Buying Traffic from Plenty of Fish – Guest Post by Justin Dupre

This is a guest post by Justin Dupre.

Scaling out. This is what you do when you’ve hit your maximum potential on any given traffic source. People get bored of seeing your affiliate ads on one website everyday, which is why looking into alternative places to buy traffic is so important. Scaling out is just another way to get all your eggs out of one basket, or in other words, diversify.

So when I was a one advertising platform kind of man, I was making a killing on Facebook. But like I stated earlier, campaigns would dry up and I’d be left searching for new niches or new targets. That was a very inefficient way to go about marketing. So when I heard about PoF’s self-serve advertising platform, I was pretty excited.  I could now take the campaigns and data I had from Facebook, and pretty much translate them over to Plenty of Fish which has a very similar targeting scheme.

So what is Plenty of Fish’s advertising platform like?

PoF is a mainly demographic ally-based advertising platform, with a few psychographic targeting options built in. They serve around 100m page views per month, so there are a ton of impressions to go around (although not nearly as many as you’d come to expect from Facebook or Google).  Ad formatting is identical to Facebooks – 110 x 80 pixel images with a short ad title and caption. You also have the option to use IAB banner sizes, although the amount of impressions from those ads is lower.

It’s a very popular platform for affiliate marketers to practice CPA arbitrage – that is buy traffic on the cheap and convert it to something that makes you more money with CPA offers. And why is it so popular? The traffic is amazingly cheap. You are forced to bid CPM, but with some traffic trickling in at 15 cents, and it flowing steadily at 50 cents, you won’t be digging deep into your pockets just to test out one affiliate offer.

So what kind of advice can I give you, from being an experienced PoF advertiser?

Dating. It’s the number one niche on PoF which doesn’t come as much of a shock, but it works! Dating campaigns are very high maintenance. You have to split test multiple images and ad copies, and continuously rotate new images to keep your average CTR up. If you plan on taking this route, be prepared with tracking tools by your side. (I recommend Tracking202/Prosper202) Dating Self-help ebooks and other similar offers work great, as well!

Use the targeting options! If you are a current Facebook marketer, this will be a breeze for you, and a joy. PoF includes a lot of great targeting options that Facebook and others don’t give you because PoF collects more user data as they are a dating site. Be creative and implement it. It will cut down your target reach, but if you work hard on your campaigns like it’s an actual business and not just a hobby (which any successful affiliate treats it as), you should be able to scale campaigns out pretty heavily over the course of one day.

Don’t forget to mention user data in the ads. Targeting smokers? “Meet other smokers.” Plenty of Fish also allows you to dynamically insert user city and other data with quick tags inserted in the ad copy. It’s a great tool that you can use to direct traffic to your ad.

There are cons, of course, as there are with every traffic source.

There aren’t very many niches that connect with users. People are here to find a date for tonight, not be advertised to. Again, it isn’t surprising why only dating ads or self-help ads seem to get a lot of attention here.

There isn’t a ton of traffic to go around. You will have to set your CPM bids pretty high to get a decent bite of the cake. You can get light traffic with lower bids, but bid price also can determine traffic quality. Higher bids get priority (Facebook also uses a similar system with their ad platform).

You can’t target international demographics other than the main English speaking countries: USA, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK. While there wouldn’t be much traffic outside of this, in some cases, that traffic might be valuable to some.

So if you are looking for some extra traffic, need to scale, or have all your eggs in one basket, Plenty of Fish Ad’s is a great alternative traffic source for affiliate marketers. It’s got it’s fallbacks, but the amazing support, traffic quality, and targeting options make up for it.

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Justin Dupre is an affiliate marketer, blogger and Internet marketing consultant. You can read his blog for more affiliate marketing tips and case studies at http://justindupre.com, or join his forums for more personal 1-on-1 advices.