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If you’re a new affiliate, one of the first niches you’ll probably explore with is dating. It’s a great niche. There are millions of single people around the world, and lots of them are looking for easy ways to meet. Thank god the Internet is here.

And as a new affiliate marketer, you’re probably looking at two very prominent traffic sources – Facebook  Ads and Plenty of Fish Ads. Again, both two great networks, but they do things a little differently. The way they act and perform to certain variables can create two very different outcomes. Hopefully, this post helps shed some light on how to go about and decide which traffic source to run on.

Let’s start with Facebook

Facebook has a lot of traffic. You’ve got a lot of single folks all around the world here, and that means internationally, you have a lot of options. I’m not talking UK or AU or any English speaking countries, either. The power of Facebook, currently, is in your ability to target hundreds of thousands of single people in Germany, Taiwan, Brazil, Spain or one of the other 100+ countries around the world. If you are a newbie on Facebook, avoid domestic US traffic all together and start with broad international targeting. Lots of easy money to be made here.

Another thing to consider is that with Facebook, you’ve got a lot more people to target. This typically means you’ll need a larger budget to test and keep things up and running. If you’ve only got a few hundred dollars for testing, avoid Facebook, or at least the larger countries.

A pro of Facebook Ads is that my ads typically last a bit longer. This means I don’t need to rotate ads in as often as I would with PoF. I’ve had ads that last me over a year with the right management.

Now on to Plenty of Fish

Plenty of Fish bases all its ads on a CPM bid scheme. What you bid is what you pay, basically, where on Facebook you’ll be better off running with a CPC bid. CPM traffic on FB is generally crap. While I like Facebook’s bidding better, PoF’s traffic is typically cheaper, especially for its English speaking traffic. This means if you have a lower budget, stick to PoF.

The way you’ll be targeting on PoF is much different, as well. While with Facebook you can go after interests, I typically go broad with international campaigns. International traffic on PoF just isn’t there yet (there isn’t enough to make any headway with), so I would recommend going with US, CA, UK or AU traffic on PoF. Instead of going broad, make micro targetted campaigns segmenting very specific people. Tailor write your ads and LPs to these people for huge ROIs. You will have to put a little more management and time into these guys, but it is worth it.

I also talked about ads lasting longer in Facebook, earlier. Well, PoF doesn’t have near the amount of scale as FB, so ads can die out in 1-2 days easily. The solution? Have lots of ads to rotate through. When you have a number of images performing well, pause some and only run a couple at a time. Pause them a day or two later and run your other ads, so on and so forth.

So, do you want to spend a little more money testing for more scale, or use your time for campaigns with big ROI on smaller spends? Depending on what kind of person you are, and your budget, this post should help you make the right choice.