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

What’s working in Affiliate Marketing – 2019 Edition.

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

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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Meet Manu Cinca, founder of the daily Affiliate Newsletter WTAFF.co … how it started and where is it going?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve most likely heard about the WTAFF newsletter … everyone across the affiliate industry seems to be loving it and for a good reason. Manu puts a lot of work into bringing his readers a quick sum-up of the most important things that relate to affiliate marketing, in one way or another.

NOTE: Just for the sake of making sure we are all on the same board … this is the newsletter I’m talking about : https://www.wtaff.co/ 🙂

I know Manu for quite some time already, we met at the STM Forum couple years ago and we also met in person several times, be it for business at AWA or AWE, or just to have a few beers in Wien, for example. So I know that Manu is a great guy, very clever and business oriented …

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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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Looking for a higher level Blockchain Conference?

Looking for a higher level Blockchain Conference?

Last December, I attended my first Blockchain related conference which took place in Bangkok, right before the Affiliate World Asia. Knowing that some of the iStack Holding guys (same people who organize AWA) helped with the organization a bit, I had pretty high expectation for the event. And I have to say I wasn’t disappointed … there were solid speeches, the venue was a nice one, I met tons of interesting people … simply put, it was definitely worth it to attend the Blockchain World Conference.

Based on the overall great response that the conference received, I was expecting some kind of a round 2 and now it’s about to happen 🙂 So here we go, mark you calendars guys, THE Blockchain Alternative Investment Conference (BAIConf) will take place in London on 18th – 19th June.

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Crypto Currencies – The new mass hysteria, should you join or stay away from it?

Cryptocurrencies have taken the world by a storm, and there is no signs of it slowing down. Since I’m always following the latest trends, I jumped on too, though later than I should have. Are you still standing by and watching the train pass? Don’t do that 🙂

First of all, I DO NOT consider myself an expert on the subject, not yet at least, but working on that 🙂 So don’t take this article as some investment advice please, it’s more about throwing ideas around and giving you some food for thought.

The reason why I actually got involved with Crypto, is because I’m kinda used to look for opportunities on the internet and the Bitcoin craze was pretty hard to miss.

We all know that Bitcoin has been around for a few years, since 2009 actually … and we all know that it went through several stages already, many expected it to be dead by now, actually “several times” dead … check this site, they map the articles with Bitcoin deaths prophecies, it should have been dead 190 times already :

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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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Adult Affiliate Marketing in 2017, where is it heading?

RUNNING ANY ADULT TRAFFIC?

I just returned from Prague the other day, where I attended The European Summit (TES) Conference. TES was the first affiliate conference I ever attended, and I keep on returning there ever since … been there like 5 or 6 times already. This conference started as an ADULT only event, but for the past few years, the organizers tried to venture out to more areas of digital marketing.

However, it still has the adult feel to it, with all the hot and barely dressed models walking around, and waste majority of the exhibitors are adult companies too. Most of the affiliates that you can meet here are adult affiliates as well. That’s why I keep on attending this event from time to time, to stay in touch with the adult industry and to see where it is going.

SO WHERE IS THE ADULT INDUSTRY GOING AT THE END OF 2017?

For the past few years, the whole adult traffic segment was dominated with MOBILE… it was everywhere, mobile traffic networks, mobile affiliate networks … mobile this, mobile that … And this has changed this year. No more huge booths from the market leaders, they been present still, but on a much smaller scale.

It’s clearly visible that the regulations have hit the Carrier Billing Adult offers pretty hard. Large part of them moved to the mainstream side of things, where the regulations ain’t that heavy yet. Or let’s just say, mainstream offers can run in more GEOs than adult products – think about the Arab world or some large Asian countries.

I’ve seen the traditional, cover-all Affiliate Networks, trying to get some more business going with the adult crowd …

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Moscow Affiliate Conference and Party Autumn 2017 Edition.

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?

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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