Perform and promote. How to manage marketing activities by yourself?
If you’re reading this, then probably you wanna know who am I to give you advices here? My name is George, representing one of the largest ad networks in the industry – Clickadu. We’ve been to the game since 2014, operate more than 7K websites for 220+ countries. Me personally in charge of affiliates and mediabuyers on the traffic supply side. Saying so I mean that I’ll gladly share my humble opinion and some experience built for almost a decade in digital marketing.
I’ve decided to write this small article in a Q&A style, because we all need an answers, not a long-reads with difficult words and hard terminology especially for those who want to focus on performance more than on promotion.
What to start with?
Start with a plan! I know that it sounds so obvious, but not a lot of us are good at planning stuff. So first of all you need a sort of roadmap with a GOAL in the end and milestones in-between. Set up a goal for 10K subscribers in 6 months, or an income of 50 grand in 3 months, for example. The goal should be any sized, but clear. After you’ve set up you goal (or goals) – think about investments. By that I mean not just spare funds to invest in your “project”. All your achievements, your knowledge, skills, industry contacts and everything else that matters for your business can be placed on paper and called invest-portfolio. After that you can move to portfolio analysis – strong and weak parts of it comparing to a goal size. For example, you can place a “lack of knowledge in digital marketing” or “poor tech side” in weakness and “more than 1K industry contacts” and “I have an Instagram acc with 20K followers” in strengths. Your plan should also contain time (as a resource), funds and tech. Now the picture started to get colors and you can move to the next stage.
How to find relevant promotion sources?
After you’ve completed your portfolio and observe the whole picture of where you are at the moment and what you want to achieve, it’s time to deal with weaknesses and grow up strengths. By doing so – you will educate yourself and learn different sides of your niche. Highly likely you gonna find one or two promotion sources within your portfolio as already existing and you can grow it.
In general, digital marketing has several sources of promotion of a product, brands or an offers (as we call it) – social networks traffic, Search Engine Optimization (if you have a website), in-app traffic, Display ads in Google (or any other search network), Advertising networks traffic, E-Mail Traffic. Each of these sources has advantages and disadvantages. For example – google/bing/yandex as well as social networks, prohibit advertising of adult content, but the quality of traffic and the ability to send targeted advertising there is much better than in the advertising network. On the contrary – ad networks (with adult traffic) have an open policy for 18+ ad content, but it’s way harder to target interested users.
Let’s dig into best and easiest way of promotion.
Social networks. Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Tik Tok, Telegram – are your best friends here. Get an account, learn functional and policy of that source (what allowed and what’s not) and make a small plan of how to approach for each of it. For example – in Telegram there are a dozens of group chats where you start conversation or make private chats with users (or buy a bot who will mass-sent a messages with your promoted profile link). For a Tik Tok you need an account with short videos (no nudity, just lingerie, posing, dancing).
Advantages – organic traffic, it’s free, it’s consistent and it’s targeted.
Disadvantages – time to grow your audience, possible accounts bans.
Ad Networks. There are several big networks with adult traffic in the industry which you can use (not only Clickadu). We all have different ad formats, pricing models and ways of approach. Best way is to start with click-based ad formats with your creative assets. Also, you can always count on a manager’s expertise and event content (creatives, text) creation assistance.
Advantages – fast start and scale, diversity of ad formats, personal manager.
Disadvantages – blind traffic with tech targetings only, paid traffic.
Email traffic. Try to collect as many emails of our users as possible with any legit way in order to run down your audience with your content and opportunities to follow you and get more of you (on paid basis).
Advantages – free traffic, loyal audience, direct access to your user.
Disadvantages – time to collect and grow email list, need an email mass sender soft.
What should I look for after a month, a year, or 5?
You can delegate and affiliate! One of the most reasonable move once you’ve grew stable income and made some steps towards your name, maybe a personal website with your profiles links and some juicy previews – is to start to delegate some parts of your promotion to a 3rd party. The hardest part here is tracking and reporting. You either need to have a soft for it (tracking systems) or run flat mediabuy.
You can work with a broker or you can go out with paid affiliate program on the CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per action – paid subscription) and / or RS (revenue share – pay a %% of your overall income, gained by attacked users). The deeper you’d like to go here, the harder on a tech side it will be. But you know what – do small steps and learn.
…back in the days there were absolutely no info about how to run a cam stuff and make a biz out of it, but today, there are gigabytes of courser (paid and free), articles, showcases, success stories etc which you can examine and learn of. Don’t hesitate to do so – educate yourself and invest in yourself.
