Part 2: It’s like gambling

In part 1, I went through the pain that led me to decide to shift from – what 97% or more affiliates doing out there – using the “Hit ‘n’ Go” approach, sending traffic straight to an affiliate offer…

For one that would allow me to control things a bit more.

I had to make that change because I realized I was gambling my money and livelihood in the business by being a Transactional Affiliate by exchanging money, in the hope I get more.

After I made that shift in mindset, I’ve had my first profit day in a long time.

I was excited for sure but still felt something was missing.

I kept asking myself, how can I control traffic…

And then I remembered reading this from a friend in one of his posts…

“…Most beginners in the CPA Affiliate Marketing scene, tend to think of the offers (or networks) as the “asset”; the most important part. But if we dive deeper into the meaning of the word asset, you’ll notice that the part where we have the most (direct) control as media buyers (with our campaigns) is the traffic sources. This is because when you treat the traffic as the asset you can then “plug ‘n’ play” style campaigns at your will and be on “greens” most of the time.…”

And I remember thinking “that’s it! I need to think (and treat) traffic as an asset.”

I must have read this quote a dozen times.

I kept reading it and reading it.

But the more I did, the more I felt something was still missing.

I realized that I still wouldn’t control it (to the extend I’ve had in my mind).

Because I wouldn’t own it.

(Read this last statement a few times)

So I started looking for ways to own the traffic.

Buying To Rent… Rent To Live

Let me share with you how important – owning the traffic – is for me.

I’ll use an example from the Real Estate Market as I think you can relate.

Think about the difference, between “renting to live” and “buying to rent”, for a moment…

When we rent, we pay some money for using the house.

The house is the asset that brings the money.

Not to us. But to its owner.

But as long as we pay the money, we are taking advantage of all the house’s amenities.

After all we pay for them.

Now how about when we own the house and we rent it out to others.

That house now becomes our asset.

And since we’ve already paid for it (to buy it), it can now give us money in continuity (from renting it out to others).

Right?

Do you see the difference?

Now we have total control of that asset (we own it) and we make money off of it too (by renting it out).

Consider what if we have 4 such assets that are already paid for and owned by us and we rent them out to others?

We get monthly recurring revenues from all 4.

Right?

And we still own those houses; the assets.  

But now, since we own them, later down the road, we can fix one or more of those up, renovate them etc and sell them for a higher price than we paid to acquire those assets.

This way we’ve made the initial investment back (from collecting rent money before we decide to sell them) AND we’ve made profit by selling them later on.

With me so far?

Now let’s bring this point home…

Driving Paid Traffic Directly Linking to an affiliate offer is like us renting the house (the asset) from someone else (the traffic source – the owner of the asset – the landlord).

We use it as long as we pay for it.

That’s it.

Our interaction is purely transactional.

And while we have some control on where to send it (& pause sources, targets etc), it’s not our own asset.

Because, it’s not working for us all the time.

The minute we stop paying for it, we have it no more.

Not to mention that the landlord (traffic source) can kick us out any time they want…

So if the key to bigger and more long term returns (including more control) for real estate investors is in owning the asset…

Why not just do that online too with our campaigns?

We know that we have most control in traffic.

We can send it where we want. We can start & stop sources. We can even select devices, browsers etc.

We just don’t own it.

Here’s what happened when I started to also own the traffic (the asset)…

At first, I begun having days like this…

And this…

And not too long after, days like this.

And in a minute or so, I will show you what I did.

But the key that makes the difference is in owning that asset; the traffic.

Building YOur own “traffic” assets

There are many types of assets we can build as marketers.

Landing Pages, Prelander pages etc.

In this case, however, we are talking about traffic assets.

And that is the type of asset you really want to “own”.

And that is… Subscriber (email, push, pixel, bot messenger etc) Lists.

Building lists with people that are interested in what we are promoting, we build our own traffic source assets.

Our own traffic source that works for us day in & day out.

And we put these traffic source assets, those Subscriber lists, to work for us.

The interesting thing is It costs* the same paid traffic as if we’re just sending it directly to the offer.

The best thing, however, is that the returns, both short and long term, far exceed those of just direct linking to an offer (see screenshots below).

And you can even use that traffic you now own for other affiliate offers.

Not even on the same vertical!

Let me show it to you

The example I’ll use is from building my own traffic assets in the Dating CPA vertical.

Note that the vertical in this example is irrelevant. It could have been a mainstream vertical for a health product or what have you.

The screenshot below is from a few campaigns I run back in August 2019.

These were for Single Opt-in Adult Lead Gen Offers with one of the affiliate networks I was working back then.

Take a look at the overall Earnings Per Click (EPC) which as shown above is ~ $0.44.

Just in case you’re not familiar with the term EPC, this is  metric that gives an indication of how much money an offer will make for us if we send 100 clicks to it. Note however that CPA Affiliate networks tend to count (& average) EPC on a per 1000 clicks.

For some, this is a good EPC. But let’s say this is average in the adult lead gen vertical.

So just to make sure of the EPC importance, that EPC tells me (that in theory) if I’d send 1000 clicks to those offers I’d get $441 -and some change- in revenue.

However, focus on that top offer on that screenshot for a moment. Here’s the screenshot again.

That offer’s EPC is $1.67. That EPC tells me that if I’d send 1000 clicks, of the same quality (this is key), I’d get $1,670 in revenue.

(In case you’ve not worked out the offer conversion rate on the above campaign: 51 leads from 182 unique visitors = 28.02%. That’s around 1 every 4 people that saw the offer, took the desired action and I got paid for it.)

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d take that $1.67 EPC (& 28% conversions) any day of the year…

And am willing to pay $0.60 per Lead(!) to get that. ($0.6 was my cost per lead seeing that affiliate offer after they became my lead. Note I didn’t even bother with the Cost Per Click. It was made irrelevant!)

I got that $1.67 EPC while I was building my own traffic assets (initially just an email list).

That EPC, for the small amount of traffic I’d sent, translated to just a bit over $300 for that day.

Just on that network alone.

That didn’t include the 242 conversions from an exit-intent asset I was building…

At the same time.

With the same traffic…

And the combined money I made when I took this whole traffic asset building game to the max.

In this case 4 different Traffic Sources…

An Email List:

A Push Notification List:

A Facebook Pixel List:

And a Google Remarketing List:

I call this whole combo of traffic sources asset building – Omnifarious Marketing.

(By The Way – if you want to see a list of the tools I used, take a look here)

The most important key take away however is that am now in full control of the asset “the traffic”.

I own it.

No one can take it away from me.

I have 100% control of it.

And I put it to work for me.

You see, that change (and shift of mindset), in how I treat traffic, enabled me to go from results like this…

And a tracker view like this…

To days like this…

And a tracker view which was much more pleasant in the eyes to watch :-).

And remember I mentioned that once you own the traffic you can use it anyway you like and that it works day in day out for you for the long term?

I was actually using a variation of the method I’ve developed back in 2013.

Here’s a screenshot from an email I’d sent to an email list I owned, for an affiliate offer, promoting a little software tool on JVZoo affiliate platform.

Now one might be tempted to think that this is all good but that was back in the old days.

As all screenshots are from 2019 (& the one above from 2013!).

I left those dates in on purpose.

I wanted to be clear that this is not a tactic – a hack – that works for some time and then stops.

It’s primarily a shift in mindset.

It’s my key strategy.

And strategies rarely change. Especially if they are good strategies.

With that said, here’s another screenshot showing the returns from “renting out” my own traffic asset to others using the traffic sources I’ve started building back in 2019 (& still building today).

There is a -massive- difference in actions and mindset of how one operates as a transactional affiliate and one that builds their own “traffic” assets.

I call this collectively as being an… “Omnifarious Marketer”…

I hope you’ve enjoyed my story/case study.