Essential Tools vs What's Optional for push traffic? (6)
Hi there,
I've been wanting to address this question for some time for all successful affiliates here. In your experience, which tools you learned were absolute MUST or which you could have save your money on. Perhaps, at least until later as with scaling and growth different types of challenges arise.
I understand that basic essential tools for affiliates with any traffic options are:
- Hosting
- Tracker
- Spy Tools
Two below are in my understanding are optional but used by many. Having used in the past optimizer myself with native traffic, I understand it makes your job easier at first. After traffic has been optimized in my experience mainly it serves as a safeguard, timesaver if you do not want to do things manually. I actually like it.
- Optimizer tools
- Cloaking Tools
I've never used Cloaking Tools and I am curious if you think this tool is a must? I totally understand the purpose of the cloaking tools. My question, how significant are your results have been, and were you able to measure your success before & after? (it seems to me that the main reason to justify this expense is to ease your paranoia about others stealing your shit. Which basically, is not really yours, unless you have created your own from scratch). However, I do also understand that it is also used to filter bot traffic, get safe approvals, etc. If you do use it, please share what is the main reason you do it for?
Are there any other tools that you would recommend? And why?
Trust me, I'm not trying to complicate things. I also want to make sure I am not missing anything. I just hate to waste my time, energy and money on something I could have live without or delay until it's due.
P.S.-I'm posting in this section as I'm starting to test with push for the first time. If it belongs somewhere else, please excuse me and feel free to move.
Thank you very much for your feedback.
It depends a lot on what you are promoting and how.
The only thing that you really can not do without is hosting or at least a CDN that you can host your LPs on. All the other tools are just going to make your life easier, so to speak. And there are also some tools that you need to use in case your marketing approach is of specific nature, such as cloaking.
So hosting is a must.
Tracker is almost a must, but many sources now offer conversion tracking so you can do without tracking. But I personally like to keep my data private, so for me tracker is a must. It's also way easier to split test something and rotate landers/funnels with a tracker.
So tracker is pretty much a must too.
Spytools can help a lot, but they are not essential for your success. In some verticals, adult for example, it's quite easy to spy manually. But in some verticals/niches spying is way harder and a spytool can greatly speed the process up.
So spytools are not a must, but they can dramatically increase your effectivity, save time and also serve as the ultimate source of inspiration. I recommend everyone to use spytools in case they can afford this.
Optimizers can help a lot too, as you mentioned they make ones life easier. They can also be of invaluable help with traffic sources that introduce new publishers all the time. It would be very hard to keep an eye on all of them, and an optimizer can handle that.
I'd say an optimizer is a must for someone who works with many traffic sources that work with 100s or 1000s of publishers, adding new ones all the time, which makes manual optimization a nightmare. For someone who focuses on a bunch of premium placements, or just a single traffic source... optimizer would be a waste of money.
Cloaker is another one where the nature of the business plays a big role. Anyone who's doing something blackhat, simply has to use a cloaker. So in case you're breaking the rules of the traffic source or the advertiser, you need to cloak and a cloaker is a must. Another reason for using a cloaker is to protect your LPs, so in case you're investing a lot of resources into building your own LPs, it might make sense to protect them with a cloaker. But for affiliates who run whitehat and use standard LPs that are out there, cloaking is a waste of money.
The question of making more before cloaking or after is not really valid in many cases. In case of BH campaigns... you can't really run them without a cloaker, so it's a question of whether you want to do it or now. Without cloaking you cant, with cloaking you can and the results will depend on the quality of your funnel and offer, not the fact that you are cloaking. In case of protecting a LP with cloaking, it can definitely increase the revenue by prolonging the duration of the campaign... but it's kinda impossible to express it in numbers. Eventually, every LP will end up in spytools anyways, and it's hard to say how much longer it's gonna take because of the cloaker.
There are also a few other tools that you might want to use, based on your business setup.
Planning to collect some leads yourself and working with the audience later on? You would need an email collection box plus an email management tool to handle the campaigns. Alternativley you could use a push notification tool to collect your own subscribers and send them messages later on.
Again, such tools are a must in case you want to use such an approach.
And let's not forget about networking and education. STM for example, it comes at a price, but it can be valuable in so many ways. Then there are online education courses, some of them providing a lot of value that can greatly reduce the learning curve. Conferences, not a cheap thing again, but just one right contact gained during it can pay for all the expenses and change your life.
These are not a must either, but they can totally help to move anyone's career further.
It all comes down to what one wants to achieve and how Many of the things that tools handle can be done manually, it just takes more time and effort that can be better spent elsewhere
Thank you very much!
Did you ever figure this out? I would say nowadays Cloaking Tools are a must with everything. All of the above for basic essential tools are still "essential" as well. I would say that most of my pubs rely heavily on cloaking and it is a must have. Results are much better. Trust me worth the time.
Originally Posted by matuloo
Learning from others, camaraderie, business connections, market insights... the value is so high here I would place this as almost essential, right up there with tracker and hosting.
By the way there are some affiliate conferences that give out free passes. https://www.affiliatesummit.com/ase1...affiliate-pass
I think the main thing you need is just a lot of hard work. The basics you need to start is a good offer, Tracking tool that can help you with the monetizing part and just a daily routine of drill downs and see and analyze you daily progress. There is no magic here, only hard work
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