Dear media buyers, 

Hello again! 

I hope you are in good shape and in the mood for learning something new. 

In today’s article I’ll show you useful tips for new marketers to make money faster. For the most experienced this might look boring, but we all started from zero, isn’t it? 

Let’s get started: 

Tip 1 - Learn everything you can about media buying and affiliate marketing. There’s tons of sources of information - from forums, to blogs, Youtube videos, etc. My advice is to not buy expensive programs that make you feel like a marketing guru after 1 month, but instead save your money for traffic and tools that you’ll 100% need! It’s the best way not to throw away your money!

Where can you start learning for free? 

1. This blog 
2. Affiliate fix forum  
   

Spend at least 1 or 2 weeks reading, take notes and ask when you don’t understand something. We are a community and everyone is welcome to ask! 

Tip 2 - Learn about the tools and the software that you’ll use in your journey. If you want to make money with paid traffic I strongly recommend you to read and learn about how to integrate your tracker, how to set up your server and how to work with landing pages - basic HTML and CSS coding at least. You will surely need these skills. It’s especially important to know how the S2S postback works, as well as how to make your landing pages load faster or how to clean and edit them. You don’t need to be a pro developer to make money with affiliate marketing, but understanding the code is a very useful skill. 

Learn more about tracking your conversions in this post. 

Tip 3 - Before starting your campaign, do market research - investigate your competitors. There’s two ways of doing that: with a tool or with good old manual research. My favorite spying tool is  Anstrex - it’s $89/month for push traffic and provides you with data across 92 countries and 38 Ad Networks, with over 3 million ads. You’ll pay a little bit compared to the manual investigation but you’ll also save yourself a lot of time! Using a VPN might be a good idea here - HideMyAss is a site commonly used by affiliates to browse some landing pages, download them and test them. ‍

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Tip 4 - Don’t copy-paste creatives, landing pages or campaigns found by your research! Get inspired by the competitor’s examples and learn from them, but always changing the images, headlines, text and colors. Don’t be afraid to test your own ideas, but always with common sense. Usually simple ads work best - believe me and don’t over complicate your affiliate funnel. ‍

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Tip 5 - Make connections. You know you have the knowledge and a solid theory behind your back, it’s now time to start the real job - to run your first campaigns! 

My first suggestion is to always talk to your Account Manager before starting - in Pushground we’re always happy to help you get started! Feel free to ask for insights, what converts good, what geos and formats are best for each kind of offer, etc. 

My second suggestion is to join some affiliate networks that are friendly to new users. E-meet your affiliate managers and talk to them about what’s trending - choose GEOs and offers according to the information given to you by your Pushground account manager. 

Tip 6 - Don’t be greedy from the beginning. It’s preferable to start with low-paying offers from Tier 2 and 3. This traffic is cheaper than Tier 1, there is no big competition and such offers are usually easier to optimize. Yes, payouts are lower, but believe me you have better chances to make profit at first.

After some experience and when you find yourself being more confident, it will be time to try Tier 1 GEOs! 

Tip 7 - Test different offers from different networks. My advice is to test 2 offers from 2 networks - so 4 offers in total. Sometimes you can have very different results even with the same offer but in 2 different traffic networks. Therefore testing is always a good idea! 

Don’t forget to cut off the unnecessary sources when doing optimization - this is one of the first things you need to do after having some conversions and enough clicks to start making decisions. 

Tip 8 - Don’t bid too low. Usually the lowest bids don’t drive you to the best quality traffic, and that’s not what you need. My personal recommendation is to bid around the price recommended by the traffic network or by your manager. Don’t forget to set up a daily budget when testing, it doesn’t have to be too big for Tier 2 and 3 GEOs, but enough to have representative data. When changing your bid, do it gradually, step by step and don’t be anxious. Check our latest article to learn some new bidding strategies! 

Tip 9 - Learn how to target properly. You’d be surprised to learn how many new affiliates run different GEOs in one single campaign. This is a huge mistake - imagine running a campaign in the GB and RU, for example. 

Firstly, you’ll pay much more for the RU traffic, as it’s cheaper than the GB one.

Secondly, there is a big language difference between both GEOs, which could totally ruin the campaign. 

Another good practice when creating your campaigns is to split test them by devices - don’t run mobile and desktop campaigns together. So my recommendation is basically to run different campaigns for one same offer, split testing them by GEOs, devices, OS, etc, when needed. 

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Tip 10 - Start using landing pages from the very beginning. Don’t be afraid of them, they’re not so difficult to edit and clean! You can quickly learn how to build them, and, after that, you’ll only need a little bit of practice to get used to them. 

You can start by split testing a couple of landing pages of each kind - for example, when running sweepstakes, you can split test a survey landing page and a spin wheel landing page, and check which one performs the best. Don’t be a lazy affiliate - your current work will have its profits in the near future! It’s also possible to send direct traffic to your offers, but in most cases it will perform worse. 

Tip 11 - Use a tracker. Period. 

This is mandatory if you want to be successful in affiliate marketing. It’s very important and it will give you extra information about your campaigns, apart from the one that you can get from the stats from your traffic network. 

There’s a lot of tracking solutions in the market but I believe that starting with a free and simple one it’s the best option. Once you get used to it, move to another one. 

My recommendation is to use one such as Bemob - it’s free for up to 100.000 events monthly. I recommend you to read their documentation properly. 

Tip 12 - Don’t play with the bids too often. I know it can get frustrating when seeing that your money is burning at a higher speed than you’d want, but actually you’re collecting data. 

Don’t freak out if you don’t have conversions after spending some $. You have to give the traffic source’s algorithm some time to do its job! 

Tip 13 - Don’t over optimize your campaigns. You should stop/change a maximum of 1 or 2 things at a time. Stop the creatives and zones that are performing worse, as well as user freshness groups and other dimensions. It’s important not to change your angles at the same time because your results will be biased. Optimize slowly and step by step, and your results will come faster!

Tip 14 - Don’t use Google Translate or similar tools for translating your creatives and presale pages. Hire a native speaker to translate your ad copies, headlines and text. A great number of affiliates are often lazy and use online translators, but if you can get a better one, you’ll have an advantage and a bigger chance to make profit. 

Tip 15 - Don’t refresh your campaigns every 3 minutes. A lot of us do this in the beginning and it can be OK sometimes, but in most cases you’re losing your time. Far better is to start preparing your new campaign, search some images for your creatives, go to the gym or take a rest. Don’t worry, the traffic will flow even without you constantly checking it. 

Tip 16 - Learn about Whitelists and Blacklists. Ask your account managers about them, and ask for insights and best practices. They will save you both time and money. Before starting new campaigns, always ask about them and, if they don’t have any, use your old data to make your own. 

Tip 17 - Don’t get emotionally connected to your campaign. A big mistake that new affiliates often make is thinking that they will make every campaign profitable. The sad truth is that, after cutting off your bad zones, creatives, landing pages and offers, the campaign can still be on a negative ROI. If you see your campaign is blocked, stop it. Analyze it and make a new one. 

Tip 18 - Check your traffic quality with your affiliate manager. You can do this every day in the beginning and ask them for advice on how to improve your traffic quality. 

Tip 19 - Ask for your payout bump. When you send the advertiser quality traffic, they’re satisfied and you can always try to ask for a payout increase. There’s nothing bad in this, if you’re doing your job it’s a win-win. They will probably expect this from you, and if the answer is no, get better and ask again after some days!

Tip 20 - Rule your cashflow very carefully - especially when you’re on a tiny budget! My advice here is to work with networks that have good enough payment terms, something between $20-$100 is good. Moreover, don’t work with more than 3 networks because again, you’ll probably have cash flow issues. 

Tip 21 - Don’t give up from media buying too soon. A great number of new media buyers quit after 8-10 unprofitable campaigns - this is a huge mistake! 

It’s normal to be less successful in the beginning - like in all life aspects, learning is essential to get better at it. The learning curve it’s not the same for everyone. If you get stuck and don’t get a positive ROI, just take a rest and disconnect. Think of all the possible reasons why your campaigns are not performing well, ask for advice, analyze the data carefully and try again. 

That’s everything for this week! 

I hope these tips will help you make new profits faster than your competitors. Our managers will be happy to answer your questions if you have any. 

Good luck and don’t forget to check the blog for weekly updates!