My Journey to 1.000 $/ Month (15)
Hey Guys,
happy to be here and eager to learn!
It's time to try something new and expand my knowledge in regards to affiliate- and online-marketing. In order to do so I set myself a bankroll of 1.000 EUR, that I'm willing to loose in order to learn.
I work full-time in online-marketing and have a few clients that cost about 5 hours/week. In other words: My time is limited. But even though that will hinder my progress, I'm determined to work hard and grind some extra hours.
I'm going to focus on mobile traffic and follow the appetizer by caurmen, which means that I'm going to buy traffic at decisive and focus on offers with a payout below 1 USD. I already applied for a few networks and got into f5 media, the others are still pending.
I set a few goals that I want to reach, they read as follow:
- Reach -50 % ROI on 1 Campaign
- Reach 0 % ROI on 1 Campaign
- Make 1 $ / day on 1 Campaign
- Make 10 $ / day on 1 Campaign
- Make 1.000 $ / month
Let's see how far this will take me.
I really hope we can all learn something along the way. If I do anything stupid, just tell me. I would love to get some feedback!
Best,
buddstr
Good luck!
I do want to add one thing though: 1.000 euros might be a bit low of a budget to do mobile with. I actually started doing mobile (loosely following the appetizer approach) and burned through my budget very quickly, without any real data or revenue to back it up.
I decided to try my luck with adult instead because it's supposed to be a bit easier and you don't need as big of a budget for testing.
However, since you do already have online-marketing experience it might be different for you! Good luck and let's hope you hit those goals!
Thanks, Johnny! But don't worry, I don't really care about the money as long as I can see improvement. I just like the concept of a „bankroll“, as this helped a lot back in the day when I played poker.
I work full-time, which means that I don't run out of money if I „loose“ my bankroll. At the end of the day this is an investment that I need to make in order to learn and be successful longterm.
tl;dr: I chose my offer, brainstormed some angles and wrote some ads. Happy to move forward!
I talked to my AM at F5 Media. He recommended a few offers from which I chose the APUS Launcher (0.24 USD/ install). When asked he recommended to focus on the brazilian market. It has fairly cheap traffic and lots of users with android 4.0 or above, a limitation of the APUS offer.
I researched the product, looked at comments on youtube and reviews in the play store. I then brainstormed a few angles and chose the two I liked the most. For each of those I texted six different ads which someone from OneHourTranslation translates into brazilian portuguese.
I thought about using google translate which would have saved about 12 EUR but think this a good investment. Let's see how it goes!
Gonna keep you updated.
tl;dr: I made some creatives while focusing on two different angles, but while I was waiting for approval I noticed something that might kill conversions: The "what" is less important than the "why".
The translation took less than an hour. I was therefore able to get creative and build some banners after I updated this thread. I sent them to my AM for approval before I went to bed on thursday, but didn't hear back yet.
The free time I had on friday was spent on another couple of banners. As approvals most likely won't happen on weekends I now have some time left to work on my angles, sign up for other networks and polish my photoshop-skills.
Because of this extra time I noticed something that might be important: All of my banners focus on the "what" (of my offer), not on the "why". They tell you what the APUS launcher does – it's fast and looks good –, but not why you should care.
This will not stop me to try them, as soon as they are approved, but it's something I remember for future campaigns. Do you think this is important?
These are all the banners I made yet. I would love to hear your feedback!
Hello. Good to see that you start taking action. However, since my journey started, one of the reflection I had is don't have monetary goals. It's the same as online poker. When you focus on the money, you make sub optimal decisions. Instead have a goal like master 1 traffic source or get 5 insights on xx niche that can be applied to the next campaign. So at least when you hit your goal, you can look to add more goals that are not money related. As long as your fundamentals are in place, buck loads of cash will just flow to you. Just my thoughts. But good luck with your campaigns!
Well, there is not much happening. My creatives for the APUS offer still wait for approval. Even though I talk to my AM daily, we haven't heard back. I therefore choose another offer and made some creatives.
As soon as they are approved I'm going to split-test the offer on three different networks. Before that I just keep quiet, there is not much interesting stuff to talk about.
Unless you have any critique regarding my first creatives. I would love to hear your opinion.
The creatives for my second campaign got approved. I therefore started the campaign on decisive as told in the mobile cookbook. That means I had four campaigns split into web/mobile and app/site. Tracking is done with
I fixed the mistake and restarted the campaign, which is still waiting for approval by decisive.
Take a look at my creatives and tell me what you think. The last two are gifs, I think it's best to just ignore them. The offer is "DU Speed Booster" in Brazil. I'm split-testing two networks.
On the second banner, a better translation would be "Com o DU Speed Booster"
Traffic source: Decisive
Offer(s): DU Speed Booster
Geos: BR
Budget: $6/day per campaign
Bid: $0.33 CPM
Updates:
Spend: $2.56
Revenue: $0
Net profit/loss: $2.65
I restarted the campaign after I fixed my initial tracking mistake, but there still are some problems.
If I look at the numbers from today, Decisive reports about 350 clicks while
Do you have any idea why the clickloss is that huge, especially between Decisive and Voluum?
Another problem I have is the small spending. I win very few of the bids at $0.33, which is about 1.5 the payout offer. Take a look at this screenshot, it's somewhat obvious.
The question is, should I just raise my bid to gather data?
Last but not least, there is still no single conversion. This is not due to a tracking problem, I checked the networks. It could be my angle but it's far to early to decide on that, which means: I NEED MORE DATA!
Actions I took: Blacklisted two placements that didn't make the cut (cost 3x payout offer, had more than 50 % of the impressions). Still searching for a solution to the tracking problem.
Never give up! green numbers will come , following !
Traffic source: Decisive
Offer(s): DU Speed Booster
Geos: BR
Budget: $6/day per campaign
Bid: $0.10 Flat-CPM
Updates:
Spend: $4,96
Revenue: $0
Net profit/loss: - $4,96
I don't get it.
It seems as if the click-loss that I reported is due to different timezones, but that's just a guess. My stats from yesterday sound kind of random:
Clicks on Decisive: 736; Clicks on Voluume: 970; Visitors on Network 1: 328; Visitors on Network 2: 462.
This at least is nothing to worry about. What I worry about is the number of conversions: Zero.
Yesterday I tried to test if I can make a conversion happen, using a VPN on my Smartphone. I followed one of my links, downloaded and opened the app, but nothing happened. I need to try that again and talk to my AM.
I was able to get more traffic by using a flat-CPM of $0.10 but noticed huge differences between my four campaigns. The only one that's getting decent traffic and has a good CTR (about 1,5 %) is the one that targets WIFI and APPs.
Next steps:
- I'll test if I can trigger a conversion on both networks and contact my AMs.
- I'll make more creatives based on the ones that got good CTR and three different creatives to try another angle.
- I'm going to ask my AMs for another Offer that I can run while waiting for data.
Do you have any idea why I didn't get any conversions?
I checked the redirects on my pc and smartphone using the HMA VPN, they redirect properly. If I would use a broken links or something similar, the affiliate network wouldn't show clicks.
Dude Newbie problems... we got them. I'm in the same exact boat as you. No conversions, think that's kind of weird. So i manually trigger a conversion. Nothing. So I try again on my tablet, nothing. So I ask a friend to download using my link. Still nothing. He asks a coworker to try. Still nothing.
This offer is dead?
Home > Mobile > Follow-along Campaigns