STM Forum (formerly called StackThatMoney) is a private affiliate marketing community started back in 2011 by Stackman, Lorenzo Green and Besmir.

Since then it became one of the biggest private affiliate marketing communities, that now stands behind big events called Affiliate World Conferences.

If you read my blog for a while you may noticed that STM forum is on my list of tools for success, it’s actually first one on the list.

And there is a good reason for it.

I wrote this STM Forum review, so we can find out what it’s all about and whether it’s really worth to pay $99/month for it?

STM Forum Preview as of November 5th, 2018

Why to join STM Forum?

When I started out in affiliate marketing I had at least million questions in my head.

Are you asking yourself any of these questions?

• Where to start in affiliate marketing?
• What is tracker and tracking?
• What is the best traffic source right now?
• How does a converting landing page look like?
• What are the best affiliate networks?
• How to choose a an affiliate offer?
• …and probably million more questions

If your answer on any of these was yes, then STM may be right choice for you.

All of these questions are already answered on StackThatMoney and if not, you can always ask your own.

Good thing about STM Forum is that it’s newbie friendly, so you don’t have to be shy or feel stupid about asking anything.

“The only stupid question is the question that is never asked.”

– Ramon Bautista

There is a friendly moderators team (btw I’m one of them) who are happy to answer your questions and point you into the right direction.

It’s almost like having a team of mentors available to you all the time.

STM Forum Price

STM is a paid forum and it’s price is $99/month.

StackThatMoney

StackThatMoney logo vs STM Forum logo

STM forum is still well-known as “stackthatmoney”, even it was rebranded quite a while ago.

When someone says “he read it on StackThatMoney”, they for sure meant STM forum.

Which super affiliates you can find on STM?

There are many super affiliates and successful affiliates who are more or less active on STM.

If you are into AM, you probably recognise some of these names already:

• Charles Ngo
• Jason Akatiff
• IAmAttila
• Servando Silva
• Ian Fernando
• Matuloo
• Manu Cinca
• and many others.

What you can learn on STM

STM Forum Traffic Sources Sub-Forums

Forum is divided into many sub-forums and therefore it’s easy to navigate.

Let me go through some of the Traffic Source sections that may be interesting for you:

Facebook

If the big blue is your thing, then you are on the right place. This sub-forum is dedicated to nothing else, but Facebook.

This traffic source may be hard to “crack”, as Facebook’s algorithms are constantly changing, accounts are banned frequently and you need to always stay ahead.

There is a “[A-Z GUIDE] CRACK The FB ALGO + EXAMPLES (In-Depth)” tutorial on STM forum that can help you crack the FB code.

Also you can find lot of folks and mastermind together, share knowledge on accounts, payments solutions and other things that include FB.

Great starter is also the “# The Ultimate Facebook Newbie Tutorial 2018 – Introduction” tutorial by stickupid.

eCommerce

This is a quite new section that is getting traction in the latest months when many affiliates started creating their own e-commerce shops.

If you are on of them, this section is for you.

There are many interesting topics discussing ecommerce such as “Amazon Ads – The Traffic Source Making Billions” or strategies like this one: “[STRATEGY] – How to leverage your affiliate background to make millions in ecom!”

Running worldwide ecommerce business can be a hassle and you may find useful threads about laws and regulations from member Digitas such as this one: “
eCommerce and VAT”.

There is also a great ecom book summary series from Vortex called: “Book Summary: Ecommerce Evolved by Tanner Larsson – Introduction”

Native

Everything about running with native sources ie. RevContent, MGID, Taboola, Outbrain and others.

Just this month (november 2018)  jack_l published a “Cool bot-catching trick for natives (low-tech)”, that discusses the way you can identify and easily block bot traffic from native traffic sources.

There is also a good “Native Ads Cheat Sheet” directly from Mr. Green, this one is 2 years old, but it has still very relevant tips.

While talking about cheat sheet, you may know that it’s common practice these days to do automation through traffic source’s API’s or using tools like The Optimizer, so here comes a thread just for that by platinum: “NativeAds Automation Cheat Sheet”

Mobile

Probably the biggest and strongest sub-forum. Mobile offers and traffic has been a huge trend in the last couple of years for affiliates. It’s not as hot these days (2018) due to lot of regulations from mobile carriers and offer flows changes.

However mobile as a type of traffic is still growing and there are still ways to monetize it.

There are interesting threads popping up like this one: “Deceptive Attack – Wait Don’t Drop Your Current Domain Yet!”, it’s a trick that can help you to remove your domain flag.

Just some time ago a new traffic source by team of Mr. Green was announced: “NEW Traffic Source] Only Pay If You Make Money”.

It’s a traffic source that charges you only when you get conversions ie. based on CPA.

Definitely interesting and may worth experimenting.

Adult traffic (NSFW)

Adult affiliate marketing & dating. If you run on sources like Exoclick, TrafficJunky, TrafficFactory and others, this one is for you.

NSFW part of the internet is old as the internet itself. It’s still well alive (I personally run traffic in these waters as well).

The base of the biggest traffic sources remains mostly same over the years, but there are always new things coming – this year for example many of the sources added push traffic.

Also native formats were hugely added yearlier this year to the most of the sources.

So there is always something going on.

As for the threads, interesting discussions pops up like: “If your goal was to make $500/day, how would you do it?” or “Anyone else have a lot of $50-100/day spend campaigns?”.

These kind of questions are great discussion starters and you can find lot of helpful insights between the lines.

POP / PPV / Redirect

This one goes hand in hand with mobile. Very popular sub-forum where you can learn all about traffic sources like Popads, Zeropark, Propellerads, Adcash and others.

Pop traffic was where I started my paid traffic career. It’s still well alive even due to high efforts from web browsers trying to block it.

There are always good tips for best pop traffic sources such as this one: “Best Pop Source with Most Mobile Traffic?” or my favorite interesting discussion starters like “Is it possible to make $1000/day on <$2 offers?” or “Question): is it too late to run pop traffic on desktop in 2018?”.

Push Traffic

This is one of the newest sections that was added just recently. Push notification traffic seems to be a new big trend after POPs.

This year literally all of the major traffic sources added some kind of push traffic and TON of push only traffic sources were started.

It’s definitely one of the hottest trends when it comes to new ad formats and here is list of some interesting threads:

• Copy That Converts – Tips for running Push Ads on Zeropark
• How to work with PUSH-Notifications in Propellerads
• Getting easy profit from Push-traffic in PropellerAds (Bulgaria)
• How to make profitable push notification traffic campaigns
• Push Notifications Pioneers, tell us what you learned!
• and ton of more!

I recently started my own follow along running push notification ads with Zeropark and I was able to hit $200+/day profit in just 4 days!

Make sure you read it here: Zeropark Push Ads Follow-Along: Erik’s Journey to Push Profits! ?

$200+/day campaign with push ads

Pay Per Call

Pay per call has been quite hot few years ago, especially with all the (though questionable) tech support offers.

There are still some discussions about this vertical to this day, although I would say it’s not as much discussed as it used to be.

SEO

SEO is not really what STM is all about, as it’s mainly focused on paid traffic methods.

But..

This year with the influx of some serious SEO players (like Greg Morrison) it started to get some real traction.

Here are some of the recent SEO threads:

• Greg’s SEO\Ranking Tutorial…
• Big SEO Tip For Ending 2018 Going Into 2019
• SEO for ecommerce stores

Copywriting, Conversion & Psychology

These are the foundations to doing sales and online marketing.

Section is not much updated, but when it is it’s mostly well worth.

Here is a sneak peek:

• 49 Immediately Implementable Copywriting frameworks/structures/tips from Ca$hertizing
• [TIP] 10 Strategies to Go Viral on Any Platform
• Tip: Boost CTRs With The Power of Emoji’s ?
• Best converting pick-up lines for dating profiles?
• Smallest Changes for Biggest Improvement to ROI?
• “Amazing Headline Script”: Free Tool That Generates Killer Headlines for You

Copywriting section also includes 2 sub forums: first is called Everything Angles and the second one is Books & Information Resources which includes many recommendations to great books about copywriting and psychology like this one: The Best Books on Copywriting.

Tracking Campaigns & Tech stuff

One of the biggest challenges for new affiliates is tracking and all the technical difficulties.

Fortunately there are whole sub-forums for Tracking Campaigns, Programming, Servers & Scripts.

You will get answers to these and many more questions:

• What is a tracker and how to set it up?
• How does dynamic tracking tokens work?
• What is a postback and how to setup server to server (S2S) tracking?
• Why to host landing page on a CDN?
• What is a back button script and how to include it on my landing page?
• .. and many more

This section is very helpful and you will learn all the basics of tracking here.

Buy / Sell / Hire

STM also has sections for Vendors.

You can search or offer your services and products.

There is a sub section also for Joint Ventures (JVs) or permitted account sales.

Networks can also post information about their promotions and their profiles.

For us affiliates it’s good resource to find about new services, tools and affiliate networks, so we can be always on top of the game.

Localised Discussions

STM is international forum and now it has localised sub sections for several languages:

• STM en Français
• STM in het Nederlands
• STM auf Deutsch
• STM in Italiano
• STM en Español
• Area: South America
• Area: Europe & Middle-East
• Area: Asia

So you can now find your local peers in your countries and even communicate in your native language!

Success Stories

• “Crossed $40K in July 2018 – Struggle of Digital Marketer in Affiliate Marketing”
• “From $1,000,000 to Net Worth of $184,000,000 & Cover of Forbes Magazine”
• “Today: Two FB Accounts – Tier 1 – Pin Submit – 500% ROI”
• “$846,365 in 9 months with ecom”
• “After giving up on AM we just made $1MM of Profit in 53 days!”
• “10k profit day after more than a year of 0 returns”

No, these are not just some catchy headlines, they are actually case studies / success stories of the most successful affiliates on STM.

One of the many success stories on STM, here one of the members hit $40k in month of July

I handpicked them, but there are over 180 threads with over 4700 posts under the Success Stories sub-forum on STM.

Another success story where @stickupid did 500% ROI on Facebook

Follow-alongs

Let’s say you are ready to launch your first affiliate campaign.

You know learned all the basics, but something in the back of your head tells you that you are not 100% confident in your steps.

The best thing you can do is to start a follow-along and post your process and steps you took.

This way experienced affiliates and moderators can step-in and help you along the way.

Follow-alongs are also great threads in general to read through – you can learn the thought process of other affiliates and what steps they took that led them to success or failure.

Newbie-Friendly Guides & Tutorials

There are many great tutorials following the latest trends in affiliate marketing.

I personally also posted some tutorials and content that I exclusively share only on STM, you can see some previews below.

My guide on how to enable SSL/HTTPS on your domains and landing pages

My post on 1 simple trick that made my campaigns profitable

Unique Features

Aff Network Application Tool

Ever worried about getting approved by affiliate networks?

Being newbie with no experience may give you worries if you will be approved and able to run the top CPA offers as other super affiliates.

Each network behaves differently, some require proof (screenshots) of your previous earning from or contacts to your affiliate managers in other networks you work with.

But if you just getting started out?

This is where Aff Network Application Tool gets you covered.

This tool enables you to apply for multiple affiliate networks just by submitting this ONE application.

Networks will automatically see that you are member of STM and it will guarantee you that you will get approved.

(well you are already prequalified as you are member of STM forum, you paid for it, you are serious into affiliate marketing and not some dirty scammer)

It’s a longer form, but well worth filling out as you can get immediately into top networks like:

• Clickdealer
• Gotzha
• Addiliate
• Aragon
• Afflow/Monetizer
• Sinum Vendo
• BitterStrawberry
• and others that are constantly being added

Affiliate Contacts Directory

What if you are looking for a contact from a affiliate network or traffic source that you heard is good?

Well, you can checkout Affiliate Contacts Directory, which has been released just recently.

Before all the contacts were posted in one long, never ending thread, but now there is a special sub page for members where they can easily search and filter contacts they are looking for.

Very easy and helpful to find people by name, email, company name, Skype ID, STM username, offer/traffic type and other columns.

Affjobs

Affjobs is a premium affiliate marketing job board.

Looking for a job as an affiliate manager or media buyer in one of the top performance marketing companies?

Do you have a small job that needs to be done, but are tired of low quality suppliers on Fiverr or Upwork?

There are people on Affjobs, that can help with setting up your tracker, cleanin landing page or other tedious tasks you always hated to do yourself.

iStack Training

iStack Training is a platform launched by STM similar to let’s say Udemy, but on a whole different level.

It offers both opportunities for teachers who want to provide courses and also people who want to take their knowledge to a new level.

iStack offers online courses and also live events.

Some examples include: eCommerce Mastery, Native Ads Master Class or Ecommerce All-Star Training.

Masterminds

Even joining STM and being able to read and learn all these great tips & tricks and strategies may sometimes not be enough.

The true power of success in affiliate marketing lies in networking.

One thing you can do immediately is to start your own mastermind.

Let’s say you are interested in running native campaigns and you are looking for other affiliates on your level.

You can post your own mastermind announcements and start working with other affiliates towards same goals.

You can share everything together and save money on running traffic, and optimise faster.

Masterminds sub-forum

Mastermind is a great way of learning and it can speedup your way to success.

Events, Conferences & Networking

Another great way for progress is networking.

I highly recommend you to visit affiliate marketing related conferences such as Affiliate World Conferences or any other around the world or in your area.

Meeting affiliates face to face and sharing your experiences is the best investment for yourself.

Not mention those great affiliate parties

Group Buy

I know many newbie affiliates are trying to search for a group buy.

I do not recommend doing so.

STM is monitoring all IP addresses and users who are doing STM forum group buy’s are going to be discovered and banned from forum.

If you don’t have $99/month for a private forum you will probaly don’t have enough budget for doing CPA affiliate marketing using paid methods anyway.

If you are serious with affiliate marketing, you should have enough budget to be able to enter these waters.

Coupon Code / Discount

As far as I know, STM Forum doen’t have any coupon codes at the moment.

The price is the same for everyone, including companies and vendors (affiliate networks, traffic sources, advertisers etc.)

Alternatives

To be fair I would like to also include some alternative affiliate marketing forums. There are plenty of forums out there, but to keep this short I would like to pick 3 alternatives:

MadSociety

Madsociety is affiliate forum run by super affiliate and musician Malan Darras. It’s also a paid forum and the topics covered there are mostly towards native traffic sources. So if you are into native MadSociety might be interesting for you.

BlackHatWorld

BHW as its name suggest is forum oriented to black hat, it started as a blackhat seo forum, but these days it also covers paid traffic and other segments. The forum as a whole is free, but there is also a private paid section.

AffiliateFix

This forum was formerly started by online enterpreneur Oliver Keynon who later sold it. It’s a free forum covering many traffic sources and verticals. It’s newbie oriented and also full of newbies, so you will not find many super affiliates hanging out there.

affLift

This is a new kid on the block. Forum is started by Luke Peerfly who is also a well-known affiliate bloger. The forum has both free and paid sections. It’s a new forum, so there is not many topics yet, but it’s growing fast.

But let’s go back to STM..

Stats & Content

Here are some statistics as of 5th, November 2018:

• Users online: 305
• Most users ever online: 1159
• Threads: 39919
• Posts: 3440111

Pros and Cons

Pros

• both newbie and advanced affiliate marketers friendly
• friendly and helpful community
• ability to form or join masterminds
• place where one of the top affiliate marketers hang out

Cons

• it’s a paid forum ($99/month)
• too much information that newbies can find ovehelming at first

Is STM Forum Worth It?

Short answer? Yes.

If you are starting out in the AM industry, STM is the right place for you.

It may be perceived as lower value over time, as you will become expert and you will have feeling that you already know everything.

(btw that’s never true, especially in this industry)

If you are serious into AM then yes, I highly recommend STM Forum as it filters out lot of the buzz and incomplete information that is all around internet or free forums.

But if you are already making $1000/day or above, I think it may be not interesting for you anymore as you are already on a different level and probably know your way in affiliate marketing.

>>> JOIN STM FORUM NOW <<<Zeropark Push Ads Follow-Along: Erik’s Journey to Push Profits! ?

SEO is dead.

PPV is dead.

Display is dead.

Pops are dead.

Mobile is dead.

Facebook is dead (Oh, wait… wait, Facebook is still alive!)

So what is my personal viewpoint on the industry in 2018?

There’s 1 thing that is definitely true.

There are methods and techniques that don’t work the same way now as they worked back in the “good old days”.

This is what I call EVOLUTION.

It happens in every industry around us.

One could say:

… taxis are dead because everyone uses Uber now.

or

… hotel booking sites are dead because everyone uses Airbnb now.

Things are changing all the time, and the one who can adapt will be the one who wins in the long run.

“Be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

– Bruce Lee

What I learned while being in this industry is that the majority of affiliates are lazy.

We are used to shortcuts and instant results.

If it doesn’t work for me TODAY, then it must be dead.

Instant gratification.

Instant traffic, instant conversions, and instant profits.

Okay, Erik, we all know that things constantly change, stop babbling about it… instead, tell us: how are you making money these days?

Well, things don’t change as much as they seem.

I would say that change comes in the form of strong waves that hit the masses from time to time.

Almost every other year there’s a major new trend that shakes things up.

Since I entered the industry, I’ve recognized at least these ones:

• 2014/2015 – Mobile
• 2015/2016 – Native
• 2016/2017 – E-commerce

If you’re still wondering about me, I’ve been in the mobile space since I started; while I’m keeping up with the latest trends and experimenting here and there, I’m still a mobile guy.

My roots just run too deep now.

Sure, I can’t run with the same old landing pages, angles, and offers that I had in 2015, but that’s the evolution part.

Even some of the good old traffic sources are not profitable anymore, but guess what? There are new ones!

However, what’s more important is that most of the stuff mentioned throughout this post still works.

It’s just how you approach things and how deeply you dig into them.

Don’t be the one who jumps from one thing to another.

Be the one who can master at least 1 thing properly and be the best at it.

Affiliate marketing is not dead (at least for now).

What do you guys think?

Where do you think the industry is headed?

Let me know below in the comments!

Then you wake up one day, check your stats, and find out that some disaster has just happened.

All your campaigns are dying, and your CTR is suspiciously low.

Your domain is flagged by Google.

What does that mean?

Well, this issue has been around for a while, and if you haven’t dealt with it yet, you are one lucky bastard affiliate.

“Deceptive site ahead.” What is it?

Internet browsers are getting smarter, especially Google Chrome, which is always one step ahead of the game. Google has an internal database, called Safe Browsing, to protect its users from malware.

Safe Browsing is a list of dangerous sites that could harm your computer/device. Google also shares it with the folks at Mozilla and Apple. So if you visit a URL that is on the list, you get the warning posted above.

In general, that’s a good thing, and you should be glad for it…unless you’re an affiliate.

If you’re buying tons of traffic and any URL in your redirect chain happens to get flagged, you’re busted.

You’ve just flushed money down the toilet.

How?

Imagine that you are sending traffic to your landing page. What happens is that the user, instead of landing on your page, is stuck on a red screen of death. Google makes it too scary to ignore the warning and continue to the desired destination.

This was actually an issue with Voluum a few months ago. Their tracking URLs got flagged, and all their users were affected.

So what can we do about it?

We will see more and more of these things happening soon, so it’s better if we’re prepared.

Here are some of the possible solutions:

Switch domains

This one is simple, and it’s the only thing that fixes your problem IMMEDIATELY.

Go to Namecheap and buy a new domain. Then just copy all your existing content to the new domain, and you’re back in the game.

Monitor your domains periodically

Use online services that scan your domains against different malware and blacklist databases.

I recommend you to check your URLs from time to time with one of these:

Google Safe Browsing Site Status

This is the official Safe Browsing scanner from Google. If they got your domain in this database, then you’re screwed. Everyone who uses Chrome, Firefox, or Safari will see your website as dangerous.

VirusTotal

A robust service that scans against 67 different malware and blacklist databases. It’s also a virus scanner that can scan any kind of Windows executables, Android APKs, PDFs, etc. We are looking for their URL scanner that can give us perfect insights for our domains. Its DB list also includes Google Safe Browsing’s, so you may consider using this tool instead.

Sucuri SiteCheck

Sucuri is a paid service that cleans and protects your sites from malware. It also has a neat free tool called SiteCheck, which scans your remote URLs. It currently checks against 10 blacklist and malware databases.

Automate the whole process

The next step for the smart affiliate or site owner is to automate this process.

Most of these services, including Google Safe Browsing, have APIs. So it’s possible to create a simple script that checks your URLs on a daily basis. It can then report back to you when there is an emergency.

There is also a tool called TrafficProtector (google it), which has been created by some affiliates. Still, it’s up to you if you want to serve them all your landing pages’ URLs.

Warning: Conclusion Ahead!

Many moving parts may affect your campaigns.

In today’s example, you may have the best landing page or offer or the fastest server in the world, yet your campaign loses money.

Most of the time, it’s about those small things that eventually add up.

Do not forget about them.

But how do we know which is the right one?

Note: In this post, I assume that you have already chosen your vertical. Be it adult dating, weight loss, or mobile app installs — it doesn’t really matter.

What do I always do before I decide which offer to promote?

I have written down 5 tips that help me every time I choose offers for my new campaigns.

1. Ask Your AM the Right Questions

It is as simple as this. Your affiliate manager (AM) has all the data you need to know in front of her, so hit her up and ask for the reports.

What you are looking for are the TOP-performing offers in your vertical at the MOMENT, not three-week-old data. Every good network keeps these offers updated at least on a weekly basis.

Choose at least 2 to 3 offers to split-test, but do not stop there.

If your offer is global, you can — and should — dig even deeper.

Ask your AM for the list of top-performing countries. This tip alone has saved me thousands of dollars. Instead of trying a random country, I can go where the money is made RIGHT NOW. Alternatively, I can look for an unpopular market with potential, such as lower-level competition.

2. Volume > EPC

When we do paid traffic, we know that to be profitable, our earnings per click (EPC) should always be HIGHER than our cost per click (CPC).

EPC > CPC = PROFIT

However — I don’t know for what reason — networks still like to present offer reports based on EPC.

When I started out in 2013, I was thrilled by these numbers, but what I didn’t know was that making decisions based on that data alone is DUMB.

Average network EPC tells us nothing because from our point of view, it’s a black box.

We don’t know what traffic sources other affiliates use, and a few big affiliates could have a great traffic source and offer combination that pushes the average EPCs up.

And when we try to promote the offer ourselves, we probably get totally different numbers.

That’s why I always recommend asking your AM for reports based on VOLUME instead of EPC.

3. Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

I believe Picasso would make a shitload of money if he were alive and working as an affiliate marketer today.

The only thing I can say about this tip is that you should not forget to take a break and look what is happening around you.

Spying on other affiliates is just another way of gathering more data. It is an art in itself, so maybe I will dig into it in one of my future posts.

4. Learn to Listen

Read your network e-mails, listen to your AMs, connect with other affiliates, and read what people on the forums are saying.

All these “hummings” tell a part of the story, which is like a puzzle, and your job is to put it together to see the whole picture.

5. The Sense of Experience

This is something I’m starting to see in myself after long months of hard work, and I’m trying to constantly develop it.

Once you launch a lot of campaigns in your vertical and in different GEOs, you will learn a LOT of things.

You will naturally develop a special sense that tells you which offers to run (and where to run them) and which not to.

I believe it’s called experience, and it’s a very good skill.

Okay, guys, I hope these 5 tips can lead you to the right path. They have helped me personally and are working for me. However, I believe there are much more and maybe better ways to find a profitable offer, so feel free to share in the comments your way of doing this.