Fighting the giants one campaign at a time (3)
How do you beat the giant affiliate marketers who have all the budget and a team? i'm thinking we fight on areas they do not want to focus on, or find it difficult to focus on
for example
1. finding out the country's local slang for use in banners/landers
2. targeting a specific niche within the country, instead of the broad based campaign. for example advertising antivirus specifically for gamers saying it will help their games run faster.
3. re-targeting previous users who landed on your landers but did not convert. we pay a higher price for users who are alot more likely to convert on another traffic source that allows re-targeting
4. any other suggestions??
You've already listed some good strategies.
The biggest affiliates will typically operate in the biggest markets.
Smaller affiliates are more likely to hit profit by focusing on areas of those markets that are under-served -- or by targeting sources and countries that are too small for the big affiliates to bother with in the first place.
If you can't out-bid the competition, then out-hustle it instead.
But even if you take this strategy, your intention should always be to build a budget and a team. You'll need both to protect yourself in the future.
What Finch said at the end is so very true, if you plan this for the future, you need more men power to help you, there is only so much you can do on your own. If you dont plan to build an inhouse team, at least outsource whatever you can, without putting your biz at danger, so keep the sensitive parts to you.
I already have a team of 5 people and it all goes better this way, now when I need new banners or new landers, it all gets done on the fly and I can launch campaigns the same day I decide to do so. No waiting or other crap. One of my team members also owns minority share of our company so he can help with the sensitive parts too, its awesome when I want to go on vacation or something like this. I would never go back to a one-man operation.
Im by no means a HUGE affiliate, but we do pretty big numbers so I can also chime in on the original topic of your question and give you my experience. Its true that as you grow you tend to start passing on small sources. Its simply not viable to mess with $10 profit per day campaigns when you want to earn $x.xxx per day. We simply cannot dedicate our time do spots that do not have the potential. But when I was starting out, these lower income spots were actually the ones that helped me to start seeing profit every day. The math is easy here, find 10 spots each doing $10 per day and there is your first $100 profit per day 
Basically anything that takes away time without having the potential to bring in significant $ is turning bigger affiliates away, simply because they need to allocate the "labor" to more profitable campaigns.
You mentioned these :
local slang - not sure about this one as the larger affiliated actually should have the ad copy nailed down already
niche targeting - this is a good one, but your example was too broad, think more like : meet 30 plus women in Chicago and take it to an ad network that allows such demo targeting
Finch mentioned bigger markets - thats a very good call coming from him as always - big affiliate will want to get his $. By a big market, do not just think GEO. It might be an offer with smaller target group, undeveloped country with really low paying offers, some weird offer with a limited cap ... whatever that makes reaching a high $ volume complicated.
Ad networks can also play in your favor a lot - I simply like some ad networks interface or algo more than others, thats why I was overlooking trafficjunky for a long time for example, it was so time consuming to setup campaigns there that I rather passed on them Some networks require more babysitting than others, for example a RON campaign on juicyads, you need to watch the placements closely all the time as new shitty publisher make it into the mix so often. Then there are small ad networks that have some good publishers but they are harder to find. etc ...
The list could go on and on, but majority of the factors come down to making it complicated to run decent volume, which is a problem for a big affiliate but a person who is starting out with a limited budget should consider this a positive.
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