The guest of today’s article is one of the most experienced affiliates – Nikolay, also known in the affiliate community as SKANKA88. Nikolay isn’t just a publisher, he’s also a large advertiser that works with many traffic sources. He’s told us about how he arranges his work these days, which experts he’s looking for to join his team, and how one can become an advertiser.

1. Hello, Nikolay! Since the beginning of 2022, you’ve only posted once on your channel and you’ve never actually said anything about yourself. Tell us how this year started for you, what goals did you set for yourself and what is your team preparing for?

Hello. Until mid-February I was resting – I went to Thailand for a month, then to Egypt to look at pretty fish and stuff. Returned to work only by the end of February. Before leaving for a vacation, we bought a lot of goods in China + bought clothes/shoes at Moscow’s markets. At the very beginning of the year, some time around January 2nd-5th, we found 3 luscious campaign approaches for GEO Kazakhstan, so 2022 started off very cool. I didn’t have to spend a lot of money on tests because somehow, we immediately found those products that sold well. We also entered Wildberries and have been actively selling goods for 3 months. We’ve reached 100+ sales per day. GEO Kyrgyzstan was also opened this year. In this GEO, we are now actively testing offers for future purchases. We plan to reach the volume of 500+ leads on Wildberries and to reach the volume of 300+ shipments per day in Kyrgyzstan.

2. Tell us about your team, how many people are there, do you need people in the team, and if so, for what positions and under what conditions?

If we’re talking about everyone who works in my team, then I’ve got about 20 people. Only 4 people drive traffic, including me. The rest are product packers/a designer/a programmer/buyout operators and other experts.Right now, we are looking for 2 publishers to drive traffic to us. The main condition is an expert’s independence, we give them our site, and the publisher brings us traffic, without asking us questions, such as how to set up a pixel, etc.

3. Which traffic source are you prioritizing right now? The case studies you’re showing on your channel are for Facebook, Google, TikTok, myTarget. Which traffic source has the most potential in 2022 and why?

A traffic source depends on an offer. Facebook is number one, then there goes Google. Since we work with products. For people ages 35-40+, Facebook doesn’t really meet some offer’s requirements, this is when we choose Google. And, we’re also exploring TikTok, our third traffic source. We can work with these sources for different product categories, which allows us to make nice profits.

4. We know that you work with nutra and white offers. What types of nutra products do you choose? Weight loss/virility/joints/etc.?

We work with nutra when the products can drive traffic on their own so that we don’t have to control it a lot. If we have some time, then we drive traffic to anti-aging and weight-loss offers. We don’t work with joints/virility just because we’re used to working with weight loss and anti-aging.

5. Starting from the middle of January 2022, everyone’s experienced lower conversions on Facebook. It has become harder to drive traffic and CR rates don’t seem to be growing. Did this also happen to you?

Nutra offers were really hard to launch at some point, back then, we used to push more towards white offers. So, when the situation gets worse, we choose to save ourselves some nerve cells and drive traffic to light-themed offers. We’re advertisers, so we can sell anything ourselves.

6. How do you handle getting Facebook accounts out of bans? People have been noticing bans due to policy violations, business models bans, and almost none of the accounts can be recovered. How do you recover yours? 

90% of the time we work with agency ad accounts, they rarely get banned. Even when they do get banned, account managers appeal to lifting those bans themselves, this is very convenient for our work. Farmed accounts we also use, we verify user personas on Facebook, go through advertising restrictions, other bans, or just get new accounts instead of lifting those restrictions.

7. Nikolay, when you drive nutra traffic, do you do that using a pre-landing page with a fill-our form for orders, or do you use landing and pre-landing pages together? Which way do you think is best?

Right now, the best way is a pre-landing page with a fill-out form for orders. 2 or 3 years ago, couples of landing and pre-landing pages were working well. And now, it only works with a pre-landing page and a fill-out form.

8. Do you warm up your domains with user activity before driving traffic? Or do you load empty domains? Which domain extension do you use and why? Please, tell us about it.

We always have many domains left from white offers, these already have a huge traffic history. Then, when we start driving nutra traffic, we take those domains, create subdomains, and then we launch them. Such domains have proved themselves on Facebook and I believe this gives us many trust points. We only use the .RU domain extension.

9. A year ago, you mentioned that you mainly work with rented and farmed accounts. What’s changed since then?

Right now, we’re working with farmed and agency ad accounts. The other category includes framed and trend accounts. We used to rent accounts but we stopped doing that. Renting is expensive and it’s pretty unreasonable, it’s better to use farmed accounts.

10. You’ve had your affiliate marketing course before, perhaps you actually still trach people. Please, tell us about it. People with what background can take your courses? What can you offer those people?

Right now, we have affiliate marketing courses for several different areas:1) Facebook learning course for white offers;2) Google learning course for white offers;3) myTarger learning course for white offers;4) How to become an advertiser: from A to Z.We aren’t offering nutra courses right now, for the past two months that we’ve been driving nutra traffic, Facebook’s been changing its ways every day. I don’t know the recent news on this topic.

11. Can you tell us step-by-step about how you test your offers? Starting with finding an offer and all the way to launching a campaign.

It’s very simple when it comes to nutra. We test pre-landing pages for GEOs and not for offers. We take a lot of pre-landings and launch like 10-15 trend accounts and then look at which of them have better conversions.And when it comes to white offers, then we first choose a product on AliExpress or Wildberries, create websites, and drive 1000 RUB for 1 account, 2 accounts in total. So, we spend 2000 RUB max for 1 offer. If it performs well, then we buy a test batch of 500 items of that white offer product, advertise it and estimate buy-out rates and the quality of that traffic. If everything’s great, then we buy a bigger batch and drive traffic on higher volumes. We create campaigns with 3 ad sets and 1 creative, so 1 campaign – 3 ad sets, 1 creative.

12. What do you do when Facebook flips out and tightens its screws? Do you have flop days when this happens or do some of your accounts work at any time?

When Facebook starts freaking out, we prefer working with Google, myTarget, and TikTok, our nerves are precious to us.

13. Which GEOs do you work with? Which counties are best for beginners and which of them are better handled by more experienced affiliates?

As advertisers, we work with Kazakhstan and, as I’ve already mentioned, Kyrgyzstan. For white offers, I recommend beginners work with European GEOs, such as Romania. In my opinion, Romania is something of a starting point. If you see some offer showing good results in Romania, you know that other GEOs will also welcome that one, it’s 100%.Nutra is a more dynamic area, I can’t name specific GEOs, they change every month. For example, we’d been having great results in France for 3 months, and then those conversion rates fell down to 0. So, I say you test it and monitor spying services.Product goods work well with Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan/Kyrgyzstan/Armenia. Don’t do Russia though, this GEO is pretty worn-off.

14. You have your own affiliate network. Please tell us about this project’s success, is it still working, and are you planning on growing it bigger?

We do have an affiliate network. Right now, it’s private and only accepts large advertisers. The problem is, 80% of those who sign up are beginners that asked us to teach them how to drive traffic. They don’t even know how to set up a pixel. We’ve also had people driving 1-2 leads and asking us to pay out them 500-1000 RUB. After that, we decided to make our network private. We only left more experienced guys and teams active, they’re fully independent. We find exclusive offers for them, those that aren’t present on the market.

15. What is it like to be an advertiser? How hard is it, how much money do you need to do this, what special skills must you have?

It’s easy to become an advertiser if you follow a set of rules. You have to understand that your starting budget must be at least 1,000,000 RUB.You will need:1) To find a call center with at least 10 people. I don’t recommend you build your own from the start, it’s better to outsource it.2) Rent a warehouse and hire 1-2 packers with cars. They will pack your orders and drop them off at a post office.3) Find 3 operator girls that will check your traffic for frauds, listen to other operators’ calls, and work with buy-outs.4) Find a person that will create your products’ websites.And, you also need to learn about all hidden hazards, and there are tons of them.

16. What does impact ROI, in your opinion? Whether it is for white product offers or nutra. What plays the key role here? The offer, the approach you use, the creative, or promo materials?

ROI depends on your offer and how worn-off it is. If the offer is too old, then the ROI will be at 0 or even negative. It’s better to work with fresh offers that don’t have many complaints, you can work with them for a long time and get banned less. Your offer and your creative is what brings you leads. The website you work with isn’t that important because if a person needs some product, they will buy it anywhere, we’ve already checked this theory many times.

17. Please, give some advice to those that read the entire article.

Don’t give up if you can’t do something. One big mistake beginners make is they sell a bunch of products and then give up on affiliate marketing. You can learn from your mistakes! So read about it, talk to people, and learn about new algorithms/launches/sources. If you do that, you’ll get that PROFIT.Follow my Telegram channel: https://t.me/skanka88I share my traffic launches details there, post nice working cases, and talk about what I do.

Original – https://blog.webvork.com/ru/pogovorim-za-arbitrazh-nikolaj-skanka88/