Just answered a question on the forums that had me looking up an offer search engine. I almost forgot for a second, the plethora of networks and offers available. A lot being junk, how do you identify the quality, trustworthy offers, capable of scaling as far as the eye can see.
In my own experience, the biggest campaign I've ran to date (xx,xxx,xxx rev) came from an ad I saw running using a spy tool, so I reverse searched everything about the ad. Got in touch with the advertiser and landed a direct deal.
Which leads to the question, how have you gone about finding the offer behind your biggest campaigns?
For anyone that's interested, these are the offer search engines I was using earlier:
O Digger http://odigger.com/
91,004 Offers, 612 Networks
Offer Vault http://www.offervault.com/
47, 252 Offers, 160 Networks
Aff Plus http://www.affplus.com/
41,798 Offers, 67 Networks
Affiliate managers won’t give you access to the best of the best (usually set on private) unless you’re a baller and can bring 6 figures in revenue monthly. With this being said, always split test 3-4 offers.
A couple of other routes to consider:
1) Find a service you find useful and good, then see if it has an affiliate program. This can work very well - one of the longer-running programs I've promoted is a service I've used myself, a lot.
It's not 100% - for example, I love Lord Of The Rings Online, but I can't get the bloody thing to convert for the life of me. But it's a good way to find things you might overlook.
2) Just look through your network's offer list, then check out the landing page of anything that looks promising. You can find some really out-of-the-way gems this way. Go through the flow, look at the lander design, look at how well the offer sells itself. Think about its demographics and how large a user base it appeals to. Don't forget that some apparently small niches are, in the grand scheme of things, still large enough to support tens or hundreds of million dollars in sales. If it looks promising, give it a test! It's (comparatively) cheap to test an offer compared with the upside of finding a single gem.
Sometimes affiliate managers incentives are not aligned with your own. While spy tools have no filter to what offers are currently generating a lot of volume.
Unless you have an affiliate manager you really trust, then I would say spy tools are your best bet to find quality offers.