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Some questions from noob in Affiliate Marketing (19)

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Hi, I have been interested in Affiliate Marketing for some time now, and decided it's good time to start. However, I'm a bit confused and would like to ask few questions.
First I would like to tell, that I'm already experienced in website development. Due to that, I'm not sure if sweepstakes is the best vertical for me. I would really like to avoid aggresive landers/creatives - I would like to make my campaings 100% legally safe. Do you think non-aggresive landers could be profitable in this vertical?
I'm already approved for Mobidea and Gotzha. There are some sweepstake SOI offers, however offers in Tier 3 geos have only low payouts like ~$0.3. Also it's hard to find few offers with same prize and geo to test. So should I start with Tier 1 countries like UK, ES etc. with payout like ~$2-$2.5 or with Tier 3 with payouts about ~$0.3?
I'm also not sure if pop traffic is best option in my case.

To start, I have budget about $1000, but I'm willing to increase it if I see some potential. Considering my website development skills, budget and prefferences maybe could you recommend me approach? Should I use something different than sweepstakes? Maybe should I use different vertical and push or native traffic?

Thank you!

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Hey, nice to see you here

Generally speaking sweepstakes requires certain level of misleading landers to convert - get your FREE iphone, your iphone will be shipped in the next x days, you win, claim prize, etc. .

I'm glad that you are thinking about it before diving deep into it.

I'd like to point you to @vortex answer that might help you (assuming that you want to start with pops). Answer is HERE

By the way you sound pops might not work for you in a long term, but it might be worthwhile to get your feets wet using it.

Thing with pops is following: this is the cheapest traffic type out there, the best one to learn how to set up tracking and set up campaigns as mistakes that will happen are not THAT pricey.

That 1k$ is budget for advertisements only or total budget for advertisements + tools?

Don't want to scare you off but there are other costs besides the ones required for ads itself like tracker (60-100$/month), spy tool(s) (100-200$+/month), STM (100$), server in case of self-hosted tracker (20-50$/month) so this all adds up to a major cost overhead.

1k$ might just not last that long when taking that into consideration.

If it comes to skipping any of the overhead costs:

skipping tracker cost - running campaigns without a tracker is not worth the money spent as you won't be able to optimize your campaigns accurately

skipping spy tools cost - it is possible after getting one month subscription to rip as much landers as you possibly can. this 150$ish will still be less compared to reinventing the wheel by preparing everything from the scratch - solid intel is important in this industry, you got to see what's working and based on that make a decisions what can be improved to make it unique

skipping STM cost - wouldn't advise that, STM overdelivers by the sheer amount of valuable content, starting separate follow-along thread is also advised, people are generous here and are willing to help with any issue that you are going to struggle with, and asking questions will speed up learning process A LOT

Native traffic is huge NAY for the budget that you stated, it's just a fraction that you would need to approach it, really.

Native is for a muscular men and you are just preparing for the first gym training ever in your life.

Hope it helps,
plutus

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Thank you!

If you mean set up technical side of campaings, tracking, A/B test, hosting etc. I'm already familiar with it. I'm working in web development industry for about 10 years

That budget tis for advertisement only, I will have additional budget for tools and STM forum.
I'm just not sure if it makes sense to use spy tools in my case. I already have some most popular landers, because I was downloading packs from adplexity and I can just customize them for different offers. I can also create landers from scratch when it's required.

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It's always nice to see another coder up here at STM

I've been involved in web dev myself for the past 5 years but got no knowledge at all about A/B testing and setting up campaigns when I started out working on AM so that's why I listed those.

Question is: what you want to achieve? You mentioned that you want to make your campaigns 100% legally safe - pops are legally safe (unless you use branded logos) but are misleading/aggressive.

If you aim to promote 100% legally safe non-misleading / non-aggressive whitehat offers you might want to consider Facebook.

There is a cool newbie-friendly Facebook tutorial prepared by @vortex here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Tutorial-Index

And also the one prepared by @stickupkid here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...9-Introduction

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Welcome to the forum "newinaffiliate"

Plutus already took great care of you and answered pretty much all the questions you had, so not much to add here, but maybe a few sentences from me:

- in case you want to run just 100% clean campaigns, sweeps might not be the best offer type for you. It's not like it would be illegal to run sweeps, but as plutus mentioned, due to to competition it's kinda needed to exaggerate and be a bit misleading with your creatives, which you might not consider to be 100% clean.

Since you're a developer, you won't have to keep a non-stop subscription to adplexity or other spytool, you can download in batches and then edit and modify as needed.

POP traffic serves as the entry for many affiliates and large part of them move on to other types later on. POPs are cheap and you can literally start running them in a matter of hours or even minutes. This makes them the perfect training ground for any newbie. You might want to try and run a few POPs traffic, even if you know you will end up somewhere else, it's great training.

Since you want to operate in the clean area, I would look at either clean leadgen or ecomm and you will most likely end at Facebook, Google or some native networks. Here is a great thread for you, where a forum member talks about an interresting leadgen concept: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ffer-with-Push

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Lots of helpful advice has been given - here's my contribution:

-If you don't wish to be misleading/aggressive, then you'd most likely want to stay away from pop and push. There ARE ways to promote SOME type of offers without being misleading, but then you'd be restricted in your choice of offers. And/Or it would be harder to compete with affiliates that DO run very aggressive angles.

-As for payouts: For sure start with low-payout offers. Low-payout offers will allow you to learn the same lessons for a lot cheaper. You can collect a lot more conversions for the same budget which means you can get more data to learn how to optimize a campaign. And please don't underestimate the profitability of low-payout offers - this thread should inspire you:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...rs(-lt-1-cent)

-Sweeps offers can be promoted on pop, push, and FB. But with how strict FB is these days, I wouldn't suggest to promote sweeps there unless you have access to a steady stream of accounts. Can't say I've seen sweeps being promoted for native. (Just checked Adplexity native - haven't found sweeps.)

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So to summarize: If you don't want to be scammy/spammy, stay away from pop and push. That leaves you Native, FB, and Google. (Of course there are other traffic sources as well - e.g. youtube, pinterest, linkedin, tiktok etc. - it's just that there isn't a ton of info on STM for these sources.)

For FB and Google, account bans are a real problem, especially FB. I would suggest to be very careful about promoting affiliate offers on FB. If you really want to promote aff offers, google may be safer than FB in terms of account longevity.

Native: Account bans are definitely a LOT more rare than for FB/Google. Big sources like Taboola and Outbrain are more strict about compliance - you'll find out after a few campaigns get rejected. But there are also sources that are more lenient. The downside is you'll need more than $1000 just to learn the ropes. If you want to give native a try I'd suggest to stick with low-payout offers - like the lead gen offers I was promoting in the Outbrain case study: https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...ewbie-Tutorial

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Lastly: Have you considered ecom? I've put some suggestions on how to start, in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post408864

Hope that helps!



Amy

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You could always try all of the above...

You might be surprised and really like x vs y, or a vs b... or trying one might lead you to something else you haven't considered yet.

If there's one thing I regret from when I started its not trying out enough different traffic sources.

They're all really different and I think it's very hard to know what is going to work for your personality-type and logistical capabilities beforehand.

With that said, @plutus and @vortex already gave a ton of great answers, but one thing I was going to additionally throw out there is push...

I don't run push myself but some of the native networks we run on like Revcontent have separate push traffic, plus there's all the regular push sources... that might be a nice medium where you don't have to spend as much as native, but also have more flexibility to run a greater range of offers...

Just my two cents...

As long as your taking massive daily action and being at least semi-purposeful about what you're doing I'm sure you'll wind up finding success with something eventually

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Wow, thank you for all your answers, that's awesome! It's so helpful!

At first, I would like to explain what I mean when I wrote that I want to make landing pages 100% legally safe. I will use sample from this amazing tutorial created by @vortex: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...518#post359518

I would like to avoid landing pages like these:



I don't mind using landing pages like these:



I just would like to make them copy-wise compliant. Do you think these less-agresive landers have chance to work in current times?

For now, with budget $1000, my goal is to learn a bit of affiliate marketing and would like to get some revenue to motivate me.
I understand that with this budget, I will not be able to get stable net profit in my first month. However it would be great if my ROI would be not worse than -75%. Then I would be motivated to increase my budget and continue working in AM

I don't mind being a bit misleading, I just don't want to use brands logos etc. I just want to be sure that landers are 100% legal and also I don't want to be banned for too aggressive landers.

Is it related to all verticals mentioned in your 40-day tutorial and @twinaxe push tutorial? I was considering starting with one of these vertical: antivirus, dating, desktop cleaners, streaming or mobile content. It looks like these verticals don't require to use too aggresive or misleading landers.

It's good idea and certainly I would like to do it in future. For now, I'm not sure if my budget $1000 is enough to try all these traffic types.


@vortex, @matuloo and @plutus suggested me ecommerce and facebook/google traffic. It's amazing idea and I see it as a great opportunity. However, it's something what I would like to do in future. I don't want to risk getting banned in fb/google when I'm just getting started. Also before starting own ecommerce store, I would like to learn affiliate marketing in different ways.

Promoting ecom CPA offers looks like very good idea for me, just I would like to avoid FB/Google for now. Maybe I would give it a try in Native traffic sources, but how big budget would be required?

By the way, I already prepared some non-aggresive landers for sweepstakes. If someone would be willing to rate them and give me opinion whether they have a chance to convert, I will willingly share them with you in private message.

Thank you!

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They can work, but you will be competing against people who have no problems using the "less" compliant ones so you need to outperform them in some other way... maybe better copywriting, better targeting, faster setup etc...

If you set everything up properly, you simply MUST reach better numbers than this, you will do better than that for sure (I believe)

The answer here is similar to the one I gave you above... all of these verticals can work with less aggressive creatives, but they naturally attract those who are not afraid to cross the line a bit, which means you are about to compete against the wolves. POP and PUSH traffic sources are much more lenient when it comes to aggressive LPs and ADs compared to Facebook or Google, for example. That's why all the affiliates, who don't mind running aggressive stuff, work with this traffic types. So again, you will need to outperform these guys in some other way

$1000 definitely is NOT enough to start with native, hard to say how much would be enough, but I wouldn't even think about it with less than $5k at your disposal.

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Ah OK - so a little misleading is OK, but just not outright scamming people. Got it!

Just to make sure - I've JUST logged into Adplexity mobile to check out the top 10 sweeps campaigns that are running the highest traffic volume - and they ALL say "you've won" or "claim prize". So things haven't changed since I last checked. Would this be too misleading for you still? If you'd be OK with these, then you'll be find running sweeps on pop and/or push.

You MAY want to stay away from credit card submit offers though, because in order to make people pull out their credit cards, you sort of NEED to be aggressive, e.g. "you have a package at the post office that you want to pick up - but only after paying a fee".

Also - below are a couple more tips on how to compete if you decide to not even use "you've won" or "claim prize" or logos:

1)Stay on sources that have STRICT rules for compliance. PropellerAds comes to mind. They're a bit less strict on push, but for pop it's no logos and no "you can win". That way at least the playing field is leveled and you're not running against super-aggressive landers.

2)Make your landers SUGGESTIVE but not AGGRESSIVE. Basically you want to be as subtle as possible when dialing down from aggressive to compliant. So for sweeps - try "you could win" instead of "you can win". Instead of using logos, use similar colors and layouts as big authoritative sites like FB (blue and white) or google (letters with different colors + white background) or amazon (black + orange). A couple of examples on suggestive colors and layouts:





Lastly: Please be aware that different sources require different levels of compliance. It's not easy or likely to get an account ban on pop/push sources due to just submitting a few non-compliant campaigns, so just submit a few with landers of various "levels of aggressiveness" and see which will get accepted to find out the tolerance of a particular network. And of course you can just message their support ahead of time, to show them your lander ahead of time to ask whether it'd be permissible or not.


First month you'd probably still be learning the ropes, but if you work diligently, getting an ROI of -75 or better over the first couple/few months would be doable - one recent example is @plutus who achieve -6x% in his first two months: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post408623


For antivirus and desktop cleaners - my past experience was that it'd be difficult to NOT be misleading when promoting these. The only times when I was successful without being aggressive was when I was promoting major brands that people were already familiar with - so if you can get permission to run such offers, I would recommend to go for it. Just be ready to have your landers pre-approved by your AM.

Streaming or mobile content - absolutely you can run these without using aggressive angles. In fact, most of these you can test by direct-linking. Even if you're testing landing pages, it would be great to split-test against direct-linking to make sure. Because the use of landing pages does NOT automatically mean better CR!

Dating - yes you can choose to run these without being misleading as well.



So in summary: Yes I guess it would be possible to make pop and push work without using super-aggressive landers, and I've done my best in giving suggestions to improve your chances. Just be prepared that you'd be restricted in the range of offers you'll be able to promote, and perhaps the number of suitable traffic sources that would be most suitable to you. And of course on some sources you may be at a disadvantage when competing with affiliate that are running aggressively.


Here's something I absolutely want to clarify: If FB+Google are where you're wanting to run eventually, then "learning the ropes" with pop/push first, will not help you much.

The 40-day tutorial MAY still be useful to browse through for setting up lander hosting+CDN+DNS infrastructure, but really, FB and Google are entirely different beasts compared to pop/push.

Meaning: Even when you have a lot of experience with pop and push, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll have an advantage when you transition to FB/Google.

I'm neither encouraging nor discouraging you from running any of these traffic types. Just wanted to clarify this so you won't waste your time unnecessarily, thinking that running pop/push first will reduce your chances of getting accounts banned on FB/google.

Because chances are, it won't.

As far as running affiliate offers goes: Based on my conversations with other affiliates, it has become extremely difficult to promote affiliate offers on FB without account bans. I would welcome anyone to tell me I'm wrong - in fact I'd be very happy to hear! Google may be better. Other PPC search platforms like Bing may be even more lenient.

Hopefully we've provided you with enough information for you to make some decisions. And of course if you have further questions, please don't hesitate to keep asking!

As for your sweepstakes landers: No need to show us! Just run traffic and see the results! Stats don't lie!



Amy

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Thank you again for all your answers!

Right, I understand. I was interested in POP traffic because it's cheap. Probably it's not something what I would like to do for too long time. Perfect situation for me would be learning pop traffic, then stabilize some small profit and use it to learn native advertising, but I understand that it would be hard without using aggressive prelanders.



Situation here would be similar to what I said about pop traffic. I can spend $1000, just would like to see potential there and at least a bit of revenue. Then I can increase budget to next $1000 and if there would be progress, I can increase again.

Yes, exactly! I don't mind misleading, just don't want to scam people.

Maybe these verticals would be more suitable for me. But I didn't found SOI offers for dating and mobile content. Most of them are click2sms/2click/pin submit.

Yes, I understand that. I'm already familiar with technical setup. I just wanted to start from pop and push as it seems to be cheapest option and it would be a "first step" for me.


So as you suggested, I tested my landing pages. I prepared 4 LP. Offer is sweepstake SOI, gift card/voucher. Geo - TH. Payout is $0.30. I used PropellerAds Popunders. I used rule Budget = Number of landing pages x payout. There was 30 unique clicks but no conversion.Here are stats:


Do you think it make sense to try different offer with these landings? Or just stats for these landings are too bad to continue testing them?

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I would suggest to run with Gotzha to build some revenue stats, then apply to other networks to expand the range of offers you have access to. Clickdealer for example has all kinds of different offers in all different verticals, so would be an ideal playground if you want to test different things. Once you know what you're wanting to focus on, you could then seek out networks that specialize in that type of offers (and/or run directly with advertisers / offer-owners).

For mobile content, you can also try video streaming offers. Those normally have payouts that are too high for beginners though, unless you can find ones that pay per free trial/signup.


Understood! Just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.


Those 4 landers - did they include the 3 most popular lander styles (survey, spinning wheel, gift box)? And did you optimize them for speed? The CTR looks low for TH.

And how much did you bid? Because the bid can have a big impact on traffic quality.



Amy

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Playing with POPs for a while would be a good idea, no matter the outcome. It's good practice, no matter how you look at it. You need to get the feel of running a live campaign, doing some optimizations, setting up the whole funnel etc... and as you said yourself, POPs are cheap so it's definitely a good choice for the starters. But as Amy mentioned in one of the above replies, it also depends on where you want to land later on... what you learn with POPs is easily transferable to PUSH for example, or even adult traffic, but won't help you much if you want to move into FB traffic.

Native traffic has a lot of potential, I can tell you that much The problem is a huge amount of widgets/placements and the specifics of the particular algos. The biggest native networks prefer buyers who take all the traffic, without doing laser targeted optimizations... global buyers who take all the traffic are their favorites. And to run such experiments takes a lot of $$$ and quite a robust setup, in order to be able to monetize the mix of traffic. It's also a known fact that native traffic tends to work better with higher payout offers (not always of course, there are exceptions) and that translates to higher testing budgets. Native definitely isn't all that newbie friendly.

If that doesn't scare you, which I'm not saying it should, native has a lot of potential, the volumes are insane.

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It's good idea, I think I will try! Just on Gotzhaa there is not too much offers like that.



They were all surveys and were optimized for speed. I was using smart cpm bid.



Is there Native traffic network which is more newbie friendly or easier to start with small budget?

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I removed LP2, LP3 and LP4 and tested that offer again with new prelanders. I made them a bit more aggressive and used spinning wheel and gift boxes. There was 1 conversion. Stats looks like this:


Looks like UCTR is improved. What do you think, should I test different offer with these prelanders?

Thank you!

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I'm not sure if there is any exactly newbie-friendly native network, since it's the nature of the traffic that's not suited for newbies in the first place.

But there are some networks that are more forgiving and not that strict, so we could say these are better for those who are starting out... MGID is one of them, Revcontent isn't that strict either. I would start with these two.

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You can find them by going to an offer aggregator like offervault. But you're making good progress with sweeps right now so I'd suggest to focus your efforts there - there are tons and tons of sweeps offers to test!


Yup as you've found out yourself, testing more landers is the way to go. You've tested one of each lander style. And that's a good start. Next you can keep running your existing landers to hopefully get enough conversions to cut down to a winner lander (please use a statistical calculator), and then you can use that lander to test more offers.

Once you find a promising offer, you can either focus on optimizing by cutting unprofitable traffic segments, or you can do another round of lander testing or offer testing first.


Please see my answer above.

Also: Don't be afraid to test more offers! The idea is to test enough landers first to make sure you lock down a good one, and then you can use it to test as many offers as you can find, that your AM has confirmed are not duds (i.e. have bad performance or even no longer active).

Testing lots of landers and MASSIVE amounts of offers is almost the only way to succeed with pop and probably push.



Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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I think on Revcontent there is no possibility to whitelist, so maybe I will use MGID. I was thinking about spying offers on Adplexity, modifying landing pages a bit and running offer in placements which are sending biggest part of traffic to spied offer. What do you think about that approach?



So as I understand, recommended approach is to select one winner lander and then test different offers? My concern is whether best performing lander in TH would be also best lander for UK, DE etc. as these countries are much different

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I meant different offers in the same geo and for the same sweepstake prize, e.g. other iphone 12 offers in TH.

However, if you're wanting to save time, you can prepare a single set of landers:

1)That includes at LEAST one of each popular sweeps lander style: Survey, spinning wheel, and gift boxes. (I would actually recommend having 2 versions of each lander style - but up to you.)

2)Optimize them for speed as much as possible.

3)Have them translated into different languages (cheaper on Fiverr but OHT can work if you don't have too much text).


You WILL need to customize them for different prizes and different locations:

-For different sweeps prizes: You'll need to prepare one set of these landers for each sweeps prize, but most will involve replacing the product image and text of the product name. You can try to download images of different prizes from different landers on Adplexity. For the spinning wheel just find another lander with a suitable image and download that.

-For different cultures: If you have a lander that has fake comments from fake people, you'll want to use names and images that correspond to people that are actually from that country/culture. e.g. Use Arabic names and profile pics for Saudi Arabia/UAE/Egypt/etc., German names and faces for Germany/Austria/Luxembourg/etc.

Or - if you're REALLY wanting to save time - just find landers that don't have comments - keeping in mind that the lander may not convert as well. But for an initial test it should be enough. Just remember to test more landers once you find an offer that looks promising.



Amy

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Yup, that would make a lot of sense. If you see specific offers being promoted heavily on specific placements/networks it should definitely indicate it's working well for someone.

Just a small note: spytools are not 100% accurate, it's not possible because of cloakers, some error factors, networks detecting them etc... so always take the data with a grain of salt. In some cases, the tools might miss something or show cloaked results that hide the real offers. Keep that in mind and always confirm the theories with your own tests.

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