In the previous part of this series, we talked about launching your own affiliate network in the gambling vertical — you can read it here. Today we’re diving into a completely different industry: crypto. Building an affiliate network in this niche comes with plenty of quirks. But just like gambling, crypto is a seriously lucrative vertical, and the income of even a mid-size network would make any mom’s-basement moneymaker jealous.
Partnering With Advertisers
Unlike gambling, where you can usually grab a direct advertiser’s contact right off their official site, advertisers in the crypto niche are much more of a mystery.
You can find advertisers in several ways:
- Arbitrage chats.
- Conferences. The best option for networking: you’ll find advertisers and affiliates alike.
- The spy method: lift direct advertisers’ contacts off competitors’ offers by analyzing the data pulled from the autologin link. I’ve already explained how on my blog. In other words, you can sign up with any crypto affiliate network as an affiliate and dig out the contacts of its direct advertiser. Or of all of them, if you put in the effort. It works both ways, though: your competitors will get to your advertisers just the same, so it’s worth shielding their contacts in advance.
With crypto advertisers, always push for prepayment and sign legally binding contracts. Not every advertiser will go for it, but that’s where your negotiating skills come in. Have a lawyer go over every term of those contracts with you: they often hide surprises like a penalty of tens of thousands of dollars for terminating the partnership.
Skip the contract and the prepayment for traffic, and you can crash straight into a cash-flow gap and go bust in style. It’s an extremely popular scenario. An advertiser might flat-out rip you off, or, because of problems on their own end, hold up a payment for anywhere from a week to several months.
This scenario is common enough that a financial cushion for cash-flow gaps is an ironclad necessity. Affiliates must always be paid on time — otherwise you simply won’t have any left.
There’s one handy way to gauge an offer’s conversion potential. The advertiser should have a separate CC, or a pool of managers, for every country — people who work only with that GEO. If the same crew handles leads from every English-speaking country from Australia to Canada, you won’t see a high conversion rate. Every country has its own specifics and its own payment methods, and the managers have to be drilled on them. So plug in local brokers first, or the ones who understand these specifics of setting up work inside a call center.
The Tech Side
When building a crypto affiliate network, it’s important to find a competent technical specialist. Nobody runs traffic to plain direct links with UTM tags or subs anymore. Everything runs through an API: the user’s data is sent to the broker, an account gets created on their side in a fraction of a second (in the broker’s wet dreams, anyway), and the user is automatically logged into it.
In gambling, when the tech breaks down, you can often recover the data with a bit of detective work. In crypto, if the API goes down, the user simply never makes it into their account. Those leads have to be saved in your own database and sent later, once the broker’s API is back up. These algorithms have long been built into AlterCPA Pro: unsent leads bide their time in the sump (a holding company with no integration), the rebox hack resends them to advertisers on a schedule, and autologiner “clicks” the autologin link itself in place of a user who’s long gone (not every broker is thrilled about that, so switch it on with care). The technology isn’t complicated, but it lifts your profit by 5–10%.
Fraud
There’s fairly little fraud in crypto. On CPA there’s almost none: to fake a real user’s behavior, you’d have to get on the phone with a CC employee one to five times, which means sitting by the phone for a couple of weeks. That’s hard to scale.
On CPL, though, you can pour in cheap, low-quality traffic. So hand those offers only to proven affiliates who’ve already shown they can run CPA traffic well.
Finding Affiliates
Finding affiliates works roughly the same way in every vertical. I’ve covered it in detail in earlier articles. Here’s a quick recap of the options that work:
- Spam in chats and DMs. Sounds awful, but it works. I’m still as shocked as you are.
- Content marketing. The long road, but the most effective one. A network that puts out useful, interesting content is buying attention and goodwill. When will that person come to run traffic with you? Maybe right away, maybe a year from now. But they’ll definitely either come themselves or recommend you to people they know. It’s a way to build yourself a reputation that will keep bringing in clients forever.
- Branding, launching targeted ads, advertising in niche Telegram channels.
Conclusion
For an affiliate network in the crypto vertical, it’s critical to:
- Know how to find great advertisers.
- Know how to find affiliates (that one applies equally to every vertical).
- Have a strong tech-support team and strong techies for internal tasks.
- Have a big financial safety cushion, because with such a long deal cycle, advertisers often drag out their payments.
Crypto isn’t the easiest niche for building an affiliate network. But it’s one of the most profitable. Which means it’s worth the effort.