If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’
This is a true story, keep reading.
I was at an affiliate marketing conference back in 2016.
I went into the hotel restaurant to have dinner and sat down at a booth by myself.
From the booth next to me, I hear a guy say, “hey, you eatin’ by yourself?”
I reply, “yes” and he asks if he can join me. Of course I say yes.
He was also there for the conference.
We were all wearing the same lanyards around our necks, which made it easier to strike up a conversation.
After talking with him for about 10 minutes he tells me he used to be in the “adult industry”… as an “actor” (read: p0rn star, lol).
He continues to tell me that he got into the marketing game by creating arbitrage sites.
An arbitrage site is a website that makes money by basically buying and then reselling traffic.
For example, lets say you have a blog about sports.
You might use native ads to drive traffic to your blog posts and your average cost per click might be $0.05.
Your goal is to make at least $0.06 from each visitor by getting them to click on the ads on your site.
Sure, not everyone will click but some will and you’ll make money from each one.
Anyhoo… back to our conversation.
He continued on, telling me that it was getting harder and harder to turn a profit from these sites.
CPC’s were rising.
Facebook was cutting organic views from posts big time and he wasn’t getting nearly as many free eyeballs on his sites.
This is the same strategy viral sites like ViralNova have used to get millions of free clicks every month.
They relied heavily on people sharing their posts on Facebook to get that free traffic.
They needed as many free visitors as they could get to offset the high CPC’s.
Hopefully this is making sense. It’s simple, really.
Buy a click for 5¢… sell a click for 6¢. That’s the goal. Make more than you spend.
Only problem is, you need to spend THOUSANDS of dollars upfront to get these types of sites rolling… hoping that people click your ads and you actually turn a profit.
For that reason, the guy I had dinner with decided to get into CPA marketing… which is the reason why he was attending the conference.
After dinner, I headed up to my room to do a little more research on traffic arbitrage.
Of course, I’d heard of arbitrage years ago.
Marketers have been doing it since the early 2,000’s online. It was nothing new.
I just wanted to see what I could find.
Initially, my research resulted in nothing more than a few thin case studies that left out the most important details.
Then, I stumbled onto a post from a paid affiliate marketing forum.
It was all about traffic arbitrage.
They showed half the post for free but you had to pay to join the forum to see the rest.
So I joined.
I spent FOUR HOURS with my face glued to my laptop as I read through everything I could find on traffic arbitrage inside that forum.
Most of what I found was about people using native ads to get cheap traffic to a “viral type” site.
But there was one thread from someone who was using extremely cheap traffic sources to both buy and sell traffic.
It was very intriguing to me.
So I started digging in to see if you could really make money with this stuff.
Let me remind you of what “gets ME excited” when it comes to making money online…
I like passive income.
I like “set it and forget it.”
I like evergreen methods.
I like simple money-making systems.
I like inexpensive strategies and easy to implement blueprints.
What I discovered about buying and selling this specific type of traffic fit that mould perfectly.
It “checked every box…” you could say.
I had that giddy feeling you get when you stumble onto to something new.
Something that makes total sense.
Something that you think you can actually do. Like, you can visualize yourself doing it.
Something that makes you stop everything you’re doing, and everything you were planning to do, and completely hijack’s your mind.
There was no way I was gonna wait until morning to test this out.
That same night, propped up at the desk in my hotel room, armed with nothing more than my trusty ‘ol, beat-up 2013 13.3″ MacBook Pro… I launched my first arbitrage campaign using this type of traffic.
From start to finish it took me about 2 hours.
I set up the lifetime budget of the campaign to $20. Just to test the waters.
I chose a very specific category to show my ads in.
A category that matched perfectly with my arbitrage site.
And I chose one very specific device to show my ads on.
A device that would display my arbitrage site beautifully and would give me the highest probability of success.
I submitted my ad campaign for approval.
After staring at the screen for about 20 minutes, I decided they weren’t going to approve it any time soon.
I closed my laptop and went to sleep.
My alarm went off a 6:00am.
I grabbed my phone. Opened my email. And, frantically scanned my new messages looking for one from the ad network.
Oooh, found one! It came in at 4:49am.
Except, it wasn’t the email I was looking for. The subject line said, “The Budget of Campaign ‘XXXXXX’ Has Been Depleted”.
WHAAAAT?!!! Holy crap! My mind was blown.
Never did it cross my mind that there was THIS much traffic available. When did the campaign actually go live?!
I went back to my new emails and there it was, the “Campaign Approved” email was right below the “budget depleted” email.
They had just approved the campaign at 4:43am.
Yep, it was live for a whole 6 minutes before it completely burned through my $20 budget!
6 MINUTES!!!
In those 6 minutes, my brand new arbitrage site received 7,407 targeted visitors.
That works out to be roughly $0.0027 per visitor. INSANE!
How much money did I make back?
Well, that’s how I learned the hard way that Google hates me with a passion, lol.
I was using AdSense to monetize the site. I followed all of their rules, even the really stupid ones, and I made sure I was compliant before I submitted the campaign.
Little did I know, about a month earlier they decided (internally) that they weren’t going to allow publishers (me) to drive this type of traffic to their site…
So, they banned me… AGAIN.
Good news was, I had actually made a profit! It was only $2.33 but, hey… it was still a profit.
Forget about Google. I didn’t need them anyways. There are 20 more advertising platforms just like it.
I knew I was on to something.
Fast-forward to present day and I’m still crushing it with this type of traffic.
Interested in learning more about this strategy?
I’ll be covering this, and MORE, inside my brand new Mass Traffic Masterclass.
I’m giving all of my email subscribers (you) a special discount of $150 off.
This is a time-sensitive offer, though.
Enroll In The Mass Traffic Masterclass Now To Claim Your Discount
Dream big. Take action.
Duston McGroarty