Hows it going IanFernando.com readers? This is Ad Hustler coming to you with a guest post.
Getting your hustle on is an important part of doing business in the affiliate marketing industry. If you get a lot of your traffic from one place you are bound to get screwed sooner or later. You need to have the hustle to be able to work around traffic issues.
Facebook changes advertising guidelines as often as Mark Zuckerberg changes his underwear. Myspace bid prices are high. Do we really need to get into the ridiculous game that is Google? The point is that you can't rely on any of these as your exclusive source of traffic. While each site has a specific type of user that you need to get at, theres more then 1 way to get at those users.
Facebook
Although not as bad as it used to be, it can be tough to get ads approved. These clowns can't make up their minds about which ads they allow and which ones they don't. You can play the game and resubmit ads a bunch of times hoping for the best, or you can try to get at that same traffic in different ways. To get at Facebook traffic you don't need to use the Facebook Ads system. You can go through apps advertising networks. Some of these networks include SocialMedia.com, Cubics, SocialHour.com as well as a sleuth of other networks. Although the targeting is not usually as tight, the traffic is a lot cheaper which can make up for it. I have personally made a lot of money doing this (and Facebook lost a lot of money because I paid a 3rd party rather then Facebook themselves for the traffic). If your a baller you can do a direct media buy on facebook as well, which seems to allow things that facebook ads does not.
Myspace
Let's face it. Often times, Myspace traffic is NOT WORTH the 25 cent minimum bid price they require (not to mention you normally need to bid higher then that just to get the traffic flowing). So what's a hustler to do? GO AROUND THEM! What other ads do you see on Myspace? GOOGLE CONTENT NETWORK! Fire up your Google account and target the Myspace traffic on the content network. Often times you are going to find cheaper traffic then going through Myspace themselves.
Google is my best friend and my worst enemy. They have made me tons of dough and destroyed my sanity over the past few years. No matter how well you run your campaigns they can get slapped. It seems like Google just arbitrarily slaps campaigns sometimes. Ive had campaigns running that had great quality scores, super high CTR's and all of a sudden traffic stopped. Sometimes it's an easy fix, and sometimes it's not. Either way you need to be targeting search traffic through more then just Google. Set campaigns up on Yahoo and MSN as well. While these search engines have less traffic and have plenty of quirks of their own, it helps you to not have all of your eggs in one basket.
I call this concept "traffic derivatives." There is almost always a way to get at the traffic you need, you just need to be creative. Think outside the box and you WILL profit!
