Reaching Positive ROI on Google, Facebook, etc.

Yeah I concur .... budget for newbies mostly right out of the gate would be an issue.

And for the few with good start up budget; they tend to burn half of it if not all before therealise they've missed it somewhere, then they turn conservative all of a sudden. Becoming extremely careful and unwilling to test appropriately next time.

It's happened to us all .... even the best of us!

Now on "Availability of volume of traffic"

I think a great budget is highly proportional to tons of volume of traffic.....

(although not always in the case where on large networks like Burst Media, Tribal Fusion to mention a few, where the prerequisite is usually a good networking skill on top of that top dollar cushion you're resting on .... yeah like showing up at trade shows and sucking up to network reps, pouring them over a glass of Ciroc just so they can run your campaigns like a direct response marketer would as yourself and not as brands who scarcely care about eCPA .... more money than brains they got obviously)


Back to our usual less expensive barrier to entry platforms like first Facebook. It can still come at a steeply price for any newbie.

Especially due to the demise of organic reach on Facebook to our campaigns which now has every digital marketer resorting to FB ads to get it back up thereby skyrocketing the CPCs (both direct response marketers and brands alike)

Also Google.... whose eternal beef for all things Affiliate is very well known and likewise, newbies shouldn't go thru the trouble of getting traffic from Google i reckon reckon if you don't have your own product ... even the ole "bait and switch" gets you busted in a week if not sooner and as for advanced cloaking .... nothing 100% bullet proof is guaranteed.

And lastly other Display services like the RTBs is equally expensive and has a funny twist to it: Volatility of Its Traffic

This is the case where when driving traffic from an RTB like Sitescout and since you're constantly in a bidding war for traffic ..... you might not win every bid ..... for every bid lost no traffic sent.

Only way to get traffic is to become the highest bidder and that requires a fat budget.

Now these are the anticipated budgetary hurdles on all 3 platforms.

Suggested solutions to break success at low budget :

Use Bing: they like affiliates at least for now and it allows direct linking.

Use PPR (Pay Per Redirect) traffic sources: here the traffic is ridiculously low ... as low as $0.0002 per redirect .... you can learn more about this type of cheap and "rumored" effective traffic by googling "CPA Strike" and downloading a PDF. But be careful a mate of mine who's doing 50% ROI on DNTX last time time we spoke said he first went in the red $500 testing out RON on there before he made it back and did 50% ROI.

Close Direct Buys: You might find you can optimize a $250 a month direct deal with a publisher if you search.

My two cents....