is an example. And trust me, if you try to do this on Facebook, expect to see a higher CTR on this because emotion is there.

So I hope you guys understand the power in emotion.

Weird Or Curiosity Images

There’s also a second part, like the weird, what I like to call weird or curiosity images.

Let’s show some examples.

So top left is exactly what you think it is, so top right, okay. What if you get your phone stolen?

Bottom left is okay, you lose your keys. Where are your keys? They’re inside the dog.

So something like this is funny, it gets attention.

Here’s what you got to understand about images. The average person sees like 1,000 / 2,000 images a day.

So you have the kind of image that doesn’t even get attention, look your offer, your landing pages don’t matter if no one clicks on your ad, right.

So your ad has to get attention.

And on the bottom right, the original campaign was talking about “Hey, did you forget where your car was?”

So what we like to do is, we like to go kind of like the clickbait, the viral, the stuff that gets attention.

Another little trick we do is, I like to draw arrows and circles. So why do I like to do that, Ben?

Arrows And Circles

Yeah, it’s actually like it makes you focus on that particular part. What is this image trying to tell, it’s curious.

An arrow and a circle. It is kind of like a proven trick to improve those CTR.

One way to find all these little Photoshop tricks is, I like to go to websites. Those kinds of viral websites, like Vironova, Distractify because you’re gonna find all these images, that’s their business.

So you’re gonna see all these like Photoshop techniques and stuff.

So we like to go there and just take some Photoshop techniques from there, but to be honest, it’s not very 80/20. I just like to focus my time on good headlines, good angles, good images.

You could add borders, all this stuff but it’s not 80/20 because you have to think about time.

So you guys are starting to get an idea of how you can improve a campaign like this.

Landing Page Has To Match The Angles

So one more point is, remember what I said? The landing page has to match the angle.

It has to always be a smooth transition from your ads, to your landing page, to your offer.

In this case, let’s say if you are promoting a pet angle on your ads and then your landing page, it should talk about pets as well.

But this is what I do not see a lot of people like throughout the spying, I see a lot of people are making mistakes.

They just use a very generic landing page and then even when you send the traffic from the pet traffic to the final offer page, it just shows you the tracker with the car.

I mean, I see this all the time. I’ll see someone talk about here’s this ad, this miracle fruit that’s gonna help you lose weight. You go to a landing page it’s like, “Hey where’s this miracle fruit? I don’t see anything talking about a fruit.”

There’s a disconnect.

Efficient Testing

Here’s one thing though, let’s talk about efficient testing.

Efficient testing, because let’s say you want to test out 5 angles. Does that mean you have to rewrite 5 different landing pages?

In a perfect world, yes. However, we have to test efficiently.

We have to be very 80/20. So one way to do this is perhaps just changed on the landing page for each angle.

Just change the headline and change the first paragraph.

First headline, first paragraph, it only takes like a few minutes.

However, this is much better because once you find the best angle, then you can rewrite the entire landing page copy.

So that’s what I’m talking about, 80/20 because we all have limited time. We just can’t do everything perfectly. So that’s why I call it efficient testing.

For instance, here’s the landing page we saw. And with this landing page, you got to make sure, whatever angle you choose to pick, you make your landing page relevant to it. 22.22

Okay, so with this campaign we covered mainly the angles.

How To Improve Your Landing Page

Another part that’s very important is the landing pages. So I want to show you guys the framework I use for improving a landing page.

Ben? Yeah, so this is more like a framework for your reference that what are other things that you can do to your landing page.

First of all is the landing page style. Trust me. The style itself, it matters a lot. We are not coming in to get some examples here, for some reason.

Secondly, it’s a value proposition. The lead urgency, like how urgent is it? You want to make people to make the decision right now. Like, “Hey one hour left before our sales is going to close.”

You see this all the time.

Social proof, believability, the trust, and lastly, the clarity.

And something really cool for affiliate kind of landing pages is on the left side, I kind of put download speed.

So obviously, the faster the website loads, the more money you make. There’s been non-stop proof of this.

Especially if you’re doing mobile. Every second you can shave is money in your pocket and the right side scripts.

So we’re not gonna go too deep in the scripts but when it comes to scripts, it’s a huge competitive advantage. So definitely look into those.

So we’re just gonna go through real quick and just give a quick example for each one.

Value Proposition

Value proposition shows how your offer adds value to the user. Have to be very clear with it, you. Have to be very clear with it.

Like the urgency is getting people like I said just now, you want to put in the urgency. See, for example, this is the urgency that you can see on a normal e-commerce store.

“Hurry only one left.”

Something that I believe you guys can see that when you come to Bangkok and when you try to book your hotel online, you always see that “Hey, you know the current hotel, the room that you are viewing right now has only one room left.” You see that all the time.

So this is how they implement urgency.

Agoda.com always does that shit to me.

Alright, social proof. So everyone should know what social proof is but if everyone is doing something, then people want it more.

For example, whenever I look for a restaurant, I refuse to eat at a restaurant unless it has good reviews on TripAdvisor, right. Or Yelp or any website.

You always want to look for proof that other people have done it and they like it.

So here’s a quick example. Different ways of social proof include testimonials, as seen on TV, social page likes. Next thing is the believability.

Landing Page Click-through Rate

You can tell this by looking at your landing page click-through rate. A lower LP CTR, Landing Page Click-through Rate, it actually implies that your landing page does not carry the trust, the believability that people expect to see.

And if you fail to do this, then it’s very unlikely your campaign is going to convert.

So one thing I want to point out with believability this is ultra, ultra, ultra important when it comes to affiliate pages.

So how many of you guys have seen those pages, “Hey you want an iPhone? How old are you? Are you a male or female? How many times do you visit Facebook a week?” And all of a sudden you win an iPhone.

It just doesn’t make sense. I mean, I know the average person is stupid but they’re not like retarded, okay.

So you guys have to make it believable. That’s why you have to put the right angle.

You have to write what’s the story. What’s the story, why are you giving out iPhone 7? It has to make sense. It has to be believable right.

Then there are all these little other things you can put in, like the social seals. So right now we have to trust factors.

Always think, whenever I go to a landing page, I like to just pretend that I’m not me, that on the target visitor.

So if I’m promoting, let’s say skin cream, I’m gonna pretend I’m like a 50-year-old woman. I’m just gonna meditate.

I’m going to pretend I’m 50-year-old woman and just go through it. “Does this make sense? Is this real?”

KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid

So clarity is very simple. Keep it simple. KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

It means, just keep everything super simple. Whenever you write landing page copy, write it on a 12-year-old reading level.

People take that for granted. You don’t realise if you’re doing a lot of international traffic, you can’t use big words.

Gotta use small words. Keep it very clear.

And the scripts, yeah. In the next 2 examples, you guys are gonna see that a lot of the things that we have discussed and how we are going to implement them into the campaign, and the script is one of them.

Yeah, here’s a simple example. It’s just like, someone’s exiting, just collect their email right? Very simple example.

Another example is, Exit pop? Exit pop.

And another example, if I create a unique landing page and some dude wants to steal it then I steal his traffic back. That’s another one. There’s a lot of scripts out there.

Landing page load speed, so we explained this already.

Okay, so now you guys have a better idea of the landing page framework. Let’s go to another campaign.

Swoggi: Penny Auction Site

So this is called Swoggi. And with Swoggi, this is like a penny auction site.

So penny auctions, you know a lot of affiliates blew it up like 5, 6 years ago but it’s still going strong.

We want to look at the landing page and give some suggestions on how to improve their landing page. You guys can see the landing page? Yes, PowerPoint can do this.

Okay, so one thing is when it comes to penny auctions, I remember the first time I ever promoted it. I had no idea what penny auctions were.

It’s like how the heck does someone get an iPad for $1? It makes absolutely no sense. It sounds like a scam.

So one thing you can do is we saw one section. Oh, that was a really weak pointer.

Okay, so there was one section that’s talking about like what products are available on Swoggi. Remember, clarity. You want to make everything super simple.

So instead of saying like “blah blah blah”, how about you insert in some photos to kind of clarify?

Okay, so make everything super clear. We like using a lot of images.

And another example is, I see there’s a code. They’re trying to do some scarcity, some urgency. “Offer will expire soon. Hurry up, click here.”

I mean, which is fine but let’s make it even more clear.

Out of stock timer.

So a lot of these things just seemed like common sense.

Optimisation And Profitability

But if you actually implement it, the way I like to think of optimization is, I implement one thing, improves my ROI by 3%, another script improves it by 5%, another thing improves it by 10%, next thing you know now you’re finally profitable right.

A lot of optimisation and profitability are the small things added up over time.

So you have a 1,000 hour day campaign, you improve by 5%, that’s 50 bucks a day, 30 days 1,500 bucks. That’s like, 10 houses in Chiang Mai.

When you are preparing all these things, you always want to answer the top 3 objections of the people, of the visitors.

So whenever someone wants to buy something from you, there are always reasons why they don’t buy. So you have to confront them. Do not avoid them.

Top Three Objections Of Visitors

So whatever you write, landing page copy, sales copy, think what are the top 3 objections.

So with this, we realised, number one, is this a scam? I mean, that’s every single affiliate offer, is this a scam?

So with this, how do you stop from saying it’s a scam.

Well, there are pictures, videos, testimonials. Here’s an example.

It actually addresses you, I see you have trouble believing it, so I decided to wait for a day. I believe a lot of you guys actually use this.

I feel very hesitant but I’ve actually done it and then now it is what I get.

Yeah, so they said, “Hey I still had trouble believing it, so I decided to wait for an actual delivery of my iPad Pro. A few days later, it arrived directly to my home.”

Versus actually, pulling in a picture of the woman who got the iPad. And we found a picture of an iPad box and we zoomed in, so that came from Swoggi.

So which one’s better? Very simple right. Make it very clear.

Here’s something else you can do to make something improve the social proof, in a long-form sales letter, advertorials, and live videos.

So with this video, we found a video on penny auctions that talked about what penny auctions were in the news. Talked about how legit they were.

And here’s a trick. It’s kind of dirty but I don’t think they’ll mind.

Tip: Edit The Videos

So a trick is you can always edit the videos yourself. For example, we found this video, it wasn’t for Swoggi, it was for their competitor.

So all we did was we edited out wherever it said their competitor. We cut and spliced it and you can actually find 5 different videos cut and spliced to make it more believable right.

But news sites are absolutely amazing because there’s a third party saying, “Hey this is legit, this is awesome.”

So another one is penny auctions. People don’t know how they work right.

People are not gonna buy something they don’t have any idea what it is. You can just explain it.

But once again, I always like video. Somehow, record some kind of video. Don’t use your own voice. People know what my voice sounds like, so hire someone on Fiverr to actually go through and explain and break it down.

The more they understand it, the more they’re likely to buy.

Third is, can you actually win? So one thing you can do is, okay testimonials, comments section, people have actually got this, but then you can actually show statistics. Like 50% of people actually won something.

So what we like to do is, and you know, more testimonials, the better.

If you guys don’t have any testimonials, one thing you can do is you can talk to the advertiser.

Talk to the advertiser, “Hey do you have any testimonials?” Most of the time they do.

So just use those testimonials in your landing pages and it just makes it a little bit more legitimate.

We did campaign number 2. And one big trend we’re noticing this year, 2016 to 2017 is Shopify e-commerce.

So we’re gonna go through and improve a page.

E-commerce

So Ben, can you explain what Shopify e-commerce is?

Alright, yeah but before I begin, can I see a raise of hand who is doing Shopify right now? In general e-commerce store.

Yeah, and I know that this is like a new trend for a lot of affiliates because apparently a lot of offers are going downhill.

So, of course, we are gonna apply all our conversion hacks on to the Shopify stores. And I’m going to show the examples of it.

So before, we talked about that, e-commerce is like you just put your products on the store and then people come to your page.

You tell them that they select the quantity, they place, the order, boom that’s it. You make the sale.

It sounds easy. But one thing you have to know, you see, I believe this is what everyone is doing right now like you have an ad on Facebook and you link it straight to your product page.

In other words, the product page itself is your landing page.

And it is your landing page because you see, these are the people that are unable to physically feel, touch the product.

And you do not expect them to buy by just having a simple, lousy landing page.

So you want to provide as much information as possible off the lander.

Why? You want people to have more confidence in the product itself.

Shopify E-commerce

So a quick 60-second explanation of what Shopify e-commerce, an affiliate trend is, it’s really simple.

You get a cheap product on Facebook, no you get a cheap product for my AliExpress from China that’s like $1 to $3. Then you offer it for free on Facebook.

So you’re wondering, wait a minute if this cost you $3, how do you make money?

Well, you charge like $12 for shipping. So you say it’s free, just gotta pay shipping.

And when they go on, not only do they buy multiple versions of your products but they also, you can do upsells, you can do downsells. They can buy other items.

So what happens is they came in thinking it’s a free product but they could end up spending like 50 bucks.

Alright, so now you guys have a better idea. Let’s kind of go through a bad landing page. So we just pulled this from Facebook, if it’s yours, it sucks.

That’s why you guys should be thankful that we’re improving it.

So something like this, the way it works is, you get a Shopify store, you offer something for free. It cost like $1 to $3 on AliExpress but with this page, we noticed it was really bad.

And one thing we noticed with a lot of affiliates doing this is, I would say like 80% of affiliates, for some reason, have a really shit landing page.

I don’t know why but they do. It’s like when they switch over to Shopify, they forget everything about affiliate marketing. So let’s improve this page.

Ooh, fancy. See it’s just plain, nothing. It’s very basic, very vanilla.

How To Improve Overall Conversion

By the way, right now, there are a lot of ways you can improve the overall conversion on your store.

But we will want to focus just on the page, what you expect to do and what you expect to put on your page. So that you can increase the conversion.

Number one is live chat. So Ben, tell them about live chat.

So live chat is actually a very powerful feature. Place it there because you see, you want people to buy it but people are going to have so many concerns.

If we were to go back to our previous slides which as you talked about, you gotta address the concern of the people.

If they are unsure when are they gonna get a product, how big is the size, and what are the color variations, is it in stock or what?

You want someone who is able to answer people’s questions before they hand you their money.

So if you have not installed any live chat apps, make sure you do so.

Two things to keep in mind. Number one, you’re not the one answering it. Don’t be a retard and just sit there all day, answering it. Outsource. Get someone from the Philippines for like 5 bucks an hour.

Number two is to make sure you have the right systems. So what that means is if you’re running traffic 24/7 and people are seeing a live chat, then there should be the systems, the right number of people in a manner right.

So here’s an example, if someone has a question, then they can answer it.

Frequently Asked Question Page

So number two is a frequently asked question page. So this is very good, we’ve tested this.

There’s actually improving conversion rates because whenever people buy from you, they have a lot of questions.

So instead of them either emailing you or them just leaving because they don’t get an answer to their question, just put a frequently asked question section in there.

So I was like its basic systems. You spend an hour doing this and it works for you 24/7 any time you run traffic.

The best way to build a frequently asked questions is to collect all the questions you get, answer them put in there. It’s not rocket science.

Number three, guarantee. It never ever hurts for you to put up some guarantee badges on your website to tell people that you’re offering this “30 days money back guarantee”

Because anyway, they are going to get their products within 30 days right.

Yeah and you know some of the security shopping, these badges are going to help you improve the trust level people have on your website.

So number four, social proof. Social proof is pretty simple, just testimonials and all that stuff. And I think the best way to approach e-commerce and all this stuff is apps.

There are so many different apps out there to kind of show social proof.

Lifestyle Shots As Testimonials

And the next one, lifestyle shots because people because you see they are not able to see or feel the product by themselves. They will want to know, “How is this particular product is going to be seen if it was to be worn or when it’s being used by someone else.”

So always good to include some lifestyle shots. It also serves as a purpose of testimonials.

It can help improve the trust of the people actually getting this product, and they look really, really great with these products on them.

Something else we really recommend, I just absolutely love video these days. So if you have a product, why not just find a video in that demonstrates that.

You can go on YouTube. There are videos for everything, or secondly just order the damn thing yourself. Play with it, make a video of it, right. It’s not too hard.

So maybe something like a diet pill. I’m not gonna like test it out myself. But something like a little yoga block, you can make a video showing the details with it.

Remove Unnecessary Things On Your Page

Number six, you’re gonna remove all the unnecessary things on your page.

For example, damn big Facebook share button, Twitter button. Because you want people to spend most of their attention on the site.

You do not want to have too many navigations on the site. So the people, they can click around and then eventually they’re going to forget.

You know, people always tend to forget things like, “Oh what do I want to buy.”

And then they saw something else. They would go to something else.

So just remove all the unnecessary stuff and make it simple as possible for people to buy.

This falls under the landing page framework clarity. So with the fonts, make them big, make them easy to read.

Everything has to support the sale. So does that stuff support the sale? Yeah, it does kinda but not compared to just getting rid of it.

And remember, everything we say, don’t take it as gospel. Test it yourself but all things, everything we say came from testing.

Number seven, exit pop. So you know like when people don’t want to exit a website, do stop them and then give them a discount before they leave.

Of course, I know there are a lot of affiliates who have done this, not me but you do not want to put an exit pop up that says, “If you do not buy, your PC or your mobile phone it’s going to explode.”

No, don’t do that okay.

Yeah, so this is an example of the exit pop that you could use. Also give people a discount in exchange for their email.

Boost Your Average Order Value

Also I didn’t put this in the slides but upsells and downsells are super, super important. It’s like free money.

Basically, someone adds something to the cart or you add yoga block. They add yoga block to the cart, well, “Hey, do you want to buy yoga pants?” Cross-sell, downsell, you should always be selling.

For instance, after they buy the yoga block, the email receipt should be like, “Hey, we noticed you bought yoga block, you want some yoga pants?” Always be selling at every single opportunity.

When they check out, upsell. They add, upsell. They get a receipt, upsell.

Always, always upsell at every opportunity because you’re trying to boost your AOV, your average order value right.

Because if the formula is you spend 3 bucks on a product, and you spend like 2 – 3 bucks on the shipping, and then you charge $10 shipping, then after all the Shopify fees, the Facebook ads, you’re barely breaking even.

So you have to add upsells to cross-sells, downsells to increase the AOV. That’s how the math works.

Scarcity

So scarcity, yeah.

So it’s the same thing that Charles was talking about. And we have seen it on the previous example.

Just tell people that, “Hey, you know this is a hot selling product, make sure you buy it before it runs out.”

And just use apps, they make it super simple. So social proof. Here’s an example of an app.

Okay, so you see like when people are on the product page, they could be seeing this, something pops up, “Hey someone has bought this,” right.

So you actually tell them that “Hey, it’s not only you but other people are also buying from the store.” And by having this, it actually can create more trust for the user and they are more likely to buy.

Just try it, like it’s going to improve your conversion rate for sure.

Trustworthy Badges

Trustworthy badges. We like badges. So the more badges that make people just trust the store more.

Guys, you got to understand, a lot of people out there still don’t trust the internet. They don’t want to buy anything from the internet.

Like my parents are scared or depth of ordering something from the internet. They think they’re gonna get hacked and stuff.

So you have all these different signs. And they’re gonna think, “Okay this is safe, kind of.”

Alright, Ben will talk about the above the fold.

Yeah, and of course, this is some very obvious. Let’s take a look at this landing page example.

You see this is the screenshot that I captured on my Mac. And this is exactly what is above the fold.

Do you see where the problem is? So is this guy trying to sell the product or is he trying to show all the people, “Hey, my local designing skill is very good.”

Remember, you only have like one second to make an impression on people. People are freaking ADD now.

And this is a very good example of above the fold. People get to see the product immediately. They get to see what is the rating, the review.

Remember when it comes to sales copy, only 67% of people only read the headline.

So that falls into the whole above the fold thing.

What Makes a Successful Page

So how about we conclude with showing you guys an example of what we think is a really good page.

So a page like this has all the elements. And I mean, whoever’s page this is good job, we’re gonna steal it.

What do you like about it, Ben?

Wow, you see this particular site, it has most of the elements that we were talking about.

Like the trust badges. Satisfaction guarantee. A very clear product image. And by the way, when you hover your mouse over to the product, you can actually see the zooming motion of the product.

And Charles, are you able to scroll down to the side?

Yeah and as you can see, there’s this urgency, “190 sold.” And there’s a video that will show you, give people a clearer view of how the product is going to be like.

Social proof is the products, cross-sells, testimonials. It has everything.

So you guys see the difference between this store and the other store we showed?

Which one’s gonna make more money?

Life support, social proof, app. So these are all the things that when you combine them together, maybe like a little bit here, a little bit there, but overall it’s going to make you more money.

Constant Improvement

I think of Kaizen, you know Japanese term for constant improvement, improvement by little, by little, by little.

So alright, here’s where to find us. If you guys want to learn more from us at CharlesNgo.com, BenjaminYong.com, he updates his website every week.

So one more comment before we’re done with our presentation.

It’s an honor for me to share this stage with Benjamin. Normally I do the presentation myself, but this time I’m sharing with Benjamin. And you know, I consider him one of my best friends like I’m the Godfather to his son.

And 3 years ago, I didn’t even know who he was. We were able to meet through StackThatMoney.

So. it’s very interesting but these networks, StackThatMoney, all these, you start off trying to meet people to help you make more money but remember that you know life’s just not about making money.

If you guys can develop a real friendship, a real relationship, networking, then you guys can really take things to the next level like me and Ben.

I think 90% of the time we’re talking about like girls or like cars and stuff, but that’s how you really build a deep relationship with someone.

So, Benjamin, it’s an honor for me to do this with you.

Thank you. Yeah and lastly, I hope you guys enjoyed the presentation. Just go and do it. Test it, always be testing. Test it yourself and then let us know the result.

Alright, thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Q&A

Rishan:: Thanks guys, that was awesome. I learned a ton. So I think we’re gonna open up for a Q&A. We’ve got about 10, 11 minutes to do it. I had a couple of questions, so maybe we start with those.
Benjamin:: Okay, that’s cool.
Rishan:: Angle generation, that’s a big one for us too. It’s kind of something that requires human intelligence. It’s not something that’s easy to teach. You can’t just put up an ad go find somebody awesome to generate angles. How do you guys manage that, how do you outsource it? How do you train somebody to generate angles?
Benjamin:: Well, the easiest way would be like ask your guys to log in to Google trend for that particular country and look for some of the trends that you know you could have never thought off.
Rishan:: Yeah, Google Trends. Yes, I like that one too.
Charles:: Yeah okay, so when it comes to training, Rishan asked about training someone to help generate angles because the entire job should be, always to fire yourself right. So if you’re always coming with angles, then you’re kind of bottle-necking your company. So this is the way I do it. I do it in different stages.

How To Train Somebody To Generate Angles

: Number one is whenever you have an employee, you’re training them, you have to let them shadow you. So let’s say I’m working on an affiliate campaign, I’m thinking about angles. So I will actually do the angles in front of them and they can ask me questions. And I’m kind of feeding my thought process. Next is you want to invite them to be a part of the angle brainstorming process. So this means when you’re come up with angles, do it as a group. Do it as a group and kind of give some feedback. Next is there are some tools we like to use. So one tool we like to use is a Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo is $99 a month, I’ve made so much money from this tool because what you can do is you can type in a word, like let’s say diet and it’s gonna have all the viral stories. You can just take these stories, import on Facebook or native ads, then boom, it’s free money, guys. So, don’t think of angles as a very difficult thing to do, you have to be creative. Another way to come with angles. Go to your grocery store. You’re trying to diet, there’s diet magazines. They be coming with angles for like a hundred years. Why don’t just take some of those angles and put them on the internet? And one thing I want to say is you just can’t hire someone, teach them for one day and expect them be angle monsters. That’s not the way it works, it’s a process. A good employee, a good media buyer, but it can take months or even a year to train up properly but it’s totally worth it.

Mistakes Can Lead To Success

Rishan:: Yeah, I think in my experience, what’s happened a couple times is I’ll have my team come up with some angles and I won’t have the time to review it. And they’ll make a mistake. They’ll put up something that’s not related to the product or whatever and it ends up being a massive, massive, massive hit. So I think you put in all this intelligence since you’re training them to come up with angles but a lot of the big hits are.
Charles:: Well what’s great is when it comes to angles, it’s like even someone that’s not a great affiliate marketer can come up with a great angle. It’s because they have a different life perspective than you. And let’s say we’re doing something like diet or skin whatever I’m not I’m not a 50-year-old woman, so if one of your media buyers is a 50-year-old woman then maybe they got better angles than you.
Rishan:: Yeah, completely. Okay, another quick question. You talked about spying and getting inspiration from spying. How do you assess an angle that you spied is worthwhile? Cause you’re gonna spy a hundred angles. How do you know which 10 should be worth testing or you know approving?

How To Assess An Angle

Charles:: So the way I like to think of things, is one thing I learned about affiliate marketing is never assume. Some of the dumbest angles I’ve ever seen, I thought that was dumb, ends up making like a lot of money by thousand dollars a day. So my default, always test. Second is I may copy an angle, but I never copy an ad. Why? If you copy ads, there’s already banner blindness. The exception of course, is taking the ad from a proper geo and bring it to another geo that is not targeted with it. So when it comes to the angle, as far as feeling what’s a good angle, a lot of this just instinct. A lot of it comes from just studying human psychology. So my default response for you guys is just, if you see something good, just throw money at it. It only takes like 20 bucks to test an angle.
Rishan:: Especially for mobile, it’s pretty cheap to test and get a result pretty quickly.
Charles:: Pricicely.
Rishan:: Yeah okay last question from me before we ask the audience. You talked a bit about page load time, which is huge for mobile, absolutely huge. Especially, when you’re working in some third-world countries with slower internet, stuff like that. What tools do you guys use to assess the load speed of pages, and then how do you typically act on that information?

Use Tools To Assess Load Speed Of Pages

Benjamin:: Well, personally I’m using Pingdom and besides that because Pingdom is actually a very good tool. Whenever your page is down or whatever, you are going to receive an SMS to notify that, “Hey, your page is down.” And besides that, my team and I we actually use CloudFlare for the DNS redirection. It is free, jump on it and we do have this infrastructure, whereby it acts just like a CDN. Like we have a server in the US, we have servers in Europe, we have servers in Singapore, we have servers in Japan, in Brazil. So whenever we upload something to the main server, it’s going to synchronise with all the servers.
Rishan:: Yeah CND is a pretty big thing. There’s also I believe, a Google plugin.
Charles:: Page insights?
Rishan:: Yeah page insights.
Charles:: So with increase, there’s a lot of tools. The tools doesn’t matter guys, Pingdom versus Page Insights, it doesn’t matter. What matters how do you actually increase the speed and I think that 80/20 of it, is number one, make sure everything is on CDN. Number two, make the page code as efficient as possible because sometimes, I don’t know you guys, I’ll rip someone’s landing page and this motherfucker still has CPV labs on that. Like the code still on there. So what I like to do is, if a page works well, I like to send it to my programmer, who’s gonna recode the page to make it more efficient. Okay, so CDN, recode the page to make it more efficient. When it comes to trackers, don’t use self-hosted. So guys, no one cares about your affiliate campaigns. No one’s gonna steal your affiliate campaigns. All those guys, they make too much money to give a shit about your mobile pops campaign.

Use Managed Servers

: Okay, you have to use manage servers. Okay, they will make a huge difference. So use Thrive, use Voluum, don’t be cheap. Go with a managed server. It will make you money. Like sometimes you have to spend money to make money.
Rishan:: Awesome, alright. So I guess it’s time to open it up to the audience. Guys, there are 2 mics if anyone would like to ask a question to either Charles, and I think we don’t even have to limit it to the topic that you guys talked about. You can ask any question. Feel free to come up.

Audience:: Hey there. Oh wow, it’s a little loud. Thanks for putting the presentation together. It was super helpful. I was definitely intrigued. I have like 4 questions. The first one is, if you’re marketing apparel or jewelry and you still want to tap into the emotional aspect of Ad creatives, how do you go about finding that when most of the times they’re just taking it from an AliExpress site right? Or like how would you go about doing it? Would you splice images together? Like how? Yeah, I’ll just leave it there.

WIIIFT: What Is In It For Them

Benjamin:: Well, first of all, you know like apparels, jewelry, it’s not something that you cannot live without it. So if I were you, I would just stick with the traditional way of promoting and just try to show the product. You see, to be a good marketer, you gotta always know the WIIIFT, what is in it for them? Like if they get this pendant, if they get jewelry, what is going to bring it for them? So again it also depends on what kind of angle that you could use. For example, let’s say if you want to market certain jewelry, it would be better for you to attach a theme with it. For example, “Hey you know this is like a yoga jewelry and then if you wear it, it’s going to like help you, the stones it has the power, it’s going to make your heart more peaceful,” something like that. Yeah, that’s how I would do it.

Angles Combined With Targeting

Charles:: So here’s my thought process. Number one, who buys jewelry? So I’m thinking there are 2 types. There are women who want to buy jewelry from themselves and there are boyfriends who are in trouble and want to buy jewelry for their girlfriends to not be in trouble anymore. So one interesting thing I like to do on Facebook is, I like to do like angles combined with targeting. So here’s an example, why don’t you target guys who are in relationships. And then from there, you can do some kind of emotional image of a girl receiving like a ring, receiving a bracelet. “Here she is crying out of happiness.” So you target that. So the big take away is you can combine angles with targeting.
Rishan:: You know a good source of inspiration for that might have been there was a big phase when getting your ex back, those products were doing a lot of volumes. You could maybe look at some of them.
Charles:: I don’t know if you’re gonna get your ex back if you give her a ring from AliExpress, I don’t know, that’s just me though.
Audience:: I guess if it’s older you might be able to pull it. No, I’m joking. So do you like to mix text and images or do you like to straight go for the images because of your 80/20 principle?
Charles:: Well could you clarify your question? Are you talking about on Facebook or something?
Audience:: Yeah Facebook.
Charles:: So okay, so are you saying in terms of testing, do I emphasise headlines more or images more?

Text On The Ad Versus An Image

Audience:: No, I’m talking about the ad creative, do you like to mix and text on the Ad creative or do you like to just go with an image that has clarity and you might just include only a circle or an arrow?
Charles:: I don’t like text, personally because I think Facebook’s always changing their freaking like text on the ad rule. So I just keep it simple. I focus more on the headline. I feel that makes more of a difference.
Audience:: Alright I got 2 more for you guys. Alright so how do you narrow down your interests and how do you know if you have the right interests? Like what’s your process on Facebook?
Benjamin:: Well it’s a little bit sensitive, but anyway like my approach is I always go broad. I always go broad. Yeah. So I actually put in a lot of effort on the ads itself, like top process, the angle, the image that we are going to use.

Behavior Targeting / Flex Targeting

Charles:: I’m the opposite. I don’t like to go abroad until the very end until the campaign is completely optimised. I like to do a lot of flex targeting and behavior targeting. So I do a lot of flex targeting, behavior targeting, so what I like to do is I like to zoom in, find the most profitable segment, optimise it and then once this campaign super profitable, then I’ll slowly expand outwards. Because if your shit is not optimised yet and you bring it on to everyone, it’s kind of hard to make it profitable, unless you’re doing something like Nutra or Bizop that just targets everyone. So I highly suggest learning about behavior targeting, flex targeting and implement in pixel.
Audience:: Okay and that makes sense. The last question is when you’re aggressively testing on Facebook, do you like to launch dark posts or do you like to publish like many, like 5 to 10 different posts on your page and then try to run ads to each one of those because they have a different angle and you’re testing differently? How do you like to go about that?
Benjamin:: Personally, I do not do any of dark pose. I don’t do dark post. It’s just a waste of time. I just like to go straight to it.
Audience:: Gotcha. Just launched a lot of published ads?
Charles:: Yeah.
Audience:: Cool, thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks, guys.
Charles:: No worries.
Rishan:: Alright, we’ve got a big red thing that says times up. So I guess no more questions from the audience right. Thank you guys so much for your time. I enjoyed the presentation.
Benjamin:: Yeah, thank you.
Charles:: Thank you, guys.

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