GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 16 - May 2011

the second month and made an ad- ditional $4,200. This really made me open my eyes! So I started to tear apart the industry and came across everything from individuals willing to advise you every day on what to watch, signal indicator services that you pay monthly for, robots you can buy/sub- scribe to and more advice than you can find on playing poker – and almost all came at a premium and had an affiliate program. Can you say “cross-sales”? So let’s say I have convinced you that this is something worth looking at. . . . Let’s take a look at the existing (available) sta- tistics on search volumes and some real stats from Google Insights (and some ac- tual forex PPC campaign tips). Take a look at FOREX and BINGO interest over time: ( See Figure A ) This should show even the novice affiliate that the market is there and is growing on-par with bingo. The difference is that almost everyone knows about bingo, but very few know about forex. Tips for forex PPC and organic targeting: The top targets are Argentina, Mexico, Italy, U.K., U.S., Middle East, Denmark, Sweden, Kenya, Mongolia and Pakistan in terms of search volume. Top clickthroughs are the Middle East with ads in Arabic. The top converters are the Middle East, Argentina, Mexico and Italy. The demographic split looks like this: Male 23-33 40% Male 34-43 60% Male 44-53 40% To help get you started, here is a prime keyword list for targeting my two picks, English and Arabic (let Google automati- cally set your geographic targets): ( See Figure B ) And finally . . . the cons One more important detail to note is to be very careful when researching white label offerings. Many fall short. They have less- than-attractive call-center support, they • • • • ◦ ◦ ◦ don’t offer the full package (like MT4), their commission structures are self-serv- ing, or they have many other issues I have come across. Know what you are doing before you give your traffic to anyone. For someone who intends on building affiliate networks, the general rule in gaming also applies here: 10 percent will generate 90 percent of your revenue; 90 percent will generate 10 percent. I still recommend getting into a two-tier program because of the anticipated future of the forex market. Additionally there are also binary options, which go alongside forex. Most companies offer forex and bi- nary options, and these are basically the same thing, down to the costs, clicks and conversions, but at one-third the traffic. These work like forex, except you invest/ bet 100 percent of your chosen amount on a preselected time frame, and it’s all or nothing. You can either lose 100 percent or gain up to 91 percent in some sectors in a matter of minutes if you predict the rise or fall correctly, unlike forex, where you only risk the amount the funds decrease. In either case, you can predict that funds will rise or fall. Figure A Figure B FOREX BINGO 70 Making the case for forex