100% WHITEHAT Offers And Niches That Can Still Make Bank (26)
100% WHITEHAT Offers And Niches That Can Still Make Bank
One of the questions that comes up on STM quite often is "how can I run 100% whitehat offers?"
It's a difficult question to ask because everyone's definition of whitehat varies. Some people are OK with adult content, some people are OK with gambling or similar things (sweepstakes, for example), and some people aren't.
Regardless of exactly where your limits are, the answer to "can I run whitehat and make money?" is definitely, definitely yes. But that's often hard to see, because some of the more controversial niches (adult, for example) are also some of the more popular ones.
So here's a quick guide to some of the many options out there for running completely white-hat - many of which are less-discussed on places like STM, and hence have much less competition too!
Games
One of the most obvious white-hat niches - but that's because they work! I made some of my early affiliate money in the games vertical, so I'm still rather fond of it. And as a white-hat niche it's solid - you can even run it on Facebook.
Loads of networks have some game offers, and some of them have hundreds. However, games come with their own unique quirks.
For starters, gaming's an incredibly broad market, and many affiliates fail to take account of that when they run gaming offers. The word "gamer" can mean a 63-year-old woman playing Farmville in her lunchbreak or a 13-year-old kids screaming swearwords into his headset as he bashes through multiplayer Call Of Duty. The two markets don't have much in common!
In addition, many "gamers" aren't very interested in trying new games. This fantastic piece of research from SteamSpy helps narrow things down: there's a huge difference between a League of Legends player and someone who's interested in trying all MOBA-style games. Targeting is key!
On the upside, games tend to come with great visuals, and you can often acquire a load of really good images to use straight from the press kit of the games company itself. And they come with a specific vocabulary, which most advertisers don't take time to learn.
See the 2015 guide to verticals and traffic sources for more hints on running games.
Lots of networks have games offers, and some - like Glispa and IQU - specialise in them.
But what do you do with those very specific audiences who are definitely gamers - League of Legends fanatics, for example - but aren't interested in other games? Well, that brings us on to...
Clickbank Ebook Publishers
What's Clickbank? It's a site where people who have written ebooks - on pretty much any subject - can sell their ebooks, and can offer affiliates generous commissions for promoting them. Usually commissions are about 50% of the book price - sometimes more - and they often come with revenue-sharing options too.
There are a number of other sites with the same model, too - the oldest is www.e-junkie.com, but more pop up with a quick search around.
Why are these good? Well, for starters, despite the traditionally shady-looking landing pages, a lot of the ebooks offered are actually really solid work. I spent some time reviewing the options for Clickbank "Gold Guides" for the game World of Warcraft a little while back and to my surprise found that all the top sellers were very informative, thorough, and contained a lot of original ideas. Clickbank offers a lot of potential for the affiliate who wants to promote a genuinely good product.
But the key point about Clickbank is that it covers literally hundreds of niches, many of which are waaaaaay outside the usual affiliate stomping grounds. I referenced games, for example - Clickbank hosts dozens of guides to some of the most competitive video games out there, from League of Legends to Guild Wars 2, and they sell well. (Those gold guides I referenced earlier did quite nicely for me when I started running them.) They've got recipe books for obscure diets, they've got guides to dancing, photography, music and more, they've got guides to making your home eco-friendly, and far more. If you want to get outside the super-competitive niches, this is the way to go - and I know that a number of STM members are sitting in some of those obscure niches quietly generating some very nice profits indeed.
On the downside, Clickbank payouts tend to be on the high side, which can make testing them for a paid traffic campaign expensive. However, that's not universal - there are lower-payout offers on there too, down to around the $5 per conversion range. And if you want to further ameliorate the payout problem, you can always investigate...
Mailing Lists
Running your own email list is a great half-way house between being an affiliate and being an offer owner. If you want to go into a Clickbank-friendly niche but want to be able to test faster, it's also a great way to do that.
Why? Because rather than optimising solely on conversions - which requires you to spend a lot in initial testing - you can treat opt-ins to a mailing list as your conversions, and optimise for them. You'll have to set your own "payout" for that, which you can do by looking at the usual payouts for email submits, sweeps, and similar things that convert on email submission, but other than that, you can use this to quickly and cheaply start optimising your campaign.
Once you've got people signed up, you do have to mail them, of course! The usual approach here is to mix in quality free information about the niche that your list targets with sales pitches for relevant products. As such, it's vital to choose a niche where there are enough products to promote. A lot of list-owners target verticals like muscle, diet or dating, where there's an eternal supply of products, but smaller niches can still work as well - particularly if you're interested in developing your own products as well as selling other peoples'.
Mailing lists are a huge topic, and one I don't have space to go into in much detail here - but they can be an absolute cash generation machine. And unlike CPA, where all you get is a single payout, when you develop a mailing list you're also building an asset you can use and develop over years.
But what if you want to advertise somewhat more conventional CPA offers? Well, then you might take a look at...
Lead Generation
Wait, isn't everything we do "lead generation"? Well, yes. But here we're referring to a specific subset of offers which are most commonly called "lead gen" offers: where we use our affiliate knowledge to generate leads for conventional brick-and-mortar companies, usually in the service industries.
Subsets of lead gen include life insurance, auto insurance, legal services, background check services, and even education. Your favourite affiliate network probably has a few of these, and some networks specialise in them. In particular, Pay-Per-Call has a significant number of these offers, and a lot of people are making a lot of money from them.
Again, payouts tend to be a bit higher than other CPA offers - although not always - and that's largely because the opt-in process is quite a bit more involved than a PIN submit or a mobile app install. Longer sales pages and really tight targeting tend to work best for these verticals. Whilst Google Adwords prices are through the roof for this kind of service, if you can find a way to target highly incentivised customers - people who are already looking for insurance or background checks, for example - you're in a very good place. But regular campaigns that target a strong fear or desire can do well too.
Two specific subsets of lead generation are very worth looking out for. Firstly, any time there's a government grant for anything, lead gen offers pop up for it - and because this is often a literal "free cash" situation, these can be really good offers. Solar panel offers are the classic example here: with large subsidies for solar installation, they're genuinely offering a great deal, which is always an advantage when you're trying to sell something!
And if you really want to run the whitest white-hat offers possible, there are actually lead-gen offers for charities out there! I don't know anyone making bank on charity offers in the digital world, but those offers have been around for a while, so someone may well be making baller income and saving the whales at the same time...
Most networks have some leadgen offers. ShareASale.com has a lot of them - nearly 300 when the STM team checked on Friday - and W4, Maxbounty and Neverblue tend to have quite a few of them too.
Mobile App Installs
Whilst app installs aren't always white-hat, they're one of the better verticals in which to find white-hat offers. It's very normal for big, trusted names to run app install campaigns to boost their numbers, either for a short time or as a steady, ongoing source of revenue.
In the past we've seen brands like Spotify and OLX running app install campaigns. You don't get much more legit! Most affiliate networks these days have a healthy selection of mobile app installs.
The mobile app install vertical is pretty tough at the moment, which is why I didn't mention this option higher up in this article. After a massive growth over the last couple of years, changes in Google's policies on app promotion have knocked a lot of the players down or out, and the vertical as a whole is still recovering.
But if you're alert to new opportunities, there's still gold to be made out there, and the advantages of the vertical - lower payouts for faster optimisation, massive scaling potential - still exist. Hlyghst posted an example campaign that made him $x,xxx a day from a weather app quite recently, for example.
SaaS
If you want to run campaigns based around really, really high-quality products, there's no better place to look right now than the Software As A Service (SaaS) market.
Software tools are a perfect match for a CPS affiliate offer. They've got marginal costs to run, and so they can offer considerable payouts. They usually service a worldwide audience, and they're fast-moving and up to date with marketing in 2015.
As a result, many top-notch Silicon Valley software tool companies offer affiliate programs.
Hosting companies are particularly hot on the affiliate sales: BlueHost, for example, has been running an affiliate program for years with extremely attractive payouts. And obviously, anything adjacent to Internet Marketing tends to have an affiliate program - mailing list management software, Wordpress themes, squeeze page designers, and so on.
Beyond that, you can find affiliate programs for the most unexpected of software, mostly in the B2B (Business To Business) rather than B2C (Business To Consumer) sectors. Accountancy packages? Yep, many of them offer an affiliate program. Online shop packages? Yep,
You can find a lot of these programs on Share A Sale or Commission Junction, but beyond that, the best approach is just to look in the footer for any software product you'd be interested in promoting. A lot of the time, they (or one of their competitors) will have that little "Affiliate" link at the bottom - and you're golden.
Weird Stuff
And then there's so much more.
Take a serious look around the nooks and crannies of your favourite affiliate network and see what they've got offers for. You'll find all sorts of odd things in there: just taking a quick look at one network a moment ago, I found a promotion offer for a shoe company, a bunch of daily deals offers (those still exist? Wow), an e-cig trial offer...
Don't assume that just because an offer isn't on the network's Top Offers list it can't generate serious cash. Obscure offers can be massive cash fountains if you match them with the right campaign. Equally, though, don't assume they work - sometimes they're obscure for a reason.
Beyond that, if you go searching around some of the more non-standard networks out there - things like CJ or ShareaSale, or even Neverblue - you'll find all sorts of odd offers for all sorts of unusual, off-the-beaten-path, 100% whitehat things. Many of them won't work. Some of them will work very well.
And if you want to go even further than that...
Negotiate Your Own Offer
Know someone with a great product? Think you could match it to an effective ad campaign? Then why not strike up a deal with them?
Generating your own offer this way has a number of major advantages. For starters, you can negotiate exclusivity, which is one of the most powerful levers your campaigns can have. You can talk directly to the offer owner, share data, and optimise in ways that just wouldn't be possible with a generic offer where the owner doesn't know you from Adam. And you can even negotiate a combination consultancy and affiliate deal, where you get paid just for developing the campaigns, and then paid an affiliate commission as well.
There are potential pitfalls too. Business deals can go sour - make sure you get everything in writing. And you need to be confident that the product's funnel is actually optimised enough to make it worth your while to run campaigns.
But if you want the ultimate in white-hat, and the ultimate in exclusive niches, negotiating your own affiliate program for a product that you love is an amazing way to use your skills.
And that's it! Did I miss a white-hat niche? Are there tips and tricks for running white-hat campaigns you'd like to share? Or do you have a question or a concern? Post 'em below!
One of my favourites guides here, provide value, get cash. Everyone here should be looking at white-hat niches IMO.
Great guide.
There is money to be made in every niche, but doing whitehat is more sustainable IMO and the payouts can be really high.
Although I feel that in order to do big amounts of money from whitehat, you need to be very focused on one niche for long(ish) periods of time.
Originally Posted by caurmen
GREAT article!
If I could add one more vertical to the Whitehat FB list than it would be e-commerce. Offers like Amazon, Zalando, Spartoo, Privalia, Spartoo, Magazines.com will also do extremely well on FB and they are 100% compliant with Facebook T&Cs. We have plenty of such offers that perform consistently well on FB + are completely compliant.
@craigm - Absolutely. They might take a bit more setup time to begin with (particularly lists) but their sustainability is great.
@fjk85 - I didn't include gambling & financial in the list because some people are uncomfortable with them as a white-hat option, but if you're OK with them, absolutely. HUGE profits out there in both areas.
@cbrughmans - Very good point! Provided the affiliate payouts that the vendors are providing are high enough to support a paid traffic option, eCommerce is a great niche - might add that one later!
Awesome guide, really appreciated.
What would you say is the main thing that made app installs fall from grace? Really interested in app installs, but haven't touched the vertical yet. Perhaps you can spare some advice on what's necessary to succeed.
Awesome post Caurmen. Optin pages + clickbank (and other) offers on the backend is what I've been doing for quite some time now and that's the best way I've found to remove the stress of always having to create new campaigns.
Originally Posted by caurmen
* Create an optin funnel
* Send traffic through FB
* Send PPC traffic
* Send PPV traffic
etc..
* Send emails to your leads
Funnel Flux will then tell you how much your FB leads are worth, how much your Adwords leads are worth, how much your Bing leads are worth etc... So you can then adjust your bids accordingly and kill it.
Another thing I've been doing is direct linking from Bing/Adwords to physical products directly. Adwords doesn't have any problem with this (yet). Just need to make sure that bidding on the product name is allowed by the merchant.
@mminsk - The really big thing that hit app installs was Google's change to their promotion rules for Android apps, last year. But in general the vertical got a bit oversaturated. My impression is that it's recovering somewhat at the moment.
Awesome writeup Caurmen! Thanks for posting this. Definitely helps me as I like to stay whitehat myself. It shows others money can be made with whitehat niches and offers even if it not broadcast as much as other affiliate offers.
thanks caurman. white hat profitable FB campaigns. the holy grail......
@str8bzns - Yep, because they often have explosive growth, greyer-hat approaches get a lot more attention - but they also usually have a shorter lifespan the darker grey they are. A white-hat campaign can often trundle along for months or years generating revenue.
@hlyghst - If we're talking ideal, I slightly prefer white-hat Adwords campaigns - but either's pretty darn good
100% WHITEHAT Offers And Niches That Can Still Make Bank
I am really only interested in white-hat campaigns that can run for years in evergreen verts. I understand you can make a lot of bank very quickly by scaling grey, but I'd prefer to have a few campaigns generating a few hundred in rev a day for many years to come. You won't get rich, no, but it's low stress and more sustainable.
Excellent read thank you!
@positivecarry - You can get pretty rich. Skyscanner, for example, is a white-hat affiliate business in the travel niche, and it's valued at $800m or more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner
Amazing guide thank you very much Caurmen
You dont consider mainstream dating as white hat?
@ericnyc - I do! There are lots of verticals that I didn't cover here, too - of which mainstream dating is one.
Since POF closed its registrations and FB kicked dating off its platform, it's harder to run these days, but still a great vertical and often overlooked (including, apparently, by me).
Originally Posted by caurmen
Since POF closed its registrations and FB kicked dating off its platform, it's harder to run these days, but still a great vertical and often overlooked (including, apparently, by me).
@ericnyc - Mainstream display traffic and pops can both be pretty good with the right angle and the right targeting. Targeting is the key there, though - even more than on POF, you can't just go broad and expect to succeed with something like dating on an RTB platform.
And don't forget about direct ad buys! They have a lot of advantages for dating - high targeting, and hopefully much lower costs.
ecommerce is pretty white hat and easy to manage if you have a fulfillment company handling all the ship and such that no one here would want to do.
Originally Posted by positivecarry
@f0ster - a lot of CPS campaigns (Cash Per Sale) can be extremely long-lived. If you find a thing that people want to buy, and a place to advertise it, there's no reason that should go down any time soon.
Awesome stuff!
Brilliant thread! Thank You!
I had a look at SkyScanner, but affiliate comissions it says are between £0.07-£0.30. Considering it markets some flights for £5000, isn't that a little low?
I mean best case there if you sold 100 per day, which (and I could well be wrong) seems like A LOT, is £30.
@mr_smiley - I think you're looking at the affiliate options that they provide. That's not really what I'm recommending here - instead, I'm pointing to them as an example of a company that is itself an affiliate business, selling flights and receiving affiliate commissions for it. That's how they make their money - and as seen above, they make a LOT of money.
Last year they posted revenues of £66m - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/083f7764-8...44feab7de.html
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