I’m starting this interview series with Luke “PeerFly” Kling, the man who just 1 year ago started his very own affiliate marketing forum called affLIFT and is already having some great success with it.

He is also a well-known blogger on LukePeerFly.com and as affiliate manager at PeerFly network.

Luke is in the industry for over 13 years now and he knows a lot about our affiliate marketing world from both sides – being an affiliate manager, but also an affiliate who runs his own campaigns and shares his experiences with the community.

Let’s get right into the interview!

Hey Luke! I think your activities (PeerFly affiliate network, your blog, affLIFT forum) are pretty well-known in the affiliate marketing community, but there are still many people that may don’t know you. Could you introduce yourself to my readers?

Sure! My name is Luke Kling and I’ve been in the affiliate industry since about 2006. I’ve been an Affiliate Manager for most of that time, but I also do my own affiliate marketing.

I have a degree in Web Application Development and building products/websites is one of my favorite hobbies. I have a bunch of websites and start a few new projects a year.

Last, but far from least, I’m a dad. I have 2 daughters who enjoy playing in my office and distracting me from my work. But, I’m totally fine with that

As an affiliate manager you are surely coming in touch with lot of newbies starting out in this industry. What do you think are their 3 biggest mistakes that makes them fail?

PeerFly has been known as a very newbie friendly network for about 10 years now so I get to work with a ton of people who are new to the affiliate industry. In fact, we get a few thousand new affiliate applications every week!

Newbies tend to make a lot of little mistakes that end up costing them a significant chunk of their budgets and deflate their motivation and optimism for affiliate marketing.

3 Biggest Newbie Mistakes:

1. Not knowing how to budget. I had a guy last year spend $6,000 on SnapChat ads without ever getting a single conversion! It’s not as important that you have a giant budget as it is that you know how to use the money you do have most effectively. Choose a multiple of the offer payout to test with and if you do not get any conversions, test a new offer with the same multiple.
2. Running traffic with garbage traffic sources. I won’t name any names, but there are some traffic sources out there that are a complete waste of money. Do your research first and ask fellow affiliates or your Affiliate Manager about a source that is new to you.
3. Not using a tracking tool. The market is filled with tools you can use to track your affiliate campaigns. There are guides available for every little aspect of pretty much every tracker. There is no excuse to not find and learn how to use a tracking tool so you can properly analyze and optimize your campaigns.

On the opposite side now. During your career you also surely met some big fishes. Do you remember how much the biggest affiliates you handled were making per month? (you know we affliates just love these kind of numbers)

I’m not supposed to give out any specific numbers simply because that’s our policy at PeerFly, but I’ll share a fun story from around 2010.

I was in college and it was a Friday afternoon. I was done with class and I was walking to a bar with a few friends of mine when my cellphone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but this was before robocalls were causing everyone to hate receiving phone calls. Anyway, I answer the call and it’s one of my account reps from a company PeerFly was getting email submit offers from.

Apparently, that afternoon while I was in class, one of my publishers had made nearly $100,000 on an iPhone email submit. This was during about a 4 hour span of time. It was a pretty exciting weekend. Since I know everyone is wondering, it was Facebook traffic.

You have a pretty well-known blog LukePeerfly.com where you post a ton of tutorials, reviews and other useful content for affiliates. In fact, you are probably the only affiliate manager that I know who actively blogs. When did you start your blog and what motivates you to write?

I started my blog in April of 2011. At the time, I was the only Affiliate Manager at PeerFly and I was managing about 30,000 accounts. I needed a way to be able to distribute information on a mass scale. So, I created my blog.

I started to see really good results by the end of 2011 from my blog. The articles were getting a lot of traction and I kept having people approach me at the Affiliate Summit conference about it. At the time, there were quite a few people with affiliate blogs. A lot has changed since then and there don’t seem to be as many good affiliate blogs.

It was much easier to write when I had more time available. Now, I have children and a few side businesses so I don’t have as much time to dedicate to my blog. I still enjoy writing it in though when I do

Have you ever though about starting a video format (YouTube channel) or do you prefer to stick to written content?

It’s funny, I have about 1,700 subscribers on YouTube and I’ve only done a few videos. I really enjoyed doing those videos and over the past year I have done quite a few more videos for my affiliate marketing forum. I think I could build up a pretty good channel on YouTube if I spent more time thinking about and producing video content, but it’s just a time issue.

I prioritize what I do and I know that I can make more money doing other things than blogging or producing free videos for my YouTube so I don’t spend time doing those things.

I do really enjoy written content though. I prefer to consume written content so that’s what I like to do.

You do quite a lot of activities and I also know you have 2 kids. Where are you taking all that energy? Could you share some tips how do you stay focused and productive?

Kids are a game changer. Anyone who has kids will tell you that and it’s not just because it sounds cool. I’ll admit right now that I was much more productive with my work when I did not have any kids. I look back at my college days before I had kids and so much other responsibility and wonder why I wasted so much time playing video games.

That being said, I have an incredible wife who does a great job taking care of our kids so I am able to still get a lot done during the course of the week.

I work from home, but most mornings you can find me working at one of the local coffee shops in my area. I love working at coffee shops. I’ll spend 3-4 hours drinking 2 lattes and get a ton of work done. I’m able to be super productive because I use an app called Todoist to plan out and prioritize what I am going to do. I do not waste any time. I focus on specific tasks until they are done and then move onto the next.

I get the bulk of the work done that generates the majority of my revenue during the 15-20 hours I work in the mornings Monday-Friday.

I do work in the afternoon from home during the week but that time is definitely less focused and productive. That’s okay though. I get to be home with my 2 daughters and my wife every day. I spend a lot of time with my girls. I am sure when they get old enough to go to school I will start putting in more work hours, but my plan is to just keep doing what I have to do to be able to spend as much time with them.

Lastly, I am determined to get as much done as possible that needs to be done. For example, I know this interview is going to provide a lot of value so I’m spending my Monday night watching hockey at 10:30pm and typing my answers.

If you would start today as an affiliate marketer, what verticals and traffic sources would you choose?

I get this question a lot. The answer changes based on what’s hot. Right now, push notifications are still really hot. I think it’s going to fizzle out a bit by the end of the year, but everyone should be taking advantage of it while they can.

What I really recommend newbie affiliate marketers learn is the fundamentals. Traffic sources and verticals are going to change over time, but if you learn how to properly run an affiliate campaign, you can utilize those skills on any traffic source with an offer in any vertical.

I had some of my most successful campaigns running dating offers on Plenty of Fish. I applied a lot of what I learned doing that to my early push notification campaigns and did really well with that too.

One year ago you launched affLIFT, a private forum for affiliates. Could you tell us more about it tell us also how is Afflift different from other private forums?

I have been a member of all the popular affiliate marketing forums. I joined WickedFire in 2006. I joined WarriorForum in 2011. I was one of the first moderators on AffiliateFix.

However, last year I decided that there is a gap in the market.

The really premium affiliate marketing communities are too expensive or intimidating for many new affiliates.

The free forums are more work than it’s worth to find the few good pieces of content in them (which is likely outdated).

So, I wanted to create a friendly community with premium content at a cost that any serious affiliate should be able to afford. I want every member to be able to be ROI positive on their membership investment.

We already have over 14,000 registered users and we’ve established an amazing culture and community. Now, we’re working on building the next generation of super affiliates

affLIFT is now 1 year old. Could you share some background stats with us, like how many members, posts etc. do you currently have?

As I mentioned, we just crossed 14,000 registered users. The goal is to hit 25,000 by the end of 2019. To do that, we need at least 50 new users a day. We’re on pace to hit it.

There are about 1,700 threads with about 17,000 messages posted on them. It’s not the busiest forum on the internet, but we have some really good discussions about everything affiliate marketing.

Something that is unique to affLIFT is our live chat. At the bottom of the forum, there’s a chatroom where you can talk to the members online. I am not sure how many messages were posted in the chat this year, but it’s pretty active.

I’ve spent quite a bit of money this year investing into our Affiliate Marketing Link Directory. I’m hoping it’ll become a valuable resource for every affiliate. We have information about traffic sources, tracking tools, spy tools, and more. Check it out!

Those are very impressive numbers! Building a project like this from scratch is not easy as you have to solve a “chicken or the egg” problem. You need to get members, but also at the same time you need to have interesting content for them. How did you tackle this challenge in the beginning?

At the beginning of last year, I was running a few Zeropark campaigns that were generating about $5,000 profit a month. I used these campaigns as examples in my video lessons in the forum. I didn’t completely give away the campaigns, but I did go into a ton of detail on how I had gotten those campaigns profitable, which provided a lot of value.

I did an “Early Bird” promotion when I launched and pushed it hard to my blog email list. I did some Facebook retargeting and was able to make about $20,000 in the first 2 weeks after launch.

That was enough to get the community off the ground and there’s been a nice network effect since.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember that affLIFT took off with discussion around the trending push traffic. I know you also ran some push campaigns yourself. Many people these days are worried about future of push as it might be killed by a browser update. What is your opinion on this and how do you personally see the future of push?

Push has been interesting because when I launched affLIFT, we didn’t even have a section of the forum for Push Notifications! I added the Push Notification section in September and it’s our most popular topic of discussion.

I believe that push notifications have great browser functionality so it’ll be difficult for browsers to get rid of them completely. Gmail, Slack, and most web apps have them built in.

I am concerned about the ad networks abusing them though. I tweeted this picture showing some notifications I got when I signed up for a push offer on PeerFly from one of our clients.

I imagine browsers will regulate frequency and make it easier to unsubscribe from notifications. This will decrease supply, but should help increase quality. The decrease in supply and increase in quality will drive prices up. All the new super affiliates from affLIFT will make bank and newbies will need to learn the basics on a cheaper traffic source

Thank you so much for your time, Luke! To wrap everything up, please tell my readers where they can find more information about you? Also if there is anything you would like to add you can do it right now!

Thanks Erik. I really appreciate you participating in our discussions on affLIFT and being a member of the community. I believe value brings value. I work hard to provide value to the community at affLIFT, the readers on my blog, my publishers on PeerFly, and everyone I have the opportunity to work with because I know it’s what is going to drive my business forward and provide for my family (including those 2 cute little girls I mentioned above).

I tried to provide value to you through my community and now we’re having this discussion on your blog.

If you are reading this and there’s any chance I can help you, do not hesitate to email me. Better yet, join affLIFT and reply to the welcome message I send you

Let’s make some money!

It’s the best way they can learn from their beginner mistakes and also everyone who is reading can step in and give an advice.

It’s a win-win situation for everyone, and many times these FA’s are full of golden nuggets.

It’s been a long time since I started my own follow-along on STM.

It was actually couple years ago, when I was starting out with paid traffic affiliate marketing as a total newbie.

However, in early December I started my own follow-along again!

Zeropark recently introduced Push Ads and I wanted to learn this new ad format.

Follow-along seemed like the best way to do it, so everyone can benefit and learn something new.

Even I’m experienced affiliate marketer and I launched hundreds of successful campaigns, push ads were a completely new ad format to me at this time.

I’ve documented my whole journey from start, with the whole setup directly on STM and updated it every couple of days.

Here is what I’ve shared:

• my preparation and research process
• my tracking setup in Voluum
• offers and landers selection
• campaign’s setup at Zeropark’s side
• ads and creatives
• best converting offer

The results were more than surprising!

I did a proper initial preparation, research (spying) and setup.

I’ve launched 5 campaigns in 3 different verticals (sweepstakes, casino and finance) in total.

In just 4 days as a total newbie with push ads I reached $200/day profit.

Of course not all my campaigns were profitable, and I shared my thoughts and reasons behind those as well.

To read the whole FA, feel free to join STM and read it with people’s comments and questions.

Also since yesterday you can also read an edited version of it as a case study on Zeropark’s official blog:

Zeropark Push Ads Case Study: A Super-Affiliate Tries Push Traffic – Ft. Erik Gyepes

Enjoy reading and I wish you good profits with push notification traffic!

Roman is travelling around the world to interview super affiliates, network owners and other interesting people in our industry.

I thought, why not! I can talk for hours about affiliate marketing.

It’s my main thing for the last 5+ years and at the same time we can have also fun and I can show Roman around in Bratislava, Slovakia.

All this happened and it was a great experience!

The interview is already and YouTube and I would like to share it with my readers in this post.

You can watch it below, or visit the link and watch it on YouTube.

If you are Russian speaker, there is also a Russian dubbed version.

Some of the topics we covered:

• we talked numbers and $$$$$
• revealed some of my best angles
• my secret tools and systems
• about being a moderator on STM Forum
• bitcoin and crypto
• tried out the best “bryndzove halusky” in Bratislava old town
• and a lot more…

Enjoy the interview!

STM Forum (formerly called StackThatMoney) is a private affiliate marketing community started back in 2011 by Stackman, Lorenzo Green and Besmir.

Since then it became one of the biggest private affiliate marketing communities, that now stands behind big events called Affiliate World Conferences.

If you read my blog for a while you may noticed that STM forum is on my list of tools for success, it’s actually first one on the list.

And there is a good reason for it.

I wrote this STM Forum review, so we can find out what it’s all about and whether it’s really worth to pay $99/month for it?

STM Forum Preview as of November 5th, 2018

Why to join STM Forum?

When I started out in affiliate marketing I had at least million questions in my head.

Are you asking yourself any of these questions?

• Where to start in affiliate marketing?
• What is tracker and tracking?
• What is the best traffic source right now?
• How does a converting landing page look like?
• What are the best affiliate networks?
• How to choose a an affiliate offer?
• …and probably million more questions

If your answer on any of these was yes, then STM may be right choice for you.

All of these questions are already answered on StackThatMoney and if not, you can always ask your own.

Good thing about STM Forum is that it’s newbie friendly, so you don’t have to be shy or feel stupid about asking anything.

“The only stupid question is the question that is never asked.”

– Ramon Bautista

There is a friendly moderators team (btw I’m one of them) who are happy to answer your questions and point you into the right direction.

It’s almost like having a team of mentors available to you all the time.

STM Forum Price

STM is a paid forum and it’s price is $99/month.

StackThatMoney

StackThatMoney logo vs STM Forum logo

STM forum is still well-known as “stackthatmoney”, even it was rebranded quite a while ago.

When someone says “he read it on StackThatMoney”, they for sure meant STM forum.

Which super affiliates you can find on STM?

There are many super affiliates and successful affiliates who are more or less active on STM.

If you are into AM, you probably recognise some of these names already:

• Charles Ngo
• Jason Akatiff
• IAmAttila
• Servando Silva
• Ian Fernando
• Matuloo
• Manu Cinca
• and many others.

What you can learn on STM

STM Forum Traffic Sources Sub-Forums

Forum is divided into many sub-forums and therefore it’s easy to navigate.

Let me go through some of the Traffic Source sections that may be interesting for you:

Facebook

If the big blue is your thing, then you are on the right place. This sub-forum is dedicated to nothing else, but Facebook.

This traffic source may be hard to “crack”, as Facebook’s algorithms are constantly changing, accounts are banned frequently and you need to always stay ahead.

There is a “[A-Z GUIDE] CRACK The FB ALGO + EXAMPLES (In-Depth)” tutorial on STM forum that can help you crack the FB code.

Also you can find lot of folks and mastermind together, share knowledge on accounts, payments solutions and other things that include FB.

Great starter is also the “# The Ultimate Facebook Newbie Tutorial 2018 – Introduction” tutorial by stickupid.

eCommerce

This is a quite new section that is getting traction in the latest months when many affiliates started creating their own e-commerce shops.

If you are on of them, this section is for you.

There are many interesting topics discussing ecommerce such as “Amazon Ads – The Traffic Source Making Billions” or strategies like this one: “[STRATEGY] – How to leverage your affiliate background to make millions in ecom!”

Running worldwide ecommerce business can be a hassle and you may find useful threads about laws and regulations from member Digitas such as this one: “
eCommerce and VAT”.

There is also a great ecom book summary series from Vortex called: “Book Summary: Ecommerce Evolved by Tanner Larsson – Introduction”

Native

Everything about running with native sources ie. RevContent, MGID, Taboola, Outbrain and others.

Just this month (november 2018)  jack_l published a “Cool bot-catching trick for natives (low-tech)”, that discusses the way you can identify and easily block bot traffic from native traffic sources.

There is also a good “Native Ads Cheat Sheet” directly from Mr. Green, this one is 2 years old, but it has still very relevant tips.

While talking about cheat sheet, you may know that it’s common practice these days to do automation through traffic source’s API’s or using tools like The Optimizer, so here comes a thread just for that by platinum: “NativeAds Automation Cheat Sheet”

Mobile

Probably the biggest and strongest sub-forum. Mobile offers and traffic has been a huge trend in the last couple of years for affiliates. It’s not as hot these days (2018) due to lot of regulations from mobile carriers and offer flows changes.

However mobile as a type of traffic is still growing and there are still ways to monetize it.

There are interesting threads popping up like this one: “Deceptive Attack – Wait Don’t Drop Your Current Domain Yet!”, it’s a trick that can help you to remove your domain flag.

Just some time ago a new traffic source by team of Mr. Green was announced: “NEW Traffic Source] Only Pay If You Make Money”.

It’s a traffic source that charges you only when you get conversions ie. based on CPA.

Definitely interesting and may worth experimenting.

Adult traffic (NSFW)

Adult affiliate marketing & dating. If you run on sources like Exoclick, TrafficJunky, TrafficFactory and others, this one is for you.

NSFW part of the internet is old as the internet itself. It’s still well alive (I personally run traffic in these waters as well).

The base of the biggest traffic sources remains mostly same over the years, but there are always new things coming – this year for example many of the sources added push traffic.

Also native formats were hugely added yearlier this year to the most of the sources.

So there is always something going on.

As for the threads, interesting discussions pops up like: “If your goal was to make $500/day, how would you do it?” or “Anyone else have a lot of $50-100/day spend campaigns?”.

These kind of questions are great discussion starters and you can find lot of helpful insights between the lines.

POP / PPV / Redirect

This one goes hand in hand with mobile. Very popular sub-forum where you can learn all about traffic sources like Popads, Zeropark, Propellerads, Adcash and others.

Pop traffic was where I started my paid traffic career. It’s still well alive even due to high efforts from web browsers trying to block it.

There are always good tips for best pop traffic sources such as this one: “Best Pop Source with Most Mobile Traffic?” or my favorite interesting discussion starters like “Is it possible to make $1000/day on <$2 offers?” or “Question): is it too late to run pop traffic on desktop in 2018?”.

Push Traffic

This is one of the newest sections that was added just recently. Push notification traffic seems to be a new big trend after POPs.

This year literally all of the major traffic sources added some kind of push traffic and TON of push only traffic sources were started.

It’s definitely one of the hottest trends when it comes to new ad formats and here is list of some interesting threads:

• Copy That Converts – Tips for running Push Ads on Zeropark
• How to work with PUSH-Notifications in Propellerads
• Getting easy profit from Push-traffic in PropellerAds (Bulgaria)
• How to make profitable push notification traffic campaigns
• Push Notifications Pioneers, tell us what you learned!
• and ton of more!

I recently started my own follow along running push notification ads with Zeropark and I was able to hit $200+/day profit in just 4 days!

Make sure you read it here: Zeropark Push Ads Follow-Along: Erik’s Journey to Push Profits!

$200+/day campaign with push ads

Pay Per Call

Pay per call has been quite hot few years ago, especially with all the (though questionable) tech support offers.

There are still some discussions about this vertical to this day, although I would say it’s not as much discussed as it used to be.

SEO

SEO is not really what STM is all about, as it’s mainly focused on paid traffic methods.

But..

This year with the influx of some serious SEO players (like Greg Morrison) it started to get some real traction.

Here are some of the recent SEO threads:

• Greg’s SEO\Ranking Tutorial…
• Big SEO Tip For Ending 2018 Going Into 2019
• SEO for ecommerce stores

Copywriting, Conversion & Psychology

These are the foundations to doing sales and online marketing.

Section is not much updated, but when it is it’s mostly well worth.

Here is a sneak peek:

• 49 Immediately Implementable Copywriting frameworks/structures/tips from Ca$hertizing
• [TIP] 10 Strategies to Go Viral on Any Platform
• Tip: Boost CTRs With The Power of Emoji’s
• Best converting pick-up lines for dating profiles?
• Smallest Changes for Biggest Improvement to ROI?
• “Amazing Headline Script”: Free Tool That Generates Killer Headlines for You

Copywriting section also includes 2 sub forums: first is called Everything Angles and the second one is Books & Information Resources which includes many recommendations to great books about copywriting and psychology like this one: The Best Books on Copywriting.

Tracking Campaigns & Tech stuff

One of the biggest challenges for new affiliates is tracking and all the technical difficulties.

Fortunately there are whole sub-forums for Tracking Campaigns, Programming, Servers & Scripts.

You will get answers to these and many more questions:

• What is a tracker and how to set it up?
• How does dynamic tracking tokens work?
• What is a postback and how to setup server to server (S2S) tracking?
• Why to host landing page on a CDN?
• What is a back button script and how to include it on my landing page?
• .. and many more

This section is very helpful and you will learn all the basics of tracking here.

Buy / Sell / Hire

STM also has sections for Vendors.

You can search or offer your services and products.

There is a sub section also for Joint Ventures (JVs) or permitted account sales.

Networks can also post information about their promotions and their profiles.

For us affiliates it’s good resource to find about new services, tools and affiliate networks, so we can be always on top of the game.

Localised Discussions

STM is international forum and now it has localised sub sections for several languages:

• STM en Français
• STM in het Nederlands
• STM auf Deutsch
• STM in Italiano
• STM en Español
• Area: South America
• Area: Europe & Middle-East
• Area: Asia

So you can now find your local peers in your countries and even communicate in your native language!

Success Stories

• “Crossed $40K in July 2018 – Struggle of Digital Marketer in Affiliate Marketing”
• “From $1,000,000 to Net Worth of $184,000,000 & Cover of Forbes Magazine”
• “Today: Two FB Accounts – Tier 1 – Pin Submit – 500% ROI”
• “$846,365 in 9 months with ecom”
• “After giving up on AM we just made $1MM of Profit in 53 days!”
• “10k profit day after more than a year of 0 returns”

No, these are not just some catchy headlines, they are actually case studies / success stories of the most successful affiliates on STM.

One of the many success stories on STM, here one of the members hit $40k in month of July

I handpicked them, but there are over 180 threads with over 4700 posts under the Success Stories sub-forum on STM.

Another success story where @stickupid did 500% ROI on Facebook

Follow-alongs

Let’s say you are ready to launch your first affiliate campaign.

You know learned all the basics, but something in the back of your head tells you that you are not 100% confident in your steps.

The best thing you can do is to start a follow-along and post your process and steps you took.

This way experienced affiliates and moderators can step-in and help you along the way.

Follow-alongs are also great threads in general to read through – you can learn the thought process of other affiliates and what steps they took that led them to success or failure.

Newbie-Friendly Guides & Tutorials

There are many great tutorials following the latest trends in affiliate marketing.

I personally also posted some tutorials and content that I exclusively share only on STM, you can see some previews below.

My guide on how to enable SSL/HTTPS on your domains and landing pages

My post on 1 simple trick that made my campaigns profitable

Unique Features

Aff Network Application Tool

Ever worried about getting approved by affiliate networks?

Being newbie with no experience may give you worries if you will be approved and able to run the top CPA offers as other super affiliates.

Each network behaves differently, some require proof (screenshots) of your previous earning from or contacts to your affiliate managers in other networks you work with.

But if you just getting started out?

This is where Aff Network Application Tool gets you covered.

This tool enables you to apply for multiple affiliate networks just by submitting this ONE application.

Networks will automatically see that you are member of STM and it will guarantee you that you will get approved.

(well you are already prequalified as you are member of STM forum, you paid for it, you are serious into affiliate marketing and not some dirty scammer)

It’s a longer form, but well worth filling out as you can get immediately into top networks like:

• Clickdealer
• Gotzha
• Addiliate
• Aragon
• Afflow/Monetizer
• Sinum Vendo
• BitterStrawberry
• and others that are constantly being added

Affiliate Contacts Directory

What if you are looking for a contact from a affiliate network or traffic source that you heard is good?

Well, you can checkout Affiliate Contacts Directory, which has been released just recently.

Before all the contacts were posted in one long, never ending thread, but now there is a special sub page for members where they can easily search and filter contacts they are looking for.

Very easy and helpful to find people by name, email, company name, Skype ID, STM username, offer/traffic type and other columns.

Affjobs

Affjobs is a premium affiliate marketing job board.

Looking for a job as an affiliate manager or media buyer in one of the top performance marketing companies?

Do you have a small job that needs to be done, but are tired of low quality suppliers on Fiverr or Upwork?

There are people on Affjobs, that can help with setting up your tracker, cleanin landing page or other tedious tasks you always hated to do yourself.

iStack Training

iStack Training is a platform launched by STM similar to let’s say Udemy, but on a whole different level.

It offers both opportunities for teachers who want to provide courses and also people who want to take their knowledge to a new level.

iStack offers online courses and also live events.

Some examples include: eCommerce Mastery, Native Ads Master Class or Ecommerce All-Star Training.

Masterminds

Even joining STM and being able to read and learn all these great tips & tricks and strategies may sometimes not be enough.

The true power of success in affiliate marketing lies in networking.

One thing you can do immediately is to start your own mastermind.

Let’s say you are interested in running native campaigns and you are looking for other affiliates on your level.

You can post your own mastermind announcements and start working with other affiliates towards same goals.

You can share everything together and save money on running traffic, and optimise faster.

Masterminds sub-forum

Mastermind is a great way of learning and it can speedup your way to success.

Events, Conferences & Networking

Another great way for progress is networking.

I highly recommend you to visit affiliate marketing related conferences such as Affiliate World Conferences or any other around the world or in your area.

Meeting affiliates face to face and sharing your experiences is the best investment for yourself.

Not mention those great affiliate parties

Group Buy

I know many newbie affiliates are trying to search for a group buy.

I do not recommend doing so.

STM is monitoring all IP addresses and users who are doing STM forum group buy’s are going to be discovered and banned from forum.

If you don’t have $99/month for a private forum you will probaly don’t have enough budget for doing CPA affiliate marketing using paid methods anyway.

If you are serious with affiliate marketing, you should have enough budget to be able to enter these waters.

Coupon Code / Discount

As far as I know, STM Forum doen’t have any coupon codes at the moment.

The price is the same for everyone, including companies and vendors (affiliate networks, traffic sources, advertisers etc.)

Alternatives

To be fair I would like to also include some alternative affiliate marketing forums. There are plenty of forums out there, but to keep this short I would like to pick 3 alternatives:

MadSociety

Madsociety is affiliate forum run by super affiliate and musician Malan Darras. It’s also a paid forum and the topics covered there are mostly towards native traffic sources. So if you are into native MadSociety might be interesting for you.

BlackHatWorld

BHW as its name suggest is forum oriented to black hat, it started as a blackhat seo forum, but these days it also covers paid traffic and other segments. The forum as a whole is free, but there is also a private paid section.

AffiliateFix

This forum was formerly started by online enterpreneur Oliver Keynon who later sold it. It’s a free forum covering many traffic sources and verticals. It’s newbie oriented and also full of newbies, so you will not find many super affiliates hanging out there.

affLift

This is a new kid on the block. Forum is started by Luke Peerfly who is also a well-known affiliate bloger. The forum has both free and paid sections. It’s a new forum, so there is not many topics yet, but it’s growing fast.

But let’s go back to STM..

Stats & Content

Here are some statistics as of 5th, November 2018:

• Users online: 305
• Most users ever online: 1159
• Threads: 39919
• Posts: 3440111

Pros and Cons

Pros

• both newbie and advanced affiliate marketers friendly
• friendly and helpful community
• ability to form or join masterminds
• place where one of the top affiliate marketers hang out

Cons

• it’s a paid forum ($99/month)
• too much information that newbies can find ovehelming at first

Is STM Forum Worth It?

Short answer? Yes.

If you are starting out in the AM industry, STM is the right place for you.

It may be perceived as lower value over time, as you will become expert and you will have feeling that you already know everything.

(btw that’s never true, especially in this industry)

If you are serious into AM then yes, I highly recommend STM Forum as it filters out lot of the buzz and incomplete information that is all around internet or free forums.

But if you are already making $1000/day or above, I think it may be not interesting for you anymore as you are already on a different level and probably know your way in affiliate marketing.

>>> JOIN STM FORUM NOW <<<Zeropark Push Ads Follow-Along: Erik’s Journey to Push Profits!

 Intro

Trackers are a hot topic recently between affiliates and performance marketers. The reason is that one of the top players decided to radically raise their prices, which outraged many of affiliates.

The good news is that in 2018 there are plenty of choices when it comes to our tracking solutions – both cloud and self-hosted.

In the last couple of days I took a closer look at Binom, a self-hosted tracker aimed for professionals, which is getting recently A LOT of traction between affiliates.

Let’s try to find out WHY is it happening and what Binom has to offer to us!

 Installation

Binom is self-hosted, which means you will have to install it on your own dedicated or VPS server.

If you are not very technical and not much into managing servers it may sound like a big NO for you, but HOLD ON for a while as I might have good news for you..

There are 2 easy ways to get up and running Binom without the need to know anything much about servers:

• ask Binom support to setup & install the tracker for you
• use their auto-installer

Both ways are pretty good choices. If you go with the auto-installer way, everything is well described with screenshots in Binom documentation (which I highly recommend to read, you will discover all the cool features and how to use them).

For my testing purposes I went with a DigitalOcean VPS with 3GB RAM and 1vCPU which costed me $15/month. According to Binom documentation this should be enough to drive up to 200k clicks a day through the tracker. They got recommendations based on amount of clicks you plan to have.

The DO VPS droplet was created under 60 seconds, I logged into server through SSH and pasted the download and auto-install command. It took around 10 minutes to install and I was up and running with Binom.

Through installation I was asked questions like my timezone, my domain name and folder where I want to install the tracker.

Now here comes the good part! If you have already pointed your domain to your server (using DNS) then during installation you will automatically get your free SSL certificate installed!

If you haven’t done so yet, no problem, it’s possible to enable SSL later directly from the tracker interface.

Updating Binom

While I was testing Binom for couple of weeks, recently there was a notification in the menu about an update.

The new version 1.11 GDPR was just released, which I’m glad as I could see how does the update process looks & works in Binom.

The update itself went on very smoothly, I think it took up to 1 minute and it was done. It downloaded couple of files and there was an animated progress bar informing about the process.

Binom Update

 First impressions

Binom Login Screen

Once the tracker was installed I opened it in the browser and was welcomed with a login screen.
The screen with a login window in the middle and a blurred background with campaigns behind it. These campaigns are just fake auto-generated data, but I find it cool.

I remember I that I have seen this screen a while ago when I was doing some spying with Adplexity. At that time I thought that I have just discovered someone else’s campaigns. Looks cool indeed!

After login I went directly to change my password (which was autogenerated) and started clicking through all the settings to get myself familiar with the tracker.

Binom Campaigns Screen

I then started adding traffic sources, affiliate networks, offers, landers and created my first campaigns.

Binom Campaign Creation

During this process I’ve found some cool features and differences to my current tracker which is Voluum.

Just to let you guys know, I use Voluum for 4 years as my main tracker. I think it’s understandable and make sense that I will tend to compare Binom with Voluum a lot. I think thanks to this I am able to pin-point features that may not be visible on the first sight and that is what a review is about in the first point, right?

 Moving from Voluum?

For someone like me who is a Voluum user for years, moving to a new tracker brings additional worries – what about my existing campaigns, how fast I will be able to move?

There are 2 main paths that you can take:

• start launching new campaigns in your new tracker (in this case Binom)
• use the Import from Voluum feature in BInom

Launching new campaigns in your new tracker

This is rather a manual and slower move by simply launching new campaigns in Binom. Your old campaign will still stay in your old tracker solution and as time goes and campaigns die (they always do at some point!) you will have everything in your new tracker.

Import from Voluum

Binom offers import from Voluum function which you can find in the settings under Import/Export tab.
To start the import process you need to enter your Voluum login and password. In the background Binom connects to Voluum through their API and fetches all your campaigns, landers, offers, affiliate networks and traffic sources.

Binom Voluum Import

If you need to import just a couple of landers you can do that separately on the Landings tab, but the real power of import lies in importing the whole campaigns.

When you import the whole campaign, all it’s landing pages and offers will be imported as well and even your funnel/flow will be built in Binom same as it was in Voluum, which is nice.

Clean URL

After I’ve updated to the latest version of Binom, there was a new feature released called – Clean URLs.
With this feature you can rename your campaign URLs as you’d like.

Your campaign URL can easily become https://trackingdomain.com/my-custom-campaign-url. The reason I’m mentioning this feature here is that this could be handy when your are moving from another tracker and you don’t want to edit your campaigns on traffic sources and wait again for re-approvals. You could simply make the URL look same as in your previous tracker.

This is also nice to have if you want to hide your campaign URL behind a nice user (or SEO) friendly URL without need to doing it manually in server’s .htaccess file.

 Usage & Features

I went ahead and started running some traffic with Binom right away. Here are some interesting features I found and tried while I was setting everything up:

So first I went to add affiliate networks. There was already a catalog of existing networks categorized by verticals, main geo and even their ratings. This is similar to templates in Voluum and it’s good to see it here as well as it’s a huge time saver when setting up things in the beginning.

There is also a similar catalog for traffic sources, what is interesting they also note if the source has a self-serve or no.

Now the more interesting part are landers.

There are 2 big features I didn’t see in Voluum:

• Integrated (no-redirect) landing pages
• Landing page protection

Let’s take a look at both of these features in detail:

Integrated (no-redirect) landing pages

With integrated landing pages you upload your lander to the tracker and use a special token as your CTA click link. On the traffic source side you will link to your campaign with campaign tracking link as usually, with one difference – there will be no extra redirect as Binom will load the landing page directly.

It’s kinda similar to direct pixel tracking (which Binom and Voluum both support), but difference is that with integrated landing pages the landing page itself is located on the same server as you tracker, whereas with pixel tracking you can host your landing page on another server or CDN.

Lander Protection

This is an easy concept of protecting your landing pages from accessing them directly by someone who knows their URL.

All you have to do is copy a single line of PHP and paste it in your landing page code. In tracker you pass a special token with key valid for this landing page.

Your IP, User Agent and time that has passed since your last visit will be checked against the key and if there is no match you won’t see the landing page.

Basically you can access it only with campaign tracking link, but not directly.

I think though it’s still not 100% going to protect you as spy tools like Adplexity will get your landing page as they follow the campaign link and then eventually save your landing page anyway.

Smart Rotations

Another interesting feature I totally love in Binom are smart rotations.

How smart they are?

Well, the concept behind them is to not show the same part of the funnel (ie. lander and offer) to the same user again if he’ve already seen it.

Imagine that you are split testing 3 landers: On first click the visitor will be redirected to lander #1, but if he clicks your ads again he will be sent to another landing page (#2) in the rotation. Then if he comes one more time he will see the last lander (#3) and if he still keeps coming back the tracker will start to rotate those landers from start. The same is true for offers.

More practical use I can see with back button redirect script, where each time the visitor hits back button, he will see a different offer. Totally automated by tracker, with no additional coding needed.

You still can use the standard (random) rotations, all these options are available when you creating a new campaign.

E-commerce and Subscriptions

If you’ve ever run COD (cash on delivery) offers, you know there are usually 3 states of a conversion: HOLD, REJECT and LEAD. I personally like to keep track of all the 3 states and in Voluum I use custom conversions for this to work.

In Binom it’s called E-commerce scheme and it’s accessible in the Settings panel. It works without problems, only difference is that in Voluum each conversions is tracked as a separate conversion. What I mean is that when you get a HOLD and it changes into a LEAD you will see 2 conversion events in Voluum. One for HOLD and one for LEAD.

Binom Ecommerce Scheme Settings

In Binom you will see only 1 event. How it works is that if HOLD changes to LEAD then what happens is that the previous conversion in the HOLD state changes its status to LEAD and that’s it, no additional conversion event is created.

While I like this approach as it’s more “clean”, I kinda lost track of which holds changed their statuses. They simply change status and there is no way to see where it happened as their conversion time is not updated.

I would like to have it more clear as I totally love to have everything under control.

What is nice though is that I can see how long does each conversion take – from time the user clicked, until the time the user converted.

Thanks to that I can see how long does it usually take for people to go through the funnel.

I don’t understand why Voluum doesn’t show this information in this more human readable form as well (they show only visit and conversion timestamps).

You can also set conversion statuses for upsells or subscriptions if you are working with these kind of events.

Estimated Approval, Profit and ROI

Another aspect of running COD offers is that you never have 100% approval rate. In a high approval geo you can get to let’s say 60% which is awesome, but forget about 100%. This leads to a minor issue while tracking:

The problem is that it’s harder to see your numbers as traffic keeps coming, spend is going up and conversions takes time to come in as they all depend on call center overload.

Here comes very handy the EA – Estimated Approval Rate in Binom. In your campaign settings you can set the expected approval percentage. After that you can enable columns E. Profit and E. ROI which stands for Expected Profit and Expected ROI.

This way you can see how are you standing at the end once the expected holds will be approved/rejected. Thanks to this you can see in early stages of your campaign if you are doing well or no.

Very helpful indeed!

Domains check for Google blocking

This has been an issue for a while for many affiliates. I also wrote about this topic in the past.

Binom now integrates with Google Safe Browsing API and let you check how are your domains standing. So far it’s all manual, so you have to click manually to check your domains.

Hopefully they will take this feature even further and will add automatic checks with email notifications, which would then completely replace my custom system I created myself a while ago for the exact same issue.

Binom Custom Domains Management & Google Block Check

Free SSL certificates

As I already mentioned, Binom can enable SSL for you by default for the tracker as whole. However it can also enable SSL for any additional (custom) tracking domain you will add later. You can do it simply by clicking on the enable button next to the domain.

That’s it and it’s free!

Honestly, shame for Voluum that with their current pricing strategy they charge for SSL, and also that for having SSL enabled we have to contact their support.

In Binom you can do it yourself in a matter of seconds without waiting for support to manage it for you.

And as I said, I do not see any sense in charging people for SSL certificates when you can get them for free these days and it’s a mandatory element in todays internet.

Notes

There was a thread a while ago on STM Forum where someone asked how do we track the changes we made to our campaigns.

I personally have a custom Evernote notebook with notes for each campaign, but honestly I didn’t use it lately so often.

In Binom you can add notes on separate levels – Campaigns, Landers and Offers. Very handy and helpful as there is no need for any external systems.

Everything stays in tracker where it’s just a click away to see.

Marking Rows & Filters

Binom Profitable Zones Marked & Filtered

Marks are useful when you working on your campaign optimisation.

You can assign different marks to publisher/zone IDs and then easily filter on them.

There also very powerful filters, you can basically filter on any existing column and use multiple conditions to get the data that you need.

You can save these filters as templates, so you can quickly reuse them in the future.

Let’s say you want to find all zones that have ROI less than -25% and have spent more than $10. You can mark these with “minus mark” and export them to clipboard so you can immediately block them at the traffic source.

Binom Token Filter Options

Info & Monitoring

If you are like me or any other affiliate you’ve probably spent a good amount of your day with hitting REFRESH button and visiting the Conversions tab in your tracker.

Not only that it’s addictive, but we also like to keep track if things are as they should be – ie. if the traffic and conversions are coming as they should.

This why I really enjoy to use the “Info” view for campaigns in Binom. When you click on the Info button, instead of seeing Visits, Clicks, Conversion, Profit, ROI and all the usual columns you will be presented with useful information for each campaign.

There will be new columns that you’ve probably never heard of and I had to dig into documentation myself to find out what they mean, but once I did I was impressed how useful they are:

• CLH – Click per Last Hour
• LLH – Leads (conversions) per Last Hour
• PLH – Profit per Last Hour
• Last Lead – Time since your last conversion

With this info you can easily see how much is each of your campaigns making per last hour or when was the last conversion. IMO much easier to spot if something went wrong.

There is also a Monitor tab in Binom where you can see graph of incoming clicks, with it you can also easily detect if there has been a significant drop in traffic.

Besides that you can see the current load of your server and other technical details about your server.

 Advanced features

What I like about Binom is that it’s very user friendly from the outside and at the same time it offers many advanced features for the pros.

These features are hidden in the documentation and that’s another reason to grab a coffee and read through it!

Custom Columns

One example are custom columns.

They allow you to add your own columns if you need additional calculations. They are especially useful with the Events feature, that I’m going to describe just below.

With custom columns you can enter your own formulas and let Binom to calculate them for you. No more need for exports to Excel to do additional calculations there.

Binom Custom Columns

Events

In Binom you have 10 events variables that you can use for your advantage.

Thanks to these you can do fancy stuff like measure scroll % on your landing page or find bots visiting your LP.

To make this work you have to use special JavaScript (examples are in the docs) that will do the required measurements and report back to tracker.

The reported numbers will be assigned to event variable and to take this to another level you can create custom columns to do further calculations like create a new column with scroll % for each placement.

Tracking Exit Points

Let’s say you have landing page with multiple CTA’s. There could be a CTA link somewhere in the text, maybe also in sidebar and then there is also a big CTA button on the bottom.

You may wonder which one had the visitor clicked the most?

Usually you need third party trackers for tasks like these, but why to not have it right in the tracker?

With Binom it’s possible.

You have to add special “&place=” variable to the CTA link and after that you will find all this information tracked in Binom.

 Another features

Honestly there is many more to Binom that I could fit into this review, which is already quite long.

Here is a list of some other features that Binom offers:

• Unlimited additional users with custom access permissions (and hide profit feature :))
• Complete clicklog
• Redirect Rules
• Rotations
• Import/Export features (also import campaigns from Voluum)
• Groups
• Smart meta refresh
• Custom domain for each campaign
• Anti-Spy feature
• Clickloss feature
• Multivariate Testing (MVT)
• Event System
• Tracking Exit Points
• Campaign Cost Update
• LP Pixel
• Mobile apps (here Voluum still wins though, their apps is much much better)
• Trends with charts to easily see your daily performance across all campaigns
• Multiple currencies for offer payouts
• Marks
• Hotkeys (Keyboard Shortcuts)
• and many more…

 Pricing & Live Demo

Binom is priced at $99/month with a monthly plan or $69/month if you choose their yearly plan.
Additional license (for example if you want to install your tracker in multiple geo locations) comes with a price of $49.

There is also a free 31-days trial, so you can try out the tracker on your servers completely free.

The support for Binom with any plan is free. From my experience and experience of others on STM their support is really nice and fast. You can communicate with support directly on Skype, without need of placing any support tickets.

Binom also offers a live demo, so you can play and test the tracker without installation on your own servers.

What about a coupon code?

Glad that you asked! I got in touch with Binom’s team and managed to get a COUPON CODE for my blog readers! Especially those few that made it until here .

When you sign-up for Binom, use coupon ERIK40 and get 30 days FREE TRIAL and 40% discount on your first paid month!

This should give you plenty of time to properly test Binom and move your campaigns over.

 Conclusion

Honestly I’m very surprised how well is Binom done.

Many affiliates are afraid of self-hosted solutions as they are used to that proclaimed fast redirect speed in distributed cloud and afraid of click loss and hassle of taking care of their own servers.

I think it’s not of a big deal these days. Binom has great support and installation optimised server for tracker is not difficult at all.

And if you are very concerned about redirect speeds you still can host your tracker in multiple geo locations with additional licenses (which come at cheaper rate as the main license).

But unless you run pop traffic heavily in countries with slow internet speeds and high click loss I would not worry about this issue as much.

On the other side if you run Facebook, Native or display traffic I would not worry at all. Plus you can use the LP Pixel or integrated landing pages which can save you another redirect.

So overall I think Binom is a really solid product.

In some areas and features it offers I would say Binom is more oriented towards affiliates than Voluum these days. Voluum starts to position themselves as an enterprise solution for bigger brands and therefore appeal to other types of customers.

Let me know what do you think in the comments below!  Which tracker do you use these days and why did you choose it?

If not, you should do some research, as you may be missing out on something big!

Introduction

If I don’t count my first time shopping for Bitcoin in 2013 (I bought my first one for $72!), I personally got involved with cryptocurrency on a deeper level last year.

My involvement consists mainly of buying and holding (or, as it’s called, HODLING).

It’s a simple and easy investing strategy that has already multiplied my investment x times for this year.

I did some daily trades here and there, but I’m still not very comfortable there and I consider it much riskier than the simple BUY AND HOLD strategy.

…but back to the main question of this post:

Once you have a couple of currencies in your coin portfolio, the main problem becomes: how do you track your cryptocurrency portfolio?

I see this question asked in crypto-related Facebook groups and forums every single day.

Well, it’s pretty understandable as the more types of coins you own, the more difficult it gets.

Why?

Imagine: you hold 20 cryptocurrencies on 3 different exchanges + your hardware wallets such as TREZOR. Add in some trades here and there and you may get lost pretty quickly:

• What is the total value of my whole portfolio? (in either USD or BTC)
• How much $$$ have I made holding this coin?
• If I sell xx amount of this coin today, will it be a gain or loss for me?

These are just 3 of the many questions that you will have to ask yourself once you start rolling with cryptocurrencies.

For me, a performance marketer, tracking my profits and costs is really crucial.

Once I started dabbling with bitcoins and altcoins, I started seeking out a proper “tracker”.

Ironically, before I even had my own hardware wallet, I just kept the numbers in my head.

I knew how much I deposited in the exchanges and how much I have now.

A bit of a crazy decision, but it was still easy to do some basic before/after math, right?

But as soon as I added 2 more exchanges and bought my hardware wallet, I was lost!

That was the moment when I started to look for a solution.

I tested several apps, such as Blockfolio on my phone and Mammon for the desktop.

I also gave web-based apps like CryptoCompare.com and Altpocket.io a try.

Each of these tools/apps had some positives and negatives, but none of them fulfilled my main requirement: AUTOMATION.

Whenever I did a transaction or trade, I had to insert each record MANUALLY if I wanted to keep track of it.

What I needed instead was something where I could do the following:

• sync with my wallets and exchanges through APIs
• see my daily/historical balances reports
• see the current prices/values for each coin and my whole portfolio
• monitor my gains and profits in real time
• etc.

Meet CoinTracking.info

A couple of days ago, I discovered Cointracking.

CoinTracking is a centralized solution for tracking and managing your entire cryptocurrency portfolio.

It supports all the main coins like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, as well as 4000+ other coins!

The best thing? Automatic API imports from exchanges!

What that means is that I no longer have to worry about entering all of my coins or trades manually. Never!

CoinTracking Features

Let’s take a quick look at the features that CoinTracking offers, and let me show you my favorites:

• Personal Analysis
  • Interactive charts for trades and coins
  • Calculation of key indicators
  • Profit/loss, coin value, & balances
  • Realized and unrealized gains
• Trades
  • List of all trades and fees
  • Grouping by exchange
  • Interactive search
  • Comment function
• Tax Declaration
  • Capital Gains Report
  • FIFO, LIFO, HIFO, and LOFO calculation
  • Prepared for accountants and tax offices
  • Variable parameters for all countries
• Trade Importer
  • Easy CSV import from 26 exchanges
  • Automatic import via APIs
  • Export in Excel, PDF, CSV, XML, & JSON
  • Direct synchronization with the blockchain
• Coin Charts and Analysis
  • Historical charts for all 4,739 coins
  • Always displays the latest prices for all coins
  • Top Coins by trades and by volume
  • Experimental Bitcoin forecasts
• Functions and Security
  • Complete documentation
  • Email reports upon request
  • SSL certified & encrypted
  • No access to your exchanges required

As you can see, the list of features is really extensive — honestly, this is probably the best tool for tracking your portfolio that you will find on the market TODAY.

It’s actively developed, and the support is very responsive and helpful as well.

My personal TOP 5 features of CoinTracking

I’m still discovering the real power that this tool, with its many options, has to offer, but there are 5 features that I’ve fallen in love with already:

1. Automatic imports via APIs

This is why I switched from half-built solutions like BlockFolio or CryptoCompare. Automatic imports are crucial for me.

All exchanges have APIs, so there is no reason to do things like this manually.

If you are a day-to-day trader with a high number of transactions, you must feel that pain!

CoinTracking supports all the major exchanges like Kraken, Bittrex, Bitstamp, Poloniex, GDAX, and a bunch of others.

All you have to do is generate your API keys at the exchange and connect it to your CoinTracking account.

After that, all your transactions will be automatically synced on a daily basis. Boom!

What about security & privacy?

You may be asking: what about security? Will CoinTracking be able to do trades or even withdraw my money?

The answer is simple: NO!

It’s not an issue at all, as when you generate your API keys, you have to assign READ-ONLY permissions to them.

With this, there’s no way to do withdrawals for third parties.

If you care about your privacy (which you should!), you can create an account with CoinTracking without entering your email address.

2. Realized and Unrealized Gains

Imagine that you’re already holding xx Bitcoins, yy Litecoins, and maybe xxx Monero.

Besides that, you have done some BUY and SELL transactions, all at different price points.

Then you decide that today, you maybe want to sell your Bitcoins, but you are not sure if you will have a PROFIT or LOSS at the end of the day.

Here comes the “Realized and Unrealized Gains” report:

You can exactly see where you are standing with each coin.

There is also a feature called “Instant Gain Calculator” that lets you enter how much of a particular currency you want to sell, and it breaks down your transactions so you will know if it’s a profit or a loss before you sell.

3. Daily balance

Daily balance shows a daily (or weekly/monthly) breakdown of your balance in both USD and BTC.

You can also see details for each currency you own, so you know what caused the gain or loss for that particular day.

CoinTracking can also send daily reports to your email, where it shows you where you stand each day and sums up how much your coin value increased or decreased.

4. Average Purchase Prices

This is another way to see your current standing for each coin.

It displays a table that is divided into 3 parts:

• Purchase value
• Current sales value
• Profit / Loss

In each part, you can see the price for 1 coin and the sum for all coins.

So you can see how much profit/loss you made per 1 coin and for a sum of all coins you have in that currency.

5. Fees

With each transaction on the blockchain and trades on exchanges, you are paying fees.

Fees are very small amounts compared to the values you are transferring, but over time they add up.

The Fees report shows you a handy overview of fees that you have paid.

You can even group them by exchanges, so you can easily see how much each exchange has cost you.

6. BONUS: Bitcoin Analysis

There is one interesting experimental report in CoinTracking called Bitcoin Analysis.

It tries to forecast the future price of Bitcoin.

They use several factors, such as past developments, trading volume, foreign exchange rates, time, day, and even Google Trends.

For example, at the moment of writing this post, the forecast says:

“It is estimated that the BTC price will be about 3776.84 Euros in 3 hours, a decrease of -57.48 EUR at the present price of 3834,32 EUR.” (Note: they use EUR for this report at the moment.)

CoinTracking pricing

It’s possible to use CoinTracking for free; however, the free version does not include its most powerful feature: automatic API imports.

CoinTracking is available with a FREE package for up to 200 trades.

The PRO package is limited to 3500 trades and it doesn’t include features like prioritized caching, daily backups, or guaranteed access to all future updates. A 1-year license will cost you 0.03 BTC, a 2-year license costs 0.04 BTC, and a lifetime version is 0.08 BTC.

The third and most comprehensive package is UNLIMITED, and it includes unlimited trades and all features. A 1-year license will cost you 0.06 BTC, a 2-year license is 0.10 BTC, and a lifetime version is 0.44 BTC.

Note: please keep in mind that these prices will fluctuate over time as the USD/BTC value changes.

10% DISCOUNT

By using this referral link you will get 10% DISCOUNT for any paid package.

Wrap up

You will definitely be hearing more about blockchain and cryptocurrencies in the following months and years from the general public, so it makes sense to be ready before it happens.

If you already own some BTCs and are struggling with tracking your portfolio, I hope that today’s post will help you and that you will appreciate CoinTracking like I have.

Let me know if you are also into crypto and what tools or resources on the interwebs you find useful.

Until next time.

Erik

Intro

Properly understanding tracking in affiliate marketing can be a tough problem if you’re just starting out and are about to launch your first campaign.

There are too many small things that need to be done before everything works as a well-oiled machine.

Don’t worry, though.

After reading this guide, you will be able to set up everything by yourself and enjoy all the great features that trackers offer.

 What is tracking?

When I heard about tracking for the first time (back in 2012), my mind was totally blown.

I was browsing through some affiliate forums similar to STM forum and some guy posted a screenshot of his earnings.

He was able to track his profits, costs, and conversions in real-time.

I remember that there were also many other reports and analytics that could show more information about his campaigns.

What?

The only “tracker” or “analytics” tool I had seen until this time was Google Analytics, and I thought that was the king of all “tracking”.

So you can see it was a totally new concept to me at that time, and it also may be to you if you are just switching to paid traffic affiliate marketing (I was doing SEO before).

Anyhow… let’s get back to the main question: What is tracking?

Tracking is the process of monitoring everything that goes on with your campaign, and the software that we use to do so are called trackers.

The tracking process usually works like this:

1. You buy traffic from a traffic source
2. You send it to your tracker
3. The tracker sends your visitors to your landing page or offer

All of the magic happens in Step 2.

The tracker notes all of the information that your traffic source is sending to it. That information varies from source to source and also from your setup, but it could be something like this:

• the source of traffic (i.e. placement or zone)
• the category of that source (i.e. Entertainment, Education, Business)
• the banner that was clicked
• the cost of the click

It also saves all visitors’ information, like:

• country, region, or city
• device and device type
• mobile brand and model
• operating system and its version
• browser and its version
• IP address
• ISP, connection type, and mobile carrier
• referrer
• language
• etc.

Suddenly, from that 1 visit that hit your tracker, you extracted all of this useful information.

You will also know which landing page they landed on if they clicked through and, most importantly, whether they converted or not.

Besides that, you can work some magic on your own.

You can set up your own rules and decide how you want your traffic to flow.

Example: Imagine you launched a campaign in Malaysia. In Malaysia, there are at least 3 languages spoken: English, Malay, and Chinese, among others.

So what you can do is create 3 landing pages for each of these languages and set your tracker to send visitors to the appropriate landing page based on their browser settings (Voluum detects this automatically for you).

Other important metrics that trackers will show you include:

• visits
• clicks
• profits
• costs
• conversions
• landing page CTRs
• conversion rates
• ROI
• EPC
• and many others

Now you should have a better understanding of what a tracker is and why it is so important to performance affiliate marketers.

Without using proper tracking software, you don’t really know what’s going on with your campaigns — you are just throwing shit against the wall to see if it sticks.

Next: There are 2 big groups that differentiate trackers: self-hosted and cloud-hosted. Let’s talk a bit about that.

 Self-hosted vs cloud-hosted trackers

Before you choose your tracker, you have to decide between self-hosted or cloud-hosted trackers.

Self-hosted tracker

As its name suggests, self-hosted trackers are hosted on your own servers.

That means you will have to purchase your own VPS or Dedicated Server.

That is an additional cost on top of the cost of the tracker.

You also need to have a good understanding of server administration or hire a professional to do it for you.

These are things you need to consider when you choose the self-hosted tracker route:

• hosting and its maintenance and costs
• maintaining the tracker (installing updates)
• monitoring servers (so you can control your traffic if your server fails)

Cloud-hosted tracker

Cloud-hosted trackers, on the other hand, are hosted in the cloud.

That means that you don’t need additional hosting for your tracker (but you will still need hosting for your landing pages).

The technical aspect of the tracker is taken care of for you.

All you have to do is log in to your tracker interface and do your work.

I personally prefer cloud-based trackers or at least trackers that offer managed service, as I don’t like to deal with the technical side of them (even though I’m good with servers).

I couldn’t sleep well with the idea that I’m sending hundreds of thousands of visits to my tracker and it could fail overnight.

Imagine the sudden loss it could create in just a few minutes.

So having a good tracker with top-notch tech behind it is a must.

Next: Let’s cover the most popular trackers that are available on the market nowadays: Voluum, Thrive, FunnelFlux, and AdsBridge.

 Trackers on the market: Voluum, Binom, Thrive, FunnelFlux, and AdsBridge

It’s 2017 and there’s no better time for tracker shopping than now.

Just a few years ago when I started, there were only a few trackers with very limited functionalities and they were all self-hosted.

Then Voluum arrived, and the tracker market boomed!

Modern tracker software competitors entered the scene and totally destroyed the old players that were around for years.

I should note that I’m personally using Voluum (I’m very happy with it) and I don’t have experience with the other trackers on the list.

However, I want to keep this guide as honest as possible, so I’m including them in here as well.

 Voluum

Voluum has been recently rebranded and they updated their logo (2018)

Voluum’s old logo

Voluum is a cloud-hosted tracker, and it’s the one that totally changed the game.

After it came onto the market, I never heard anyone talking about CPVLab or Prosper202 anymore, which were the top trackers before (I used CPVLab).

They have probably the best infrastructure in the whole tracking industry. Everything is in the cloud, across continents, which means the fastest redirects you can have.

Fast redirects are very important, especially if you are going to run worldwide traffic on mobile.

Faster redirects = less click loss

Voluum has “infinite scalability”, which basically means that they can handle all of your traffic without worrying about server downtimes.

Setup (as you will see below) is very easy, and they have a modern UI that’s pleasant to look at (which is also an important factor, as you will spend hours on your tracker).

Reports are in real-time and you can do amazing things there.

Your can view your campaign from almost “any angle” you wish, and if it’s still not enough, you can do multiple-level drill downs.

On top of that, they have mobile apps for both iOS and Android so that you can monitor your campaigns “in the terrain.”

I especially love the widgets that I can place on my screen in the Android version of the app.

Voluum also has an API, so you can build your extensions or tools on top of it.

Voluum Pricing

Starts at $299/month for the lowest package, which includes 2,000,000 events (visits+clicks+conversions). Voluum doesn’t have free trial at the moment.

Learn more about Voluum here.

Voluum Free Trial

Many people asks if Voluum does have a free trial as most of the other trackers do have it.

When Voluum started out in 2013 they used to be totally free, then they introduced paid packages and still had a free package with 100 000 free events.

Unfortunately these days (September 2018) they do not have a free trial or any other free package option.

 Binom

Binom is a self-hosted tracker and is recently getting lot of traction.

It got all the features that Voluum has + many more such as smart rotations, custom columns, e-commerce features, event system, tracking exit points, smart meta refresh and so on.

I recently wrote an in-depth review of Binom and you should really take a look at it, even if you think that self-hosted tracker is not something you are into.

Binom Pricing

Binom costs $99/month (or $69 with a yearly plan)  and for additional licenses they charge $49/month. Everything is unlimited  and you can have as much events, domains and users as you want.

Binom Free Trial

Binom offers a 31-days free trial. You can also get a free month + 40% discount if you use coupon ERIK40 when you sign up with Binom.

 Thrive (now called ThriveTracker)

If I remember right, Thrive was introduced to the market shortly after Voluum, becoming its main rival.

What I like about Thrive is that they offer both self-hosted and cloud-hosted options.

One interesting feature they have is the ability to track your conversions without extra redirects.

It’s done with a special LP pixel that you have to include in your landing page source code.

The benefit of this feature should be clear: less click loss.

They also offer many batch actions (which Voluum doesn’t include), so you can edit multiple offers or landing pages simultaneously or add 100 landing pages through CSV import.

Thrive Pricing

Starts at $99/month for self-hosted service and $299/month for managed cloud-hosted service.

For the self-hosted service, there is also an additional cloaker / bot filter add-on for $59/month and a multi-user access add-on for $79/month, which totals to $237/month.

Learn more about Thrive Tracker here.

Thrive Free Trial

ThriveTracker currently offers 14-days of free trial.

 FunnelFlux

FunnelFlux or, as it calls itself, “The Visual Tracker”, is taking a different, yet very original, visual approach.

It’s a self-hosted tracker and its main and best feature is the possibility to create visual funnels.

You build your funnels visually using a visual editor. There is also no need to place any other scripts on your page, and you can build any funnel you can think of.

FunnelFlux can also show you the lifetime value of your leads, has a powerful statistics engine, and tracks 60+ key performance indicators automatically.

FunnelFlux Pricing

Starts at $99/month, but keep in mind that you will also need additional hosting, as FunnelFlux is a self-hosted tracker. The recommended server setup for 200,000-1 million visitors per day is a Vultr server with 8 to 16 CPUs and a minimum of 16GB memory, which falls between $160 and $320/month for server costs.

Learn more about FunnelFlux here.

FunnelFlux Free Trial

FunnelFlux tracker offers a “TestDrive”, which is technically a free trial, it is very limited though as it lasts only 3 days.

 AdsBridge

AdsBridge is the new kid on the block.

It’s a cloud-hosted tracker, and a couple of their extra features compared to the other trackers I’ve mentioned is a landing page builder and hosting.

What that means is that you can create or design and host your landing page on AdsBridge servers.

Another feature that got my attention is SMS & Email Alerts that can really come in handy in many cases, and I wish Voluum had it too.

AdsBridge Pricing

Starts from $0/month for a 14-day trial followed by a $75/month package with 1000 000 visits/month.

Learn more about AdsBridge here or read a in depth AdsBridge review from my friend Servando.

AdsBridge Free Trial

AdsBridge offers a 14-days of free trial. It’s basically a hard limited package with 50 000 free events.

This was a short intro to other trackers, but as I said earlier, this tutorial is about using and setting up campaigns in Voluum, which is the tracker that I have the most experience with.

So let’s start!

 Switching to Voluum?

If you’re already using another tracker and thinking about switching to Voluum, here is a simple method on how to do it without major pain:

Keep your old campaigns in your old tracker and start your new ones in Voluum.

Easy, right?

Create Your Voluum Account

If you don’t have your own Voluum account yet, you can create it from here.

Once you have your account set up, log in and proceed to the next step:

How to Set Up a Custom Domain in Voluum

One thing that I recommend everyone do before they launch their campaigns is to set up a custom domain.

Voluum by default gives you a free domain of their own, but that might already be banned by traffic sources or flagged by Google or antivirus companies.

Register a domain name

First, you need to register a domain name.

I recommend doing it through NameCheap, as they give you FREE WHOIS Privacy Protection for the 1st year, and they also often have promotions like domains for 80 cents a pop.

To point your new domain to Voluum, you have to set your DNS records.

In Voluum, navigate to Settings -> Domains.

Copy your Voluum domain (there are currently 3 choices — you can copy any of those).

Next, at NameCheap, find your domain and go into its management. Then click on the “Advanced DNS” tab and:

• add a new CNAME record.
• set host to something like “track” (so if you have domain campaigns.com it becomes track.campaigns.com)
• set value to your Voluum domain value that you copied before (ie. qwerty.voluumtrk2.com)
• you can leave TTL at its default value

Save all changes and wait for your new DNS settings to propagate.

I like to monitor it live using a free tool called WhatsMyDns.net; it’s a free global DNS propagation checker.

To check for your changes above, type in your domain (i.e. track.campaigns.com), select CNAME from the select option, and hit search.

The next step is to add this domain to Voluum, so go back to Settings -> Domains and:

• add your own custom domain
• make sure you click “Set as main domain”
• you can also monitor if the DNS is set correctly using the “Verify DNS settings” button

How to Use Tokens and Types of Tokens

Before we talk about adding things to Voluum (by things, I mean landing pages, offers, and so on), let’s talk a bit about tokens.

What is a token?

A token is nothing more than a variable that can hold many different kinds of information, and it can be prepopulated in 2 ways:

• by a traffic source
• by your tracker

Traffic Source Tracking Tokens

Almost all traffic sources these days support tracking tokens. Tracking tokens are dynamic variables that can be assigned to the query string in your URL to send more information back to your tracker.

If you are running mobile pop traffic, the most common token you will have in every source is your placement ID (also called the site ID, zone ID, or simply placement).

Example: Let’s say you are setting up a campaign on PopAds. They’ve got a token for placement called WEBSITEID, so if you set your campaign URL as http://track.campaigns.com/tracking-link?websiteid=#websiteid (#websiteid is the token), it will become http://track.campaigns.com/tracking-link?websiteid=12345.

Tracker URL Tokens

Another type of token is a URL token, provided by your tracker.

That’s another great reason to have a tracker. As I mentioned before, trackers can detect many useful things about your visitors, such as their country or city where they are located.

You can use this information to your advantage and, thanks to URL tokens, you can send and display them on your landing page.

Example: You enter your landing page into your tracker as: http://mylandingpage.com/?brand=#brand&city=#city. Voluum will translate it to: http://mylandingpage.com/?brand=Apple&city=Sydney. Then you just add a simple script on your landing page to display your visitors’ mobile phone brand and the city where they are located. This gives you unlimited possibilities on how to craft the copy for your landing pages!

I hope tokens now make at least a bit more sense to you.

You will use tokens a lot during your affiliate career.

Postbacks and Postback URL

When it comes to tracking conversions, there is the important concept of postbacks that you need to understand.

Postbacks are server-to-server (S2S) calls that enable your affiliate network to notify your tracker that a conversion happened.

Every time a visitor goes through your tracking link, Voluum generates a unique click ID that is then sent to your affiliate network.

If the visitor converts, your affiliate network sends the conversion back by calling your postback url and attaching your unique click ID to it.

Your tracker then thanks to click ID knows to which campaign to assign your conversion.

You can find your postback URL in Voluum by navigating to Settings -> Setup, under “Postback URL”.

Example: http://xyz.voluumtrk2.com/postback?cid=REPLACE&payout=OPTIONAL&txid=OPTIONAL

The most important part of it is cid and payout.

You will have to replace their variables inside your affiliate network system.

Here is how you do it for the Cake system (it’s the one that networks like ClickDealer or Gotzha use):

Here is how you do it for the HasOffers system (used by network like AppFlood):

This is maybe the most technical and confusing part of all tracking, but also the most magical one. Thanks to tracking conversions, you will later be able to optimize your campaigns and make more profits!

How to add affiliate networks

One of the first things you are going to add to your tracker is an affiliate network.

The guys at Voluum did a great job of prepopulating it with “trusted affiliate networks”.

Here is how you add a new Affiliate Network in Voluum:

1. Navigate to your Affiliate Networks tab.
2. Click on the “New affiliate network” button.
3. Choose one of the predefined networks or add your own by entering the affiliate network’s name.
4. Click “Save”.

That’s it, you just added your very first affiliate network into a tracker!

How to add traffic sources

Once you’ve added an affiliate network, you need a traffic source.

Here is how you add a new traffic source in Voluum:

1. Navigate to the Traffic sources tab.
2. Click on the “New traffic source” button.
3. Choose from a predefined one or add your own by entering the traffic source’s name.
4. You can ignore the Postback URL (this is for sending your conversions back to the traffic source) and other checkboxes below for now.
5. Click on “Advanced”. This is where you enter your tokens, and it’s probably a bit confusing if you’re just starting out. That’s why I wrote about tokens initially, so you could understand them better at this point. (See my screenshot and tip below for this step.)
6. Click “Save”.

Now about Step 5, entering traffic source tokens: As each traffic source has different tokens, this section will be different every time. The easiest way is to use the predefined traffic sources. If the traffic source is not on the list, I recommend using trackingtokens.com.

How to add offers

To add an offer, you need to copy your tracking link from your affiliate network.

Here is how you add a new offer in Voluum:

1. Navigate to the Flows -> Landers tab.
2. Click on “New offer”.
3. Enter a descriptive offer name.
4. Enter your tracking URL.
5. Select the country for your offer (if the offer runs in multiple countries, leave the default option selected).
6. Select the affiliate network that the offer belongs to.
7. Leave payout on auto (that’s why you need to set up your postback correctly).
8. Click “Save”.

How to add landing pages

Here is how you add a new landing page in Voluum:

1. Navigate to the Flows -> Landers tab.
2. Click on the “New lander” button.
3. Enter a descriptive name for your landing page.
4. Enter your landing page URL + add your tokens (as explained above in the tokens section).
5. Choose your campaign’s country.
6. Additionally, you can also add tags, but it’s not necessary.

Set up your first campaign

You finally made it to the most exciting step: creating your first campaign in Voluum!

Here is how you create a new campaign in Voluum:

1. Navigate to the Campaigns tab.
2. Click on “New campaign”.
3. Enter your campaign name.
4. Select your traffic source.
5. Select country.
6. Set the cost model to CPC and enter how much you pay for 1 visit/click (in case you pay for traffic in CPM, you have to divide that value by 1000, i.e. $5 CPM = 0.005 CPC).
7. In the advanced settings, choose Path and select your landing page and offer combination. If you don’t want to use a landing page, check the “Direct linking” box.
8. Click “Save”.

 Wrap up

And that’s it.

At this point, you should have a better understanding of how tracking and trackers work and you should be able to set up everything by yourself.

It may look complicated at first, and you will probably need to come back and reread the steps, but after launching a few campaigns, you will know Voluum like the back of your hand.

Let me know in the comments if you have any more questions! I want this guide to be the best around, so I will keep updating it over time.

If you find this post useful, please consider sharing it with your fellow affiliates. It took me many hours to write and verify all the information and steps.

Thank you so much guys!

Two main problems people had were that:

• their CTR was way too high = more people were clicking through the landing page than visiting the landing page
• their CTR was very low = very few people were clicking through the landing page

I’m going to analyze both of these extremes and suggest solutions that might fix these problems.

MY CTR is too high!

Usually a good problem to have.

Most of the time, affiliates will only complain when their CTR is too low, not high.

But what if it’s high, I mean, like really high (above 100%+)?

Wait, how can someone have more than 100% CTR?

If 1,000 people visit my landing page, it’s not possible for 1,500 to click through!

Well, it normally doesn’t make sense, but let me illustrate how it could happen and how to fix that:

1. Scripts

If you’ve ever done mobile, you’ve probably heard about something like the “back button script”.

Yeah, this small beast can control your Android phone’s back button.

Sometimes it’s set up to bring you directly to the offer.

What it does then is that once you tap your back button, you are redirected to the offer.

Then, when you tap the back button again, you go back to your landing page.

And what happens after that?

Well…

1000% CTR!

FIX: Remove or edit the script so that it doesn’t send you directly to the offer (unless you want it to).

2. Bots

Ad fraud is a huge issue these days and it will probably just continue to grow.

Bot traffic is traffic from a computer program/script that tries to behave like a human.

The art of optimization in performance marketing is cutting bad placements (mostly from bots).

Sometimes these bots try to behave too much like humans and click on EVERYTHING.

Even several more times, just to be sure.

So your CTR naturally (in this case, artificially) goes up.

FIX: Open Report by Placements in your tracker and block the placements with artificially high CTRs and no conversions. Make sure the data is significant and that the CTR is not high because of the script mentioned above.

My CTR is too low!

Generally, this is a more common problem for new affiliates who are overly concerned about their CTR.

But they’re on the right track.

If nobody clicks through your landing page, what is its purpose in the first place?

Good point.

There may be a problem in the funnel somewhere.

1. Missing or incorrect tracking link

The problem is that you haven’t placed your tracking link into your landing page at all (0% CTR) or that it’s missing from some of the links.

FIX: This one is easy.

Make sure your tracking link is attached to every link on your landing page.

Especially if you ripped it from a spy tool (you sneaky bastard!).

You may forget to replace all the occurrences of the old link.

Don’t forget to examine external files (especially .js format) as well.

2. Someone is stealing your traffic

So you really ripped off someone else’s landing page, huh?

Well, he was clever enough to steal your traffic back using a traffic hijacker.

FIX: Read your landing page code line by line and remove any script that you don’t understand. Sometimes it’s encoded and will be easy to spot.

As mentioned before, don’t forget to look at external files as well.

3. Your landing page loads slowly

Ever opened a site from a Google search result and it was loading for ages?

I bet you just hit the back button and clicked on the next result.

No wonder they’re now trying to make site speed one of their ranking factors.

The same applies to your landing pages.

If someone hits it, your tracker may count it as a visit, but a very small percentage of people will click through it.

Slow site speed can even create another common problem, click loss.

But that’s a topic for a separate blog post.

FIX: Make sure your site loads quickly.

Host it on a dedicated server, VPS, or CDN instead of using slow shared hosting.

Make sure you compress your images and minify your code.

I’ll have more on this in a separate blog post.

PageSpeed from Google should give you more than enough hints on how to optimize your landing page’s speed.

What is the best CTR to have?

This is a favorite question of new affiliates that I call CTR chasers.

The problem is that there is no correct answer, as there are too many variables in play.

Every geo and niche/vertical will give you different numbers.

The use of scripts is another factor that has a massive influence on it.

Then there’s the flow of the landing page itself.

Is it just a simple page with one big CTA to click?

Or are there a couple of questions that your visitor must answer before he even sees your CTA?

Instead of CTR, focus on 1 simple metric which works all the time:

PROFIT!

If I have a reasonable profit margin with whatever CTR I’ve got, something’s working right.

Then I can make even more profit by fine-tuning my landing page or split testing it with others.

KISSAP = Keep it simple, stupid, and profitable (Just made this up!).

Can you think of any other CTR-related problems and their solutions?

Let me know in the comments!

SEO is dead.

PPV is dead.

Display is dead.

Pops are dead.

Mobile is dead.

Facebook is dead (Oh, wait… wait, Facebook is still alive!)

So what is my personal viewpoint on the industry in 2018?

There’s 1 thing that is definitely true.

There are methods and techniques that don’t work the same way now as they worked back in the “good old days”.

This is what I call EVOLUTION.

It happens in every industry around us.

One could say:

… taxis are dead because everyone uses Uber now.

or

… hotel booking sites are dead because everyone uses Airbnb now.

Things are changing all the time, and the one who can adapt will be the one who wins in the long run.

“Be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

– Bruce Lee

What I learned while being in this industry is that the majority of affiliates are lazy.

We are used to shortcuts and instant results.

If it doesn’t work for me TODAY, then it must be dead.

Instant gratification.

Instant traffic, instant conversions, and instant profits.

Okay, Erik, we all know that things constantly change, stop babbling about it… instead, tell us: how are you making money these days?

Well, things don’t change as much as they seem.

I would say that change comes in the form of strong waves that hit the masses from time to time.

Almost every other year there’s a major new trend that shakes things up.

Since I entered the industry, I’ve recognized at least these ones:

• 2014/2015 – Mobile
• 2015/2016 – Native
• 2016/2017 – E-commerce

If you’re still wondering about me, I’ve been in the mobile space since I started; while I’m keeping up with the latest trends and experimenting here and there, I’m still a mobile guy.

My roots just run too deep now.

Sure, I can’t run with the same old landing pages, angles, and offers that I had in 2015, but that’s the evolution part.

Even some of the good old traffic sources are not profitable anymore, but guess what? There are new ones!

However, what’s more important is that most of the stuff mentioned throughout this post still works.

It’s just how you approach things and how deeply you dig into them.

Don’t be the one who jumps from one thing to another.

Be the one who can master at least 1 thing properly and be the best at it.

Affiliate marketing is not dead (at least for now).

What do you guys think?

Where do you think the industry is headed?

Let me know below in the comments!

Then you wake up one day, check your stats, and find out that some disaster has just happened.

All your campaigns are dying, and your CTR is suspiciously low.

Your domain is flagged by Google.

What does that mean?

Well, this issue has been around for a while, and if you haven’t dealt with it yet, you are one lucky bastard affiliate.

“Deceptive site ahead.” What is it?

Internet browsers are getting smarter, especially Google Chrome, which is always one step ahead of the game. Google has an internal database, called Safe Browsing, to protect its users from malware.

Safe Browsing is a list of dangerous sites that could harm your computer/device. Google also shares it with the folks at Mozilla and Apple. So if you visit a URL that is on the list, you get the warning posted above.

In general, that’s a good thing, and you should be glad for it…unless you’re an affiliate.

If you’re buying tons of traffic and any URL in your redirect chain happens to get flagged, you’re busted.

You’ve just flushed money down the toilet.

How?

Imagine that you are sending traffic to your landing page. What happens is that the user, instead of landing on your page, is stuck on a red screen of death. Google makes it too scary to ignore the warning and continue to the desired destination.

This was actually an issue with Voluum a few months ago. Their tracking URLs got flagged, and all their users were affected.

So what can we do about it?

We will see more and more of these things happening soon, so it’s better if we’re prepared.

Here are some of the possible solutions:

Switch domains

This one is simple, and it’s the only thing that fixes your problem IMMEDIATELY.

Go to Namecheap and buy a new domain. Then just copy all your existing content to the new domain, and you’re back in the game.

Monitor your domains periodically

Use online services that scan your domains against different malware and blacklist databases.

I recommend you to check your URLs from time to time with one of these:

Google Safe Browsing Site Status

This is the official Safe Browsing scanner from Google. If they got your domain in this database, then you’re screwed. Everyone who uses Chrome, Firefox, or Safari will see your website as dangerous.

VirusTotal

A robust service that scans against 67 different malware and blacklist databases. It’s also a virus scanner that can scan any kind of Windows executables, Android APKs, PDFs, etc. We are looking for their URL scanner that can give us perfect insights for our domains. Its DB list also includes Google Safe Browsing’s, so you may consider using this tool instead.

Sucuri SiteCheck

Sucuri is a paid service that cleans and protects your sites from malware. It also has a neat free tool called SiteCheck, which scans your remote URLs. It currently checks against 10 blacklist and malware databases.

Automate the whole process

The next step for the smart affiliate or site owner is to automate this process.

Most of these services, including Google Safe Browsing, have APIs. So it’s possible to create a simple script that checks your URLs on a daily basis. It can then report back to you when there is an emergency.

There is also a tool called TrafficProtector (google it), which has been created by some affiliates. Still, it’s up to you if you want to serve them all your landing pages’ URLs.

Warning: Conclusion Ahead!

Many moving parts may affect your campaigns.

In today’s example, you may have the best landing page or offer or the fastest server in the world, yet your campaign loses money.

Most of the time, it’s about those small things that eventually add up.

Do not forget about them.