Who Can Be Bothered Coming Up With New Campaigns Anymore? (36)
Who Can Be Bothered Coming Up With New Campaigns Anymore?
Before I start I just want to say this is not an attack on anyone. It's just me trying to have a conversation with the affiliate community, and trying to get more of an understanding where it's heading as a whole.
Back when I started out (7 years ago or so) it seemed the majority of people would come up with their own campaigns, design their own landers.
Now, I struggle to find many people that do come up with their own campaigns and landers. Someone people started like this. Other people got so fed up with people coping their hard work, that they just gave up being creative and started copying too.
I guess what I've been thinking is, what is going to happen once more and more creative people join the copying side. Till there is only a few left...if any!
What I'd like to know from you is, do you still come up with your own angles and landers (not just change an image or a couple of lines), or do you copy. This poll is anonymous so don't worry, there will be no hate!
I think these results will be interesting, and it can give you more of an idea on how to approach your AM strategy.
The spy tools aren't really motivating people to be creative anymore. Everything you need is right in your face already in order to be profitable within half a day.
^^ If that is right, it's interesting thinking about how to adapt to this change in mindset.
I'm a noob when it comes to the AM game. I'm in it to be good at it and understand why I'm failing or succeeding (if not, how the fuck would I ever figure this out)
I come from the Advertising world (creative copywriter) and the Direct Marketing world (did a Masters in DM a few years back), so I'm inclined to do my own stuff (I enjoy the creation process)
Now, will copying get my to profitability faster? Probably...but, I'm a strong believer in getting personal satisfaction out of it, copying does not give that.
Am I taking a definitive stand? No way... most likely I'll try everything along the way, but I refuse to be a follower, I want to fucking lead.
I like to build my own landers, and write my own ad copy.. but have been guilty of taking a couple of lines of text, or ideas on layouts from other landers.. but I always build it fresh for my own use.. Is that copying? ha..
I enjoy building new campaigns from scratch simply because I love the creative process, messing around with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, brain storming new angles and learning how to do new things, but from personal experience it does take longer to get a new campaign you've created from scratch to profitability then just copy and pasting and then modifying another affiliates work.
Personally i like to just take ideas and principles that are working for other affiliates and incorporate it into my own work.
Like Bruce Lee use to say “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
Wow these results so far are surprising.
I really wish I could vote more than once because I do a mix all the time. Right now I'm using a ripped lander. Yeah I said it. And it works, but I'm also split testing it with one of my own using some of the same elements. I think it's good to test what others are running in addition to what you want to run or what you think would work. Using a tried and true angle is always a good idea to start.
With all that said, mobile (non-adult) is the best place where the creative guys are gonna shine ... err theoretically. You can just do so much without having as many eyes on your campaign in the beginning. To my knowledge there isn't any all inclusive mobile spy tool since there are so many variables involved. This makes it tough for anyone to just rip > copy > adjust > profit. Non-adult mobile reminds me of where I was in the affiliate industry was 5-6 years ago. I had no idea of what was working for a certain offer so I would just test angles and ads until something stuck. Campaigns would last longer as well.
I still think theres heaps of creativity out there. Because Mobile doesn't really have many spying outlets you don't know of the new creative angles out there.
One thing I've noticed in the mobile scene is, the more complex your lander the better. My basic pages do crap but when I create a whole new angle with all the bells and whistles and fancy features = $$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Interesting question, and an interesting discussion in general. Here's my £0.02...
A lot of the evolution in how affiliates approach creating campaigns vs ripping them is a result of the years of testing that have come before today. Most of the more established traffic sources or verticals have had enough ideas thrown at them that a few clear winners have emerged, particularly in terms of landing page design. I'm thinking of the Rules Lander as the canonical example here.
As a result, it becomes gradually more cost-effective to grab something that's already working and iterate changes from there, and less cost-effective to innovate - because it's harder to compete with the proven design.
As river says, this is obviously less true in newer/less explored markets like Mobile, and more true in older markets like POF and Adult.
This is a fairly normal evolution in any creative industry: think about the computer games world, for example, which started out as a free-for-all but after about 7-10 years, clear genres and best practises emerged. The differences in the FPS world, for example, are the equivalent of the many variations of the rules lander out there: it's different, but clearly the same design pattern.
(As a filmmaker, I'm familiar with this idea from another angle. My current project is original, certainly, but it's using a three-act structure with well-understood techniques like the Inciting Incident, Expectations Gaps, and fits into the overall genre of an romance piece.)
Most of the time these days, I tend to approach campaigns by looking at the current state of the art, and asking what I can do to outperform that. Sometimes that involves coming up with something completely original (I have at least one campaign that's running an LP design I've literally never seen running anywhere else), but often it'll involve fixing leaks or improving flow from a current lander. Some of the time it just involves taking a lander design and re-implementing it in a way that shaves a couple of seconds off its load time. 
Two thoughts spring to mind about this entire discussion from a practical basis:
1) The industry is evolving and developing, and we're starting to see these design patterns occur. It would be useful to start a deeper discussion about why some of our most popular campaign formats work, how the flow works, what each element is actually doing, and so on. That's a good way to develop techniques for developing original creatives that can reliably compete with established ones, as well as giving us techniques to use our creativity without having to take the risk of doing something totally new, as cashmoneyaffiliate mentions.
I'm not the copywriting or design expert that some people on STM are, but I might attempt to dissect a common campaign pattern on STM soon and see if that's useful.
2) There are huge spaces out there in the potential technique sphere that 99% of us still don't touch - and some of them might well contain the key to something that equals or beats the current state of the art and makes us all a lot of money. It would be interesting to make a list of things that most affiliates aren't trying, and start to look at quick and easy ways to test those ideas. Just off the top of my head, we don't see many attempts to gamify our offers, we don't see a lot of video used at all, let alone motion graphics type video, I've never seen anyone attempt to use 3D...
"Other people got so fed up with people coping their hard work, that they just gave up being creative and started copying too." -- this is where I'm at currently, but also because my old campaigns were copied to the point of saturation and no longer being profitable, so now I am doing this temporarily to give me a base income again. I hope to have the luxury of experimenting with more creative stuff soon, though it's extremely frustrating to have your creativity copied so I tend to not put as much effort into unique campaigns anymore as they aren't going to be unique for long with all the copy pasting.
From what I see, most people steal (ads and landing pages).. it was far worse when the POF spy tools were active but now it's a lot better that most are dead.
I am against the use of spy tools because I don't think it helps anyone in the long run because if you copy homework your entire academic career, you aren't going to learn as much as someone that's done the work.
@BenPOF -- I am so glad the spy tool is dead, I'm going to get back into POF again now that the tool is dead, as before it was just not worth the time and effort knowing that literally the next day my campaign would show up in the spy tool and get copy pasted. Now at least only the semi motivated copy pasters with spy accounts will steal my work
i hate ppl ripping my shit... thats why i keep my mouth shut. :-)
There are very few innovators in this business which is why there are very few people making big money.
There are guys who do "decent" revenue from ripping stuff but that is no way to be "successful" IMO.
In the long run you have to feel good about what you do and having a creative outlet in your work is really important if you want some longevity.
Ripping people's stuff is NOT confined to affiliate marketing. Its a trends that's becoming prevalent in all industries - even those that are not based online. One obvious example is with mobile games - as soon as a game has some sort of success there are thousands of blatant knock-offs. Even big companies like Zynga are known for ripping people's stuff.
Things are just moving too fast these days to spend the time and money on testing "new" ideas. Its far safer to just copy what's already working. Maybe that's why the economy is in such a lull worldwide
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Almost the entire Adult industry is built on rewashes of the Rules landers lol
Originally Posted by polarbacon
I'm surprised that you're surprised that I'm surprised.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
There is clearly a sizeable group who all they do is spy, rip, test, replace and never run anything of their own. I think though that anyone who has done this long enough knows that to really hit a solid campaign it has to be novel and unique. People respond to novelty like nothing else. It's evolutionary, we crave NEW NEW NEW.
Our boredom, in my opinion, is one of our most valuable human survival traits.
I'd also like to see "my largest campaign poll" to determine if it came from
A) Own creation
B) Ripped
Even though i have a feeling it'd be near 50/50, it'd be interesting to know
Talking about this, all the spanish adult landers I'm seeing now, are a rip of the text I translated here haha: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post109381
The more reward for innovation the more innovation you will see. In adult there is not a great reward for innovation and so there is less of it. On other traffic sources there is probably a lot more innovation because your stuff is not as transparent for all to instantly rip.
Originally Posted by pokersensei
So it doesn't count as an edge. An edge there is having direct relationships with advertisers , better technology , employees etc.
On mobile it's the oposite. Spying is pretty hard so if you come up with a good angle you know it's going to last more.
Couple that with cloaking and some tech tricks and you are set for way longer.
It might be a good idea have a sticky post collecting all of the posts addressing the tips about locking your camps down, reducing the chance to get ripped etc. I've seen a ton of content here about that but kinda overwhelming to sort it all.
Would be awesome to see a security checklist that could be run down when launching new camps.
Good call. I'll get onto that.
Originally Posted by tmcalvin
For example , no matter what you do in adult , you will ALWAYS be ripped.
However for sources like mobile / pops / intext a little cloaking can add quite some time to the life of your campaigns.
I agree that there's nothing that can be done to keep things 100% secure, but there are things that can be done to make lazy thieves skip over your stuff and rip the next guy's.
I'm just saying you gotta find a balance between leaving everything on a silver platter and spending time locking stuff down that could otherwise be spent innovating.
Originally Posted by pokersensei
The adult market is so aggressive, and so overpopulated with affiliates competing on the same traffic sources for the same offers, many of the LPs/banners you see are saturated because they've been tested to work the best. I've tried various innovative landing pages that simply haven't compared in ROI, so they get dropped. Even if you find something new that works, you better restrict your ads to the Mongolian desert if you want to keep it a secret.
Anybody can innovate in the adult space. But innovating and getting profitable without trading volume for original niche angles is tough. I think you're going to see the best results by modelling what's already out there and making a few minor tweaks rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel. Then, as bbrock says, focus on building out better relationships with the merchant by working in your lead quality.
A small effort to improve the quality of your leads can translate in to a huge competitive advantage over other affiliates if it gives you staying power and better payouts.
I forget the exact study, but I remember reading something like 85% of the profits in this world are reaped not by visionaries who invent, but by the people who imitate them who actually operationally competent.
Case in point: Xerox comes up with the world's first GUI operating system, Steve Jobs is present at the demo, envisions the future of computing, Xerox was still stuck in a small box, Jobs rips them and runs with it. Bill Gates sees it and comes up with an even more mass-scalable version than Apple and gains PC majority and the world's most valuable company in the 90's and 2000's by ripping and running with it too. iOS comes out, Android rips and runs.
There's romanticism and ego-feeding in being the dude who comes up with some unique ass shit that performs extremely well, but the reality in my experience has been that the real money is NOT in inventing something amazing with pure creativity, but in observing trends, the state of affairs in the environment, and then mixing the perfect combination of different skills and elements together for the perfect profit pie.
I'll take being the distributor of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" any day over being the actual brilliant artist Van Gogh who died alone, clinically insane, penniless, starving, and sad
Originally Posted by timtetra
I agree with what you're saying and I'm guilty somewhat of the ego issue, also that I don't want to see myself as a copycat. I need to get over it though.
Originally Posted by scito
@paycoguy Scroll up to the very top of this page and click on the third link to the left.
The craziness around the adult industry is the thing that kept me away from affiliate marketing for almost a year now.
I was totally pissed off to see so much disrespect for the Art.
To be honest, affiliates started to disgust me.
Now I think I grew up and can live with that.
And I'm happy to be back in the game, and try to make some money.
I haven't set up any campaign seriously during all that time, because I was tired to put so much energy for nothing.
It's more important to me to have fun when I launch campaigns, so I'll focus on innovation and angle creation, as always.
Without that, this whole game has no fucking sense.
I usually test what everyone else is doing then also test my own angles to see if I can improve upon the way the offer is marketed.
One thing I've found that can help combat affiliates ripping your campaigns is working direct. If you have a good relationship with an advertiser you can sometimes get them to pause affiliates that blatantly ripped your campaign (assuming it was unique in the first place) + plus a higher payout makes it much easier to compete when everyone is doing the same thing.
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum