Trying to Keep My Cool - PopAds + Mobidea (8)
Direct linking to smartlinks can work but you really have to be testing a lot of geo/carriers at the same time, and then when you see a geo/carrier is hot...you push traffic to it until it dies out. The campaigns do tend to die out very quickly though. It is a good way to learn the ropes and get some conversions, but it can be tough to be profitable right out of the gate. The barrier to entry is low for smartlinks, so there is a lot of competition. Personally, I didn't hit any bigger money campaigns until I started using landers and single offers. If you want to try that, you have a subscription to Adplexity so you can go see what types of funnels are working for other people and test some variations of that. Use it as a guide to get an idea of how things work, then innovate.
Hello Kevin!
priest already mentioned that and I will repeat - smartlinks and directlinking CAN work, but it usually won't ... it requires a lot of testing, plenty of offers and a lot of $ to burn until you find something that works. Using LPs and a smaller pool of verticals might be a good idea ... or stick with smartlinks, but ask your AM for the best performing segments and target those.
Since you picked
Please read them and come back with more questions 
Matej.
Smartlinks do work, but yes, competition will be fierce. Plus not every smartlink is built the same. Try Kimia as suggested by matuloo.
If you want to run worldwide traffic to identify some low-hanging fruit, make sure you bid low. The quality of traffic you get will not be great for sure, but the alternative would be to spend a ton more money. Try bidding the lowest bid that's allowed by the traffic source. You may find a few gems in tier 3/4 geos, and probably particular segments instead of the entire geo (e.g. a carrier and/or OS and/or browser).
And target carrier only. Running wifi traffic in a worldwide camp is asking for trouble. If you want to run wifi it would be more sensible to run each geo separately and do a bot test first to weed out the heavy-bot placements.
Once you find these low-hanging fruit, you can split them out into their own camps. Play with bids to see if you could get more volume and higher-quality traffic, and optimize further by cutting placements.
These camps probably won't make you rich, but you're at a point where you need to see SOME green to stay motivated, and hopefully you'll find some smaller green using this method.
Now you have several options from us. Choose one or all to test - looking forward to seeing further progress!
Amy
Hey guys! Just wanted to follow up with you all and let you know that your help is much appreciated.
I've decided to focus on the mobile Anti Virus PIN Submits/Installs vertical (Inspired by Mr. Payne's follow along). And I'm currently in the process of applying to several more networks that can provide such offers in Tier 2/3 GEOs.
In the meantime, I'm fixing up several AV landing pages I ripped off Adplexity so I'll be back in full force!
Stay tuned,
Kevin
Originally Posted by kevinadriel
I spent the last couple of days reading up on everything about AV offers and I'm feeling pretty frustrated.
There are two roadblocks I'm running into:
1. I'm having a hard time finding A/V offers in the networks I'm in and the few that there are are often scattered between GEOs with no more than a few offers per GEO.
2. In regards to promoting these offers, it seems there are plenty of restrictions from both my affiliate networks and traffic sources (POP traffic). Unless, of course, I cloak but even then I can't justify doing so.
I'll be pivoting over to sweepstakes as it seems there is a wealth of those offers on my networks and plenty of ways to promote them without using blackhat methods.
Anyway... for anyone reading this, the reason I'm typing this out is because I see one big issue newbies have is jumping from vertical to vertical without ever making fully attempting to make something work. And I guess I feel guilty of this right now given the statement I wrote two days ago. So! If this happens again, please call me out on my bullshit!
Best,
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
I am going through what exactly you are going. All these AntiVirus landing pages have to be not so aggressive or you have to cloak. I had a word with AM of one of the big traffic sources out there, and here is what he said -
"[7/14/17, 3:44:25 PM] <hidden name>:you could try to cloack till we bust you too ,)
[7/14/17, 3:45:25 PM] <hidden name>: some adv manage to do that for a long time )[7/14/17, 3:45:30 PM] <hidden name>: well....
[7/14/17, 3:45:49 PM] <hidden name>: if you do it wise it can be better for both of us...
[7/14/17, 3:46:06 PM] <hidden name>: if we don't get abuse from our pubs
[7/14/17, 3:46:23 PM] <hidden name>: then our both revenue just grows )
[7/14/17, 3:46:32 PM] <hidden name>: sure you see what I mean".
I think all big players do cloak, the difference in people surviving in the long run with cloaking depends upon how good they cloak.
And affiliates that cloak may get busted once in a while by advertisers and/or get banned from traffic networks. Aside from the technical aspect of cloaking, forming solid relationships with affiliate networks traffic networks will get you far as well.
For example, when you get busted by the advertiser and they don't pay out - if you have a good track record with the aff network and you've been honest with your AM, they may absorb the losses for you or at least a portion thereof. But if you've kept your AM in the dark about running against their rules, then they'd be under no obligation to pay you.
Another example is if you have personal contacts at traffic sources. Some will allow you to run against their TOS if you're doing volume and have a good relationship with them. It depends on who you know. Basically all traffic sources including FB, know that people are running blackhat, and blackhatters are paying good money and generating revenues for the networks as well. Traffic networks are only needing to find a balance between making money from blackhatters and at the same time keeping the percentage of blackhat stuff low enough to keep most of their publishers happy (or users in the case of FB).
So in the end, it's a combination of who you know, plus whether your cashflow can sustain the occasional losses when you get caught.
Anyways - getting a bit off topic here - Kevin you're making good progress! Looking forward to seeing you set up your first camp real soon! Don't try to make it perfect. Just take action, then learn from it and improve on it. I'm one of those people that likes to be well-prepared before doing anything, but when it comes to learning how to run camps, it's definitely much easier when you do have a bit of practical experience before reading and thinking further - the practical experience will accelerate your learning by a lot.
Amy
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