New to adult affiliation, or starting over with cams? This is the order we would follow today, with the article to read at each step. It takes an evening to read, and it will save you the mistakes that cost us the most in our first years.
1. Understand how you get paid
Cam programs pay in three ways: a share of what your users spend for as long as they spend (revshare), a fixed amount per signup, or a fixed amount per paying customer (CPA). Revshare is the slowest to start and the one that builds a lasting income, because a user you send today can keep paying you for years. The catch: most of the money arrives months after the click, so a new site always looks like a failure at first.
Read: Your new cam site earns nothing? Judge it by its age, not its revenue.
2. Pick one or two programs that fit your traffic
Don’t open ten accounts. Pick the program that matches your audience and your site, and a second one to compare against with the same traffic. Our programs page starts with a short table: which program for which profile.
3. Place your first links so people actually see them
Start simple: text links inside useful content, and a live widget on pages about a specific model. Then make sure they survive ad blockers, which hide raw affiliate links and block many widgets. Sending your links through a short redirect on your own domain fixes the worst of it.
Read: Ad blockers are hiding your cam links and widgets and The Stripchat Player widget: strict=1, sound and the traps nobody documents.
4. Verify your tracking before you send traffic
Tag each site and each placement, then send one test click and check the next day that the tag appears in the program’s report. It takes ten minutes. Skipping it can cost you months of data: on Stripcash, the classic sub-IDs never reach the report.
Read: Stripcash is throwing away your sub-IDs (and how to track anyway).
5. Measure the right thing
Clicks first, then signups, then spenders: judge each site on the signal it can already produce. When you start testing pages against each other, compare revenue per visitor who saw each version, not clicks.
Read: Split testing affiliate pages: measure revenue per variant, not clicks.
6. Automate, and watch for silent failures
Once a site works, automation is what lets you run more of them: model feeds, pages that update when a model goes live, scheduled reports. It also brings a new risk, integrations that fail without any error and return zero for months.
Read: Stripchat’s API fails silently: three requests that return zero.
Where to go next
Browse by topic: Strategy, Tracking & measurement, Widgets & APIs, Conversion. And if something is unclear, ask us.