My favorite method of learning something is jumping into it. I’ll usually start by reading all I can about a subject, then quickly try a real life version of something simple, then something more advanced….an “experiment” so to say.
So I wanted to try an affiliate marketing experiment in order to learn all about this industry. From what I understood, a lot of affiliate marketing had to do with creating effective landing pages and making people want to buy or take action. Basically that means out of 100 visitors to a web page, how many of them can you make buy/signup whatever. Since I run an e-commerce store, this appealed to me. Perhaps learning some of this affiliate marketing could help me increase the effectiveness of my own business.
For the month of October 2009 I decided to embark on this affiliate marketing experiment in my spare time. I first made a written list of things I wanted to learn from it:
- Learn why most affiliate marketers don’t go into much detail about their work.
- Learn more about what all this affiliate marketing stuff is about.
- Learn to make great and effective landing pages.
- Learn how to A/B split test landing pages using Google Website Optimizer.
- Further understand how to optimize paid keywords and conversion rates.
Even if my real life experiment lost money, this list contains some pretty valuable skills that could add much benefit to my own business. So it was decided, the month of October 2009 I would try an affiliate marketing experiment to see how this all works.
Now to start a real life experiment promoting something……