admin 
INTRODUCE YOURSELF
It’s Ian Fernando here. I do online marketing for the past 20 years already. Been an affiliate, media buyer, and advertiser. I own a software company. I sold two software companies, sold a social community recently. Yeah, I’m an all-around marketer online.
CURRENT WORK FOCUS
Nowadays, I’m doing a lot of lead gen, and a lot of social traffic. I do a lot of TikTok lead gen specifically in debt, finance, home repair, home renovation, and things of that nature. But all on TikTok.
TIKTOK VS AFFILIATE MARKETING
TikTok is just an easy platform to get on just because it’s so automated on their side. The algorithm is so powerful that you can literally throw up your ad and give it a couple of hours and get a conversion and theIR algorithm with what makes their platform very powerful.
TIP TO START WITH TIKTOK ADS
I say, just throw up a couple of ad variants, figure out the CBO campaign and let TikTok figure out which one of the ad formats is best for your creative or your offer, and then start tweaking it in that direction.
WHAT VERTICALS DO YOU PROMOTE ON TIKTOK
I’ve only done lead gen, so finance, debt. I also tried a tort as well. Tora did pretty well, and offer wall do well too as well. So those are the ones that I’ve done specifically so far.
HOW TO TRACK CAMPAIGNS ON TIKTOK?
Tracking I use RedTrack volume. More so with your conversion API, just so I can get real-time tracking with that platform and feed it back to TikTok in real time.
HOW TO DO RESEARCH
They are a lot of supply tools. I use a very expensive supply tool that gives me a lot of pretty good in-depth data. But I don’t want to say it just yet. But it’s a very good one, but the best way to really just find the best ad organically is pretty much just go on TikTok, type in a keyword or hashtag and look at what people are promoting and see which one is the most popular one and see if you can angle it that way as well.
IS A/B TESTING IMPORTANT ON TIKTOK?
Of course, you have to always test. So when I start a campaign, I probably start off with five creatives that are very different from each other, 5-second, 15, second, 30 to minute videos, and see which one does well.
They all have different angles as well, different intro styles as well. And then I figure out from there, what ad creative and what angle I need to go to based on what TikTok is telling me.
WHAT OTHER AD FORMATS DO YOU USE?
Facebook native. I stepped away a lot from, the last time we talked with pops and push. I was doing a lot of, but now I’m doing definitely more into the tier one traffic sources, for sure.
IS NETWORKING IMPORTANT?
Of course. Yeah, the networking side of the industry is super important. I’ve known you for years. I know a lot of people here for years as well. And just to shake hands with somebody that might be doing better than you gives you aspirations to even push yourself and do more. So networking in this industry specifically is very important.
WHAT SHOULD BE THE MINDSET?
If I’m going to lose. I’m going to lose money. So if you have that mindset already right away, then I think after that, just picking yourself up is much faster than just staying down on the ground. A lot of people in this industry, give up too quickly because they don’t understand maybe the tactic, they don’t understand maybe why the CTR happened.
They don’t understand why the click-through on their landing page dropped. The thing about affiliates and creative marketers is we ask the question, why did that happen? And then from there, we dig deeper into that situation and try to find a solution as to why.
So I think the mindset of asking why and being willing to lose right away instead of winning is a very important mindset to have, I think, in my opinion.
WHAT SHOULD BE THE FOCUS?
So there are two arguments. Do I want to focus on money? Do I want to start on what I’m enjoying? I feel like the easiest way to get started is to focus on what you enjoy, because you actually have knowledge of what you enjoy. And if you have the knowledge, you can start thinking about your audience. You can start thinking about the ad style because you’ve been around it.
Whereas if you’re just looking for the money side, you have to put in more effort for research. Whereas if you enjoy something, you kind of already have that basic knowledge of what the audience is.
Who’s going to look after it? And if you lose on what you enjoy, technically you’re not losing. But I think that’s the important part too.