You want to get started in Affiliate Marketing want to make money with right ad network ? So I have someone very much experienced in Affiliate Marketing Carmen Lumina MD of BitterStrawberry Network. What a amazing opportunity to interview Carmen who will be sharing her journey of Afiiliate Marketing and how did she grew BS to a next level in ad network industry. So lets get started and see what she has to share about her journey.
Please introduce yourself to our readers. Can you tell us something about your affiliate marketing journey? How and when did you enter into this?
My journey through affiliate marketing was pretty straightforward. In 2012, together with a team of online marketing veterans, we started to build a mobile affiliate program, but in the beginning of 2013, together with my partner, we understood where the trend is going and we decided to put together BitterStrawberry.com, since this was that something the industry was looking for. When we started, we had an uphill battle to fight, and remaining competitive and as an industry leader has not been any easier. We believe that one of the reasons we have had such success is that we really LOVE what we do.
Even in our off time, after all these years, it is almost difficult to NOT look at stats and check out campaigns. At this point, being one of the top companies in the industry has given us a sense of pride and at the same time humbled us in that we know how easily it can take a drastic turn.
We never want to see that happen, so we are constantly pushing our staff to be the best and remain as a top contender.
What is the success secret behind BitterStrawberry? How you are planning to grow in 2017?
It’s little things that make a BIG difference in being effective. And BitterStrawberry.com gives immediate effective results. That’s how I’d define our core offering.
Besides the solid partnerships with major mobile carriers and big advertisers, another unique feature that our platforms have to offer is the technology behind it. At the core of our “brain” is a WW 3G & Wi-Fi ad-scanner, in-house developed.
This unique tool gives us a better understanding & insight on rising mobile offers, in each niche, each country, any day 24/7, including current market share (%), lifecycle stage (introduction, growth, maturity, decline) and much more valuable information that helps us position the offer and understand it’s integration value within our campaign distribution system.
In short, we hunt, integrate and test mobile campaigns that are more or less accessible, we create and optimize funnels, tailored for every affiliate’s business model, and constantly work towards achieving higher gains and performance for our partners.
We already launched 2 new products in 2017, a 12.000 direct pre-tested offers MarketPlace and a new revolutionary way of monetizing mobile traffic, the HybridLink, and we are proud of their immediate results, thing which shows us that all the efforts we put into market research are paying back. Beside these 2 products, we have few other projects brewing, some of which will DRASTICALLY increase the efficiency of ad purchasing for the publisher, for which we work hard to launch at the end of this year.
Do you think mobile marketing scenario is changing in 2017? How you plan to achieve mobile affiliate market with cut throat competition?
The key in developing in this industry is having the knowhow. If you’ve got the knowhow, then the rest can be built. If you don’t have the knowhow, then you can have the biggest technology company and still make significantly less money and deliver bad results.
What do you see as the future mobile app publisher monetization?
This starts with the developers; they shouldn’t bombard users with irritating ads until the app reaches a core 10-20% retention. As long as they focus on higher user engagement and retention, the users will be more likely to spend, take for example the more popular apps, where users are totally engaged and make purchases not in the first week, but starting with the second one.
As for ads, they should be “localized”. Different countries and different market segments within those countries, will need individualized approaches in order to guarantee success.
One of the critical decisions a newbie affiliate marketer has to make is choosing what product or service to promote. How do you do it? What is your process of selecting products or services to promote to have the greatest chance of success?
As a regular affiliate, your goal is easy: find a good converting offer, a good traffic source, maybe create your own funnel and then set up the campaign and the measurement tool to see how to scale it.
Compared to other networks, what we offer is guidance and an easy tool to get started and make your critical budget on which you can scale later, we give you global SmartLinks. These are not just some links with tons of offers, but they are based on metrics you can make money on. For each affiliate that registers, we want to understand what their profile is, what experiences and what kind of traffic they have. Why? Because if you understand the users that a specific source has, you are more likely to monetize it.
This term has become more frequently used during past years, predominantly by networks. But what makes BitterStrawberry’s SmartLink stand out is the complexity behind it. It optimizes way faster/better using complex 95% statistical algorithms calculations which helps the affiliate earn 25% more on the exact same campaign settings than when one of our media buyers used to optimize by hand, meaning you’ll be sending traffic to offers that have proven performance. Your users won’t be the guinea pigs. J
Why Budgeting Is Very Important In Affiliate Marketing?
Effective budgeting is what fuels successful companies, so also Affiliate Marketers. Successful affiliates budget accordingly, starting with the overall budget, broken down into campaign budgets. The overall budget it’s important because it gives you an overall capping to work with and you have also control over your personal budget.
You should look at your affiliate business like a stock portfolio. You need to diversify your investment and have measures in place so you’re never without revenue. Most successful affiliates dedicate a percentage of their overall budget to testing new campaigns, another percentage for scaling high ROI campaigns and the rest to keep rolling the “safe” campaigns.
Affiliates that are just getting started need to focus on testing just one campaign at a time, but not exceeding the budget allocated for that particular campaign or they can take the safe way, our global SmartLink which will give them the amount of liquid capital that they will need to scale using the HybridLink for complex targeting or targeting directly an offer or more in the MarketPlace.
The most important rule is to make sure your personal budget is less than your overall budget, in that way you have enough funds for re-investing into diversification and scaling.
The trick to a good affiliate partnership is finding quality marketers. What are the best tricks to find it?
Like any other partnership, it requires a lot of investing: time and money, and to know exactly what you want, what your goal is, and to deliver your part, with no delays and excuses.
We appreciate honesty and being fair play, and we deliver the same. We invest a lot in different channels in order to keep finding new potential partners and to find time to spend with loyal old partners. BitterStrawberry.com is ready to work with anyone, just because we have a few big banners at shows does not mean that the smaller guys could not use our services. We believe that an extensive portfolio of clients is one of our strongest competitive advantage.
Why affiliate marketers should join BitterStrawberry as a mobile affiliate network? Why is is different from other networks in the market?
In light of the abundance of networks out there, we’ve set our goals to create a product that is not meant to compete with other networks, but to collaborate with them, thus provide a more complete one stop-shop solution for WW affiliates, app developers, publishers and media-buyers.
No matter which is more suited for you, from the 3 moneymaking concepts available on our platform, SmartLink, Direct Offers MarketPlace and HybridLink, you will have everything in house: performance, highest conversion direct offers, optimization and last, but not least, custom guidance from experienced Affiliate Managers.
Did you like this interview and have some questions in mind do let me know in the comments. Interested to join BitterStrawberry sign up below & get started with them to make money with their amazing affiliate offers.
Don’t forget to share this awesome interview of Carmen Lumina on social media. Join BloggersIdeas on Facebook, Google+ & Twitter . Also do subscribe our Youtube Channel.
