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Want to know what works in 2013? Newbie starting point to $x,xxx/day! (41)

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This is a rough guide that should help you figure out your starting point to getting serious in 2013. Whether your brand new or have had mild on/off success.

I mentioned in another thread that the best advice is to stick with 1 thing and become amazing it before you continue. When it comes to affiliate marketing that thing to start sticking with is 1 traffic source.

Traffic Source
- You want a source thats easy enough to get started with and that will still be active, growing, and scalable in years to come.

1. Adult
Adult is still the hot topic right now and there's tons of competition. There is also tons of volume, but the most important part is its easy to get started and understand. Just enter with reasonable expectations, start small and slow and ask your AMs for the top offers.

Add your own creativity into your campaigns and split test a lot otherwise you won't have a campaign that makes a cent for longer than a week. Focus on quality of traffic and placements, to increase the quality of your leads, then ask for pay bumps and you will receive them. The adult genie rewards pubs who drive quality!

>> Where to get started? try exoclick.com or trafficforce.com.

2. POF (pronounced "POFF"; officially by Maynzie)
A great source thats easy to understand, and easy to start with. They work with affiliates too which is great! It's very low barrier entry. Highly recommended for beginners. The downside is the lack of volume… BUT that's not something to worry about right now. Spend some time making $xxx/day campaigns on POF and then you'll be skilled enough to keep those going and move to more traffic sources.

3. Mobile
Hard to get started with, and a good chunk of startup $$$ is needed for testing because there's lots of testing variables such as mobile carriers, handsets, placements, banner sizes, and landing pages… BUT if you spend the time testing many campaigns you may just find a gem or 2. Then you will likely reap the rewards for months to come.

It's a hard traffic source to tackle, but the lack of spying, and sheer amount of traffic across so many sources makes it profitable for longer then a lot of other sources.

>> Where to get started? try Inmobi.com, Adiquity.com, or Mobfox.com

4. Special PPC (for lack of a proper name)
Special PPC is anything that sells traffic but isn't as mainstream as Facebook/POF. etc.. This is all based on research and testing but can be worth it. You've got sources like Ad.ly, Adblade, 50onRed, BuySellAds (these are all different types of sources). Then you got gaming sources like mochimedia.com and epicgameads.com, . Then you can look into filesharing traffic and torrent traffic with wigetmedia.com.

5. Search
What affiliate marketers talk about search/2nd tier sources these days? It's not common discussion at all. Doesn't mean it's not a great area to get started in. Search & 2ndtier has more volume then ANY other types of traffic. Skip adwords (unless your a cloaking pro) and go straight to BingAds or the hundreds and hundreds of small networks that are overlooked by affiliates, where you can carve out your expertise and have some campaigns that run for years instead of weeks/months. I'm not just talking specifically search either.

Sources i'd hold off for the moment
Facebook is becoming harder and harder, cloaking isn't exactly easy and Facebook doesn't like affiliates, but obviously tons of volume. Not exactly desirable to longterm affiliates. PPV is hard to scale and is cluttered from it's big boom in 2011. Media buying is good, but it's no where for a beginner to be.

Niche
- Your niche is not as important as your traffic source! Niches come and go, and there's plenty of big ones and small ones doing well. Whats more important is the specific offers. If your a beginner don't just grab a random offer off the shelf of your affiliate network. Ask your AM whats doing well across multiple niches and test a couple things. Don't jump from 1 niche to another niche in the same day, try and stick with an area, but it's much better to jump from niche A - B, rather then from POF to Mobile.

What type of traffic would you start with if you were just starting out?

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Well written and informative post.

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Great info thank you!

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Ohh.. I'm dead. I'd started with PPV.

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POF is the best to teach a beginner the art of tracking, creatives and more.

Reasons why I've stopped advertising on POF:

0. I am scaling on Bing and about to hit FB - both traffic sources with way more potential and longevity
1. ROI (100% on my best day, 25-30% total over the 2 months I've been running on the platform)
2. CPC - their minimum bid prevents 1c clicks (unless your ad CTR is 20%). Not that I want them, but it'd be cool to tell somebody I'm getting 1c clicks haha
3. Slow and inconsistent ad approvals
4. There are basically no "edges" you can have on POF.
5. On POF, I always felt when I ran broad campaigns that I was only 1 of 5 guys doing it! I have two accounts so maybe I was 2 of 5, who knows.

I would recommend a $1,000 investment in POF for absolute beginners, then moving to FB or adult.

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Thanks stackman, pretty good summary post. I'm at the point of getting serious right now so it was a helpful read. I've been prepping all weekend for some dating camps on POF(F). Thinking I'll put up a follow along once I get it up. I have plans to get some adult camps going but want to get my dating stuff up first and get a plan outlined first.

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@redrummr

I completely agree and was talking to Maynzie yesterday about POF and was deciding if i should include it. Overall its a great source to learn/test on for your first bunch of campaigns, but overall it's steam is running out.

I started out on search, but got serious when i started running Facebook. If Facebook was still good like it was 4-5 years ago, I'd be recommending that as source #1. Same could be said for adwords though 6 years ago. All in the past now

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A little tip from me:

I know most people who are wanting to start fresh campaign after looking at this post, will most likely go straight to US Adult or US mobile. That would definitely be the hardest route to go.

If I were to start a new campaigns in 2013 I would be focusing on INTL Adult, INTL Mobile or a combination or it all INTL Adult Mobile. I've definitely found my margins and profits to be higher where the majority of the affiliate crowd aren't looking by default.

Meow.

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INTL adult is just ooooozing with shawties who want to get laid and men who have never seen this type of lady-oozing before.

It makes it a lot easier to hit a positive ROI, and easier to hit higher profit margins.

The STM gang is in the Netherlands right now (prepping for the meetup!) and we can tell just by looking at the ads that adult competition is lacking here, and old techniques work. That means new techniques will likely work even better. Get down on it

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You guys are huddled together watching porn in NL? Yeah buddy!

Spot on with this post though.

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Great post!

One thing I'd note from the research I've been doing on adult mobile (although obviously I'm still a n00b in this area compared to Stackman): a lot of advertisers in adult mobile DO NOT understand best coding practise for mobile. I've seen some real howlers on the coding front - people massively slowing their landers down with really half-assed techniques or deploying landers you'd need a microscope to read on common phones.

From my experience so far - and this is in US adult mobile, so probably goes double elsewhere - I'd say that if you're prepared to spend some quality geek time optimising your tech, you really boost your chances of success.

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is trafficjunky not a good idea for starting out in adult?

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For starting out you have to learn the basics and POF is still probably one of the best traffic sources out there that is friendly towards affiliates. You got Demo, Macros, Banners, LPs, Day Parting, etc to get your feet wet with before jumping to one of the more challenging traffic sources out there.

With that said if running adult just make sure offer allows adult.

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Wigetmedia is an affiliate network? why did you list them as torrent traffic?

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Wiget has a shitload of torrent / movie watching / sport streaming / etc. etc. in their inventory - including a lot of torrent sites. Some of the biggest movie sites are monetized for a part by wiget so I guess that's why

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Where do we sign up to run on their inventory though if they are an affiliate network. Do they just run internally?

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Erm affiliate network? It's a managed source isn't it ?

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They are for managed torrent traffic, not an affiliate network. You must contact them and work with a representative, there is no signup.

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Great post, very informative. I'm not a prude or anything but adult traffic just doesn't really interest me, I guess. Right now I'm on POF and finding it difficult to crack that triple digit per day mark due to the fact that the volume is already low, PLUS I started running in non english speaking countries for less competition. I was really looking forward to trying PPV, since I'm in TrafficVance and LeadImpact. From this thread, I gather it's no longer a good idea?

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We are in the same boat
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-change-to-PPV

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Haha I sense a thread "What works in 2013 for the well-behaved"

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Although POF is lower volume for sure, 3 digits should be well within reach there. With their super targeting functions, you should be able to reach 3 digits easily with 1-2 campaigns, even going some niche.

I guess the idea of going non English on POF is to make life easier for you, but I'd think at least 85%+ traffic of POF is English speaking, maybe Ben can give us some up to date insights on this

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Question: I have been on POF doing CPA dating offfers for 2-3 months and am reaching maybe $30-70 profit days, but I'm getting a bit frustrated with it and burnt out...

- POF has little volume and it's hard to scale... lots of small campaigns needing micromanagement even with POFpro
- It feels a little bit saturated even though there's still some space to make $

I did learn alot though... but maybe it's time to try something new?

- Adult: not my thing
- Mobile: Seems interesting... Is is possible to start on small budgets (say $50 spend/day) I haven't had a cell phone in years, is that a disadvantage?
- facebook: Not sure if I want to deal with getting banned
- "special PPC" - not sure where I would start there. Doesn't seem to be be too many threads/resources to help
- search (bing): seems like a whole different beast, would my POF skills translate there?
- Media buy: I'm still too much of a newb, not enough budget either maybe?


I'm leaning towards mobile... Any suggestions?

I

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I know someone who pulled in ~3k revenue on POF today - so I wouldn't jump to blaming the traffic source as a "low volume" traffic source when you're running xxx / day. The affs who can rightfully call POF a low volume traffic source are the guys doing mid x,xxx - xx,xxx numbers. To them, it is relatively low volume. However, I see way too many affiliates just not putting the work and testing in, and bashing POF as "low volume."

My suggestion no matter what source you choose is fully commit and accept personal responsible and work hard at it, but more importantly work smarter. Take a step back from just endlessly submitting the same looking ads and campaigns as everyone else and setup a plan. It's the little nuances of traffic sources that make or break campaigns and lead to big days. It's going to be the exact same situation in mobile, adult, facebook, etc. There's a painful learning curve breaking into any of those.

This industry is a lot more about thinking than grinding, despite what some people will tell you. The way I always approached POF was thinking that there are probably 100s of affiliates on there doing $50 or so / day. Why can't I work way harder than all of them and run as many campaigns as all of them combined and bring home some real $. It's all about mindset and how you view things. If you believe POF is a low volume traffic source, and over saturated, then it is, and you will never succeed on it. Same thing with facebook, if you're afraid of getting banned and not going to figure out how to get back on there or do things legitimately, then you'll never hit the x,xxx - xx,xxx facebook days. Fear and over analysis will paralyze you. I'm not saying you need to stick to POF, you can jump to whatever source you like, but the most important thing is to pick something and stick with it till you've mastered it.

Also, set small attainable goals. I.e., if you're hitting $30-70, try to break $100 or $150. Also, think in terms of revenue moreso than pure roi % for getting started. If you only ever run $100-$300 worth of revenue a day, you will never make $x,xxx or even come close to it. You have to run more campaigns and buy more traffic. You'll learn so much more, and most likely find more winning campaigns faster as well. I know it's tough when you have a small budget starting out but find a network with solid converting offers, good pay terms, save, roll the money over, and keep going.

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Hmmmmm.... I have nearly 280 campaigns running with pof and still cannot obtain xxxx days.... I'm gonna go with the majority and say its a lack of volume from the site.

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Best quote of the post. So many guys are going like ' what only 40% ROI? I won't run ' recently... Pretty much everybody spending serious money on ANY source in ANY niche will grab even 30% right away if it gets him volume.

ROI does not pay your bills... profit does.

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@ Mr Green.... you mentioned starting INTL adult.... cuz of the profit margins etc.

is this cuz you're promoting as an affiliate?

Wondering if you OWNED the offer, would you do the same? or differently...

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remove all of your targeting from those 280 campaigns and see how much you can spend in a day


owning the offer is irrelevant, its the fact that INTL adult isn't as saturated and yields better returns in general (usually with a lack of volume but can make up for it with ROI) for everyone - owner/affiliate/etc

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True, but these filters is what eliminates the trash and establishes angles. If I went broad on 280 campaigns, I seriously doubt I'd be in the green

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@swifclick - owning the offer is irrelevant

how do you figure?

if you're making 100% of the money, vs an affiliate making a % of the sale...

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We're working on a 2014 update to this as I write!

However, briefly:

Yep. If you want to learn the basics, and you don't have specialised skills that would imply you should go elsewhere, POF is an excellent training ground.

It's still possible to run FB, particularly in very, very clean verticals like games.

It's doable, certainly. You'll need a decent budget, you'll want to focus on low-payout offers to get more data, faster, and you'll need to be very aware of the stats you're getting in.

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Hi Caurmen, you mentioned a 2014 update...has that been completed yet? If so where can I find it? Thanks!!!

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Update would be cool.

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It's coming... very very soon.

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^^ yeppp

A lot is definitely the same, mobile is coming in hotter and hotter though and niche specific traffic is where people are setting long term businesses and campaigns from.

I see a lot less 1 hit wonder campaigns, everyone seems to be focusing on a traffic source and sticking with it for the longterm which is the best way to go. Treat that traffic source as your business and area of expertise.

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Hi is that 2014 guide ready yet? I want to see an updated guide if possible...and also I was wondering if INTL adult is still profitable to go into? I am completely new to aff marketing and am having difficulty choose a traffic source right now. Whats a good traffic source for INTL adult and what would be some disadvantage and advantages between choosing an adult traffic source and a traffic source like POF?

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This! http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...TION-AND-INDEX

Also, this http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-to-Do-in-2014

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yes, yes, yes! INTL adult is a great place to start mate

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so i am seriously considering INTL adult. There are a lot of stuff here on POF and a lot of people seem to be using POF as a traffic source. I am assuming exoclick and trafficjunky are the better source to go to for adult traffic as you have mentioned, but for a total beginner, is starting in INTL adult better or just start in POF or are they the same? and also should i try going mobile for intl adult or is that a bad idea for a noob?

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POF's easier to learn than international adult, I'd say, although a lot of the difficulty in both cases is just random chance. There's a lower maximum profit ceiling on POF, but it's generally a friendlier environment to get started in. Having said that, INTL adult is definitely not a bad place to get going either.

Mobile requires more budget, and more tech skillz (although less so than a year or so ago), but is also doable.

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What type of traffic should i start with ??

and i would like to start with mobile , is it okay ??

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