[Text version of the podcast by Jitendra Vaswani: interview with Aina Sivceva]
This time we let our hearts speak. The following interview is the text version of an insightful podcast hosted by Jitendra Vaswani. Jitendra is a digital marketing pro, an international keynote speaker, and a founder of BloggersIdeas.com. In his podcast called Inside A Hustler’s Brain, he interviews digital gurus making them share pure practical tips and strategies. This episode puts a sharp focus on Adsterra CPA marketing strategies made clear by our expert, Aina Sivceva. But not only.
Adsterra’s Head of CPA Department, Aina, is sharing her expertise of trends handpicking and testing. She unveils some strategies that will help affiliate marketers run their CPA offers with superior results. You’ll find out what offers to try first with Adsterra, how the team manages to stay ahead of the market even in COVID-19 realities, and what you need to launch your first winning campaign.
Hey, guys, I’m Jitendra Vaswani. I’m a founder of BloggersIdeas.com, and I’m a digital nomad. And today, on my podcast Inside a Hustler’s Brain, where I interview all online entrepreneurs and hustlers. Here I have the Head of CPA Department at Adsterra, Aina. And she’s going to talk about the latest trends in affiliate marketing facing COVID-19 and some new things happening at Adsterra. So, over to you. I would like to know how did you start this affiliate marketing journey? Can you please just introduce yourself to my audience?
Thank you. Hey, guys. Hello, Jitendra. Thank you for having me today. I found the topic of this podcast very interesting and actual. Especially now, when everyone’s income has dropped. And I hope everyone who listens to this podcast will find some useful information, answers and tips.
A few words about me. I studied economics and I had worked in many agencies… advertising agencies before I joined Adsterra five years ago. I had zero experience in affiliate marketing and started as a junior advertising manager. Later on, I was promoted to Head of CPA Department. So now, my responsibility is setting goals to the whole team and helping to meet sales plans and mentoring team members.
How are you tackling this extremal COVID-19 situation?
We work without interruptions. All our team has moved online mostly for safety reasons. But the working processes haven’t changed. We are still in touch with our partners 24/7.
And yes, indeed, this time is about facing difficulties. But also about focusing on the highest priorities and discovering some new earning opportunities.
With Adsterra, it is possible to stay safely at home with your family and just start making money on Internet ads even if you don’t have a website. Well, I’ll say a few words later about Direct Link, our great innovative solution with which you can monetize all of your traffic easily.
That’s very nice. Actually, I’ve been working with you for a long time, especially with Catherine from PR and marketing. And I really love the support you are giving to the webmasters and the interaction; the way you build personalized relationships.
Thanks a lot. To be honest, we at Adsterra are very proud of having such an account management team. They’re really doing great.
My next question is what kind of blogs do you read in the affiliate field. Have you read some recent articles on affiliate marketing that truly hit your Head with something like, “okay, this one is amazing!”?
Our business is changing very fast. So it can be like this: something that is actual today tomorrow will turn into trash. For us, the key point is to stay in touch with our clients. We need to be aware of the upcoming trends, even based on rumors, be aware before they become popular. Then we’ll be ahead and will be ready to test new creatives and discover new offers.
For example, when the rumors started to spread that the TikTok application would be shut down, we were the first who found alternative applications like Short Video App and started promoting these kinds of offers. And by now, we have great expertise and know what creatives work perfectly with these offers.
So I can say that practice matters.
But for sure, we keep checking our competition blogs. And we run our own blog where we’re sharing some great insights and case studies. Here everyone can find relevant and useful information.
Okay, so why Adsterra is the best CPA network, and how can a webmaster like me just start making money and join Adsterra? Please explain to me the process.
Actually, Adsterra is not a CPA network. We are an advertising network. We don’t provide offers; we provide traffic. And it’s high-quality worldwide traffic which is suitable for different kinds of offers.
I can say that we are mediators between advertisers and publishers. Advertisers can be sure that all traffic is of high quality. From our side we guarantee publishers that all their sources will be linked to only relevant offers.
At Adsterra, we have all possible payment methods like CPM, CPC, RTB, and CPA. So why we’re doing great in CPA? First of all, because 90% percent of our traffic is direct traffic.
With our publishers, we provide traffic of the highest quality. And we’ve got some exclusive sources available only for CPA managed campaigns. And we open them only for the best-performing campaigns. We also have an in-house creative department that provides you with some exclusive creatives available only for CPA campaigns.
I could continue listing our benefits 🙂 Like, for instance, we’ve got multiple ad formats. We have popunders, banners, web push, native ads, and Social Bar, which is our innovation.
As for the second part of your question, that was about how publishers can start making money… As I mentioned before, it’s really easy to monetize your traffic. You just have to sign up (as a publisher – ed. note) and fill all the required fields. After that, you can easily start monetizing your traffic. Even if you don’t have a website, we can provide you with our Direct Link to monetize, say, social traffic. It’s an ad unit, but unlike banners, it doesn’t require any specific place on the website. So literally, it’s just a link that you can apply to any area of the web page.
My next question is about how to make money with specific offers like Sweepstakes in 2020.
Yes, sweepstakes have been doing great lately. But before you start with them, you need to check the field and some key points in advance. Like, for instance, on our platform, sweepstakes with electronic devices run well.
You never waste your time if you start running a “win iPhone” or “get the latest iPhone or Samsung” sweepstake. Old but gold are Walmart vouchers for mobile. It’s really important to try different types of creatives as they give you diverse results in terms of CTR. If you’ve just started work with sweepstakes, you can check the most used creatives at Adplexity; it’s free and gives you different ideas on creatives.
I can suggest following the guidance of our managers. We’re extremely good at working with this vertical. And we can provide direct sources of traffic. As well as test our own creatives. Also, we provide highly competitive rates, which means a lot, especially at the end of the year. But remember that the final performance depends only on the offer itself. You know, some sweeps strike, some sweeps suck.
It’s true. You need to do a lot of testing on those kinds of offers if you really want to make money. Always do a lot of tests to find the best converting landing page or even a pre-lander.
Okay, my next question is what hot new offers have appeared during these COVID-19 times. And what offers an affiliate webmaster can promote, mostly for Tier 1 countries, of course. Can you share something?
Well, VPNs are doing great for iOS and Android. So if you have in your pocket some VPN offers, just start promoting them with us. We have highly suitable traffic for these types of offers.
As I mentioned before, sweeps are stable and are showing great results. Currently, Netflix subscription sweeps are killing. I think people are bored staying at home and are looking for entertainment. If you’re aiming at fast results, I would suggest going for VPN mobile offers; you will be impressed by how our traffic works.
During the lockdown, we started testing more entertainment subscriptions. And we see impressive results with Amazon, Netflix, HBO subscription offers. We know how to make these offers work the best possible.
And how about those immunity boosters that people are buying since COVID-19 has started? Or CBD oils along with immunity boosters?
Well, to be honest, if the traffic doesn’t suite, these offers won’t show great results. In our feed, at least, we don’t have these offers.
Okay, fine. So my next question to you is what are the most important things to track and test whenever you are promoting affiliate offers?
You have to always analyze the sources. I would suggest staying in touch with your advertiser, who provides these offers; always ask about the quality of traffic; do blacklists in time in order to optimize your traffic and the most relevant. And also, provide the highest rates. It’s better optimize your rates later that simply cut budgets, because when you cap and run on very limited cappings, that will decrease your volumes day by day and will eventually decrease your chences to generate more conversions.
Be ready to rest different creatives, as they can brind really diverse results in terms of CTR. And the last but not least…Listen to your manager’s suggestions. Our managers have got a rich experience in running various types of offers and they can suggest the best way for you.
Well, that’s a very nice answer. So my next question will be about your affiliate marketing success. Like the first succees you had in your life as an affiliate marketer.
Oh, it happened when I just started working at Adsterra. This case was about one utility offer, a mobile cleaner. There was an advertiser, well-known in our field as an advertiser with truly big budgets. But they had really strict quality requests. So they had a reputation of advertisers who never pay for traffic if it doesn’t meet their inner metrics. It was kind of tricky 🙂
So we stated very slowly with little caps. Actually the first days and weeks I spent a lot of time on optimizing traffic. I was in touch with the advertiser 24/7. When the very first report came, it stated zero rejected conversions. That meant that the advertiser was happy with our traffic. And they opened thier budgets to all GEOs in the end.
Later I found myself running offers that were on top of our system. And I realized that you can make a lot of money if you put an effort in analyzing and optimizing the traffic. So, basically, if you have now VPNs or mobile utility offers, start running them with us. For example, if you have one for the United States, Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia stay and launch with us as we gained a huge experience and can help you promote these offers.
And now my next question. Who are your favorite affiliate marketers in the industry?
Well, to be honest, a lot of. Now we’re working with almost all of popular and big affiliates. And all of them are listed as our partners on our website.
So you love working with them cause the’re just super partner affiliates?
We understand that good partners can come in every “size and shape”. And we value all our partners, no matter when we started working, yesterday or years ago.
Right, I know that. And are you missing now all those kinds of live events like we were having in 2019? Like all those events when we were meeting face to face …like seminars and all sort of those? COVID-19 has changed a lot of things in the industry.
Sure! I do miss conferences and big shows. 2020 has made a huge impact on the shows, and I’m waiting for when it will be possible to travel around and to join all these shows. It will really be great to have it all back.
Yes, you’re right. And my last question, okay, my first last question is what are the new ad formats that are available, maybe, ads standards you guys have, some new ad forms you would like to talk about.
Yes, we’ve got our Social Bar. It’s a fresh new ad format that we’ve invented this year. An in-house format that is fully customized. It was half a year that we were testing it on a closed beta to learn as much as possible about this format. And now it’s open to the public, so at this very moment you can access this new format to test different verticals.
Mobile VPNs, cams, and dating are showing great results, because the format is fully customized, and you can rest almost any type of creatives.
We have round circle creatives, video, interactive chat creatives. It’s extremely flexible which allows you to promote a wide range of offers. I would like to mention that since web push age is slowly dying, coming to an end, it’s a very good time to try some new a formats with higher CTR and CR like Social Bar.
Ok, so now maybe a few words you would like to say to the affiliates that are just starting out. Would you like to tell them how to start as affilaite marketers, how to join Adsterra, maybe, share a few words with them?
Of course. Just sign up to Adsterra, and our supreme account management team will reach you out and advice on how to set up your very first campaign. We will help you go through all of the campaign stages. We will even give you pre-made wishlist of the top-performing offers. We will guide you in order to find the best converting offers. So just stay in touch with Adsterra, and we will help you make bigger profits.
