Over the weekend we released our gaming guide in our newsletter entitled “Promoting Games the BLAM Way”, and the response was extraordinary. We had so many people thanking us for the knowledge we dropped in that newsletter, and I have to tell you it feels good to see the success stories happening before our eyes. I know it may come as a surprise to most that our new affiliates having come from ad networks that only push top offers without giving up the goodies on how to promote and profit from those offers. To our more veteran affiliates it does not come as a surprise how we train our affiliates teaching them step by step on how to make money in this industry. Now as promised, we added more than 20 gaming offers today and will be adding tons more in the next several days. This will give you the variety you need to capitalize on the gaming niche.
Now that you have the basic foundation on how to promote gaming offers the BLAM way, you can take that a step further with direct site media buying. Here is the easiest way to approach this task. Start with picking out your target websites. Remember, Google search is good for this. Just simply come up with a few keyword terms and save 15-20 sites that rank well but don’t have a good ad layout for a profitable ads website. I like to use Quantcast’s Media Planning Tool also for this. Plug in some of the top gaming sites that you documented, as discussed in the previous post, record the demographic and search it. What you are looking for are sites that are trying to earn money with Adsense and contain a lot of Google AdSense ads or other indicators that they are not monetizing their sites properly. You should be looking for sites like celebrity gossip blogs, image hosting sites and a few arcade sites that feature female friendly games. These ad websites are the most receptive for an adsense alternative that will make they money. After you complete this, you’re all set and ready to reach out to webmasters. Contact your AM for further details on how to make contact with webmasters. We will help walk you through this process. However, if your’re feeling brave just follow these steps taken out of our mini-guide.
“Making Contact and Negotiation. Almost always, this is the trickiest part of doing a direct site buy. Average webmasters make it somewhat tricky to contact them, so try these 3 techniques. First, look for any sort of “contact us” form or email. If you can’t find that or they don’t reply, head over to do a whois lookup. The type of people who own sites that work well for direct buys have never even heard of affiliate marketing. They don’t have whois guard or any sort of protection on you looking up who they are and their phone number. Call them, email them, Facebook them – whatever it takes to get into contact with them. The reason I recommended you have 15-20 sites to contact is that often times you will get no response.
Once you get in contact with someone, its time to start your negotiations. The first thing you want to get out of them is the average unique views and total number of page views as well as what they are expecting for advertising. Some webmasters just have crazy ideas like their traffic is worth $5 cpm. You have to feel it out how well the person is going to negotiate. If they seem tricky, move on. Plenty more fish in the sea! Once you have this data, depending on the size of the traffic, you either want to negotiate for a one day test or just negotiate for the monthly deal. I generally break it if the site has under 500,000 imps for the month, just buy the whole month. Its not worth your time to negotiate for a one day test for that. If you are going for the 1 day test, take a monthly estimate for what you would spend and divide by 30 then offer slightly more then that. Don’t be afraid to be generous here – a little extra grease on the bearings for later larger negotiations always helps. When looking to do a direct site buy I hate hate hate paying cpm. Just buy a flat rate ad for a certain time span. This gets rid of a ton of complications you can face from CPM buying without an official server. For us, we got in contact with a certain celebrity blog. Their traffic was around 750,000 impressions a month of non repeat visitors to their image galleries. They were expecting .25 cpm, so we offered them $200 even for the month for an above the fold 120 X 600 banner. Everyone is happy, especially the blogger making $50 bucks a month using other online advertising services.”