In this post, I would like to share some lessons I have learned from making money with mobile advertising (pop and push traffic) using PropellerAds as a traffic source. These are purely my personal experiences — things I learned through practice. They may not necessarily work for everyone, so please read with a critical mindset and apply what fits your own situation.
First, I would like to share some screenshots from my PropellerAds campaigns, so you can see that this is not just talk. I have spent more than $10,000 on PropellerAds to learn these lessons, and I am sharing them with you for free.
Below are the lessons I learned.
1. To achieve passive income, you need to maintain a consistently high ROI — around 100–200% (or even higher if possible).
This usually means you cannot scale aggressively, but you can have campaigns that run passively. There were many days when I didn’t do anything at all — I just opened MaxConv, took a quick look, and closed it.
Because when a campaign is archived in MaxConv, traffic is blocked (unlike BeMob, which still forwards traffic), I almost never archive campaigns in MaxConv.
2. Test campaigns carefully and spend your budget slowly.
Avoid targeting big GEOs like India or Indonesia. These GEOs can drain your budget very fast, are difficult to optimize in terms of placements, and often have lower traffic quality. They are more suitable for experienced affiliates, not beginners.
3. Learn to accept making small money.
If you are a newbie with limited capital, you cannot expect to run thousand-dollar campaigns right away. Be realistic. I once tried to run a campaign that made only $0.2 per day. The profit was small, but I gained experience — and at least I wasn’t losing money or quitting.
For such low-profit campaigns, the key is that they can be set up and then left running without further optimization. Once you can do this consistently, your experience will gradually grow, and you can move on step by step.
4. One reason many people feel affiliate marketing is difficult is that the effort they put in does not match the results they get.
I went through a long period of testing losing campaigns. Looking at red numbers and constant losses was very discouraging. At that time, I was working around 14 hours a day on affiliate marketing, with no weekends off, and still losing a lot of money.
Now, I don’t rush anymore. Instead, I focus on how to work as little as possible.
When I see an offer at the top, or an offer that looks like a potential winner, I don’t jump in and test it immediately. I leave it alone for a few days. If it stays at the top or remains stable in the middle, I will reconsider it — but still won’t test right away. I only test when I genuinely feel like doing it. I try to keep my daily work under 30 minutes (for me, that’s what real work–life balance means).
Surprisingly, by working less, my profits became more consistent, and my mind felt much clearer and more relaxed.
5. Because I am not good at English (it is not my native language), communicating with affiliate managers has always been difficult for me.
I often have to use AI to talk to them. Even when they explain tracking setup, I sometimes struggle to follow the conversation. I learned affiliate marketing mostly through forums (AffLIFT and STM). About 8 years ago, my English was very poor, and self-studying was extremely challenging.
So if you are fluent in English, that is already a huge advantage in this industry.
6. Don’t rely too much on CPA Goal.
You need to understand that each placement (Zone ID) has its own price. Always ask yourself: why is this placement priced at that level? How does its price behave across different GEOs, devices, and browsers?
Placement prices change constantly because there are many advertisers competing. One advertiser buys it, then another. When they optimize their campaigns, they pause or stop certain placements, so prices keep fluctuating all the time. Our job is to bid at the right level, because when others “let go,” it becomes our turn.
Advertisers who bid higher usually get their ads shown earlier. If I bid lower, my ads are shown later. And ads shown earlier often have higher conversion rates.
However, in chess, going first does not always mean winning. The same applies to advertising.
7. Luck is a very important factor.
In many cases, it almost determines success or failure in affiliate marketing. How much capital you have, your English skills, your educational background, your mental flexibility, and even the country you live in — in the end, all of these are also forms of luck.
When I first started affiliate marketing, I had almost no money. The country where I live has high inflation, and I had to borrow $5,000 from relatives to get started. For me, $5,000 was a very large amount, and I had to repay it over an entire year. Luckily, after spending around $2,000, I found a campaign making about $150 per day, and it survived for roughly one month. Honestly, that was also luck.
8. Don’t be greedy.
Greed leads to losses. When you become greedy and focus only on making more money, greed clouds your judgment. Your mind becomes less flexible and less clear, and it becomes very easy to make wrong decisions.
9. Most winning offers nowadays are iGaming offers.
You don’t really need spy tools to find them — just browsing the web a bit is enough. People call it “iGaming” because it sounds nicer, but in reality, it is gambling. In my country, many people are addicted to gambling and end up losing everything.
I have a cousin who got involved in gambling. He ended up selling his parents’ assets just to keep playing. I don’t know exactly what type of gambling he was involved in, but eventually he disappeared and cut off all contact.
I don’t like this at all, but when I run Smartlink campaigns, a lot of traffic is redirected there. I have to accept it because this is simply how the industry works.
I am not judging anyone who runs iGaming offers — I fully understand that this is a major part of the industry. I’m just sharing my personal feelings and limitations.
I also want to move on to other models, such as Facebook ads or dropshipping, but they are too complex for me. With PropellerAds, I only need about 5 minutes to set up a pop campaign (and for push ads, there is now an auto-creative feature, which is very convenient).
With Facebook ads, I would need to set up many things: landing pages, ad creatives, tracking tools, and even cloaking. It takes a lot of time. I’m not saying that making money with Facebook ads is impossible — it’s just not suitable for someone who values work–life balance the way I do.
In the past, I worked extremely hard. I spent my youth working and building my career. In the end, the results were not what I expected, and honestly, it was exhausting.
10. Focus on one traffic source and one affiliate network.
Ignore everything else. In reality, which traffic source you end up with is partly a matter of fit and timing. I can make good money with PropellerAds + Mobidea. But I have friends who say PropellerAds is not profitable for them — they work with Adsterra, and others focus on Zeydoo.
Don’t assume the “grass is greener on the other side.” Focus on one traffic source and one affiliate network that you are familiar with, and ignore the rest. At the same time, beginners should stick to the most established and proven traffic sources — that is the safer path.
11. Selling courses can make much more money than affiliate marketing.
I used to sell affiliate marketing courses, and I saw this clearly. However, only about 4% of students were actually able to make money, even though I shared almost all of my knowledge. I felt genuinely disappointed, so I stopped selling courses.
12. You should have a full-time job.
Affiliate marketing is not as “free” as you might imagine. If you currently have a full-time job and are thinking about quitting it to do affiliate marketing, I strongly suggest you reconsider. Even if your job does not pay much, it is still providing stability for you and your family. Affiliate marketing can be learned gradually — there is no need to rush.
At the moment, I work as a full-time affiliate. However, I spend no more than 30 minutes per day on affiliate marketing, and I no longer have a regular office job like most people.
At first, I thought affiliate marketing would give me time freedom and financial freedom. But in reality, it was not as ideal as I expected. Staying at home all day made it very difficult for me to control myself and resist distractions. After making some money, I often wasted it on entertainment and games. Afterwards, I felt regret. I truly regret wasting so much time and money during that period.
Because of this, I now try to dedicate most of my time and money to a non-profit project. I am building a website and a YouTube channel to share knowledge with people in my country, and I do not monetize this project at all. I hope I can overcome distractions and do something meaningful and positive.
13. Avoid blocking too many placements (Zone IDs in PropellerAds).
For SmartCPM campaigns, I almost never block placements. Since this traffic comes from real users, conversions will eventually happen. Some Zone IDs may have very poor traffic quality, but instead of blocking them, I simply lower their CPM to the minimum possible level. This way, I can still receive traffic while maintaining profitability.
However, I do block placements that generate bot traffic (mainly in SmartCPM campaigns). Bot traffic usually appears when a single IP hits the campaign URL repeatedly in a short period of time. PropellerAds does not charge for this type of bot traffic because their system can detect it.
The problem is that my tracking tool (MaxConv) does not always detect it and still charges tracking costs aggressively. If you leave the campaign unattended for just a few dozen minutes, you can receive hundreds of thousands of bot hits and lose several dollars in tracking fees.
In MaxConv, there is a feature that allows you to add a custom column, which you can use to calculate tracking cost formulas.
Below are some placements that I always block in every pop (onclick) campaign:
4284564, 6118780, 6895621, 9216850, 9300299, 9884161, 8503337, 9718904, 9645846, 9589008, 9327429, 9394921, 9036193, 9704728, 10049492, 6551527, 9667507, 8834010, 7393037, 9713013, 8833942, 9338828, 9036000, 7054341, 6757941, 8833906, 7923438, 9430924.
Recently, PropellerAds has introduced a very convenient feature that allows you to create Zone Groups. By adding Zone IDs to a blacklist, PropellerAds will automatically block all of them across the campaigns you select.
Please note that the following Zone IDs are blocked based solely on my personal experience. It is possible that I may have blocked some of them by mistake. Also, a Zone ID that had bot traffic in the past may later be cleaned or fixed by the publisher. So please do not treat this list as absolute — use it only as a reference and always test and judge for yourself.
14. I only use direct linking and do not use landing pages.
I know that landing pages can increase conversion rates, and I can deploy a landing page on Cloudflare very quickly. However, optimizing landing pages takes too much time. I even tried learning some basic coding to tweak my landing pages, but eventually gave up because it was too exhausting. In some cases, landing pages actually converted worse than direct linking.
In the end, I “threw landing pages aside” and focused only on direct linking — sending traffic straight to the offer link.
As long as you test the offer link properly and make sure it does not redirect too many times, direct linking works just fine.
15. Work–life balance is the most important thing.
I would rather work very little, even if it means earning less money, and still feel satisfied. Having time to live for myself matters more to me. I am not chasing pleasure; I am trying to find a purpose in life.
With my current income, I can afford decent food and meat in my country, and that already makes me grateful. In the past, only the wealthy could enjoy meals of that quality.
Since entering affiliate marketing, I spent nearly 10 years working non-stop — from Monday to Sunday, without days off. There were months when I worked 14–16 hours a day, continuously.
I believed I was fighting for my career and my future. But one day, when I looked back, it felt meaningless. There was a deep sense of emptiness.
If you are someone who is constantly consumed by work, I suggest taking a few days to reflect on your life. Ask yourself: what is your purpose, why are you living, and where are you heading? Most importantly, try to maintain balance between work and life. Don’t spend your entire life like a machine that only knows how to work.
Since I started working less, my mind has become much clearer, and I make more accurate decisions in affiliate marketing. My income hasn’t increased significantly compared to before, but the amount of time I’ve saved is enormous — and to me, that is a real success.
Final thoughts
This post is not meant to teach or convince anyone. It is simply a record of my own journey in affiliate marketing — the mistakes, the lessons, and the trade-offs I experienced along the way.
Affiliate marketing can make money, but it also demands discipline, patience, and self-awareness. What works for me may not work for you. Take what fits your situation, ignore the rest, and move at your own pace.
In the end, money is just one part of life. Time, clarity, and balance are just as valuable — if not more.
I hope this sharing helps you in some small way.
Disclaimer:
This post is based solely on my personal experience. I do not guarantee that you will succeed after reading or learning from it. Whether you make a profit or incur losses depends largely on your own effort and decisions. I am simply sharing my journey, and I hope it can help you in some small way.