Sweepstakes, nutra, mobile content, binary options…you sometimes feel lost in the offer jungle of the affiliate marketing world!
Are you tired of all these different verticals attacking you everyday? Are you done with Googling and scrolling for answers?
No need to despair! Here comes your ultimate guide about the most common verticals – or offer categories, as they are sometimes called.
Now we’re gonna give you a detailed map to navigate through the wonderful arena of sub-verticals and allow you find the biggest treasures!
So come on, let’s get going! Time to explore!
Mobile Content – Download Content
Mobile content offers have become quite popular and are always in high demand for mainstream junkies.
Why?
Due to their flow, which can either be pin submits or 1-clicks. Since they always manage to bring valuable users who convert for advertisers, these offers are always a hot commodity. This is why you’ll notice that these offers tend to showcase a much higher payout than all others.
Some of the categories are really self-explanatory such as horoscopes, battery boosters or wallpapers.
Nevertheless, some of them deserve a closer look that we’re gonna provide right now because we’re cool and we’re better than most players in town! Word!
1) Utility Apps
This vertical tends to be about performance boosters and battery saver offers for both mobile and desktop. Those offers can either be subscription based (CPA) or require the download of an app from the Google Play Store/Apple App Store (CPI).
2) Sweepstakes
Win an iPhone7!
Get 100€ for Primark shopping (our favorite!)
Don’t miss your chance to get a 50$ Virgin gift card!
We’re sure you’ve seen these types of slogans so many times you start getting dizzy! They sometimes appear on your Facebook feed, among your friends’ updates and a cat video where the obese cat chases a fuzzy ball.
Sweepstakes are always gonna be making money for some cool affiliates. In case you ever felt like trying to actually be the lucky winner, you’ve probably went through a very nicely designed prelander with user-customized questions, followed the steps and….you’re probably still waiting to be the one!
That’s a sweepstakes offer for you, alright! They’re a type of contest where a prize may be awarded to a lucky winner.
As you may have noticed, some of these offers don’t actually require any purchase on the user side. In fact, users just need to fill a form submit (CPL) which makes it all seem super appealing. Direct billing is also real popular nowadays.
What about the traffic?
The majority of ad networks out there are gonna go for pop-unders. Nevertheless, social media is currently winning the game since it’s basically a huge user database where hungry consumers are looking for appealing ads and cool opportunities to win free stuff!
Moreover, Facebook users are terribly bored out of their minds and guess what? According to some studies, boredom is actually the official reason for users to check their Facebook as frequently as they now tend to do.
Boredom. Who knew that having nothing to do could be a catalyst for clicking a sweeps ad?
Now you’re probably asking yourself: do people actually ever win these online lotteries?
The answer is yes (checked with the source!)
You’ve just gotta keep calm, relax, and wait for that golden ticket to come home!
3) Antivirus
This is all about that awesome piece of cool software that’s gonna keep your device safe. Safe from what, exactly? All that nasty malware, of course!
Most of these offers can be adapted to fit almost any audience out there.
Plus: you can use those amazingly generic banners and alert pre-landers which can suggest a user’s device has been infected! Use them well and “force” naive users into acting rapidly and buying like hungry little lambs!
Why are we so evil?
We don’t know.
Golden tip: the promotion of these kinds of offers often includes the use of engaging and ‘alarming’ pre-landers on pop traffic, created to catch the user’s attention. We know you love your smartphone and treat it like a family pet dying from feline AIDS, which means you can be scared that any whisper of a threat can harm your device. That’s why it’s so easy for affiliate marketing players to prey upon these willing victims. Even so, don’t forget to always bear regulations in mind so you don’t risk getting banned or something!
4) Games
Got some traffic for fanatic gamers? Remember the huge success of Pokémon GO?
Yes, indeed! That’s right! Good creatives, motivating pre-landers, and well-designed video manuals are 90% of the road to success!
What’s hot right now? Old classics.
Playing with people’s nostalgia and their love for childhood memories! Check this one out! We bet you’ll also wanna subscribe!
Gambling
Sports bets, poker, casino games! You find all this and much more in this category. Everything that makes the user addicted is worth promoting.
How?
Simple: strategy, planning, and street smarts! This really is the point in time where researching your GEO’s behavior becomes mighty crucial.
Moreover, you should remember the gaming industry is hugely influenced by brands.
Forget a higher CR/Payout/RevShare offer in the premium site spots: if no one has ever heard about them, they’re unrecyclable junk. Also remember to lure the user with a strong argument on why they should subscribe to an online casino, instead of real one. Everything’s gotta look straight-up legit, especially in terms of payments.
If you happen to be a gambler, your mindset will help you succeed in the tough but fabulous Affiliate Marketing road.
Golden Tip: Don’t underestimate adult traffic! If you do, we’ll make fun of you!
Nutra
If you’ve been working in affiliate marketing this year, there’s no freaking way you haven’t come across this term. Nutra is a broad vertical and it’s all about health, dietary supplements, weight loss, and skincare products, as well as some adult products such as male enhancers.
In LATAM geos such as Brazil, as well as in the US or Canada, this vertical is trending and has many cash cows to discover!
The most common models are CPA (subscription/rebills, commonly following a free trial period) or CPS (straight sales or cash on delivery). These offers tend to work best on Facebook, Google AdWords, or native traffic.
The use of ‘aggressive’ creatives featuring celebrity endorsers and bold claims to make the products more appealing to the user are a widespread practice. However, this may hit a nerve on some traffic sources and is often connected to the use of cloaking services.
Dating
What kind of evil person doesn’t look for their true love, or at least a legit company for a bit of funky fun? There are different types of dating offers out there. In fact, you’ve got adult offers and others which are more mainstream-oriented.
Since you’re an affiliate marketer, this usually means offers based on CPL (leadgen offers based on data submission), CPS (subscription with credit card), or CPA (carrier billing).
These offers now tend to work better on display rather than pop traffic, even though pop can be worth a shot, depending on your traffic source. In any case, the use of engaging banners and pre-landers is a must.
Due to the need of filling out contact details and match-making forms, which is more comfortable to do at home, protected from curious eyes, dating works particularly well on Wi-Fi traffic and can also have a nice performance on desktop.
Travel
Hotel booking, transportation tickets, trip purchase, and the whole holiday organization plan!
These offers are getting hotter and hotter in 2017! Depending on the service, you can check some different flows:
-CPI – travel & booking apps – think about the season in which you wanna promote
-CPS – credit card billing on booking trips from a landing page
-CPS/CPL – travel calls – transferred to the call centers or to the team of travel agents helping to book flights. Attention! Might convert only after a certain time of a connected call!
Golden tip: Seasonality! Always seasonality!
Mainstream VOD
Hands up right now! Who among you readers isn’t currently searching for ALL the available “Game of Thrones” seasons online? Yup…We figured!
Saturday comes every week and all we wanna do is grab a cheap IKEA blanket, curl like soft puppies, and watch an entertaining movie, Saturday Night Live scenes, or a rerun of an old TV show while sipping some delicious hot chocolate (or wine!)
TV sells! Movies sell!
Go with the flow!
Golden tip: Travel sites also work well with videos. People wanna be entertained while travelling for a long time.
Adult VOD
Oldie but goldie! Easy to understand what’s all about just by reading the name!
These are classical subscription offers, either via pin submit or direct carrier billing. Even though this infamous vertical has been around for a while and certain segments have now matured, there are still some hidden niches to be explored.
Adult offers work well, both on display and pop traffic, and you can usually work with more generic banners or pre-landers. This makes it a very appealing vertical for newbies as well, since these beginners wanna focus on getting a feel for launching and optimizing campaigns without spending much time and money on creatives.
So don’t be shy! The world is your oyster! A pretty sexy, luscious, lingerie-clad oyster. Still an oyster, though! We’re excited for you! Can you tell?
eCommerce
It’s shopping time! As the name suggests, eCommerce is all about promoting e-shops and the products they sell. This is an enormous vertical which means there are several ways of working on it and getting a nice piece of the cake.
CPS (cost per sale) offers, where affiliates promote a third party online shop e.g. with coupons and get a percentage of the purchase value, or app installs (CPI) are two common practices.
Plus: a big trend in ecom now is that of affiliates re-selling products from platforms like Aliexpress through Shopify on a drop-shipping basis – often promoted as FREE + delivery.
The main promotion platforms in this vertical are Facebook and other social media networks, as well as Google AdWords, and native traffic. Due to the growing density of e-shops and partly ‘shady’ ways of promoting, however, it’s increasingly challenging to work smoothly on Facebook.
There’s still lots of cash to be made though. Ka-Ching!
Finance
Another vast vertical with highly targeted and narrow content recently promoted not only on ad networks but directly on websites and social media.
Attention, sailors! These offers are difficult to convert.
Why are these finance offers difficult to convert?
These finance offers are difficult to convert because of these two reasons:
A. Some users have had a lousy experience with unreliable offers
B. You’ve gotta invest a lot of cash!
How to play in this financial game?
Try to be as legit as humanly possible! Make sure the user gets all the info they need in advance. Then work it all and see that saucy brass pour with class!
Now let’s check some examples:
-Forex – offers dedicated to currencies trading
-Insurance – home insurance? Life insurance? Travelling, maybe? Catch the users when they fear for the most valuable things they’ve got!
-Binary options – give people the opportunity to feel like a real stock-broker at Euronext, show the sweet life a millionaire has after cashing in millions; make users aspire to that awesomely wealthy life and…they shall subscribe!
-Loans – again: seasonality is the name of the Loans game! Christmas, Black Friday, Summer Holidays, Studies. This is where zeros become heroes!
Conclusion – Affiliate Verticals Unchained
We hope this article has managed to help you out!
Now, you’ve got everything you need to buckle up, think about a winning strategy and make your move to become one of the richest affiliate marketers on earth!
You know you can always contact us for more ideas, tips, and advice on how to find success in affiliate marketing!
Are you tired of all these different verticals attacking you everyday? Are you done with Googling and scrolling for answers?
No need to despair! Here comes your ultimate guide about the most common verticals – or offer categories, as they are sometimes called.
Now we’re gonna give you a detailed map to navigate through the wonderful arena of sub-verticals and allow you find the biggest treasures!
So come on, let’s get going! Time to explore!
Mobile Content – Download Content
Mobile content offers have become quite popular and are always in high demand for mainstream junkies.
Why?
Due to their flow, which can either be pin submits or 1-clicks. Since they always manage to bring valuable users who convert for advertisers, these offers are always a hot commodity. This is why you’ll notice that these offers tend to showcase a much higher payout than all others.
Some of the categories are really self-explanatory such as horoscopes, battery boosters or wallpapers.
Nevertheless, some of them deserve a closer look that we’re gonna provide right now because we’re cool and we’re better than most players in town! Word!
1) Utility Apps
This vertical tends to be about performance boosters and battery saver offers for both mobile and desktop. Those offers can either be subscription based (CPA) or require the download of an app from the Google Play Store/Apple App Store (CPI).
2) Sweepstakes
Win an iPhone7!
Get 100€ for Primark shopping (our favorite!)
Don’t miss your chance to get a 50$ Virgin gift card!
We’re sure you’ve seen these types of slogans so many times you start getting dizzy! They sometimes appear on your Facebook feed, among your friends’ updates and a cat video where the obese cat chases a fuzzy ball.
Sweepstakes are always gonna be making money for some cool affiliates. In case you ever felt like trying to actually be the lucky winner, you’ve probably went through a very nicely designed prelander with user-customized questions, followed the steps and….you’re probably still waiting to be the one!
That’s a sweepstakes offer for you, alright! They’re a type of contest where a prize may be awarded to a lucky winner.
As you may have noticed, some of these offers don’t actually require any purchase on the user side. In fact, users just need to fill a form submit (CPL) which makes it all seem super appealing. Direct billing is also real popular nowadays.
What about the traffic?
The majority of ad networks out there are gonna go for pop-unders. Nevertheless, social media is currently winning the game since it’s basically a huge user database where hungry consumers are looking for appealing ads and cool opportunities to win free stuff!
Moreover, Facebook users are terribly bored out of their minds and guess what? According to some studies, boredom is actually the official reason for users to check their Facebook as frequently as they now tend to do.
Boredom. Who knew that having nothing to do could be a catalyst for clicking a sweeps ad?
Now you’re probably asking yourself: do people actually ever win these online lotteries?
The answer is yes (checked with the source!)
You’ve just gotta keep calm, relax, and wait for that golden ticket to come home!
3) Antivirus
This is all about that awesome piece of cool software that’s gonna keep your device safe. Safe from what, exactly? All that nasty malware, of course!
Most of these offers can be adapted to fit almost any audience out there.
Plus: you can use those amazingly generic banners and alert pre-landers which can suggest a user’s device has been infected! Use them well and “force” naive users into acting rapidly and buying like hungry little lambs!
Why are we so evil?
We don’t know.
Golden tip: the promotion of these kinds of offers often includes the use of engaging and ‘alarming’ pre-landers on pop traffic, created to catch the user’s attention. We know you love your smartphone and treat it like a family pet dying from feline AIDS, which means you can be scared that any whisper of a threat can harm your device. That’s why it’s so easy for affiliate marketing players to prey upon these willing victims. Even so, don’t forget to always bear regulations in mind so you don’t risk getting banned or something!
4) Games
Got some traffic for fanatic gamers? Remember the huge success of Pokémon GO?
Yes, indeed! That’s right! Good creatives, motivating pre-landers, and well-designed video manuals are 90% of the road to success!
What’s hot right now? Old classics.
Playing with people’s nostalgia and their love for childhood memories! Check this one out! We bet you’ll also wanna subscribe!
Gambling
Sports bets, poker, casino games! You find all this and much more in this category. Everything that makes the user addicted is worth promoting.
How?
Simple: strategy, planning, and street smarts! This really is the point in time where researching your GEO’s behavior becomes mighty crucial.
Moreover, you should remember the gaming industry is hugely influenced by brands.
Forget a higher CR/Payout/RevShare offer in the premium site spots: if no one has ever heard about them, they’re unrecyclable junk. Also remember to lure the user with a strong argument on why they should subscribe to an online casino, instead of real one. Everything’s gotta look straight-up legit, especially in terms of payments.
If you happen to be a gambler, your mindset will help you succeed in the tough but fabulous Affiliate Marketing road.
Golden Tip: Don’t underestimate adult traffic! If you do, we’ll make fun of you!
Nutra
If you’ve been working in affiliate marketing this year, there’s no freaking way you haven’t come across this term. Nutra is a broad vertical and it’s all about health, dietary supplements, weight loss, and skincare products, as well as some adult products such as male enhancers.
In LATAM geos such as Brazil, as well as in the US or Canada, this vertical is trending and has many cash cows to discover!
The most common models are CPA (subscription/rebills, commonly following a free trial period) or CPS (straight sales or cash on delivery). These offers tend to work best on Facebook, Google AdWords, or native traffic.
The use of ‘aggressive’ creatives featuring celebrity endorsers and bold claims to make the products more appealing to the user are a widespread practice. However, this may hit a nerve on some traffic sources and is often connected to the use of cloaking services.
Dating
What kind of evil person doesn’t look for their true love, or at least a legit company for a bit of funky fun? There are different types of dating offers out there. In fact, you’ve got adult offers and others which are more mainstream-oriented.
Since you’re an affiliate marketer, this usually means offers based on CPL (leadgen offers based on data submission), CPS (subscription with credit card), or CPA (carrier billing).
These offers now tend to work better on display rather than pop traffic, even though pop can be worth a shot, depending on your traffic source. In any case, the use of engaging banners and pre-landers is a must.
Due to the need of filling out contact details and match-making forms, which is more comfortable to do at home, protected from curious eyes, dating works particularly well on Wi-Fi traffic and can also have a nice performance on desktop.
Travel
Hotel booking, transportation tickets, trip purchase, and the whole holiday organization plan!
These offers are getting hotter and hotter in 2017! Depending on the service, you can check some different flows:
-CPI – travel & booking apps – think about the season in which you wanna promote
-CPS – credit card billing on booking trips from a landing page
-CPS/CPL – travel calls – transferred to the call centers or to the team of travel agents helping to book flights. Attention! Might convert only after a certain time of a connected call!
Golden tip: Seasonality! Always seasonality!
Mainstream VOD
Hands up right now! Who among you readers isn’t currently searching for ALL the available “Game of Thrones” seasons online? Yup…We figured!
Saturday comes every week and all we wanna do is grab a cheap IKEA blanket, curl like soft puppies, and watch an entertaining movie, Saturday Night Live scenes, or a rerun of an old TV show while sipping some delicious hot chocolate (or wine!)
TV sells! Movies sell!
Go with the flow!
Golden tip: Travel sites also work well with videos. People wanna be entertained while travelling for a long time.
Adult VOD
Oldie but goldie! Easy to understand what’s all about just by reading the name!
These are classical subscription offers, either via pin submit or direct carrier billing. Even though this infamous vertical has been around for a while and certain segments have now matured, there are still some hidden niches to be explored.
Adult offers work well, both on display and pop traffic, and you can usually work with more generic banners or pre-landers. This makes it a very appealing vertical for newbies as well, since these beginners wanna focus on getting a feel for launching and optimizing campaigns without spending much time and money on creatives.
So don’t be shy! The world is your oyster! A pretty sexy, luscious, lingerie-clad oyster. Still an oyster, though! We’re excited for you! Can you tell?
eCommerce
It’s shopping time! As the name suggests, eCommerce is all about promoting e-shops and the products they sell. This is an enormous vertical which means there are several ways of working on it and getting a nice piece of the cake.
CPS (cost per sale) offers, where affiliates promote a third party online shop e.g. with coupons and get a percentage of the purchase value, or app installs (CPI) are two common practices.
Plus: a big trend in ecom now is that of affiliates re-selling products from platforms like Aliexpress through Shopify on a drop-shipping basis – often promoted as FREE + delivery.
The main promotion platforms in this vertical are Facebook and other social media networks, as well as Google AdWords, and native traffic. Due to the growing density of e-shops and partly ‘shady’ ways of promoting, however, it’s increasingly challenging to work smoothly on Facebook.
There’s still lots of cash to be made though. Ka-Ching!
Finance
Another vast vertical with highly targeted and narrow content recently promoted not only on ad networks but directly on websites and social media.
Attention, sailors! These offers are difficult to convert.
Why are these finance offers difficult to convert?
These finance offers are difficult to convert because of these two reasons:
A. Some users have had a lousy experience with unreliable offers
B. You’ve gotta invest a lot of cash!
How to play in this financial game?
Try to be as legit as humanly possible! Make sure the user gets all the info they need in advance. Then work it all and see that saucy brass pour with class!
Now let’s check some examples:
-Forex – offers dedicated to currencies trading
-Insurance – home insurance? Life insurance? Travelling, maybe? Catch the users when they fear for the most valuable things they’ve got!
-Binary options – give people the opportunity to feel like a real stock-broker at Euronext, show the sweet life a millionaire has after cashing in millions; make users aspire to that awesomely wealthy life and…they shall subscribe!
-Loans – again: seasonality is the name of the Loans game! Christmas, Black Friday, Summer Holidays, Studies. This is where zeros become heroes!
Conclusion – Affiliate Verticals Unchained
We hope this article has managed to help you out!
Now, you’ve got everything you need to buckle up, think about a winning strategy and make your move to become one of the richest affiliate marketers on earth!
You know you can always contact us for more ideas, tips, and advice on how to find success in affiliate marketing!
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