Who in the world of media buying hasn’t thought about starting their own affiliate network? The owner of a network doesn’t have to fight the hated moderation of Facebook, TikTok, Google and the rest of the ad platforms. No need to spend thousands of dollars on ad accounts that keep dying. No need to burn working capital into the red hunting for a winning funnel. There’s a lot you don’t need to do. But what does a network need in order to take its commission and make big money without generating traffic itself? In this article we’ll be talking in broad strokes, but there will still be more information here, and it will be franker, than anywhere else.
Three pillars the network stands on, and how to get them
An affiliate network is a tripod in the media buying business. It stands on:
- Traffic, brought in by affiliates.
- Access to offers from direct advertisers on favorable terms.
- The technical side: the engine.
At the very start of its life, a network is stuck in a kind of vicious circle: to get offers you need traffic, and to get traffic you need offers. The single biggest asset of an affiliate network is traffic, which means the media buyers who generate it.
How to find traffic at the very start of the journey
Having media buyers ready to run traffic while the network is still young is essential for getting the best terms on offers in many verticals. There are a few ways to get there:
- In-house media buying. A small team of your own not only helps probe the market and test offers, but also lets you hand advertisers traffic right away, with a promise to scale it. That always gives you a stronger position when negotiating terms. It’s fairly easy for a network to land talented people, since in-house buying is the sweetest spot there is for a media buyer. Down the road, the network’s own buyers get access to a huge amount of information: offer statistics, the funnels outside affiliates are running, and other data that only the network itself has.
- Build up your media presence. Set that goal a month or two before active work starts, and it’s quite realistic to gather an audience that’s willing to send traffic to the network’s offers, at least for a test.
If you haven’t found affiliates ready to run traffic before you connect offers, that’s not a death sentence. It all depends on the vertical; more on that in the next block.
Connecting offers: life hacks for finding direct advertisers
How hard this is depends on the vertical the network works in. In gambling, for example, casino websites spell out how to become a partner. Same story with dating. In terms of getting offers, these are the easiest verticals to build a network in. Accordingly, having traffic from day one isn’t that critical either.
With nutra and white-hat e-commerce it gets harder. First, advertisers are hard to find. Second, advertisers want to see traffic right away.
There are a couple of tricks for hunting down advertisers. They work for affiliate networks and media buying teams alike:
- Sign up as a media buyer with a network that has the offer you want. Submit a lead with your own phone number. Get the call center agent to put you through to someone from the affiliate department.
- Many networks will let you resell an offer. Now you can present that offer as your own. To start with, you’ll get the same payout as any media buyer. To bring affiliates into your network, give them a market payout too and still make money yourself, there are two ways to monetize. The first is shaving. I’m not calling on anyone to do it, but the method is extremely popular. The second is to set money aside to work at zero or a small loss at first, build up volume and earn a higher payout from the donor network. This trick is especially good with advertisers who’ll only hand over their offer if the network already has traffic.
- Chats, conferences, friends, acquaintances. Personal relationships are the best way to get an offer, in politics and in media buying alike. I strongly recommend building up social capital.
In crypto the situation is the toughest. Almost every advertiser wants starting traffic; otherwise there’s no prepayment and no high payout with room for a commission. On top of that, reaching advertisers is extremely hard because of how gray the whole industry is.
Nobody knows this one: how to find a direct advertiser in the crypto vertical
The call center will most likely send you somewhere you really don’t want to go. Chats, conferences and acquaintances are more realistic, but still pretty hard. There is one trick, though. Using the autologin link, you can quite often trace exactly where the traffic goes and get the most direct access there is to any advertiser in the cryptocurrency vertical. I hope I don’t get shot for putting this method out in public. Four years on, nobody has shot me yet.
The autologin link for tracing traffic is only used in the crypto vertical. I don’t want to be categorical, but I’ve only ever seen autologin in crypto. And in other verticals, advertisers can be found in simpler ways, the ones I described above.
How to avoid up to 90% of the cost of opening a network
The technical side is usually the biggest expense when starting out. Writing your own engine is hard, slow and expensive. In numbers: $30,000 to $150,000, with a median of $70,000, and four to eight months. And that’s assuming you managed to find programmers who understand the task and they didn’t run off to a competitor halfway through the job. It used to fit into three to six months, but the market now expects a lot more from a network out of the box, such as anti-fraud, a cloaker and a mobile side, and all of that has to be written too. I’ve broken the full estimate down by roles and line items in the post about building a network in style, so I won’t recite every figure twice.
The problem can be solved for less with an off-the-shelf solution. I recommend my own, of course. There are two options. AlterCPA Pro goes on your own server: full control over your data, and the license costs $500 a month, or $1,450 with the top support package included. Hard to call that pocket change anymore, but there are no compromises on control or scale either. AlterCPA Cloud is the same Pro, only the server and all the infrastructure are on our side: you pay by the day, from $8, and once you’ve paid it deploys itself in about fifteen minutes. A working network in a day? More like a quarter of an hour. There are competitors too, and I have nothing against them. The main thing to know is that you don’t have to sink big money into a risky project at the start, or hold up the launch for months on end.
Conclusion
I hope I’ve managed to give a general picture of the tasks and difficulties involved in building your own affiliate network. Back in 2022 this article ended with a promise: soon there would be a lot of information here, on the AlterCPA blog, that nobody had ever made public. Delivered. There’s now a whole series here called “Perfect CPA”, about how to build your own network: who to hire, what to pay them and what it all adds up to, down to the dollar. If this topic interests you and you want to know how to start a network without going broke, start from the cheap end: a network on a shoestring costs exactly $100 (no, that’s not a typo), and the entire team it needs is one founder and a cat. Hard to go broke on that. On the seventy grand from the previous section: easy.