Low-Cost Affiliate Marketing

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Sources and Offers for Starting with Limited Budgets (Spoiler: not about Free Traffic)

What usually comes to your mind when you hear the phrase “affiliate marketing”? Facebook, nutra, gambling — these are the niches most affiliates typically focus on. Unfortunately, these require 💲 sizable budgets to get started. Even experienced teams spend significant amounts just to find a working setup (not to mention the costs of an antidetect browser, proxies, cards and most importantly — accounts).

Average cost of testing funnels on FB.

If your starting budget is small, rookies in affiliate marketing are usually offered so-called CFT — 🆓 conditionally free traffic. In other words, mass automated promotion of social media accounts, comment spam and similar cheap methods.

But in reality, you can still get started in affiliate marketing even if you’ve got 🚀 less than $1000 in your pocket. Of course, today there are fewer low-cost entry opportunities compared to five years ago, but they still exist. Which means the topic is relevant and worth exploring. To be precise, let’s first have a look at the general direction and then go through specific strategies.

Key Components of a Low-Budget Start

To find working funnels when starting with a small budget, you need to follow a few rules.

📌 First — low payouts per lead and simplicity of the target action. Usually, testing an offer costs around 3 to 10 times the payout per lead. If the payout is $50, $100, $200 or more, you’ll need to spend anywhere from $300 to $2000 just for testing. And considering that it usually takes at least 3–5 tests to find a profitable funnel, testing offers with $1000 payouts per lead is just not realistic.

To fit into a small budget, you should look for offers with payouts up to $20 per lead. That way, testing one offer will cost no more than $200, and with 4–5 tests you’ll most likely find a profitable option.

📌 Second — affordable traffic sources. You’re unlikely to turn a profit if the payout per lead is $1 while your traffic source charges $0.10 per click. That’s why, if you’re starting small, it’s better to focus on pushes, pops and teaser ads as clicks are cheap  and moderation is more lenient. Sure, you can run campaigns on FB or Google, but in that case it’s best to use agency accounts and white-hat e-commerce offers.

📌 Third — fast feedback. What does that mean? It means you get results right after launching a campaign. You start a campaign and immediately see how much you’ve earned from leads.

There are many verticals in affiliate marketing where 🕓 results are delayed. They include  gambling, betting, essay writing, crypto, as well as offers where payment is based on revshare models. For example, if you drive traffic to an online casino, the first deposits paid by the advertiser don’t always come right away. Some of them may only show up after a month and a half or two.

In the banking subscriptions vertical, it’s even more complicated as the profitability of each paying subscriber can only be evaluated 😐 after several months, half a year or even longer. You’ll end up spending a lot before you gather enough conversions to properly evaluate the funnel.

That means you need to 🔎 look for offers with payable actions such as:

• App/plugin installs;
• Registrations;
• Confirmed applications;
• SMS code entry;
• First login to a game;
• Data input (for example, a phone number).

Low-Budget Start: Types of Offers and Traffic Sources

There are several types of offers that allow you to start with minimal investment.

💋 Adult products and nutra offers targeting Tier-3 countries. As a rule, payouts per lead here are around $5–15, which means testing each offer won’t drain much of your budget. And you don’t necessarily have to run them on Facebook as pushes, in-page and pops perform well for these kinds of offers.

The main problem here is approval. Even if you find an offer that brings in leads well, you’ll still need to test for the average quality of those leads and optimize your ads to reduce the share of rejects and junk. And since Tier-2 and especially Tier-3 have a lot of low-quality traffic, you’ll need plenty of tests. That’s why, when it comes to finding a profitable nutra funnel, not everyone is able to stay under the $1000 budget.

🎰 Gambling in LatAm and Tier-3 countries. Although gambling is often seen as an expensive vertical to enter, choosing the right GEO can reduce startup costs. The key points to keep in mind are:

• The advertiser evaluates the quality of your traffic after you reach a certain number of leads;
• You need to attract players who intend to play for a long time and deposit regularly. If you bring in a mass of players with clickbait and unrealistic promises, your leads are unlikely to pass the quality check;
• Advertisers set fairly strict requirements for creatives like no misleading, no promises of earnings even though that works best in poorer countries and sometimes no mentioning of the brand.

Casino Valor can be tested very cheaply in Kenya, Bangladesh, Zambia, Ghana and Brazil.

👩‍❤️‍👨 Dating. The beauty of dating offers lies in their very simple flows as many advertisers pay for registrations or app installs. Since payouts per lead are usually no more than $3–5, with $100 you can test at least 2–3 offers. And since most of these offers are adult or semi-adult themed, conversion rates are quite good (although not all push and teaser networks allow this type of traffic).

🎮 Online games. This refers to services that help players from the CIS-countries access Steam at a discount, as well as purchase in-game currency, game items and the games themselves.

These services have affiliate programs and are willing to pay affiliates for bringing in players and their purchases. Yes, the target action itself isn’t very simple as getting a user to register or install an app is easier than getting them to make a purchase.

However, you can promote both expensive and inexpensive items (commissions are percentage-based) — there’s room for choice here. And by advertising cheaper skins, weapons or access, it’s quite easy to generate leads (almost any player will happily spend $5-6 dollars on an interesting item).

And if the payout per lead is $1–2, testing an offer will cost no more than $20 and finding a working strategy no more than $100.

As for traffic sources, the primary ones are push networks with very low minimum CPCs:

• Push.House;
• Propellerads:
• RichAds;
• Hilltopads;
• Tacolo.co;
• Clickadilla.

There are other networks as well, but these provide acceptable traffic quality. There are bots, of course, but with proper filtering and settings, you can still turn a profit.

In many of these networks, the cost per click for the CIS is less than a cent, even for the premium segment. For Tier-1, the minimum bid ranges from 1 to 5 cents. Such rates significantly 📉 reduce testing costs.

Key points when working with push networks:

1. Choose premium segments and high-quality traffic. Otherwise, you’ll need to spend a lot on optimization;
2. Set up tracking, because without it, optimizing ads and turning a profit is more complex.

Keep in mind that besides push formats, these networks offer others as well, and among them, pops have performed particularly well.

Low-Budget Cases

Let’s look at three illustrative cases where webmasters invested far less than $1000.

360% ROI on the Play Regal offer in GEO France

The webmaster ran pushes to a casino with a $2 payout per registration. During the campaign, the payout was bumped to $13 per lead.

• Offer — Play Regal
• CPL — SOI
• GEO — FR
• KPI — active users
• Traffic source — Adsterra
• CPA network — Yellana

During the campaign, the webmaster optimized it using a tracker, improving traffic quality and conversion. As a result, with $286.1 spent, he earned $1316, making a net profit of $1029.9.

Our notes

First, beginners are rarely allowed to run casino campaigns with registration payouts. You need to rely on the trust of the CPA network and the SOI payment model in gambling is almost obsolete. So focus on payouts for first deposits.

Second, such a massive ROI (360% in this case) is extremely rare. If you make a profit, aim for more modest figures like 50–60%. In practice, these are much more common.

$1036 on Dating and Popunders with HilltopAds

Here, the webmaster ran popunder traffic to a dating offer from a well-known affiliate network. The traffic came from Sweden, where the payout was just over $5 per user registration.

• Offer — WAP+WEB Se*tingPartners SOI/SE
• Affiliate network — iMonetizeIt
• Traffic source — HilltopAds, Popunder mobile
• Expenses — $489.49
• Conversions — 259
• Profit — $1036
• ROI — 111.65%

Initially, $50 was spent on testing, but since the funnel proved profitable, it was scaled and optimized. During optimization, the campaign reached a conversion cost of $2.5 with a $5 payout per lead.

Our note: Dating is an evergreen niche, but keep in mind that registering with iMonetizeIt requires solid experience in other affiliate programs. Without that, they won’t grant access to the offers.

$1500 from Teasers on Mobile Games

Here, the webmaster drove traffic for selling in-game items using long-forgotten teaser networks. As a result, they discovered that access to Genshin Impact and its in-game items sold very well.

• Offer — Genshin Impact top-ups
• Affiliate network — Kupikod
• Traffic source — Kadam
• Expenses — ₽31,430
• Earnings — ₽127,800
• Profit — ₽96,350
• ROI — 306%

Our note: Unfortunately, the author didn’t specify how much was spent on testing and finding the setup, as the 306% ROI looks almost too good — just like in the first case.

Conclusion

As one can see, starting out with ✅ small budgets is absolutely possible as long as you don’t follow the typical affiliate paths. The cases above don’t show that sky-high ROIs are the norm, but rather where and how to run traffic so that testing doesn’t cost too much.

Most likely, you won’t make that kind of money right away with gambling, dating or gaming offers. However, your first $1000 will be enough to eventually pull out a larger profit, even if it’s just 10–20%. The main thing is to start and find the right direction.