How a Beginner Made $200,000 on Mobidea

You’ve already checked Mobidea Academy’s affiliate success stories but now’s the time to experience something special! Guess what? Cihad is a super affiliate who’s earned a whole lotta money working on Mobidea and we had the chance to talk with him! Ready? Check an interview with a successful affiliate and see how it’s done!

Introduction

When Cihad heard about affiliate marketing for the first time, he was a simple guy living in Turkey.

But then, his life changed.

Why?

Because he joined the Mobidea Crew!

And guess what?

We had the chance to meet and chat with this super affiliate!

Now, it’s time for you to learn from his passion, path, and struggles!

Ready for this?

Check the interview right now!

Cihad: The Super Affiliate Interview

1. How Did you Learn about Affiliate Marketing?

I remember asking one of my friends about it.

At the time, I wanted to move to Canada.

While searching for information, I met a guy in a chat.

He was from Bangladesh.

He was also looking for ways to move to Canada.

Then, he told me about affiliate marketing.

First, I didn’t know anything about it.

He told me I could make money with this, since he was also making money with it.

At the beginning, I thought that it was some scam and that I would have to stay away from it.

But I was curious, so I started asking my friends about it.

One of them said:

“Yes, it’s true. You can make money online with it, though it doesn’t look easy.”

Some years ago, when I started, there was nobody doing it in Turkey.

All of my friends had 9 to 5 jobs and real businesses.

It was hard to research how to do something for the first time.

I had no trust in it.

But I kept searching for more information.

I read some articles, affiliate marketing forums, and blogs.

I was trying to understand what an offer was and how it all worked.

That’s why I started checking affiliate networks.

I applied to some but got rejected due to the fact that I had zero experience.

That made me feel sad.

I wanted to know more, but I couldn’t.

But then…

I was looking for more networks on AffiliateFix and I found Mobidea.

AffiliateFix actually has a lot of networks trying to get people.

With Mobidea?

It was different.

As soon as I applied, there was no need to wait for an approval, and I quickly started talking with the Affiliate Service.

They explained everything.

How it all works, what are the offers, where to get the traffic, etc.

I didn’t even know I would need to buy traffic.

I was trying to do it for free.

I wanted to make money without having to pay for anything.

But then I understood that the process is much harder than I had previously thought.

I needed to find someone from Colombia with a certain phone and operator, and make them subscribe to an offer.

Back then, it felt like it was impossible and totally crazy.

Besides, my friends and family didn’t support me at the beginning.

They were laughing at me.

They thought I was getting into some shady business that would make me lose money.

Now, it’s different.

I managed to prove to them that this is a real money-making machine.

I’m still giving money to one of my friends because he helped me to invest in ExoClick at the very beginning.

2. What were the First Offers you Ran?

I started working with signup forms because I didn’t need the users to perform a lot of actions.

They only had to leave their email.

I was targeting users from the USA on some local chats, asking them to subscribe.

It was a testing stage.

I was still trying to understand whether or not it worked and if I could even get money when they eventually subscribed.

I made $10 by following this strategy.

But then I started to have doubts about whether or not Mobidea could pay me.

The minimum amount to withdraw was $50, and I thought:

“Okay. Let’s make $50 and see what happens.”

I did it, and Mobidea paid me.

I was finally ready to pay for traffic!

The Affiliate Service told me I should also explore the Smartlink.

They said it’s good for newbies to get their “feet wet” and – sometimes – it could even outperform Single Offers.

That’s why I agreed to test.

I was mainly focusing on Adult traffic at that time.

That hasn’t changed.

I only launched a campaign when I got to chat with my first Account Manager – Raul.

3. Main Issues

Withdrawing money was a big issue for me.

PayPal is not available in Turkey and Paxum rejected my account, even though it accepted my friend’s account.

I didn’t want to invest money from my pocket:

I wanted to keep my earnings rotating.

Mobidea had sent me my 50 bucks.

As soon as I discovered ExoClick, I started looking for ways to insert money there.

It took me some time to set everything up.

Luckily, I discovered a Russian payment system – WebMoney.

I collected the minimum amount required by ExoClick – $200 – and sent it to the platform.

I struggled to do even that.

For me, it was a huge amount of money and WebMoney didn’t allow me to spend more than $50 per day.

That’s why it took me four days to charge my balance on ExoClick.

Afterwards, with Raul, I created my first campaign, including targeting, bidding, and banners.

I created my own banners, with a better quality.

I didn’t want to appear to be a scammer.

And then I started testing.

4. How Did the First Campaign Go?

The first campaign was for Costa Rica (Claro).

I think many people give up because they don’t see the conversions coming.

When you don’t see results, it’s easy to get disappointed.

You start thinking that there’s no money in affiliate marketing.

But I got lucky!

Right on my first day, after about 20 clicks, I saw a conversion.

I then focused on making my campaign profitable.

I talked with Raul a lot, annoying him all the time.

For every cent I lost, I panicked and quickly got in touch with Raul.

I was like:

“Hey, Raul! There is something wrong! I lost money!”

And Raul was like:

“How much did you lose?”

And I answered:

“5 cents.”

I know.

He was calming me down.

He was telling me that it was okay.

He was always asking me to be patient, but I couldn’t wait.

I stared at the screen and waited to get at least one more conversion.

After two days I lost about $2, and I asked Raul to check and see what was wrong.

He checked and suggested I cut a few zones, change the banners, or simply wait for the next day, or change the bid to get more traffic.

My main metric was CPM.

Every time it went up, I got nervous.

After a week, I felt like I knew a lot and I started to invest more money.

It was the same Costa Rica campaign.

I found out that Huawei, Android was out-performing.

And this is what I started making money with.

5. The Most Difficult Aspect of Affiliate Marketing

Patience.

That’s tough.

Yes.

Waiting is the hardest thing.

I don’t feel like this is true for me anymore, though.

Now?

I’m super patient.

I’m probably losing money at this exact moment, but I don’t care.

Before, I used to check my campaigns every single minute.

Now?

I check them every week.

I think it’s dangerous for you to start getting addicted to checking.

It doesn’t help.

Moreover, the amount of attention you give to your campaigns depends on a lot of different factors.

Of course, if I know that the campaign is not performing well, I’ll pay more attention and check it more often, as well as when I’m making tests.

But if it’s a stable campaign, you have to wait for about five days or a week to see what you can do next.

6. What Other Campaigns did you Launch?

The next campaign I created by myself was targeting Panama.

While Costa Rica’s traffic was really cheap and was bringing me money, Panama felt like it was too expensive.

Guess what?

I had to stop it one hour after it started, when I spent $3.

At the beginning, my goal was to earn $5 per day.

That’s it.

People told me that I could do more, but I didn’t need it.

$5 was enough for me.

Why not?

Losing $3 in one hour?

That was too much for me.

Interestingly enough, my Costa Rica campaign started performing poorly too.

Raul explained:

I was simply over-optimizing.

It was too much!

Now I know that I need to be patient.

I must let the campaign get solid numbers before optimizing.

Back then?

Raul was my only source of knowledge and I thought he was wrong.

I started learning and reading a lot, looking for other ways to make my campaigns profitable.

In one week, I grew from a simple newbie to an average media buyer level.

7. Working with Single Offers

When it didn’t work well with Panama, I started checking the offers’ list on Mobidea.

I left Costa Rica as it was, but then I tested similar Single Offers.

Why?

Because – unlike the Smartlink – they have fixed payouts.

The offers worked well.

I tested more.

I was still working with LATAM, especially Colombia Claro, which was performing well.

Still, my earnings were too small to cover my spendings.

I didn’t want to invest extra-money on this.

Getting another $200 wouldn’t be easy.

I made some changes to my campaigns.

I decided that, if I didn’t earn enough money on the next day, I would stop the campaign.

I was really close to giving up.

I think it was a Colombia-Tigo campaign that saved me and brought me more money.

I did withdraw it really fast and reinvested in new campaigns.

I finally started earning $5, $6, $10 per day.

I had reached my goal.

This motivated me to test even more.

The hot offers are hot because there are many people running them.

You just need to come up with conclusions based on the data.

So you can say it’s hot.

But there are offers that nobody’s running.

I started testing those.

I made some good money:

Something like 200$ in two weeks.

8. Did You Try Running Offers in Turkey?

Not really.

Since I live in Turkey, I know that affiliate marketing is complicated here.

I didn’t try working with Turkish traffic.

9. Do You Usually Talk with Your Account Manager?

I learned a lot from Raul.

At some point, I stopped telling Account Managers what I was doing.

For instance, my current Account Manager doesn’t know where I get traffic.

10. How Did You Learn Affiliate Marketing?

I read a lot of stuff on forums.

I watched YouTube videos, read affiliate marketing blogs, especially the Mobidea Academy.

I did the same in the past, but I was not as brave as I am today.

I have to be honest:

When you read articles for newbies, they all say that Tier 3 countries are better for newbies.

I think this is a mistake.

It scares people.

Really:

I was scared!

It felt like if I entered another segment, such as France, there would be someone that would crush me, and I would simply spend too much money.

Besides, many articles are just too positive.

I keep reading articles.

Even so – at the moment – it’s not that easy to find what I’m looking for.

I guess I am more advanced.

I feel like I know all this stuff already.

Matuloo’s blog is also quite good.

You can understand everything and he mentions some good tools there.

With Matuloo, I also learned about Clickadu.

I read a lot on the AffiliateFix forum.

I did it to get help with exploring new traffic sources.

Usually, if your offers work for one traffic source, they will also work for another one.

Just adjust the bid and you’re good to go!

11. Do You Test a Lot?

Yes, I do.

At some point, I just fell in love with testing.

I was always asking my Account Manager about what I could test.

Testing is really important.

Once my Account Manager suggested I tried testing France, it worked really well.

For every $15 or 16$ spent, I got a conversion on ExoClick.

The Conversion Rate was about 1/100, and it was really good for a Tier 1 country!

If you have at least $6 of payout and you can find 100 clicks for $3 – depending on your banners, of course – it can work.

Every conversion was bringing me at least 5$.

And France is a big country.

You can find a lot of traffic from there.

But I was running only ExoClick, still making good money.

12. How Did You Translate Banners?

My Account Manager sent me some banners.

I decided to edit them.

Until today, I’ve been running the same banners.

I also take advantage of Mobidea’s Affiliate Service when it comes to translating the creatives.

And all the banners are more or less the same:

“Are you older than 18?” (16 for France).

And I categorized my banners by languages.

I confirmed with the Account Managers so as to make sure the banners looked good.

Now?

I’m not creating much.

I got lazy after a while.

13. Did You Test Other European Countries?

After France, I made $500 and started thinking bigger.

I checked the offers’ list.

I saw some offers for Switzerland with a really good payout ($35 per conversion) and thought:

“Okay! If it’s working with France, maybe I can try Switzerland.”

14. Did You Work Exclusively with ExoClick?

I won’t disclose all the traffic sources that I worked with but it’s obvious that ExoClick was one of them.

ExoClick is good.

Even so, the traffic they’ve got is quite expensive and there’s a lot of competition.

I would say that it’s too much.

I also explored PlugRush (not knowing about their automated rules is a massive mistake!) and TrafficJunky (which is quite cheap).

My profitable campaigns from ExoClick worked on TrafficJunky too.

This means I was able to double my income, and I started earning more money without doing much!

I just changed the sizes of my banners and that was it.

Comparing TrafficJunky to ExoClick, I can say that TrafficJunky is cheaper, but the quality of traffic is usually lower.

They have 6-7 big websites, so there isn’t much to cut.

Otherwise, you have no traffic.

On ExoClick, you must exclude ad zones while optimizing your campaign.

Here’s a little tip for you:

ExoClick’s mobile central banners aren’t that good.

Don’t run them.

When I’m creating a campaign, I always exclude mobile middle banners, because there’s a low CTR.

They are quite competitive which means you end up paying a lot.

There’s no need for it.

I couldn’t find a way to make these banners profitable, even for my best offers.

After launching campaigns on TrafficJunky, I earned lots of money.

That means I was easily refunding my traffic sources.

I felt like I had more power.

I could do anything.

I was really brave.

I started bidding the highest for Tier 1 countries, just to see what would happen.

15. What was Your Motivation?

Money.

Money is what keeps people motivated.

When I saw that Mobidea paid me twice – first $150 and another time $250 – I was sure that media buying was working.

I knew I could earn much more than that.

But the point is:

I don’t know how to make my withdrawal process smoother.

I have the money, I see it, but it always feels like I can’t touch it.

I didn’t withdraw it until I started getting really big amounts.

16. Don’t You Feel like Switching to Other Verticals?

Not really.

I only work with Adult offers, VOD mostly.

I never ran sweepstakes.

I have tried it but it didn’t really work for me.

The same goes for Dating offers.

I don’t want to try crypto or any other type of offers, because I feel like Adult is my area.

I know how to work with it.

I don’t want to struggle by creating landing pages (all my campaigns are running direct-linking).

A good offer is really important for me.

When I’m evaluating new offers, I analyze all aspects thoroughly.

If they are similar to what’s already working for me, I go ahead and test.

17. Spy Tools

I got AdPlexity (check our exclusive AdPlexity coupon).

It was really just out of curiosity.

I wanted to see what others were running.

I downloaded some landers but didn’t run them.

My offers were already converting.

I didn’t want to spoil it and don’t think that you need to use landers with Video offers.

Maybe if I had tried it with Dating, I would be able to make some money there as well.

The path to the conversion for the VOD offers has to be short.

Why?

Because the majority of those clicks are performed by impulse.

While the user is clicking, I don’t want them to take too many steps until the conversion.

The shorter the path, the better!

18. How Did the Story with the Swiss Offer End?

I’m sure that if I asked my Account Manager about running the offers in Switzerland, he’d say there was no one working with it.

He’d deem it a bad idea.

But it worked, of course.

It brought me so much money!

Other people were afraid to dive into this niche.

The offer’s payout was $35.

It’s scary.

You feel like you need to do something extraordinary to earn $35 per conversion, but it wasn’t my case.

The offer was a Click to SMS and – surprisingly – it was working better than a Single Opt-In offer!

It was working like Double Opt-In in Latin America.

Single Opt-In in LATAM was 1 conversion per 10 clicks.

Meanwhile, Double Opt-In was like 1 conversion per 50 clicks.

And – at times – my Swiss offer was giving me a conversion per 100 clicks.

It being that a conversion was $35, and that I had spent only $10 per 100 clicks, imagine how much money I made.

And the Swiss offer made me want to expand even more – bring even more traffic for better results.

I discovered more traffic sources.

I tried everything.

I expanded it.

The offer from France was working really well on Clickadu.

The traffic source research I have performed has given me awesome results!

19. Did you Spend a Lot of Time Working in Affiliate Marketing?

I was spending a lot of time on it, yes.

At the end, it was only two hours per day.

Right now, it’s even more relaxed:

I set a campaign, close my laptop, and live my life.

It also gets boring, if you are not expanding to other verticals.

Lately, I have been working with LATAM campaigns.

I have lots of things happening there.

I got used to having a lot of money now.

I can’t give affiliate marketing up.

In total, I’ve tried at least 10 traffic sources.

I know all of them.

The key point here is that you really need to know how they work.

Different traffic sources have different features.

Some are better when it comes to working with PPC, some with CPM.

In some of them, your daily budget matters a lot; in others, not so much.

For instance, on ExoClick, you have to bid the most.

That’s it.

They only check your money.

If you give them money, they give you traffic.

On other traffic sources, you can find a way to get cheaper traffic with a high volume and a good quality.

People must know and explore everything, not just how to create a campaign.

20. Advice for Newbie Affiliates

My main advice?

Don’t go for media buying!

But 6 months ago I’d say:

“Go for it! This is your chance!”

You can’t predict anything in this business.

You can’t say for sure how the market will change.

You’ll never be able to know whether or not newbie affiliates will be profitable.

I’m making a lot of money.

I don’t want to teach anyone how to do it.

I don’t want to have more competition – I already have enough.

Instead, I can suggest them other verticals.

I made it with Adult, but it doesn’t mean you need to do the same.

You can do it with Mainstream or with Facebook traffic, I don’t know.

I didn’t run any campaign there or on AdWords.

Some people run on Yahoo.

I’d say that – if you are running the same offer on the same traffic source as I am – you will lose, and that’s it.

Because you can’t out-bid me.

No way!

I believe that I can make money.

I made all of this money on my own, but of course, we all need help.

Without help, you can be successful but it will take a long, long time.

Moreover, you will only be able to make it rain after spending a lot of money.

I’m telling you:

I spent nothing.

I only put $200 from my pocket.

I kept it all online.

And now?

I have so much more!

Whoa, Cihad!

What an amazing interview!

Thanks for these tremendously useful insights!

See Also:

• How to Become a Super Affiliate in 10 Simple Steps
• Mobidea Tutorial: Getting Started With Mobidea [Webinar]
• 4 Toxic Affiliate Marketing Scams You Have to Avoid
• Best Affiliate Marketing Forums on the Internet
• TrafficForce Review