Beginner Series: Simple Method for Direct Linking to Profits (34)
Beginner Series: Simple Method for Direct Linking to Profits
So to commemorate the launch of my new website AffiliateSuccess.com, I wanted to share another very simple but fun method that I’ve used to quickly find profitable campaigns.
The great thing about this approach is that its quite easy to do and you can setup campaigns super quick. You don’t have to worry about ripping or split testing landing pages, which means you focus your time on gathering offers to test and reviewing your campaign data to locate the winners.
The Strategy
This method is so simple I feel like I’m not really giving you any tips. But maybe some of you will find this a great starting point that has an easy barrier to entry but keep in mind, you’re not likely to trick any huge campaigns with this approach.
The overall concept of the method is…
1. Pick one traffic source.
2. Choose one country to test offers for.
3. Select one main mobile carrier for the chosen country that has lot of mobile 1-click or 2-click offers.
4. Gather atleast 40 offers from one or more affiliate networks.
5. Setup a general test camp and direct link to the offers.
6. Remove offers that aren’t converting.
7. Blacklist poor performing placements.
8. Profit.
Pick a Traffic Source
So which traffic source should we use? Well, if you’re just starting out this method works exceptionally well with Zeropark and PopAds. That’s because these two sources have great traffic volume in many geos, PopAds even shares specific traffic estimates for the target settings you select and they show the average CPMs currently expected in the country you are wanting to test in.
Some things to keep in mind… since we are targeting mobile carrier traffic we will not be able to bid super low like you can on some types of campaign methods and offer types. There is also a more limited amount of mobile carrier traffic so when you find something that works, you will need to test and scale to other traffic sources.
Choose a Country
This part doesn’t require too much thinking. Basically any country that has 1-click or 2-click offers and plenty of them. Some of those countries are India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippians, Brazil and more. So don’t spend alot of time on this, just do some basic research and pick one.
Select a Mobile Carrier
Now, some countries are large enough to have several big mobile carriers and plenty of traffic for each of them. While others are smaller countries or only have one or two main mobile carriers. The last thing you want to do is get stuck trying to test and promote alot of offers that are designed for a mobile carrier who has very little market share. So again, do some basic research and choose wisely. This step is pretty straight-forward.
Gather Offers
Picking the right offers is not something you have to think much about with this method. Many of the offers you will be test you may not even know what the offer landing page looks like because you will be unable to access. While other may have screenshots of the landing page on the affiliate network you are gathering them from but even those screenshots may not be fully accurate.
There are lots of affiliate networks that have 1-click and 2-click offers. Two particular networks that I like to test with are Avazu and ClickDealer because they usually have a ton of offers to work with.
For example, if I were using Avazu I would simply log into my account and do the following steps:
1. Click Performance Ads
2. Click Mobile Campaigns
3. Click Filter By Traffic and select the country I am targeting.
4. Select Search Campaigns and type in the mobile carrier I have selected.
5. Click the Sort Tab that says Rankings.
6. You can hover over the offer and see the rankings and how popular that offer currently is.
7. Then grab the first 20 offers (or more) that allow direct linking.
Here is an example of one of the offers:
Setup Test Campaign
Next, you would add the offers to your tracker, like
I prefer to test the offers in batches of 5-10 but you can test as many as you would like at one time. Just be sure to allow enough traffic to run through the campaign that gives each offer a chance to convert before putting new offers in to test.
Pro Tip – I suggest that you start your bidding atleast 2x or 3x times the average bid and thats just to start. For example, on Zeropark I would run a little bit of traffic and then look at what the top bid is for some of the higher volume placements. If you are bidding $0.002 and the average top bid shows that it is $0.0075 then you are bidding way too low for the best traffic. In the beginning you will need to increase your bid to between 50-75% of the average top bid, so I would up it to $0.0055. And later you will likely need to increase it quiet a bit more to remain competitive. This is something that you will grasp better with time as you start to test and get more familiar with buying traffic.
Remove Non-Performing Offers
This is something else that varies but from my experience if an offer is hot and is going to work on your traffic source by direct linking, you will notice conversions coming in pretty quick. So if after approximately $5 spent per offer, if you aren’t get any conversions, you may want to consider replacing the offers with new ones to test. Now this estimate of what to spend will vary by GEO and offer payout but if you are testing offers in the $0.25 to 0.75 range, that should give you a good starting point to see if an offer will convert for you.
Also to note, during this phase I would not blacklist or cut any segments of traffic unless a particular high volume placement is just spending all of your budget without any conversions.
Once You Find a Converting Offer
After identifying a converting offer you will then need to remove all the other offers from your flow and just run traffic to this one offer exclusively.
Monitor its performance and be sure to quickly blacklist any placements that aren’t converting within $1-2 dollars of spend.
Profit
At that point, you should be seeing some green coming into the picture and you will start to make up for your testing budget and beyond.
Here is a quick snapshot of one simple campaign and the results I was able to achieve following this exact method outlined above.
Campaign Details
Spend: $339.12
Revenue: $572.16
Profit: $233.04
Timeframe: The campaign lasted for 3 Days
Pro Tip – Another great way to scale this campaign or to determine if using a landing page is better. After you find a converting offer, take the offer page domain name and go to Adplexity, click on the By Advertiser tab, select the Search In “All of the Above” option and insert the offer domain name and click search. You sometimes can find unique and creative landing pages that would be a good idea to split test along with your direct linking.
I hope this encourages you to try a new and simple method. Again, this method will not likely take you to huge profit but its a great method to get started with and get some experience under your belt as you continue your journey into affiliate marketing. Plus, there are tons of countries and offers that you can test with this method.
Free Coaching Giveaway - As a way of giving back I wanted to mention that I am doing a monthly giveaway where I select one affiliate to do a 30-minute coaching session with me at no cost. And if you don't win the first month, your name will remain on the list for a chance at future months. To enter you simply visit my website and fill out the short survey form for the coaching giveaway.
Good Luck!
Andrew
Thanks Mr.Payne, you have been dropping knowledge bombs lately. May I ask that you just send traffic to offers without landing page (Direct Link)?
Originally Posted by lamnguyen0406
Originally Posted by lamnguyen0406
Great guide!
How is it possible to get the revenues into
Originally Posted by osmiumman
If you setup your affiliate link correctly in
There are a handful of offers that sometimes you will need to manually set the payout in Voluum when setting up your affiliate link because the offer payout may be in a difference currency and you want to reflect the correct currency in your Voluum account.
Andrew
Awesome post thanks MrPayne. How important is it to have a one/two click offer? Can I use MO MT flow effectively?
Originally Posted by brandonsharpe
No, you need a 1-click or 2-click offer. You may find rare cases that it works with the other flows depending on how good the advertisers lander is but I've never tested it that way and personally wouldn't recommend it. You need a lander for those type of flows.
Andrew
Great tutorial. You can also use Adplexity to get an idea of which offers are doing well on direct link. Search by GEO & CARRIER on Adplexity and then sort by the ones receiving the most traffic or running longest. You will see a lot of 1-click or 2-click offers near the top and those would be good offers to add to your test.
Hi Andrew, thank you for this case study ... it helps me a lot with my tests 
May I ask you a couple of questions:
Originally Posted by Mr Payne
Originally Posted by Mr Payne
At that point, you should be seeing some green coming into the picture and you will start to make up for your testing budget and beyond.
Here is a quick snapshot of one simple campaign and the results I was able to achieve following this exact method outlined above.
Campaign Details
Spend: $339.12
Revenue: $572.16
Profit: $233.04
Timeframe: The campaign lasted for 3 Days
When I look at the targets in my test campaigns, I hardly see any top bids higher than $0.002 in India. Is this because I was bidding too low and more expensive targets haven't been "unlocked" in my campaigns?
Thanks!
Glad you are finding the case study useful.
To address your questions tho...
1. If you look back at my statement, I said that the AVERAGE TOP BID is .0075 and if you are only bidding .002, then you are way too low. There is an AVERAGE BID, then there is Zeroparks estimated TOP BID and then there is the ACTUAL TOP BID bringing in traffic (this is the one you manually take the average of). I can see how my statement may be confusing. But with Zeropark their "top bid" that they show is only an estimate based on advertisers using their platform. In many cases, the actual top bid for the best placements will be much much higher because Zeropark doesn't account for the advertisers on other sources (because ZP is brokering from other places). Using my original example, I would have adjusted my bidding to around .015 which is 2 x .0075. You have to find what targets are converting and at what bid range are they converting at, then bump up your bid to that general range for future testing to get the best traffic.
2. After I cut out the bad performing targets, here is a screenshot of the targets that were performing really well. You can see the CPV and other data for them:
Hope that helps.
Andrew
I'm new to affiliate marketing and interested in trying this method to get my feet wet. I'm still very much in the research phase, but ready to put some money in the pot in the next week or two. One thing I notice missing from your tutorial is anything related to ads/angles/creatives. Obviously, I think I'm missing something here. Do these offers have their own creatives, and you just send traffic to them?
My understanding of a typical campaign:
Traffic sees ad/angle/creative >> *CLICK * >> Lander, or in this case, direct link to offer page >> *CONVERT*
What am I missing?
Thanks!
Originally Posted by jmcrist
Welcome to the forum and to my thread.
You are correct, this method is using a format called Direct Linking because simply you are linking straight to the offer when you buy traffic. There are no other creatives/ads/angles that you need to use yourself.
Andrew
Originally Posted by Mr Payne
To address your questions tho...
1. If you look back at my statement, I said that the AVERAGE TOP BID is .0075 and if you are only bidding .002, then you are way too low. There is an AVERAGE BID, then there is Zeroparks estimated TOP BID and then there is the ACTUAL TOP BID bringing in traffic (this is the one you manually take the average of). I can see how my statement may be confusing. But with Zeropark their "top bid" that they show is only an estimate based on advertisers using their platform. In many cases, the actual top bid for the best placements will be much much higher because Zeropark doesn't account for the advertisers on other sources (because ZP is brokering from other places). Using my original example, I would have adjusted my bidding to around .015 which is 2 x .0075. You have to find what targets are converting and at what bid range are they converting at, then bump up your bid to that general range for future testing to get the best traffic.
2. After I cut out the bad performing targets, here is a screenshot of the targets that were performing really well. You can see the CPV and other data for them:
Hope that helps.
Andrew
I am new to AM and i am trying to understand your concept, but i was looking to the pic, and i was having a question about the third and last line from down. How is it possible to have 2 visits and 76 conversion and 0 visits and 8 conversion?
Tnx
LT
Originally Posted by lanateez
I honestly have no idea. It was a weird fluke that hasn't happened to any other campaigns.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for this very interesting strategy.
Quick question, you say:
"3. Select one main mobile carrier for the chosen country that has lot of mobile 1-click or 2-click offers."
But why select just one carrier? Why not select all carriers and then measure the performance
of each carrier in
Originally Posted by flashpacker
You can certainly modify this approach to your own liking but I highly recommend keeping each carrier in their own test campaign because bid prices will greatly vary for each one and having them all in a single campaign will many times cost you more and/or lose out on opportunities
Andrew
Okay so if I understand correctly, it would make good sense to try each carrier for a country, but
split them into their own separate campaigns. Or, does it make more sense to try one major
carrier, see if the offer(s) start performing well, and if so then take this offer and
test it on the other carriers?
Originally Posted by flashpacker
Either way, just depends. Some offers accept mutliple carriers, some offers are designed for just one carrier. And even if the offer accepts multiple carriers, there are many instances that it only works well on one carrier.
The idea of focusing on one carrier at a time is just to keep you very focused on your objectives and executing this strategy, for those who are beginners. Helps to not overwhelm you with too much at once.
Andrew
Andrew,
I just tried to start a direct link campaign but ZP rejected it saying they "Can't see the landing pages". What do I do in this scenario?
Originally Posted by digitaldreamsmktg
Well... I usually setup a generic lander that I use for approval for those direct link campaigns. Then I just send the exact traffic to the direct link offer.. but this may be against their terms, I'm not sure.
Usually you can find a screenshot of the offer page on your affiliate network and can send them the screenshot in an email or you can grab the actual offer URL and not your affiliate URL, submit the campaign with that and then later swap it out for your affiliate link.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Great guide, thank you. I'm new to AM and decide to give your strategy a go.
I have my tracking, traffic source and offers set up, but I have a mix of adult offers and non adult offers. Would you recommend to split them up and just send adult traffic to the adult offers and main stream traffic to the non adult offers, or should I just run all offers on both adult and mainstream? What do you think?
Thanks,
Bram
Originally Posted by lanateez
Just a quick clarification; I'm assuming you use the advertisers' banners? For example, if you were to select 5 offers from a country, you wouldn't make, say, 5 banners per offer? In this example, you would have 5 offers, 1 banner each, for a total of 5 banners being tested?
Can someone please share the link to sign up for Avazu? Thanks.
I googled but the form does not work - nothing happened when I clicked Submit button? Are they still in business.
I follow the aff link on Charles Ngo blog and still the same problem.
Thanks a lot.
The screenshot shows what I meant:
The dropdown for Country does not show any countries?
Ticking the 'I have read ... Terms and Conditions' does not show any ticks.
Click the Next button and nothing happened.
http://prntscr.com/fm0svy
Very clear write up Mr Payne. Cheers.
Hi Andrew -
This approach sounds great! I've just started a week ago and am working through Vortex's tutorial too. I've received plenty of traffic, but I am finding very low, to nil, conversions. I'm only using
..Geoffrey
Hello,
thanks for your great tutorial!
What type of traffic i should choose in ZeroPark - Standart or Premium PPV?
Is there any other offers which can work with direct linking? Thanks
Another great tutorial from Andrew. Thanks a lot
Great Post , keep it up Andrew.
However, I have got lot of 1 and 2 clicks for direct Linking, as Andrew advised, with better converting offer pages... connect with me for these Campaigns.
Thank you so much for all of the knowledge bombs you have dropped here. Would you still recommend testing with this method? I know vortex is removing the DL from the 40 day guide.
Mr. Payne is an absolute freak show with the pop game lol (lovely guy too if anyone gets to meet him at future events!) - afaik direct linking is a fine quick way to know if the offer will convert.. but landers is whats gonna make you profit in the end and have a lot more control over your campaigns $
Originally Posted by maynzie
What can I say, I do like to get freaky haha
--
As for this method, I do not advise putting much time into it. The landscape has changed a good bit over the last 18 months in the pop arena. I'm not saying this method no longer works but its less likely to work and isn't a good use of your time.
You would be better offer running a more traditional campaign that includes landers/offers and going with that approach.
Too many people are lazy and just want to direct link, expecting to have success - I encourage everyone to change your mindset from direct link.. but if you just want to dip your toe in the water with low effort to get some experience then sure, it doesn't hurt. Just expect little or no returns on the short run with this approach.
Best advice would be to target countries that are still known to have mobile content offers, like the middle east, italy and similar countries.
Cheers,
Andrew
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