Hello! 

Dear friends, 

Today’s article is aimed at all those who are starting in the Media Buying world, or who are considering doing it. 

Specifically, we are going to talk about the money that is needed to start in this industry. 

Firstly, let us explain you why “free traffic” and “low budget” campaigns are not an option: 

1. A great number of affiliates think SEO traffic is “free” traffic, but it is not the case - you need to invest a lot of time on it, plus money and knowledge, in order to rank your website or blog on the first Google results (or any other search engine). 
2. Spamming Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or any other social network to get a few clicks on your affiliate links is also not an option here. If you are ready to make serious money, you need to play in the long term.
3. Starting with low budgets might be an option but it is not the best idea. It will be hard finding the best creatives, landing pages and site ID. Plus, at the beginning, it is important to gather information and understand how things work. 
   

Now, let’s see how much money you need to start your media buying business. 

• The tracker - this is one of the most important tools, and investing in it is especially worth it. Our top picks are Voluum and Keitaro - they’re fast, multifunctional, stable and easy to set up. The main difference between them is that Voluum offers a cloud-hosted service, plus optimization tools, while Keitaro is a self-hosted tracker. 

Our top pick plans from each one of them are, the Profit Plan (Voluum) and the Pro Plan (Keitaro).

‍

‍

Of course, you’ll need hosting for your tracker and landing pages. Digital Ocean is an ideal choice for every media buyer - cheap VPS and a lot of locations to choose from. Our advice is to start with $18 or $24 Premium Intel with NVMe SSD

Pro Tip: use your tracker to store your landing pages - this way, you won’t need a separate server to host them, and avoid unnecessary redirects too. 

• The spying tool - there are lots of spying tools in the market but one of our favorites out there is Anstrex - they have a push tool that costs only $89.99 and a native tool for $69.99. According to the creators, by using Anstrex Push you’ll have data from 92 countries and 38 push networks. 
  

Pro-Tip: for a limited time, the Anstrex Pop tool is free, as long as it remains in Beta version. 

• The Pre-Landers - you cannot work in the Media Buying industry without pre-landing pages. There are a lot of landing page builders out there, but our recommendation is PureLander. They have a cheap plan for $25/6 months, which represents a total of approx $4,2 a month. Affordable or not? 
  

In exchange, you will have access to a lot of pre-sales pages for almost every vertical: Dating, VPN, Antivirus, Nutra, Casino, Crypto. 

Let’s summarise - an average of $95 for a tracker + $90 for a spying tool + $4,2 for pre-landing pages = approx $190. Not bad, right? 

• The VPN - last but not least, an almost mandatory tool for every Media Buyer is a VPN. You will need it to do manual spying on competitors, test your funnels, etc. 
  

HideMyAss is what lots of industry marketers are using - it supports a lot of countries, it is stable, and has versions for all major platforms - Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux. 

You can buy a monthly plan in HideMyAss for $12. 

So, the total budget of our industry tools will be approx of $202. 

It’s now time to address the biggest expense in this industry - the traffic expense. 

In this case the rule “the more the better” is completely true - the more money you can manage to invest on your campaigns, the more chances of making profit increase. 

Of course we realise it’s not always easy for everyone to pull a few thousand dollars out of their pocket for traffic, but we recommend at least to test $500 in order to get representative data, during the first couple of weeks, when you’ll be testing. And at least another $500 for being able to scale your initial campaigns. 

Here are a few quick tips on how to test campaigns on a limited budget: 

1. Start with a daily budget slightly above the minimum daily budget (which is $20): 

2. Spend your budget smoothly, and not accelerated: 

3. Test between 6 and 8 push creatives and use the auto-optimization tool for a better budget control. 

4. Do not test more than 3 landing pages. We recommend starting with 1-2 only - this is one of the reasons you need a spy tool - investigate what your competitors are using and save money on unnecessary tests. 
5. Start with easy offers - SOI or 1-step pin submits. DOI and COD offers, for example, are harder to optimise and require a higher initial budget.  
6. Do not spend the first $500 only on one campaign - test more campaigns (maybe 5, with a total budget of $100 for each).
7. Do not spend your initial budget on Tier 1 countries like US, UK, AU, DE, AT, CH! Your money will be burnt quickly. Better try other GEOs such as  Tier 2 or even Tier 3 ones. 
8. Find a network that will pay you fast. MyLead minimum withdrawal amount l is only $20 - working with them, you'll have control over your cash flow and you’ll be able to reinvest your profits back into traffic quickly. 
   

To end, I’ll give you some free tools that will help you achieve your goals faster! Check them out: 

1. GIMP - this is an open-source and free alternative to Photoshop and will help you edit your images.
2. Unsplash.com - a big online library with thousands of free images that you can use for your push ad creatives.
3. Google Cloud - every new customer receives $300 in free credits to spend on Google Cloud. All customers get free usage of 20+ products. But we still do not recommend using it unless you really can't afford $20 for a VPS. 
4. The DeepL Translator  - will allow you to translate your landing pages and creatives to different languages, our experience shows it is better than Google Translate, so give it a try. 
5. AffiliateFix forum - start reading and learning. This forum is totally free and there is tons of valuable information you can use and learn from. 

That was all for today! 

With this information you now know that, to start running your push ads, you’ll need an initial budget of $200/month in tools and $1000 in traffic to test your initial campaigns. 

So, don’t be afraid! Take the plunge and start running your campaigns now. Everyone is able to succeed in this industry and the initial investment is low compared to other industries- 

See you soon and stay safe!