A determined newbie starting out (29)
Hello!
I've spent pretty much all day here on the forum, just taking in information. There's so much stuff in here! 
Anyways, I decided to open up some sort of an accountability thread for myself in here, as I want to get going as soon as I can.
So, I've had a dating site in Finland where I was making at around $1000 per month on basically 3 different offers. Then I got slapped by the Penguin 3.0 and to be honest, that was the last drop for me on the endless line of negative aspects of SEO. I'll probably do SEO as well at some point, but for now I want to take some distance and learn the paid traffic.
Anyways... I was thinking of jumping into POF with these Finnish offers, but then I noticed that they don't serve any traffic in Finland. Bummer. It also seems like it's worthless to run dating ads in Facebook, correct? Let's see if I can find a way to monetize these dating offers somehow...
BUT, there are 2 options left for me.
Some time ago I purchased myself the rights to about 250G worth of adult content. Yes, I have about 300 videos, and the rest is pretty much pictures, all complete with 2247 information and all. I made some watermarked videos and uploaded them by hand and with this AVS video uploader, and now I'm getting like 15 visitors to this site of mine (not worth the effort to continue on that road). I do, however, have that adult site that I can tweak to any direction I want to, so I might test out some adult traffic with it (or on a standalone page). I'm a decent writer and now that I have access to all of this material, I think I could come up with good banners at least. So, this is my one option.
The next option would be, as Zeno suggested in his Facebook tutorial, to get involved with gaming. I'm 29 right now, but I used to play a lot when I was a kid, so the passion for games might still be buried somewhere inside of me. Therefore beginning with gaming ads on FB could be a good strategy.
What do you guys thing? Should I go with the adult or gaming in Facebook (probably here in Finland)?
Sorry to write such a romance novel here, but I've got some more stuff I don't yet understand...
So, what is this tracking thing essentially? I get some code on my landing page, and that'll tell me how many are clicking on the offer, yes? What tracking tools would you recommend to begin with? I saw the
I only have something like $300-$500 to use on a monthly basis, so I really want to do my homework well and then spend my scarce money wisely.
Anyway, I invite you along with me, and I'm hoping you get something valuable out of this journal
Okay, so having slept a good night sleep, I've now come up with some decisions.
As zeno suggested, I'll use the
Another thing that I'm arriving at is that I'll probably go with the adult traffic thingy for now. The reason for that is that I read in the awesome thread somewhere that the biggest mistake people have made is to not milk a well-functioning campaign. Well, I have a couple of offers from my SEO'd dating site that pulled really well. I think I could make them profitable in the adult niche, given that majority of traffic came in from adult-dating-like terms anyway. So, I'll just go into FINNISH adult niche and start from there. I think I can make it work, as I know how to write at least decent copy, I know the terms and creatives that seem to work (at least in my actual dating site), and overall I'm already familiar with the niche. I also have TONS of royalty-free adult content I can use, so I should be able to come up with some good banners as well.
Zeno suggested I would forget about the VPS now that I'm still getting started. That's fine for me, although I'm somewhat familiar with the technical world (and I have a pretty tech-savvy web designer friend as well). Oh well, I guess I'll just start with the easy way to get going, and I'll update to VPS as my volumes grow into such measures that it's a good idea to have a VPS.
Good luck on your journey! I'll be following :-).
Hey, thanks biggiant!
Okay, live and learn, as they say!
My background has been messing with WP as my CMS, but it seems like that's a no-no if I really want to make this work for me. I'm no web designer, but I have a good friend who is good at it, so I'll just ask him for advice.
Oh, I also had a look at Lead Pages TOS, and it says you can't use LP for hosting any adult-themed landers. Right. So there goes LP anyways...
Thus far it seems like I would be hosting my site at Amazon S3 and use Cloud Fare for CDN.
I'll probably get a domain and get it up and running first. I'll then have a look at the tracker (
Some question here.
1) What kind of templates do people use for their landing pages? I would imagine everyone develops their own style and taste over years, but where do you start?
2) Is ExoClick recommended for starting out in adult traffic? I have a pretty (very) limited budget, so I'd rather stick with one network for now. Is this wise?
3) What are some of the most popular banner sizes I should go for?
All right, I've spent pretty much this day in practicing the Adobe Muse. I must say that the Adobe Creative Cloud is probably THE sweetest deal I've ever encountered anywhere, ever! Some 50 euros a month for all those dozens of apps! And today, I started to learn yet another one: Muse.
My earlier experiences from editing HTML were from using the ancient software called NVU. It was as horrible as it sounds, so no wonder I had a bit of apprehension going on for me about doing these landers myself. But with Muse, I'm pretty sure everything will be fine.
I asked this from zeno as well, but what do you guys think would be the best order to proceed right now? I mean, should I first decide on the angle, then create some banners and finish it off with the LP?
Also, one other thing I'm thinking here is, how do people split test while running campaigns? With Muse it would be easy to create these A-B tests and therefore hopefully get quicker to the stuff that actually works.
For split testing, make multiple landers and then rotate them evenly using your tracking system.
Banners point to a single URL (but with query string differences or tokens), tracking system handles the rest.
Originally Posted by artsifin
I don't do Adult or Dating or even Gaming so there's not much advice I can offer
but I did see this question which I'm not sure if someone answered.Tracking is basically collecting as much data as you can about people coming through to your site and taking/not taking action. It usually is a piece of code that goes on your landing/checkout page and will give you information when someone triggers it.
Since you're paying for traffic here, you want to know what sources of traffic/websites/demographics are getting you the best results so you can cut costs and tune up your revenue.
E.g, if I'm running an FB ad, I'll usually split test different age groups, (20-25, 26-30, 31-35), interest, gender, locations, etc. If a particular age group is more profitable, (which my tracking data will be able to tell me), I'll focus more on it.
The more you can figure out about your target demographic, the better chance you have at marketing to them.
Good luck with your journey
~ Mateen
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by mateen
I don't do Adult or Dating or even Gaming so there's not much advice I can offer
but I did see this question which I'm not sure if someone answered.Tracking is basically collecting as much data as you can about people coming through to your site and taking/not taking action. It usually is a piece of code that goes on your landing/checkout page and will give you information when someone triggers it.
Since you're paying for traffic here, you want to know what sources of traffic/websites/demographics are getting you the best results so you can cut costs and tune up your revenue.
E.g, if I'm running an FB ad, I'll usually split test different age groups, (20-25, 26-30, 31-35), interest, gender, locations, etc. If a particular age group is more profitable, (which my tracking data will be able to tell me), I'll focus more on it.
The more you can figure out about your target demographic, the better chance you have at marketing to them.
Good luck with your journey
~ Mateen
Okay, so that explains. I was a little bit confused on what's the fuss with simply knowing whether someone converted or not (I thought I'd see that in my CPA network stats anyway.)
So, what kind of data are people collecting here for the most part? I can understand how in adult dating the urls and banners people come from would be valuable to know, but what else? Is there some value in tracking OS, browser, screen resolution and whatever else I can? Are these things even trackable by something like
Tracking is a cornerstone of internet marketing.
You may want to know:
a) what banners people clicked on, how these interacted with landing pages, and the offer
b) how different landing pages perform
c) how different angles/ad copies/etc. perform
d) how these interact with each other
e) whether different browser perform differently and if this points to an LP design issue
f) whether different mobile devices or connectivities perform differently and if so can you alter targeting at the traffic source to become more profitable
g) how different networks/offers perform on the back end
h) list goes on
And not to mention the automation, data aggregation/analysis and click flow control that a good tracking system (e.g.
If you think people in this industry get to $xx,xxx/day by just throwing up banners direct-linked to an affiliate link and looking at the network stats, you are thoroughly mistaken.
Originally Posted by zeno
Originally Posted by zeno
Anyways... Have you run a lot of adult, Zeno? I have some new questions...
Given that i'm going to be using
1) Traffic networks
2) CPA networks to join?
I mean... I have an account at Peerfly, MaxBounty and Neverblue, but are there some CPA networks out there that would have more adult dating offers, especially in Finland?
Also, I understood that the tracking only works when information flows back and forth, and this requires that the tracker can communicate with the networks, yes?
Originally Posted by artsifin
2) Try adding Advidi to your list, I believe they do a lot of dating and are based in NL.
3) Yes information must flow back and forth. You pass data to the network (subids) and one of these should be a unique click ID from the tracker. Then, for the offer you are running (or globally i.e. account-wide) you can set a postback URL. When a conversion happens the network will communicate this to your tracker.
You need to manually configure server to server tracking, no magic involved.
Okay, thanks Zeno!
All right! I fired away my first 2 ads! How exciting!
Here's what I did...
I signed up for Juicy Ads (thank Finch for the awesome tips), and placed my ad in 2 tube sites here in Finland. I chose to take the top right placements, as those seem to get a bigger CTR.
Now... I wanted to get started FAST, so I simply direct-linked into the offer. I know this is bad, BUT I think it would be way worse to just fart around and try to come up with the perfect system before actually doing shit. This is my fifth day in this world, so I really just wanted to create something - ANYTHING - and get going. The next part of course is to create a LP in between the ads and the offer. But now I at least have some ads running.
The ads have been running for about 6 hours now. Thus far the numbers look like this:
Ad 1
Impressions 3,739
Unique visitors: 36
Raw clicks: 45
CTR: 1,2%
Ad 2
Impressions: 496
Unique visitors: 7
Raw clicks: 9
CTR: 1,81%
These CTR's are of course going to go down over time, but I'm pretty happy about them, taken into account that these 2 are my very first ads I've ever created.
So, thus far I've gotten 54 unique visitors to the offer page, but no conversions just yet.
I did calculate, that if I can get ONE lead per day at $7 per lead, I would be having a 150% ROI. That might, however be a fantasy. I don't know... When my dating site was at the top of Google, this offer page converted at about 10% pretty consistently. Maybe things are a bit different when guys have a dick in their hands? 
As for the tracking, I did a very simple sub-id thingy where I at least know which banner is producing which results.
Anyways... I'm super happy to be MOVING already. There's TONS of stuff to learn of course, but now I'm getting some numbers in, which is the most important part.
HOLY LORD!
12 hours into my first campaign, and my ROI is 194,8%!
Now, this one is most likely going to pass as people get fatigued about my ads, but STILL! It's small successes like these that get you keep on working. I probably just got lucky here, but it definitely feels good to have it go like this
Hehe, well seems like I got a little taste for the "beginners luck" right off front
(Also, my math is terrible, of course the real answer was 94,8% ROI for the first day.)
The next couple of days pretty much without conversions, but I'm still getting a nice CTR of around 1%. I also made a decision to temporarily direct traffic to my dating site, where I have good amount of text and a video that should help some people out. Today I also got a conversion from the site ($12.25), so if that came from these efforts, that would be roughly a 240,9% ROI. It's hard to tell, however, whether that visitor came from search engine or my ads.
ANYWAYS....
I've gotten some stuff done:
- my first ever lander (ugly as shit, but it'll suffice for now)
- I hosted the LP successfully on Amazon S3
- I've configured
So, have I understood it right, that I use the CLICK URL from Voluum in my CTA buttons, and then the CAMPAIGN URL when people click on my ads?
That's the way it seems to work, but I'm a little bit confused how there could be just one url for all the offers I decide to promote in all the landing pages? How does that work?
Once again I must say that this forum is such a beautiful place! I've been at this like a hawk for the past week or so, and I don't think I would've ever even got this far on my own, so thanks a lot everyone!
NEXT UP: Finish the CDN setup on CloudFront and make sure the Voluum works. Then publish the landing page in between the ads and the offer.
PS: I came up with an interesting angle, but I'll share it later if it actually ends up working to any degree
All looks very good! You seem to be seeing the power of familiarity with a niche already - nice work.
As a result, you only need one campaign URL and one URL for all your landers - Voluum knows, for example, that you've got 4 offers set up, so it just makes sure that even numbers of visitors go to each offer. It'll either randomly choose an offer to send each visitor to or rotate between them - I don't know which exact method Voluum uses internally but they end up having much the same results.
All right, awesome! Very fortunate that I chose the
All right!
So now I have an ad on 2 different sites (direct placements on top right corner). They both point at a LP, which is similar in every other sense other than some coloring (which matches the site they came from.)
With just a couple of dozen clicks it's of course impossible to say anything conclusive just yet, but thus far I'm very happy about the CTR of these landers:
LP1: 50,00%
LP2: 57,14%
I think I'm getting somewhat stuck on the ancient offer LP, so I asked my AM if he could get some new landers for the offer (I saw a couple of really good ones out there, but I have no idea what network they are from.)
I also did some new banners, and seems like they are pretty consistently getting around 1% CTR.
Did sign up also for the Traffic Junky, so I'll buy some small little placement from the BIG tubes as soon as I get my account verified
PS: Oh hey! For all the
No, that shouldn't be the case. The campaign URL should stay the same when you change landers - otherwise you'd have to continually get your ads reapproved, which would kill your campaigns.
Yes Caurmen, that's what I thought! Oh well, maybe I clicked something wrong in there. I'll see what happens the next time around.
Apart from that, I now have some new networks for both traffic and offers I've registered for, so I'm really excited to get going!
I also noticed that there might be some opportunity available in one of the neighbor countries of mine (Norway), so I already got some translations done and tomorrow I'll start (hopefully) creating some damage outside my own country as well
I'm still getting a consistent 50% CTR on my landers, so it's the offer that's leaking right now. Hopefully I'll get this sorted soon
Okay, so now I've got tracking in place, so it will be easier to see whether I'm actually getting somewhere or not.
I published my landing pages in the morning yesterday (might have been at around noon or something).
Here are the stats for both landers from yesterday according to
LP 1
Visitors 115
CTR: 52,17%
Cost $1.84
Profit / Loss: $1.84
LP 2
Visitors 25
CTR: 48.00%
Cost $0.50
Profit / Loss: $0.50
No conversion as of yesterday.
Today (it's around noon) stats look like so:
LP 1
Visitors 48
CTR 45,83%
Cost $0.77
Profit / Loss: $0.77
LP 2
Visitors 20
CTR 25.00%
Cost $0.40
Profit / Loss: $6.60
So, it seems I've gotten 1 conversion today ($7 payout), which means I'm profitable for yesterday and today! Wooo-hoo!
Now, these are miniscule numbers of course, so no conclusive observations can be made just yet, but I like what I'm seeing thus far.
The only difference between landers is the background color of the text boxes I have in them (to match the site they came from).
Banners have also been working pretty well (I've updated them every now and then). I made a curious observation, though. Yesterday I uploaded a banner that has a blurred picture of some MILF spreading her legs. That one seems to have a bit lower CTR than the ones I've ran that aren't quite as explicit. The difference is not HUGE, but difference nevertheless: around 0.07% or so. I won't stress about it too much right now, but will definitely make a mental note of it for the future.
The new banner 2 I made yesterday seems to be pulling pretty well: 2,31% CTR as of today. Again, only 649 impressions so could be luck as well. I did, however, come up with a new interesting angle that I tested with this amateurish-looking photo of a woman. It's also worth noting that the conversion came from this banner, so...
Anyways, I got some translations made in Norwegian and I got an account approved in TJ, so I'll run some smaller tests there as well. Interestingly the Juicy Ads didn't have anything in Norway. Sweden had a couple of good tubes, so I'll test there as well.
All in all, I'm happy about my progress thus far
Definitely test some more similar offers - but watch out for the flow from offer to lander too. A good lander CTR isn't necessarily what you want - what you're looking for, primarily, are highly pre-sold visitors leaving your lander.
See http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...y-Don-t-Matter
Great follow along, subscribed, wish you all the luck mate!
Caurmen, that's an awesome thread! I'm going to at least change the CTA button to match what's at the offer side of things to see if that has any effect.
Actually, this could become my first split test in
EDIT: Okay, so I read the whole post now. Wow, I'm definitely going to test some different themes or angles here as of next. My current angle is a little bit modified version of the Rules lander. It's kind of like "well, let's see if you qualify", but in a bit more believable manner than most of the offers I see out there.
But in any case, I'll just split-test the CTA-button right away, as that's the easiest and fastest to do. Then I'll go back and test different themes altogether as well.
I got a bit lost after starting this follow-along, but now I'm back!
The STM London is over and I've launched some new campaigns as well. The budget is still small, but I'm working on getting some new client work now that would at least alleviate that a little bit. Meanwhile, I don't want to use that as an excuse for not doing anything.
So, after STM London I've spent like $75 to get going again. No conversions yet, but I've learned a lot:
- how to have a routine of creating banners - even animated ones - and how to upload them
- how to create simple landers
- how to setup
So, I would say I put a cap for the "learning fee" at around $100. That's when I know I've gotten all the moving parts going, and I can focus on actually optimizing the campaigns.
QUESTIONS
I would love to have some of you more experienced guys help a newbie out here.
1) How much do you spend per ad before you cut it? I heard somewhere that spending 2x the payout would be a good rule of thumb (which I followed on this one)
2) How many ads do you create per lander?
3) I have had a couple of hundred clicks to my landers, with a CTR of about 25% - 60%. No conversions yet, however. Is it too early for me to think that there's a problem with the offer(s)?
I'm currently working on FINLAND, as I'm Finnish, and I thought I might be able to use that to my advantage. The traffic volumes are low, but I still somehow think I could make it work in here. Or do you think I should just go somewhere more mainstream, like Germany or France?
I've been running Sex Partner offer on my actual dating site (SEO), and it seems to pull pretty well over there. However, with these paid adult campaigns, no conversions whatsoever. I'm suspecting people have seen those Sex Partner landers so many times that they just won't stick no matter what. Or am I too hasty in my conclusions?
Anyways, good to be back on the game! I made some difficult decisions on the STM London so that I could focus on affiliate marketing. I still need to drastically raise my budget, but at least I'm moving again.
Meanwhile I need to figure out the offer thingy here in FInland.
All the help, suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated
Originally Posted by artsifin
Hello lavish!
1) I'm running desktop CPL
2) Ok, good!
3) Yeah, for whatever reason I tend to get 50% LP CTR pretty easily. I think this MIGHT be about the offer, but I'll let it run for some time to see if anything changes.
Thanks!
Hey hey people!
I'm still kind of struggling to get my video lander up and running. I'm hosting the video on S3 and I use CloudFlare.
Does anyone have any kind of handy tutorial on how to set up this combo for video landers? I'm especially stuck on finding a good player for the video.
I looked at Vimeo, but they don't allow adult content. I've been looking at Wistia, but it has been loading really weirdly with many of the videos, so I wouldn't want to use them.
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