Bang For Your Buck: Investing $1,000 Wisely

Bang For Your Buck:  Investing $1,000 Wisely
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Affiliate Marketing

Written by

Papa Whale

PUBLISHED ON

February 24, 2016

Category

Affiliate Marketing

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$1,000…

What’s $1,000 to you?

To some it’s a huge number, to others, this amount isn’t all that impressive; as they say, it’s all relative.

However, in the affiliate marketing world in which we live, a $1,000 investment can make the difference between a hobby generating complementary revenue and a professional business.

“Money is the seed of money”

...said the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau — and nearly 200 years later, this statement holds true.

If you’re looking to grow your business, spending money wisely is fundamentally crucial to your success.

Therefore today, we’ve got money on our minds -- $1,000 -- and we’re taking a look at just some of the things we could do with this money.

If You Have a Tube Site....

With the always increasing number of tubes on the market, investing a little to stand out from the crowd is never a bad idea.

SEA - Search Engine Advertising

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) will always be a good investment because it's one surefire way of gaining a greater level of quality and relevance when it comes to traffic.  

SEA provides a greater number of targeted search terms & keywords. Those who do SEA will be right next to some of the biggest players in the industry.

Google is famous for its pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-click (CPC) advertising service — Google Adwords. With so much competition, it makes sense to carefully target the audience you want while at the same time getting the most out of your investment.

On the other side of things—and this might even be a well kept secret in the adult marketing world—another wise SEA strategy would be to choose Bing over Google. Sure, Google may dominate search and the world, but Bing still controls one third of the US market.

Bing’s advertising is a little less restricted than Google’s - especially concerning the adult market.   

Invest in a SEM Tool

Another solid choice is to invest in a professional Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tool. As we said earlier, the tube market has a lot of huge players. Therefore, a SEM tool can certainly aid you in your path to the same great ranking as some of your biggest competitors -- and hopefully more.

At CrakRevenue, the SEM tool we use ourselves is called SEMrush.

SEMrush allows you to find the keywords targeted by your competitors and allows you in a way to “copy” their campaigns. So, not only will your campaigns become super-targeted, if you bid more than your competitors, you’ll easily out rank them using SEA.

Use Plugs

On Tubes, another not-too-shabby investment strategy is to spend some money on plugs.  

This allows you to feature some of your content and videos on other tubes and - therefore - attract only qualified traffic that has a proven interest in your content.

Of course, our favorite tool for the contextual advertising approach is Plugz.

Once register an account, you have the opportunity to buy and sell adult traffic through plugs as well.  

If You Have a Dating Site....

Despite Dating sites differing from Tubes, investing in SEA or a SEM tool like we talked about above still has its advantages in the Dating niche.

Mainly, though, there is something that you can do to dramatically increase the value of your Dating site...

Develop a Member Zone!

Developing a Member Zone area is a proven way to increase your Dating site’s value (and the value of its traffic).

Heck — depending on your Webmaster skills — you might not even have to spend $1,000!

Yep, having a Member Zone can add a ton of value to your site since the users in this area usually have had to sign up with a credit card. What this boils down to is… super qualified, money-spendin’ users!

Do you know the kind of value this adds?!

You now have a highly-sought after class of people.  

With this additional value, comes all sorts of opportunities when it comes to negotiations with other sponsors and providers.  

For instance, adding a navbar tab in your Member Zone area that leads to another Dating site or Cam offer can be particularly worthwhile and sought-after by another company seeking this type of traffic.

You can...

  • Sell a spot like this to an interested party for steady guaranteed revenue; or,
  • Monetize a spot like this as a CrakRevenue affiliate

And last but not least, having a Member Zone area increases the overall value of your site should you ever decide to sell it.

If You Don't Have Any Site at All...

Of course, if you don’t have any website to monetize, it’s probably safe to assume you’ll be entering the Media Buying world—if you have not entered it already.

If that’s the case, $1,000 is not a huge budget in the grand scheme of things — and this kind of budget should be spent with extra care.

Buy CPC traffic  

Buying Cost-Per-Click (CPC) traffic is probably one of the smartest decision you can make if you have a small budget because it’s very easy to manage its capping.

In the case of CPC traffic, you know there’s a good chance it’s already qualified traffic because these visitors have hopefully clicked on your banner display intentionally. But of course, that doesn’t mean that you should put less effort into your banner choice:  you still want to have one that has a fairly high click-through rate (CTR).

Although it’s fair to say 90% of your efforts should probably still be spent on the optimization of your landing page and on your sales funnel.

Buy CPM traffic

We know that the biggest players in the industry typically buy Cost-per-thousand (CPM) traffic at a flat rate.

We also know this allows them to reach a larger (if not huge) volume of traffic and, consequently, collect vast amount of information and data on the traffic that they’re buying.

One they have the data, their campaign managers start to optimize the funnel accordingly and only then, start making money.

Therefore, $1,000 again, is not a huge budget if this is the direction you’re going to go in.

Which in this case, you should only buy traffic at a CPM rate if you tremendous insight.

So, we recommend buying a small segment of this traffic and making the most out of an opportunity that you’re aware of.  For example: maybe a GEO on the rise that converts well with one offer on a certain device (Mobile, for instance).

But, even with segmentation, you still need to control your expenses if you don’t want to implode your budget!

To help, we recommend you add some parameters to your CPM purchase:

What?Why?
Frequency Capping Frequency capping allows you to control the frequency of impressions on the spot. For example, you can ask for your banner to be displayed once per 24h per visitor (1:24). This allows you to manage your spending better.
Daily Budget You can ask to cap your spendings on a daily basis. For example, you can cap your expenses to $50/per day on the spot.
Time TargetYou can ask that your banner be shown in specified timeframe. For example, between 6PM and 11PM each night. This also allows you to have a better control over your expenses.

Take Your Affiliate Business to the Next Level

As we said earlier, if you’re looking to grow your business and make a true living out of affiliate marketing, you’ll definitely have to invest some day. As we've shown, there are numerous good investment possibilities to choose from.

Having money to invest isn't the hard part—investing these funds wisely for your own long-term benefit is what’s truly challenging!  But don’t go too crazy with the diversification….

“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing." - Warren Buffett

But if you’re struggling to figure out what you should invest in… relax, take a deep breath, and reach out to your Affiliate Advisor. There will always be someone here at CrakRevenue willing to give you some advice.

And finally, if there’s something else out there that you think is worth investing in pertaining to the adult niche that’s not covered here -- be sure to share it with us in a comment!

We love a good investment.

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