Affiliate Marketing in 2024 – Where to Start: Recommendations

Blog » Affiliate Marketing in 2024 – Where to Start: Recommendations

With the constant development of technology and the increasing popularity of IT professions, more and more people are becoming interested in making money online. Not surprising at all that many of them consider affiliate marketing as a viable option since anyone who has enough will and desire can master this method of earning money. Arbitration comes in different types: crypto, traffic, bets and many others. Today we will talk specifically about traffic, or to be more precise about driving traffic to particular websites – affiliate marketing.

There is a bonus at the end of this text with recommendations from professionals in this field. 😉

Introduction

Affiliate marketing is the process of buying traffic on one platform and redirecting it to a target platform for resale. For example, a user saw an advertisement, clicked the link, moved to the store’s website and placed an order. The affiliate who launched an advertising campaign and brought this client through his link will receive a reward: a fixed amount or a percentage of the payment. The perfect situation occurs when the amount of the reward is greater than the cost of running an advertising campaign. The difference between costs and profits will be net income. This is the essence of affiliate marketing: buying traffic cheaper and converting it for re-selling at a higher price.

A logical question arises immediately: where one can buy traffic? The most important and desirable sources are targeted advertising on social networks, advertising in Google Ads, Yandex Advertising Network and Direct, SEO website promotion, native advertising through posts in communities, Telegram channels and mobile applications. You can also attract traffic for free through your own groups or YouTube channels, for example.

At the same time, not everything can be advertised online everywhere. There are different types of offers (products or services) for promotion. You can advertise goods in different niches or verticals. When offers in e-commerce contain practically no restrictions, advertising in dating, gambling, betting and casinos like 1win, crypto trading platforms is a little bit more difficult as these offers are not so white. You can easily be banned if you break the rules of the platform for their promotion. But this problem can also be solved if you carefully study them. ☝️

One of the best examples in e-commerce – Aliexpress affiliate program

Affiliate program, offer and advertising network 👨‍💻

After studying the various verticals and their features, you should have a close look at affiliate programs. There can be multi-vertical ones, where you can find offers from different niches, and those that specialize in only one niche or one advertizer. The terms of cooperation are usually clearly stated in the user agreement, and support will gladly answer all your questions.

Registration in the affiliate program can be open or closed. Beginners should choose the first option, since in the second you will most likely be asked to undergo an interview and show statistics from your past advertising campaigns.

👀 You can view the list of popular affiliate programs on specialized media, for example on Affpaying.com.

Affpaying.com, founded in 2009, is the largest and the most popular directory & review site for affiliate networks, affiliate programs and advertising networks. 2000+ affiliate networks, 5000+ affiliate programs, and 200+ advertising networks are listed on our site.

List of affiliate programs on Affpaying.com

When deciding on an affiliate program, be sure to pay attention not only to the conditions that it offers to its webmasters, but also to its history and reputation. This will protect you from unscrupulous partners and no-name companies that lure you in with high rates and then refuse to pay your earnings, citing supposedly low-quality traffic.

For example, the 3SNET affiliate program began its work back in 2016 and has already earned a good reputation among affiliates. Today it has more than 1000 offers for traffic monetization in any GEO (Brazil, India, Europe, CIS) in such verticals as betting, gambling, dating and loans. By offering high quality traffic, you can get uncaps, higher rates and a wider variety of sources.

3SNET Affiliate program

After you have chosen an affiliate program and registered in it, you would find yourself in your personal account, where you can make decisions on what offers to promote. Usually affiliate programs cooperate with specific sites. It’s better to choose those offers that you both know well and know who might be interested in them. Programs that are direct advertisers usually set higher payments to affiliates.

The next step is to decide on the traffic source. This is where you will attract users to your target site from. Each affiliate program prefers its own sources and each source has its own characteristics for promoting offers. For example, if we talk about the offers in finance, you should know that Google Ads has many nuances, since the company tries to make sure that “users make informed financial decisions.” You also need to study all thas before you start driving traffic.

We can’t ignore one of the most desirable and high-quality sources of traffic – Facebook Ads. Besides a huge supply of traffic almost anywhere in the world, this advertising network offers many targeting options. Thanks to them you can hit the target audience very precisely and get maximum profit. While studying Facebook advertising, you will definitely not be left without a theoretical basis, since there is plenty of information on this topic and it is not difficult to find it. Although working with this platform is a bit difficult for a beginner, if you decide to try to know it better, you won’t regret it in the long run.

Necessary Tools ⚒️

And for a successful affiliate marketing, you will urgently need several tools and consumables. It is simply impossible to work effectively without them.

In today’s manual, we’ll tell you exactly what you’ll need to start affiliate marketing from scratch. 👇

Antidetect Browser

Any user while accessing the Internet creates a huge number of footsteps and traces by which he or she can be identified. Such user prints can be combined under one term – digital fingerprint. It contains a large amount of data about your digital identity: IP address, geo, device, operating system, Internet provider, browser, etc. Moreover, despite the constant tightening of legislation in the field of protecting personal data, any site, even the smallest one, wants to collect this data in order to offer the most relevant content to each specific user. Or, if we talk about more complex resources like Facebook and Google, then their goal is not to be deceived by creating many accounts for running advertising campaigns that may be unacceptable to some extent.

That is why the issue of confidentiality and anonymity on the Internet is becoming more and more relevant for affiliate marketers who generate traffic working on one device. And the antidetect browser is needed precisely for hiding the real one and replacing it with a fictitious digital fingerprint. First of all, it is necessary to bypass the security systems of popular advertising platforms, which have been continuing their fight for the uniqueness of each user for a very long time and are banning them for multi-accounting. If you use an antidetect browser, banning one account does not affect other accounts at all. That means that affiliate marketing will not stop even for a minute.

In general, the antidetect browser is exactly the same as any other browser you are used to. They are even created on the same core. And in most cases it is Chromium. While using antidetect, you imitate the activity of another person, creating unique fingerprints. Here you can create an unlimited number of profiles and manage each one of them in a separate environment, where cache, cookies, proxies and other information are separated from other profiles. 👍🏻

🟣 One of the most popular solutions on the antidetect browser market is Dolphin Anty. Its main feature is that it was created specifically for affiliate marketing.

Dolphin Anty interface

✅ Dolphin Anty has everything you need for work:

• The ability to manage an unlimited number of accounts in one interface;
• Functionality for working in a team: you can assign an administrator, team lead and regular user and distribute access levels;
• Access to automation scripts: you can configure the execution of repetitive actions, for example, for farming accounts;
• Managing multiple proxy servers from one interface;
• Extension management: each profile can be assigned with its own set of extensions;
• Profile mass management: launch, farm cookies, start automation, change proxy, etc.;
• Automation – integration with the Dolphin service to automate Facebook advertising;
• Convenient navigation through profiles via system of tags, statuses and notes;
• Mass import of cookies and profiles, for example, after purchasing them in a store;
• Synchronizer – functionality for repeating the same actions in browser windows.

Dolphin Anty is the best solution for affiliate marketing on Facebook, Google, TikTok and other sites that have anti-fraud protection.

📖 Previously, we wrote an article about why antidetect is needed in affiliate marketing. Read it here.

Multitool for Advertising Automation

The Dolphin also team is developing a cloud-based tool for automation of advertising on Facebook – Dolphin Cloud. It makes advertising management across multiple accounts much simpler through automation of multiple processes. All work is done in one window.

⚡️ The service will save you a lot of time and effort without losing efficiency in your work.

Besides that the Dolphin Cloud has other advantages:

• This is a completely cloud-based solution, which you can use directly in your browser without necessity to rent a server;
• Easy to use – you simply upload accounts to the service and manage them, you don’t need AdsManager to work;
• Setting up roles for team work: administrator, team lead, buyer, farmer;
• Откруты optimization – you have access to templates that you can assign to different accounts in just a couple of clicks;
• Mass actions on accounts – forget about manual modification of each profile;
• Creation of unique ads;
• Adding of payment services;
• Mass creation of fan pages;
• Detailed statistics;
• Privacy and encryption.

✅ And there is also a free three-day trial – first you try and only then pay.

Proxies

Another tool that is also necessary for beginners in affiliate marketing is a proxy. This technology allows you to change your real IP address, thereby replacing one of the most important browser fingerprints. An IP address is assigned to a device when it goes online. Each Internet provider in each region has a pool of such addresses. They contain personal data such as geographic location, device location on the network and information about the provider. And all of them can be recognized by the site you access from your IP.

Proxy model according to Fortinet

The proxy changes this IP to hide your data, bypass restrictions if they are imposed, for example, on a provider or country, increase confidentiality and encrypt network traffic. As a result, the site will think that you are visiting it from a completely different country through a different provider.

In addition to increasing confidentiality, a proxy is widely used to bypass anti-fraud systems, for example, of Facebook or Google, since these systems prohibit creating several accounts on one IP or logging into several accounts from it. If smart algorithms understand that a single person is doing this, then his IP will be banned. Everyone agrees that the situation is quite unpleasant. The same thing can be said about mass subscriptions, likes and comments – they raise suspicion among security systems.

Simply put, an anti-detect browser is the basis and a proxy is a reliable foundation in multi-accounting.

👉🏻 We have compiled a list of the best proxy providers. Check it out here.

Accounts 👥

Accounts are perhaps one of the main consumables for an affiliate marketer. They are necessary to promote offers that are prohibited by the policies of large platforms like Google or Facebook. For example, there are restrictions on advertising of online casinos, bookmakers, tobacco products and other “gray” niches. But their audience is huge and no one wants to miss it. That’s why accounts are bought – it’s a pity to lose yours, but you can survive the loss of a purchased one. In case of a ban, you can easily switch to another account and continue running campaigns, instead of proving your innocence to technical support.

For example, one of the most popular stores among affiliate marketers, fbstore, specializes in selling advertising accounts and ready to use FB business managers. It has been operating for many years and consistently supplies webmasters with high-quality consumables. There are always both inexpensive accounts for mass launches (автозалив), and premium ones with two business managers or with a high financial limit of $250 and even $1500.

Account store fbstore

By purchasing ready and prepared accounts, the chance of them being blocked is minimized, and fbsore’s caring support will help you with launch of your first advertising campaign. If you have any questions or problems, feel free to contact them on Telegram.

Accounts are not expensive, but they have a lot of advantages:

• They do not require warming up, promotion and increasing the level of trust (if you purchase from a bona fide supplier);
• They easily connect to advertising accounts;
• Affiliate marketing becomes really easy when the accounts are of high quality.

And if you add cloaking, then your accounts will live much-much longer. Cloaking is the redirection of moderators to one page and users to another in order to get advertisements approved. A very useful thing that is regularly used by pros. But we’ll tell you about it another time, for now we will continue with where to start your journey in affiliate marketing from scratch.

Payment Services 💳

Since the work of an affiliate is not tied to any specific geo, he has to pay for different services. With the advent of virtual cards and the development of crypto this has become much easier to do. Many payment services have appeared that have a lot to offer for their customers, regardless of the user’s country of residence.

These services allow you to issue payment cards, top them up and use them to pay for various services. In general, do everything that can be done with a regular bank card. You can also top them up in different ways: either from a physical card or with cryptocurrency. Registration is usually simple. To issue a small number of cards you don’t even need to go through the KYC verification procedure, which is convenient. The main task of payment services is to provide many payment cards in order to avoid user identification on the basis of this information.

Creatives 🎨

Creative, or just creo, is a set of text and graphic elements of an advertisement. Its purpose is to attract the user to the offer page to perform a targeted action. We are talking about a banner, video, text and other information that conveys the value of the offer to the consumer. A kind of clothing that partially does the man. That is why it must be catchy and shown to those for whom it is intended. This is the first contact of the product with a potential client.

Neural network generated this creo for a casino ad

In terms of cost this is one of the most inexpensive tools, since most affiliate programs provide them to affiliates for free, and even make them upon request. And if you need something completely unique, then neural networks will draw anything on the basis of a single promt. If you have a budget, you can order creative for any offer from a specialized designer.

There are several types of creatives:

• banners – images and at the same time the most common type of creative;
• text – a brief description of the product; often disguised as search results in the top lines;
• push notifications – pop-up notifications on websites or applications;
• all kinds of mailings;
• video – full-length video or embedded, several-second advertisement.

You can see examples of creatives on special spy-services. They monitor advertising networks and collect databases of images, videos and text materials that are used. These services are often paid and the creatives that can be found there are often in the ban or simply no longer bring results. Use them only for inspiration.

Examples of creatives in one of spy-services

🙌 The level of conversion and the success of the entire advertising campaign depend on how accurately the creative hits the target audience.

Where do I Learn Affiliate Marketing?

There is nothing better than practical experience to gain knowledge. But to start affiliate marketing, you have to study a lot of information that will allow you to understand the topic better and not get confused in terms. One more option is to take courses. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money in the initial stages, then you can easily find leaks from the largest educational portals online.

Course on affiliate marketing from SPI

In addition, there is a lot of specialized literature and books that will help you master traffic managment on your own. Their main problem is that information becomes outdated faster than a new edition is published. But you can learn the basics, especially if you love paper media.

Another good source of knowledge is thematic chats, where you can ask general questions that interest you, such as “how to make money in arbitration”, “how to make money quickly”, “how much do arbitrage specialists earn”, “how to promote more effectively”, “where is the best traffic” ”, as well as more specific ones related to your vertical, for example, “how does a cryptocurrency exchange and p2p trading work”.

If you have the opportunity, you can attend a conference dedicated to affiliate marketing. There are many of them held in different countries. Various affiliate programs set up their own stands there and are happy to communicate with visitors. 🙋‍♀️

You can also chat with affiliate support. They are more willing to give advice on traffic and where to start for a beginner. They also provide working algorithms, affiliate links and creatives.

Recommendations on Affiliate Marketing for Beginners 🔥

Now we’ll tell you about some points that beginners to affiliate marketing should definitely pay attention to in addition to studying the theoretical basis.

1. Learn to evaluate your strong points and calculate your budget. It is very important to have a clear understanding of your capabilities: how much time you are willing to devote to training and tests, how much money you are willing to spend on accounts and proxies, and also allocate to the advertising budget.
2. Accept one golden truth: money for tests is necessary. In a good way, you need to spend 2-3 times the cost of a lead to understand whether the advertising campaign will bring results or not. For example, if the payout per conversion is $5, then you need to spend at least $10 – $15 on advertising to see results.
3. Understand the advertising metrics. To be able to clearly determine the campaign’s performance, you need to know by heart the basic metrics of ad effectiveness: CPM, CPC, CTR and others.
4. Decide how you want to progress in the field. Affiliate marketing is a huge opportunity, but to succeed, you need to understand at once how you want to work: solo, in a team, for a fixed rate or for a percentage of the profit.
5. Select vertical. You shouldn’t scatter your attention to many affiliate programs, offers, verticals and advertising networks. Pick one thing and devote maximum time to it, it will definitely increase your chances of success.
6. You need to get hands-on experience and it’s not just taking a course or reading up on lots of information. You need to make your first launch to understand how it works, invest your first budget and track your first metrics. There are two options.The first one is you will be lucky and you will be able to earn money right away. But I ask you not to have any illusions – affiliate marketing is not a button for money making. It is a 24/7 job, which will bear fruit over time, if you spend your efforts wisely. The second option is that your budget is running out and you still haven’t found a working combination of an offer and a creative. If you understand that this is what motivates you and you are ready to move on even after such negative financial experience, then you should write a resume and go assault the teams that are recruiting buyers.
7. Why is money not being wasted? It’s simple, because if you already have real experience on hand and understand how FB works in practice. This will greatly help you when you get into a team where your main income will depend on the bonus grid. You will not waste your precious time on understanding basic things, and this will allow you to receive your first bonuses in affiliate marketing.
8. Not only paid traffic sources bring profit. There is also always the option to use free traffic in parallel with the paid ones. This is not easy, it takes a lot of time, but it can also bear fruit and give impetus for further development.
9. To make it easier to communicate with like-minded people, study the slang of affiliates, since without understanding it, you will face the problem of not understanding what your colleagues are talking about.
10. It would also be a good idea to find a friendly community or a mentor who can immediately advise what you should pay attention to now and how to adapt to changes in the market.
11. Among the skills you must learn are how to make creatives (it is really important, since spy services are not a magic pill), interact with affiliate program managers (communication skills), since they with the right approach can help you a lot if you work alone.

Conclusion

The main thing that an amateur in affiliate marketing needs to understand is that there is a lot to learn. This is exactly the same profession as all the others – in order to achieve success, you have to do it regularly and a lot and spend your time and energy. You can learn the basics for free, but you will have to pay to enter the market in any case: be it purchasing traffic or consumables for free traffic. And you will definitely need them.

Remember: success in arbitration is hard work, perseverance, regular training, tests, tests and more tests. Good luck and may Zuckerberg’s grace be with you! 🍀