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I love the dating niche. It’s easy money once you crack it, and its even easier money once you learn how to do it internationally, and no, I’m not talking about every other English speaking country out there. This is actually going to be, what I think, a very simple, but hopefully, very informational post for all of you struggling affiliate marketers out there.

The Offer

Here is where you’ll have to do a little research on your own. Find an international dating offer you think will do well. For me, it can almost be a gut feeling that makes me pick promoting one offer over 100 others. Other times, when I feel like spending a lot, I’ll test them all. The best way to go about this is to really hit up your affiliate manager and ask them for some internal numbers. I know you will probably be looking at “top offer lists” but I’m going to tell you something I’ve never published before here…

Many of the top offers, once they get to that stage, fail to perform. In fact, I’ve run several “top offers” before they were so and they crushed it for months at a time for me. Then, once they get up there, they crash and burn. This is due to increased competition which drives click costs up, usually kills lead quality for the advertiser (stop being so shady, affiliates!), and can stretch an advertisers budget meaning more shaving. This isn’t to say every top offer is a loser – I still run some here in there, but my best offers are usually completely new to networks before thousands of other affiliates bombard it with traffic from who knows where.

Step outside your comfort zone and try new things. Look for offers with a simple conversion path. Ignore payouts. So long as its over a couple dollars, you’ll be okay. I’ve had profitable international dating affiliate campaigns on $1.20 payouts, before. Go down the conversion path to get into the mindset of a user. You can use Google Translate to get you through the tough parts. Just make sure if its a leadgen offer, the user wouldn’t have to fill in 50 pages of information before the conversion pixel fires.

Want some suggestions? Be2 has offers in a ton of countries, and the offers convert well (especially with a landing page). I see Cupid has now gone international with an offer called “Ange de L’amour” (either that or they completely ripped the logo) – a French offer. Offers for countries in SE Asia will get you tons of traffic for less than penny clicks on Facebook and some display networks. Brazil and Portugal are some great countries to put early efforts in to (If anyone needs some Portuguese translation done, hit me up and I’ll get it translated for you at a small cost)

Research

We’re not going to be doing an Quantcast or Alexa style research here. The information and stats you’ll get outside of the main English speaking countries is pretty limited. And, come on, we’re not trying to promote an education degree for rocket science – we’re pushing dating at lonely, horny guys and crazy batshit cat loving women. If you aren’t sure how to go about that, get my consulting. </plug>

The most important thing to get down in your ad copy. This is simple, simple, simple! You’ll be gathering data on your own using Plenty of Fish or Facebook. We’ll be looking at 1 core analytic – click through rate (CTR). CTR is probably the most important aspect of international dating campaigns, because the click costs are so cheap for non-English speaking countries you’ll wish you started advertising there from the start (for some of you that follow me on Facebook, you might have noticed my post about getting 540 clicks for 55 cents. This is for a couple Asian dating campaigns, so 1/10th cent clicks are completely viable here).

Anywho, back to gathering data. We’ll start off with a simple English dating campaign. Pick a general dating offer, or one that is already profiting for you, and set it up on PoF or Facebook. Choose 1 image you think will perform well. I’ve stopped using cleavage shots on Facebook, and stick with clean shots, shoulders and up, with the camera angled down at a smiling girl. Something like this. If you’ve gotten the huge image pack from my email list, there is a few in there. Use just 1 image. You probably won’t be making a profit on this campaign anyways, so think of what you are about to do as an incredibly cheap investment into a future of lots of dating monies.

Write 10 different ad copies. More if you want. Make them all different. Play with fear. Go the simple route. Make a complex ad. Make one talking about meeting a girl tonight. Write one about meeting the girl you will marry. If you can’t be creative about it, I can for you. We’re then going to set up our general dating ad at our main demographic – Men 25 – 40 for a typical, general dating site. These guys will take your ads into a little more consideration than horny 18 year olds.

Set your budget at $50 – $100 and just let the ads run. Perhaps you’ll pick up a few conversions, perhaps zero, but you should be getting clicks. Conversions will depend on the offer, so if you pick a bad offer you probably won’t make much back. Again, this isn’t your goal. We want to see our top performing ads.

Now, to pick your top performing ads, first, see if any got consistent conversions after going through that $50 – 100. If it was just 1 or two here and there, ignore the statistic and move onto CTR. Take your ads with the highest CTR ((clicks/impressions) * 100) and then get to translating them. If you need Thai, Portuguese or Tagalog translated, I have guys on my team that can do that for you – however, for everything else, I recommend OneHourTranslation.com. They’re amazingly fast, you’ve got a lot of different people that can translate for you, and it’s extremely affordable. For a few Facebook/PoF style ads, you won’t have to spend more than $20 – 30, probably less.

Now stick them to your offers with hundreds of images. This is the very, very simple process I go through to get things rolling. Many times, its down to the offer. Sometimes, some offers are just shit for the countries traffic, or they expect too much for the amount of data they need for a conversion, but there are plenty of great offers that should help you over come any losses you might obtain. And losses should still be extremely low. With click prices in some of my listed countries, you shouldn’t have to spend more than 20 or so dollars to fully give an offer a decent test.

How do you test landing pages? Much in the same way you test your offers. Create your simple set of ads, split test English ad copies and designs, take your best performing landing page copies and translate them. Is a landing page required? No, direct linking works great for me, many times with 200%+ ROIs, but when I throw landing pages up, even stupid simple ones, they double my returns.

Difficulty: 1.5 out of 5

International dating is simple. My ads are almost always consistent performers across the countries and offers I test. While some offers might not perform at all, others might, or the country might just be a dead end (I’ve found Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong to be very difficult, but that is probably due to the very international climate there).

Final Thoughts

It takes money to make money, and my testing methods prove this. You can go ahead and wing it, and if you are lucky you might make it, but my stats have talked for me. Taking the time to look at those stats and how I got things right, then replicate that success out internationally has helped me to the stage I’m at now. International dating is still a highly unexplored area by most affiliates, simply because many are too lazy to take the time to accurately translate their ads (Google Translate =/= accurate). It’s cheap and can be highly rewarding so jump on it, and focus on it until you make it work!

Oh, and if you liked that first pic, I’ve got more on my old Thai girls blog.