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

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

Posted By 7 Comments May 24, 2017

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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How to profit from Carrier Billing Offers with KIMIA. What works now and where is it all going?

Posted By 10 Comments May 10, 2017

Carrier Billing Offers a.k.a. PIN Submits, are among the most popular offers preferred by newbies, as well as experienced affiliates. This vertical is arguably one of the easiest to start with, PIN submits are most likely the last type of offers that can still work direct-linked – so without using a Landing Page.

This makes them the perfect choice for any aspiring affiliate, there are simply less options to optimize. I personally, for what it’s worth, also recommend Carrier Billing offers as the best choice in for any newbie affiliate marketer in 2017.

I have already written a pretty detailed article about Carrier Billing offers, so instead of repeating myself again, check it out directly : http://www.matuloo.com/what-are-carrier-billing-pin-submit-offers-and-how-to-promote-them/ The article contains all the necessary info on how these offers work, how the subscription process works as well as basic tips on how to promote them. Please make sure to read it, in case you are not familiar with PIN Submit offers… otherwise you won’t be able to benefit from today’s article.

I received a lot of questions about PINs, once I published the first article, many of you were interested to learn more about how to make money with these offers. So, to take it one step further, I reached out to KIMIA, which is one of the biggest players in Carrier Billing offers, to provide us with answers for the most crucial questions like :

What works now? Where is more money (adult or mainstream)? What traffic types work the best? What GEOs are hot? What are the regulations and how they affect the future of Carrier billing? …

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

Posted By 10 Comments April 28, 2017

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?

Posted By No Comments April 21, 2017

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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What is DATING and how to promote dating offers – with expert advice from Cpamatica.com

Posted By 12 Comments April 12, 2017

There are verticals that come and go, some are seasonal and only popular during certain periods of the year, some become saturated and impossible to make profits with after a while … and then there are some, that are always working to some extent, no matter what – Let’s call them the evergreens 🙂

Dating is one of such evergreen verticals, it has it’s ups and downs, but it keeps on converting year after year. I’m not gonna lie to you, even this vertical is harder to make money with than it was couple years ago … but it’s not because people are not interesting into dating anymore, it’s because of the competition.

Since Dating is actually one of my favorite verticals, I decided to write a full article about it. I will tell you what kind of dating offers there are, how it all works, what are the payout options you can work with, how dating sites make money, how to promote these offers …

To make it more interesting, I invited an affiliate network that specializes in dating, “Cpamatica.com”, to provide us with some insights from a networks side too. I sent them quite a few questions, so we get a better understanding of the vertical, how much big affiliates are making, what type of offers makes the most $$$ for them, what GEOs are hot at the moment … all the information I like to get from affiliate networks.

I always love to get info directly from the “horses mouth” so to speak,

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

Posted By 7 Comments March 23, 2017

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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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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Affiliates are taking over MOSCOW – Event hosted by the STM Forum and Leadbit.

Posted By No Comments March 14, 2017

Affiliate events and conferences became very popular lately, since they offer an excellent opportunity to meet fellow marketers, find out what the latest trends are … or just get wasted with other affiliates, the call is yours 🙂

US, Western Europe or Asia usually host the main events, but this time, the fun is coming to “Eastern Europe”!

For the first time in history, Moscow will host a large affiliate conference and the organizers made sure it’s gonna be a blast. Speeches, ton’s of networking options, drinks, food and an exceptional party to make it a complete package … it will all be there.

The event will take place on the 30th of March, so mark your calendars and plan the flights, it’s only two weeks away!

How do I know it’s gonna rock? Cause it’s hosted by the STM Forum folks, do I have to say more? 🙂 STM Forum has been recognized as the premier resource for the Affiliate Marketers for quite some time already, you’d have a hard time finding a better one. And I’m not saying that because I a moderator over there! 🙂

Did you know STM is also behind the two most popular Affiliate Conference of the world : Affiliate World Europe (AWE) and Asia (AWA)? This alone should be a guarantee that the Moscow even will be awesome too.

AWA and AWE are huge multiple-day events, but not everyone has to like that. And that’s why you should attend the Moscow event in case you’re one of those who don’t like crowded places. It’s gonna be smaller and 1 day only.

And the best part : Entrance is FREE for all quality affiliates. Thanks to Leadbit.Com, who is the main sponsor and organizer of the event, the entrance is free. Leadbit will even give a way a Porsche Cayenne to one of their affiliates at the conference and you can still take part in the contest, check this for details : http://porsche.leadbit.com/

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How to improve the CVR (Conversion) and CTR (Click Through) of your Landing Pages?

Posted By One Comment March 06, 2017

Landing pages are like salespeople, they have dramatic effect on the conversion rates of our campaigns. We all know that a good Landing Page (LP) can mean the difference between a profitable and a losing campaign. In case you’re not familiar with the Landing Page concept, please read my older article that deals with Landing Pages and explains why you have to use them : http://www.matuloo.com/landing-pages-what-they-are-and-why-use-them/

There are two main performance factors, that determine the quality of a Landing Page. One is the CTR (Click Through Rate) and the other one is the CVR (Conversion Rate). In order to profit, we need to reach good numbers for both of them.

This might sound as an easy task, but it’s not 🙂 The fact is, these two usually work AGAINST each other. The higher the CTR, the lower the CVR. And vice versa, LPs with high CVR usually have low CTR. I will get back to why this is the case a bit later on.

Some affiliates would argue that all that matters is a high Conversion Rate, which is true to some extent … but if you have a Landing Page with very low CTR, the high conversion rate will not save you.

Let’s take a look at an example.

The CTR % tells us how many visitors of the LP actually clicked on something on it, usually some Call To Action (CTA) button. CVR means how many of those who clicked on something, and got to the offer, actually converted into a subscriber, member or made a purchase.

LP1 : 20% CTR and 10% CVR

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