Ricardo Klajnberg, Founder and CEO of TraffiKongs, joins the latest series of affiliate interviews on Affiliate Grand Slam.

Ricardo Klajnberg speaks about their customised performance marketing solutions, vision, traffic, and about how they stay ahead of the curve – follow his story below

Congratulations on running a successful affiliate network for almost three years! At what point in your career did you begin to view affiliate marketing as a potential career path, and what factors influenced your decision to pursue this field?

I entered the gambling and affiliation industry after working for years in big multinationals where I managed big sales and marketing teams. When I started working with big brands and influencers, I started to understand more about performance marketing/lead generation. In 2017, I was invited to lead a new group of brands doing acquisition and I applied everything I knew regarding technical, analysis, and most important, relationships. The partners I made throughout these years with countless deals are the fuel to keep me motivated in such a volatile industry.

As the founder of this small but powerful affiliate network, I am curious about your experiences and insights. Here’s my question for you: What key strategies or unique approaches have you employed to achieve such success in your affiliate network’s growth and impact over the past three years?

TraffiKongs wouldn’t be anything without the trust I have from my partners and affiliates. Throughout these 3 years, we’ve been through adverse times too, but with trust, understanding, and partnership, we have always protected our sources and have been doing our best to keep them happy, motivated, and sending the best traffic to the brands that trust us.

Your company specialises in building multiple brands, and I am eager to delve into your approach and methodologies. Here’s my question for you: What are the core principles and methodologies you rely on to successfully create and grow multiple brands for your clients?

Throughout the last 3 years, we have given consulting to more than 15 brands on strategic level to help understand the weaknesses and opportunities. Having a deep understanding of products, payment solutions, affiliate systems technicalities, brand awareness, and niche understanding, we’ve helped these brands direct their attention to where they need to instead of trying to generate different results using only one method they know.

My team is also specialised in acquisition, so we also helped many brands to start buying traffic the way we know and train their teams with sophisticated market analysis tools and understanding of their main competitors.

How do you ensure successful and meaningful connections between brands and high-quality affiliates portfolio, and how does this strategy contribute to adding value to both the brands and the overall portfolio?

I must start by mentioning our main weakness as a network: to convince affiliates that we can do the campaign optimisation, deals negotiation, and most important, finance. We direct the traffic to where our statistics indicate, and while we collect commissions from hundreds of brands every month, our sources can be comfortable by receiving one file with all due to commission and with one transaction only, they have at least 30% more time to focus on what they really need: TRAFFIC.

Our sources do not have to worry about account management, can reduce the costs of employees, and have more energy and time to focus on bringing in more and better players.

With all that said, I can deliver more and better traffic, optimise more and more campaigns, A/B testing, and find the next big thing out there. With this service, our partner brands are happier getting more volumes and dealing with one person only for dozens of campaigns.

Since we work with transparency and an amazing system, we are constantly showing our partner brands performance per source so that we can have better relationships.

How does TraffiKongs approach working with clients to develop customised performance marketing solutions that align with their unique business objectives and target audience, and what metrics does the team use to measure success and track progress over time?

We are a performance-based business, i.e., if the affiliate doesn’t bring traffic, we do not make money. If campaigns are paused due to quality, we also lose money, so we really care about our reputation out there and once we find an opportunity to scale up, we try to partner up with the brand to bring the best creatives, promotions, and deals possible.

Basically what we are looking for as a success marker is the EPC of every campaign, but of course, it really depends on the type of traffic we are looking at.

After all numbers are clear in our system, we have a chat with both sides (affiliates and brand) to understand opportunities to scale up and most important to make sure that everyone is happy. We take a very direct approach with our partners and intend on doing more by adding more team members!

It’s evident that your company is experiencing growth and development. As you continue to progress, I am keen to learn more about your plans and how these changes will impact on your business. Here’s my question for you: With the recent doubling of your team and the significant investment in new systems, how do you envision these changes will strengthen your company’s capabilities and positively impact your products/services in the near future?

My vision is simple: three pillars.

• 1^st – Grow and make TraffiKongs Network a solid business that can run sustainably connecting the best brands with the best sources. We have an aggressive plan to stick to for the next 2 years and we are succeeding. Time, patience, and trust are our allies here.
• 2^nd – TraffiKongs Media – We have decided to grow the company by investing tens of thousands of euros in in-house traffic. We have recently launched our in-house SMS and Email Traffic for our trusted brands and are starting to heat up our Media Buying Project. Once we start to heat that up, we will move to more aggressive and costly projects.
• 3^rd – Inhouse Brands. We are partnering up with the industry’s best and soon we will bring some great news!

As an affiliate network that actively engages in affiliate work, your unique perspective and experience are valuable. I am interested in knowing more about the benefits of being involved in affiliate work directly. Here’s my question for you: How has being an affiliate network that also does affiliate work directly influenced your understanding of the industry, and what advantages do you believe this dual role brings to your clients and partners?

I understood that our job at the network is very simple: get strong deals with real high-quality traffic and send it to the best converting brands out there. In addition, making the flow easy for our partners and paying them on time are the basics of our partnerships.

With that being done, the advantages are countless. Since our partners are keen to work straight through our network, our trusted brands get more attention, and this puts our business in a very interesting spot.

It’s hard to have a middleman especially when the network has the ability of mixing in traffic; but we go the extra mile. We share relevant information, optimise campaigns before the brands can even start looking into the numbers, because we know our traffic and its potential better than anyone else.

How does your company differentiate itself from competitors in the market, and what strategies do you use to maintain a competitive edge? How do you balance the need to innovate and stay ahead of the curve with the need to maintain stability and consistency in your operations?

I learned that we have two things that differentiate us from our competitors: Speed of service and our team.

We are a small group of smart professionals working with sophisticated systems who are able to deliver more with less. Moreover, when we have the ability to pay our affiliates before brands start paying them, this gives us extra leverage.

Have you ever been to SiGMA? Which of our expo shows would you likely book on your diary for 2023/2024?

I have been going to SiGMA since 2017, when I first started in the industry. As always, I will attend the Malta edition, where, I hope, I can keep playing the amazing poker tournament where I usually finish among the top 5!

I also have great interest in the Dubai Edition (never been) and I hope that the Brazil Edition will be a yearly thing. I am investing a lot of effort in BR and LatAm and need extra pushes from these events.

We’d love to get to know you better! Maybe you could share with us some details about yourself, as conducting business involves dealing with individuals and not just organisations. This could include your hobbies, preferred books, go-to quotes, and whether you have an interest in gaming.

Well, I must mention that I am a gambler myself. Since I was 18, at university, I have been going to poker events, and always tried going on vacation to places with casinos like Las Vegas! I am a big buyer of what we sell, and this industry makes me very happy because we sell FUN!

I also enjoy getting to know all these different places that I didn’t even hear about when I was growing up, such as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Whenever there is an event, I try taking an extra 2 days to get to know the place, eat the food, listen to music, and try making some friends!

Thanks to these events, I fell in love with Malta and am always looking forward to going.