Hello everyone! Today, we’re interviewing Evgeniy Toporkov, leader of an affiliate team called “Komanda A” (or A-Team, when translated from Russian; we’ll explain the name of the team below), owner of a marketing and media buying agency Zeon Ads, and expert in affiliate marketing.

We talked about the past and present of media buying, the most profitable categories in affiliate marketing for Zeon Ads, the growth of the Facebook daily spending limit, the difference between TikTok and Facebook affiliate marketing techniques, and so much more.

The first question one just can’t help but ask is the question that comes up when people enter your VKontakte community called “Affiliate marketing with Hannibal Smith” (translated from Russian – “Арбитраж трафика с Ганнибалом Смитом”). Why Hannibal Smith? What does this represent?

You see, initially, this public page was started as our team’s page, but the team wasn’t exactly the way everyone is used to thinking about it now. That was just a team of like-minded friends.

At that time, I was working closely with two of my friends, together we chipped in for campaign tests, shared experience, etc., so our results were always shared, we had a collective.

And I had a big idea to make it all look more organized, which subsequently could bring some profit to everyone.

I decided to make our “team” public page, where we could share our thoughts and case studies with the audience and receive feedback. I didn’t have to think long about the name and the idea, because I watched the film called Team A the day before and named the page that.

Some of the very first posts even had case studies from different people under different pseudonyms. Since I was sort of the host of the whole action, I took on the pseudonym of the leader from that movie.

Later, the guys lost their enthusiasm for making content for the page, and so I renamed it to the page of just Hannibal Smith.

We would like you to talk about your experience in affiliate marketing in literally one or two paragraphs. How did you get to the field, where did you start, and what did you end up with now? What partners have you worked with?

I found affiliate marketing pretty easily when, like many guys of my age, I asked myself the question of how I could get some money.

In 2015, I had just returned from the army and immediately got a job as a security guard, since I was just in the process of getting my education.

Naturally, that job as a security guard wasn’t bringing me a lot of money, so I thought about how I could start earning more. One idea was to start reselling the then very popular Casio G-Shock watches. One of the questions that I then asked myself was the question of how and why people would buy from me, and how I was to get my customers.

At that time, one of my acquaintances had a friend who was engaged in “advertising”, so I asked for his contact information so that I could ask him a couple of questions. We had a talk and he advised me to consider CPA marketing. That notion changed my whole life.

We know that since 2017, you have been a member of the professional CPA Club community. Please tell us about this experience. What was the reason for becoming a part of it in 2017, and what is the reason for staying in the club now, in 2022?

CPA.Club was shining bright at that time in its glory. No one had any doubts that it really consisted of the top experts in the market.

Members of the club were making presentations; people were wearing their badges and merch in VIP areas at different niche conferences. So, from the outside, it was clear that the guys in the club were discussing something truly interesting, accessible only to a closed circle of people, they must have been something very cool, elitist; people wanted to know what the club members were earning at the time, and what they were using to make millions. I wanted to get into such a club too, get closer to that information, communicate with people who had achieved success in their field, and grow with them.

For all my time in the club, it did lose its brilliance. Many don’t even know about it now, but all the time that I was part of it, I never had any regrets. I have made many new acquaintances and good friends. There, I was always able to get an answer to any question I had and even help others in difficult times, or, for example, just get advice on a particular work situation.

Now, the club is practically a dead community that entrepreneurs sell to one another. The main active backbone of the participants has separated into a separate community where communications continue in the best traditions of the CPA Club.

As for me, the club has not lost its relevance.

In 2017, you started working at Alfaleads as a media buyer. Tell us what was media buying like back in 2017 and what has changed in it in 2022.

It has obviously become more difficult. More competition, higher CPM, more bans, fewer new users. Creatives need to be concealed in so many ways to get past moderation and conversion rates have become even lower.

It didn’t get any easier, that’s for sure.

If you had to choose between two positions: a media buyer in a top affiliate network or a solo publisher with start-up capital, what would you choose today?

If we talk about the beginning of my journey, then most likely, I would start from the position of a media buyer in an affiliate network. Now, it has become much more difficult to get a similar experience just on your own working solo.

Right now, to be a solo publisher, you need to have tremendous experience, insight, budget, and self-confidence.

But right now, I would choose to work solo.

Judging by the content in your VKontakte community “Affiliate marketing with Hannibal Smith”, you currently have good success with nutra offers. For example, one of the last offers you worked with was Oculax. You then composed a case study on it and the numbers there were as follows:

Spending: $4748.5

Income: $7321

Profit: $2122.5

So, tell us, Evgeniy, which Nutra offers were the most profitable in 2022, and which ones, on the contrary, were the most disastrous? It would be great if you could name the numbers of your spending, income, and profit for the best and the most unsuccessful offers.

I don’t want to name some offers so I don’t promote them. And I won’t name others so as not to reveal them, since they are still working pretty well 🙂

But I will answer the question this way: this year, we found good success in the categories of adult offers, eyesight offers, and prostatitis products.

The worst thing for us was the category of weight loss – again, we still couldn’t have learned how to work with these offers 🙂

How long have you been cooperating with YeezyPay and does it help with your Zeon Ads?

I have known the owner of YeezyPay for a long time now. We hardly use their services, but I know for sure that they have a good quality product.

Now, let’s talk more about Zeon Ads 🙂 You are the owner of this marketing and media buying agency. What does your working day look like as a Zeon Ads owner?

I wake up, take my kid to the kindergarten, eat, and sit down to work 😂

In fact, everything is the same as with other managers. Checking my tasks, checking with plans, looking at the tasks of the departments, and looking over how everything is being worked out. In case I need to help someone – I just go and do it.

How much traffic does Zeon Ads generate?

Not much, we spend 5,000-10,000 per month.

What are the current SMM projects in Zeon Ads?

Nail services, dry cleaners, cosmetology projects. All sorts of safe client-oriented businesses.

What future do you see for Zeon Ads? Or do you have plans for some other projects?

In most cases, it doesn’t make sense to get ahead of ourselves, because plans can change and what I could say now may simply not come true, or perhaps, I may change my mind about it.

But I can say for sure that we plan to grow in the directions we have chosen:

1. Safe client-oriented business

2. Affiliate marketing, and not necessarily nutra offers

In that order exactly, affiliate marketing is not a priority for ZeonAds.

At the end of September, in your “Affiliate marketing with Hannibal Smith” community, you said that Facebook’s daily spending limit was growing again on some accounts and it was impossible to identify a pattern due to the fact that there were so few of those accounts. Have you managed to identify this pattern now, or at least come close to solving this problem?

So far, we have no clear understanding of this process and everything seems to work so randomly. To this point, some suggest that that pattern contains the life of the account + its spending. Although so far, there has been no confirmation of this assumption due to the fact that we’ve been reaching a large spending limit faster than we were previously. And with a large spending limit, the account does not live as long.

Maybe you should just forget about some accounts, it’s worth a try.

Have you tried driving TikTok traffic? If so, what is your opinion on affiliate marketing there, especially when it comes to nutra offers? And why is Facebook the one true love for you?

Yes, I tried to drive TikTok traffic but not in the nutra niche. I tried to advertise dating and mVas offers on TikTok.

I will say this, I didn’t have a pleasant impression. If you want to drive a profit, you’d have to spend a lot of time generating traffic there, the whole point of TikTok campaigns is in manual bidding per action. When you set manual bidding, traffic generates very slowly and it is important to upload a whole lot of creatives in the hope that one creative will be a success at a cheaper price and will generate your traffic very quickly.

I didn’t like this format. Everything happens much faster even when you drive traffic with manual bidding on Facebook.

In one of your articles, you said that today, publishers (not affiliate networks, but publishers themselves) often do not understand that affiliate marketing is a business. How does this manifest itself and how and why should this perception change?

You can see it in the fact that many simply do not want to promote themselves and grow their funds. They treat affiliate marketing like a gig, they want to get money quickly without thinking about their actions and the future. I’m talking about some first-timers. They defecate in the same place where they eat, without being scared of criminally punishable actions. They are not embarrassed that every account they abandon harms not only the community and other market players but also themselves.

There is no way to grow and no way to analyze one’s work in such an approach. There is no accumulation of funds, not even financial, but in a broader sense – no worthy experience

It is important to form a business out of your actions so that your earnings turn from a short gig into a system that will work for you so that you have to worry about money anymore and the “environmental friendliness” (in a sense of Facebook traffic) of your actions and your own productivity grow at the same time.

Give advice to those affiliates who read the whole interview.

Get an education somewhere and go to work in your specialty, you don’t need this.

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