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A Simpler Approach to Your First 1k/day and Beyond (73)

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Hey all,

So it’s been quite a while. I remember when I first joined this forum, I’d look through follow alongs, and my eyes would glaze over seeing people making 1-2 thousand per day net on facebook. And here I was with $30 stuck to my whiteboard - that was my goal at the time for net profit/day I wanted to average over a month. With my sights set so low, I struggled for a long time. If you’ve similarly been having trouble getting traction, then this method is going to be for you. I used it to go from making basically nothing to 1k/day+ revenue in a month’s time at decent roi. There may be a faster or more profitable method to get there, but I doubt it’s as simple as this.

There are no offers to select, no ads to create, no landing pages to setup, and no server required. More importantly there are no more excuses for not taking action! Right!?

Can you guess what it is? Well I’ll give you a hint, in the form of a riddle:

Most networks will have me.
Most affiliates will see me,
Most visitors never will.

My hope is that this method will help make you think outside the box, get some fire going in your belly, and set your sights higher if you’re starting out. But first, I thought I’d give a little update since the last time I checked in here, and hopefully there’s some value added there too.

Things really started moving for me last year, in large part thanks for this forum. Not necessarily due to any particular guide, but just by virtue of being a little active in posting and trying to get things going, I ended up connecting with a few people on here through skype, and got a business partner out of it. You have no idea how much that helped kickstart things. When you’ve been going it alone for so long and not making much happen, being held accountable to another person makes you realize how inefficient and undriven you really are. Prior to that I just cruising through campaigns, networks, and traffic sources, with no real direction or focus and making peanuts or worse. All for longer than I care to admit.

We ended up pursuing adult (small fail), to making our own email submit offer (timewasting fail, also hello fraudulent leads!), and finally months later ending up at facebook and cloaking (huge win). That’s when things finally took off in a big way. However... not long after I decided to leave that partnership. Going from making facebook diet money back to making next to nothing was pretty disheartening, but what was even worse was that I starting as a newbie all over again. Yes I could have continued to pursue cloaking on facebook, but for the amount of work, and stress over it, I figured I could make the same or greater amount of money doing something else and enjoy it more. I was also burnt out by the whole process and grind and wanted to do something new. It was around that time I stumbled upon this post: http://www.wallofmonitors.com/2012/1...-redirect-com/ that set off a few lightbulbs and made me rethink my whole approach. So here it is:

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Step 1 - Monetization

If you’ve ever been redirected to a different offer when clicking an affiliate link because your ip is from a different country than where conversions are allowed, then you’ve likely been subjected to a redirect monetization service/network. Affiliate networks use them to monetize traffic that is otherwise wasted, as do some ad networks. You’re always going to get a small percent of clicks that don’t match the country/geo set in your campaign. For the media buyer, it’s a good way to help monetize left over traffic on a site buy, where you buy all the traffic for a given site placement, but don’t have similar offers available for every country in place. However for this method we’re not going to be doing any of that - instead you’re going to send them ALL the traffic. No hunting for offers. No setting up LPs. Just grab a link for each traffic source and you’re good to go. You can sit back and they’ll care of fitting the right offer to the traffic you send. If need be you can have stuff like entry/exit alerts and auto-play sound disabled.



The ones out there I know of are YTZ , Redirect.com , and Geomize. YTZ is the one I recommend, and oddly enough I found out about it advertised in Mundo Media’s dashboard - not exactly a direct competitor but still. I had tried redirect.com in the beginning, but found YTZ monetized much better for the international web traffic I was sending. One thing I noticed is that they would always have landing pages in rotation, whereas with redirect.com I’d often see direct link campaigns in the mix. Plus their setup and tracking process is easier, and overall I got a better impression by their platform and communication that they really know their stuff. If you/they want a referral just mention this post. Geomize I never used, as they had a 1k minimum payout last I checked.

Things can get a little messy at times when you’ve got all these links and campaigns going, so communication can at times play a big part in succeeding with this method. Ideally give your AM a heads up when running new traffic so they can keep an eye on it. Launching over the weekend probably isn’t the best idea, but I’ve done it anyway at low volumes just because I didn’t want to wait to start generating data. Sometimes there may be a trending winning offer in the mix that hasn’t been given full rotation yet, but if you stop the campaign test too quickly and don’t say anything then you may overlook some potential winners. This is also why l like to break up links for each traffic source - especially if each source has different restrictions.


Step 2 - Traffic

Now that we’ve simplified one side of the equation, we need to do away with something on the traffic side of things to make this method work and help you launch as fast as possible. First things first no more text or display ad based traffic - everything should be direct to link traffic, whether that’s pop-ups, pop-unders, redirects, domain traffic, ppv, or whatever else you can get your hands on. There’s a ton of it out there and honestly the best way to find it is just to google search for it and look for lists on forums like this one. Here’s one: http://www.trafficplusconversion.com...affic-sources/
I bet most of those the average buyer has never even heard of, but there’s an ocean of traffic out there that isn’t covered in guides or even snooped on by spy tools. Doesn’t really matter what you end up going with, but just make sure it’s CHEAP. Ideally under 1-2 cents per view/redirect. Zeropark is an obvious fit, and yes I did run some traffic there in the beginning that did okay. For many ad networks you can get under a cent for non US traffic, especially with pop traffic. By the way some of the best converting traffic I’ve had has come from some of the worst looking interfaces and lack much in the way of targeting options. Go figure.


Step 3 - Volume

In order to hit significant numbers and approach 4 figures a day, especially if you’re targeting smaller countries and/or small to mid sized sources, you're going to want to run as broadly as possible, which means RON - run of network traffic. I’d pick one source and then split up campaigns per country, and then further by web or mobile if they offered it. Typically I’d test a few new campaigns at a time with cap of like $25 each, but that’s going to depend on your budget and what country you target. For larger countries it will be harder to accurately gauge if its going to work since there’s so much traffic and categories/publishers/etc attached to it. Instead you could add like 10 small countries at a time and start that way. Even at low caps you should be able to tell pretty quick what has potential.

In the beginning I was pretty aggressive with launching 5-10 few campaigns each day for a few days straight, and was plenty fine hitting break even or slightly under. By the second week I had hit $500 revenue and about $550 costs, just throwing everything at the wall, and a few days later I started making profit as I continued to cut losing countries. In exactly a month’s time I was able to hit my 1k revenue a goal day with it, with around $300 profit and when I optimized more I added a few hundred more per day on both sides of the equation.

Actually back then I didn’t have a good approach to optimizing RON. If a country ended up being break even or slightly negative I’d just turn the whole thing off eventually. What I should have done was split up promising campaigns in half for starters with 1) a whitelist campaign with just the profitable ids/categories/whatever and then 2) a RON blacklist campaign with those profitable and unprofitable ones blocked. Or just keep the profitables ones in there and you might get a little more traffic to them depending on the source. If you still have a bunch of break even ids/categories/whatever doing decent enough volume, then you could optionally break those into a 3rd campaign with just those whitelisted and lower your bids accordingly.


Step 4 - Voluum


At this point you’re up likely up to several hundred thousand clicks per day. The idea of running that much traffic on your average self-hosted tracker and server should cause you to wake in cold sweats at night. They’re not engineered to handle that, and you’re going to run the risk of crashing things or having major slowdown and losing money. Not to mention having to constantly clear out the database and throw away data. Yuck. Thankfully it was around this same time that the cloud hosted tracker Voluum was first making waves, and I went with it. It’s hard to imagine succeeding as well at this method without it. Not just because it can handle the traffic, but because it’s able to setup a campaign faster than any other, and process big reports without slowing everything down. I’ve used every tracker at one point or another, and it really is the best overall at this point.


Tip for Tracking Costs:
Don’t get caught up trying to tracking costs too accurately for every campaign by the way or you’ll go nuts. Just shoot for approximate cpc/cpv and after a few days of running traffic. At this point I don’t depend on my tracker to show me accurate daily totals, and instead punch in my numbers to a google docs sheet like so: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
Really helps keep things in perspective with what your running average is shaping up to be.

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Pros

• Easy peasy. Paste links and pause countries that don’t work. Cut out a lot of busy work and excuses for not launching.
• Fast track to 4 figure days. If you go about this smartly and are persistent about testing then I don’t see why you couldn’t hit 1k/day and beyond in a few weeks time with a good source or couple.
• You don’t have to worry as much whether “X offer will work.” Say it’s a sweepstakes offer. If you were to pick one to run yourself chances are it wouldn’t go well. This way you know it’s working somewhere or it wouldn’t be in rotation.
• Access to some offers that aren’t so easily tracked down.
• Lets you test and assess new sources quickly for volume and get a first impression of traffic quality for running broad appeal offers.
• Free iPad lol! It’s pretty easy to hit that $2500 in 60 days with this method. First “prize” I’ve actually won from a network. Felt pretty cool.
• Lastly and most importantly, you set yourself up for bigger days by having a go to source of proven ad networks. This is the true value of this method in my opinion.

Cons

• It’s likely that many traffic sources you try won’t work. Only a few will end up being break even or profitable on those initial country tests, but that’s just how it goes. Either the minimum bids will be too high, or the traffic quality just won’t be there, or a myriad of other reasons specific to how that source works. You could do an extended test and try and make it work, but then you almost might as well be doing things the traditional way.
• Likely lots of campaigns making small profits and few making more. That’s frowned upon from a time management standpoint, but remember we’re also not doing things the traditional way and don’t have a lot of the usual tasks to keep us occupied. These smaller campaigns should be mostly test, optimize, and forget campaigns that need checking up on once a week. By all means though if you find a few campaigns are making the bulk of a days profit then focus on scaling those. But sometimes for smaller countries there’s not much you can do.
• YTZ has delayed reporting and conversions of several hours, or longer every once in a while, so you’re going to have to get used to being patient. Not a bad trait to develop really.
• You don’t have as much power to turn something from break-even to profit when you’re not in control of the landing page. This is probably the thing I dislike most and is what’s going to determine whether you stick with this method once you reach your goals or move on to something else.
• Net 30 payments. If you can do some volume with YTZ you should be able to get faster payments, but it’s going to suck a bit that first month if you’re trying to scale fast and don’t have much cash to go around. I just used a credit card and got a limit increase and that covered me.

So hopefully you can see the beauty of simplicity in this method. This is as close to those stupid “make money online posting links on google” work from home ads that actually does work. I came up with it because I wanted an easy way to hit that 1k/day mark and get my mojo back after exiting from cloaking on facebook. Yes “revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality” as is said, and while you may find a few breakout source-country-offer pairings with unexpectedly high ROI, overall with this method likely won’t profit as much as others. In truth it was really planned more as a stepping stone on to the next thing, and it certainly helped build confidence and a more driven mindset along the way.

So how do you get to that next level? Well there’s really only two ways to go about it. You either:

Master a traffic source

and/or

Master a vertical

Traffic is arguably more important of the two, but still those two are all it really comes down to. I wish someone had slapped me in the face and told me that when I first got started, because it didn’t truly sink it for a long time. With this method you should at come away with at least one solid traffic source, which is going to be your ticket. Where you go from there is anyone’s guess, but just keep pushing for higher and higher volumes.

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Awesome share. thanks

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For someone starting out, what would your recommended budget be? Or I guess a better question is, how much traffic would I probably need to buy to hit $1000 revenue?

I have my own list of low cost traffic networks that I'd readily consider running these redirects on. My main concern is cashflow.

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Damn dude nice write up!

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Kudos. Something I hadn't seen, thought or heard about.

Can you see the offers that are backing out at YTZ or wherever? I'm guessing not otherwise there would be nothing to stop you taking your profitable campaign and making it work direct?

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I'm assuming you mean 1k/day and not the first $1000?

That's sort of a tough question to answer, because it's going to depend on a few things like ones tolerance for scaling at break-even or in the red, how many countries you test at once, and how the traffic source(s) perform.

To generate that first $1000 I spend around $1500, because I was testing a lot of countries at once. My threshold for going negative was around -$50 a day. By the 10th day I had a profitable day from cutting a few things, but I went back into the negative as I continued to test and scale. That trend continued a few more times before I hit that first $1k/day in revenue.

As far as cashflow, it can be tough depending on how fast you want to get there and what financial resources you have at your disposal. I used both my personal card and got a business account & card setup as well. That plus a few thousand I had available covered me for the first month.

If you're strapped for cash then I'd advise if you find one source working okay, then just stick and be more conservative with how many countries you test at once.

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Not from YTZs end - just your stats. But you can certainly use a proxy and see what's being shown.

There's actually nothing to stop you from running things on your own. But like anything else you see being run and try to duplicate, sometimes it's easier said than done. They have the advantage of driving a lot of volume and securing higher payouts, direct with advertisers in most cases, and take a pretty low cut (not sure if I can disclose that). And occasionally offers that I can't find anywhere else.

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Nice write up man!

The first decent money I made online was through arbitrage. It has a special spot in my heart.

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Awesome post mate!

Its a throw shit on a wall strategy and see what sticks! Defiantly the strategy I've moved towards since accumulating enough money to handle the 'shit that doesn't stick' and know the shit that does with most defiantly cover the initial losses.

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This is really the first time i have heard of this too. Thank you for the eye-opening post.

By using this approach, besides cutting out underperforming countries, are there many variables to track and cut out too? like underperforming carriers, underperforming brands of mobile phones etc?

Please correct me if my understanding towards this is completely wrong.

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Great post, never knew about that way of doing things!

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Congrats mate, these success stories always inspire me!

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Hey everyone. There has been a fair amount of Interest from this thread so I just wanted to say thanks for the write up and introduce ourselves. If you have signed up already , please be patient we will be reaching out this week to everyone and approving accounts.

If you have any questions please feel to reach out.

-Max Dennis
YTZ International

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Thanks dude for sharing, not going to do what you say but for the sake of my STM members that might want to let me ask a few questions:

-Out of 1000$ rev, how much % is profit?
-In other words, on a $1000 ad spend, how much profit margin can you make?
-For someone interested, what are the barriers of entry aside money for this?

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I thought I'd parse the quotes above.

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thanks jenn , i <3 you

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So a couple more questions about how much you can make with this method. As rule I'd say it's generally a lower roi approach, in the in the 30% range when you operate at higher volumes and don't optimize things too much. You may find some countries doing 100% or more though, and/or chose to only run a few countries with whitelist campaigns with the profitable data instead of RON, which would net you a higher %.

How much profit you make is really up to you and your goals though. I wrote this guide specifically for people who wanted to hit that $1k/day revenue mark in a timely fashion, because by that point just a few optimizations can amount to an extra $50/100 a day profit and more. If you just want to make $10 net/day then you can look through your stats after running one or a few countries and find some publisherids/categoryies/devicetypes, etc that's getting a few conversions and just whitelist those.

Yes it will depend on the source and what targeting options they have. How much or little you optimize things is going to be up to you. You can keep it simple in the beginning and just focus on things at the country level, but you'll definitely want to start cutting by whatever tokens the source or targeting the source offers as time goes on, and use the recommendations I posted for splitting up a campaign.

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+rep for that post.

Btw, I see there are more services like this, have u tried Mobidea?

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Awesome thread OP! Will definitely give this method a try one day..

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Great share - thanks!

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awesome share!!!! thanks!!!

(this is why STM rocks)

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Hey everyone, Kate is home sick so the account approval process is a bit slower.

Once you are approved you will need to submit a redirect link request. Please be very specific about where you plan on sending traffic from (Zeropark, DNTX, 50onRed)

Thanks for your help and patience.

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Do we need a redirect per source?

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The best set up is a redirect per type ( direct navigation, pops ect )and then use a KW parameter for the source

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Showing us arbitrage is still alive! Awesome unique writeup

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awesome post. big ups

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really useful share
I am going to redirect my waste traffic to this sites and see what will happen

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What do you think about desktop traffic vs mobile traffic?

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Nope

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Hi,

Is anyone experiencing more revenue in their Voluum panels than in their YTZ Stats? Sometimes is not that much (less than .50$) but for one geo I had 36$ in revenue in Voluum but only 9$ in YTZ

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Bimoca, send me an email with account details and date and I will take a look at it.

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@bimoca,

What Time zone are you using?

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Done! I sent you an email

I'm using GMT but I was getting the stats of Yesterday and Today and overall they were quite spot on except for that geo.

PS: I saw that YTZ panel is under maintenance. I guess I should't have to worry about the campaigns, right?

EDIT: panel is back again and it seems that my Voluum stats are ok, really cool when suddenly you've won more money

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I have lost my profitable campaigns for the last 3 days anybody experience that...?

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Here's a thought.

If your question is true, what would you do about it?

If your question is false, what would you do about it?

As far as I can tell--maybe I'm missing something--regardless of the answer, the reaction is the same.

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I just started advertising using zero click traffic from DNTX.com and they blocked my account after 1 week. Reason was due to legal issues. They are not going to open again. And the best thing was they blocked my account on the same day I funded another $200... Argh.... Anyone experienced this problem?

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The problem with DTNX might be their TOS, when you signup you agree to the following:

especially avoiding the toolbar / downloads point is not easy with YTZ or Redirect.

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I see. DNTX has refunded my money and reactivated my account again...

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cool, what did you tell them?

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We now support suppressing downloads on all traffic types. Please submit new link requests if you want to run on DNTX with this.

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To those who have been using this method, has anyone found a placement (country/source) that is spending more than $20/day?

I'm having a good amount of trouble finding places to profitably spend money.

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I did profit from one source in a country for more than $20/day. But unfortunately the traffic died out in a week. The rest of my profitable campaign earn around $5/daily.

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Looks like I lost a very profitable source. Is there a way to resurrect a source that's losing performance or should I just call time of death?

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anyone receive the payment from YTZ?

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I got my August Payout at the beginning of the month. I'm expecting another one late this week / next week.

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my revenue always increase then decrease again and again. does anyone experience this?

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Hi tommy123,

If you think you are experiencing any kind of stat related issues, can you send us an email outlining what you're seeing?

Thanks,
YTZ

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OK, I will post it soon.

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Please PM your email.

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I experiment this with some geos: at first they perform really well but after a week / few weeks they start to lose ROI, getting to break even or even a slight loss, forcing me to pause. I guess they have fluctuations in the rates the Advertisers pay them but I still get mad when I have to pause a geo that was doing a good ROI with nice volume.

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Hello Guys,

My first post on STM here. And I am total noob in affiliate marketing using paid traffic.

I have tried this on a traffic source and tested with 6 countries ($10 spend on each initially). Out of which 1 country is profitable. It's doing +38% ROI on 40-50$ spend. And there is not scope to increase my spend because increased bids is either loosing money or breaking even.

I am using Voluum as a tracker and it's helping a lot. I concentrated on parameters like 'day of week' and 'hour of day' and that has helped me to convert breaking even campaign to making avg +34% roi for last 12 days.

But I agree finding traffic sources for these offers is hard. But optimizing day parting and week parting would help immensely as per my limited experience with this.

Thanks.
Priyank.

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@priyankcmp,

If that geo/source is stable, keep it running. You basically have a mini moneymaker on autopilot. Find another.

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Has anyone had trouble getting payment from YTZ? They told me payments would go out on 10/31 and I haven't received anything yet via paypal...

Probably because it was the weekend/holiday maybe its delayed?

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I received my August payment October 10. I'd give them a week.

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Yeah. Hunting for other sources/GEOs.

BTW, you have done impressive follow along. That gives strength to keep at it.

Regards.

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Great thread

Wanna ask something, the goal is to buy traffic and let (example YTZ) handle all business right? Why don't you buy traffic and then direct it to your own offers… probability for good ROI much higher I think?

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ROI will definitely be higher, but what is the cost of researching and developing a good landing page to match offers on the back end?

The biggest benefit for me of YTZ is they are using other people's traffic to optimize their funnels. I'm not the only person sending traffic from a particular GEO, which means the cost burden of optimizing the traffic is shared between us.

Another major advantage of YTZ is they have direct advertiser relationships often at rates higher than what I as an individual affiliate can get.

The only real drawback is not readily knowing what the offer is so I can better target the traffic. However, because of the broad appeal of the offer to the traffic, that's becoming less and less likely.

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@jennatalia
Got it… thank you for the explanation

Will try to direct with aft offers and hope can contribute something to this thread

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overage charges are my new master

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OK, i read and and read all over the forum and internet ..

I get how this method works.. ok!

The goal is to buy traffic from a source (eg. Decisive) for X and to sell it to another source (redirect.com ?) for X+.

+ is your payout.

The thing is, i dont get it how you all do that technically.

What i do up to know is, find an offer from an aff network, create some banners, create the campaigns to the traffic source (eg. decisive) and wait and optimise.

Is that any close ?

If there is a step by step example of how you do it between a source and e.g. redirect.com please point me there.

I have searched the web and i didnt find anything like that, at all tutorials assume you know how its done practicaly.

Am i making any sense?

Thank you for you time all!

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Have you tried signing up? It becomes easier as you go along.

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You mean signing up with redirect.com ?

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What action have you taken toward implementing this method?

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You should take action and learn things for yourself, you're not going to get far independently if you don't sign up to platforms to see how they work.

YTZ is an international monetisation network. You sign up, generate a link, and send traffic to it. That's it.

You create a campaign at a traffic source and send traffic to this link. That's it.

There are no banners, landing pages and YTZ is the affiliate network.

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Just got through all 12 pages... What an awesome read. congrats Jenna on keeping with it and tearing shit up!

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Such a cool thread!!

Some questions for the experts

I got an account setup with dntx and toped it up
I have a Voluum account and i have a domain from redirect.com

I see that i can create a campaign with PPC or PPR targeting.

1. OK, with ppc people are shown ads that they click on and get redirected to my link from redirect.com
If i go with that option, i have no idea what the adv text should be about, as i have no control of the offers my domain displays. right?

2. If i go with PPR, i do not need an adv. BUT, if there is no adv, how is traffic being redirected to my domain?
Is it like "user A clicks on an adv that accepts traffic only from Romania but he is from Turkey, so if i ask dntx for traffic from Turkey this user is being redirected to my domain" ?

3. And i guess the domain i get from redirect.com is unique and only for me? That why is tracks cv ?

I just try to get me head around this.

Thank you all in advance.

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1. This method isn't suited for banners or CPC-based media. You could do it, but I wouldn't recommend starting out with that.

2. This is redirect traffic. Users go to a specific site and that site may monetise by sending a % of their visitors to a redirect. It could also be popups/unders where the same thing happens. It could also be parked domains - i.e. domains with typos or that no longer lead to a website, which monetise by sending people to a traffic network's link.

3. Yes.

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Is anyone still doing this, I 'd like to try it too.

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Follow this thread: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...k-with-banners

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I'm starting the campaign now ..just curious who's paying for the conversion? Lol

Ps. Please excuse my ignorance

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Hi all,

I hit first $xxx today in revenue and this is the second day running the campaign from YTZ since I got approved by yesterday!
Thanks to thedudeabides, jennatalia, craigm, and sieghart for the tutorial and follow along campaign about arbitrage.
I haven't calculated the ROI yet for all campaign since there is delay from YTZ, but there is around 16% green ROI for one campaign. I believe this is my way to go 4 figures/day.
My tips for anyone who want to try this, just launch the campaign and found your profitable geo, try that geo on another TS, i think it should works

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