Affiliate Marketing General

I've recently started going away from Amazon. The conversions are high, but your cut is so low that it's not worth it (in my niche at least). If you sold boats on Amazon I guess I could see how it's good.

CJ and Shareasale and other niche specific affiliate programs are what I'm really trying out now.

IMO Amazon still works well because people buy more than what you link them to.

If you link someone to a blender they might also buy some paper towels, some kitchen cleaning wipes, and a new crisper for their fridge.

Amazon has everything so it has become the Walmart of online shopping. This generally means it'll be here to stay for a while.

But I do agree there are tons of other affiliate programs out there to test. If you can find niche-specific offers they'll work very well(ie. arts&crafts, golfing, sewing, cookbooks etc)

I haven't tried to join Shareasale but I've heard great things about quality, esp compared to Clickbank.

But for newbies Amazon is an excellent way into the field. You'll definitely convert people once they click over and the site has basically everything you could ever hope to sell

what do you consider a profitable niche?
any directions in finding one?

There's so many possible niches and so many variables that it's unproductive to tell you a single niche, because once you understand how to find one (it's really easy) then you won't have that question again.

Niche choices can be seasonal or year round. For example, you can make a website about easter products that obviously wouldn't do well in September, but you could end up making a lot of money during easter season.

Like I've already mentioned, you can look through Amazon best selling products and get ideas from there. Let me do that right now just to give you an example.

Okay, here's an Omaker M4 Portable Bluetooth Speaker. If you're an audiophile, you could easily have some fun with this product. If not, it's still a good item to promote.

Now from this product, there's lots of things you can stem from. Make a niche about bluebooth products, about speakers, about music listening devices in general. You can even go a bit broader and make your website about what does good music sound like (music theory). These are just ideas off the top of my head.

For this, we'll say the niche we'll be testing is "bluetooth speakers".

Next, use a keyword tool to search up products related to bluetooth speakers.

I'm not using my own tool for this, but here's some ideas I'd enter in:

best bluetooth speakers 2017
best bluetooth speakers
where do i buy bluetooth speakers
should i get a bluetooth speaker
what is a bluetooth speaker

and so on. After analyzing the numbers for these, you want to have about less than 100 competitive websites while still getting at least hundreds of searches per month. If there's too much competition or not enough searches per month, try out a new idea for a niche (e.g. "bluetooth products" instead of "bluetooth speakers").

(1/2)

Once you have a good niche, you can come up with ideas to produce content (articles) for that niche. With "bluetooth speakers" as a niche, you could make a top 10 bluetooth speakers article, why are bluetooth speakers better than other speakers, battery powered bluetooth speakers vs rechargeable bluetooth speakers, and so on. As you can see, the ideas for content that you produce within that niche is also endless.
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How does he get money from it? From visits or amazon refferals?

I hear ya, but I disagree.

The cut is abysmal, especially for those hard-drives mentioned before. But that is normal. There are hardly any margins in that niche and everybody knows it. I always made the big bucks from unrelated purchases. My angle was B2B sales. IE, you sell a toner cartridge, but the same customer buys 20 office chairs on the same cookie.

I got my clicks from other things than copywriting, guess that is why Amazon canned me (cough). But if you can write engaging copy about someting B2B related (and not kill yourself in the process) you can definitely make good money.

An important thing to keep in mind is that the average North American buys something off Amazon about once every 100-200 days. Just by having your 24hr cookie on somebody's computer, you can get a piece of that "automatically".

>How does he get money from it?
Turn off your adblocker user. There are Amazon ads splattered all over.

I have a porn image gallery website website. I get around 4000 impressions on the homepage each day. right now I am making a measly 25 cents with trafficjunky ads. Can I make more with some affiliate banners/links? Anyone recommend an affiliate offer or network or something.

Hell yes. Crakrevenue is my personal preference for adult affiliate marketing.

I have a question about the amazon cookies. Say a visitor goes to another user's affiliate review blog and clicks and get amazon cookied. Then they go to mine and click on an Amazon referral link. If it's been less than 24 hours, does my cookie replace theirs? Or does amazon use the original affiliate cookie and doesn't let it be replaced for 24 hours?

Your cookie would replace the old one.

sup guys, I posted in a couple affiliate marketing threads in the past. I currently generate 35-50k profit monthly doing mobile advertisements. Anything from promoting new apps or generating leads.

As for my tips, best to read up and spy on competition. Most of the landing pages I used are from other people that made them, I have one outsourced designer that creates different variations to split test. I started in late 2014, was very tough to start off as I had no idea wth I was doing and where to start. Started going to conferences around the globe and networking with top affiliate marketers. Key is to network as much as you can and never give up.

> Anything from promoting new apps or generating leads.
Please elaborate.
Also, how do you do split testing (AB TESTING) online? Got any tools?

Made this and it looks like I had a little luck and after a year my site makes over $100 with Amazon in a month. I know it's beermoney but at least it's something. The truth is that I haven't posted new content on it for months now... if only I wouldn't be so lazy.

Ok, this post motivated me.. I'll work on it tomorrow! And I'll post to social media daily again! Thanks!

So happy to here that! Try to motivate yourself to make a couple articles a week and it'll help your website's overall Google rankings. They don't have to be anything special, hell, they could even just be an article meant to cross promote another article. Just make sure the title and SEO settings are set to hot keywords and you'll see a steady boost in impressions/clicks.

Awesome, thanks!

Hey man! I remember you from the old thread, really appreciate everything you've shared.

A few questions if you have time:

1. Are you mostly on pop traffic or do you run banners/FB/native?

2. What level did you reach before attending a conference? I mean like monthly revenue, is it worthwhile for a complete newbie to attend AWA/AWE or an affiliate summit?

3. I'm currently on STM(pinkcat if you remember) and running a follow-along. What can I do to learn the ropes quickly and get the most out of that experience?

4. When first starting it seems best to target tier 2/3 geos. But these all have different languages which can be costly to translate. How did you initially start testing offers when you were a newbie? Did you translate into 5-10 languages, or did you just stick to a few geos and run many landers?

The toughest part when starting is facing the fact that you know nothing. And it seems like once you reach a certain level you just kinda "get it" and you learn how to test/optimize offers properly. That's how you can do $30-50k monthly consistently because you have the skillset down pat.

And that's where most of my frustration comes from, I just want to "get it" so bad and I'm really putting in the time. Your posts in the previous thread were very insightful and got me started on the right track.

Again really appreciate your time affilanon & if there's anything else you specifically think a newbie should understand I'd value anything you have to say.

Anyone seriously interested in paid traffic should listen to this user If anyone has questions about SEO/website-based affiliate marketing I'll try my best to answer. But I'm glad to see more discussion on this topic.

I'll be sure to bump this thread so it doesn't die too quickly.

With paid traffic it all runs through a tracker. Most newbies use Voluum but there's also AdsBridge, Thrive, CPVLab, and Prosper(although i think that's changed a bit)

Split testing on the web is a bit different. You need to hook that up into a SaaS platform or a custom A/B testing suite like Optimizely.

The goal of both is to test the difference between page(s) and see which perform better.

If my niche search results first page and first 5 results contains amazon, wikipedia and manufacturer for a product I try to push on my site, can I compete with them with SEO?

Generally speaking, yes you can compete with that. Amazon, Quora, Blogspot, and/or forum threads are all easy to outrank even without backlinks.

Wikipedia is another story. It depends on the quality of the Wiki article & how many links it has. For example when I Google "beirut" the first result is Wikipedia, and I do not think that's gonna change easily.

But for lesser-known search terms you definitely stand a chance. The surest way to know is studying backlinks in a tool like Ahrefs to see how old the page is & how many links it has. But if you can write longer/better content and laser-target your onpage SEO for those keyword(s) you can probably outrank the results you listed without needing links.

Thank you, I have one more, do hosting country matter? I live somewhat close to europe and can buy local hosting, is it worth to buy something like GoDaddy or Hostgator? Will it give me better results?

Use cloudflare and have it cache your page so it can be served by local cdns

add a CDN that'll def improve speeds. amazon has a good one I think its called cloudfront

Is there a compiled PDF of this stuff or other previous posts? On mobile right now but I'd love to learn more

Hey Guys, sorry I am back. I am Been sight-seeing out of the country, but just got back to hotel.

So somethings I would promote are games like Mobile Strike, Candy Crush or for 3rd tier geos I would promote some utility or lifestyle apps. I would find a landing page or have my designer create a landing page. I would split test anything from pictures, header, button (color, size, etc...). The data I look at is loaded on a tracker (currently using Voluum. Only tools I use at the moment are Spy tools like Adplexity. It may be a bit costly, but if used right, you have a gold mine right there.

Hey! You're very welcome, glad I can help. I will answer your questions below, if there isnt enough text on this post, I will continue on another.

1.I mostly do pop traffic. However I also am doing Facebook on the side now, along with some banner traffic.

2. My first conference I basically just had the understanding of loading a campaign up, tracker set up, etc.. I wasn't doing any big numbers at the time maybe max $30-50/day average? I would say go to a conference if you have a chance man, I wouldn't be at this level without networking and meeting new friends.

3. Oh wow! I will add you tonight on my STM, although I don't frequent as much, feel free to PM me there. I will check for your follow along and provide input. To learn faster, I would say start mastermind. I did that when I was a complete noob and I can hands down say that it sped everything up for me.

4. Tier 2/3 is the best to start. Tier 1 geos you are going to find it extremely hard to start unless you really know what you are doing and have the money and offer combination to out bid the big guys. cont...

Hate to ask a totally unrelated question, but as a complete newbie to affiliate marketing, how much time do you work per week at your level?

So I started with one geo and I used onehourtranslation to translate my pages. however you can skip alot by just paying for adplexity, taking the pages and just using those pages now. However I would say not to try to rely completely on it. I focused on about 2 geos max. You will find that you will get 3rd tier geos more profitable because most people are honestly lazy to translate their pages.

Exactly, thats how it was for me. Once you "get it" you basically will know the in's and outs. Learn one vertical at the start and learn it very well. Same with a traffic source. For example, before apps installs, I was focused on sweepstake SOI's. Till this day, I can almost always get it to work if needed. Also, no problems man, I will add you on STM and you can ask me any questions there, I will be more than happy to give you advice.

Yep, most newbies do use Voluum. I started with it, but have used AdsBridge, Thrive and FunnelFlux. Voluum is still great even at high voluum, but... can be extremely costly when you push alot of traffic. I just came back to voluum and with a 50% discount for coming back, I still pay around $3,000-4,000 a month for it since I push alot of traffic at the moment. I am now having a custom tracker built.

Cloudflare is great, I currently use them even for my landing pages. However, it is always best to split test. I learned a couple countries will perform better on CloudFront vs Cloudflare, like Germany for example. Always want to optimize as much as you can.

Once you have something running and optimized, most of time you are just checking to see if stuff is funded. For example, I just left for HK last week and I haven't really optimized or checked my campaigns for more than 30 mins a day. Have mostly been sight seeing and its still currently pulling in the profit. Although if something dies or an offer gets pulled, then I would put in a good amount of time trying to find the next thing to run and optimize. At this point though, I wouldn't really consider it work at this time since I like what I do. The deep truth though is money never sleeps, so you really have to keep an eye on your campaign or your offers randomly just to make sure its all still going smoothly.

I hate to be "that guy" but this sorta sounds too good to be true, is the only real barrier to entry knowledge and dedication? I'm in school right now for CSE but you make more in a month than some of the offers my friends received for their yearly salary. Is there a catch that I'm missing or the market just really volatile for affiliate marketers?

Also, I'm from the US, but you mentioned travel, is affiliate marketing generally an international gig? Do you specifically target developing or BRICS markets alongside developed markets?

I'll let the affilanon answer cause he probably has better insight, but I'll share what I've learned since starting paid traffic ~2 months ago.

Performance marketing is worldwide you can do it from any country. All geos work as long as they have Internet.

I can't speak on volatility cause I'm very new to that side of marketing. But from stories I've read things were much easier back in the early 2000s when affiliate marketing was still new. It's stricter and tougher now but still possible to turn big profits(think $1MM/mo or more)

The barrier to entry is really money & time. You do need to learn and be dedicated but this comes with practice. To practice you need to spend money. A lot. You will lose a lot of money trying to learn. Because of this most people give up.

I already do SEO affiliate stuff so I know this works. I'm willing to lose $10k or more just to make this work because I know this works. Not everyone has that mindset. So IMO it's really a mindset more than anything else. You don't need a degree or much technical knowledge... anyone CAN do this, but most won't.

I have saved two previous big threads for anyone intrested, ufile(dot)io/0ff41

There

Thanks so much I just added you on STM. I'm busy on another project today+tmrw so I won't be doing much w my camps but I'm typically on STM every day tweaking/testing offers. I plan to update my followalong daily and I've already connected with a couple awesome people from the site.

I will send you a PM sometime soon with a few questions I've had. It seems like the path you walked is very close to my ideal path. I'd like to make mobile pops work to the tune of $15k-$30k/mo, bank most of it, then move into native. But having mobile pops to fall back on seems wise so I'm really trying to master that area.

I'll drop a couple more q's here in case you check back, both to help any other Veeky Forums readers & to answer other SEO questions. But for the most part I'd rather connect w you on STM since that's obviously better and more private. But let me run down the routine I've been working on recently to get your thoughts.

Hey, no worries. I used to be in your shoes as well, but I honestly can't tell you any other way. Real barrier really is knowledge and dedication. I know it sounds insane, but its true. I can say that not everyone will reach this level if I had to be honest. I am still nothing compared to the top guys in the game. It is volatile in a way that offers come and go. I know people who make what I make in a month, in one single day. I am from the US as well, it isn't an international thing. I just like traveling desu. Feel free to ask me any additional questions, I will be more than happy to answer.

Hey, btw I added you on STM. In regards to your comments, thats very very true. The people who started way before me had it much easier, I know guys who made literally millions back then when facebook was much more lenient on advertising. Totally true, I said it on a previous thread, but I felt like giving up at one point, but I ended up pushing through. The rewards are amazing and I still am mind blown at the money that is made in this industry. I know to 95% of the people on any of these boards will think what I pull is either bullsht or just outrageous, but I am telling you all now, what I make to most of the top top affiliates is just pure peanuts. I actually get intimidated speaking with a couple of them when I meet them. No degree is needed, I actually personally graduated with a finance degree and ended up working in HR for a big named hospital for about 70k/year. I know a guy who does more than me who has his doctorate and used to teach Physics (actually trying to get in contact with him till this day to exchange info.) in a university. Btw, since you are in STM, I saw Caurman post, just FYI, he actually is the founder of Machinima, if you know what that is. He spoke at AWEurope last year. Super awesome guy and helpful to everyone.

So right now I'm trying to settle into a day-to-day routine. I know I needa test lots of offers to find winners, but the process is still very hazy to me.

I have Adplexity and I use it religiously to rip landers. I already know HTML/CSS/JS so editing is a piece of cake.

My trouble is understanding how to match landers to offers. Two networks I've been using are Glize + Expertmobi. None of these offers show up in adplexity when I reverse-search their URLs so I can't find exact matching landers.

This leaves me looking for semi-related landers to desperately match the offer. ex: Let's say I have a Russian music subscription offer. I'll search Adplexity for pop landers with the keywords "music" or "download"(translated into Russian) and try running these.

So far I've honestly had better luck direct linking offers. All my landers perform WORSE than the offer landers! Still testing a lot but I might be doing something wrong?

It might be better to ask like this: when you started how were you testing offers? I know to test a lot and just keep testing. But how many landers per offer? Or how do you gauge if a lander is "good enough" to test with many offers?

I'd like to settle into a day-to-day routine where I wake up and do *insert routine here* to ensure I'm testing properly. I know I'll get there eventually but if you have suggestions on how to initially vet offers/landers I'm open to any suggestions for a routine.

Right now I'm doing Brazil, Russia, and middle east(Arabic countries). It's been a crazy ass ride so far and I'm determined to make this work!

Also to anyone else reading I will try to answer all questions that I can. Most of these threads die fast but I only started PPC/paid marketing because of a random Veeky Forums thread... so if this can help even 1 more person get started then I'd be grateful to give back.

>he actually is the founder of Machinima
No idea what that is but once I can book a flight I'd be thrilled to shake these people's hands and thank them in person... Vortex, Mr Payne and Carumen have helped me so much already

You're welcome! No worries as I am actually still sightseeing here in Hong kong. Will be going to bangkok soon, but will have more time to post, chat on STM (send me your skype in PM on stm and I can add you). Mobile pops is awesome, I would say think smaller goals first, 15k/month is possible, but aim for smaller goals first. The money will come when you least expect it. As for going into Native, that is a tough one man, not going to stop you, but I would recommend you go for something like Facebook/Adwords.

When I first started, I aimed for literally $50/day just to supplement my income from my day job. It took a while to break at first since I had no idea wth I was doing. But just focus and keep it going, even when things go bad. That will be the real test.

So I am going to be dead honest with you, I never heard of Glize or Expermobi. I would recommend some reputable networks that are well known. Some being: yepAds, Mpire Network, MundoMedia, ClickDealers, F5media. These are some I would say you should start with and should give you all the offers you are looking for/need. So, there is nothing wrong if direct linking performs better than the lander. This happens sometimes, but it seems that maybe you are doing it all backwards. What I would recommend is going on adplexity, finding what is being run the longest, see which offer is working and the landing page that is getting the most hits. You then get the offer that is the same/similar to what you see on adplexity. Get several variations of the landing page and start split testing there.

So everyones testing method is different, so don't just follow what I do. You will eventually find out what works for you, but for me I do the following. First I would choose a vertical, lets say sweepstake SOI's. I would then find out which one I want to do, lets say iPhone SOI. I would ask my AM for a couple networks for and iPhone SOI for one geo that I want to focus on. I would get 3-4 offers to test at a time max. I would go to adplex and find landing pages for the offer. I would get a minimum of 3-5 landing pages that are completely different. I would then test that on a couple of my own testing sources. You will 100% clearly see which does better after a day or two (depending on your budget).

I can explain much better on stm or a chat desu. But you are in the right path so far. Brazil, Russia are some good geos to start with.

What is a good resource if I literally have no experience in this field? I mean I just opened this thread on a whim and I'm not totally convinced but I really want to learn more, where can I go? A lot of these terms are really foreign so if there's a basic resource that can help me learn more I would be really grateful

No problem. Yeah this is most likely all alien to most people, but the best that I can show you are a couple links to some blogs that have free info (don't need to add you email in them, they will try to catch your email to add to their list, just skip it- although some do give good info in their emails).

1: charlesngo.com/affiliatemarketingdictionary/

2.ppcmode.com

A good read of these two should give you enough info you need.

Appreciate it lad!

Good shit man. I'll PM you my skype later today & we'll find time to chat. I'm sure you're a busy dude so I don't wanna take up too much of your time but I always appreciate anyone willing to help

I'm in Clickdealer but haven't applied to any of the others you listed(they're all on my list tho). Just got into Adsimilis & currently pending Affiliaxe. Once I finish up my current project I'll be back on the grind so I'll apply to those other networks ASAP

You're very welcome! I won't be able to respond much, but know that if you leave a question, I will get back to it. However you may need to wait over 15-20 hours for it since I am traveling. Good luck!

Hey, great thread!

So I've been making a living as a direct response copywriter for hire, and I've been in online marketing for a while. But I just don't "get" affiliate marketing.

Do you affiliate pros I could work out a deal where I add value to a proven affiliate marketer through my copy and research skills and in return he teaches me how to run my own operation?

I just don't "get" affiliate marketing.