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How I cash in on obscure GEOs and low volume placements and you can too... (40)

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These days, everyone in AM searches for the biggest traffic source, the best converting offers in huge GEOs ... everyone wants to run $XXX per day campaigns, if not $XXXX straight away. I see questions like : "... does this have the potential to reach $XXX per day?" or "... can this campaign be a big money maker?" over and over.

But what about the small campaigns generating just a few bucks per day? What about the small GEOs and small traffic sources? Affiliates, even the new ones to my surprise, tend to forget about them and that's a huge mistake ... let me tell you why. SMALL can beat the BIG if you know how



Large GEOs, large traffic spots, large placements ... these can certainly make you a lot of $$$ ... but they all pull LARGE competition too. Campaigns die faster there, they get ripped in a matter of hours and the CVR is usually erratic too - due to massive competition and constant bid changes caused by it. So while these large campaigns have a lot of potential, they aren't usually all that stable and this can become frustrating pretty fast.

On the other side of the fence, there are obscure GEOs, small traffic sources and offers overlooked by the majority... simply put – campaigns with low profit potential that the majority of affiliates doesn't care about at all. Weird combinations of creatives and LPs, very targeted campaigns, barely used offers ... these all have one thing in common – the volume will be low, but the ROI can be insane and on top of that, these campaigns tend to last waaaaay longer than large ones. One campaign like this won't make you rich, but 20 of them can.

I've been pulling nice income this way for a long time. I have always several campaigns like this running across multiple GEO's. They serve as a security bumper for me, when the larger campaigns die once again, these small ones give me the “so much needed” peace of mind, so I don't have to worry about some baseline income. Sometimes it feels like an insurance

Since they say a picture is worth more than a thousand words, let me show you a screenshot. This is a small, laser targeted adult campaign of mine – 1 carrier/1 OS/under 5 mil. GEO/1 unsaturated low paying offer/1 smaller traffic source. The campaign is running like this for almost 4 months now, the screenshot I made is for June. I blurred some data from obvious reasons But the most important parts are there, check the ROI



In all honesty, this is what I believe the new affiliates should be after these days. Find the overlooked spots or GEOs and run small, very targeted campaigns like this one there. When it's one campaign, it doesn't look so hot ... but you can have 10, 20 or more like that and that's suddenly a completely different league.

Thanks for reading.

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Nice post! I can attest to this:



(I picked an old camp so I wouldn't' have to blur out anything haha!)

The offer died within 2 months unfortunately, but the camp fits all the descriptions in the OP: One carrier, one small geo (3.6 million population), one OS, one traffic source. But yup - the advice is solid!



Amy

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Very solid advice Matuloo, thanks!

Having 10/20 like this definitely puts you in a different league.

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Exactly, at some point, I was obsessed with campaigns like this, I was like a ROI hunter My focus is elsewhere now, but this is something that the new people should totally focus on.

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Here's a geo with just over 1 million in population - again, single carrier single os single traffic source. I've just cut the underperforming offer last night - look at the ROI today (so far):



So when I can find a little bit of time to scale this to all major sources - set and forget until the offer dies.



Amy

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Good stuff Vortex, I hope the new people are getting what we are showing them here

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Nice post Matuloo!

I can attest to that...since we are posting screenshots of successful in obscure countries...

This is data from one campaign on Monetizer this month. In the top list is Morocco, Iran, Romania, Korea etc.

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Nice Mr G! But I'm still in the lead with my 1.x million population! ^_^

Can anyone show a green camp for a geo with a smaller population? This is an open challenge!



Amy

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Heyyyy... didn't know Romania was obscure till now )) but good thing it's making the cash

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As an new affiliate I absolutely love the idea of this approach.

What would all your thoughts be on dominating one particular small geo in general?

Or would focusing on one vertical and going horizontal to other small geos be easier? (as in: getting the hang of one vertical and traffic source). Reason I ask is I speak a pretty damn obscure language and have a feeling not much traffic is going to that geo because there are really no translation tools that exist.

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Being a new affiliate, I would pick at least 5 small geos to dominate. I wouldn't narrow myself to just one geo.

Take each of those 5 geos, pair them up with the top 2-3 Offers with 5-10 ripped landers and then check the performance on those. In the end you should be able to detect which geos have the most potential and then you can focus on those by improving your funnel and then after improving your funnel you can move your offers/landers to other traffic sources to increase volume potential.

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Some amazing shares thanks guys. I've been preaching this approach to new affs for years! 100% the best way forward.

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Time to launch some campaigns in the Vatican and Monaco LOL. Let's see who can get less traffic.

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I now have the goal of running a profitable adult camp in the vatican. Just for the lulz.

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ROI = 3,000%??? Who knows ...

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This is the better way to start! Thanks for the advice.

Could anyone please put some examples to the jargons to give us noobs a clearer picture? Obviously not your current campaign, but a died out campaign so we know exactly what to look for when setting up.

Offer:
Traffic Source:
Traffic Type:
Landers or Direct linking?:
Carrier:
OS:
Geo:



campaign of mine – 1 carrier/1 OS/under 5 mil. GEO/1 unsaturated low paying offer/1 smaller traffic source.

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ROI isn't as amazing, but had been running this bastard since January.

It's still chugging along.

20 mil population - bigger than the rest of the examples, but hey it's on autopilot

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The approach I was talking about was not actually about dominating a small GEO, but rather picking just the best converting combinations and target certain segments very accurately. Thats how you can get massive ROI, but with low volume. The goal should be to find such segments in a number of GEOs, not just one.

In your example - speaking the language of a specific GEO - you could technically dominate the GEO, but you would have to run a wide range of offers, you can't dominate a GEO with just one offer, everyone simply won't respond to it. It would be too much work I'm afraid, with questionable results. I would pick just one or two offers and start with that.

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You actually don't need this info, it would be useless anyways as the campaign would be dead by now.

This is what you need : low paying offers that are working NOW, this can work well with sweeps, PINs or simple lead gen (SOI)...
Traffic used the most is POPs or display (banner clicks). You can get the traffic from the popular sources like propellerads, adcash, popcash, popads ... for display go to avazu dsp, go2mobi etc ... these are all big sources, the small ones you will have to find on your own
I use landers for this, sometimes directlink can work too tho.
Carrier, OS, GEO : this can be anything - to figure it out, you need to run tests and analyze the data, the good combinations will stand out pretty fast

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Obscure as to not being the traditional country to make $$$ from in AM. Not so long ago US, CA and western Europe were the only countries that you could actually turn some profit in... these days it's all different. I'm looking forward to the day when China becomes a country widely covered with good offers, that's gonna be a goldmine And if they'd let them watch porn finally, god that would be something

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hah ) interesting point about China + porn. is it the same for India in terms of $$? since in numbers they are there

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I think China would slam India in terms of traffic and $$$, their internet infrastructure is better I believe.

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HEY OP - Can you share what niche your offer is in ? Nutra? Sweeps ? etc.. Just curious to see what niche in a obscure country is working. I am new to CPA offers, but no new to affiliate marketing. So this is a very interesting post. thanks BTW!

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These low paying offers are usually sweep, antivirus or other PIN submit offers, so that's what Im using too.

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Hm.. dunno on this one but given the different advancements, you may be on to something there

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They soon add up and i completely agree with your "insurance" mentality. I like to think of little campaigns as paying off a certain bill at the end of the month - "Hey there's my utility bills paid off by a trickling Oman campaign."

Also if 90% of affiliates are targeting Android OR IOS, why not just target Windows Phone? Huge ROI difference between Android and Windows Phone when i pushed some sweeps last year. Think who'd have a Windows Phone... (my Mum actually...) - people who are after a mobile handset as cheap as possible (sound like a good sweeps candidate?) - or who aren't very familiar with mobiles... and they're aggressive marketing messages...

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Exactly, since Im not the best "cash flow" manager in the world, spend more than I should and I also tend to become lazy, I love to have some backup campaigns running at all times And these small ones are perfect candidates for the autopilot mode

The windows phone remarks is a very valid one too, I also see this traffic perform well in many cases.

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This is a campaign I have on PropellerAds only targeting Blackberry. Propeller's daily estimated impressions is around 3,000. But, I'm not evening bidding the highest spot yet, so there's room to be the highest bidder to achieve a higher conversion rate or I could port this campaign onto multiple traffic sources only targeting Blackberry devices.

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Expect the campaign to die soon, you just invited a ton of affiliates to target blackberry with their campaigns

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Great read Matuloo!

Always suggest that the biggest market is not always the best

Thank you!

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Thanks for the advice here. As a beginner, it makes sense to me especially to just seek the area with lower amounts of competition! You have to start on the playground before you make it to the stadium I suppose.

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Pretty much so yes. On top of that, this method can actually make you a ton of money, it doesn't have to be a starter only.

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Do you just start with RON campaign, and if you see that overall campaign is not a big success, you find little pockets and extract them?

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Yup, this works the best with RON type of campaigns. The fact that you are cutting out the worst segments actually can lead to isolating pockets of profit and you can extract them and target with a whitelist campaign if you wish so.

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What is a RON campaign?

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Run Of Network - let's call it mixed traffic from all the placements/spots that a particular network sells traffic from. So instead of buying traffic just from specific sites/placements you buy from all the placements at once. Placement specific purchases are typical for Adult sources for example, because there are many HUGE sites in that niche. Contrary to POP or Redirect traffic, which comes from a thousand places and more.

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So is the strategy here to start with everything and then narrow down as it makes sense?

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Yup, the whole strategy in this thread is about starting with everything and then narrowing it down by cutting the worst segments/parts.

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matuloo- thank you for this thread. This is actually something I've been mentally battling with for a while (a few 'whales' vs lots of 'guppies'), and everything you've set out here is the validation I need to go after the lower hanging fruit to build confidence & bankroll.

Cheers!

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Yup, this is a perfect strategy to gain the so much needed self confidence.

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