iAmAttila: Sayonara to FB

Attila o’Dree, top affiliate and one of the old-timers of the industry, shares his view on the current market trends and provides some insights about working with his own offer in the lead generation vertical.

Hey man, how are you? What is the iAmAttila’s team up to, how are you doing and what are you running nowadays?

I’m good, just in Dubai at the moment getting ready for the Affiliate World Conference 2022 edition. The team is up to no good, haha, just kidding. Always changing, but the last 2 years we’ve been heavily focused on lead gen, and it’s growing. 

How did you make $1KK, what were the traffic source and the offers?

We run lead gen, real value “gen”. We took the offers specialized in homeowner targeted niches and other broad niches like insurance. Stuff that everyone needs, basically. 

The white-hat seems to be all the rage today, yet FB and Google are still pretty resilient on affiliate campaigns, is it better to keep on hitting the wall or just change the source? 

White-hat is the only thing left. Facebook has gotten so good at detecting all affiliate offers, angles, and creatives that it’s total torture trying to run anything like that on that platform. Even white-hat is a nightmare, Zuck bans anything and everything. That’s why their stock fell off a cliff and lost 25% of its value in early 2022.

What are white-hat offers for you?

White-hat offers to me are those offers where the customer (the lead) wants the product and is happy with the result, and where the lead buyer (the offer owner) is also happy with the conversion.

In the past, an affiliate was like a player VS player: the customer would get ripped off in some way or another, while the offer owner would benefit. There were no mutual benefits, but with lead gen there are. Both sides win.

What drove you to ditch the most talked about traffic source and opt-out in favor of your own offer traffic-wise and offer-wise?

The never-ending bans and lack of customer support over at Facebook made us switch and say sayonara to the platform. I’ve been saying for years that this no-second-chances attitude Facebook decided to use against their advertisers will backfire. And it did, big time. MAJOR loss in revenues impacted the stock price. They haven’t only f*** us — advertisers paying their salaries, they have also removed organic reach from users and limited their freedom of speech which caused a ripple effect — people started leaving the platform. Facebook is really going down the same slippery slope as MySpace.

So, you’ve made your own offer, could you give us more detail about the motivation and profitability of such a move? 

With all the new policies and restrictions, the margin of profit keeps shrinking. Mix that with CPM costs rising everywhere and the reduced targeting options due to the IOS 14.5 update which doesn’t let platforms track the users unless they opt-in (which 99% of users decline) — we need every cent we can get. And one way to get that is to cut the middle man.

But why should you run white-hat with <100% ROI when you know the possibilities of running gambling and nutra on Facebook? Why?

I run white-hat with less than 100% ROI because there comes a point where you have made enough money, bought all the stuff you had ever dreamed of, started thinking long-term, and focused on wealth conservation and slow growth rather than quick growth for a month or two — then back to being broke. I’m 10x happier getting 30–50% ROI and knowing it will be there one year from now and thereafter, than get 1000% ROI for a week then go back to zero.

What are the offers that are reasonably profitable and can be managed by a single affiliate? 

Broad-audience offers like auto insurance, solar panels, mortgage, quick loans to name a few. 

The time of solo affiliates seems behind us as media buying teams gain more prominence, is there money to be made (not just spent to gain some EXP) for those working solo?

You can’t make it solo, it’s all about opportunity cost. I say you need at least a designer who can pump out creatives while you network — learn what’s hot, and stay on top of what’s going on — and then use the creatives they prep to run campaigns daily, like clockwork.

How’s your blog doing? What are the most requested types of content and what are the most viewed?

The blog is down visitors-wise, it seems like a lot of affiliates switched to crypto. Also, a lot of people are lazy and much rather watch YouTube videos than read content. I don’t have time to make YouTube videos, they require a lot to research, write the script, film, edit — I just don’t have the time for that stuff. Writing is quick for me, I type super fast and can dump my mind in less than 1 hour and get back on with my day running campaigns and engaging with the community. I enjoy these things way more than filming and editing videos.

Judging from your blog, what is the direction affiliates are headed?

The affiliate niche is headed towards whiteness: less shady stuff, less cloaking, fewer scams. More legit services and new customers for businesses — the market is heading in a good direction for them. But it’s kinda negative for affiliates because F U cash isn’t so easy to come by anymore like back in the tech support/nutra/pin submits/trials days where you could rip-and-run celebrity landers and kill it with insane ROIs.

By the way, how’s your book doing? Are you going to write the 2nd part? 

The book was made to help total newbies get up to speed before they join my forum where we like to focus on actual campaigns and up-to-date challenges and not waste our time on newbie topics that are all over the Internet if you are capable of typing a query in Google search. 

So, your core vertical is lead gen — has promotion methods changed in the past few years, and what does iAmAttila’s lead gen campaign look like today?

Even in lead gen, the biggest change is the compliance factor. You need to be more “feature-oriented” in the ads and forget about the benefit approaches. Benefits in ads may be considered misleading or sensationalized, and most traffic sources hate that. Sadly, marketers are taught to sell benefits, but if we look at online marketing and what’s happening with the policies over at traffic sources it’s becoming way the opposite. We sell the features and do less of what they teach in marketing schools to avoid our ads being declined or ad accounts banned. 

What’s your take on NFTs (and the crypto vertical in general) and how “entrepreneurs” are making money on this promising technology?

I think NFTs are utter BS in the current JPEG sense. NFTs will have great usage in play-to-earn games and others where there will be an actual application for such stuff. But to pay a huge price for a stupid ass picture so that you can simply own it — it is plain stupid. The only use I see at the moment is for those who want to launder money or do some illegal shit fund transfers, then the NFTs are good.