Working The Landing Pages--Because I So Desperately Need To (47)
Working The Landing Pages--Because I So Desperately Need To
I finally got my tax return, and with that, a new cash infusion to make another run in paid affiliate marketing. I will still be working the arbitrage and updating that follow-along as time permits, but for the most part, the efforts of that follow-along are 90% automated by machine, with the remaining 10% being monitored by a VA. The profits earned from those efforts very readily pay for the server costs, tracking services, STM, and the VAs salary + bonus. It took me 9 months to get to that level, but considering the cashflow restraints (net-30), and the cash I had on hand ($5k), I'd say I did pretty well for myself. It also doesn't hurt that I'm racking up airline miles with this method. So I can continue to fly fancy-class to wherever the next meetup is.
CMDeal and John Alanis' talks at STM london had the most impact on me. The former helping me reorient my perspective, and focus on building cashflow, while the latter confirmed to me the value of owning media--an email list.
So here's the plan:
- Build an email list off of PPV traffic.
- Apply my own brand of facebook advertising that requires absolutely no cloaking. I shared details about this strategy at STM London in exchange for something of equal value. I learned my lesson from my first major affiliate marketing break. Never freely give away your advantages and secrets.
- Use PPV traffic as the seed for all audience interaction.
- Use MaxBounty and their weekly payments as the monetization source. I realize I may be limiting myself by using one network, but two important metrics that CMDeal highlighted were risk adjusted cash flow and risk adjusted cash flow growth. Being able to quickly reinvest into what's working seems to be a major reason why kepe95 was able to experience explosive growth.
- Market to the email list using the attractive character / talk show personality that John Alanis taught at a Daegan Smith event.
- Leverage the email list to launch and promote my own product(s) to help reduce if not eliminate my dependency on the advertisers in the affiliate marketing relationship.
The goals should be fairly straightforward from here:
- Build a salable asset--the email list.
- Subsidize the cost of building that salable asset--with affiliate marketing
- Phase out the dependency on 3rd party advertisers--to protect and grow my cashflow.
I dug out a letter I received from Aweber a long time ago. They offered me a gift code with 2 months free service should I join their platform. I plan on taking advantage of that gift code once I prove to myself that I can readily generate an income off of my email list, as well as build a sizable email list quickly.
I fired up some spy tools, and started digging around for email optin pages. There were a handful that I really liked, so I'll be swiping them for my tests.
Back when I promoted Clickbank MMO products like Google Sniper heavily (see my introduction thread) I signed up to a whole variety of mailing lists. More than a few of those mailing list owners became solo ad sellers, and as a result, I got introduced to a ton of squeeze pages that are easy enough to copy and generally are proven converters. The highest one that I blatantly ripped off enjoyed 60% optin rates off of PPV traffic I was running at the time.
With those two sources, I have a ready, proven library of swipe files to work with, and am putting together my landing pages to mimic those landing pages.
Also add re targeting for all your campaigns specially on PPV they work great for me ..
April 6:
I heard back from my AM and have a couple US and international offers that are worth pursuing. Now, I'm setting up iframe type landing pages that force my optin form on top of them. Something similar to this:
I'm also going through a list of high traffic websites in the same niche as the offers to find targets with sufficient high volume that it's worth building out a landing page. For today, I'm gonna get 4 more landing pages up and their associated campaigns running in
April 7:
Spend: $1.28
Revenue: $0
ROI -100%
I'm not getting as many hits to the various pages I have up as I'd like. After several months with YTZ, I'm not really used to the whole $0.01/visit spend of the newer campaigns.
On top of the now 14 landing pages I've built (two headlines x 7 high traffic sites) I'm raising the bids across the board to $0.02/click. Maybe I'll see some traffic then.
I'd really suggest going with two or three networks, not only does it spread the credit risk, but should your primary offer go down at maxbounty you won't be left high and dry.
If your using a credit card to buy traffic, then the weekly payments won't help much with cash flow if your paying it off on net 30. Most networks are very happy to pay weekly, adsimils was even doing daily for me with 1k minimums
Have you thought about what incentive your visitors have to double opt on, giving away an eBook for example? Just like your Facebook tips example, it needs to be a fair exchange and a lot of people value their email...
You will definitely want to run the use of iFrames past your affiliate manager, as its a big nono with quite a few offers
April 8:
Spend: $1.34
Revenue: $0
ROI: -100%
I had raised the bids up to $0.02 manually, and still no traffic. I went into zeropark and saw this:
There's clearly traffic, according to the traffic tool, but not from the domain(s) I'm targeting.
After a brief chat with zeropark support, it appears that I'm targeting websites and building landing pages that are too low traffic on the zeropark network to see any significant volume.
So, I'm building out a scraping tool that will go through Alexa's top 1 million domains and get me the zeropark available volume, as well as the average bid.
To comment on what nickpeplow said,
The email optin forms emphasize the benefits found on the various email submit offers I have. The subscribers are effectively opting into the list because of that benefit, and I do redirect the users on to the CPA offer after the fact.
I never test with credit cards. The credit card money that I have is strictly for scaling up. All testing for me is done using cash--money I can afford to lose.
As for my use of iframes, I am not iframing the offer itself. I am iframing the matched website behind an optin form that I control. Iframing is generally frowned upon in the performance marketing space because less ethical affiliates could arrange the iframe such that the email optin box and the button are all that's visible--and then replace the rest of the page with their own copy. That's what the CPA networks want to avoid.
Using a credit line when appropriate is at the heart of most businesses. Split the theoretical risk of non payment between three networks and it's pretty unlikely you will ever get into trouble. It's more than just a credit line though, It also offers protection - what if a technical issue blew all your cash? or a rep took your cash wire payment and blew it on caviar? With credit card spend, thats the banks problem. I'd much rather risk non payment from a network, than leave myself open to abuse from a sketchy traffic source sending a wire or using my debt card.
Without knowing your situation its hard to comment, but a $5k credit card "investment" in a testing budget might not be such a bad idea...
Are you suggesting I use the credit card's ability to file a chargeback against traffic networks?
As for how I handle payments, I should probably clarify.
I send payments through a credit card, but I never exceed my cash balance--to make sure I can pay off the card.
April 9:
Spend: $6.13
Revenue: $11.00
ROI: 79.36%
Looks like I got lucky with this conversion. In addition to that conversion, I got myself some 20 odd email addresses. The cost per lead is still fairly steep, so I'm working on finding more sources that have substantial traffic.
The alexa scraper is taking longer than I had hoped largely because file-based databases of 1 million rows come out to ~80MB. So I'm reacquainting myself with MySQL to process the alexa rankings there.
Great job, man. What is "YTZ" by the way?
April 10:
Spend: $6.12
Revenue: $11.00
ROI: 79.75%
This is a little bit more of the same. Traffic counts are still low. I also wrote my own tool to measure--with 95% confidence--which landing pages are the worst and to automatically shut down traffic to the landing pages that are performing poorly.
I've completed the code for the alexa scraper. At the current 1 second per scrape, it will take some 12 days to process the entire list. I'm gonna reach out to my ZeroPark AM this monday to ask what sort of restrictions I should put on the code to ensure I don't overload their servers.
Why don't you just ask ZP to give you a top target CSV.
TV do that no problem if you ask, I'm sure ZP will know the best volume 500 URLs.
Originally Posted by dynamicsoul
By going through the alexa top million, I should be able to find websites that are underutilized so I can come up with a custom landing page that melds as closely as possible to that website.
April 11:
Spend: $1.48
Revenue: $6.70
ROI: 352.72%
I got lucky again, but this time in a different market. My cost per lead is steadily decreasing, and I'm hoping to get it down to $0.10 asap.
I'm also running the alexa scraping tool on a disposable VPS from LowEndBox.com--just in case ZeroPark bans the IP address. The insights I have so far on the bid prices and volumes of various websites is interesting, and there are a few angle ideas I am looking to try for each.
Here is a list of the most expensive domains:
And I'm only up to the top 39k domains on alexa so far.
April 12:
Spend: $1.34
Revenue: $12.00
ROI: 795.64%
Over the weekend, I spun up a couple new campaigns that target websites that have a lot of traffic, and a low bid. Those have been approved this morning and I hope to be able to show some results in tomorrow's entry.
So far, I've gone through the top 100k alexa websites, and I have found 6 different adware/malware popup domains, a few tracking domains for ad networks, really high traffic parked domains, and a few golden nuggets (I hope).
I'm also still collecting leads, and the cost of a given lead is falling nicely. More exciting is the lead's email address gets a hit when I upload those emails to build an audience in facebook, so they are almost definitely legitimate email addresses, and I should expect any broadcasts I send to be inboxed.
April 13:
Spend: $3.04
Revenue: $18.00
ROI: 492.31%
This is becoming frustrating. I set the bids such that I'm #1 and there's still a relative trickle of traffic. I'm doubling all the PPV campaign bids now that I have a slightly more effective optin page.
That's a very interesting list.
Guess someone's got a tax-related offer that's doing very well just now...
It's tax season here in the US.
Tomorrow is the deadline to pay income taxes.
My expectation is those bids will be very different on April 16 
April 14:
Spend: $3.44
Revenue: $0.00
ROI: -100.00%
I spoke with my AM at zeropark and we went through some of the keywords I'm targeting. Some of those keywords incidentally came from the alexa scraping that I've been doing.
Crap.
It turns out that competitors have already figured out the angle I had thought up between the keyword and the offer, and have monopolized it with bids 3x my own during certain hours of the day. So, I'm rewriting one of my bots to go through the database and get me hourly bids for the keywords that are active in my campaigns.
Nobody said it was gonna be easy. My biggest disadvantage is that the competition has had a lot more time to optimize their campaigns in the same verticals that I'm chasing.
I still intend to compete for the same keywords, but only after I establish the EPV of the offer. I could bid well above my competition to establish the EPV quickly, but the risk is I won't be able to make the money back. I'm on the lookout for a relatively simple mathematical way to establish the bid and testing budget based on my risk preferences.
how do you convert ZP target to an actual domain url? thought that info was not available to public from ZP?
It isn't.
But when you run a campaign, you can see what {match} is associated with a given target.
interesting, but my match shows up as Unknown on
You need to run a keyword campaign.
April 15:
Spend: $2.43
Revenue: $0.00
ROI: -100.00%
I'm leaving the campaigns that I launched out there to help me increase the spying capabilities.
I also got word of a couple more domains that have high traffic and a low bid, and I'm creating the necessary landing pages in a bid to capture their email details and forward them to whatever offer I end up getting.
I'll also take some time to work on the keyword bid spying bot so I can get a sense of when people are dayparting a given campaign. The more dynamic bidding that I do in my own campaigns should allow me to scrape a few extra ROI % above my competition to ultimately out bid them and buy up the traffic.
April 16:
Spend: $2.38
Revenue: $4.50
ROI: 89.20%
I went through and launched 6 more campaigns each with two angles and each angle with two separate landing page designs focusing on the traffic that is visiting the various domains that my alexa scraper has identified as high traffic--low bid. We'll see if anything converts reasonably well, or at all.
I also spotted what I can only assume is the modern version of the sweepstakes landing page: http://screencast.com/t/2zlQQDOnAbtO
We've definitely come a long way from "You're the 109,928,923,847,393th visitor!"
April 17:
Spend: $12.56
Revenue: $2.10
ROI: -83.28%
The landing page that I showed above got one conversion at an EPV of $0.0017. So the bid has been moved to that level to try again. I did notice a CTR of < 1% on the sweepstakes process. It very likely has to do with the fact that the actions required are considerable.
One thing I noticed is that people leave the landing pages on a mobile device by clicking the 'back' button instead of simply closing the page. I have some JS that is capable of capturing that back button click and I'm on the lookout for places that will buy my mobile traffic. The goal isn't really to make money (although that would be nice), but rather to help recover losses a little faster.
It seems the new trend in CPA is being able to monetize as many clicks as possible, and this may play to my technological skillset.
April 18:
Spend: $3.02
Revenue: $4.50
ROI: 48.88%
The most frustrating part about this process is that it appears a lot of other people have come up with the same angles and ideas that I have and implemented them in their landing pages. Creativity is admittedly not my strongest suit, and I have found a partner who is a lot stronger than I am when it comes to developing landing pages. I'm hoping to learn from that partner's process and apply my advantages in buying traffic efficiently to build my edge in the market.
I've also been using this ppv scraper (http://scraper.lolmonies.com/) instead of the usual whatrunswhere or boxofads largely because I'm paying a mere $10/mo for maybe 80% of the capabilities.
April 19:
Spend: $5.02
Revenue: $0.00
ROI: -100.00%
The biggest problem I'm having is coming up with angles worth pursuing.
With that problem in mind, I have been trawling through BlackPops to try and get a feel for what angles are presently being used.
I've seen some tech support, dating, online backup, credit score, and weight loss type landing pages. The majority of them look so basic and pedestrian that I'm surprised they're even in the wild. I was half expecting to see more bare bones landing pages like this one here: http://cpahotspot.com/optin/5000c.php
I have also partnered up with someone who develops adult landing pages. My buying capability coupled with their landing page design and expertise should make for a formidable team.
April 20:
Spend: $4.73
Revenue: $6.70
ROI: 41.68%
Finding traffic placements that are relatively open have been difficult lately.
One thing that I have noticed in my landing page research is that there are plenty of landing pages with sound embedded in them. I had a bit of a brain wave/fart to improve on some landing pages, and I know a voice actress that does reasonably good work for amazingly cheap.
I'm going to get the various lines recorded, and get set up on a new landing page. Hopefully to see more favorable results.
April 21:
Spend: $5.26
Revenue: $2.10
ROI: -60.05%
The sound based landing pages are up and running now. Still an issue finding more traffic. It looks like it will cost me $20-30 CPM to get a proper test going.
I'm focusing on the broadest appeal angles possible so I can take full advantage of my bots buying capabilities. I have a sweeps landing page set up.
I'm also doing a credit score
And a back up my computer offer.
The sweeps offer I'm mimicking the various survey landing pages that I've seen on BlackPops, as well as some stuff I've found in the wild.
Credit score is simple enough, and focusing as much as possible on the fear-based angles.
The same goes for computer backups.
I'm of the impression that people are more willing to move away from fear than to move toward gain so the landing pages are adjusted accordingly.
Originally Posted by jennatalia
Congratulations to you, and I hope this serves as a great inspiration to others!
November 28:
Spend: $95.23
Revenue: $236.20
ROI: 148.031%
November 29:
Spend: $91.54
Revenue: $213.60
ROI: 133.341%
The main advertiser severely paused the offer and I had to switch to capped backups. I guess the next step now is to build out more relationships at AWA to get more primary and backup cap.
November 30:
Spend: $9.45
Revenue: $99.96
ROI: 957.778%
I'm guessing the bulk of the conversions were residual stuff. The timestamps for the clicks were at least 24h ago.
December 1:
Spend: $6.74
Revenue: $9.25
ROI: 37.240%
Still working out kinks before turning on major traffic again. I hate having to pause like this, but that's the nature of this industry--at least at this stage. I hear it's much better the bigger you get.
December 2:
Spend: $85.36
Revenue: $213.09
ROI: 149.637%
Back up again with another advertiser. The original one told me they paused the offer for December and are testing new creatives. We'll see. In the meantime, now that this campaign is all set, I'm looking to scale much harder again.
December 3:
Spend: $78.59
Revenue: $162.41
ROI: 106.655%
Had a hiccup in scaling and are back to this relative baseline while things get sorted out. Building up the necessary momentum is tougher than some people give off.
December 4:
Spend: $168.30
Revenue: $31.50
ROI: -81.283%
December 5:
Spend: $443.95
Revenue: $330.00
ROI: -25.668%
December 6:
Spend: $510.17
Revenue: $246.00
ROI: -51.781%
December 7:
Spend: $431.69
Revenue: $708.00
ROI: 64.007%
December 8:
Spend: $425.45
Revenue: $577.71
ROI: 35.788%
December 9:
Spend: $729.26
Revenue: $1129.93
ROI: 54.942%
December 10:
Spend: $834.96
Revenue: $1358.79
ROI: 62.737%
December 11:
Spend: $721.68
Revenue: $972.86
ROI: 34.805%
More or less back on my feet. Nothing major changed--yet. Following up on all the contacts I made at AWA to see if there is a way to improve the EPL of my flow.
December 12:
Spend: $823.19
Revenue: $1092.47
ROI: 32.655%
December 13:
Spend: $841.32
Revenue: $1177.13
ROI: 39.780%
December 14:
Spend: $785.75
Revenue: $1344.81
ROI: 71.047%
December 15:
Spend: $496.52
Revenue: $672.34
ROI: 35.342%
December 16:
Spend: $673.75
Revenue: $1176.46
ROI: 74.545%
December 17:
Spend: $717.24
Revenue: $774.01
ROI: 7.914%
December 18:
Spend: $614.00
Revenue: $888.81
ROI: 44.625%
December 19:
Spend: $897.72
Revenue: $1086.17
ROI: 20.973%
December 20:
Spend: $852.78
Revenue: $756.94
ROI: -6.228%
December 21:
Spend: $1467.56
Revenue: $1764.67
ROI: 20.200%
December 22:
Spend: $1459.08
Revenue: $1572.19
ROI: 7.739%
December 23:
Spend: $1539.14
Revenue: $1908.52
ROI: 23.965%
December 24:
Spend: $1333.64
Revenue: $1158.17
ROI: -13.170%
December 25:
Spend: $1449.10
Revenue: $1938.39
ROI: 33.738%
December 26:
Spend: $1845.76
Revenue: $2538.39
ROI: 37.504%
December 27:
Spend: $1.38
Revenue: $72.69
ROI: 5117.391%
December 28:
Spend: $1836.91
Revenue: $2406.62
ROI: 30.981%
December 29:
Spend: $1358.91
Revenue: $1722.23
ROI: 26.719%
December 30:
Spend: $1683.05
Revenue: $2244.51
ROI: 33.329%
December 31:
Spend: $600.81
Revenue: $1104.41
ROI: 83.752%
December 27 I was told to halt traffic for some maintenance issue with the advertiser. They got back up and running the next day. Those conversions that happened were mostly the result of conversions earned for prior traffic.
This i like...
December 27:
Spend: $1.38
Revenue: $72.69
ROI: 5117.391%
January 1:
Spend: $254.74
Revenue: $800.36
ROI: 214.187%
I was asked to throttle back conversions by the advertiser, so I rewrote some aspects of the bot to focus bidding on the higher ROI placements and basically used a waterfall type model where placements received ad budget based on the likelihood of them turning a high ROI. Lower ROI placements were turned on if the bot fell short of the budgeted number of conversions. This method sees to work surprisingly well, so we'll see if I can continue that streak for tomorrow's traffic.
It would suggest that the streak of lower profitability wasn't necessary, or at least didn't need to run as long as it did. It will be hard to confirm, but this looks to be the first bidding war that I've won, and it's exciting to see that. Hopefully I don't end up outing my campaign.
Looking back at how I struggled with some of the creative aspects of landing page development, it's satisfying to know that I finally found an angle that works. As much as I am pro-solitude, there's a certain benefit to stepping away from my desk and interacting with the outside world. It reminds me of something John Alanis said, (I'm paraphrasing) "The bulk of money made on the internet is earned offline". Going forward, I'm increasing the use of spy tools and coming up with a checklist of elements worth split testing.
After several hours of talking with various affiliates and self-proclaimed super affiliates around AWA I've come to the depressing conclusion that the vast majority of people earning in the mid-x,xxx through xx,xxx / day profits make the bulk of their money copying other campaigns and scaling up / out to other sources faster than the originator. While I've always known this was going on, I was not aware of the scale that it was happening. It takes away from my original belief of how affiliate marketing is more a meritocracy. Certain particularly drunk and horny affiliates were bragging openly about how their affiliate managers gave them the best converting landing pages from other affiliates. Makes Charles Ngo's statements about relationship management even more true--although the extent of that relationship is still unclear to me.
January 2:
Spend: $252.06
Revenue: $773.63
ROI: 206.923%
After an additional conference call, my advertiser and I have a better perspective on what's causing them to hold back (cashflow from their upstream group). They're expecting a wire to hit tomorrow, so assuming the notification goes in, I should be clear to run higher volume again.
January 3:
Spend: $208.53
Revenue: $480.01
ROI: 130.183%
January 4:
Spend: $1483.81
Revenue: $2328.57
ROI: 56.893%
January 5:
Spend: $1669.08
Revenue: $2430.31
ROI: 45.589%
January 6:
Spend: $1145.00
Revenue: $1818.73
ROI: 58.791%
January 7:
Spend: $1058.47
Revenue: $2808.73
ROI: 165.289%
January 8:
Spend: $1232.19
Revenue: $2112.49
ROI: 71.402%
January 9:
Spend: $664.46
Revenue: $1896.51
ROI: 190.773%
January 10:
Spend: $168.92
Revenue: $714.29
ROI: 322.685%
January 11:
Spend: $349.44
Revenue: $978.32
ROI: 179.876%
January 12:
Spend: $386.19
Revenue: $960.59
ROI: 148.582%
I ended up dropping spend hard during ASW because my advertisers didn't have any cap for me to fill. Interestingly enough, I did notice that during the event the cost of traffic across the various pop networks I run on went down. Not sure if that has happened in past years, but it was an interesting phenomenon which my bots seem to have taken full advantage of considering the higher ROIs during that period.
I had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of people in the centurion lounge at LAS, and it was a unique networking opportunity for me as the people I spoke with largely shared my biases and viewpoints on a myriad of topics. I guess there's a certain mindset that traveling holders of Amex Plat cards share. Not really sure.
January 13:
Spend: $369.81
Revenue: $828.14
ROI: 123.899%
January 14:
Spend: $411.84
Revenue: $1038.91
ROI: 152.040%
January 15:
Spend: $326.57
Revenue: $738.71
ROI: 125.985%
January 16:
Spend: $390.70
Revenue: $480.31
ROI: 22.856%
January 17:
Spend: $0.27
Revenue: $36.50
ROI: 13233.333%
January 18:
Spend: $0.74
Revenue: $48.49
ROI: 6386.486%
January 19:
Spend: $31.11
Revenue: $36.14
ROI: 15.718%
So goes the saying, "It doesn't rain forever".
I briefly lost sight of that during ASW, but was bought ever faster back to reality with the tightening conversion caps and more excuses from my advertiser. I really need to get back to testing more traditional sweepstakes offers and some of the other stuff caurmen mentioned during his opening talk at AWA.
So tonight...
I got a subscription to BoxOfAds, and Adplexity, and started poking around what I've seen working.
Here's some inspiration that I'll be applying on certain pop/redirect networks and we'll see what sticks. They'll need to be modified to maintain compliance, but I figure it's as good as any place to start.
January 20:
Spend: $325.54
Revenue: $276.18
ROI: -15.218%
End of a campaign cycle I guess. Time to test some more.
January 21:
Spend: $679.32
Revenue: $678.01
ROI: -0.194%
January 22:
Spend: $699.64
Revenue: $690.15
ROI: -1.378%
January 23:
Spend: $43.82
Revenue: $54.17
ROI: 23.231%
January 24 and onward I shut off the campaigns. With the superbowl coming up, I'm spending more and more time manually reviewing campaigns I'm managing on behalf of Draft Kings to make sure my bots are on point.
Hi Jenn - Great follow along, curious to know whether you still working on this and how did the new landers fare?
Those landing pages perform at 30% below top bid. I've put the project on hold while I was running draft kings in the run up to the Superbowl and with any luck solidify my contract with DNC
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