CPA Сampaign without Investments 3.0: Turning Sites & Platforms into Marketplaces – AdCombo

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Hi there!

Running traffic to an offer without spending a cent is a sweet dream for every affiliate. AdCombo is here to make it a reality. Making money online without spending is real, and we’ll show you that! 

We’ve overviewed free traffic sources and useful tools for them in our previous articles on how to launch an affiliate campaign without paying:

🆓 CPA campaign without investments

🆓 CPA campaign without investments 2.0.

Now, we want to add some more to build up a comprehensive guide on free traffic. 

How to find a free source

Remember that instead of requiring money, free sources require time and effort. Sometimes free sources are even harder to work at, compared to paid-ad platforms. Anyway, the main benefit of them is the opportunity to start affiliate marketing with no money.

But how to define the suitable source for your CPA campaign?What should an affiliate do after pre-marking a source for a free campaign run?

Well, we’re ready to talk about concrete examples of traffic sources that promote making money for free.

Full steam ahead!

TikTok

CPA

Despite the fact that there is TikTok Ads Manager for placing and managing paid ads, there is also a free way to promote items. Yes, it may take more time to get results than targeting certain users and optimizing campaigns with the Ads Manager, anyway, it works and it’s free 🙂

You need to create a Pro account, and design it either as a user or as a product page (it’s better). This account type provides the opportunity to monitor the channel statistics, learn the preferences of the audience, as well as see the geography of followers, their gender, and activity peaks.

Only with this type of account, you can add a link to your profile. So after creating the account, place your affiliate link in BIO. Then you can start generating promotional TikToks.

For instance, by using Canva. There you can find photo and video filters, fonts and text effects, animated graphics, stock photos and videos, music, and ready-made templates for TikTok. To find them, search for “TikTok Videos”. Moreover, you can edit the same projects both in the desktop version and on your smartphone. 

Don’t forget to use hashtags below the video to let the audience find what it’s interested in.

TikTok doesn’t allow links on non-sponsored posts, so you need to make viewers click through the affiliate link put in BIO. 

Also, you can comment videos on the related topic to the vertical of your offer, and ask users to visit your profile for more info. Surely, your comments shouldn’t be like spam messages.

Note that storytelling and trending content work best on TikTok. 

Here are a few TikTokers that may give ideas on creating promotional videos on Dieting & Beauty:

@beautifuleatsandthings – body-positive dietitian that refuses to follow diet-culture tendencies. Andy breaks down diet myths, shares healthy recipes and nutrition hacks along with her own tips and recommendations.

@mygentleskin – skincare reviewer who lists do’s and don’ts for good-looking skin, overview various beauty items and gives useful beauty recommendations on personal care. 

SEO

A fairly classic source that has long been used by affiliates. Basic code knowledge can help with it.

One needs to create a site (prelander/landing page) taking into account the rules of SEO optimization to get organic traffic.

For instance, you can use a prelander designed on https://www.wix.com/  or https://tilda.cc/ with AdCombo landing page or create your own landing page there. You can even try to create the whole blog. 

The main disadvantage is the long and slow rise of the site in the search engine results pages. Scaling-up is a hard thing for this source. An affiliate needs to constantly check the relevance of the website for certain search inquiries. Also, the site should contain articles with the needed keywords.

Here is a heap of helpful tools to optimize your site’s SEO:

  • https://www.seoptimer.com/ – SEO Audit Tool that performs a detailed SEO Analysis across 100 website data points, and provide clear and actionable recommendations to rank better in Search Engine Results;

How to uplift site’s ranking

  1. Keywords. and phrases Identify keywords and  keyword phrases for your website. How users  will search for your page. Let’s say, weight loss and  how to lose weight fast? Repeat your keywords and keyword phrases several times throughout the page. Use long-tail keywords (keyword phrases) to narrow the target audience and focus on a specific niche.
  2. Formatting. Don’t forget to use bold, italics, heading tags (especially an H1).
  1. Content. Website’s content rich with keywords and phrases can boost your search engine rankings. Articles or short posts should be engaging and informative. 
  2. General metadata. A web page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert metadata – information about the contents of the website’s page.
  • Title metadata: the page’s title at the top of a browser window and the headline within search engine results. (1)(2)
  • Description metadata is the textual description of what the page contains. It should encourage visitors to enter. Two full sentences are enough here. (3)

5. Alt tags. Add extra info to posted images and videos using alt tags, or alternative text descriptions. 

6. External and internal links. A web page that provides the information on a topic from different angles is deemed valuable for visitors, which improves your search engine optimization.

Attract external and internal links to your previous posts within the text. Don’t ask a reader to “click here” because such phrases are useless in getting credibility of the website for the search engine ranking. Attach URLs to “Best Keto diet supplements”. Among links to sources or articles of your blog, leave affiliate links to make them seem appropriate to the website’s content.

Telegram

Telegram has more than 550 million monthly active users. This hybrid of a messenger and a social network also fits for running traffic from there freely.

Some use WhatsApp for that, but there are limits on the number of people in the chat – no more than 256 people. To create a messaging list, an affiliate either has to buy a database or collect contacts manually, which can take several years and will end up collecting only 10 people.

The channel should have regular content updates, so the subscribers won’t be bored and unsubscribe, and new users will be eager to subscribe.

Name the channel using the keywords regarding the offer’s vertical – health, beauty, weight loss, etc.  There will be a higher chance that the channel will be found by the people who are more engaged in a topic. Note that the tag search is a bit weak here. 

Anyway, having appropriate audience make you be able to promote an offer natively at no cost, to the rather warm audience.

Your posts should prompt readers to save and share them. If the readers are interested and want to tell somebody else about your channel – this will definitely increase your channel’s awareness. 

Have the channel stuffed with fine content and some subscribers? Look for relevant channels around the topic and arrange a cross promotion. Don’t aim at famous channels, while middles will fit.

Promotion on Telegram takes a long time for taking off, and you may even have to advertise the channel somewhere else to drive people to it. You can opt for our suggestions. Promote the channel by complementing advice on a Q&A site, or on Twitter, after explaining to the audience what it can find there. Sharing links on social media pages or social media communities are also appropriate options.

Try to sound natural. Leaving links to your TG channel won’t be effective if they are just thrown. Chat like a user that wants to chat. Share advice, tips, recommendation or whatever else to make your invitation to the channel looks like an add-on matching the message.

Add your channel to Telegram channels catalog. It’s free. Users of a certain country can find it by typing the channel’s keywords. Do that on https://tgstat.com/, but notice that, for now, it works only for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, India, China and Ethiopia.Bots can also be created and set up to communicate with customers, answer questions about price, delivery terms, or the product’s features.

  • @BotFather — for creating new bot  and managing existing ones 
  • @Manybot — for designing a tailor-made bot
  • @TGStat_Bot — statistics of a channel and posts

Online selling sites

The placement on such sites is free, and the TA can find your ad by category or title, so try to reflect the gist of the offer’s ad in the title. It’s also possible that your ad may show up if a user is looking for an ad of a similar category.

Before entering a site, read the rules and policies of the marketplace carefully to protect your ad from being suspended.

We will take the selling site that is widespread  in the UK – Gumtree. The most crucial notice – the ads with adult products are prohibited there, so it isn’t the place for Adult campaigns.

Such sites are appropriate for white offers, but not limited by them. 

Links here are not free, but would-be customers can contact you via email.

Here are some ads promoting a product for losing weight:

Q&A sites

Question and answer sites may also be fine for advertising. Let’s utilize one of the popular sites of this kind.

You can try placing your links here, carefully, because an account can be shut down for too explicit affiliate links. 

Quora is for help, advice, and answers based on your own experience. The answer to a question should be made up of advice or recommendations, and only then it can be supplemented with a link that will be even more helpful in finding the answer to the user’s question. 

To start promoting an offer, you first need to fill out a profile. The more information, the better. A detailed profile adds credibility to the response. Then, you need to find the right topic, according to the vertical of the offer. And answer the question, sticking to what’s written above. 

Here’s an example of how two affiliates put their links in the answers:

You can also give answers (or even post questions) in Spaces on a topic. You can either create a new Space or find an existing one.  Space is a community dedicated to the discussion of members on a specific topic. 

The most basic principle of advertising in this source is to be a helpful user who gives an answer to a question or offers a solution, without the purpose of selling anything here and now. 

You need to be crafty to work with the platform. The output may be not immediate, but time and your native-like comments will bring the needed CR.

Twitter

It  can be used as a platform to promote affiliate links too. However, to “sell” something, you first need to entice users with your tweets. They come to Twitter to share news, have fun and find interesting content, so ideally the promotional tweet should match such demands. 

To begin with, you need to create a profile. You can focus on the product you want to promote: choose a profile picture and header related to the vertical of your offer. You can also create an account of a real user. The choice is yours, tests and imagination can help out here.

But whichever option you choose, add an affiliate link to your profile’s page, so users can go to your affiliate page while they are looking through your profile page.

It is worth noting the appearance of the link that will be displayed in the tweets. Pay attention to the metadata of your page. Title and Description metadata should represent the content of the page along with the picture to additionally attract users. You also need to set a type of Twitter cardsthat will be featured in the preview of the link in a tweet.

Twitter has several card types:

Let’s explore Twitter’s meta markup. By default, meta tags are classified by Open Graph protocol invented by Facebook to beautifully represent links in posts. Twitter has its own meta markup, but Open Graph meta tags also fit. Twitter also supports mixed meta tags classified by both Open Graphand Twitter. The difference is in the prefixes: Open Graph has the prefix og:, while Twitter’s is twitter:. Here are the protocols in comparison and requirements for the elements.

For example,

<meta name=”og:title” content=”Small Island Developing States Photo Submission” />

<meta name=”og:description” content=”View the album on Flickr.” />

can be replaced for:

<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”Small Island Developing States Photo Submission” /><meta name=”twitter:description” content=”View the album on Flickr.” />

Also, og:title and og:description can be mixed with the meta tag twitter:card (see this below).

For editing the page’s metadata, use a free formatter – https://jsonformatter.org/

Let’s pick Summary Card with Large Image. Now you need to add the following meta tag to the header of the web page:

<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image”>

After updating the data, you can check the preview of the page here. You can also check the video preview if you need to embed it. 

Let’s get back to the promotion of links. What are the other options besides placing the link in the profile section to advertise an offer?

  • Twitter thread. In other words, microblogging, creating tweets and adding a link to them. You can also write short tweets without posting the link every time, but have it pinned at the top of your profile. 

Exploit tags to help users find your tweets.

  • Reply to someone’s tweet. Here, posting a link will be similar to posting on Quora. You can find someone who is concerned about a certain topic that correlates with the one of your offer, give advice, and add a link to the tweet to make it more effective;

  • Viral tweets. You have to be pretty creative and clever up here. But most affiliates already are 😉. Try using an existing trend to promote an offer, or even create your own. The most essential thing is that users should be enthralled to read such a tweet, or they will recognize immediately what it’s referring to.

💡 Here is the article on 6 viral marketing campaigns for your insight.

Alas, the promotion of the offers here may not produce quick results and will require some effort, but there is a chance to catch the eyes of a fitting audience.

Closing

SourceFeautures
TikTokSeeing the effect of promoting an offer here may take time compared to doing this via TikTok Ads Manager with targeting and campaign optimization functionality. Anyway, free promotion of products to 1+ billion users is possible, but this requires good storytelling skills, enthralling content ideas and using a video editor. The most of the users are aged 18-34.
SEO
Organic traffic can be driven infinitely to a website from search engines. There is a long and slow rise of the site in the search engine results pages. Scaling-up is a hard thing. One needs to constantly check the relevance of keywords and write a lot of articles with them on the site. Basic code knowledge is required. 
Telegram
After creating a channel dedicated to the topic of an offer, one need to promote it somewhere else for a while to gather warm users engaged in the channel’s topic. Only 200 people can be invited, others can join by subscription. An affiliate should be crafty in promoting the channel and have a nice content to build up audience and offer it a product in the place with 550+ million users. 
Online selling sites
It is easier to get a lot of traffic there at once than via SEO, where you need to promote the website for a while using keywords. Selecting the right category and title for an ad to attract would-be customers faster. Keep in mind that sale must be indirect, or the ad can be suspended.
Q&A sites
Affiliate links must be useful and appropriate complement to advice, recommendation, or experience sharing. Too obvious intention to sale isn’t accepted. So an affiliate should be clever in an unintended promotion. Anyhow, promoting an offer here is a fitting way to find the needed customers.
Twitter
This platform is mostly top visited by the users from the United States, Japan, India, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK. To sell something here, you first need to entice users with your tweets. As in the previous source type, straightforward sales are unwelcome. An affiliate must write engaging or useful  tweets to draw users’ attention first and then to give a link. Interesting content for the certain topic-oriented profile and appropriate replies will help advertise an offer here.

There you have it, you can combine any of the listed traffic sources as you like to make money online or maybe not just make money online… but win Aston Martin V8 Vintage IV in AdCombo’s new challenge – The Great Adventure lasting from the 1st of May 2022 to the 28th of February 2023. ! 

  1. Explore the GEOs that you haven’t tried out to find new affiliate opportunities there and succeed. 
  2. Collect 🗝Golden Keys to access the largest number of opportunity troves.
  3. Get extra Keys for being a regional leader, exchange them for money and navigate with an interactive map!

🗺 Find more info on Great AdVenture’s page.🗺

And we’re around to point the way, if needed.

Good luck! 😎

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