The True Master (Affiliate) Skills

16 months, 3 Verticals, 391,475.17$ spend, and a bright Future

A Master Affiliate / Media Buyer is a man of many skills.
He is similar to Leonardo Devinchi (a painter, sculptor, technology innovator and an accomplished Engineer) or Elon Musk (entrepreneur, financials expert, computer science expert, self taught engineer and even a social influencer).

A Master Affiliate / Media Buyer becomes great by learning how to be profitable across several Verticals, while finding the best traffic sources for his campaigns, developing effective optimization techniques, being Patience with A-B testing, and has Communication skills to get traffic partners to cooperate with him.

Some say, and the Pushub Team is among them, that the skill of effectively communicating with your traffic Partner, is the real big difference, The one that makes a good (earning) Master Affiliate / media buyer, into the best (earning) Master Affiliate / Media Buyer.
Philosophy aside, here is one case study of a Master Affiliate that impressed us, with all the right skills combined.

16 months, 3 Verticals, 391,475.17$ spend, and a bright Future

This Story starts in the best way – It did not work at all!

He started with a Sweeps Campaign in DE, for which a CPA goal is usually around 4$-5$.

After running for a month and a half, spending about 800$ total, avg CPA was 11$, which was a bust. At this point he paused.

For many affiliates testing a new partner for the first time, this would’ve been the end.

The Traffic partner would’ve been categorized as “not good”, and he would move on.

However, he kept an open mind. He knew that “having conversations while not being profitable” is very different from “no conversions at all”.
It mostly means you have not found the right offer/ creative/ Landing page/ Pre-lander/ sub-source/ targeting.

He was not bitter or upset, he kept an attitude of “let’s keep trying to find what works”

A matter of mindset

The Pushub Team took notice of his healthy approach and soon later, when we launched high quality Push traffic from High Ranking sites in Asia – PH, TH,MY,HK,SG, we offered him to open campaigns.

We shared with the Master Affiliate that finance, investing and forex offers should work very well (these were top ranking news, finance and sports sites), and that other forex brokers did not want to shift focus from the trending geos they were running, so he can get high priority, but also needs to Test with patience.

He identified the exclusive opportunity, even if for what was considered “secondary” desirable geos for the Forex. Then, he did the work – finding the right brokers, creatives, landing pages, pre-landers – in local language and in English, while building a variety of concepts to A-B Test.
Coming with the right Mindset already made him a Winner in our books.

And what do you know? It also paid off for him.

About 9000$ spent in 2 months, 326 Leads, Overall profitable by his Broker’s Indication (in this case the Broker working with the Master affiliate did not disclose CPA goal or ROI, which is common for Forex. He did confirm he is Profitable and satisfied with ROI, asking the Master Affiliate to keep buying)

Master (affiliate) Skills used – Communication with Traffic Partner, Strategic Mind set, Ability to see an Exclusive opportunity which others missed, and Seize it

This is (not) the end

And that could have been it.

Hard start, lost about 400$ out of 800$ spent, kept testing, switched Vertical, Run 9k$ spend in 2 months, and became profitable. a nice turn around from Red to Green.

Good, but nothing out of the ordinary.

But this was a Master (Affiliate) at Work.

Software Products, like big brand anti-Viruses, are seasonal and affected by promotions.

October – January have many World Wide holidays with sales and attractive prices, and they are considered a great time to run these offers. while the Forex was already doing nicely, the Master Affiliate started to run Software.

Month	campaigns	spend	sales	Avg CPA	notes
September 2021	US	$8,341.44	112	$74.47	unimpressive
October 2021	US,CA,JP	$9,501.10	121	$78.52	unimpressive
November 2021	8 Geos, Browser targeting	$18,796.8	240	$78,32	Scaling but not improving profitability
December 2021	10 Geos, Browser targeting	$20,946.59	305	68.67$	Looking Better
January 2022	10 Geos, Browser targeting	$41,768.45	751	$55.61	Scaled and Profitable

We could have told the detailed story, with the ups and downs (and there were plenty of both).
Instead we can look at 12 month stats from 8 out of about 60 Software campaigns in 2 Geos, split with Browser targeting, and split with 2-3 similar software products.

we see a spend that kept growing, and an avg CPA that kept improving.

Master (affiliate) Skills used – Patience, Planning and build up, Optimization and setup techniques, strategic mindset, A-B Testing.

Final Words

This is not a story telling you that Push Traffic is good for Sweeps, Software, Crypro, or anything else (we also run Loans, Ecom, Nutra with this Master Affiliate, but that is a story for another time).

This is a story telling you that your success depends mostly on the skills, knowledge and mindset you will develop and bring to the table.
A skillful Media Buyer will never run out of new verticals to succeed at, new optimization Methods, new Test ideas, and new traffic partners that will want to work with him.

Some might say “if i just had the right traffic…” or “if i just knew what are the right offers…”

Well, this Master Affiliate, a 1 Man show, started with the wrong offers, and kept finding the right offers. bought the wrong traffic, and found his way to the right traffic, spending almost 400k$ in the course of a little more than a year.

the truth is there is a lot of great traffic to go around, great offers to test, and good traffic Partners that will match what you bring

Are you communicative and responsive? They will be as well

Are you professional, patient and help them achieve their goals? They will help you as well

if it’s not so – change your account manager, or change your Traffic partner. You deserve better.

Fun fact

We had the opportunity to close the loop with the infamous DE Sweeps campaign re-launching in August 2022, this time spending 7.5k$ and hitting Cpa goals, in less than 2 Months