Andrew Payne Tells You All About Mobile Pop Traffic Monetization! [Video]

AWE 2017 Interview Series: Andrew Payne

Affiliate World Europe was a terrific experience that allowed us to meet some of the most important names in the affiliate marketing industry!

One of the awesome marketers we met was Andrew Payne, the founder of AffiliateSuccess.

He’s also known as Mr. Payne – the voice of reason at the StackThatMoney forum.

Andrew is super knowledgeable!

If you’re a fan of the Mobidea Academy, you’ve probably checked the PopAds Guide he created!

Since we had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Andrew for a while, we couldn’t deny you Mobidea Academy readers the chance to watch the video of the interview!

Don’t feel like watching the video?

Then read up, because we’ve also got the content in written form!

Check it out now!

Andrew Payne Interview at AWE 2017

1. Tell Us About Yourself

I was originally introduced to Affiliate Marketing about eleven years ago.

I got into it back in the Wild West days so to speak and I was focused on AdWords, at the time, running different types of campaigns.

Things were very different back then so I had some success early on, but I was young and wasn’t really business-savvy; didn’t quite manage things properly.

Later on, I decided to transition to a consulting business, which I still own.

We work with B2B companies to manage their online marketing and handle all their online lead generation.

But about a year ago, I kind of got the itch that I wanted to step back into the affiliate marketing space and I decided to do so.

I went to one of the best resources, which is the STM forum, which I’ve been a part of in the past.

I re-joined it and kind of got acclimated to the current landscape of things and determined where I wanted to begin and I decided to start with Mobile Pop Traffic.

From there, I just put a lot of effort into understanding how to develop and create Mobile Pop Campaigns and things have grown since then.

Over the last eleven months, I’ve added two people to my team.

We have a small team now and we’re continuing to grow in that sense.

We focus a lot on Mobile Pin Submits:

Things like Antivirus, Gaming Offers, sometimes Adult and Glamour type of offers, but we also do a lot of Sweepstakes campaigns as well, that are more lead gen based.

2. Verticals and Strategies to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing

I actually do offer coaching to a limited number of affiliates and so I advise them what to do when they’re just starting out – because there are different stages.

You have some affiliates that have a larger budget to work with and are maybe a little bit more knowledgeable already.

Or you have those who are working with a smaller budget and starting from ground zero.

In either case, I tend to recommend they start with low-payout offers – something less than 50 cents, a lot of times it’s a great starting point.

Your primary goal when starting is to generate data and collect information that allows you to review it and make decisions.

If you don’t have data, you can’t really make decisions and determine how to turn a campaign profitable.

With lower-payout offers, it requires a smaller test budget to collect some of that information.

As for types of offers, sweepstakes are a great type.

There’s also a lot of low-payout Pin Submits and then also CPI Campaigns.

Those tend to convert quite easily and are a great starting point.

At least it gives you a way to collect data at a lower cost – that way, you’re not losing a tremendous amount of money.

It allows you to get yourself more acclimated to things and more familiar and then you can start progressing to more aggressive offers, and higher payout Pin Submits, and things like that.

Related Content: Affiliate Marketing Verticals: The Definitive Guide

3. Is it Possible to Achieve Financial Freedom In Affiliate Marketing?

Yes.

That’s a short answer.

Just to give you a little insight about my personal goals and kind of how it translates to that:

For me it’s time; time and flexibility is what a lot of us really desire and I guess that’s kind of where that messaging is speaking to, for those who want a little more control of their own destiny.

It’s about learning affiliate marketing – whether you’re sticking to doing it full-time or whether you learn those skills and then move on to something else where you can utilize those skills.

It can certainly allow you to have the flexibility to travel if you want, to live in different locations, work remotely if you choose to, and certainly obtain your financial goals, absolutely.

4. Why Should You Use Mobile Pop Traffic as a Primary Method?

Why Mobile Pop Traffic?

That’s a good question, cause there’s a lot of different traffic types, right?

When I got back into it I had a specific budget I had set to begin.

So I dedicated this amount of the budget to start my affiliate business once again and I knew that pop traffic is a lower-cost traffic in general.

It’s a great way to maximize the amount of budget that I had and use it towards pop traffic.

I could buy so much more traffic and potentially more data that allows me to learn and to make campaigns profitable, whereas if I’m working with Facebook or Native Traffic the cost is a little bit more expensive.

I’d have to be willing to lose more and – in a lot of cases – have a higher starting budget.

Related: How to Create a Killer Media Buying Budget Strategy

5. Biggest Mistakes of Tracking Optimization

I see that a lot of affiliates – when they launch their campaigns – decide to start cutting or start removing elements of the campaign too soon.

You might be testing five different offers from a brand-new campaign or you might have two or three landing pages that you’re also testing in that new campaign.

You’ll find that – a lot of times – after the small initial test they’re just like:

“Ah, nothing converted so I’ll just scratch everything”

They didn’t give it enough opportunities to convert or they didn’t spend enough money to run it longer so that they could collect data to determine what’s working.

One caution and one mistake that I see happen all the time is they make decisions too early because they don’t have a process.

They don’t understand what to do so they just kind of randomly shoot in the dark.

What I suggest they do is:

Even if you’re learning and don’t fully understand everything yet, write down – step by step – what you’re going to do and just follow it.

It may not be correct the first time or two, but overtime it will.

You’ll perfect it.

6. Best Strategies for the Internet Marketing Business

For what I’m doing with affiliate marketing, the strategies that I’ve found work best for me are focusing on countries that are in the Tier 2, Tier 3 GEOs.

A couple of regions that are doing quite well are the Middle East, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam.

Focusing on those regions is great because there’s a lot of traffic at a reasonable cost and there’s usually quite a few offers available so you can typically find campaigns more easily.

For those starting out, it’s great to target GEOs that are 50-70 million in population or below because a lot of bigger affiliates don’t spend a lot of time in those GEOs and so it gives you less competition.

There’s less optimization needed and you typically can find profitable campaigns more often.

Although they’re small, they’re great starting points.

7. If You Were Starting Today, What Would You Do?

When I got back into the industry, I started with Sweepstakes campaigns.

For whatever reason, I just couldn’t make it work, I don’t know why.

So I decided to start trying different things:

I started to test multiple countries for Sweepstakes but still didn’t have much luck.

Then I decided to change up and try a different type of category altogether.

That’s when I stepped into App Installs.

The reason why is because the process that a user has to go through to make a conversion is simple:

They see a Landing Page, they click on it, they get taken to the Google Play Store or the iTunes store and they simply click “Download” and it downloads to their phone.

It’s really not a hard process to complete.

And, because of that, the conversions started coming in very quickly and that allowed me to learn.

That’s the part you have to figure out in the beginning:

How to optimize the campaign.

But to do that, you gotta have the data coming in.

Later on, I revisited Sweepstakes Offers, I do a lot of Pin Submits.

Those work well but they don’t convert quite as often, perhaps, in comparison to an App Install campaign.

The volume is better; a lot more frequent conversions.

Once you learn the basics with something low-payout that converts very easily, then you can move on to the higher payouts and to the more challenging offers.

8. Affiliate Marketing Trends

The main trends are…there’s always a lot of trends.

Some of the things I’m noticing is that certainly there are more people stepping into Pop Traffic so it’s getting more competitive.

To balance that out, you need to start moving faster than you think you are.

There’s been two points in the last year, two different time periods where I thought that I was progressing quite fast.

I thought that we had a good team, we had good tools in place and then one day I thought:

“I’m not moving quickly enough.”

But I thought I was.

So then we started adding things to our process to improve.

And then – several months later – I had the same realization once again and I think that’s because I’m recognizing more competition stepping in.

Those who have more experience, like myself and others, are starting to take more control of the better-quality traffic.

We’re finding the better offers faster.

If you’re starting out, if you’re not able to move very quickly, it’s gonna be very difficult for you to get a piece of the pie.

9. Future Opportunities in Affiliate Marketing

There’s a lot of buzz around E-commerce and Facebook Shopify.

I see a lot of people going that direction.

It’s certainly a more complex setup required so you can’t just launch a campaign, make money off of it, and move on.

You need to have customer support, you need to identify good products to have a promotion strategy, a marketing strategy.

But the great thing is that it’s completely compliant with all the traffic sources so you’ll have no headaches about getting banned, or having issues, but you do have to deal with customer support, refunds and things like that…cash flow is gonna be a challenge.

That’s one big trend that’s happening and that I hear a lot of people talk about.

There’s a lot of affiliates doing very well in that and it’ll be around for quite some time.

To bounce off on something I see as a trend on the Pop Traffic side of things is that traffic sources are starting to make adjustments that help you find the better-quality traffic.

It’s really important to learn your traffic source very well – all of the features – and speak to your representatives at those sources because they’re constantly coming out with new things and if you jump on them first you’ll stay ahead.

There’s not been a lot of changes with traffic sources for about a year.

But in the last six months, you’re starting to see new updates constantly and a lot of them are very good updates.

That’s one trend.

On the negative side, there are some concerns about Google coming out with new AdBlock technology into their browsers.

There’s a lot of uncertainties with that.

I don’t think Pop Traffic is going anywhere.

Certainly Affiliate Marketing is not going anywhere.

But there’s always gonna be big Google or big Facebook…they’re always gonna throw something that instills a little bit of fear but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.

10. How Do You See Mobidea?

I think that – on a couple of points – you guys are positioned really well, in addition to you guys being everywhere.

I see you at all the conferences, I’ve been contacted by you guys and I know you pretty well.

One thing I think is attractive to affiliates is the flexibility of payout terms, especially when affiliates are just starting out, getting your revenue back so you can reinvest, and getting it back, and reinvesting it…it’s a really big thing and you guys approach it very well because you allow daily payouts at your choosing and in different formats.

Learn More: Affiliate Payment Methods: The Definitive Master Guide

That’s a huge benefit and I think you guys have positioned yourselves well in that way.

There are a lot of people who still don’t know about that, though, despite it being a pretty common thing that we know; that those who use you are aware of.

I think that you guys are uniquely positioned because you dominate Pin Submit Types of offers which you focus on, which is great.

Those types of campaigns, from my perspective as an affiliate…when running those, we deal with less bot traffic.

There’s a higher percentage of time when we can find a Pin Submit offer that does work and we don’t have to cut as much junk out of our campaigns because we’re targeting carrier traffic – people using their mobile phones on a carrier – so that’s a great thing and that’s kind of like your specialty!

11. What Do You Think of Mobidea’s New Tracker Capabilities?

While I don’t have direct experience with yours yet, I think that those types of optimizations and automations certainly help.

We’ve built some of our own custom tools that helped with some of that process.

If someone wants to stay competitive and stay ahead of things, automation and data analysis is gonna be very important!

12. Future Plans

Future Plans?

Nothing concrete.

There’s a lot kind of up in the air.

I am considering developing a pretty thorough video course that’s around mobile pop traffic and for those who want to get into the space.

Still uncertain but I’ve been getting a lot of questions and inquiries about that.

I have an “Insider’s Tip” email list that people have joined and they give me a lot of great feedback.

Some of them keep poking me over and over just so that I can teach them but I can’t teach everyone, I don’t have that kind of time.

So I think something like that is very helpful.

Otherwise, in addition to doing pop traffic, I’m looking to expand into Facebook and potentially Native Traffic as well.

Thank you, Andrew!

This interview was amazing and it was a pleasure having the chance to meet you at Affiliate World Europe!

Keep on reading some awesome Mobidea Academy content and stay tuned for more cool interviews with inspiring industry experts!