If you’re on this site, you’re probably interested in making money online. There are so many ways to make money with affiliate marketing, but one of the most effective ways to drive paid traffic to affiliate offers with paid traffic.

Native advertising has advantages over other types of paid traffic. Namely, it doesn’t have the restrictions of other traffic sources. You’re also not going to get every account banned in 10 minutes (Hi Facebook!). So what exactly is native advertising? Let’s find out!

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising is a form of marketing that blends the art and science of influencing people with the power of compelling ads. It is especially useful for affiliate marketing where you can drive massive volume to high payout offers.

Native advertising is different than other forms of advertising such as search engine optimization and social media marketing. In those cases, readers typically are aware they are being sold something.

With native advertising, the sale is not obvious. Instead, the emphasis is on providing useful information, without which the reader may not purchase. Native advertising is also different from opinion pieces or advertorials.

Where Did Native Advertising Come From?

Native advertising was created by two marketing geniuses named David Ford and Tom Bell. Ok not really. Native advertising has been around a long time – probably longer than you think.

Native Ads have been around since the early 1900’s. You can find examples of them in newspapers of the day.

Below is an example from Cadillac, in a 1915 newspaper. The basic idea of a native ad is that it blends into the surrounding content. The goal is to make it not look like an ad, but rather just a part of the (in this example) newspaper:

Since then native advertising has been used in print, radio, tv, and of course online. What’s interesting is how the core idea and strategy of native advertising hasn’t changed all that much from the early days.

How do Affiliates Make Money With Native Advertising?

Native is quickly becoming affiliate marketers top choice for paid traffic. One reason is the relatively few restrictions on what and how you can run your campaigns.

The big reason though, is because of how much volume (aka traffic) affiliates can drive to the offers they’re promoting.

You can optimize your campaign all you want, but what you really need is more volume. We can’t tell you how many student’s we’ve seen struggling with trying to make money with low traffic campaigns.

when you’re struggling to get volume on your affiliate marketing campaigns it’s actually harder because you have less data to work with. Many affiliates think that a low-volume campaign is the best way to make money, but the top affiliates use higher volume campaigns to make serious money.

When you’re struggling to get volume on your affiliate marketing campaigns it’s actually harder because you have less data to work with.

Many affiliates think that a low-volume campaign is the best way to make money, but the top affiliates use higher volume campaigns to make serious money.

Native Ad Formats

Native ads come in different formats. Here are just a couple:

In-feed ads

In-feed ads are a very powerful form of native advertising these ads are placed in between articles and content feeds so they are viewed naturally with little effort.

In-app ads

In-app ads combine the look and feel of the app someone is using to create a seamless advertising experience.in other words, these ads are built to look like the characteristics of the app including font graphic style color, etc.

Recommended Content

You have likely seen this one all over the place sometimes they are labeled as recommended content you might also like or from around the web. These ads sort of look like the viewer is going to see other articles on the site that they’re visiting.

There is no one perfect native ad format. It depends on what you’re promoting as an affiliate, how much the ads cost, and more.

What kind of offers work with native ads?

Generally speaking, the best type of affiliate offers to promote with native ads are those that have broad appeal.

Broad appeal just means something that a large percentage of the population would be interested in. An example of a niche with broad appeal would be weight loss or beauty.

When reason these types of niches work so well is that the offer payouts are usually high and it’s something that a very high percentage of people browsing the site are likely interested in.

That’s not to say that smaller niches can’t work, but one of the biggest benefits of native advertising is just how broad of a net you can cast so it makes sense to take advantage of all that traffic by promoting something with broad appeal.

How to Get Started with Native Advertising?

To get started with native advertising you’ll need to belong to an affiliate network such as ClickBank or Max Bounty this is where you get the offers to promote

Second, you’ll need a tool to track your advertising campaigns so you know what you’re spending money on and how best to optimize it. The tracker that we use ourselves and recommend is Voluum.

Finally, you’ll need a network to buy native ads on a few that we recommend are MGID and Voluum DSP.

If you want to learn more about native advertising and affiliate marketing, check out our Native Ads Master Class course. You can also check out the affiliate marketing tools and resources we recommend.

Have you done native advertising? Let us know in the comments 🙂