Antoine Moreau is the commander-in-chief of Mobidea, a technology-driven network in the mobile affiliate marketing industry.
Trusted by over 40.000 affiliates, Mobidea is specialized in mobile subscriptions, pin submits, sweepstakes and app install offers, on a global scale. Antoine’s team has one goal: to work along with affiliates in the struggle for monetization success. Today we sat down with Antoine to get his take on what it takes to be successful in the affiliate marketing space.

1.) Imagine you are a newbie affiliate entering the industry today. Which vertical would you choose? What would be your strategy for success?

Nowadays, affiliate marketing requires users to invest in both learning and tools.

The first step is knowledge. You need to gather a lot of information so as to be able to clearly understand the difference between all the traffic sources available; between the different tracking platforms, SaS, or hosted solution that requires some IT skills, different types of offers, how to create appealing prelanders, and banners, and much more.

I would recommend to any newbie that starts in affiliate marketing that he/she first join different online communities that generally charge a monthly fee for that access. You should also read Mobidea’s free media buying and affiliate marketing academy available in http://academy.mobidea.com. There, you will get a lot of information, check case studies, and become able to understand some of the most complex industry aspects.

The second step is to get a subscription to a good business intelligence tool such as Adplexity and start studying the competition. It’s crucial that you gain a deep understanding of the type of offers your competition is running via each traffic source. You also need to check what kind of prelanders and banners they use so as to become well-prepared.

Next, get a piece of the action! Inspire yourself by analyzing what your competition is doing and try to find your own marketing angle. At this stage, you need a small budget to run experiments in several ad networks until you have a campaign that becomes profitable.

Once you have a profitable campaign, try to scale it up as fast as possible. Because of the increased competition, good offers last only a few weeks before your angle is copied by the competition.

As I’m sure you will be able to understand, becoming and remaining competitive in affiliate marketing in 2016 is going to take a huge amount of effort and a certain level of capital. This is why having analytical skills to study the large amount of data you collect via your tracking tool coupled with IT skills is definitely a plus. Indeed, you will need those assets if you want to increase your chances of succeeding in this competitive industry.

2.) The traditional route into affiliate marketing was always via the creation of a blog, gaining experience in growing and converting an audience, and then perhaps learning how to buy traffic. Does that approach still work?

This method is clearly a much more difficult choice now. Why? Because of the amount of competition and the time it takes to scale it up. I would never recommend this course of action to an affiliate starting in 2016.

3.) We have seen a number of networks introduce new platform features or interfaces recently. Is technology investment by networks increasing? If so, why?

The several companies selling SaS affiliate platforms as a service won’t like my comment but I truly believe that investing in a custom platform and technology is the key to create competitive advantages. We all need to keep coming up with new ways to differentiate ourselves in the market by constantly innovating our product. Competition is good and I’m glad that networks are investing more in technology. The reason why investment is always good news is that it stimulates us to go farther faster. We started to build our IT team 5 years ago. Now, we have 25 engineers that are part of the group and we plan to double this number in the coming years.

4.) Does the difficulty in predicting which creatives will be accepted to run by Facebook and other social platforms make them still useful or too much bother? Why?

There are indeed more and more rules to run affiliates’ offers on Facebook. I have been hearing people say that FB marketing is going to die but the fact is that some affiliates are still crushing it. Being able to adapt to an ever changing environment is the key for lasting success in affiliate marketing.

5.) How can an advertiser tell the difference between a good network and a poor one?

Advertisers need to check a network’s reputation. Moreover, they should analyse the number of years it has been in business and the team’s size. These are some good indicators of a network’s credibility and of its ability to tackle crucial issues such as fraud prevention and advertisement compliance.

6.) What are your two or three key performance marketing-related predictions for the next year?

We’ll probably have to deal with raising concerns by mobile content advertisers regarding the quality of the traffic. This has been the norm in the CPI vertical for a while now.

Next year, I believe that we’ll experience an acceleration of the consolidation that has been happening since 2014-2015 in the industry between medium-size players, or big companies buying smaller ones.
By the way, we are looking to acquire a growing company with a good technology and an ambitious team. If this description fits you, feel free to contact me to discuss how you could benefit from our scale!

About  Antoine Moreau
Antoine has carried multiple projects for international internet companies. His strong vision, pragmatic intelligence, and uncanny ability to seize new opportunities on programmatic/automated media buying have all led him to create a global mobile performance marketing company trusted by thousands of affiliates worldwide.