Acquiring Arbitrage Traffic Without Investment: A Beginner's Guide
Discover how to make money online through arbitrage using traffic you can acquire for free without any upfront investment! Learn different strategies for acquiring free traffic proven by real case studies from successful affiliate marketers.
Affiliate marketing also known as traffic arbitrage is one of the promising areas of digital marketing that many people aspire to excel in. While traditional traffic arbitrage often requires some initial capital, we will analyze several ways that teach you how to earn money on traffic arbitrage without investing any money upfront.
What is traffic arbitrage, and how can you acquire arbitrage traffic without investment?
In simple terms, traffic arbitrage also known as affiliate marketing is the process of buying traffic at a lower cost and selling it to an advertiser or affiliate program at a higher price. The difference between the costs is your income.
Whether you're a beginner or an experienced marketer, working on arbitrage programs involves the following steps: You choose a product or service from an advertiser, set up ads for it, and earn rewards based on the actions of users.
For example, an advertiser may pay you $10 for each user registration on the service that you referred and $30 for every purchase made by those users.
There are several main types of payment for your traffic: CPC, CPA, CPL, and RevShare.
Let's briefly explain each of them:
CPC (Cost per Click): You get paid for each click on an ad. This method is rarely used and usually offers lower pay.
CPA (Cost per Action): You receive payment for a specific action taken by users on the advertiser's website, such as registration, a small purchase, or filling out a form.
CPL (Cost per Lead): You are paid a fixed fee for generating a lead, which could be a purchase on the advertiser's website or depositing funds. This is the most profitable model but also more complicated.
RevShare: You earn a percentage of the payments made by users you refer over their lifetime. For example, you may receive 20% of each deposit made by those users.
To start making money through affiliate marketing, you need to register on the website of an affiliate program, which you can find online. Then, choose a suitable vertical, which refers to the niche or category in which a product or service is being promoted.
Here are some of the main verticals:
eCommerce: Promoting products such as waterproof watches, children's items, and household goods.
Nutra: Promoting specific products like weight loss supplements, disease pills, or potency drugs. It's a profitable and relatively easy-to-learn vertical, but there are advertising restrictions for similar products on most platforms.
mVAS subscriptions: Attracting traffic for mobile subscriptions where users pay through their mobile phone balance. An example is personalized ringtones that replace standard beeps. Push advertising in platforms like MyBid can be used to generate quality traffic for this vertical.
Gambling and betting: Promoting online casinos and sports betting. It's a high-paying vertical, but there are restrictions on promoting it on large platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. It's also more challenging to bring quality leads compared to other verticals.
Dating: Attracting traffic to dating sites and mobile apps. It's a popular and profitable niche in affiliate marketing, and it's relatively easy to generate traffic without initial investments. Here, you normally get paid when a visitor you sent to the website registers an account.
Adult: Driving traffic to adult content sites. It can be promoted on a limited number of platforms, including MyBid, which offers high-quality traffic from its own sites.
Once you've chosen a vertical, you need to select an offer.
An offer is the advertiser's proposal to affiliate marketers, describing a specific product or service, traffic requirements, allowed advertising schemes, and the amount of compensation.
Where to get traffic without investments and start earning?
Affiliate marketing relies on leveraging social media platforms to generate traffic and monetize it. These platforms offer a large user base and various ways of driving traffic to your affiliate offers.
One simple and effective strategy is to create your own group or channel on social media and engage with users through conversations and interactions. However, it's important to avoid spamming as social networks have strict policies against it. Once you have built an audience, you can seamlessly introduce your affiliate products by integrating your referral link into relevant posts. Social media platforms remain a primary source for acquiring free traffic due to their large user base and active user engagement.
Here is a list of the most relevant social networks for affiliate marketing:
Facebook: With over three billion users, Facebook provides tools to promote affiliate programs through groups.
Instagram: Success in affiliate marketing on Instagram is more likely if you already have a well-established and popular account with a substantial number of followers. Starting from scratch on Instagram can be challenging, requiring daily posts of three to four stories with engaging photos.
Twitter: As the second most popular social network with approximately 400 million users, Twitter attracts a significant percentage of a global, financially capable audience.
Vkontakte (VK): This social network is suitable for promoting goods on the Russian-speaking Internet (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan), accounting for 20% of digital marketing in the CIS region. Also, there is a small percentage of users from Turkey, India, and Eastern Europe.
Pinterest: On this platform, users can create collections of images and share them with others. It's possible to attach a referral link to these images, allowing you to acquire clients without the need for traditional posts or banners.
Pros of using social media for affiliate marketing:
Abundance of groups and communities to engage with the target audience.
Effective tools for promoting your product.
Cons of using social media for affiliate marketing:
Requires significant time and effort to grow your community or profile.
Short video platforms
Platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts bring organic traffic to users by featuring their videos in the "Recommendations" section. To sell a product through these platforms, create accounts on all three and start uploading videos featuring the product or promotional materials provided by the advertiser.
To maximize your chances of success, you can diversify your videos by creating testimonials, demonstrating how to use the product, and highlighting its benefits. Over time, your videos will gain visibility and attract organic and targeted traffic. Patience is key in this method, and creating multiple accounts increases your chances of getting recommended.
An example of a video showing the operation of a vegetable cutte
Pros:
Quick content creation
Organic video promotion
Easy to scale.
Cons:
The process of acquiring traffic can be difficult to automate.
There is a risk of getting banned on the platforms if you violate their policies.
Case study: How to promote a gambling offer from TikTok and earn $1500 net profit through Affiliate Marketing
The affiliate used TikTok as a platform to generate free arbitrage traffic for promoting a gambling offer. He created videos showcasing people's reactions to big wins at online casinos. By posting approximately five videos daily on 30 different accounts, they increased the chances of their content appearing in the recommended video sections.
This is what the profile looked like when users landed on it. After subscribing, they followed the link in the description, which led to the advertiser's website. After a period of running this campaign, the affiliate received the following results:
The costs were as follows:
Purchasing a VPN account - $0.6
Buying phone numbers for accounts - $0.25 per phone number
30 accounts were created, making the cost of the phone numbers to be $0.7.
Total costs amounted to approximately $1.6.
Revenue earned: $1535.92
Net profit: $1534.32
In this example, the affiliate spent only a few dollars and earned over $1500. The result proves that short video platforms are a relevant and profitable source of free traffic.
Spamming on social networks
Another scheme of driving traffic is through social media spamming. Affiliates use various standard features available on social networks as a means to attract traffic, considering them both free and effective.
The primary types of social media spamming include:
Mass following (subscribing to multiple user profiles to gain attention to one's profile)
Sending private messages
Commenting on other users' posts
Spamming through the use of hashtags
By engaging in spamming tactics such as sending private messages or commenting with similar messages, affiliates can attract a portion of the audience to their products. However, it is crucial to note that there is a high risk of being frequently blocked since social networks actively combat this type of spam. Nevertheless, spamming remains one of the most popular sources of free traffic. Many online services offer automation tools that simplify routine tasks for affiliates engaged in social media spamming.
Pros:
Flexible tools for spamming (mass following, likes, commenting, private messages, and hashtags)
Ability to upload various types of content (videos, stories, photos) to the profile
Cons:
Frequent blocking
The possibility of shadowbans on the profile can be challenging to identify, leading to wasted time when working under such restrictions.
Case Study: Earning $9,000 in three months through dating spamming hashtags under Instagram posts
In this case study, an affiliate marketer chose to promote a dating offer on Instagram. They achieved a huge increase in organic traffic to their profile by creating posts and using many hashtags related to adult content (18+).
This is what the profile looks like, which users get to through posts promoted by hashtags.
By clicking on the link in the profile description, the users get to the landing page illustrated in the screenshot below:
By clicking any of the buttons on the landing page, the users got re-directed to the offer page where they could sign up to join the dating site.
After three months of consistent effort, the results were as follows:
Expenses: The affiliate spent only $2 on registering 15 Instagram accounts.
Revenue for three months: The total profit earned was $9,045.69.
Net profit for three months: The final net profit after deducting expenses was $9,043.91.
Spamming in social networks to this day remains one of the most relevant ways to get free traffic, which is proved by the case of this affiliate.
YouTube Channel
YouTube allows users to create and upload videos easily. It offers various benefits, including:
Social Networking Features: YouTube incorporates social network features like subscriptions, likes, and comments. These features help attract an audience using free methods and enable communication with subscribers.
Popular Search Engine: YouTube is the second most popular search engine, right after Google. By optimizing video pages for search engine optimization (SEO), you can achieve higher rankings in video search results and attract more traffic.
Exposure in Search Results: YouTube videos are also displayed in search results on Google and Yandex if the video page is optimized for specific queries. This additional visibility helps drive more traffic to the videos.
Users on YouTube are not only seeking entertainment but also looking for tutorials, tips, and reference information. This presents opportunities for promoting product offers (e.g., unboxing videos or gadget reviews) or services.
However, growing a YouTube channel comes with its challenges. The key difficulty lies in creating interesting and engaging content. To build and retain an audience, consistent uploads of new and exciting videos are necessary. Channel owners must maintain a high frequency of publications.
Pros:
Organic Traffic: YouTube provides authors with organic traffic through its internal search feature.
Search Engine Indexing: Videos on YouTube are also indexed by popular search engines like Google and Yandex.
Cons:
Content Quantity and Quality: Creating a large quantity of high-quality content can be challenging, especially for affiliates without prior experience.
Complex SEO Optimization: Optimizing videos for SEO is a complex process that requires careful research and understanding.
Case Study: Generating $1000 per month through Affiliate Marketing on YouTube
In this case study, an affiliate marketer decided to promote a crypto offer using YouTube. To attract viewers, the affiliate created a YouTube channel and regularly posted informative videos about binary options trading. Every 3–4 days, a new video was published.
To direct traffic to the offer, the affiliate included a link in the description of each video and the channel description.
An example of a YouTube channel created to send traffic to a crypto offer
To optimize the videos for better visibility, the affiliate used relevant tags such as "how to trade cryptocurrency," "cryptocurrency," "binary options," "lesson binary options," "binary options learning," and "earnings on binary options," among others.
By using effective SEO strategies, the affiliate managed to rank his videos at the top of YouTube search results within five months. He received organic traffic to his channel, which led to his earnings of $12,000 in the last three months of his work.
How to make money on affiliate marketing without investment by sending traffic from dating apps to an adult offer
Directing traffic from dating apps to an adult offer is one of the less spoken-about methods that can help beginners make money on traffic arbitrage without having to spend a single dollar on arbitrage. This strategy works well for adult offers that pay per sign-up. Once you've selected an offer, it's important to identify the ideal audience for it.
Typically, the target audience for these types of offers is men, and the best place to find men interested in adult offers is in dating applications. These apps can help you attract targeted traffic from both the CIS region and other areas. Below are the steps that show you how to make money on adult affiliate marketing offers without investments.
Step-by-step instruction:
Download the dating app, such as Badoo, onto your device.
Create a profile using pictures of a beautiful young girl. You can find these pictures on the internet, but make sure to flip them horizontally (mirror them) to prevent others from using reverse image search and realizing the profile is fake.
Set your desired country and apply any filters that match the target audience you're aiming for.
Start liking profiles and accepting friend requests.
Save any interesting conversations you have.Once you have a sufficient number of conversations, start engaging with men. Begin with a brief and standard conversation.
After about 5–10 minutes of conversation, direct them to the advertiser's website with a message like this: "Hey, I have too many messages to handle here. It's more convenient to chat on this website: *link*. My username there is *nick*." This encourages the user to visit the offer page of the adult site you are promoting and register.
Before starting the conversations, prepare a simple script to easily manage a large volume of messages. Once your profile gains traction, you'll receive likes, friend requests, and messages automatically. Your main task is to handle and respond to them on time. With a few days of work, the affiliate marketer received over 2000 likes, even with little activity on the profile.
Traffic is fast and easy to process.
With this strategy, you can earn your first affiliate commissions without any investment!
If your goal is to make more profit, then you need to use the money that was earned using this strategy to purchase paid traffic from other sources.
Ad networks are an alternative source of traffic that requires very little investment to get started
Ad networks are platforms that provide traffic to affiliates through various types of ads, such as banners and push notifications. They are a cost-effective way to start generating paid traffic and increase profits through affiliate marketing.
When working with an ad network, it's important to understand their approach and how they work with affiliates. For example, let's consider MyBid as an example. They operate on a fully-managed system, where each affiliate is assigned a personal manager who takes care of most of the tasks involved in launching and scaling advertising campaigns.
To effectively drive traffic through ad networks, you will need creatives. Creatives refer to the advertising banners that affiliates use to attract users to sign up for the offer.
When choosing an ad format, such as banners, pop-ups, or in-page push, it's helpful to consult with your manager in a fully-managed network for advice on the best format for your offer.
Here are some examples of creatives that could be used for promoting an adult offer:
While ad networks provide an affordable way to access paid traffic, it's important to be cautious about the quality of the traffic they provide. Some networks may have a high amount of bot traffic, which can drain your budget without generating meaningful results. However, platforms like MyBid ensure the quality of traffic by displaying ads on their sites.
Even with a small budget, you can start experimenting with paid traffic through ad networks.
Pros:
Requires low initial investment to get started.
Fully-managed networks offer the support of experienced managers.
Allows advertising a wide range of topics without restrictions or blocking.
Cons:
Risk of encountering bot traffic, so it's important to analyze the traffic quality of the chosen ad network.
Users may experience banner blindness, so it's necessary to frequently change creatives to combat this issue.
Alternatively, formats like Native Ads have been successful in addressing banner blindness.
Conclusion
If you don't have a budget, there's no need to worry — nowadays, there are plenty of opportunities to earn money through affiliate marketing without investments. However, instead of using money, you'll need to invest your time and effort. Begin by using free methods to acquire traffic, save up some funds, and then move to paid sources so that affiliate marketing can become your primary source of income.
