The realities of the affiliate marketing industry are forcing affiliates to seek new ways of acquiring traffic. This year, more and more teams are turning to influencer traffic. Some are already profiting from it, while others have doubts, including questions such as:
- How much to pay the influencer?
- How to plan the funnel for the player?
- How to monetize the project?
- How to use a bonus approach to attract traffic?
Pavel Panin attempted to answer these questions in his recent video. He also shared how he drove influencer traffic during the World Cup. You can read the text version of his speech in this article in just 5 minutes. You can also find a lot of useful information on money making and affiliate marketing in our telegram channel.
Finding an Influencer
The speaker talked about two models for finding influencers. The first involves selecting a real person who becomes the face of the project. Their responsibilities include warming up the Telegram channel audience, which includes:
- Hosting discussions (so-called "circles");
- Posting content.
A charismatic candidate will have more trust from the audience and will be more willing to make deposits for promoted products. In this case, the entire funnel is built around one person, who is the face of the sales channels. They need to be paid a good salary since they risk their reputation, and the future of the entire project is uncertain. You can find such a person through a job exchange by posting a relevant job listing.
The second option is to find a suitable candidate among popular content creators or active Instagram users. You should write an appealing message offering collaboration. It's advisable to explain that this is a new project that will help the influencers become even more popular and gain expertise in a new field.
Pavel also mentioned that you can promote a Telegram channel related to betting without a public face. In this case, an anonymous author manages the channel, and success depends solely on the content. However, this approach has one significant drawback: users may have less trust when they don't see a real person.
How Much Money Should You Pay the Blogger
Influencers who have already participated in such projects know their worth. They typically demand both a fixed fee and a percentage of sales. Bloggers usually receive around 30% of the profits.
In rare cases, you can find an influencer with a large target audience who has already worked in the sports betting industry. Such individuals may agree to collaborate for no less than 50% of the affiliate marketing team's earnings.
If someone doesn't have their own audience but has a memorable appearance and charisma, affiliate marketers may need to invest in their development. These individuals are often willing to work for a fixed fee since they don't understand all the mechanics of influencer traffic. The average market salary for novice bloggers is around $300-400.
About the Sales Funnel
The player's path in the influencer collaboration scheme is shown in the following screenshot.
The algorithm for creating the funnel is as follows:
- Register two Telegram channels. One will be the primary channel, while the other will be private for upselling.
- Build up subscribers in the Telegram channel. People are often brought in from Facebook or by paying for ads from influencers. In the latter case, you can choose a more targeted audience. Advertising on established channels costs around $500. You can also attract conditionally free traffic through mass video publications from various TikTok accounts. Pavel mentioned that he was able to gain over 5,000 subscribers for his Telegram channel using this method.
- Actively engage the audience with posts and short videos providing information about how much other participants earned in the casino. Screenshots can always be fabricated, as advised by the influencer.
Application of additional audience retention methods. One such method is the "betting ladder." The influencer honestly informs subscribers that a bet may not succeed. In this case, they propose an alternative solution, but for it to work, the user must place a x2 bet. This method aims to achieve the following objectives:
- Increasing audience loyalty by providing accurate information and options for addressing a negative outcome.
- Raising the average product check since users will make larger deposits.
- Increasing the number of satisfied customers because an increase in deposit frequency results in more wins.
- Satisfaction of the advertiser with the quality of traffic since players do not drop out after making their first deposit.
Pavel recommended that: “The funnel should be reasonably complex. Otherwise, the traffic won't satisfy advertisers as it will appear too schematic."
Working with the Influencer
If you're collaborating with an influencer who is not familiar with betting traffic, they need to be trained. The video's author mentioned that for this purpose, he recorded videos in the Russian language and sent them to his Brazilian influencer. The influencer simply needed to mimic the gestures, convey emotions, and engage their audience in Portuguese.
During the initial stages of collaboration with an influencer, their training will consume a significant amount of time for affiliate marketers. However, the channel will be filled with content of the desired quality, and over time, the team will develop a skilled influencer who can independently attract an audience to deposits.
Funnel Testing
Once the funnel is set up, it needs to be tested. This involves running ads with a small budget to identify all user pain points. Users may not like certain buttons in the bot or may not understand how to make payments. Test runs allow you to identify and fix such issues at every stage of the user's journey.
The Telegram channel should have responsive support that collects feedback and conveys it to the team for quick bug fixes. The team's main task is to ensure that, at the end of testing, they have a perfect funnel. No user should drop out due to misunderstandings or technical issues. This directly affects the number of deposits, and thus, the profit.
Monetizing the Project
To ensure the project generates revenue, it's necessary to establish a sales department that engages potential customers. Moreover, everything should appear as if the influencer is interacting with users, serving as the face of the channel. Subscribers become accustomed to the influencer, and private messaging further fosters trust. This, in turn, encourages more active deposit contributions.
In addition to monetizing traffic through CPA and Revshare models, there are many upsell options. As an example, Pavel mentioned how they and their team pushed their Brazilian Telegram channel's audience. They sold subscriptions to predictions from a bot. This way, they earned money directly, bypassing advertisements.
The team also organized so-called bonus matches, where the likelihood of the desired outcome was almost 100%. In reality, all these predictions were made up by the team. In the main Telegram channel, they posted screenshots showing that the prediction published in the private channel had succeeded.
This way, they upsold in two stages:
First — when selling subscriptions to the bot. It was available in the following options:
a) 2 weeks;
b) 1 month;
c) 3 months;
d) 1 year.
Second — by selling VIP predictions, which users could only access with a higher purchase.
Monetization of traffic for advertisers happened as follows. Affiliate marketers abandoned the idea of forcing subscribers to deposit heavily. Instead, they opted for a more native approach, making people unconsciously make the right decision.
They posted odds for upcoming matches from the most popular Brazilian bookmakers on the channel. The product they directed traffic to always had the highest odds. They achieved this by negotiating with the advertiser to increase the odds using the team's promo code.
Differences in the Mentality of Residents of the CIS and Brazil
Pavel mentioned that Brazilians are very laid-back people. The team had a case where they agreed to collaborate with an influencer, made an advance payment, and he began working. After a couple of days, he said he got sick, and sometime later, he said he didn't want to be part of the project.
"In Brazil, people simply don't want to earn. You have to persuade the influencer to create some content, then remind him a thousand times, and still double-check his work," complained Panin.
Also, Brazilians are misled with their reach and the number of posts on their profiles. They present someone who will manage the channel, and discuss all the working details, but, in reality, a completely different person does the job.
Almost all influencers Pavel collaborated with demanded a 100% advance payment. They simply ignored any feedback about their work. From this, he concluded that doing influencer traffic in Latin America is quite challenging.
How They Managed to Achieve 100 FTDs per Day
Despite the aforementioned difficulties, Pavel and his team managed to boost their Telegram channel to 100 daily FTDs. This was possible because they were in the right place at the right time.
The team arrived in Brazil just before the World Cup. According to statistics, 95% of the population in the country is passionate about this sport. During each World Cup match in which the Brazilian national team participated, life in the cities came to a halt, and everyone was glued to their screens.
Thanks to this engagement of Brazilians in football, the team was able to launch and grow their project. However, a few days after they started receiving 100+ deposits per day, the leads became more expensive.
Conclusion: Networking is Everything for Us
In conclusion, Pavel shared how he and his team maximized their project. When the lead cost started to rise, they came up with an idea. They met some local guys in a Brazilian bar and offered to collaborate.
The essence of the collaboration was that these locals had to wear branded t-shirts with a QR code embedded with the affiliate marketers’' referral link. The Brazilians posed as official brand representatives and offered their compatriots to place bets on their favorite team using the QR code, which provided a 50% bonus on their deposit. For every goal scored by the Brazilian team, users who registered via the referral link received $0.5.
Thanks to all these incentives, during one match between the Brazilian national team and the Argentine national team, the guys collected 285 deposits, spending only $120 on it.
