The “TICKLE” Method: How to Legally Manipulate Major Native Ads for MILLIONS in Cheap Clicks
After $2.67 million in spending on native ads, James Van Elswyk discovered three steps to make native platforms spit out the cheapest and best clicks available. What you’re going to learn will be the meat and potatoes of how to go from 20 percent ROI to 120 percent ROI in two days (sometimes less)…
No fluff, no bloat, just step by step technical instructions on how to trick ad servers.
Speech by James Van Elswyk | Co-founder, Purple Leads
James Van Elswyk Speech Transcript
Hi, my name is James Van Elswyk. Thank you. And I forget my cue thing.
My name is James Van Elswyk. And I absolutely, fucking love media buying.
I don’t just like it. I don’t just do it as a job. I’m completely obsessed with it.
Whether it is solving riddles, optimising, figuring out how to scale. Making things work, it’s something that I truly enjoy almost more than anything else in my life these days.
I want you to understand who I am and why I really want you to listen to me today.
I really was excited to be invited to this event because I’ve been in the process of learning how to buy media and make money online.
And I really want you to listen. And take something away from this both on a granular level with things that you can apply immediately as well as on a more theoretical level and stuff that you can use to kind of push your career forward.
The Beginning of the Journey
Right now I own a company called Purple Leads.
We are a kind of three-pronged endeavor. We buy media internally. We spend roughly around a million dollars a month between Facebook and native ads and Google.
We do lead generation, white-hat lead generation as well as e-commerce now.
The white-hat lead generation being solar energy, refinance, debt, settlement, a lot of these evergreen verticals and niches.
We also have a network that offers these Facebook friendly type of offers for affiliates to be able to send traffic to.
I want to go through my path to here, my start of this journey so that you guys have a better understanding of where I come from and how my history can be applicable to what you’re trying to do as well.

James Van Elswyk – Corporate Fat James
I came from the corporate world. This is corporate fat James. I was living the nine-to-five existence of corporate America.
It was something that I realised, after time, was a little bit too difficult. A little bit too hard to make money. A lot of work. Not making as much as I could for the use of my time.
I decided I wanted to exit and move into something a bit easier. And that’s when I found the idea of affiliate marketing.
Outsourcing
I started out like everybody else in here before I even knew what a click was.
I think that most of us in here use Upwork. And I find it pretty, I don’t know, I guess at this point, amusing.

James Van Elswyk – Upwork
I was looking for all the basic things that everybody needs. Chopping PSD to HTML, setting up Google Analytics, setting up a tracker, which I still can’t do. But fortunately, I’m able to hire people now that can take care of this for me.
Joining the STM Forum Family
The other step that was really important to me was STM.

James Van Elswyk – STM
This is where I started getting a full understanding of how to make money online.
A full understanding of other people that were involved in this business to kind of give me examples. And I think this is one of the reasons I’m really happy now to be involved with this.
I remember where I started out before I knew what a click was.
And now it’s a chance for me to go and give back to the same people as they’re starting out their journey. So it’s important for me to give back now to STM.
Level of Obsession
This is a very important part for me to transmit to you guys that the level of obsession and the level of intensity that we pursue the goals of making money online is really going to be the difference.
You know, the level of intensity is going to decide how fast you get to where you want to go.
I truly believe that I can do anything when it comes to marketing online. The question is
How long will it take me? And how much money is it going to take till I get there?
And I think that if we all kind of pursue our affiliate marketing careers in this manner, then there’s a high level of success.
All the information that we need is online. Everything that we need to know to make things happen is available.
So it’s a matter of how much money do we have to test on campaigns? And how much time do we have to make this happen?
To kind of demonstrate my level of obsession, I was living in Amsterdam, I had just lost about $65,000 on Yahoo Gemini, absolutely failed. Could not figure out how to make traffic work.
And I realised that traffic was the most important thing in what we do.
I did not have a Facebook rep. I was barely buying on Facebook. I was buying on Taboola and Outbrain, I did not have reps.
And I decided, oddly enough, to move to Tel Aviv, Israel.
Moving to Tel Aviv, Israel
Tel Aviv is one of the epicentres of the world for media buying. This is where the gaming industry is at. This is where the binary is at, as well as Facebook, Taboola, Outbrain, AppNexus, SimilarWeb.
It is really a centrepiece right now in the world digitally.
The Facebook office is 2 blocks from my home. Across from my home is my office. So I’m 2 blocks from Facebook.
I moved there, I don’t have a rep.
I’m just gonna get closer to Facebook, was my idea.
In the bottom of the Facebook building, there’s a coffee shop. And every single morning, when I got up, I walked over to that coffee shop and I sat there.
I had my morning cup of coffee. And I just tried to kind of suck in the power.
Hoping that my CPM’s would go down, that my CTR would go up. And that I would really kind of gain the opportunity to eventually get a rep.
We did. We got a rep.
We started getting a nice relationship with Facebook.
It’s kind of a funny thing with this is I asked my rep 6 months ago. I said look, “How much do I need to spend to get a path so I can just…” I want to eat in the cafeteria every day. I wanna be able to just walk into the Facebook office, eat in the cafeteria.
And he kind of gave me a little number and it took a few months but we got there.
Once you hit a high enough numbers with Facebook, they’ll do a lot for you.
So we’ve got Taboola. We have a beautiful relationship with them.

James Van Elswyk – Taboola
Facebook, as I just mentioned the beautiful relationship, they’re very helpful to us. And their level of access is really big for us.

James Van Elswyk – Taboola + Facebook
And finally Google as a partner, we’re just starting to work with now more and has also been very helpful.

James Van Elswyk – Taboola + Facebook + Google
The Tickle Method
Basically, the foundation principle of the tickle method is the idea of getting something that I want by doing something kind of nice to the other person or the ad server in this case.
So when someone is getting tickled they are absolutely defenseless.
If I’m sitting there and tickling someone, I can take anything I want out of their hand. I can basically do anything to them. Without kind of being violent, I’m able to get what I want.
And the idea behind this is that ad servers, whether it be native ads, whether it be display, whether it be Facebook, they’re all going to give us something we want if we give them something that they want.
And when we start to think of them in this relationship, we’re able to kind of hack the system. And this is what I want to talk about today.
The tickle method is something that I use on a grand scale whenever I’m working with an ad server to trick it into giving me cheaper clicks or better delivery, etc..
I’m going to give you granular examples on the native platform that you’re able to use immediately to get cheaper clicks and more profit.
How To Tickle on Native Ads
We’re gonna talk today about native ads even though it’s applicable to many platforms. We’re gonna talk about native ads first.
If you’re not buying media on native ads, you’re making a mistake.
Everybody loves Facebook. I love Facebook. I spend the majority of my money on Facebook. But Facebook is getting more expensive.
It’s 37% more expensive CPMs this year than last year.
It’s getting more competitive. There are problems with stability. Q4 very expensive.
Native advertising is a manual platform. It does not go up and down. Has a very low reliance on an algorithm so it’s very consistent. You can scale it. And you’re going to need to have native advertising in your repertoire as these years move on. (Recommended Reading: Native Ad Networks Automation: Behind the Algorithms)

James Van Elswyk – How To Tickle
Okay, so when I want to tickle, how do I get this here?
Step 1. I live in the data. I refresh constantly. I take notes.
And I make sure that I am utterly part of the flow of what’s going on.
And the reason is that when you want to find something strange or you want to find an anomaly, which is really the key to getting these hacks, you need to be in it enough that you notice the weird things.
If you’re not logging in all the time, if you’re not paying very close attention, you’re not gonna notice the little things. And it’s the little things that make the difference from the guy making 5k a day or $500 a day to the guy making 20.
It’s about finding this edge.
And the edge is noticing the one little thing that does something weird. And very often we can see what this is and we see it creates profit.
So you live in your data. You find the patterns that are strange.
And then you have to go backward and reverse engineer the cause.
What’s making this happen? Can I do this again?
Once I figure out what this lever or reason is to get these cheap clicks or that’s creating this weird situation, now I want to figure out how to recreate this environment to make it happen again.
So now I can control my own profits.
The Value of Refreshing
Okay, refreshing is good. Refreshing is addicting. Refreshing is like a drug.
Every time that we see things going up and we’re getting our nice green as opposed to our red, it gives us this nice feeling on the inside.
But refreshing also really has a value in what we do.
Unlike Facebook, which is really an amazing platform and is automated, machine learning, strong algorithm. It’s doing all the thinking for us.
But the important thing is, on a native platform or display, is that we need to be the machine in machine learning.
We need to be taking in the data consistently in an organised fashion so that we’re able to be the machine.
So that we can make the decision as opposed to leaning back on Facebook or something that is more automated to figure out what should be done for us. It’s a manual platform.
We are gonna have to control what we need to do to make our money.
Align Your Systems
Step one in this is, align your systems. And it’s just important for me to put this in here to save you guys any troubles.
When you are in there refreshing all the time and you’re in there trying to find these different things, just make sure everything’s in the same time zone.
Make sure that you know that your traffic source and your offer are in the same time zone so you can always match up your data.
And the last thing is, take notes.
If you’re just going in and refreshing just to get that nice buzz of making money, you’re not getting anything out of it.
Whenever I go in and refresh or take a look at my stats, I write down the time and I write down the status of where things are so I can kind of go backward and reverse engineer what’s going on. Or see when something happened or why something happened.
What Are The Levers
Alright, when I mentioned levers or the things that I’m able to do to kind of adjust and kind of recreate these hacks, they’re the things that affect the cost.

James Van Elswyk – Adserver Levers
So on native platform, the biggest things that I can use to affect the cost is going to be the bid and the click-through rate.
All of these factors can be affected. And we’re going to use a few different ones here in my examples.
But these are really the major things that we can play with to adjust what’s going to happen inside of the native platforms.
Geo Swapping (Page Engagement 2.0)
So step 1, we’re going to talk about – and I really like this one – I call it geo swapping. And it’s kind of a page engagement 2.0.
A lot of you probably buy media on Facebook. And there’s a nice hack that I use there that’s very similar to this native hack.
And I’ll explain the Facebook one and brief. So if you’re not using it, you can get some real benefit off this.
Facebook, they like to give more delivery and cheaper clicks not just based on the CTR of your ad but also based on the relevant score.
How engaged are people with your ad? How much do they like? What’s going on? That’s the likes, the shares and the comments.
One thing I like to do is when I run my Facebook ads, I will also run at the same time engagement campaigns, likes campaigns, engagement campaigns for shares, at the same advertisement.
And I’m falsely increasing this relevant score. And I’m getting cheaper clicks.
What I like to do here with the geo swapping is basically the same thing, except I’m using countries that have high CTRs to trick the ad server.
How Do We Decide On Pricing
Now, how do we decide pricing or how is pricing usually decided on native ads?
It’s the click-through rate. They just want to see a high click-through rate.
If a lot of people are clicking on the ad, they’re making money and they’re going to give you cheaper clicks.
So what I like to do is, if I’m advertising, let’s say in the United States, and the click-through rate is on average, let’s just say 2.
What I’ll do is, I will throw in a country that has a very low conversion rate value for me but has a very high click-through rate. Malaysia, Philippines, India, these are countries that click a lot on ads.
So I will take a high click-through rate country and I will add it into one of my campaigns to trick the ad server.
Hence the idea of tickling.
I’m giving them what they want, I’m giving them a high CTR and they’re giving me what I want, which is cheap clicks.
So it’s an exchange where I win and they win.
So when I’m building my campaigns, I’ll either start out with a lot of high CTR geo’s and slowly kind of remove them from my campaigns till I’m just left with the geo I want to target.
Or I’ll run the geo I want to target and occasionally just pop in geo’s that have a high CTR to trick the ad server into giving me more cheap clicks so I can make more money.
Best Impressions
The 2nd thing that I like to build off of here and this is also applicable across a lot of platforms is best impression.
Whenever you are launching a new advertisement in an ad server, whether it be Facebook, whether it be native ads, whether it be display, they’ve got to assign it some type of CTR at the beginning.
They’ve got to make a decision real quick, what is the value of this ad? What is the click-through rate?
And in order to do so, they want to give this piece of content as much testing or as much quality testing as possible to assign it this click-through rate.
So what ends up happening is that when you launch a new piece of content, whether it be a new campaign or whether it be adding content to a campaign, they’re gonna give you the best impressions they have.
So what are the best impressions?
The best impressions are the ads at the very top of whatever type of media you’re using. At the top of the page, above the fold, the real nice high creamy placements.
So they’re gonna give you these just enough to test your image. But it’s the best.
This is what you want. You want those impressions right there for your highest performance for your campaigns.
So what I kind of figured out was, well instead of waiting for them to give me these impressions or instead of just having them give me when they’re testing new placements, or when I bid a lot of money to get them, if I constantly upload new images, I’m tricking the ad server into always give me the best impressions.
So again, it’s a tickle.
I’m giving them something nice. I’m giving them a new content. They’re giving me back something which is my cheaper clicks.
So again, I’m kind of just hacking the ad server and to give me what I want by just doing a little twist on the way that they work.
Revving The Engine
This is something that it’s useful across again all the native ads and display and we can also see it in Facebook.
I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Tim Burd and the bully method, which is the high level manual bidding. It’s the same thing here with the natives.
We want to always buy those top premium impressions.
So what happens here, when I start a native campaign, I first set the budget as low as they’re gonna let me run. And I want to mark the campaign image with a very high score.
As I said, at the beginning of the campaign, they need to establish what they think the starting CTR and the starting value of this image is.
I want to trick the ad server at this time to give my image a falsely high CTR.
So what I do here is when I set that budget as low as I can, then I set the bid as high as I can go. And I just smash it.
I know I’m going to lose money. I know that I’m going to just take a little bit of a hit on the front side but the key here is that I’m getting that image marked with this high score.
After I’ve revved the engine, I’m basically able to figure out where I need to drop down to now so that when I finally drop it, it’s going to take off.
It’s got this high CTR. I burned through that first budget.
And now when I drop it and put it in at a regular bid, I’m able to see the high CTR take off. I get the cheap clicks and I’m able to keep lowering the bid because I’ve tricked the ad server into still believing that it has this high CTR, that it still has this high value.
Geo Swapping + Revving The Engine + Best Impressions = More Profit
So between geo swapping and revving the engine and best impressions, I’m consistently finding little ways to make more money than everyone else.
And this is really the key to the idea of the tickle method.
When I’m running ads and you’re running ads and someone else is running ads, especially on native ads, there’s only so many things to optimise.
We’re gonna rip each other’s ads. We’re gonna rip each other’s landing pages. We’re gonna run to the same offers.
So why is it working for one guy and it’s not working for the other guy?
And the reason is things like this, you’ve got to go in and find the little opportunities that you have to make the extra money otherwise everyone’s just running at the same level.
Everyone’s just running on it on a level playing field.
And what I’ve found is by finding these little hacks. You’re able to then take your profit from your 20% ROI where you kind of run it but you’re like a little nervous about it, the CPMs go up and down, to spreading that margin out to where you’ve got the 40%, 50% margin.
When I first started running natives, as I said I lost 65,000 on Yahoo Gemini. That sucked. That absolutely stung.
I thought I knew what was going on. I figured I’d start working at it. I was still holding on to things.
And I was seeing other people making money on Yahoo Gemini’s, so I assumed I could do the same. And boom, I lost my ads.
I started running on Taboola. I started running solar, which is one of the offers that I’m still running till today.
I got on Taboola. I did the same as everybody else. I kind of figured out what everybody else did and I was like making okay money.
And then all of a sudden, when I started to implement the revving of the engine and the geo swapping, I have my first 20k profit day.
When you go from losing $65,000 on a platform to making 20k in 1 day, it’s a very changing experience.
And just like we’ve been discussing here about the levers or recreating the environment, when all of a sudden, I played this game. I had to figure out why it happened again.
And I think that this is really the key takeaway from what we do here. You have to live in your data. You need to be obsessed with your data.
You need to be the person that is refreshing all the time and analysing so you can find your own tickles.
It’s embarrassing but my laptop is next to my bed.
And when I crack a campaign, I am logging in once or twice at night to see what’s going on because I don’t want to lose the flow of what’s going on in my campaigns.
I want to find other opportunities to tickle the ad server to give me what I want so I can be the one that basically wins at the end of the day.
How To Learn Your Own Tickles
Okay, how do we learn our own tickles?
Live in your data. Look for these things. See what other people are doing. Try to recreate. Take a look at the odd things that happen.
There are some crazy exploits and hacks that people have found the last couple of years on Facebook or they have found on native ads or display.
And it’s always the weird little thing.
Maybe they last for 2 weeks, maybe they last for 6 months or a year.
These are all still running. All of the ones I just gave you now are still things that are applicable today.
But there are always new ones popping up and you must be paying attention to this.
You’re not going to be the person that is just crushing and making so much money if you’re not the one looking for the small edges.
And I think this is something that I really wanted to impart to you today is to understand this.
The guys that are really, really crushing.
Everyone sitting here, why are you doing 20k? Why are you doing 30k profit per day?
It’s not because they’re doing the same thing as everyone else. They’re doing the same thing as everyone else plus a little edge.
I don’t have access to any information more than you have.
I’m not any smarter than anyone in here.
But I’m just always looking for the little thing because I’m involved in that obsessive pursuit of living inside of my data.
(Recommended Reading: Tips: Scaling Straight Sales On Native)
Mantra For Media Buyers
For my media buyers, this is my mantra for them all the time.
- Live in your data.
- Refresh
- Take notes
- Think
- Sleep
- Learn
- Profit.
I have a team of media buyers. I have to learn what to do and then give it to them.
And how do I decide who’s gonna be a media buyer that I keep and a media buyer that I’m going to fire?
What I do is I come in before work, before they arrive, early. New media buyer, they just started handling campaigns. I get there early and my first question is “How did we do yesterday?”
If they’re a media buyer that already knows what happen the campaigns the day before, they’re going to be a keeper.
If you’re someone that is inside of your stats every single day knowing what’s going on, you will be successful in this business.
If you are organised with the information that you take, you will be successful inside of this business. But this is the difference and this is what it’s going to take to make it.
So to close things up, the tickle method.
Figure out ways to give the ad server what they want, so you can get what you want.
It’s important that we’re always looking for this little bit of edge because affiliate marketing is just an edge.
That’s all that it is.
It’s the people that try harder and go and find the edge on how they can make more money than everybody else.
Thank you very much.
Q&A
- Eric:
- All right, thanks James. Are you ticklish?
- James:
- Am I ticklish? Yeah, of course I’m ticklish.
- Eric:
- So we just have some questions here. So the first one, they told me last time I did this that there should be like a big screen that’s just like, “the sale is coming”. But I wanted to talk a little bit about a project that we’re working on together.
- James:
- Yeah.
- Eric:
- Called the Native Ad Master Class.
- James:
- Yes.
- Eric:
- So we’ve done the Facebook master class. And we thought we wanted to tackle native next because we think it’s a really good opportunity for affiliates. So why in your mind is native such a good opportunity for affiliates versus something like Facebook?
Biggest Advantage of the Native Platform
- James:
- I think is a necessity. I think that we’re not able to depend on Facebook anymore. I think Facebook has become pretty unstable. So that you can’t just naturally dial in the amount of money that you’re going to make like you used to, I think this is a big step one. Step 2, the native platform is manual, you control it. You’re not at the mercy of some algorithm. So if you have a winning campaign, and then you want to scale it up on Facebook. Let’s say you got to figure out, “Okay, am I gonna increase the budget a little bit. Am I gonna clone it? Duplicate it?” And then you do this and you got to wait 3 days to see what happens. “Does it optimise down? Does it stay the same? Etc.” On the native platform, since it’s manual, when things are working you just turn up the budget. This is your scale. Just increase the budget. If it works at $10 a day, it’s going to work at $1000 a day. So I think that this is a big advantage of the native platform. And again the stability goes all the way into the idea that you can kind of “set it and forget it”. I just spoke about living in your data and refreshing and finding your edge and finding your tickles. But once you find those, once you spend the first 4-6 weeks cracking your data, then you’re going to be able to have the ability to basically “set it and forget it<” and let it run. So it’s something that you can just set up and it consistently makes you money every month.
- Eric:
- Which is the affiliate dream.
- James:
- It is the affiliate dream. It’s not like Facebook where you need to refresh all the time. Change the image, see what’s going on, things are changing. You make something work, you get it running it takes 4-6 to six weeks. Once it’s rolling, maybe you change the images once a month. You keep uploading new content but there’s nothing else to play with. I think it’s a superior platform.
- Eric:
- But in those early days, you’ve got to grind.
- James:
- Yeah, you have to crack it. When you take on a new vertical or a new offer on natives, you have to live in the data really for the first 4-6 weeks till you understand how it works, what’s going on, notice the discrepancies, notice the anomalies. Figure out how to adjust the bids and play with all this stuff to get it where it needs to be so that you can just let it ride.
Native Ads Master Class
- Eric:
- Nice. So this Native Ad master class, you’ve created the free trial, which is just something people can go to courses.istacktraining.com/courses/native-ads-master-class, go talk to our booth about it. But with the free trial, we’re then gonna be releasing the course in the New Year, what’s your goal for people taking this?
- James:
- Yeah, so basically, as I kind of reiterated here, I’m pretty obsessed with this stuff that we do. And I’m pretty obsessed with learning. And I had to spend quite a bit of money losing to learn. I guess my goal with this was to give people a chance to learn natives without having to kind of go through the head-banging that I had to and stubbing my toe across everything. So I wanted to lay out pretty much a copy and paste method to run through natives. Since it’s manual, you really can set up a copy and paste campaigns. So I wanted to put together a course that shows everyone, on a theory level, how things work from a higher view, as well as a just insert here, copy and paste setup so you can start making money on native ads very quickly. So that you don’t need to go really deep in the hole, cash-wise to learn. I wanted to put this into a course with homework and an understanding of how to test and get things right so that you can have a really easy landing to enter into natives.
- Eric:
- Because it can be expensive right? There’s so much inventory out there. It’s not as cheap as pops or redirects or anything like that. So I imagine you could burn some cash early, especially if you didn’t have the right guidance. But for people wanting to get into it, say they did take your course, what would they need in terms of cash to start tackling it and really start to understand the systems that you need to be profitable?
- James:
- That’s a very difficult question.
- Eric:
- Yeah.
Work On An Offer With A Low Payout
- James:
- So on our network, we have some offers that have a very low payout and some that have a high payout. So when it comes to learning any of these platforms, there’s a cost to learn. We can’t learn if we don’t spend money because we need to buy data. We need to try. So what I like to recommend to people getting into the game is, work on an offer with a low payout because you’re gonna need to make conversions to optimise a campaign. The cheaper the conversions that you’re needing to make to optimise, the less that you need to spend to figure out if something’s gonna work or not. So I think that you could get in the game anywhere from 2k-3k if you want to go for lower payout offers, up to 5-10 if you want to go for a more expensive type of things.
- Eric:
- And again, that’s not gonna float your career but that’s gonna give you enough to see what a profitable campaign looks like.
- James:
- Yes.
- Eric:
- And from there, when you want to really scale native ads, you got to have a bankroll, I guess, right?
- James:
- Yeah, when you really want to scale natives, you need to have a strong partnership with a network or whoever’s buying your traffic. We’ve had a lot of situations where we had guys kind of blow up. And they just didn’t have the money. And we saw like they kept just hitting capping areas. And eventually, you contact them, and just like, “Listen what’s going on? Do you need some money to make this happen or what?” You got to either get a front from the network or you need to get some friends to throw in because when you find a real winner, there’s no time to wait. You need to step on the gas and get as much out of it as you can, fast enough. So the amount of capital you need is — if you got a winner, it’s as much as you can find, as much cash as you can throw at it.
- Eric:
- Which is the other great reason for this versus things like Facebook, maybe.
- James:
- Exactly.
- Eric:
- Because when you step on the gas, it’s like a linear progression.
- James:
- It’s a very safe bet. It’s money in money out.
The Future Of Native Ads
- Eric:
- Very cool. Nice. So, with this Native Ads Master Class, starts on January 1st or January 15th, we think. I wanted to ask about how you see native ads maturing over the next few years? How do you see it? Facebook is constantly evolving and I think that’s because it has this super smart algorithm that’s going in there and their constantly layering things on there. How do you see native following that trajectory? How will they be maturing over the next couple of years?
- James:
- This is a good question. I think that what’s going to happen on native ads is not so much how they’re going to mature, but how they’re not going to mature into the way that Facebook got. So let me go backward on it.
- Eric:
- They’re not a social network.
- James:
- Exactly. And also they have different focus and different barriers. They’re younger and less profitable ad servers, okay. And like anything else, this is a business. And if you take a look at the progression of Facebook or Google or anyone else, they run really relaxed and loose levels of compliance when they want to make money. And then as they make more and more money, than they get a little tighter and a little stricter. And if you look at the natives, they have not been really hitting the profit levels of Facebook. So you can still run a lot more aggressive. There’s no account banning. There are no tons of ad rejections. So I think that this is gonna maintain for a while, which is a huge edge. The 2nd thing is, native advertising is very profitable for the websites that they have the ads on. So you’re gonna see the number of websites that you can advertise on and really the volume that you can run continue to grow more and more. So I think that what’s gonna happen is native ads will become more expensive.
- Eric:
- Yeah.
- James:
- I think the prices are gonna stay about the same. I haven’t seen them raise up the last couple of years very much. And I think they’re just gonna be more opportunities there. I do believe that a lot of people will start leaving Facebook to go to native ads because it’s getting so expensive. But I haven’t seen it yet, but I think that this could also possibly happen.
- Eric:
- So is native working? Like what’s the mix, is native working really well on lead gen or Purple Leads, your company, you guys are lead generation company.
- James:
- Yes.
Native Ads On E-commerce
- Eric:
- You’ve got offers that work there. Does it work for e-commerce as well?
- James:
- Yeah. Now, recently, it’s been amazing for e-commerce. Native Ads work around the board. If you take a look at what native ads really are, there’s a different quality of traffic based on the quality of the website that the advertising is run on. So you’ve got some pretty trashy native ads where you see the offers for fungus and tinnitus and these different types of things. And then you’ve got your high-quality native ads, which is where you see your solar and your refinance. And recently, e-commerce has really hit. We’ve started to see a lot of these best gadgets of 2017 or the Christmas presents of the year. And it’s a new avenue to get people to buy. People that are on native ads usually have money. They’re usually a pretty well-off consumer. So if you’re able to find anything that has a nice sale value to it, will usually sell on native ads.
- Eric:
- Nice. So if people wanted to get more information from you, if they wanted to really dive in with you personally, what would be the best avenue for that?
- James:
- So we’ve got a couple of different ways to do this here. I’m pretty into this. I mean I really like it and I think I kind of iterated this when I was speaking but it’s also something I want to reiterate now, I love this. I love this shit. I love media buying. I like talking about it. I like learning about it. And I’m always open to talk about it. Add me on Facebook, hit me up on Facebook Messenger. I really enjoy helping people with this on an intrinsic level. I guess step 2 is that this year, really in a couple of days, we’re doing an elite retreat where we’re going to really dive in, myself and a few guys a lot smarter than I am, and we’re going to dive in and really examine how to buy media, how to scale businesses, how to hire and all of these things personally. It’s going to be a group of people, not a classroom setting, but more of a dialog where any question can be asked to kind of figure out what to do. I know that the villa angle is sold out. But Eric and I kind of have talked about it, and we want to try to do something with day passes. So I would just say, look if you guys want to learn media buying, if you want to get better, it’s a brain job. And as we said, it’s a matter of how much and how long. Anybody can do anything they want if they keep at it for a long time. But when we have the opportunities to go to learning events and masterminds and events like this, it speeds up that process. So in 2 days – it’s in 2 days?
- Eric:
- Yeah.
- James:
- In 2 days.
- Eric:
- 9th to the 12th.
Take Advantage Of Learning Opportunities
- James:
- In 2 days, we’re gonna be there, we’re gonna be learning. We’re gonna be working on this and helping people with their business. You really should come to something like this if you want to take your career further. If you need to change your plane ticket, do it. If your girlfriend is waiting for you at home, she can wait a few more days. You need to always take advantage of learning opportunities. You need to, in your career, set aside a budget that you’re going to spend on learning every year. I mean people go to college spend 50 grand, 60 grand and they get nothing back. Even at the level that I’m at, spending a million a month on media buying, I still go to all the masterminds that get to every year because just 1 or 2 little learning tips is going to pay for it. So if you haven’t signed up for the mastermind or looked at it, come talk to me. Let’s make something happen. We’ll try to put something together to still fit people in. But I think it’s important to try to access us directly. And really figure out what to do next with what you’re doing.
- Eric:
- And it is a Facebook elite retreat. But after what you’ve just said here, like but you bring the native aspect to the table and really getting people to open their minds to not just focus on that platform but see the huge potential that’s in native. It’s gonna be a valuable part of the experience.
- James:
- Yeah, I think there’s a lot that everybody needs to understand with what we do. There’s a lot of moving parts whether it be how to hire on oDesk. If you’re a one-person affiliate and you want to start having employees, how do you build a team? I’ve got a pretty large team of media buyers. I’ve got people that do motion graphics. I’ve got people that do copywriting, programming, landing page, offers.
- Eric:
- How do you train media buyers, that’s something we get all the time.
- James:
- Totally. How do you train? How do you hire? I’ve created kind of like a mentor program so that I can teach new media buyers to do what I need them to do and learn to let go. There’s a lot of things like this that are investments in building your business when you learn these different assets. Facebook, I love and I can’t wait to talk about and really teach about. Native Ads, obviously, are also close to my heart. But just the actual business and all these different moving parts of media buying, I really I’m excited to talk about.
- Eric:
- Yeah, it’s gonna be a good time. Cool well, thanks everyone for the warm welcome here. Everyone give James a warm round of applause!