Hey guys. I'm in a situation where I may be quitting my salaried position as a media buyer to re-enter the affiliate space.
I'll TRY and keep it short:
I made a bunch of money promoting my friends offers back in the day on facebook off and on from 2008-2011 but took LONG breaks in between and never scaled like I could have, played around with display and cloaking fb a bit in 2012 with moderate success, and quit the game in 2013. Along the way I made a ton of financial/tax mistakes and wound up declaring bankruptcy.
In late 2014, I started working for my friend again for a super low salary (for bankruptcy reasons). I've been media buying for his offers on facebook and taking care of a bunch of other aspects of his businesses. A lot of people in the office tell me regularly that the place would fall apart without me.
My bankruptcy is over now and we started talking about what my compensation would look like. Bottom line: his idea of fair compensation is insulting and I'm going to leave the company unless we can come to a much better arrangement.
So here's my question: If you were starting over today, what would you do? Assume a $20-30,000 dollar starting budget and a moderate amount of risk tolerance.
I can quite likely drum up some consulting/freelance work with a few people I know to keep me afloat if I'm unprofitable for an extended period but not enough to make a real business out of it. My short term goal would be to get a (relatively) stable $1K a week profit.
Cloaking fb and all the headaches and volatility that come with that is out of the question. If it's FB it's gotta be white hat. I've been mulling over native as it seems like a pretty forgiving traffic source for affiliate shenanigans and traffic quality is apparently quite good.
If you want to go down the native route, learn tracking and optimizing on mobile pops or display. learning the basics on native will eat your mentioned budget in no time.
Once you got a grip around the basic topics you can make a move. But its not all sunshine in the native world. And things are changing at a rapid pace currently (not to the better).
My 2 cents on Native:
Native can be either hit or miss, so optimized campaign is key, with a list of on-point whitelisted placements. There is a ton of competition, and the way you bid, approach the system will vary source to source. I recommend starting one traffic source like Revcontent and sticking with it, learning how to get the best CPC and such.
In my case I started doing a Clickbank Battery Reconditioning offer as my first offer getting into AM.
I did not realize that to optimize this campaign, it would take a lot of money. None the less, I was actually making like $60 profit a day for the first week and a half, even had a few days where I made over $300. Also had a few days where I lost $100. After two weeks of this, apparently people caught on that I was making some profit (with a not optimized campaign mind you) and I started getting a ton of competition. Soon after I had to drop the offer as I was seeing more negative days than positive days, even though I was starting to optimize and even had a good whitelist.
Long story short, native is quite volatile when you promote offers like this. Some days you will kill, some days you will be pulling out your hair.
There are other ways to do it with native though, so you can explore them all. You can incorporate some list building in there (best for long term), or make one of those sites with an article that is spread out over like 20 pages (mostly images and little text) with a shit load of ads. If you do calculations correct, you could make more from the Google Adsense payout then you spend per click.
A site I like to use to get a sense of what people run is www.ConservativeTribune.com
Anton