An Old Dog Learning New Tricks (6)
Welcome to my Follow-Along.
I started my career in advertising for a large corporate conglomerate in 2005. After looking down that barrel for two years, at the ripe age of 23, I packed my bags, moved to Bangkok, hollar’d at Justin Dupre (what happened to that guy?) and dedicated myself full-time to affiliate marketing.
I’ve been able to gainfully employ myself for the past eight years, dabbling in just about every angle of affiliate marketing (less mobile) while traveling the globe and establishing some really bizarre, albeit fun, brick-and-mortar side projects in various corners of the planet (if anyone needs East African cowhides, I'm your man!). The last eight years has been a dream come true and I owe it all to affiliate marketing.
So why the follow-along when this reads more like a follow-behind?
I have no mobile experience.
I know the future and riches of this industry will be reserved for those that master mobile, so in efforts to protect the dream I've loved to live the past 8 years, I’m making the commitment to mobile today.
And while I’ve developed such reliable systems for my display efforts on the desktop side of things, each time I attempt to transfer those systems, operations or logic to mobile, the results are terribly frustrating and I trot back to desktop/email/lead brokering with my tail between my legs.
As such, I’m aware that I need to approach mobile with a completely different mindset this time. As a noob. Which I plan to do in this follow-along.
Can a (relative) old AM dog be taught new tricks?
That’s what I attempt to answer in this Follow Along and my gut wants to howl an emphatic "YES."
I’m going into this as humble as possible and starting out with The Appetiser approach outlined in these forum pages.
My better judgement already tells me I need a lander, but my personal goal has been to approach mobile without preconceived notions so I'm going to accept the process (with adaptability in mind) and hone my skillsets with Decisive and
I will update tomorrow with my first campaign details, lingering set-up questions and unfiltered analysis.
Thanks in advance for following along, or something like that...
Can a old Am dog be thought new tricks. Sure man i started last yera again with AM , And i am also from that era down there 2003 or so , Most important is Focus, Take Action, Vision . Its easyer said than done 
Wow, very interesting follow-along! I'm looking forward to your next updates!
FYI, you may find this Follow-Along from times past interesting: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...e-mobile-world . It was from fjk87, another experienced affiliate who decided to jump into the mobile world. You may well find that his journey mirrors yours initially, so hopefully there'll be some good tips in there!
Day 2
Location: Manhattan Beach, CA
My pomodoro set, Panda Bear’s new album bumping, and a talk with my Mundo AM led me to a tier-three security app install in Serbia after browsing through his suggestion list.
Why Serbia?
I know a guy that could help me with some translation and I figured clicks would be cheap. I also had visions of a burly Serbian with a face like Novak Djokovic looking to beef up security on his Android phone. That made me chuckle a little bit which has to be worth something.
The offer had a little bit of a flow built into the product itself which I thought would help with conversions. Network wide it supposedly converts a little under 10% with a $3.50 payout. The nice thing is that the security app is available in the other former Yugoslavian countries as well as some neighboring countries in Eastern European should there be success in Serbia.
Eight 320x50 banners created with subtle angles, appetiser method followed and the ads showed up in Decisive as “Pending Approval.”
The first rejection came quickly due to compliancy of the banner content. Angles altered and I watered down the fear in the copy.
The second rejection was based on the animation looping. You can only loop three times. Easy fix.
Then the third rejection was compliancy issues on the landing page itself. The inevitable question then follows: To cloak or not to cloak.
I’ve decided not to. I’ve actually decided to go with a different approach. Going completely against the grain of what most people encourage on this forum which is to make a plan and stick with it. But once I took a step back and looked at my approach, it had too many holes. I would be mining data, but I also wanted to own the pieces of data to market to again at a later time.
One of the main successes I’ve had in affiliate marketing is acknowledging that the money is in the data - the emails.
Even if you don’t get an initial conversion on the CPA play, if you can lift an email and a little customer data you can start mining information on the clicker for a payout at a later time.
I’ve decided to build out a basic landing page and offer-wall around a somewhat broader niche of financial benefits for Americans. This demographic typically does well with biz-opp, insurance and entitlement style affiliate offers. I’m capturing email, phone, name and city which I plan to monetize through lead-brokers and my internal email platform.
The thank-you page will be an offer-wall of sorts - a series of relevant affiliate offers with angles tying back to my signup niche.
I just launched 8 banners in Decisive following the Appetiser method and the ad was quickly approved. Traffic flowing...analysis in the next post.
Thanks for following along, or something like that...
Lil Help: In Decisive, they gave me the following link to track conversions ( http://win.crwd.io/convert/{{{bidhash}}} ). I understand how to use this with an affiliate network, but would anyone know how to help me set this up as an image or iframe pixel to track on my own internal “thank-you” page?
have you tried just putting http://win.crwd.io/convert/{{{bidhash}}} into your browser to verify that it does trigger a conv.
try leaving off the width/height attributes. the pixel should already be 1x1 anyway.
Just tried placing the link into a browser and just received an error message. Going to sift through the various articles on the forum about conversion tracking. Not sure why this has been so challenging for me to figure out - have never had this type of issue with something as mundane as conversion tracking.
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