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

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What’s working in Affiliate Marketing – 2019 Edition.

Posted By No Comments April 15, 2019

Click here to download the FULL report!

So what’s the most promising traffic type, vertical or offer type RIGHT NOW? What segments are growing and which ones are fading out? That’s the million dollar question that you simply have to know the answer for, unless you want to waste your money and time.

Many years ago, Hugh Hancock (known as Caurmen on STM Forum) has started the tradition of posting a What’s Working in AM (insert year) thread on the STM forum, outlining the biggest trends in the business, in an attempt to help all the members to focus on areas that showed the most promise for the given year. Needless to say, that these threads were among the most viewed ones on the forum, year after year.

Unfortunately, Hugh has passed away recently as most of you know, but we didn’t want to let the idea die with him. So we (Amy-vortex and myself) decided to continue with this tradition and turn it into something bigger… to honor Hugh and for all of us to remember the good things he did for this industry. That’s how the “What’s Working in AM” e-book was born.

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How to make profitable campaigns with PUSH notification traffic from Megapu.sh

Posted By One Comment October 23, 2018

PUSH notification AD format has been gaining lot’s of traction lately among affiliates from around the world, being used across multiple verticals and niches. Many see PUSH as the descendent of the POP traffic format, as that has been under scrutiny from Google for a long time … though they are still failing at blocking it and POPs continue to be served in the billions per day 🙂 But whatever happens to POPs, it’s always a good idea to test a new format, isn’t it?

WHAT ARE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS?

First of all, how do these PUSH notifications work? I’m sure you’ve seen one of those small alert windows, asking for your permission to send you notification. It can look like the one on the screenshot below…

Once a user grants this permission, it’s possible to send them push notification at anytime of the day, as often as you like… regardless of whether they are browsing the site they agreed to get pushes from or not. Obviously, they can still revoke the permission at anytime, so it’s wise to not abuse the system and keep the amount of pushes at a reasonable rate. Annoy the users to much and they will “unsubscribe”. The screen below shows what a push notification message actually looks like, both on a desktop device or mobile phone.

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Moscow Affiliate Conference and Party Autumn 2017 Edition.

Posted By No Comments September 13, 2017

Looking for an affiliate conference to attend in September?

Leadbit is back with round 2 of their Moscow conference, again in co-operation with the STM Forum folks. Everything is expected to be bigger this time … more speakers, more exhibitors, bigger party …

Entrance is still free for affiliates, but you have to register here and mention that you are an affiliate : http://affiliateconf.com/

The first Moscow event turned out to be quite a success, there were more than 1200 attendees on the spot … 180 companies from the affiliate space sent their reps to the conference and more than 30 exhibitors presented their companies directly on the event venue. To increase the value for regular affiliates, 12 industry experts visited the conference and held speeches for the attendees.

To tease you a bit, let’s take a look at what the first Moscow conference looked like :

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What is hot in Affiliate Marketing in the 2nd half of 2017?

Posted By 2 Comments September 06, 2017

Hello again everyone 🙂

Summer is over… the days of BBQ, travels and beer are gone, so it’s time to get back to work again. It’s not like I wasn’t running campaigns during the summer, but I’ve decided to focus more on my family and have some fun. Which was possible thanks to my colleague, who managed most of our campaigns in the meantime 🙂

Now that I’m back in the office, it’s time to launch some new campaigns and maybe play with some new verticals …but what should I test, that’s the question 🙂 What is working now in affiliate marketing, in the second half of 2017?

There are several ways to find out, I can check out the spytools, which I did already of course. I also see which ones of our campaigns are working good, which I check all the time obviously. I could also ask the reps or friends I have at several Affiliate Networks, as they see directly where the volume goes up and down … and I did this too already.

So… I got results from the spytools, I see our own data and I have replies from 4 affiliate networks that I work with, in one way or another. And this blog posts will be some kind of summary of what I was able to find out. Let’s get stated.

NOTE: I researched regular affiliate offers only, let’s call them CPA offers. I didn’t go into eCommerce etc … Check this article to get a better understanding about affiliate offers.

1. SPYTOOLS

These were not much of a surprise actually, it looks pretty much the same as at the beginning of the year. I’ve used Adplexity for this, it’s still the best affiliate marketing spytool at the market in my opinion.

Mainstream traffic: still a lot of utility apps (to my surprise), sweeps, antivirus (mostly cloaked), nutra products (skincare and diet mostly), gambling/games (this seems to be more popular than before), carrier billing is still everywhere (I expected a decrease here). I found a lot of dating on native networks, seems to be on the rise there.

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

Posted By 7 Comments June 07, 2017

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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Introduction to the NUTRA Vertical with expert advice from Adcombo.Com

Posted By 2 Comments March 17, 2017

Welcome to part #2 of my Affiliate Networks series. The first one was a rather general Interview, but based on the feedback I got from you guys, it was received pretty well.

Today, I decided to take it one step further and include more specific tips and actionable advice on a specific Vertical, to make it more interesting and worthwhile for you guys. That’s why I reached out to a more Niche/Vertical focused network called Adcombo.Com. These guys put a lot of focus on one vertical : NUTRA offers. They are also active in Bizzop, Sweepstakes and Pin Submits, but I picked them for their Nutra dedication, so that’s will be the focus of this article.

Nutra has been killing it lately, I know several affiliates who are making $X.XXX per day profits by pushing Nutra offers. It may not be the easiest vertical of them all, but those who have what it takes to master it, can reach awesome numbers.

There was one thing that was holding many affiliates back from trying it : small selection of GEOs that there were offers available for. The main reason was the Credit Card payment model, that works well in the western world, but not so much anywhere else.

But this has changed lately, thanks to the COD (Cash On Delivery) payment method that is extremely popular across the globe right now. I mean, COD was around for like forever, but from some reason, affiliate networks started to use it heavily just lately. Due to this, I’ve seen NUTRA offers popping up left and right, for GEOs that were previously unusable : think of Eastern Europe, Latam or even Asia with huge markets like India.

This opens a huge opportunity for anyone who’s willing to work with these GEOs!

This was also the reason why I picked Adcombo.Com as a consultant for this article – I’m pretty sure they have the biggest selection of offers in these emerging GEOs.

Meet Holly Naz from Adcombo.Com 🙂

As I mentioned already, I invited an affiliate expert and manager from Adcombo to help me with this topic.

Her name is Holly Naz and she will be answering some of my questions – I will always quote her answers, so they are easy to identify in the text.

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NEW Series : Introducing Affiliate Networks – Addiliate.Com

Posted By 2 Comments January 31, 2017

Affiliate Networks are one of the “key components” of the affiliate industry puzzle. Having good relationships with a few of them is absolutely crucial. Sure, you can focus on working directly with the advertisers, but at some point you will need to work with affiliate networks too, whether you like it or not. To read more on this topic, check my article about Affiliate Networks.

WHAT DO I WANT TO ACHIEVE HERE?

Many new affiliates are facing problems when trying to join their first few networks, their applications get rejected pretty often. On top of that, as a new affiliate, you never know who you can trust and what network is known for pulling stunts on their affiliates.

That’s why I decided to start something like a series, let’s call it “Introducing Affiliate Networks”. The purpose of this series is not to introduce just my favorite networks, or those that I currently work with. What I want to achieve here, is to give some exposure to affiliate networks, that are known for being solid and are generally considered honest operations, by the affiliate crowd.

So even thou I cannot make any guarantees, since that is not possible, I will not list any network that is known for fucking their affiliates over. And trust me, all the bad news find their way to “my ears”, one way or another 🙂 It’s in nobody’s interest to work with inexperienced networks that can bite the dust within a few months either, so I will put more emphasis

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How much money is needed to start in Affiliate Marketing, is low budget a problem?

Posted By 9 Comments November 28, 2016

Affiliate Marketing (AM) is a business, and as with any other business, you need to invest some money at the beginning. People keep on asking how much money is actually needed to start in AM and whether it’s even possible with a small budget. So let me take a closer look at this topic, to help you understand what it takes to become an affiliate marketer in terms of funding.

First of all, we need to set one thing straight – in order to sell anything at all, you need the visitors (traffic) and there are two possible approaches to obtain it – PAID and FREE (organic). The simple logic behind these two approaches determines how much $ you will actually need to start. If you decide to work with PAID traffic, your costs will be higher of course.

This is very obvious and easy to understand. But to really decide what approach would be better for you, we need to dive into this a little bit deeper. Both approaches have their pros and cons, so let me try to compare them.

Let’s start with the PROS of each approach :

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Big List Of Affiliate Marketing Terminology

Posted By 4 Comments October 11, 2016

NOTE : I originally wrote this article for the STM Forum, but since I need to cover this topic here on my blog too, I am re-posting it for everyone instead of writing it again from scratch, which would be a waste of my time. Enjoy 🙂

The affiliate business, just like any other business for that matter, uses it’s own vocabulary and every aspiring affiliate needs to learn at least the basic terms in order to crack the code. SO I decided to write a post about these terms and explain them in a detailed way. The list will be long so sit tight 🙂

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Who Can Succeed In Affiliate Marketing?

Posted By One Comment October 07, 2016

Do I have what it takes to succeed in affiliate marketing? That’s one of the questions I see people asking over and over. So, is there a specific set of skills that are required in order to make Traffic. it? The answer is not a clear YES or NO, unfortunately. In theory, literally ANYONE can make a living as an affiliate, but in reality, there are some skills and a certain mindset that will determine whether you will fail or succeed.

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