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Guest Post
This is a guest post by Dennis Yu of BlizLocal
Huge Money In Asian Markets
Greetings from Tokyo, where I am stopping for a day between trips to Singapore and San Francisco. I want to share what I’ve learned about the Southeast Asian market. In short, if you’re an affiliate, whether you can speak Chinese, Hindi, or just English—you should be considering opportunities here. Do you remember how easy it was to make money in PPC back in 2003? It’s like that here today—you’re stepping back into a time machine and get another chance in a developing market.
Search marketing is still new here: Agencies, brands and advertisers are not sophisticated yet. Ad-Tech Singapore was a few weeks ago and by most observers, a disaster—only a few dozen people attended. That tells you that affiliate marketing doesn’t really exist here. At SMX Singapore-- our second time here speaking-- most delegates didn’t know what CTR stood for. The Australian market, as Austin and I saw back at SMX Sydney in April, is perhaps 2-3 years behind the United States. Instead of one giant developed market, like we have in the US, there are a dozen smaller markets in which you can pick a niche.
I met a guy who built a Singapore dentist website and is ranking on any dental term you can think of. Granted, there are only 4 million people in Singapore—but imagine how profitable it would be if you could rank on “cosmetic dentist”, “root canal”, or even “dentist” and then sell those leads. That’s just not possible in the United States.
Labor is cheap. The average person in internet marketing makes $3,000 Singapore a month, which is about $2,000 in the US. Go to China and you can still hire people for $600 a month. The guy who builds dentist and healthcare sites, that I just mentioned, has a team of folks in China cranking out such sites. I’m even told that you can get free flights to Kuala Lumpur, as the Malaysian government wants to encourage business.
Unfortunately, things like automobiles are not cheap. A buddy who drives a M5 paid nearly $300k for his car, which would only cost $100k in the US. That’s import taxes for you, which triples the price on certain goods. Even beer from 7-11 (which doesn’t take credit cards, by the way), is $5 a can. An iced tea at Starbucks (which appears to be on every street corner, just like in the States), is a whopping $9. Yet, you can have a nice sushi dinner for $15 at a non-tourist restaurant, and an unbelievably good one hour massage for $30.
The traffic is cheap, too. There is a ton of Facebook traffic going unsold because advertisers haven’t quite understood what it’s all about yet. Incidentally, if you have traffic in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand—I can probably pay you $5 a lead on a 12 field submit for expectant mothers. This is for a global brand you have definitely heard of—they make baby products—we’re just not allowed to say who it is publicly. Opportunities to broker deals like this are rampant.
India is an emerging behemoth, too—with over a billion people. That’s 4 times the size of the United States. With a ton of people coming online, you want to be there to make money before the market is crowded. The consumers who are online now are well to do. Thus, even with zero targeting, you’re guaranteed to hit users who have high income and are likely to buy online. You just need the offers.
That’s why we’re hired a few folks locally to be BlitzLocal Singapore—to develop advertiser relationships and use our folks back in the United States to manage the campaigns. So the next time you’re in Asia on holiday or talk to a friend who lives here—find out what you can to connect the dots and create opportunities for yourself. If you’re doing the same thing as other affiliates—grabbing the same offers from the same networks and running on the same traffic sources—you’re not likely to making excess profits. Some final tips for you:
- Build websites for businesses here that would benefit from local lead gen. Start an agency if you can. Look at Justin Dupre, who has cheap labor.
- Find advertisers who want to get traffic to their sites—you have to reach out to these folks. And you’ll find them if you just ask. Got student friends who are from Asia?
- Next time you’re on vacation, keep your mind open for business opportunities. Whenever we travel, we usually run into folks that run businesses that are unaware you can buy ads on Google. Plus, speaking at conferences is a great way to network and also get your vacation paid for.
- Be careful with cultural differences: We were served uncircumcised chicken the other night—a poor translation for skinless chicken. There is also an area nicknamed for its “four floors of whores”—women who are seemingly beautiful in every aspect, even too feminine. Turns out that they’re not women. So be careful!
Just a note for you Jon – the car thing – that rule’s in place so that everybody buys from the one car company in Malaysia (I can’t remember the name), increasing local jobs/money/etc.
And yeah, Australia’s a few years behind the states. The negative bit of that is people here are a little bit wary of pulling out their credit cards and inputting the info into forms. There’s CONSTANTLY articles in the papers here about how scary the internet is and how your children might see boobs, so I stay away from rebills in this market.
Nice recap Dennis and way to dissect the opportunities. Don’t know where you got the info on adtech but there were several hundred people there if not more. I bet when you go to India you’ll find even more opportunities that you can share. The uncircumsized chicken was great!
How about language barriers? I’m an American speaking English only. I’d love to run traffic in other countries, but worry that my ad copy will be weak in translation.
You would have to work closely with a native speaker who also understands English. Maybe some sort of partnership is the way to go.
Even here in Scandinavia, we’re behind the times in PPC somewhat. Some marketers are starting to get the hang of things, but they are few and far between. The opportunities are vast but as with SIngapore – population is relatively low so you can’t really run massive volume to CPA offers or anything like that yet.
What you can do though, is offer lead gen or SEM services to all the companies who have no clue what they’re doing with their big ad budgets.
A lot of other countries do have the volume on top of that though. I wrote a post about some other markets that really have killer potential:
http://profitapolis.com/affiliate-marketing/time-to-kick-ass-in-foreign-affiliate-markets.html
“Yet, you can have a nice sushi dinner for $15 at a non-tourist restaurant, and an unbelievably good one hour massage for $30.”
Are you implying happy ending?
“Are you implying happy ending?” rofl
Jonathan, you nailed it about the cost in Singapore which i worked there back in the early dot com days. But they are still pretty advanced at least in Singapore but sure there is plenty of niches to target to help monetize International traffic.
We have expended are phone cards from 40 countries to over 200 countries and were up for Int merchant of the year from Linkshare.com. So always looking for ways to go global through partnerships.
Brian AM @ Pingo.com
Volk’s life is one happy ending.
Im gonna use rosetta stone and start learning some new languages. Hopefully they will come in handy if I ever work in other places like asia for example
I Live in India (Asia) I am surprise to see your analysis. I am a real dumb can’t see these opportunity.
My dear world is like a global village. I think you get what i wanna to say.
i think it is not the best time to buy into Asian market.
but Volk didn’t write this article. anyway, i agree with this esp the india part, that country is going to be a cash cow. moo.
I live in Indonesia and I’ve been doing PPC since the dawn of Google Cash. You’re right that SE Asian market is still an untouchable gold mine, just waiting to be extracted. The biggest problem is, I still can’t find the right offer for this local market yet. Most of offers I find so far is kinda suck.
That’s a good idea there. I think I should start my own agency company to localize the offers. I can make a killing with big offers cuz CPC for big terms in US (try ‘insurance’), is only pennies in here.
Imagine you’re Peter Minuit in 1626…
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I’m fully agree with above post. There are many business opportunities in Asian Market like mobile, automobile and more sector from where anyone can earn huge profit..
You are new here at this blog welcome Subedar shab. I am very much concern with your point of view that in these sectors anyone can earn huge profit.
I would also add that there is alot of money to be made in Brazil right now, Brazil is booming, and doing great!
-Kevin
I live in Indonesia, it’s very potential too. thanks.
Even if you don’t plan on targeting the asian market, it may still be worthwhile to consider hiring asian freelancers. There are many tasks that they can do effectively for a fraction of what you would pay US freelancers.
I think INDIA and CHINA holding 80% of Asian market. These are fast growing economy. There is many opportunities in many fields.
You know what is an awesome market right now? Besides the Asian markets? Brazil!!!! Brazil is doing so well right now, not many people are thinking Brazil, but believe me Brazil is full of opportunities to make money right, and it is paying off for me big time. =D
-Kevin
I’ve been running some international IQ in some international markets for awhile – it’s been converting great for me. I can’t wait till CPA gets globalized.
Yes, you are right about this thing. These are really having good percentage of market.
The Asian market particularly China and the Indian subcontinent are soon going to dwarf the Western economies. Chinese is already or close to being the dominant language on the web.
If you are a designer or coder, especially familiar with wordpress, send me an email (dennis@blitzlocal.com) with some sites you have done and sample code.
I don’t want to talk to middlemen– only with the people actually doing the coding. We are hiring!
This is really good news. Search engine traffic is an incredible source to dominate.
You could also try East Europe markets – they’re also very attractive. Maybe labour is not as cheap as it was 15 years ago, but still competitive.
This is really good news i thik Asia is a excellent market with a growing economy. Jonathan thanks for that tips
I live in Thailand, have for nearly 5 years. I have some sites with some traffic – about 40,000 unique visitors/month. If you have something you think we could workout together let me know!
[...] http://www.jonathanvolk.com/internet-marketing/huge-money-in-asian-markets.html [...]
I live in Thailand and would really love to do CPA here or even create my own network. Does anyone know resources for existing affiliate programs with a focus on Asia or networks that help people create their own offers?
info @ hitclickmarketing.com if you have any suggestions or just reply here. Thanks!
[...] #1 Dennis Yu (via JonVolk.com) : Huge Money in Asian Markets [...]
Asian cheap labor for the win! My designer would nail me extra 50 – 100k a year if I just outsourced him for other peoples projects.
I’m about to hire another guy for less than $100 a week, full-time. It’s rediculous.
Also thinking about expanding to the Phillipines. Excellent English speakers that will work for 2-3 dollars an hour!
[...] Yu, Jonathan Volk and BlizLocal: Huge Money in Asian Markets This article highlights the exciting potential for online marketing and advertising that exists in [...]
Great post Dennis, Jonathan, and BlizLocal. We have featured the article in our new post “The Best of the Blogosphere: July” http://blog.directagents.com/2009/08/the-best-of-the-blogosphere-july/
Keep up the great work!