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Six lessons worth $500 - My affiliate marketing journey 02 (9)

12-07-2014 12:18 AM #1 kepe95 (Moderator)
Six lessons worth $500 - My affiliate marketing journey 02

Besides learning Affiliate Marketing, I'm also running a lifestyle and self-development blog. I decided to publish a series of articles on my journey in affiliate marketing, geared towards everyone who never heard of affiliate marketing but wants a job which enables them to live a freedom lifestyle.

This is part 2 of the series, and I think everyone starting out can profit a lot from it. Enjoy!

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SIX LESSONS WORTH $500 - MY AFFILIATE MARKETING JOURNEY 02


Three weeks deep into full-time affiliate marketing, I’ve spent $500 while earning $50. That money isn’t lost, though, but an investment in experience.
What exactly I learnt from that $500 is what I’m going to tell you in this article.



FIRST LESSON

I started out reading and absorbing all the information that was available. I found guides custom-tailored to newbies. Of course every newbie tries them, and their results are very similar. My thought: Let’s get away from the common path and try something different.
While trying to be smart and make a good decision, here is what happened: I spent $40 to pay for my first lesson.

Don’t try to run before you can crawl. You won’t make money by learning how to crawl, but if you attempt to run you’ll just fall and die.
The offer I picked failed completely, and I started with a -100% ROI, completely in the dark and not knowing what I was doing wrong. It would have been a lot smarter to just stay on the common path, not forever, but just to learn the basics.



SECOND LESSON

Luckily, advice from great Affiliates kept me from spending more money. The next offer came along, and I jumped on something that looked very promising. It seemed very straightforward to me: I would advertise a website for a market research company. Once the user clicks on my banners, he has to enter his email on the company’s website. Once that is done, I get paid.

So I created some banners and started testing. After $10 a lot of people had clicked on the banners. But not a single one had entered their email—again, I ended up with -100% ROI, losing another $20 and still completely in the dark.

When you don’t have experience, choose an offer that is working well for others who are promoting it exactly the same way as you are. Ask your Affiliate Managers what works.
Just because something looks easy and promising does not mean it works. Even if the affiliate network provides statistics, other affiliates might take a totally different approach. Maybe the offer worked very well for them promoting it on Facebook. But I tried to promote it on mobile phones using banners.

Especially if you’re new, there is no way to have intuition about what might work. Always ask your AM for an opinion, and which offers are performing best for affiliates using the same approach as you are.



THIRD LESSON

Then the next offer came along, and after trying for one week and having invested almost 100 hours already, my first income finally showed up: $0.30. I would not have thought that making 30 pennies would ever feel so good.

Now was the right time to optimize my campaign. Even though I earned 30 pennies, I had spent 10 times that to make those. That’s a juicy -90% ROI, and the next step is to improve it.

I started looking at where the campaign performed best: It ran better on apps than on mobile sites. And people using 3G instead of WiFi were much more likely to make me money.

Don’t make decisions too early. Don’t cut away the traffic underneath your feet without sufficient testing. View the money you spent completely objectively, as though you were playing a video game.
More than 10,000 people had seen my banners, and hundreds of them clicked. However, I only got a few conversions. Because I did not want to spent more money, I blacklisted banners and placements way too early.

I looked at the banner CTR (the percentage of people who clicked on the banner after seeing it) to decide which banners are performing best. But that’s flawed, because our goal is making conversions, not getting clicks. For example:

1. If you a banner that says “Scandal: Justin Bieber + Miley Cyrus,” a lot of people are going to click on it. But if you are promoting an antivirus app, people are usually not going to install it. They clicked because of Justin Bieber.

2. In comparison a banner saying “Download the best antivirus app now” is going to get less clicks, however people are clicking with the intention of making their phone safer. Because of that, a lot more people will download the app, and you are going to make more money even though fewer people clicked the banner.


But: Maybe the Justin Bieber banner is clicked so much more that even though people have a different intention, you are still getting more conversions and making more money than with the other banner. What we need to make a reliable decision is the CONVERSION RATE.

To get an accurate conversion rate, you need much more than a couple conversions. I made those decisions based on insufficient data, which means it’s completely unreliable and will never get me a much better ROI.



FOURTH LESSON

Massively motivated by my first income, I cranked out new banners and ideas en masse. I was really excited about how they would perform, and then I got smacked in the face.

Never trust your feelings. Test, test, test—and let the data speak.
The new banners I spent so much time and thought on performed like shit. I could not believe it. Using my web design skills, I had designed a beautiful looking mobile landing page. What happened? The ugly 5 minute page I used previously outperformed the beautiful one by many conversions.

The pattern stayed consistent: whatever I predicted would happen never actually happened. There is no way to guess; the only way is looking completely objectively at the data you get after testing. It is all about creating something, testing, testing, testing—analyzing—optimizing—testing, testing, testing. Rinse and repeat.



FIFTH LESSON

After learning a bit more about optimization, I tested various offers. I got recommended an offer to promote a mobile game. Great, let’s do it. Then a fitness app came along. When I started, I was trying to promote insurance. Then browser app installs.

Do not jump around trying everything, because you can’t make something successful within days. Keep trying and trying and trying. Remember that it is working for someone else.
That’s a general life principle – niche down as fast as possible and become an expert. Trying everything and being mediocre at many things won’t get you far. But having a laser focus on one niche and one approach will make you extremely valuable. I decided to only focus on promoting tool apps using mobile display traffic. From now on all I will do is keep trying and testing using this niche.

After getting a brief overview of the playing field, and what works for you, I recommend you choose your own niche. Try to go as niche as possible—is always possible to expand your niche a bit later on.



SIXTH LESSON

After two weeks I started developing a feeling. That thought of how dumb I had been when I started kept creeping in—a good sign. And I could get a lot more conversions—over 100 in total. The best campaigns were now making only -60% ROI, but the learning curve was not as steep as in the beginning.

After several campaigns, I started wondering about how to improve further. The slowing down of my progress, the constant money being lost, and some hard hits wore me down a bit. Luckily there was a great safety net.

Don’t be a lonely keyboard warrior—you are shooting yourself in the foot. Share what you learn and connect with people who are sitting in the same boat.
I started by investing $99 a month for a STM forum membership. Besides masses of useful information, the forum is an incredibly valuable networking platform. I ended up getting into a Skype group with others who are just as motivated as I am. Doing something hard together is always ten times easier than attempting it alone.

12-07-2014 12:44 AM #2 reidmoto (Member)

This is a great summary of what you've learned so far and thanks for sharing it. Being in the Skype group with you, and having had the opportunity to read what you share there, I can tell you that you think, test, take action, and analyze results like the successful affiliates I read about here. I've learned a lot from the discussions you've had with other members and you've helped me directly with some things I was confused about.

Looking back, I'll bet you're amazed at what you've learned in three weeks. Keep up the good work and I know you'll soon be sharing about many days in the green.

12-07-2014 02:33 AM #3 yohn1985 (Member)

Well done Kevin, go Crew!!

12-07-2014 03:33 AM #4 ngolim82 (Member)

Well done kepe95

12-07-2014 08:57 AM #5 cmdeal (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by kepe95 View Post
Doing something hard together is always ten times easier than attempting it alone.
This is definitely true.

12-11-2014 03:00 AM #6 stackman (Administrator)

Very nice conclusions of someone new to the industry.

You'll notice as you make more and more campaigns certain things you found the first time won't always remain true for every campaign. Which is why most affiliates always preach "TEST TEST TEST" to most questions.

12-11-2014 07:57 AM #7 laoba2006 (Member)

Such nice concludion ！Keep on Updating

02-20-2015 04:43 AM #8 dlegia (Member)

Like it

it is simple and easy to be understood

05-22-2015 11:14 PM #9 yussef (AMC Alumnus)

Nice self eval.

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