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Introduction

Paid traffic is one of the fastest and simplest methods to

drive targeted visitors to your CPA offers. It is also one of the

fastest and simplest methods to leave you flat broke and

discouraged from internet marketing. That is the major reason

why many beginners and even some veteran marketers choose to

stay away from paid traffic. However, you will soon learn that

when used properly, nothing can beat the speed and scalability of

using paid traffic.

Although I do love all paid traffic sources including PPC and

PPV. The one paid traffic source that will always be my favorite is

media buying. Why? Because media buying is faster, simpler, and

more easily scalable than any other form of traffic generation.

Period. Also, unlike PPC and PPV, media buying ad networks are

much more flexible when it comes to approving campaigns so you

run a much lower risk of running into trouble. Most importantly, no

other traffic source can match the absolutely incredible targeting

and volume of media buying.

With media buying, you do not need to write any articles,

design your own websites, or do any off-site SEO. You go straight

to the websites that are already bringing in tons of targeted traffic

for your offers. You are essentially paying for someone else’s time

and hard work to bring in relevant traffic so you can reap the

benefits immediately. The type of media buying we will be doing is

display advertising. You place your banner on their website and

watch the traffic come in straight to your CPA offer or landing

page.

Step 1: Choosing The Offer

As always, we are going to need to choose a CPA offer

before we do anything. I know you read this all the time, but the

number one recommendation I can give you is to ask your affiliate

manager. Not only do they know what is converting best right

now, but they also know what is converting best for each traffic

source. That’s why it’s important to not just ask which offers are

the hottest, but also which offers are converting best specifically

for display traffic.

I also recommend you choose a wide ranging niche. The

bigger the niche, the better. This will widen your options when

looking for sites to buy display advertising from, meaning it will be

easier to scale up. For this example, we will be using a hair

removal product offer from Maxbounty called NoNo Hair

Remover. It is an offer I am promoting with this method with great

success. I will reveal exactly what I did and the results I got.

However, I will not be revealing the exact sites I advertised on for

obvious reasons.

Tip: Competitive Intelligence

Another way to choose an offer to promote is by using

competitive intelligence. These are tools that show you what the

competition is doing including the exact banners, websites they

are advertising on, and how long they have been advertising.

What I like to do is use competitive intelligence to see which

campaigns have been running for at least 90 days. The reason

why is because it is extremely unlikely that someone is going to

be running an unprofitable campaign for 90 days straight. The

longer the campaign is running, the more likely it is that the offer

they are promoting is profitable.

With competitive intelligence, it is possible to completely rip

off someone else’s campaign. However, I highly advise against

this. Not only is this very unethical, but it can lead you into trouble

with the affiliate you are ripping off and possibly even the traffic

network you may be running on. Instead, use this to get ideas of

what is proven to work and implement those elements into your

own campaigns.

There are many competitive intelligence tools on the market, but

here are the main three:

• Adbeat

• MixRank

• WhatRunsWhere

If you decide that you want to use competitive intelligence, I

suggest you do your research on all three of these before you

make a decision. By the way, none of those links are affiliate

links so I have no incentive to recommend one over the other.

Step 2: Researching Demographics

This is the foundation of your campaign and a crucial step in

determining your success. If you match up the demographics of

your offer with the demographics of the site you advertise on, then

you are already giving yourself a great chance of success.

We will be using Quantcast for demographic research. When

doing bigger media buys you will want to also use Alexa and

Compete. You can also go to offervault.com, find the offer your

promoting, and then find the demographics of your offer in one

click. However, in this particular case, Offer Vault does not have

the demographic information for this offer. We will be specifically

researching the demographics of the offer’s main website. In this

case it is trynono.com

Go to quantcast.com and simply type in the URL of the

website you are researching:

Click “Search” and it will take you to the site’s profile of the

website. Scroll down and you will see this:

What we are primarily interested in are age range, gender, and

income. In this case we see that our target demographic should

be females aged 35-44 with an income of $0-50K. This means

that we will get optimal results if we advertise on a site with these

demographics.

Tip: SEO For Chrome

When researching demographics and analyzing sites, I

highly recommend you use the plugin SEO For Chrome for

Google Chrome to make the process much simpler and much

faster. It is a free plugin that allows you to quickly analyze data

from any site from Quantcast, Alexa, and Compete with one click.

All you need to do is visit the site you are interested in and then

click the SEO For Chrome button on the browser and a sidebar

will popup showing you a quick analysis of the site based on

Quantcast, Alexa, and Compete. You can also visit the profile of

the site with one click.

Step 3: Finding Sites To Advertise On

This step is where we will try to find sites that match the

demographics of the offer. The method I have had most success

with regarding small media buys is by contacting owners of niche

forums. Often times these guys are passionate about their niche

and drive massive traffic, but they have no idea about

monetization. They either don’t have any advertising on their site

or they are making little to no money by placing Adsense on their

forum. They will jump at the opportunity to advertise for you as

you will be able to offer much more money than they are already

receiving.

I will be discussing how to contact these owners in the next

step, but for now I will show you how to find these forums. The

first method is by using Google and simply typing “(niche) +forum”

(side note: if you have a profitable PPC campaign you can search

one of your profitable keywords and contact sites directly. It works

wonders if you get deeper into media buying). Another way to find

forums to target is by going to one of the big forum search

engines and searching for forums in your niche. Two of my

favorite such search engines are http://omgili.com/

http://boardreader.com/.

You will then check the demographics of these sites to see if

they match up with the demographics of the offer. Keep in mind

that these demographics don’t have to be completely identical,

but the more similar, the better. Here are the demographics of the

site I ended up advertising on for my campaign. They don’t

exactly match up, but I was still able to get an amazing ROI.

Also, you want to target forums that are getting at least 30,000

views per month. The reason why is because even with a very

low CTR of 0.5% you would still get 150 clicks on a site that gets

30,000 views per month, which is a very significant amount of

clicks to receive from targeted high quality traffic that is very likely

to convert well. To check traffic statistics, you can use Quantcast,

Compete, and/or Alexa. I like to check all 3 in order to verify

information. Here are the traffic stats of the site I advertised on

from Compete:

Tip: Bookmarking Sites

Using bookmarking sites to find sites to advertise on is one

of my favorite strategies. Usually, these bookmarking sites will

have much more targeted sites than Google. Also, these sites

usually have much less competition for advertisement. Lastly, the

sites you will find are usually higher quality sites for the reader

that they continue to return to. My favorite bookmarking site to

search is Xmarks.com

Step 4: Contacting & Negotiating With Forum Owners

As I mentioned in the previous step, I recommend contacting

15-20 sites. The reason why is because these are smaller sites

that are not usually contacted by advertisers so a large majority of

them will not even respond. In my experience, about 10-15% will

respond after you initially contact them. Of the 15-20 sites you

contact, you can realistically expect 2 or 3 of them to respond.

This is where you begin negotiating.

Usually, there should be a “contact us” link at the bottom of

the site where you can contact the site owner. You don’t have to

say anything fancy during your initial contact. Here is the exact

script I use:

“Hi (owner of forum),

I am interested in advertising on your site, and I wanted to discuss

rates for purchasing advertising space. Please respond back with

any information to (your email).

Regards,

(your name)”

Be sure to keep it professional and don’t use language such

as “would you like to make some extra cash?” You don’t want to

come off as a spammer, and you are more likely to get a

response if you seem like a person who is serious about

business. When negotiating a price, you will want to pay as little

as possible while giving yourself the best possible chance of

being profitable. Here is a simple formula to figure out the

maximum amount you should pay per 1,000 impressions (aka

CPM):

(offer payout) X (minimal CTR) X (minimal conversion rate) X

(1000)

In this case the offer payout is $15.00, the minimal CTR we

should expect is 0.5%, and the minimal conversion rate we should

expect is 1%. Using these numbers, the formula would be

calculated as such:

$15.00 X 0.005 X 0.01 X 1000 = 0.75

That means the most we should pay is 0.75 per one thousand

impressions of our ad which would be 0.75/1000 X 66,000 = 49.5

so the least we can pessimistically expect to make is $49.5 per

month on this site being pessimistic about conversion rate and

CTR. Keep this number in mind when discussing rates for

advertising space.

Remember, these forum owners often times have no idea

what their site is worth so you can get away with offering as little

as $25. Even if they are making $25 per month on Adsense, they

will love the fact that they are getting paid immediately instead of

monthly. However, keep in mind that many of these forum owners

will not waste their time with low amounts so I recommend that

you don’t just flat out offer $25 per month. Instead, ask the forum

what they believe their site is worth monthly. If they overshoot the

price you are willing to pay, show them the traffic statistics you

researched and explain what their site is worth. If negotiations

come to a standstill, then offer $49.5 (or whatever price you came

up with using the formula) per month as a take it or leave it offer.

You can offer higher than this amount, but remember that this is

the least you can realistically expect to make per month. If you

want to give yourself the best chance of profitability, then that is

the highest price you should pay. I ended up paying $25 for the

first month of my campaign in this particular case.

Step 5: Setting Up Tracking & Optimization

Unlike PPC and PPV, you will not be tracking dozens and

possibly hundreds or even thousands of keywords/URLs. Instead,

you will be tracking clicks and conversions of 3-5 banner ads. You

can use a tracking platform such as Prosper202 or CPV Lab, but I

have a much easier way for tracking.

You will be using simple sub-IDs for each banner you create

(you can also use the banners that come with the offer from the

CPA network). For each banner, you will use one different sub-ID.

It is very easy to create these links. With Maxbounty you will

simply go to the offer and enter “b1” “b2” and “b3” for each banner

by using the advanced tracking options:

Each time you enter a different sub-ID you will get your tracking

code for the banner by scrolling down and clicking on “get

tracking code”

You will associate one sub-ID with each banner. Make sure you

tell the forum/site owner to evenly rotate your ads so that they will

get equal amounts of impressions. After gathering enough data,

you will then eliminate non-profitable banners and keep the

profitable ones. To check your clicks and conversions to each

banner, you simply click on “REPORTS” and find the offer you are

promoting. You will then click on “Sub-ID” and a report will pop up

showing you the clicks and conversions from each banner. Below

is what happened during the first month of my campaign so you

can get an idea of what you should do for optimization.

First 5 Days

Banner 1: 18 clicks, 0 conversions

Banner 2: 33 clicks, 2 conversions

Banner 3: 27 clicks, 0 conversions

So after 5 days, I already had two conversion for $30.00. I had

already obtained a positive ROI and the month had only began. At

this rate I would make $120 for the month and have an ROI of

over 400%. However, there was very little data to work with and I

still had to optimize the campaign. I decided to drop banner 1 as it

had a very low CTR along with 0 conversions. Obviously, I

decided to keep banner 2 running, and I also decided to keep

banner 3 as it had a pretty strong CTR.

After 10 Days

Banner 2: 83 clicks, 5 conversions

Banner 3: 67 clicks, 1 conversions

By dropping the 3rd banner, the clicks to banner 2 and banner 3

increased and so did the conversions. I had already made $90

and was on pace to make $270 for the month.

After 15 Days

Banner 2: 125 clicks, 7 conversions

Banner 3: 105 clicks, 2 conversions

As expected, the CTR had dropped for both banners. You can

expect banner blindness to come into effect especially with a lot

of repeat visitors on forums.

After 20 Days

Banner 2: 160 clicks, 8 conversions

Banner 3: 129 clicks, 3 conversions

Again, the CTR dropped for both banners and was terrible for

banner 3. I decided to get rid of banner 3 and see how much I

could milk out of banner 2 for the remainder of the month. It was

already too late to start testing new banners so I had to work with

what I had.

After 30 days

Banner 2: 270 clicks, 14 conversions

In total, after the month was up I had made 14 conversions for

$210. Not bad for a $25 investment.

Step 6: Scaling Up

It would be unwise to continue to use the same banner for

the next month as the CTR is constantly dropping, especially with

forums where there is a significant amount of repeat visitors. It

would eventually become non-profitable so I would need to create

new banners for the next month to increase CTR and

conversions. In order to scale up, you can of course contact more

sites using the demographic research I showed you.

Also, remember the data we gathered from Quantcast? At

the bottom of the page it shows you “Audience Also Likes” along

with a list of sites. An example is below:

This is the Quantcast profile for nba.com. The higher the

affinity score, the more likely a visitor to nba.com is to visit it. For

example, a visitor to nba.com is 33.9 times more likely to visit

pgatour.com than the average internet user. Use these sites to

determine which sites to contact to purchase advertising space.

The higher the affinity, the more likely you are to replicate your

success from your initial campaign.

General Tips About Small Direct To Site Media Buys

If you are lucky, the site you place your media buy on will

have an ad server installed. If that is the case, simply ask the

website owner, or whoever is in charge of advertising, to place

your banners on the ad server so that they will automatically

rotate. However, more often than not the smaller sites will not

have this installed. This is no big deal. All you have to do is tell

the website owner that you would like to use different banners on

different days so he/she can manually rotate the banners as

frequently as you want. Also, make sure they include the different

tracking links with each particular banner so you can see which

ones are performing best.

Always make sure that your banners are being displayed

above the fold. This means that your ads should be seen as soon

as the viewer reaches the website without having to scroll down.

There is a dramatic decrease in CTR when your ads are below

the fold so make sure during your negotiations that you get ad

placement above the fold.

Network Media Buys

My favorite form of media buying is going direct to site. It is

the cheapest way to go and gives you the potential of the highest

ROI you can get. However, I do a lot of media buying through ad

networks as well. On these networks, they have an RTB (real time

bidding) system in place which allows you to generate traffic

almost immediately as long as you are the highest bidder on a

particular website. It is a very fast process and I know a lot of

people who solely use these networks to be successful with

media buys.

There are downsides to this. The most notable difference is

that most ad networks will take anywhere from 30-50% of your

money to act as the middleman between you and the website

owners! Of course, you can lose your money very quickly with

little results if you do not know what you are doing, but that also

goes with any paid traffic source.

What I like to do with network media buys is quickly test

several websites at a time. Doing this I can see which sites I can

potentially be profitable on. I may even be profitable immediately.

However, ultimately I do not want to keep running traffic on that

website through the ad network. Remember how most take 30-

50%? That is a lot of money negatively affecting your ROI.

So here is what I do. Instead of continuing to run ads to the

site through the ad network, I contact the site to see if I can

negotiate a direct to site media buy with them. This eliminates the

30-50% cut from the ad network, and significantly increases

profitability. Remember, the website owner is also taking a pay

cut from the middleman so he/she will likely be willing to negotiate

a direct to site buy.

Premium Traffic At A Budget Price

As I have stated before, media buying is an absolute HUGE

source of traffic. It is so big in fact that ad networks often do not

sell their entire traffic inventory that they have available. This is

called remnant inventory, and I am going to show you how to get

this traffic at a budget price.

Mbuy.com (formerly known as Adbuyer) is a remnant

inventory ad network. They will be able to give you premium traffic

at a much lower rate than the bigger ad networks such as

SiteScout, GCN, and AdSonar. They also have a much lower

minimum deposit (when I first used it as Adbuyer I believe it was

only $50) so it is much more accessible. What you want to do

here is test out the remnant inventory from other ad networks. If

you find something profitable, then you can scale up by

generating more traffic from the same websites by going directly

to the bigger network that is supplying the remnant inventory to

mbuy. Or you can go directly to the site and negotiate a media

buy with them as well.

Conclusion

I have shown you step-by-step how to generate targeted

traffic through small direct to site media buys. If you follow these

steps, I am very confident you can have success with this

excellent traffic source. Don’t listen to the “experts” who say that

media buying doesn’t work or that it is too expensive or

complicated. Media buying has always worked, is working now,

and will always work when done properly. There is a reason why

8 of the top 10 CPA marketers from one of the top networks I

work with use media buys as their primary traffic source. It is no

“loophole” or “hidden secret.” It is a real, proven strategy that the

top marketers are using every single day, and this is one of the

ways to do it properly.

In my opinion, media buying is the number one traffic source

you can ever get into for CPA marketing. Unlike PPC and PPV,

there are little to no restrictions for getting ads approved. There

are literally millions of sites to choose from so this can practically

never become saturated and competition is very rarely an issue.

The simple and easy demographic research allows you to laser

target visitors that will convert. Also, the way I teach you is

cheaper than any PPC or PPV method that I have seen. The

example study case I showed got about $0.06 per click which I

could have easily made even cheaper if I created more effective

banners. Media buying may not be the most praised form of traffic

generation, but for me it is undoubtedly the most effective.