I have been an affiliate for 10 years now. I have tried breaking into paid traffic dozens of times with no success. Most of what I do is black hat and comes with lots problems that I need to distance myself from. (Most recently my main competitor got me kicked from an offer by being dirty)
I'm wondering if there is something wrong with my approach so I want to spell it all out here and get some feedback on my methods.
I'm focused on adult traffic and in that the niche dating vertical.
Last month exoclick was my focus I spend about $1000 on 30 or 40 campaigns all were the same offer with a mix of banners.
The offer was black milf dating I was testing a single placement (NTV) targeting ebony traffic. I had what I felt was a competitive 0.37 CPM bid.
It was showing promise for sure, I would test banners, then cpm vs cpc... I could never get enough traffic quickly enough. So it was a lot of waiting sometimes for a weekend before I new it, the offer stopped converting so now it is time to move on.
My approach is to test banners first, then landing pages, and finally the offer. I had several things planned out, but not enough volume to address the issues quickly and scale the campaign.
More than likely it was me and a flaw somewhere with how I was doing it. So how do I quickly test a niche dating offer? Was this the right approach? Was it just bad luck?
I feel your pain man. I also came from blackhat seo background and paid traffic is completely different game.
If you look at many successful follow alongs and stories here on stm, the main common trait that you see with these people is that they hustle a lot. I mean they test a LOT of offers, a LOT of landing pages and banners. You can't assume you try one campaign and can make money.
What you should do, and it doesn't depend on the vertical, is test maybe a dozen of offers/campaigns with small budgets on one proven traffic source. Then take one offer that shows most promise ROI-wise and focus completely on it. Make a lot of landing pages and banners, take what works, cut the rest and constantly impove the remaining.
There are many things you can do to impove conversion rate:
- Improve load speed of landing page
- Make landing page and banner styled like traffic source or like offer or combine both styles.
- Find cheaper traffic sources
- Do volume with small roi until you can get a pay bump
- Test angles and copy of course
- Apply targets blacklisting approach based on conversion rate, banner ctr rate or landing page ctr
Hope that helps. I am also just starting to get first positive results from AM game, but I can say that its definitely doable, you just need to work a lot!
Keep hustling.