Can Skills Overcome a Low Budget in Native? (10)
Hey! First of all, thanks in advance for any help or advice. This is really important to me because I'm trying to make a firm decision on what direction I'll be taking for the rest of the year.
It seems to be common agreement around here that Native needs a larger budget to break into properly, at least 10K.
To those nodding their heads: would you say that advice is meant for an internet marketing newbie looking to create their first profitable campaign, or is there something inherent to running traffic on native networks that requires a large budget just to get started and building a healthy placement list even if you have "skills" (w/o experience in Native, but surely many skills are transferable)?
The reason I ask is because I am not a new affiliate, but due to bad decisions I made over the past few years (professional stubborness/stagnation and debt) I am basically on a newcomer's budget right now and didn't make the jump to hot traffic sources of 2014-2016.
Goals & Deciding Factor
My short-term goal is to make a few hundred extra dollars a day to fix my financial situation, long term goal is to learn traffic sources with more traffic available and scaling potential than I currently have access to.
If it really takes 10K to get started in Native... then it's not realistic for me and I would begrudgingly default to getting into Mobile Pops.
If skill can reduce that budget significantly, then Native appeals to me more for several reasons (I can go into detail if anyone's curious, but trying to keep this post to-the-point.)
Things I have going for me:
* General affiliate marketing experience and strong copywriter
* Already on weekly payments with a few networks that are strong on Desktop offers, so if I hit a profitable campaign without breaking my finances first then I can have immediate cash flow
* I have been doing my homework and now understand the "process" behind creating a Mobile Pops campaign
Things I have going against me:
* Low initial budget, and cashflow is barely stable (difficult to run low ROI campaigns or "properly" test stuff)
* No experience running Mobile offers or running on Native
* If I choose Mobile, will have to work with new networks for offer selection, and won't have access to weekly payments
Thanks! This decision may be rather make-or-break for me, so I won't be making it lightly, and really appreciate you guys sharing your expertise. I basically signed up for this forum primarily to ask this question!
The budget for native is proportionate to the traffic price and payouts of successful offers.
You need to buy enough traffic, much more than on mobile and at a higher price no less, to really test native offers.
The "skills" in native are actually those placement lists from what I've seen and talked to those who do it. That has the biggest effect on your testing budgets. Different story for scaling.
Since you are a good copywriter, have you thought about Facebook ecommerce, with
Mobile pops are not ideal for a good copywriter, they are more of a techie's playground nowadays, if you really wanna make them work and not just learn the ropes of AM with a few dollars a day.
I'd actually say you should compare Native and Facebook options (Facebook is very vast, not just ecommerce) and pops would be a last resort.
PS: Tom Claflin (hlyghst on STM) who is an experienced Native guy had to spend $10k to get to BE on a case study he did for an iStack Training module.
Decisions, decisions, why they are always so hard for all of us. 
As Manu already pointed out the main difference between pops / native are bid prices and offer payouts.
On mobile you can get away with low offer payouts (let's say $0.8-5 for a subscription offer) versus $20-40 for diet or even more (hundreds) for bizop offers.
The traffic cost difference is then like $0.005 for a visit from pop vs. $0.5 for a click from native= 100% difference.
Of course the second click would have much better quality than the first one (as it's more targeted and the visitor decided to click himself 
)
That's the only reason why native requires higher budgets and is therefore most of the time not friendly to newbies with lower budgets.
So you can do some math for yourself.
The copywriting skill could be a slight advantage for you, but count in that most of the good copy has been already written and is easily findable using spy tools.
However using it for new angle creation and creativity? There you go!
Just my 2 cents.
Now it's your turn to decide
Besides the good arguments from manu and erik, i would like to throw ROI into the mix.
Many verticals on Native average 20-40% ROI.
So while finding a winning campaign is way easier on native than on pops for example, it needs however a way bigger budget to do big absolute figures.
It would take forever to grow a 2k budget with low margins (after deducting cost of doing business).
It depends on what traffic source you run on, not every native traffic source requires 10k budget to be profitable, and you can definitely achieve your 3 figs/day profit goal without 10k.
But if you want to hit 4 figures profit campaigns generally you'll have to run on sources like revcontent and the ROI would be 20-40%(I believe it's the ROI of running compliantly, no cloaking) as sebastian_r mentioned above, that's why most people say you need at least 10k(you need at least 10k to run on revcontent).
For skills to overcome a low budget on native, if you have skills that can help create new angles, optimize landing pages, bring new verticals to a traffic source, find new traffic sources, then it'd help, but I wouldn't rely on them though since you still need budget to test, and test is the key.
The above are from my own experience running on native, may not apply to everyone.
I'm an experienced marketer, 15 years experience programer, had success in pop before i go to native, spend $3,000 to attended 6wamc. so I would say i have some skills in this business.
I spent over $20,000 to make native work.
so, I would not jump in native if I don't have $50,000 in the bank.
The reason is, native ads have high cpc. high cpc will require high payout offers. with high payout offers, you need more money to get 'statistical significant'. If the offer is $1, $10 can give you 'statistical significant'. if the offer is $50, $500 will do that. you need 'statistical significant' for all the factors, including the offer, the creatives, the widgetid, the lander and so on.
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Let go make some money. My Skype: jack@hearttell.com
Originally Posted by dollar
I got in early on native (almost 4 years ago). It was ridiculously profitable from day one, and we were the #2 advertiser on Taboola for over a year hs our main geo.
Now it has gotten extremely competitive, and with tools like Adplexity and Optimizer, it is getting more and more competitive each day. I think focusing on geos with less competition is probably your best bet if your budget is limited.
Middle East and LATAM are very good geo's for native traffic! Stay away from english speaking geo's.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
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