Who in the world of traffic arbitrage ever thought about creating their own affiliate program? The owner of the affiliate network has no need to deal with the hated moderation of Facebook, TikTok, Google and other advertising networks. No need to spend thousands of dollars on dying accounts. No need to merge the turnover into a minus in search of a bunch. You don’t need a lot. But what does an affiliate program need in order to receive a commission and earn big money without independently generating traffic? Within the framework of this article, we will talk “in general and in general”, but all the same, there will be more information and it will be more frank than anywhere else.
Three pillars on which the affiliate program stands and how to get them
The affiliate network is a tripod in the world of arbitrage business, it stands on:
- Traffic driven by affiliates.
- Access to offers from direct advertisers on favorable terms.
- Technical implementation of the engine.
At the very start of its existence, the affiliate program is in a kind of vicious circle: in order to have offers, you need traffic; in order to have traffic, you need offers. The most important value of the affiliate network is traffic, which means the affiliates who generate it.
How to find traffic at the very beginning of the journey
The presence of affiliates ready to drive traffic at the beginning of the growth of the affiliate network is necessary to get the best conditions for offers in many verticals. There are several ways to achieve the goal:
- Own media buying. Your small team helps not only to probe the market and test offers, but also to give advertisers immediate traffic with the promise of its scaling. This always gives a strengthened position in negotiating terms. It is quite easy for an affiliate to get talented heads for themselves, since internal buying is the most tasty place for an arbitrator. In the future, affiliates will receive a huge amount of information on offer statistics, links used by third-party affiliates, and other data that the affiliate program itself has.
- Upgrade your media presence. If you set this goal a month or two before the start of active work, it is quite possible to have time to get the required amount of audience that is ready to send traffic to affiliate offers, at least for a test.
If, before connecting the offers, it was not possible to find affs ready to drive traffic, this is also not always a problem. It all depends on the vertical, more in the next block.
Connecting offers: life hacks for finding direct advertisers
The complexity of this task depends on the vertical in which the affiliate network operates. For example, in gambling, casino websites indicate how to become an affiliate. The same situation is with dating. In terms of getting offers, these are the easiest verticals to build an affiliate program. Accordingly, the presence of initial traffic is not so critical.
With nutra and white merchants, the situation is more complicated. First, advertisers are hard to find. Second, advertisers want to see traffic right away.
There are a couple of life hacks on how to search for adverts. Works for both affiliate networks and arbitrage teams:
- Register as an arbitrator in an affiliate program where there is a desired offer. Submit a lead with your phone number. Get a call center employee to communicate with someone from the affiliate department.
- Many affiliate programs can give an offer for reselling. Now you can use this offer as your own. At first you’ll have small commission as a regular affiliate. There are two ways to monetize in order to attract affs to your affiliate program, give them also a market rate and earn money yourself. The first one is shave. I do not call anyone, but the method is extremely popular. The second is to pledge money for work at zero or a small minus at first in order to accumulate volume and get an increased rate in the donor network. This life hack is especially good for those advertisers who are ready to give their offer only if the affiliate program has initial traffic.
- Chats, conferences, friends, acquaintances. Personal relationships are the best way to get an offer in both politics and arbitration. I strongly recommend building social capital.
In crypto the situation is most complicated. Almost all advertisers need starter traffic, otherwise there will be no prepayment, no high bid with a gap for the commission. In addition, it is extremely difficult to reach advertisers because of the gray format of the industry.
Nobody knows: How to find a direct advertiser in the crypto vertical
In the call center, most likely, they will send you somewhere you don’t want to go at all. In chat rooms, at conferences and among acquaintances – more real, but still quite difficult. However, there is one catch. Using the autologin link, you can often track exactly where traffic is going and get the most direct access to any advertiser in the cryptocurrency vertical. I hope I don’t get shot for posting this method in public.
The autologin link for tracking traffic is only used in the crypto vertical. I do not want to be categorical, but I saw autologin only in cryptocurrencies. Yes, and in other verticals, ads can be searched for in simpler ways, which I wrote about above.
How to avoid up to 90% of the cost of opening your network
The technical component is usually the main item of expenditure at the start of work. Writing your own engine is difficult, long and expensive. In numbers – $ 20,000-50,000 and 3-6 months. This is provided that it was possible to find programmers who understand the task and they did not run away to competitors in the middle of doing the work.
The issue can be solved cheaper using a boxed solution. Of course, I recommend AlterCPA Pro: it costs a penny and allows you to make a functioning affiliate program in a day. There are competitors, I have nothing against. The main thing to know is that it is not necessary to invest large amounts in a risky project at the start and slow down the launch for a long time.
Conclusion
I hope I was able to convey in general terms the tasks and difficulties in building my own software. If you are interested in this topic and want to know how to create an affiliate program and not go broke, read this blog, soon there will be a lot of information that no one has made public yet.