I'm working in online advertising since 1998 and finally decided to start my own blog.

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BASICS

Promoting exclusive dating offers with TopOffers.Com

Dating, especially the Adult part of it, is a VERY competitive vertical … but at the same time, it’s one of the EVERGREENS, offers that will always work to some extent. People will always want to date their counterparts, whether their intentions have something to do with a real relationship or just the urge to feel some “human warmth” 🙂

I’ve posted a few blog posts about dating already and today I want to focus on one more thing that can give you the competitive edge … working with direct advertisers or in other words in-house affiliate programs.

What’s the difference between a REGULAR and IN-HOUSE affiliate program?

A standard/regular affiliate program works with a ton of advertisers, they are multi-focused and they make their income by taking a share from what the actual advertiser is paying per lead or conversion or whatever they are after …

An in-house affiliate program is actually either directly a part of the advertisers company, or they are close and exclusive partners. So you could say the affiliate program is managed by the same people/company who are also running the offers. This means they are able to pay a bit more per lead to the affiliates, since they are funded from the profits that the offers generate and they do not need to financially support another affiliate network.

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Facebook is about to kill organic reach of FB pages … or so it looks like.

About 3 weeks ago (Oct 20th), Facebook rolled out an update in 6 countries, that they chose god knows how as it’s a rather random list : Slovakia, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. As I happen to live in Slovakia, I could witness the early effects of the change and I could also follow the reactions of several page admins across the country. To sum it up really quickly, before going into more details : IT SUCKS!

SO WHAT DID THEY CHANGE ACTUALLY?

First of all, let me tell you what changes Facebook actually did… there are now 2 news feeds, one is the original news feed that you are used to scroll through, but from now on, there are no posts from Facebook Pages shown in this main feed. These posts are all moved to a new one, called

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Affiliate Marketing Offers – What can you actually promote as an affiliate marketer?

The million dollar question : I want to become an affiliate marketer, but what product should I start with?

TIP: Affiliates are not using the term products or services, we call it the “OFFERS”, so let me use that term from now on.

Affiliates are promoting all kinds of offers, the range is so big, that it’s quite easy to get lost in the process of choosing some to promote. Even the small affiliate networks have hundreds of offers, the big ones boost a collection of several thousands of them. So how do you actually pick one, when there are so many?

You don’t just browse the huge lists and pick stuff randomly, you need to make a few decisions before you even look at the lists of offers – this will limit the amount of matching offers and the process of choosing an offer will become easier.

I will get to particular offer types and categories in a short while, but first we need to sort out one thing. We can divide affiliate offers based on some basic criteria and form some kind of groups, that we will focus on.

1. VERTICAL

Vertical defines the main offer category, something like a large group of niches that have something in common. Let’s say App Installs – this is a large Vertical that groups many categories of mobile apps – games, utilities, antivirus …

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AWE Berlin 2017 is around the corner! Does it make sense to attend affiliate conferences?

There are about 3 weeks left until the start of another Affiliate World Conference – AWE Berlin 2017 (June 14-15). In case you’ve never heard about Affiliate World Conferences (AWC), check this website out : https://affiliateworldconferences.com/

There are 2 Conferences organized in a year, one in Europe (Berlin) and one in Asia (Bangkok) – hence the short names AWE (Affiliate World Europe) and AWA (Affiliate World Asia).

In case you didn’t know, Affiliate World Conferences were started by the same team, who has brought you the STM Forum. The original plan was to hold smaller, local meet-ups for like minded people, but the interest totally blew the organizers away … the rapid growth is insane, and it’s still getting bigger and bigger.

Below is a video highlight from the first AWE Berlin (2016), check it out 🙂

SOME HISTORY NOW 🙂

I just had a chat with Mr.Green, who is one of the founders of the STM Forum – along with Stackman and BBRock32 – so I can give you a pretty detailed summary of how it all started and how a small local meet-up turned into a massive Conference such as AWC.

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BOT traffic – How to detect fake hits and what to do about it!

One of the biggest annoyances for every paid-traffic affiliate marketer is dealing with the bot traffic, which results from the high amount of various BOT’s, that are surfing the internet. According to some estimates, more than half of all internet traffic is actually caused by BOTs in one form or another – crawlers, spiders, rippers … some are legit tools, some not so much.

There is not much we can do about the google crawler, for example, SE crawlers are an acceptable part of the internet ecosystem. There are many legit reasons for running automatic systems that mimic user behavior, so I’m not gonna complain about such tools at all.

But what really SUCKS, is BOTs that are deployed by fraudsters, in order to defraud advertisers and media buyers. There is a whole lot of cheaters, who create ton’s of sites with fake traffic and sell these BOT traffic impressions to various traffic networks.

To get an idea about how HUGE this problem actually is, read this Forbes article : https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/12/20/methbot-biggest-ad-fraud-busted/

Some traffic networks do their best to detect this fake traffic, but many of them just turn a blind eye to the problem – every impression they can sell brings them profit, whether it’s real or fake … so some networks simply don’t care and act like the problem is not theirs to solve.

One way or another, BOTs don’t buy, so we don’t want them in our campaigns, or at least as low amount as possible. Since these clicks totally screw up the optimization process, is in the interest of every affiliate, to detect them and block placements/sources with too high % of fraudulent traffic.

When optimizing a new campaign, you need to make sure that you are working with human traffic, it’s completely pointless to attempt any optimization with fake BOT traffic

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Why I don’t offer coaching and what training program I would recommend?

Ever since I accepted the moderator position on STM Forum, plenty of people approached me with one question : “Do you offer any course or coaching?” And as you could guess, when I launched my blog, the interested has risen even more. I’m not saying it’s hundreds of people asking for my services, but I do get these requests every week 🙂

But I’m turning all these requests down, I don’t do coaching or run a course, and don’t plan to do that anytime soon. Wondering why I’m turning these “easy money” offers down? Well, read below :

The most important thing I would ever want from a coach, would be his full attention and help WHEN I NEED IT – so some sort of frequent if not live support. I would also want help with several aspects of the business, including design, copywriting, campaign setup, optimization … and what not. This means, I wouldn’t actually want the help of a single coach, but rather a TEAM OF COACHES.

And since there is just the one of me and not a team of Matuloo’s … I don’t coach 🙂 Simple as that, I wouldn’t feel comfortable charging for service that I wouldn’t be happy with myself. If I ever attempted to handle the tasks of a team on my own, the first thing I’d have to do, would be to stop running affiliate campaigns myself. And who would be interested into an affiliate marketing coach that doesn’t run his own campaigns? I certainly WOULD NOT! 🙂

That’s why I’m not doing coaching and never will do that ON MY OWN. I’m offering help to anyone who is interested – on the STM Forum – where I can keep my own schedule, and choose when to reply to what… that’s what my schedule allows for now. So if you want my help, be my guest and join us at STM Forum 🙂

BUT WHAT IF YOU WANT A COACH OR TAKE SOME TRAINING?

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Why NEWBIES shouldn’t start in the most competitive TIER-1 GEOs?

You hear it left and right … do not start in TIER-1 GEO’s straight away, learn the basics in developing countries first. But why is that? Or is it true at all? I will summarize the reasons in this article and try to explain why it is so and whether it’s a rule to follow in 100% of cases.

Note: This is a repost from the STM Forum, where I posted the article originally, in November last year. I decided to repost my own articles from STM from time to time, so guys who don’t have membership over there, can benefit from it too.

LET’S DEFINE WHAT TIERS MEAN FIRST.

When talking about GEOs, we often use the so called “TIERS” to define what countries we actually have in mind. 3 tiers are used most of the time : Tier 1 are considered the most competitive, Tier 3 are the least competitive ones.

There is no definitive list of countries per Tier or a fixed set of rules that would define them unfortunately. On top of that, several industries or agencies have their own rules for this. So we gotta come up with our own definition, in relation to internet marketing and affiliate offers.

Basically, the longer it is possible to monetize a certain GEO with online offers, the higher Tier such country belongs to, in terms of affiliate marketing. This is closely tied to the available payment options and the wealth of particular countries.

HOW MANY TIERS DO WE HAVE?

Not so long ago, the only way to pay for something on the internet, was to use a Credit Card. As you can guess, only a limited amount of GEOs were developed enough for this : USA, Canada, founding EU members, The Nordics, Australia, Switzerland … the most developed Asian countries like Japan etc … These were the original TIER 1 Geos.

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Do you have to target each GEO (Country) separately or can you mix them?

This is a very classic question, asked by almost every affiliate who starts with paid traffic campaigns.

Usually it goes like this : “Hey Mr.Matuloo, I started this campaign for Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, using a kickass PIN Submit offer that my Affiliate Manager recommended to me … and I’m loosing heavily on it, why is that?

Well, cause you’re a LAZY ASS, that’s why. There is only one reason for mixing several GEOs in one campaign – LAZYNESS – I know it’s faster to create such campaigns and it looks tempting to have one mega campaign that targets 500 Million people. But that’s not the way it works, unless you’re in the game to loose money.

BUT WHY WOULD I SPLIT THE GEOS, IT’S ALL LATIN AMERICA!!!

Oh my, there are so many reasons for this, so let me list & explain the most important ones :

1. Language – Properly translated creatives and landing pages pretty much ALWAYS work better. In some GEOs, you can do well with English langu

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How to get better payouts from your affiliate network?

Affiliate Marketing is a very competitive business, some niches are so crowded that it’s impossible to make any profit without some kind of competitive advantage. But don’t worry, sky isn’t falling and as always, there are several ways of winning the battle with your competitors.

The advantage that can set you apart from your competitors can be a range of things, some obvious, some less so …

– Experience / Knowledge – this alone can make you the winner at times, for example when working in a niche that you are pro at. It might require special language that you know and the competitors don’t. There might be some crucial parts that only pros understand etc …

– Cheaper traffic – maybe you know a traffic source that is not so popular, but their traffic is good. Maybe you can come up with banners that have super high CTR, which translates to cheap traffic…

– Quality Creatives – related to the above point, but it can also mean you can make killer Landing Pages that will convert like a charm.

… there are many more I could mention, but I want to aim your attention at one more factor that can help you a TON : Better Payouts.

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Mobile or Desktop traffic – what should you focus on?

Here is another popular question, asked by affiliate newbies all the time : “Should I focus on desktop or mobile traffic?” Not an easy answer again, but let me try to give you an answer, or at least help you understand the differences, so you can make a qualified decision.

When talking about desktop traffic, we mean surfers who are sitting behind their home computers or using their laptops. Mobile users are surfing from smartphones, feature phones or tablets. Tablets and Smartphones used to be treated as one in the past, but these days, many advertisers look at them differently. The reason is simple, tablet users convert and retain differently from smartphone users.

So instead of 2 basic groups, we are actually looking at 3 : Desktops/Laptops VS Tablets VS Smartphones. To make it more complicated, we also need to consider the connection type, especially when it comes to mobile devices …

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