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

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Research

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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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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Got a great performing banner? Duplicate it! Let me tell you how.

Hello guys, this is yet another article that was inspired by questions posted on the STM Forum. Coming up with topics to write about on my own, is a surprisingly hard task. So instead of trying to guess what you might be interested in, I thought it would make sense to just write about what people ask for. And since I spend a ton of time over at STM, many of the question will be sourced from there 🙂

So let’s go back to the million dollar question :

GOT A GREAT PERFORMING BANNER? HOW TO MAKE MORE LIKE THAT?

We all know this situation, some banners simply work better than the rest. Doesn’t matter whether you made that banner, ripped it somewhere or your AM gave it to you (some really do this) … as soon as you got a banner like this, you SHOULD IMMEDIATELY duplicate it and make more variations from it.

Affiliate Marketing is a competitive industry, any advantage that you can get is like blessing, but you need to act fast. Having variations of well performing banners at your hands, ready to replace the old ones anytime you need that … this can be your competitive advantage and your ticket to Profitopolis!

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Damn Fallback redirects can get you banned from traffic sources, fight them!

There are many things in affiliate marketing that are getting on my nerves, the so called FALLBACK redirects are one of them. The sad fact is, pretty much all affiliate networks keep on using them, even thou they can get us (affiliates) banned from traffic sources and they (affiliate networks) know this very well.

I keep seeing this topic pop up on the STM Forum all the time over and over again : new affiliates are wondering, why they can’t see the offers they promote, when clicking on the link themselves. Or why they got a campaign rejected by a traffic source, even thou they picked a totally white-hat offer that’s not breaking any rules.

I’ll tell you why, it’s the fucking fallback redirects that’s causing this. You don’t have to ask for them to be activated, they are ON by default … in order to make you more money as the networks claim, when in reality the extra revenue is pretty much non existent in

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How important are domain names in Affiliate Marketing.

Domain names are something that the internet, as we know it, couldn’t exist without. But how important are they, when it comes to affiliate marketing? Do you have to worry about choosing the most appropriate domain or can you just register whatever is available?

As always, the answer is not an easy one, and we have to analyze this a bit deeper. The determining factor here is, what are we actually trying to achieve. Are we going to build something, some site or some product … or are we just looking for something to put our promo material on?

The more long-term our goal is, the more important the domain name becomes. Let’s take a look at the possible options :

SIMPLE AFFILIATE CAMPAIGNS – USING PAID TRAFFIC

This is what I’m personally doing the most now : I buy visitors from traffic networks and send them to affiliate offers. To increase my conversions, I’m using Landing Pages pretty

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

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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SPY ON YOUR COMPETITION – Lesson #1 – WHAT IS A VPN?

KNOW YOUR COMPETITION!

Whatever business you are in, you should know as much about your competition as possible, I think there is no need to argue about this. You should know what your competitors sell, where they sell it, how they get customers etc … Online business is no different – whether you are running an e-shop, selling someone else’s products or simply promoting something as an affiliate, you should always know who you are competing with, in order to get as much visitors as possible to see your and not your competitors advertising campaigns.

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