Affiliates talks: Timur Sharipov, owner of the «Avalon» affiliate team

Affiliates talks: Timur Sharipov, owner of the «Avalon» affiliate team


We’ve got another portion of written goodness for you today – an interview with Timur Sharipov, the owner of the Avalon affiliate team. Timur has told us everything about offer tests and Facebook bans workarounds in detail. We also talked about accounts, media presence, payout models (CPA/CPL), open positions in his team, and so much more.

If you struggle with working with Facebook, then keep on reading, we have a lot of interesting insights here!

 

1. Hello Timur! It’s only recently that you went public, so please, tell us a little bit about yourself. What did you do before affiliate marketing, how did you get here, and what results have you been able to reach so far?

Hi! I learned about affiliate marketing a long time ago. I tried to launch my first ad campaigns back in 2014, when I was a first-year student at the Institute of Industrial Management, Economics and Trade in Saint Petersburg, Russia, trying to find opportunities for making income online. I used to take different online earning courses, which is how I found out about affiliate marketing. But I didn’t have enough money for tests at that time, so I decided to get into one advertising agency. That way, I ended up as a targeted ads specialist at one of those agencies. I ended up working there for a year and quitting afterwards because I already hit my earning cap there. So, I had to think about what I could do next. That was when a guy I knew contacted me to ask me to go work in their affiliate team. They drove traffic to white offers with myTarget. I was happy to join them and worked in their team for a year. That was enough for me to understand what affiliate marketing is and what opportunities it can offer. Then I joined another affiliate team that was driving nutra traffic with Facebook at that point, which got me introduced to the whole topic of nutra and the fuzz with Facebook. So, I worked with them for a year and went off to build my own affiliate team, that was in January of 2018. That was when I created Avalon. The first team squad was 25 people. We weren’t making any social media appearances back then but we did drive nice traffic already. At the end of 2020, I had to break up the team due to the challenges of Facebook (that was the US elections period), and a lot of guys also burned out. I started driving Facebook traffic on my own in January 2021 and doing it well, making up nice cases for my work. So, I decided to go public on social media. I created my Telegram channel to share my results. Right now (November 2021) we’re experiencing growth once again. The team is 9 people and we have begun looking for teamleads and media buyers for Facebook work and other traffic sources.

 

2. You’ve mentioned that your potential media buyers undergo a very thorough review process to get into your team. Can you please describe your criteria? Are you hiring at the moment? What working conditions are you offering?

Anyone who wants to get into our team goes through a series of interviews and psychological tests. This gives us an opportunity to get the contestants better and try to predict their behavior in different situations. We value soft skills over hard skills.

We’re looking for teamleads and media buyers for different traffic sources. We highly rate such qualities as love for hard work, consistency, optimism, sense of purpose, communicative skills, open-mindedness, love of self-development, self-management, adaptiveness, and creativity.

If any of the readers possess the above-mentioned qualities, then we’ll be glad to interview them. We’re only looking to hire people for work in Saint Petersburg. Employment conditions are discussed individually.

 

3. Is media presence good or bad?

It’s obviously a plus. The main advantages of media presence are:

1. Expanding your social circle;

2. Shorter ways to find new people for your team;

3. Special attention from affiliate networks and advertisers that are looking to give you special offers.

 

4. You drive nutra traffic from Facebook. How is Facebook affiliate marketing doing right now? What payout model (CPA/CPL) do you choose and what GEOs are you currently working with?

Yes, we do nutra with Facebook.

Well, if we’re talking last fall, then September and October went very well. And November started more chaotically, our traffic went down by 70%. We’ve already begun recovering from that and are growing our performance rates back.

We mainly work under CPA. GEOs – South America and Asia.

 

5. How do you test your promo materials? How many split tests do you run, how many creatives do you make? And what’s most important, where do you find transit pages?

We start all our tests with affiliate networks’ managers’ advice. We ask them about certain verticals and topics, GEOs that show nice results. then we’re picking our transit pages for the chosen offer (2-10 transit pages). We find them in different affiliate networks and spying services (Spyover, Adplexity, Adheart). After we find those transit pages, we start testing them: drive traffic to 3 transit pages as a split test, driving 1000-3000 clicks for each. Then we disable those pages tested and start testing 3 new ones, and so on. As a result, we have 1-3 leaders that we then split test again.

After these tests, we can determine one leader transit page that we then start improving on our own: changing its characters’ images, testing different fill-out forms, reviews, interface and design, etc. After we’re done deciding on the transit page, we start working on our creatives: creating tree-structures in our mind maps that we’re using to express the ways we can sell our offer. Then we make 5-10 creatives for each and start testing them. This way, we can understand which approach suits our audience best in different GEOs.

 

6. Please tell us which verticals other than nutra you’re currently working with?

We only work with nutra right now, this is where all our attention is pointed at. Other than nutra, we’re also interested in SS/Trial and crypto because these have much higher payouts than nutra.

 

7. What can you tell about traffic sources? Facebook alone tends to tire people out and some teams also test other traffic sources at the same time. What about you?

We only work with Facebook right now. But we’re soon starting to test TikTok and native ads networks. By the way, if any of the readers have expertise in these traffic sources, you’re very welcome on our team. We’ll provide you with the best working conditions and build a new source department together. Text us.

 

8. Are you ever planning on becoming an advertiser and driving traffic for yourself? What do you think the pros and cons of this situation are?

I’ve had a couple of such offers. But I’m not considering them at the moment because I’m determined on building a good affiliate team, this is what I’m focused on. I try not to get preoccupied with other projects.

 

9. How do you feel about payout frauds? Do you think they decrease the quality of the entire market and that Facebook is always trying to “perfect” its advertising mechanisms because of those people? And that other, normal publishers only have to suffer because of those frauds?

I feel neutral about them. This is forbidden within our team and I don’t hire such publishers. I care for people being creative, knowing how to analyze their work, optimize traffic, work with big budgets, manual bidding, calculate ads rates and measures and understand what they indicate. If a person knows how to do it all well, they won’t find it hard to assimilate to new traffic sources or new verticals. These are the kind of people I want to see on my team. And as for billing frauds, I can only call it reselling stolen traffic. This is nowhere near analytics and creativity. And when a business model is based on fraud payouts, then it’s actually very sad, because Facebook can stop this once and for all very easily.

 

10. Please tell us about your criteria when choosing accounts to work with. Many people think that it’s nearly impossible to launch ads from farmed accounts these days and only use rented or trend accounts. What do you think?

We’re using farmed and trend accounts at the moment.

We started building our own farming department in November and we’ve already started working with our first batch of accounts that have been through advertising restrictions. These are some great quality accounts. We’re about to create way more.

And, we’re only using high-limit trend accounts. It’s also best if those accounts already have some spending limits, this makes it easier to launch campaigns. If any account sellers are reading this article, I want you to know that we’re ready to buy accounts in bulk. Just contact us.

 

11. Facebook is cruel. Right now, almost all publishers have their own launching technique. Could you please tell us about your launching algorithm?

This is our algorithm right now:

Farmed accounts that have been through advertising restrictions + a fan page on these accounts + trend accounts.

Launches and unbanning are done through farmed accounts. So, if accounts get banned, we file to get unbanned and try to get our banned accounts back.

 

12. How do you fight the most common Facebook challenges? Fan page bans, risk payments, microspending?

These are the most common problems on Facebook these days. I can briefly tell you about how we solve these issues.

Fan page bans:

1. Buy ready-made fan pages that have been through advertising restrictions;

2. Get your fan page unbanned on your own using farmed accounts that have been through advertising restrictions.

Risk payment:

1. Test different payout algorithms;

2. Test accounts that get payouts on a certain card of yours;

3. Test proxies for your accounts’ GEOs.

Right now, we’re using Qiwi payouts, attaching payout cards to trend accounts through our farmed accounts.

Microspending:

1. Warming up accounts;

2. Spending limits/debt accounts;

3. Launching through unbanning.

 

13. Please tell us about advertising restrictions. How many accounts of yours get through them? Maybe you drive traffic without passing these restrictions first? Do you generate documents to pass through advertising restrictions or do you do something else?

The situation with advertising restrictions is always changing. Sometimes, 80-90% of accounts pass through them. And sometimes, all accounts get banned forever.

We use both document generators and templates to design them on our own.

Right now, accounts undergo advertising restrictions pretty well (70-80% come out fine). We’re using document generator sources.

 

14. Could you tell us a little more about your tests? How much money do you put into one test, how do you pick your offers?

I elaborated on tests in the 5th question.

I can add that when we find a good ad approach, we always start to scale it to other GEOs.

As an algorithm, it looks like this:

1. A manager recommends us an offer;

2. We look for and test transit pages;

3. Testing approaches and creatives;

4. Split-testing other affiliate networks/offers of the same topic;

5. Translating and scaling our chosen approach to other GEOs.

We don’t have certain test budgets. The publishers’ goal is to test all transit pages for the given offer. Then test all approaches and creatives. They have to get the result and know what to do next. So, it doesn’t matter how much money they spend.

 

15. Do you do automated ad launches? Some publishers think that automated launches don’t impact Facebook’s trust points and launch 200-300 accounts a day, others believe that automated launches are considered bad and that it’s better to launch ads on 10 accounts but do it manually. How do you feel about this?

We try to maintain the quality of our work and use high-limit warmed-up accounts. Our publishers do no more than 10-15 launches a day, so we don’t need to use automated launching. Everything’s manual.

 

16. Does it ever happen that your accounts start to compete with each other during the auction? If so, then how were you able to determine that and fight that tendency?

Yes, this happens. If you launch a lot of accounts for the same offer, then applications will start growing in price. The solution to this problem is to launch campaigns using different approaches and never launch too many accounts with the same offer. It’s always better to have 2-3 campaign approaches active and scale them with time.

 

17. Please give some advice to those that have read the whole interview.

Work hard, test your hypothesis, take notes of all of your results and tests to later analyze them. Be creative and consistent. Read articles less and work more!


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