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

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Traffic

BlackLists or WhiteLists? What should you focus on when buying traffic?

Posted By 6 Comments March 29, 2017

Every traffic network out there has both good and bad publishers in their portfolio. Publishers are guys/companies who run sites or apps, that they sell ad spots on. That’s how we, the affiliates, can buy traffic from them. The problem is, not every publisher is a honest person, some are flat out assholes who code BOTs and sell them to us, scamming us for money and wasting our time.

Unfortunately, we cannot count on the traffic networks to solve the problem completely, because even in case of BOT traffic, they still make their commission. That’s why many networks turn a blind eye to this problem …

On top of that, some cheaters are pretty good coders, so detecting advanced BOTs is not so easy. So even the honest networks have a problem catching all the crap. One way or another, pretty much any traffic source at least offers the option to pause/block specific placements that are not performing for us and/or use Blacklists or Whitelists. A placement can be a site, app or a specific ad spot, depending on the network and traffic type.

But there can be many reasons for blocking a placement, not just BOT traffic … just as there are many reasons for targeting particular placements only. In this article, I will explain what White and Black lists are, why and how to use them, whether one is better than the other and why that is the case…

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Maximize your profits with a backbutton redirect – script included.

Posted By 17 Comments February 16, 2017

A clever affiliate marketer always takes every step possible, to increase the ROI of their campaigns. In the competitive world of affiliate marketing, there isn’t any other way to survive anyways. You have to stay on top of your game.

If you don’t squeeze every last drop of revenue from your campaigns, someone else will, which will give them a competitive advantage against yourself. Then it’s just a question of bidding higher than you … and your traffic is gone.

Today, I’m gonna talk about a simple and effective trick, that is very popular, but still overlooked by many. It’s called the Back-Button Redirect.

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Mobile or Desktop traffic – what should you focus on?

Posted By No Comments January 12, 2017

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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How much should you bid for traffic? HIGH or LOW? What’s the difference?

Posted By 2 Comments December 02, 2016

Pretty much all traffic networks are using the auction model, when selling their traffic. Of course, you can also make FLAT deals with them, especially when going for BIG volume, but that’s not an option for new affiliates at all.

On top of that, with offers going down anytime, caps getting filled at random times of the day and a lot of other factors you cannot influence … I’m not such a big fan of Flat deals anymore, because you can’t stop them at will. These days, I buy bulk of my traffic via bidding auctions.

HOW TO APPROACH BIDDING?

There is a ton of different ways you can approach bidding, everyone will develop their own strategy at some point. Some people love to mess with bids all the time, some set a low one and wait for the outcome, some love to sit in the middle, some at the top … but I don’t want to write a summary of all the possible bidding models here.

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What is native advertising and how you can benefit from it?

Posted By 2 Comments November 22, 2016

Banner blindness is a serious issue, for both the site owners (publishers) and advertisers, as well as for affiliates who serve as the middle men between these two. The more the users ignore the ads, the harder it is to sell them something. In order to fight this, the internet marketers have to come up with new ad formats all the time.

HOW TO MAKE BANNER BLIND SURFERS CLICK AN AD?

There are basically two ways of getting the “banner blind” users to click on your Ads :

– Distract them with intrusive AD formats like POPs, Interstitials, Self-Maximizing video banners … the problem with these is that they are annoying. They do produce results for sure, but the latest trends are not favoring such intrusive ADs. Google announced

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Small niche sites project with 500% ROI – how I did it?

Posted By 11 Comments November 11, 2016

WHY BUILD NICHE SITES AT ALL?

I was talking with one aspiring affiliate the other day, he wanted to start making money online, but didn’t like the instability of affiliate campaigns, especially when utilizing paid traffic. We all know, that campaigns come and go and what worked yesterday, doesn’t have to work tomorrow. This can get pretty annoying after a while and not everyone is able to cope with it.

When talking about alternatives he could take advantage of, we ended up talking about small niche sites that are easy to build and even easier to manage, since it’s all about the build and forget approach 🙂 You all know that I have tried a lot of stuff during my affiliate career, and

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Traffic Targeting – The Best Friend Of Anyone Running Paid Traffic.

Posted By 3 Comments October 24, 2016

Whoever want’s to start buying traffic has to understand targeting. It’s one of the most important skills you need to master, but also one of the easiest to understand. Let’s not waste time here and move on with the topic, so what exactly does targeting mean? Simply put : it’s a way of picking just the traffic that we need. So instead of serving our ads to every single visitor of a site, we decide who we want to show them to.

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Landing pages – what they are and why you must use them.

Posted By 4 Comments October 14, 2016

Every affiliate marketer must know what landing pages are and why it’s crucial to use them. So let’s start with a short definition, what exactly is a landing page? It is actually a pre-sale page that you send visitors to, in order to convert them into a subscriber, paying customer or a member of something. Please note, when talking about landing pages in the affiliate marketing context, we don’t mean the actual registration, product or checkout page. Landing pages serve as an intermediary step between the banner and the actual product page. Their goal is to grab the interest of the user, highlight the pros of whatever you are selling and persuade the user that the time to buy is HERE and NOW!

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Traffic Networks Explained – Do We Need Them?

Posted By 7 Comments October 13, 2016

SOME DEFINITIONS FIRST

Traffic Networks are given several names by affiliates, so let me list all that I have heard so far, whichever of them you see, it’s still the same thing : Traffic Source, Ad Network, Banner Network, Traffic Broker. All of these refer to the traditional setup where the network manages advertising placements/spots on the sites of their publishers.

Sometimes you will also see the term “Pop or Popunder Network”, this refers to Traffic Networks that focus exclusively on “Pop Up” or “Pop Under traffic”. Pops are those down-sized, or full size windows that open on top of the browser window or behind it.

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What is Tracking And Why You Should Use It.

Posted By 2 Comments October 10, 2016

One of the best things about online marketing is the ability to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Unlike TV, newspaper or radio campaigns, you can literally track anything online – where the visitors came from, what they clicked on, what device they used to connect, what type of internet connection they used, what landing page or product converted them … you name it.

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