Choosing a right offer to promote is essential for your campaign success. Most beginners make one crucial mistake before they launch their campaign - choosing a RANDOM offer or an offer which they think it MIGHT work. Picking up a random offer and see if it sticks is the wrong way to go. The other big mistake that most newbies make is to select an offer with a high payout. Usually in this case most people think: "Oh, this offer has a $120 payout per sale! Great, I'll make money quick!". Wrong. The truth is that the high payout offers are great, but they are hard to monetize and you need a significant experience and initial budget to make them work. What I will advise you is to start with a low payout offer. These offers usually convert much better. Imagine this situation:
Affiliate A chooses to promote supplement pills offer with a payout of $60.
Affiliate B chooses to promote a mobile application install offer (it could be game app, antivirus app, etc.) with a payout of $0.40.
Both affiliates start with $500 budget for advertisement.
Affiliate A spends its budget and gets 6 conversions (sales). That brings him/her 6x60 = $360 revenue. But he/she invested $500, so at the end of the day he/she is on red with $140...
Affiliate B is playing smart and runs a low payment offer which converts much better. At the end of the day he/she gets 1800 installs of the mobile application and his/her revenue is 1800x0.40 = $720. He/She is on green with $220!
This is only an example and the numbers are just figurative, but I can assure you that this is the approach most affiliates implement. Do not be tempted from the high paying offers if you do not have a decent budget to start! Play smart this game to avoid disappointments.
Ok, you will ask: "But how to choose the right offer then?". First of all, you must have a basic idea what you want to promote. Lets say you want to promote skin care product from AdCombo. Log in and check what they have as an offers per given country. Contact your affiliate manager and ask him/her to give you the list of their top 5 converting offers per country of your choice or the best converting offers per any geographic location (GEO). Also you have to ask which of their pre-selling (landing) pages bring the most sales and what is their conversion ratio (CR). CR will give you information about the effectiveness of a pre-selling page. High CR - better! Other thing that you can pay attention on, after you get the list of your offers to promote, is their EPC (earning-per-click) ratio. EPC is an averaged measurement of how much you will get as a profit from your clicks if you bring sales. This is usually the total EPC ratio across the network and it is not personalized. Important: do not count only on this ratio when you choose an offer. Sometimes this ratio is very biased (like few clicks generate high payout sales) and can mislead you that a particular offer works great. It is useful though to get an idea how the offer performs in general. Remember - always ask your affiliate manager what currently works and has high demand. They are the people who will help you to make your informed choice. Never pick up an offer if you read somewhere on forums, blogs etc. that a particular offer works great for someone. Some offers work great for some, but that doesn't mean it will work in the same way for you (different traffic sources, different affiliate programs, different pre-sale pages, etc). You have to find what works best for you. I will write more about how to test offers in "Starting a campaign" chapter.