Getting back in the game (16)
Intro
Hey guys, I figured it’s about time I stopped stalking around and started my own follow along. I’ll also do my best to be more active and contribute to STM as much as I can.
This thread will be my journal, and I’ll keep it updated for as long as it takes to get back in the game.
TL;DR from my intro thread: I’ve been a freelance designer by trade for almost the past 7-8 years, and I’ve also been doing AM throughout the journey, 50/50 between the two.
Not long ago I started working with Charles Ngo, making some designs, and he recommended I joined STM since I was planning on rebooting my affiliate career once again.
My AM background is big ( been through almost anything you can imagine ), but I’ve never been a consistent marketer. I’ve seen success many times, but for some unbeknownst to me reason I’ve never kept anything going for extended periods of time. My best niche by far has been adult, where my best days were in the $X,XXX range, but those were short-lived as well. The last 2-3 years have been fairly inactive in terms of running any campaigns, so I’ve fallen a bit behind, although I was at least following the progress of the industry as a whole.
Right now I’ve decided I should forget absolutely everything I know and start completely fresh, step by step, carefully analyzing my data. I’ll focus entirely on mobile, since I haven’t ran a lot of mobile campaigns in the past ( at least not mainstream, non-adult stuff ).
Spent the last month absorbing any and all info from STM but no matter how much knowledge you have, I’ve learned that it doesn’t really mean anything without the actual experience and just taking action. I was about to start my follow along two weeks ago, but I had a really nasty back injury, and just very recently was I able to actually start working again, after all of those bloody painful injections.
Goals
Even though goals are indeed a very important thing in order to keep pushing yourself and having a direction, I noticed a lot of people setting goals like $50, $100/day and so on, but I’m a firm believer that you should wholly embrace the process instead, in order to stay motivated and happy in the long run – failures and setbacks aren’t as painful when you’re not thinking about how far you are from your goal, rather they become stepping stones towards a new journey, one where you consider them a learning experience instead of being all bitter and grumpy and feeling far away from your goals.
Sure I get angry and start cursing sometimes when things mess up, that’s a completely normal reaction, but I never let these emotions consume me.
This TED talk sort of explains what I meant above:
http://www.ted.com/talks/srikumar_ra...ired_happiness
Throughout the years I’ve learned that a proper mindset is everything and so far it has never failed me.
Basically, I’m an extremely stubborn bastard and I’m here to kick some ass.
As far as goals go I just want to have profitable campaigns again and I want to be consistent.
Alternatively, a Bora Bora vacation sounds really nice too.
Enough of this emotional bullshit, let’s get to work.
As much as I enjoy taking risks and jumping into the dark, I prefer making calculated risks so I’ll use everything I can from STM to help me achieve a better start.
Today I got in touch with a few AMs, just to check on my old accounts from all the affiliate networks and see if they’re active – Clickdealer, Mundo, A4D, Adsimilis, Neverblue and wherever I had accounts. I already have accounts on most of the major mobile traffic sources.
Got some nice mobile offer recommendations from my Clickdealer AM, and he also offered his help with everything else, we’re gonna do some brainstorming. Will keep them on the low payout range as tempting as high payouts may be. Will focus on Tier2 and Tier3 countries, with sweeps ( pins, leadgen, 1click flow etc. ) and mobile content offers. Tier1 may drain my budget too quickly, and it’s a very limited budget.
As far as traffic types, I’m not entirely sure yet but I may go for pops – one less variable to test if I don’t have banners to make.
Since I don’t have a clear path and I don’t know what kind of stuff works on mobile yet, I’ll spend the whole day tomorrow researching and spying the competition. Going to subscribe to Mobileadscout and WRW and I’ll start digging. Once I get a grasp of what kind of stuff people are running I’ll have a better idea in terms of overall types of LPs, banners and angles that I should be making, and I should be making those better than what I find. Also going to get the blacklisted targets for all the traffic sources I can, I saw a few threads here and there.
I may just make 1 or 2 campaigns as part of the Mobile Appetizer/Cookbook ( great guide! ) just to get my feet wet with mobile, but I always prefer doing things my way.
It has never worked out for me when I followed somebody else’s rules/guidelines or methodologies – I always strive to add uniqueness and improvement to everything.
That’s about it for now, will update as soon as I can.
For all of my follow along readers ( if any ) I’ll also be posting a song with each update.
This seems appropriate:
Cheers!
Hi Shishev! Your post was a joy to read and I found myself nodding to everything you said. Looking forward to learning from your experiences as you update this follow-along. 
And thanks for that link to Srikumar Rao's talk! Everything he says resonates in me. If you like this kind of theory, I'd like to recommend Abraham Hicks if you haven't come across them already. There's tons of their workshop vids on youtube.
Looking forward to seeing you update this thread....
Amy
Seems like you know the drill, sishev. All the best, looking forward reading all of your future updates.
Originally Posted by vortex
And thanks for that link to Srikumar Rao's talk! Everything he says resonates in me. If you like this kind of theory, I'd like to recommend Abraham Hicks if you haven't come across them already. There's tons of their workshop vids on youtube.
Looking forward to seeing you update this thread....
Amy
Originally Posted by equadox
Not sure if this counts as an update, but my back pain got a lot worse instead of feeling better and I haven't been able to get a lot of stuff done. I went to the office today for 2-3 hours but couldn't stand the pain and went home, fell asleep in the afternoon because of exhaustion and it's now 1 AM, woke up from more pain, I guess I'm off to the doctors again tomorrow.
Silly excuse, but I'll post an update anyways.
I managed to get a few things done:
Subbed to WRW mobile and browsed around - I'm not sure if it's me or a lot of people are running direct linked stuff. Couldn't find a lot of LPs, but I did see some interesting banners. A lot of the LPs I've already seen before, so that's a good sign - the waters aren't as murky as I thought they would be.
After playing around with WRW for a while I sort of found a way to see more affiliate LPs and banners - just searching for obvious stuff like "sweeps" "iphone" shows some banners, and from then on you can search by the advertiser's URL and LPs start showing up as well.
Some LPs were poorly coded, some were nice, but the problem is that everybody seems to be ripping from everybody else - the sweeps LPs all looked the same: FB style "lucky visitor", claim that 1 available iphone, greyed out buttons for iPads etc.. A few of the LPs were questionnaire style, but still the very same FB landers. The app LPs were all also very similar, just different styling here and there. A few of them had extra CTR boosting elements like countdowns, JS pops and so on, but still, a lot of the same stuff everywhere.
Based on my experience with adult this leads me to the conclusion that I'll have to be making some unique LPs and angles - there's no way I'm gonna make the same stuff work. From what I know it's probably possible, but I don't have the mobile experience or budget to squeeze out those presumably tiny ROIs from such overused LPs.
I saw a thread from Mr. Green explaining what kind of banners are more efficient and judging by what I saw this seems to be correct - black/white backgrounds, icons, blinking elements and so on.
I couldn't subscribe to Mobileadscout for some reason - CC didn't go through so I sent a PM to bigeasy to see if he can help me out. Maybe it's the CC number format I'm not entering correctly.
Also joined
Doing research and planning is all good, but I should also start launching campaigns. I'll get in touch with my AM tomorrow and try and narrow down some offers, GEOs and traffic sources and I'll just start some campaigns as part of the mobile appetizer machine, while I'm doing more research on having a decent start.
I know there probably will be jumping around various traffic sources if I combine things with the mobile appetizer but I think I've the experience to handle something like this. Will post an update once I've made some progress.
Good stuff, following this with you. I'm trying to get going as well; and I'm in the same boat as you, I'd like to see what's working zag where other's zig - I have a few aces up my sleeve that I know work, it's just a matter of applying them to AM.
Originally Posted by raymondduke
So far Decisive isn't looking good, I launched some campaigns but haven't gotten a single conversion, not that I expect any but I learned some lessons.
Decisive doesn't like WhatsApp stuff, I should've paid more attention to the posts here on STM. Also approval times are very slow.
My banner CTRs are very different for the Wifi and Carrier traffic - Carrier is in the range of 1.4% - 2%, Wifi is lower, kinda like what you usually see on TJ.
Waiting for approvals and will test some more stuff these days. Decisive is just for getting my feet wet while I'm still researching pops and sweeps.
I'll write an update once I have some results with conversions at least.
this is good stuff!
Good to see you resuming back your AM journey. I am also doing a fresh start here with the help of STM.
Hope to see your journey and learn things together.
Cheers.
Hey shishev,
I like your attitude, I hope you can sustain your motivation and see this through. I am sure having direct access to Charles and your design skills is a clear advantage.
Are you from India by any chance? (Question based on your username).
- Arun Basil Lal
Originally Posted by raviraj
Originally Posted by arunbasillal
Having access to Charles is great indeed but I tend not to bother him at all, he's a VERY busy guy. We haven't been working on stuff lately. When working with him you have to switch to much higher gears in order to keep up, he has great work ethics, highly organized.
As for my name, I'm from Bulgaria. My full name is Stoyan Shishev, Shishev being my family name. I use it everywhere because it's become recognizable amongst my long term design clients ( and I'm terrible with nicknames ).
I know I've a pending update, but I've been delayed. Turns out my debit card is a lower tier after I spoke with my bank, and that's why I was unable to subscribe to Mobileadscout nor renew my WRW subscription after the trial. I'm going to visit a number of banks tomorrow to see if I can get a hold of a higher tier card.
Apps and AV offers don't seem to convert direct linked on decisive, not that I've tested that much, but from previous experiences I can tell I'll definitely need LPs, so with my few dollars left in there I'll throw in some LPs in rotation after I resub to the spy tools and see what happens.
I'm still not 100% sure where to start on pops - should I go to Zeropark where all the newbies tend to flock, or perhaps focus on another not so popular traffic source. Will do some in-depth reading here on STM while playing around on Decisive, before I make the final decision.
I'm not sure whatever I'm writing so far is helpful to anyone, so it'll probably be a few days before a proper update.
Alright, I promised the next time I show up I'm gonna have some stats to show. These stats aren't from mobile, because I'm still waiting for my higher tier debit card so I can sub to mobileadscout, but I couldn't just sit idle during this time, just working on designs. I figured I'd play around with adult a little bit again, back to the roots.
So I started talking with a person from this very forum and I received some awesome tips, and a golden opportunity to hopefully have something profitable in the next few days. I knew my old adult offers and LPs wouldn't work, but now I have some promising stats:
Even though this is on the losing side here's the best part - the total combination of banners and placements is 16, and I haven't even touched them yet! All of my bids are in the top 3 positions too, on all the different placements.
I know that's not a lot of stats, but based on my experience it's enough to tell me there's a very good chance of making this green. I'll let this run for a few more days, and I'll even upload more banners before starting to optimize the campaign. IF this turns green at some point, I'm gonna hit it as hard as I can.
As for the mobile stuff, still waiting...
Obligatory song tax for the update:
Quick update on the adult campaign, cut only a few banners/placements, campaign is still pretty unoptimized, but It's good seeing some green numbers after so long:
Today's stats:
Cost: $19.98
Revenue: $32.25
Profit: $12.27
Uploaded 5 new banners, still testing a lot of the old ones, even the ones that aren't performing well.
Some stuff is in the works regarding mobile too. Going to post a bigger update in a couple of days.
Quick update: I have not forgotten about this, even though I failed with the promise of an update "in a couple of days", currently no time to play around with campaigns, but I'll see if I can sneak in a few quick mobile test campaigns in the following weeks.
The adult campaign made me a few dollars but it flopped eventually - TJ and Exo's traffic is just so inconsistent in terms of conversions even with week/day parting and constant banner refreshing. Leaving adult behind for good, at least until I make mobile work.
Another quick update: Came back from London on Oct 1st after a 40 day stay there. Had a chance to meet and work with cmdeal and his team where I spent time training their junior designers. I haven't launched any campaigns the past month, but I am now attending the 6WAMC and I guess I'll be posting some stats soon.
Figured I'd focus on launching campaigns instead of stalking around STM or doing anything else that's not launching campaigns ( or designing when I have to ).
After a gazillion campaigns I now have 1 profitable sweeps campaign but it's only making $15-$20/day ( some days $10 ) on average. ROI on the other hand is huge after proper optimizations of the landers. A few other promising campaigns in the works as well.
I have trouble finding traffic for this particular GEO. Registered at more than a dozen ad networks and all of them have very little traffic.
Still trying to dig out some specific traffic sources from that country, traffic that's not available in intl ad networks and mDSPs, and especially not available for other affiliates.
After a lot of battles with app installs on Go2Mobi and other traffc sources I lost the war, just couldn't make those app installs profitable. Multiple GEOs, A WHOLE LOT of landers, banners, angles, fine-grain optimizations ( carriers, devices, OSs, day parting, week parting and everything in between ), the best I could do is break even. Wasted too much money compared to testing sweeps, so in case any miraculous offer shows up that hasn't been bashed to death I might give it a shot again.
Will keep on focusing on sweeps for now, and I've got a few other verticals on my mind as well.
Updates aren't going to be as frequent as I promised earlier. Instead, slower and more detailed - I'd rather just launch campaigns, that's the best way to go about this.
I noticed this myself: 1-2 months ago I was focusing on reading and absorbing more information and launching 1 campaign here and there, quite rarely actually, trying to catch up after 2-3 years of being away from all of this. However now I focus on launching campaigns instead of reading stuff, the results are FAR better and I'm starting to get a grasp of what people are actually doing on mobile for example ( something I've never done in the past, ran only desktop traffic ).
If any newbies or struggling affiliates are reading this, this is how I've survived throughout the years with all my ups and downs, albeit being at the very bottom yet again here's a tip for you: I'd go against the herd and say that you should be testing EVERYTHING and being EVERYWHERE, don't focus on this one thing "until you make it work", that's pure bullshit and does not apply specifically when running our typical affiliate offers. It does apply to basically everything else BUT typical aff offers.
Hopefully the next update will have some more satisfying profits.
PS: I keep forgetting the obligatory songs.
Any updates? how it's going for you?
Originally Posted by wozkode
I haven't been updating this for quite a while because of STM stuff, shame on me, but I've got some big plans here. Gonna be posting case studies and a lot of different and interesting campaign updates and tests in the future.
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