Things I learned going from broke to $400 per day in my first month (10)
07-30-2014 03:06 PM
#1
Todor (Member)
Things I learned going from broke to $400 per day in my first month
Things I learned going from broke to $400 per day in my first month
I wrote about my success story and great start with the help of this forum in this thread. I'd like to share with you some of the things I learned and put into practice which helped me get to those results in a summarized guide:
1. Get to know your market needs
Do your research, you don’t have to be a business analyst or have expensive tools. If you want to sell something to a market, find what that market needs and amongst that, discover what it desperately needs. My approach in this sense was:
- Look for indicators of interest (IOI for fans of The Game), they may be in the media, something like “Chinese mobile phones sales have boosted in the last quarter in Spain”, you can get them from an industry player you know “John, is it true Chinese phones are being so demanded lately, do you sell them in your shops?”, be proactive, note every concrete number you gather to establish a trend.
- Confirm the needs you discover with high interest indicators using tools like Google Trends, even better, go to a marketplace like eBay, use the free tool Watchcount.com, see what people are bidding and following massively, eBay marketeers use it to discover trends on popular products. There are many tools available that you can use to measure both the interest and the actual purchases of people for some products and services. Do your homework before picking your niche.
- I myself have some technical skills and programmed a small market analysis tool which I used to scout for interests in my market, I’m not a developer and I invested less than a week in doing it with some basic PHP and database skills.
- Using the publicly available tools and my custom data gathering tool, I identified and focused on five desperate needs in my market and in different sectors, from customer electronics to adult dating, with concrete numbers and trending percentages.
- From all identified and confirmed desperate needs put in top priority: the ones that have a clear targeting and at the same time are covered by a good offer, we will see this in the next points.
2. Get to know your market offers
- In paralel, you have to get familiar with all affiliate products available for your market. For when you discover a “desperate niche”, your brain has to click immediately and remember the offer you found in that network a couple of days ago, which may just cover this need.
- Don’t waste your time going into details of the offers until you have finished the market needs scouting, just do a quick review so you remember where to go after you’ve identified a desperate need.
3. Get the best possible product (for you)
- By this point you should have at least a couple of desperate needs identified with a proven interest trend in your target market.
- Now it’s time to find the best product for you. I say for you, because for desperate needs I have discovered that you don’t need to offer the best quality product or the best service. People want it and want it now, so focus on something which has an optimal conversion funnel, low cancellation rate and, if possible a high CPL better than CPA, you drive them the desperate customers, if you are paid for every lead you don’t have to invest so much time in learning about the product and researching if it will convert well or even worst, trying to teach the offer owner why his funnel is not converting, I had enough of that in my years of owning a web agency.
- If you don’t find the perfect offer, don’t throw away that need you’ve identified, look for some of the companies that offer solution for it in your market and put them in touch with your affiliate networks, it may take some time for them to set up an affiliate program but by the time they have, you’ll be the first to have access to it and you will have already build a good relationship with both the affiliate network and the owner of the product.
- I was lucky and found my perfect product, I remembered one of the affiliate networks I joined having several products in the sector of that desperate need, CPL based with a very low cancellation rate (duplicate registrations basically) and a quick payment confirmation. I was worried that there was only one available in this market but few days ago I just found a second one, with a lower CPL but still can work if I have some troubles with the first one, I will rotate them soon as it may even convert better regardless of having lower pay per lead.
4. Get the traffic flowing to your offer
Now, if you have placed in high priority those desperate needs that are clear to target, we only have to open the channel and let the desperate buyers flow to our offer or pre-sale landing page.
Clear targeting doesn’t always mean demographics, device type, etc. A secondary benefit of accomplishing an extended market research as per point 1 is that in the way of doing that, you will also do a media analysis and possibly find forums and blogs where people speak about those desperate needs.
- For one of my dating offers, I focused on single parents. Since POF wasn’t so popular in my target market, I found a couple of social networks and online communities where single parents met for excursions and support stories, then filtered my ads to only be displayed in those sites. My Google Ads account manager told me “But… this will limit a lot your reach and displays, are you sure?”, the best way to increase your CTR and CVR is to be very specific in displaying your ads. Sure you’ve to do more research to fine-tune and scale your campaign, but you will save a lot of money on displaying millions of impressions in sites that don’t work until you filter them.
- In my winning campaign I found two sites who drove a large amount of desperate buyers in search for information, these sites were very well positioned in Google and also had TV and other media campaign running, I just had to get my offer inside them.
- My limitation with this strategy is that in order to scale up I need to find more similar sites, which is not always possible, paid search ads in google if the offer allows it and I can optimize a profitable bid per click.
Great share!
You are right about the need to find a desperate niche. The game is much easier that way.
Keep the good work.
Awesome.
Google has been discussed in another thread, but I will ask you here, did G have any issues with you using display ads linking to an affiliate sales page?
Thanks
Great info, appreciate it!
Originally Posted by nzbryant
Nice lessons, 'get to know your markets needs' is key and the best way i find that out is from a mix of research and then testing/ I like to split test copy/angles against eachother and see first hand what my market converts with. When you see it for yourself you come up with better angles and ideas.
Great write up! You mentioned..
There are many tools available that you can use to measure both the interest and the actual purchases of people for some products and services.
thanks!
Google has been discussed in another thread, but I will ask you here, did G have any issues with you using display ads linking to an affiliate sales page?
I'm curious about this too. I'm pretty familiar with Adwords, I've ran many successful campaigns for local businesses, but I've always been told to not touch it with affiliate pages. Can you elaborate a bit on this? Are you setting up a more "legitimate" website around your offer?
Can you or anyone else recommend some of these tools?
thanks!
thanks!
You can also use some social media listening tools like Radian6 or similar to know what your potential customers are talking about, that can give you some insights on what they are looking for or where you can actually find them.
Hello
I like your explanation. Thank you.
Does these methods applied to mobile CPA too?
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