Basic concepts of arbitration
- An advertiser is a seller of goods, services, an online service in need of clients or new users. For example, an online store, a dating service or an online game publisher;
- A partner is a webmaster, arbitrator, SMM specialist who, for a fee, finds clients for the advertiser;
- Offer - an offer from an advertiser to earning partners. The offer describes a specific product or service, traffic requirements (for example, geography of potential customers), permitted advertising methods and commission amount;
- CPA network is an intermediary between partners and advertisers. The CPA network takes care of the technical and organizational aspects of the affiliate program, ensures traffic accounting and financial settlements between partners and advertisers.
Traffic arbitrage: where to start for a beginner?
Let’s return once again to the original question: “Where should a beginner start?” If you've read this far, a lot has probably cleared up in your head and you now feel like you're not such a newbie! Is not it? But actually, I’ll be a little sad. Traffic arbitrage is a complex activity, which is not at all clear at first glance. So read on and get some useful tips!
5 very first steps for a beginner affiliate marketer!
1. Changing our thinking
So, the very first thing to do is to change your awareness. Yes Yes exactly! Of the thousands of newly arrived webmasters, only a few continue to work. Many people believe that traffic arbitrage is easy money and are very upset when they encounter failures.
Traffic arbitrage, like any business, requires an initial investment. But getting your first profit may take a while. Many people are not happy with this arrangement.
2. Analyze
The second thing you will need to do is analyze several aspects:
- time;
- money;
- skills;
- help.
Think about whether you have it all. Assess your time: how much are you willing to spend on this business. Decide how much financial resources you are willing to invest. Think about your skills: a very good affiliate marketer should be able to do a lot – from programming to copywriting. Enlist the help of already experienced webmasters.
3. Register
The third step will be registration in the affiliate program. Yes, and don't go it alone. Contact the manager and ask him for help. A newcomer will always be helped in his promotion and recommended which products to start selling with.
4. We begin to pour traffic
In simple words, the next step is to start searching for the target audience. Those. We are looking for our potential clients. To do this, we will need the traffic sources discussed above.
5. Launch the campaign and sum up the results
This is the most creative stage. We analyze and compare what kind of return this or that type of traffic resource provides.
The main mistakes of a “young arbitrageur” - read and DO NOT waste your money!
So, let’s point out the main reasons why many debutants remain so and forever say goodbye to the idea of making money on arbitration.
- Incorrectly chosen affiliate.
- Incorrect traffic source selected.
- Ignorance of the basic rules of arbitration and specific affiliate programs (affiliate programs). For example, certain offers can only be advertised on certain advertising platforms.
- The target audience is incorrectly selected.
- Traffic resource testing was not performed.
And that's not all. Therefore, before thinking about the question of where to start traffic arbitrage, return once again to the second point of the steps for beginners. And analyze whether you have everything from this. This is the only way to become a successful webmaster!
What is an affiliate program
This is a form of cooperation between the advertiser and partners according to the following scheme:
- The advertiser needs clients and is willing to pay for new ones. To do this, the advertiser launches his own affiliate program or publishes an offer in the CPA network;
- The partner, with the help of advertising on the Internet, attracts potential buyers and directs them to the advertiser’s website;
- If a user buys an advertiser’s product, the partner will receive a reward in the form of a percentage of the order amount or a fixed amount.
Arbitration courses
Many problems can be mitigated by taking arbitration courses. The problem is that there are almost no really good courses on the RuNet. Such that an experienced arbitrator would personally work with you and supervise all your work. Personally, I only saw various posts from schoolchildren allegedly earning hundreds of thousands of rubles from arbitration and offering to learn this craft for a certain amount.
I don't think it takes a genius to understand the whole point. These are simple information gypsies who have never dealt with this at a professional level. They just collect money from naive people to enrich themselves. Training may indeed exist, but there will be nothing useful in it. Only information that is already available on the Internet.
Nevertheless, you can find really interesting information on this topic. For example, in the M1-shop.ru affiliate group there is a whole block with articles for beginners and professionals. There are a lot of articles, and new ones are published regularly. If you are interested, I recommend following the link and reading the articles. All materials are written in simple words, so beginners can easily understand them.
I also draw your attention to the Admitad Academy. This affiliate network publishes useful materials about making money from traffic, advertising and, in general, everything related to Internet marketing. All articles are available absolutely free, you can go to the platform right now and read them.
A lot of useful materials can be found in the “Partnerkin” group, which is dedicated to traffic arbitrage. It contains a lot of useful information about this type of earnings. There are also various top affiliate programs, which are divided by criteria. Every beginner will find something useful there. They also have a website with ratings of affiliate programs and real reviews from users.
You can also search for information in groups and on the websites of other affiliate programs. Typically, affiliates are interested in having knowledgeable people work with them. That is why they create their own articles, information materials and guides. With their help, CPA networks want to improve the literacy of their partners.
How a partner is rewarded
- CPA is a model of one-time partner remuneration for an action performed by a user. The advertiser does not pay for site visitors, but only for those who do what he needs. For example: download an application, place or pay for an order, subscribe to services, register in a social network or casino;
- RevShare is a model of paying a partner a share of the client’s profit. Often used in gambling affiliates. For example, having brought a user to an online casino once, the partner will receive a percentage of the establishment’s profit as long as this user loses.
Selecting an affiliate program
When choosing an affiliate program, you should also consider what areas you are interested in working in. The fact is that there are different models for making money.
- CPA affiliate programs . The abbreviation Cost Per Action stands for “payment for action.” In this case, the customer pays not only for the fact that you brought visitors to his site. To receive your reward, visitors must be active on the affiliate page. Such an action could be registration, ordering goods, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.
AD1 is a time-tested and reliable service. Gives a reward. Gives you a percentage of purchases made by clients you referred.
AviaSales is a high-quality system with a similar operating concept.
2 . Affiliate sales programs. In this case, you will cooperate with online stores. They will pay you a bonus for every unit of their product sold. Naturally, you will only receive profit from purchases made through your referral link.
Admintad and MixMarket are the most convenient services for working in this area.
Need to know: Top 11 sites for arbitrage traders in 2020
What you need to make money on arbitrage
To make money, you need to register in an affiliate program and get traffic. These are the target users that you will attract using various advertising methods and force them to follow an affiliate link to the advertiser’s website.
- Target users are people who may be interested in the advertised product or service.
- Affiliate link is the URL of the advertiser’s website, unique for each affiliate. If the user follows this link, then it is considered that the client was brought by the partner to whom this link was issued.
Using trackers in arbitration
For traffic arbitrage to be profitable, each advertising campaign requires constant monitoring and convenient traffic management. Trackers provide this opportunity. This is a script or cloud service that allows you to configure traffic redirection in a convenient interface and keep statistics on visitors and traffic source sites.
The main function of the tracker is TDS (traffic delivery system). This is traffic distribution according to rules.
Minimum usage of this function:
- In the tracker interface, you create a URL to which you send the purchased traffic;
- For this source, you create a rule in the tracker, that is, you configure where to redirect this traffic (your affiliate link). There can be several rules for each incoming channel.
Ways to get traffic without investment
If you don’t have money to buy traffic on an advertising exchange, you will have to pay for target users with your own effort and time. As a rule, obtaining free traffic comes down to two types of work:
- Creating content in large quantities - articles and illustrations for social networks and websites, videos for YouTube or Instagram;
- Performing a large amount of work on registering accounts, posting, correspondence, sending messages.
In some cases, you can use demo versions or free trials of programs and services for promotion.
Free traffic can be obtained from one of the following sources:
- Own website;
- Community on a social network;
- Telegram channel;
- YouTube channel;
- Spam on social networks;
- E-mail newsletters;
- Direct sales.
Where to get traffic for arbitrage – overview of the main sources
As I already mentioned, the main sources of traffic are social networks, teaser advertising, contextual and banner advertising.
Let's make a comparative review.
Source 1. Teaser advertising
Teasers are small pictures with short texts. This is a source of “dirty” traffic, but with proper configuration it gives high conversion. Teasers are most suitable for entertainment websites.
One example of teaser advertising
This is the most budget option for a beginner advertiser. Everyone has seen provocative and “shocking” headlines like “Fat goes away in 48 hours, all you need is...” or “Doctors were shocked when I showed...”. Teaser advertising is cheap, irritates everyone, but lives on. And we have to take this into account.
Source 2. Contextual advertising
Sometimes this is a simple text line with a description of the offer and a link, but more often also with a picture that is not shocking like the image in a teaser ad. Contextual advertising is available in Yandex, Google and other search engines.
Such traffic will be more expensive, but setting it up also requires experience. The advantage of contextual advertising is that it attracts targeted visitors who came to search the Internet for exactly what is being advertised.
You can become a contextual advertising specialist by completing free training from a specialist in the Yandex advertising network.
Source 3. Advertising on social networks
The youngest and most promising type of advertising. With the help of social networks, they buy traffic for resources on a wide variety of topics. The advantage is that traffic here is easily filtered by age, gender, interests, education and other criteria.
The most popular and “monetary” social networks are VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Instagram, Facebook . Anyone can try a free way to attract traffic - create a group (community), promote it, and then encourage participants to take various targeted actions.
Here you can learn advertising on VKontakte for free in 3 days.
Source 4. Banner networks
An old-timer among ways to acquire traffic. This conversion method is most effective for large projects designed for long periods and a solvent target audience.
Source 5. Posting on forums
A free source of traffic for affiliates.
If you are an active participant in various thematic forums, no one will prohibit you from promoting offers from advertisers on such resources. Another thing is that the conversion rate of this method is unpredictable and in most cases low.
Source comparison table:
№ | Source | Expenses | Conversion |
1 | Teasers | Minimum | Average |
2 | contextual advertising | High | If configured correctly - high |
3 | Social network | At the discretion of the arbitrator | High |
4 | Banners | High | High |
5 | Forums | Zero | Low |
Creating your own website to get traffic
Your own website is a source of high-quality SEO traffic. You can create a blog on one of the free platforms (for example, blogspot.com) or on paid hosting. In the second case, the minimum costs are a domain name (from 191 rubles per domain in the .RU zone) and hosting (from 96 rubles per month).
Disadvantages of using your own website
- You need to pay for a domain and hosting;
- It will take time to develop the site before there is a permanent audience;
- Traffic cannot be filtered; you must either look for universal offers, or use banner rotator scripts and show different advertisements to different visitors.
The advantage of having your own website
- A well-promoted website is an almost free source of quality traffic;
- You know your audience and their interests well;
- There are no costs for testing creatives and various offers;
- There is no moderation or restrictions on the subject of advertising placed. You decide for yourself which banners to put up and which offers to work with.
- In addition, a website with a regular audience is valuable in itself. It can be sold on an exchange, for example, Telderi. We recommend our detailed article on website monetization.
How much can you earn on your own website and affiliate programs?
The statistics below show earnings from affiliate programs for six months on a site dedicated to the treatment of varicose veins.
Feedback on your own websites as traffic sources for arbitrage from Wildo
The future belongs to organic traffic, so it is important to invest money and effort into your own platforms. Sooner or later, top advertisers will push out ordinary arbitrage traders from regular exchanges. And then those platforms where outsiders will not be able to publish advertisements will be especially valuable. For example, your own websites.
An example of making money on affiliate programs and your own website
How websites become not only sources of traffic, but also passive income, is shown by a case study about making money on an essay affiliate program. The webmaster made blogs using copied content. On one domain, up to 1000 pages were created using low-frequency keywords. No work was done after indexing. With the help of banners and online forms, traffic was transferred to the BestEduDeal affiliate program. 60 such sites bring the webmaster $3,000 - $4,500 in passive income every month.
Which free traffic source is better?
998 votes
Your own website - 42% Social network community - 55%
How to make money on traffic arbitrage - step-by-step instructions for beginners
Thousands of newcomers come to arbitration, but not everyone has a stable income from this business. Buying traffic requires certain investments, although there are also free methods of promotion.
There are many companies online that train beginner arbitrators. Examples are the CPA NOOB , RichAdvert and CPA King on VKontakte, proprietary courses and trainings from experienced arbitrators.
However, to get started, there is enough free information that is abundant on the Internet. Universal advice for beginners is not to focus on one direction, but to try different offers, traffic sources and affiliate programs.
Step-by-step instructions will help you avoid mistakes and start correctly.
Step 1. Select an affiliate network for cooperation
First, you need to register in a CPA network or even several, otherwise where else will you get offers. It happens that in different networks, owners or specialists responsible for website promotion indicate different prices per lead - look for the option that is most profitable for you.
By the way, a difference of even 5 rubles significantly affects profits in the long term. If the number of leads is measured in hundreds and thousands, then even a small plus in your favor will significantly increase your earnings.
Step 2. Get a referral link
After that, select an offer and receive a referral link - this will be your main earning tool.
Choose an offer that is extremely clear to you and suits you in all respects. Advertising something you don’t understand will be uncomfortable, to say the least.
Step 3. Direct the maximum amount of traffic to the link
The key question in the arbitrage business is where to get suitable traffic at minimal cost?
There are two options for attracting traffic – for money and without it.
The free method is available to those who have their own resource with decent traffic. If people who are interested in the topic of your chosen offer regularly spend time on your website and social network group, then it will be much easier to attract the target audience.
For example, you are running a video blog dedicated to online games. You have hundreds of subscribers and regular readers. Choose an offer that requires leads to register for a new online game, do as honest and professional a review of the product as possible, and encourage visitors to register using a link. Counting coins.
But the sad truth is that not everyone has their own well-promoted websites and blogs, which is why most novice affiliate marketers have to resort to paid methods. These include contextual advertising, teasers, posts and banners on social networks. We will talk about all these options in detail a little later.
If you want to quickly create your own website to make money through arbitrage, come to the free online training “How to make a website in 5 days.”
Step 4. Find the best options for making a profit
Traffic arbitrage is a constant analysis and search for new ways to get rich. If you want to earn more, regularly test the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. You start it up and relax - this option will not work here.
Those who are engaged in:
- traffic analysis - we find out which source gives the best conversion;
- checking the effectiveness of advertising materials - we look at how well the advertiser works on his page;
- creating various ad blocks - checking what is more effective: teasers, banners, contextual advertising;
- We determine the best time for displaying advertising - at what time of day the ad is seen by more users.
Step 5. Filter low-quality traffic
Low-quality traffic needs to be cut off and eliminated. To do this, they use special statistics services (for example, Google Analytics ) and all sorts of traps for bots that are invisible to real users.
At first, while you have minimal experience, it is better not to use Yandex.Direct and Google Adwords. For beginners, the best choice is teaser networks like BodyClick or TeaserNet .
If you want to earn money quickly, read the material “Earn 1000 rubles in an hour without investment.”
Creating your own public pages or groups on social networks
This source has an important advantage - a community on a social network can be created and developed for free. You are provided with a ready-made engine and infrastructure. All that remains is to publish interesting content and promote the community using free methods.
The disadvantage of using your own public page or group is that it takes a lot of time and effort to create and develop a community.
Advantages of public pages or groups on social networks
- A community with a stable audience is a constant source of free traffic;
- You can publish advertising posts with graphics, large videos and any text. It is more effective than spam;
- You can advertise offers that the moderators of the official VK exchange will not miss;
- In an active group, users begin to generate content themselves;
- Regular community members are loyal to advertising.
How to create a community on a social network for arbitration
Since you are acting for the purpose of earning money, it is important to choose a commercially valuable community topic. Main criteria:
- New offers regularly appear on this topic that allow traffic from social networks;
- You will be able to find or create interesting materials for regular publication;
- This topic does not violate social rules.
For example, to advertise auto products, create communities for car repairs, auto news, or tuning. If you intend to work with gaming offers, create a public page for fans of games of a certain genre. And to sell children's products, it is better to create women's groups.
We have prepared step-by-step instructions for creating and developing a VK community. You may also find our article about making money from a group on Odnoklassniki useful.
Feedback on making money from traffic from social networks
What is arbitration and who are arbitrators?
Traffic arbitrage is the redirection of this same traffic to specific target sources. Typically, arbitrage refers to the purchase of traffic in various advertising services for subsequent redirection to the necessary sources in order to make money on affiliate programs.
Roughly speaking, a person goes to some service, buys advertising there and places some affiliate materials. The goal of this person will be to earn money from affiliate contributions. At the same time, he must not only break even (that is, recoup advertising costs), but also earn an acceptable amount on top.
The arbitration system, at first glance, is very simple and understandable. You just need to buy traffic somewhere for resale. However, there are a lot of nuances in this whole process. People have been learning to work competently with various services and affiliate programs for years. They spend quite a lot of money on this.
But this is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. You won't be able to simply buy traffic. You must attract target users who will be valuable for the affiliate program. If a lot of people go to a certain site, but don’t buy anything there, then all this will be of no use. The goal of an arbitrageur is to sell someone else’s property and receive a percentage of the profit for it.
In order to succeed in making money from traffic arbitrage, you must have a number of special knowledge. You must clearly understand your target audience and their interests. If you advertise children's toys in the IT community, then there will be no profit from such a campaign.
In addition to choosing the right audience, you must understand their pains and experiences. Everyone has long been tired of banal advertising, and if you learn to put pressure on what is most painful and desirable, people will follow the link and buy the product (or service) that you offer them.
A successful affiliate marketer can use a variety of ways to attract users. This could be purchasing advertising on social networks, using advertising accounts from search engines, teaser and banner networks, direct advertising from bloggers on YouTube, advertising on websites, etc.
Everyone decides for themselves which direction to work with. Some people choose several directions, but too much is not good. To make money, you must understand the chosen direction inside and out. And if you try to study everything at once, then nothing good will come of it.
Understanding your advertising account is still half the battle. Next, you will need to come up with creatives: banners, pictures, text descriptions that will be used in advertising posts/banners, etc. The matter is not so simple, because a lot depends on the creative.
Even if you have well defined the target audience and can boast of good knowledge of the advertising account of the same VK, bad creatives can ruin everything. Excessively loud promises or the use of some disgusting pictures can lead to blocking of your account, due to which you will simply lose money.
This is where we come to the most important thing. Traffic arbitrage is an income that requires initial investment. Sometimes very significant, because sometimes affiliates spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of rubles on advertising campaigns. And things don’t always go smoothly for them, so this money can be lost very easily.
The initial investment, as you might have guessed, is used to pay for advertising offices, groups on social networks, or to replenish the balance on teaser/banner networks. You buy advertising and promote an affiliate product. The goal here is one - to recoup all costs 2 or more times. If you succeed, it means you have found a good way to make money on arbitrage. If not, don’t despair, even the coolest arbitrage traders simply lost all their money at first.
Therefore, this method of earning money is not suitable for everyone. In no case should you think that arbitration is a kind of “Loot” button that you can use to your heart’s content. You can really earn good money from this, but no one will insure you against huge losses. Nobody but yourself.
If you have extra money and a stable income, then you can try to increase your wealth using this method. At first, you will lose a lot of money, because you need to learn everything and experience first-hand how advertising services, affiliate programs, etc. work. That is, losing money in this case will not turn out to be anything critical for you. Lost? You’ll earn more money, it’s not that scary.
However, if you don’t have money, then it’s better not to get involved in traffic arbitrage for now. You can drain all the last accumulations and not get any exhaust. In this case, arbitrage will be similar to betting or online casinos. You take a lot of risks and if you lose, you lose everything. You may be left not just without money, but, in general, in debt. It will be very difficult to get out of such a situation, so under no circumstances get involved in this topic without income.
You can read various articles on arbitration, watch the results of others and study cases. However, to start, you will in any case need practice, which will require money.
The best option would be to study the theory. I’ll tell you about various sources where you can look about arbitration a little later. Now we will highlight several very important points for a deeper understanding of this topic.
- Traffic arbitrage is the process of attracting users using various methods. Most often, traffic is purchased through advertising networks. These are contextual advertising, teaser and banner networks, social networks, platforms like YouTube. Sometimes traffic is attracted through owned media sources.
- This method requires an initial investment. At a minimum, you must pay for advertising offices. As a maximum, order creatives and descriptions for advertising materials from freelancers.
- In arbitration, especially at the initial stages, there are certain risks. You may simply waste your entire budget and not get the desired result. This means that you don’t need to pour your last funds into arbitrage, hoping to quickly increase your capital. There is a great risk that you will be left without money to live on.
- Typically, arbitrageurs work with affiliate programs. These could be CPA networks, other advertising affiliates, etc. The most popular are CPA affiliates. Most affiliates work with them.
- You must constantly improve, learn something new, master advertising offices and monitor the current state of the market in the area in which you work.
Using a Telegram channel to earn money
The advantage of Telegram in terms of arbitrage is its high audience involvement. Unlike social networks, a post in a channel will be read by at least 50% of subscribers. To create a channel in Telegram you do not need finances. The main thing is to publish interesting content. We recommend our article about promoting a Telegram channel from scratch, and proxies for Telegram will help affiliates from the Russian Federation bypass the blocking.
How much can you earn from traffic from Telegram?
The capabilities of this source are demonstrated by a case of leaking from Telegram to a casino. The arbitrator used free traffic from Telegram and earned 59,550 rubles in net profit.
As you can see from the case, if you supplement your own channel with neat chat spam, you can spend 450 rubles on a domain and earn 60,000.
Feedback on traffic from Telegram from Artem Prokofiev (owner of the Ordynets CPA network)
Compared to Instagram, VK and Odnoklassniki, the Telegram channel has the highest profitability per 1000 advertising impressions. Artem Prokofiev recommends this platform for business.
Where to learn the art of arbitration
Many people come to arbitration already making money on the Internet, for example, by copywriting, running their own groups, or providing services on freelance exchanges. This category is starting to explore arbitration on its own.
Or a category of website owners who need additional income for their website. Where to start?
- Enroll in an arbitration (traffic) school and undergo step-by-step training there. Lessons, webinars, feedback, all teaching methods will make you a professional arbitrageur. Everything from registration to receiving your first income, under the strict guidance of mentors.
- Training lessons directly on partner sites M1-shop has a YouTube channel where it conducts training. Admintad regularly conducts webinars and also publishes articles on seasonal product promotion. Questions can be asked directly on the website or in social network groups
- Find a practicing arbitrator and sign up for a course with him. Such specialists often conduct free webinars; listen to a few and you will decide how clear and interesting the information is.
Using a YouTube channel as a source of free traffic
YouTube provides free video hosting services with convenient tools for creating a channel, uploading and a simple video editor. The advantage of this service is:
- Specialization in the most easily perceived - video content;
- Social network functions (subscriptions, likes, comments) make it easier to attract an audience using free methods and help the author maintain a dialogue with subscribers;
- This is the number 2 search engine after Google. Using video page optimization, you can achieve high positions in video search results and receive additional traffic;
- Videos from YouTube are shown in Google and Yandex search results for queries for which the video page is optimized. Which also brings traffic.
Users of this site are looking not only for entertainment, but also for lessons, advice, and reference information. This allows you to advertise product offers (for example, videos of unboxing goods or testing gadgets) or services on YouTube.
The main difficulty in developing a YouTube channel is content. In order to increase and retain your audience, you need to regularly post new and interesting videos. The channel author must be able to maintain a high rate of publications.
How much can you earn from YouTube traffic?
In our article on making money from views on YouTube, there is an interesting case of draining traffic from YouTube to a binary options affiliate program. The author filled the channel with high-quality educational videos for novice traders. Traffic from the channel was drained with a link in the description to the Binomo affiliate program. During the period from August to May, the blogger achieved earnings of $7,000 per month.
How to choose an offer for traffic arbitrage
Choosing an offer is the first stage of making money from traffic arbitrage. To select offers that are promising for making money, you can take a look at what other affiliate marketers are currently working with. Three sources of information will tell you about this:
- Top offers in affiliate programs.
- Mailings of affiliate programs and CPA networks on new offers.
- Analysis of advertising platforms using Publer.
We recommend reading the article about how to find promising offers using Publer.
An advertiser's offer that suits you must meet the following criteria:
- You understand what the service or product offered is, how you will advertise, and the parameters of the target audience.
- The product offered is in demand among potential clients. It is important to consider the seasonality of goods or services. For example, drugs for alcoholism before and during the holidays or drugs for weight loss in spring and summer are especially relevant.
- You have the opportunity to buy traffic for this offer. This means that you know on which exchanges or by direct agreement you can buy targeted traffic and your budget is enough to work with the offer.
- You are happy with the difference between the income from leads for this offer and the costs of purchasing traffic. You can assume this, but you will probably find out after some of the traffic is drained.
The demand for a service or product can be checked using the services wordstat.yandex.ru and Google Trends.
It should be taken into account that if an offer appeared a long time ago and is popular, then it can be “squeezed out” - users are tired of its product due to mass advertising or disappointment and bad reviews. In this case, you can spend money on traffic, but not get leads, even though you do everything right. This is indirectly evidenced by the large number of advertisements over a long period on the main traffic exchanges (you can check this using Publer by setting different periods for advertising analysis in the settings). You will find out for sure only after you start working with the offer.
When choosing an offer, pay attention to the following parameters:
- The purpose for which user action the advertiser will pay. Simpler goals mean more leads, as people are more willing to register than pay for orders or top up their game balance. But for a more complex goal the payout is higher. For example, for the offer of the forex broker Alpari, the payment for registration is 67-147 rubles, and for replenishing the balance 1,477-1,539 rubles.
- Remuneration amount and payment rules. For product offers, the payment for an order from a new client is often higher than for a repeat purchase from the same user (for example, from the Ozon affiliate program).
- Traffic requirements: GEO of users, permitted advertising methods. The advertiser can prohibit some sources that he works with (Wildberries prohibits contextual advertising) or that harm the reputation (for example, aggressive advertising, ClickUnder and PopUnder). Here you need to be very careful, there are many sources of traffic and each advertiser has its own requirements, which are mandatory for you.
- Post-click duration is an important parameter for your earnings. This is the period for which each visitor is associated using a cookie with the partner through whose link he was referred to the advertiser. For example, if the post-click is 30 days, then during this time the user can return to the advertiser’s website to buy a product, and the reward will be credited to you.
- The quality of the landing page, how beautiful it looks, whether the form elements are noticeable, whether it is obvious what is required from the visitor. This is important because when the user gets to the landing page, you have already incurred costs. If a visitor doesn’t like the site, he doesn’t understand and leaves the landing page, this means your loss.
- Order processing time, the faster you call customers from the advertiser’s call center and check leads, the faster you will know the quality of traffic and be able to analyze the advertising campaign. For example, according to the Alpari offer in the Actionpay affiliate program, processing takes a maximum of 14 days, and in Cityads - up to 45 days.
- Hold is the time of complete verification of clients and their payments, during which the reward already accrued to the partner is delayed. This period can range from two to 45 days.
- EPC - affiliate data about how much other affiliates earn on average from traffic for this offer.
For your convenience, our catalog of offers provides the ability to filter advertiser offers based on basic parameters.
And in the card of each offer, in addition to its description, there is a comparison table for affiliate programs that offer this product.
After choosing an offer, check the information about the affiliate program (if you have not worked with it before or have not worked with it for a long time): what is the minimum amount to be paid, what are the commissions, supported payment systems. If money gets stuck in an affiliate program for a long time, you risk finding yourself without working capital and the business will stop, even if you have found a very profitable partnership. Also important is the company’s attitude towards partners, the absence of problems with payments, and the level of technical support. You can learn about all this from the reviews of other affiliates or webmasters in our rating of affiliate programs.
Split testing to improve operational efficiency
The audience of potential clients consists of many people with different interests. Therefore, even an experienced specialist cannot immediately say exactly how users will react to a specific banner or advertisement. The solution is to test promotional materials. This is the only way to find the creative with the highest conversion for a specific combination of offer and traffic.
For example, below are the results of a banner test for advertising an AdsXposed offer (a spy tool for affiliate marketers). Ratio - the number of clicks on the banner as a percentage of the number of impressions.
Split testing (also called A/B testing) is the process of pouring equal amounts of traffic with the same parameters into two different creatives in order to choose the best one. For example, there are two banners, one with a photo of a slender girl, the second with a large photo of a package of weight loss capsules. Using TDS or a tracker, they drain 1000 visitors for each and use statistics to see which banner has the most clicks. Of the two, they leave the more effective one and continue to use it. Using this method, you can select banner colors, combinations of graphic elements, ad format, volume, and text content in the ad.
When split testing, there is one mandatory rule, without which you will not get accurate information: check only one parameter per test. For example, you cannot simultaneously change the background color and the font of the banner inscription. First, test several banners with different backgrounds and choose the optimal one, and then, separately, find the best inscription.
In the same way, landing pages and other elements of the chain of work with an offer are tested (for example, to check which is better, put a lower price in an ad, or offer a discount coupon). You can test multiple traffic sources with the same creatives. And the same offer can be checked with different affiliate programs.
As practical experience shows, the same product can be sold differently by different affiliate programs. If CTR is important for banners, then for other elements conversion and EPC are assessed (that is, which landing page or traffic source brought more sales with the same number of visitors).
This process requires time and expense, but you should understand that your goal in arbitration is not traffic itself, but profit. It’s important for you not just to get targeted visitors, but to achieve the maximum difference between income from leads and traffic costs. We need to make the most of the traffic. Only a test will answer which of the two banners pushes the user to click more, and on which of the two landing pages visitors are more willing to place an order. We recommend reading the article about how to properly conduct split testing.
Using trackers in arbitration
For traffic arbitrage to be profitable, each advertising campaign requires constant monitoring and convenient traffic management. Trackers provide this opportunity. This is a script or cloud service that allows you to configure traffic redirection in a convenient interface and keep statistics on visitors and traffic source sites.
The main function of the tracker is TDS (traffic delivery system). This is traffic distribution according to rules.
Minimum usage of this function:
- In the tracker interface, you create a URL to which you send the purchased traffic;
- For this source, you create a rule in the tracker, that is, you configure where to redirect this traffic (your affiliate link). There can be several rules for each incoming channel.
Creating a traffic source in the tracker
Already in this mode, it gives you the opportunity, regardless of the exchange and affiliate program, to keep track of traffic yourself. In addition, you can quickly switch traffic to another URL (for example, if the offer you were working with suddenly stopped). This is not only convenient, but also very important. If you immediately indicate an affiliate link in your ads, then quickly changing it can be difficult, and in some cases impossible (for example, if you bought advertising posts in other people’s public pages).
Also, the tracker allows you to set up several rules, dividing users by GEO, operating system, type of mobile device and merging visitors with different “parameters” into different offers in order to earn the maximum on traffic.
In addition, the tracker will help you in the following situations:
- Split testing of creatives, platforms and affiliate programs. For example, create three referral directions for the same offer from 3 different affiliate programs and send 33% of the traffic to each. After a few days of draining the traffic, you will see which affiliate program brings in the most money and continue to work with it. Or if the offer comes with several different landing pages, then first you spread it evenly across all of them, and then use the one with the most leads.
- Cloaking to pass moderation of ads on some exchanges. Some exchanges do not allow advertising of completely legal products due to just one redirect or for other reasons. Using the tracker, you can send users to an affiliate link, and initially show the moderator (and the exchange robot in the future) a static store website without any long URLs.
- Hiding transition links in order to protect your working methods and links from “peeping” and copying. Unfortunately, affiliate marketers have repeatedly complained that their work patterns are revealed and copied by employees of affiliate programs and CPA networks. All this remains at the level of complaints and rumors, but it is better, in principle, to deprive others of the opportunity to see how you work.
- Analysis of advertising campaigns. Using a postback (a special request with parameters from an affiliate program to your website), you can receive real-time information about traffic, leads, and earnings.
And all this can be done in a single convenient interface. In the case of arbitrage, such convenience is not a question of comfort, but of the efficiency of earnings, quick response to events (for example, the CTR of creatives has worsened or the quality of traffic on some site has dropped).
When choosing a tracker, in addition to functionality, its ability to work with a heavy load (large amount of traffic) and redirection speed are critically important - extra milliseconds when redirecting users lead to the loss of part of the traffic and harm the overall conversion. It is better to check this information from user reviews or test it during the tracker’s trial period.
- There are two groups of trackers: cloud-based (hosted by the seller) and scripts installed on their own hosting. Example of some popular trackers:
- AdsBridge is cloud-based with a 14-day free trial, minimum plan $75/month.
- Binom - for your own hosting, there is a 14-day trial, cost from $99 per month.
- Pixelk - for your hosting, 2 weeks trial period, price $49/month.
- Keitaro TDS - for installation on your server, cost from $15 per month.
- RedTrak is cloud-based, free if you redirect less than 50,000 clicks per month, starting plan is $29/month.
- Voluum is cloud-based, with a minimum plan of $99 per month.
- Cpatracker - for installation on your server. Up to 10,000 clicks per day - free, paid tariffs from 1000 rubles / month. You can also buy hosting with an installed script from Cpatracker partners.
- OctoTracker - for your own hosting, tariffs from 2000 rubles. per month.
Spam on social networks or instant messengers
This method of generating traffic is based on attracting attention to your profile or public page on Instgram, VKontakte or other social networks. Users are transferred to the offer using a link in the description or from a pinned post.
Everything is based on the assumption that social network users will be interested in someone else's comment and want to see who liked or subscribed. Some people will not only look at the spammer’s profile, but also click on the advertisement.
How to spam on social networks
There are the following spam methods on social networks:
- Massfollowing - mass subscription to other users;
- Mass liking - marking many other people's publications as liked;
- Commenting on other people's posts;
- Sending personal messages (direct).
In addition, Instagram uses frequent publication of photographs or illustrations with a large number of hashtags. This social network has TOP hashtags and, probably, a new publication will be noticed there before it is moved by other people’s posts.
Disadvantages of spam on social networks
- The danger of blocking - by the administration due to user complaints about SPAM or automatically, after performing actions too often;
- Limits on the number of actions per day are being reduced, and the minimum intervals between likes or subscriptions are increasing;
- Low traffic conversion due to poor content and interest.
How much can you earn by spamming on Instagram?
The capabilities of this source are demonstrated by a case study about making money from traffic from Instagram. The arbitrator used free tools: a proxy, an SMS receiving service, and an Android emulator to register and create hundreds of Instagram accounts.
Each profile featured up to ten fashion photos of clothes and accessories, and included an affiliate link in the description, hidden by a URL shortening service.
Traffic was transferred to the offer of the GIlt mobile application of the AdsBerry affiliate program. The method of attracting traffic is mass following and mass liking with selection of the target audience using hashtags. We used a three-day trial in instagress (the service is closed, the alternative is SocialHammer).
In three days of free spam, the arbitrator used up 500 accounts. They were all banned, but before that they managed to generate 31,610 clicks and earnings of $1399.5.
How to get free traffic from VKontakte
A headphone sales case shows how you can get free VK traffic to a product offer. The arbitrator worked with the “Monster Beats Headphones” offer of the Leadspartner affiliate. The creative was designed as a message from a person who has a large number of promotional codes for purchasing headphones at a discount.
And on the landing page there was a field in which you could enter any set of characters and the price would decrease. Such a message was sent using a free program (for example, Brobot) to a database of 2,000 “Overheard” public pages.
As a result, with zero costs, the arbitrator received 12,825 rubles in income in three days.
Tools for getting free traffic on social networks
Mass operations on social networks, likes, subscriptions or comments, are very labor-intensive. As well as finding suitable communities. Even without a budget, these actions can be automated using free tools or Trial tariffs of online services.
The following tools will be useful for spamming or promoting your community:
- BroBot - with one profile, the program allows you to use all functions for free: search, joining groups, friends, invitations, correspondence, likes, reposts, publications on social networks Vkontakte, Instagram, Odnoklassniki, Mamba, LovePlanet. There are many educational articles on the site;
- vk.barkov.net is a search service for VKontakte communities and users using a large list of parameters. There is a free plan in which you can only get the first 5,000 results;
- pepper.ninja is a powerful service for parsing communities and users on VKontakte and Instagram. Free period for three days without restrictions on functions;
- SocialHammer is an online social media promotion service with a large range of tools and a seven-day trial period;
- INSTA.tools is a service for spamming, publishing, liking and other actions on Instagram. There is a trial period of three days and 5,000 actions;
- Toolsstar is a service for auto-posting on Facebook. In the free plan, you can schedule up to 50 publications;
- PublBox - auto-posting to social networks. There is a free trial period of seven days.
Selecting traffic sources
Before choosing, pay attention to:
- Offer . Thus, serious financial offers should not be advertised in teaser networks: there will be a lot of useless traffic and very few leads. Products that have just entered the market and are not yet familiar to the consumer will not appear in contextual advertising in search results (because they are simply not requested in search yet).
- Source complexity . You will study Yandex.Direct for a month or even more before you start as a traffic arbiter. It is better to choose simple lead generation methods and move on from them to more complex ones. Ideally, those that can be learned in a day or two.
Types of traffic sources:
- Advertising in groups, social network communities, on YouTube channels;
- Teaser networks;
- Banner networks;
- Targeted advertising;
- Contextual;
- Advertising in mailing lists;
- Doorway traffic;
- Spam by e-mail, on forums, social networks, etc.;
- Motivated traffic;
- SEO.
Traffic arbitrage through social networks and YouTube channels
Perhaps the easiest way for beginners to get started is to buy space for advertising posts from the admins of pages with a small number of subscribers. For one publication on VKontakte, for example, it will cost 50-200 rubles. There is no need to take on more expensive pages for traffic arbitrage at first. Practice on small ones until you get the hang of it. Take offers with a low cost per lead and the product itself.
So, you shouldn’t immediately sell iPhones with a small budget: you will lose it without even collecting enough statistics for analysis. Try to start with simple offers where you pay for registration, subscription to the newsletter, filling out a questionnaire, etc. Games, dating sites, information business with payment for subscribers, etc. are suitable. The budget for starting in traffic arbitrage is from 5,000 rubles to infinity.
There are a lot of nuances in making money through posts, but the general algorithm of actions is as follows:
- We are looking for groups, communities, channels, which are suitable for advertising our offer. You need to study the audience of the pages: their gender, age, geography. We study and compare audience activity. We compare the number of subscribers/activity/cost of placement. In general, before starting traffic arbitrage, we conduct analytics before purchasing advertising space. On VKontakte, for example, you can view group statistics for many parameters (if it is open):
- We create creatives: posts, videos, photos, advertising texts.
- We receive a link in the affiliate program (one for each advertising platform) and insert it into the post/under the video on YouTube.
- We agree on publication with page owners. Another option is to order posts from an advertising exchange.
- We are waiting for publication.
- We analyze the results after a few days.
- We weed out pages that are ineffective for traffic arbitrage, mark the successful ones so that we can work with them further, and return to point 1.
Example of an advertising post on VKontakte:
Each social network has its own nuances of choosing platforms and creating creatives, and each deserves a separate article, and more than one. For example, I already touched on VKontakte traffic arbitration in one of the materials.
Teaser networks
A huge number of sites are collected in teaser networks. They contain blocks with teasers - advertisements consisting of a small picture and short text.
As a rule, teasers are an aggressive type of advertising in traffic arbitrage, designed for short-sighted users. They can sell all kinds of weight loss creams, dietary supplements, male or female organ enlargers, games, trainings, etc.
Examples of teasers and how to make them yourself can be found here .
Your action plan for traffic arbitrage:
- Select a teaser network and register.
- Create teasers, add them to the network, add affiliate links to them. At the same time, pre-landing pages (or more simply, padding sites) are often used to whet the desire of visitors to buy a product before they go to the product’s website. Blogs with fake (unreal) reviews are often used as pre-landers.
- Set up advertising display.
- Launch advertising and monitor its promotion, statistics in the affiliate program and in analytics systems such as Yandex.Metrics and Google Analytics.
- As you work, remove ineffective sites that do not generate profit.
Important : you should choose only one teaser network and work with it. There is no need to waste your budget on 5 teasers if you only have 5,000 rubles in your pocket for tests. In general, it’s worth starting with at least 10,000 rubles. By the way, you won’t be able to get a positive result immediately in teasers: this happens very rarely. At first, traffic arbitrage works at a loss. You analyze the statistics - optimize the advertising campaign - turn it into a plus.
The advantage of teasers is the low cost per click, which starts from 10 kopecks. However, the quality of traffic for arbitrage suffers: bots will steal your budget, so you need to delete sites if you notice empty clicks and zero conversions.
Examples of teaser networks:
- Oblivochki.biz is a teaser with a lot of positive reviews from affiliate marketers and tools for more or less accurate targeting. Click from 70 kopecks.
- Teasernet – geotargeting, wide selection of topics, clicks from 10 kopecks. A very large and old network.
- BodyClick – there are sites on any topic, and in addition to teasers, you can advertise here with banners, contextual ads, and clickers.
Banner networks
With their help, you can place banners on websites of various topics. Banners differ from teasers in a wider variety of sizes and formats, and the absence of text. That is, it's just a picture or animation. You can buy ready-made banners from affiliate programs or make them yourself and then place them in banner networks. The most prominent representative of them is Rotaban.
Targeted advertising
Targeted advertising helps to most accurately target advertising to the consumer. Not only gender/age/geography is taken into account, but also marital status, interests, education, life position, presence of children, and so on. What you include in your social media profile is used by advertisers to show you relevant advertisements. The information that users provide about themselves can be used to accurately hit the target (“target” from English - “goal”).
Advertising formats here are varied and are not limited to teasers alone.
Targeted advertising services:
Target VK
It is possible to show teaser blocks with a small picture on the left to users on Vk.com or promote full-fledged posts in their news feeds. You can create a button with a call to action “Buy”, “Go”, “Join” and so on. There is a “Carousel” format, where in one ad in the news feed you can create several cards that consist of a photo, a link to the site and a “Buy” button (or with other text). Retargeting tool available.
Mytarget
Using the service, you can arbitrate on Vkontakte, Mail.ru, and Odnoklassniki. Target mobile or desktop users, advertise mobile applications, games. In Maiterget there are more than 15 types of targeting, including by income level. There is retargeting. It is distinguished by strict moderation of advertising, so not all offers are accepted, especially “gray” ones, like weight loss programs and other things.
Perhaps this is the coolest targeted advertising tool. With it you can enter not only the CIS market, but also the bourgeoisie – use it for affiliate programs around the world and receive income in dollars. True, advertising costs are higher here. You shouldn’t try to push a “gray” offer onto Facebook: moderation won’t let it through. Although some cunning arbitrageurs manage to do it.
The advantage of Facebook is that it has a huge number of tools for retargeting, tracking and optimizing traffic, there are split tests, as well as the most detailed targeting (it seems that Facebook monitors its users at every step).
For a beginner, it’s better to start getting acquainted with targeted advertising on VKontakte: it has the simplest and most intuitive interface. Facebook has just crazy functionality, so we’ll leave it for a snack.
contextual advertising
Context leaders are Yandex.Direct and Google Adwords. Advertising blocks can be seen both when searching in Yandex and Google, and when visiting websites.
How is contextual advertising different from targeted advertising?
A way to find the target audience. So, in the search target, we set the characteristics of people who, in our opinion, may be interested in our offer.
In context, it’s the other way around: we only need to indicate what search queries people can use to search for our offer. Of course, here you can also determine the geography of impressions, but it is not necessary to indicate interests, age, marital status, etc. We find out exactly what a person wants from his search query.
The advantage of contextual advertising is that it reaches the target audience more accurately. However, even here it can be difficult to catch her. You need to be able to carry out complex settings, choose strategies, and conduct analytics.
To make money from contextual advertising in traffic arbitrage, you need deep knowledge, otherwise you will drive yourself into the red and be disappointed. Ideally, take a couple of courses from configuration experts. But even if you don’t become an affiliate marketer, contextual advertising specialists are a highly paid position, so don’t skimp on spending money on education.
Advertising in e-mail newsletters
The scheme is simple:
- you need to look for authors of newsletters on topics that are interesting to your target audience.
- Then buy from them to send an advertising letter with a link to subscribers;
- Analyze the results, select the best email campaigns based on the envelope, and deliver similar advertisements again.
The best content in mailings is informational products: trainings, courses, etc. You can also make money by creating your own e-mail newsletter, from which you can send subscribers to affiliate programs and cpa networks.
Doorway traffic
A doorway is a website that is automatically created using programs for promoting low-frequency queries. As a rule, such sites do not provide value either to the user or to the search engine. However, they bring traffic to the owner, which is then converted into income from affiliate programs. The costs of doorways are limited to a one-time purchase of software for their generation, as well as payment for hosting and domain. Sometimes they also purchase links to speed up promotion.
Doorways often “die”: they are banned by search engines, so constant work is needed to create new packs. Unlike sites for people (SDL), which live for years, doorways may not last even a few months.
In the bourgeoisie, with the help of doorways, it is popular to drain traffic to pharmaceutical affiliates, essay affiliates, casinos, poker, and sports betting. The exhaust costs hundreds and thousands of dollars.
You can read more about traffic arbitrage using doorways on Wikipedia. And we move on.
Prohibited Methods
These include:
- Email spam;
- Spam on forums;
- Question-answer services;
- On social networks: mass following, mass liking, sending personal messages, spam in public pages, etc.
Not all affiliate programs accept spam traffic, and you can even get banned for it and lose your earned money. Before you start making money on spam in traffic arbitrage, ask the technical support of the affiliate program if you can use these methods of attracting traffic.
The advantage is that you can do spam manually and not pay for traffic at all, i.e., make money on affiliate programs without investment. Another option is to buy a program that will spam you automatically and much faster. The cost pays off quite quickly with the right approach. The main thing is to know the technology of obtaining traffic in arbitration using similar methods.
Incentivized traffic
Incentivized traffic is traffic that you receive by agreement with people.
- For example, you need a person to register in the game, and you will receive 50 rubles for registering in an affiliate program.
- Go to special services (books), where for 10 rubles a person will register using your link or perform another required action.
- You have a profit of 40 rubles.
Simply, to the point of disgrace. But the catch is that affiliate programs in most cases do not recognize motivated traffic and harshly ban dishonest affiliates. Although there are options where it is allowed. Check cpad.pro for current offers.
SEO and traffic arbitrage
SEO is a softer way to get traffic with almost no investment. To make money on a blog or website, you only need to pay for hosting and domain. By the way, you can get free hosting for 3 months with a 2nd level domain for 1 year. Moreover, this hosting is of high quality, because I have been using it myself for many years. This blog is on it. If you want to start without any investment at all for 3 months, click here , I tell you in this post how you can get this privilege for free and without a catch ;).
General algorithm of actions:
- Register a domain and buy hosting;
- We select the engine on which the site will function (Wordpress, for example);
- Install the template;
- Compiling a semantic core;
- We fill it with articles optimized for these keys (unique ones - you can write/rewrite them yourself or hire specialists);
- We promote;
- After some time, traffic begins to flow, which you will monetize with banners, links and other promotional materials from affiliate programs.
The main thing is to immediately choose a niche and see if there are affiliate programs for it. The income will come in six months to a year, when enough traffic from search engines begins to arrive.
Email newsletters
If people have subscribed to your newsletter, then this is a more loyal audience than random visitors to a website or public page. Subscribers can be effectively influenced through personalization and trust built through previous emails.
But you will have to make an effort to collect a subscriber base and it will take time before you can make money from affiliate programs.
The disadvantage of newsletters as a source of traffic is the need to maintain the interest of the audience and regularly send out new content. In addition, free plans for mailing services are limited. For example:
- SendPulse - up to 2,500 subscribers and up to 15,000 emails per month;
- MailChimp - up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month;
- MassDelivery - up to 1000 subscribers and up to 50,000 letters per month.
Creating a newsletter step by step
- Register an account in the mailing service;
- Embed the subscription form code on your website, blog, or create a landing page;
- Create your first few emails;
- Attract traffic to the subscription form - post announcements of your newsletter on your blog or social networks.
The most important thing is to attract subscribers. Nothing new has been invented other than offering something free or interesting. Hold competitions, sweepstakes, offer to send something for free. You need to use any means to force visitors to enter their e-mail and then agree to receive letters.
If you don’t want to waste time collecting subscribers, you may find this article on how to buy an email database useful.
Conclusion
At first, you might think that there is nothing complicated about traffic arbitrage. However, now you understand that this is a whole universe in online earnings that requires detailed study. If you don’t want to spend all your money on empty traffic, then dive into this topic headlong. Start with small actions: place an advertising post on your VK page, make a blog on Tumblr, sell products through YouTube - all this will help you understand how best to sell through affiliate networks. And only then you will be able to reach an “industrial” volume and buy traffic for its subsequent monetization.
Good luck!
What is direct selling
In this case, the SMM specialist does not publish advertising. He communicates in various communities, on social networks or on forums and, having discovered a potential client, contacts him and offers a product.
For example, in a health blog, when discussing baldness, offer a new hair growth product. Or provoke a discussion from several accounts. The main thing is to provide an affiliate link and attract attention.
Direct selling requires communication skills, communication skills, and more mental stimulation than mechanical spam. But in terms of earnings to time spent, they are very effective.
Examples of how much you can earn from direct sales
The partner worked with a product offer - graphic tablets at a reduced price. Reward is a fixed rate for the purchased product.
Actions to attract traffic:
- Registered on forums dedicated to computer graphics;
- The partner monitored new threads with questions and problems, quickly Googled a possible solution and provided useful answers. This is how the trust built up the profile of the arbitrator;
- I tracked new topics in which people complained about a broken tablet or wanted to buy a new one;
- In such topics, he joined the discussion and wrote something like this: “by the way, I can help you with a good option for a brand new Wacom Cintiq at a good price”;
- Next, communication took place in personal messages with redirection to the product order page.
Results : out of 27 attempts, 19 were ignored. The rest began to ask additional questions about delivery and packaging. 4 people bought it (three designers and one who loves to draw manga).
The partner spent an hour to an hour and a half on advertising tablets during the first week; in the second week, only 15-20 minutes a day for correspondence. As a result, for 10 hours of personal time, spread over two weeks, $210 was earned.
It should be borne in mind that direct sales are effective if you advertise either a rare product (for example, a new gadget that has not yet appeared on general sale) or a common product at a significant discount.