Which Strategy Would You Choose? (8)
Hey all,
I am new to STM and CPA marketing in general. I have had some success with affiliate marketing, but nothing big to speak of.
My question is, if you have 200$ to spend each month on learning CPA marketing (and trying to make some bucks along the way), how would you do it?
A. Try smaller campaigns and invest 200$ each month
B. Save up for 5 months and then launch a bigger campaign
I have been reading the forum posts and see many people recommend $1000 as the starting amount. I have even seen people say $10k is what you need to get the ball rolling.
Is it even worth trying to do 200$/month campaigns?
STM has been a great resource. I am reading up as much as I can and have applied to neverblue, maxbounty, and F5 media. Hopefully I'll get accepted soon and can start testing.
People may have different recommendations on this one, but I'd say get going now. Get yourself a cheap server (Beyond Hosting starter) and start launching some small niche campaigns.
No lie, you'll find it tougher because of your lack of spending money, but you can start learning and improving, and hopefully start seeing at least small profits.
Aim for ultra-niche campaigns on low-payout offers. Because you are initially working with such a small budget, you should be able to pick off low-hanging fruit in tiny niches most people wouldn't consider.
Just remember to aim for statistical significance even so - you'll probably need to spend about $8 a day, then get actionable stats about every second or third day.
Alternatively, work on developing a bigger cash flow for the first month or so through free traffic sources! You can still run tracking, practise split-testing offers and so on via free traffic.
Since I am strapped for cash, here are a few ways I am trying to cut costs
1. Instead of going fully managed, go for a cheap unmanaged VPS- Digital Ocean costs me around 5$/month. I can then set up prosper here
2. Go with cheap traffic sources only- A lot of advice I read on STM suggests that beginners should go with dating offers. I will try and do this with POF
What are your recommendations for cheap paid traffic? Does sources like Adf.ly convert decently? I have tried it in the past- but the bounce rate is extremely high (99.8%).
Also, I would like to experiment with diet offers. I already have a site set up 2 years back (didnt do much with it). My sister is a doctor, so she can write content. I also have freebie landing page set up for lead capture. However, I have read in this forum that testing diet ads alone would mean hundreds of thousands of dollars spent at zero profit (which at the moment I cannot afford).
Any help would be appreciated.
**Update** Got prosper up and running on a 5$/month VPS after getting a cheap .biz domain for tracking @ 3$.
**Update 2** Got accepted at MaxBounty and got rejected by F5Media.
Thank you.
The starting amount doesn't matter because everyone has different conditions. Do your best to earn extra income and cut your expenses whenever possible. Find a way to make that $200 a month into $400 a month extra.
Then start working on campaigns now. One mistake I've seen is these guys will save 6 months for that $2,000 to work on a campaign, and they panic after losing $100 because they worked so hard for that cash.
My newbie advice has always been to go after well known traffic sources and well known offers first, because you know they can convert. The newbie strategy would be to tap into a demographic or segment that's not as competitive. For example if you wanna do adult dating, you could try a much smaller country like Denmark or Sweden.
Don't do diet, you're really overestimating the advantage of your sister being a doctor. Diet has a lot of legal issues that could get you in trouble if you don't know what you're doing.
Thanks for the reply dr_ngo.
I have already started my campaigns on a smaller budget. Since I am from India, the amount I can earn even from a full time job wont be very high (To get 2000$ a month you need to have 10+ years experience and be in a very high position. The average person my age earns around 300-800$/month ). So increasing income is a bit limiting for me.
Now coming to my campaigns. To test things out, I started off with 2 campaigns in the dating space. I targeted females above 35 years in a specific country. No other targeting option was exercised. Also, I used direct linking.
Here are the stats
Campaign #1 (Small Ad)
Total Impressions: 35,305
Total Clicks: 17
Avg CTR: 0.048%
Total Costs: $7.98
Campaign #2 (Small Banner)
Total Impressions: 41,682
Total Clicks: 24
Avg CTR: 0.058%
Total Costs: $10.37
MaxBounty Stats
Clicks: 38
Leads: 1
Earnings: $5.30
I have created another campaign with 9 small banner creatives- this time targeting men since I read in STM that men convert better. Hopefully I can make some sense out of testing within my 100$ budget for direct linking campaigns.
Are you tracking these campaigns with Prosper, and are you using a VPS for that? Given you have a small budget, you really need every advantage you can get - not using tracking is a very false economy.
(Digital Ocean will be fine, btw, provided you know what you're doing setting up the LAMP stack. Bh is better for the low hassle, but if you're trying to save every penny and you have the sysadmin skills, an unmanaged VPS is a decent way to go.)
@smallbusinessguy:
I'm really keen to see how you get on with this mate. I'm in a pretty similar position where I don't have a huge amount of disposable income at the moment but am really excited by the possibilities from this variant of affiliate marketing.
Not quite ready to take the plunge yet myself but we should definitely touch base and confer if I do end up going the POF way in the near future. 
Yeah definitely start asap. Besides the money theres a lot of learning ull have to do so start getting some experience with all the tools you'll use.
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