Fresh off his participation in panel discussions at the recent YNOT Summit, YNOT sat down with George, the Business Development Manager for the Clickadu digital advertising network to talk about the key components of managing your own advertising and marketing campaigns.

Clickadu launched in 2014 and its advertising network is comprised of over 7000 websites across over 220 countries. George’s responsibilities at the company include managing relationships with Clickadu’s affiliates and media buyers on the traffic supply side, which has given him valuable insight into the operation of digital advertising and marketing campaigns.

YNOT: Where should webmasters and companies start when it comes to setting up a campaign?

George: Start with a plan! I know that it sounds obvious, but a lot of us are not good at planning stuff. So, first of all you need a 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 can be any size, but it needs to be clear.

After you’ve set up you goal (or goals), think about investments. By that I mean not just the 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 part of your investment portfolio. After that you can move to portfolio analysis – evaluate the strong and weak parts of your portfolio, comparing it 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 starts to get colored in and you can move to the next stage.

YNOT: Where can people find relevant traffic sources and good places to advertise?

George: After you’ve completed your portfolio and considered 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 your strengths. By doing so, you will educate yourself and learn different sides of your niche. It’s highly likely you’re going to find one or two promotion sources within your existing portfolio and you can grow those.

In general, digital marketing has several options for promotion of a product, brands or an “offer” (as we call it). These options include social network traffic, Search Engine Optimization (if you have a website), in-app traffic, display ads in Google (or any other search network), advertising network traffic, email 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 other hand, adult ad networks have an open policy for 18+ content, but it’s way harder to target interested users.

YNOT: Can you break down some approaches for promoting sites, brands and products through these various avenues?

George: Let’s look at a few of them, one-by-one.

Social networks: Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, Tik Tok, Telegram, YT – these are your best friends here. Get an account, learn how they function and get familiar with the content policies of that source, what’s allowed and what’s not, and make a small plan of how to approach for each. 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-send messages with your promoted profile link. For a Tik Tok you need an account with short videos – no nudity, just lingerie, posing and dancing.

Advantages – it’s organic traffic, it’s free, it’s consistent and it’s targeted.

Disadvantages – short time to grow your audience, possible account bans if you cross any lines.

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 to approach the network. The best way is to start with click-based ad formats with your creative assets. Also, you can always count on an account manager’s expertise and even with creative assistance.

Advantages – fast start and easy to scale, diversity of ad formats, personal manager.

Disadvantages –limited targeting of traffic, paid traffic.

Email traffic: Try to collect as many emails of your users as possible, through any legit means, in order to target your audience with content and opportunities to follow you and get more of you.

Advantages – free traffic, loyal audience, direct access to your users.

Disadvantages – the time it takes to collect and grow your email list and the need for a reliable mass mailing solution.

YNOT: Once I’ve executed the initial plan, what should I be doing a month in, or a year in, or even five years in?

George: You can delegate and affiliate! One of the most reasonable moves, once you’ve grown stable income and made some steps towards your name – maybe a personal website with your profiles, links and juicy previews – is to start to delegate parts of your promotion to a third party. The hardest part here is tracking and reporting. You either need to have software for it (a tracking system of some kind) or run a flat media buy.

You can work with a broker or you can go out with paid affiliate program on the CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition, paid subscription) and/or revenue share (pay a % of sales to the those who refer them). The deeper you’d like to go here, the harder on a tech side it will be. But you know what – take small steps and learn.

Back in the day, there was absolutely no info about how to run online ad campaigns, or how to market your sites. Today, there’s gigabytes of educational courses (both paid and free), informative articles, showcases at trade shows, success stories you can refer to, etc., all of which you can examine and learn from. Don’t hesitate to do so; it’s important to educate yourself and invest in yourself.