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From Newbie to Master Chef - The Journey Begins (34)

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Hello!

My name is Oscar, and I am here to attempt to learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing. I hope to learn a lot, and make a lot of money. I have been in IM for a little while, but I never stuck to any single endeavor and ended up with a lot of failure. As such, I've joined this forum. I'm starting right here and now with this follow-along, so with your help I think I can succeed.

Budget: $1000

Starting my First Campaign

I have accounts at the following CPA Networks:

• Adscendmedia
• Performance Revenues
• F5Media

On top of that, I've signed up for KingMobi. If there are any other networks I should really know about, let me know!

Traffic Source
I have an account on decisive, with $71.50 on the account. I will add more money as needed. If anyone has any tips to make some money on the side in order to strengthen my budget, let me know. Otherwise, I'll try and produce a few freelance articles (I contribute to a couple of semi-high profile sites, I should be able to earn a fair amount of money per article).

Vertical: I will look for a utility app.
Offer: Unsure, waiting to get approved to KingMobi, and a response from my AMs regarding the best offers on the Adscend and Performance Revenues.

My next post will be when I start up my campaigns on decisive, wish me luck.

EDIT:

Since this is the original post, I've decided to add some goals:

First conversion:
First day I break even:
First profitable day:
First $10 day:
First $50 day:
First $100 day:

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Good Luck to you oscar_wong67

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Update #2

I've decided that I will attempt to work on gaining funds to increase my budget, as I only have about $950 in my Paypal at the moment.

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Hi Oscar! Just came from saying hi to you in your intro thread.

Regarding budget, you can get started with the amount you have. While you're learning the ropes it would be wise to limit your daily spending anyways. Worse comes to worst you run out of funds for the current month - you can fund your account again in the following month. If you want to go that route though, perhaps it would be wise to choose an offer that probably won't get terminated any time soon (nobody can ever know for sure, but sometimes your AM may be able to tell you what the chances are of that happening and when - wouldn't hurt to ask!)


Regarding affiliate network recommendations - here are some that I know are pretty friendly to new affiliates: Maxbounty, Adsimilis, OasisAds, A4D, Affiliaxe. And here's a post that has tips on how to improve your chances of getting accepted:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l=1#post222603


Your plans to talk to your AMs to find out which verticals and offers are hot right now is a great idea! You can also browse the most recent follow-alongs and success stories to see what kinds of offers people are having success with right now.

Have fun and I look forward to hearing how you get on!


Amy

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Quick tip on the funding issue - try and focus very hard on:

a) low-payout offers. Your $1000 will go a lot further testing $0.40 app installs than $12 PIN submits.
b) squeezing every bit of data you can from the results you get. In particular, that means drilling down to the placement, carrier and device level, thinking hard about why those things have the results they do, and testing big changes - entire different designs, lots of angles and offers, not just "does the button convert better if it's blue?".

Good luck, and looking forward to your first results!

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Thanks for the insight everyone! I'll be definitely taking a look at a couple more networks, and will definitely try to learn everything I can from all the data I receive. I hope I can make the STM community proud!

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UPDATE #3:

I've been approved at Oasis Ads, Adsimilis and A4D. I think it's time to choose an offer, and begin brainstorming some angles.

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Update #4 - I've begun to apply for as many offers as I can (out of the ones that interest me) that have interested me on Oasis and A4D. Wish me luck, I think I should be able to get approved. If I can get them approved, I'll have a good selection to pick from.

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Alright, I've decided to pick an offer and get to work.

Offer: Ebay App iOS
Geo: Mexico
Traffic Source: Decisive - Mexican traffic is actually quite expensive on Decisive and there is a TON of it, but it appears to be less competitive than US traffic (pretty much everything is), so I'll give it a shot.

I will begin work on thinking of as many angles for the offer as possible.

Then, I'll need some banners. The mobile cookbook has info on creating banners, and I have Mr. Green's mobile banner template as well. However, the offer itself includes a few banners that have an advantage - they're already in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, but I'm pretty confident I can get help translating. I was wondering if any other members have had success using included creatives? Otherwise, I'll start off creating 8 myself.

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I'm hesitant about possibly raining on your parade - but from what I can see from trends on appannie, this app is quite old and saturated:




Moreover, trend is starting to drop off recently:



I'm far from being an expert on picking app offers though - so could the rest of you guys please comment on this?


Amy

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Hmm, if another user could provide some info, then I could decide whether to move forward or not with the app. Otherwise, I'll look toward picking another offer in order to stay on the safe side.

Amy, doe STM members have access to any tools for measuring the popularity of apps based on their countries (such as AppAnnie)?

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I'm curious, what tool did you use on the screenshots above?

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I believe she used a tool called AppAnnie

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Update #6 - I've decided that I will keep my angles and the eBay offer in the back of my head, and will research it more. However, I've chosen an offer that can serve as a backup -

Nice Weather Free (Simple weather app)
Geo: I can choose between US, CA, NZ, UK, IR (Ireland), AUS. I will most likely choose Canada, UK or New Zealand - what do you guys think? New Zealand is the cheapest on average at Decisive, however has by far the lowest amount of traffic available. I like Canada the most out of these ideas because Canadians really check the weather a lot, considering that it can be extremely hot or suddenly turn cold. However, the payout is only $0.19, which means it'll be hard to win bids at $0.30-ish.
Traffic Source: Decisive, of course

The app has a very clean, appealing design, and it appears to be pretty decent. However, what I need to focus on are some angles. I will get on thinking some up right away, and some more tomorrow as well as I create a set of banners.

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Update #7: I have gone ahead and applied for a bunch of offers on F5 media as well, for various geos. Hopefully I should soon have enough offers to choose from in case I need to pick more (which of course I eventually will)

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None that I know of - but what's wrong with appannie? It's free to use!

I checked that weather app on appannie as well:



Your thoughts on Canadians checking the weather is very good logical thinking that will definitely give you an advantage when it comes to picking winners to promote. However, there are other important considerations as well - such as:

-The number of installs for this app (I'm assuming you're promoting the android version) is "100,000-500,000", which isn't much for an international app, so saturation probably won't be a problem here.

-The trends are confusing though - there are bouts of ups and downs over the past 2 years. I could only think of a couple possible causes for this. Either the advertiser/owner did their app promotion in fits and starts (most likely due to budget constraints), and/or affiliates that pushed the app couldn't make it profitable and dropped out.

Oscar - did you pick these apps out yourself or were they recommended to you by your AMs? Going with offers recommended by AMs is usually the better way to go when we're just starting out. They're the ones that know what the advertiser's budget is and have all the data on conversion rates and EPCs and which geos convert better. I would suggest that you bug your AMs more - ask them which types of offers are hot, which traffic sources they recommend that you try those offers at, and angles that are working. Just pick one and start a campaign and use it to learn the ropes. Once you're familiar with the entire process of launching and optimizing a campaign, you could then pick several offers at a time and test them simultaneously or one after another. AM is a numbers game. The more you test the more promising stuff you'll find (whether it be offers, banners/landers, traffic sources, campaign targetting, placements...) And the smarter you test, the less money you'll need to spend in the process.

Hope I haven't made things even more confusing for you!

Amy

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Hi Amy,

I've asked a few questions to my AM about the offer, but no response yet as it is the 4th of July and a Saturday. However, my network is showing some stats for the offer:



It appears the offer is working, at least for some affiliates. I think I'll give it a try.

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Update #9 - I've decided to come up with some angles -

Angles:

Convenience
-Check weather easily!
-Check weather from your phone!
-Get weather info from anywhere, any time!

Portability
-Get weather info on the go!
-Get weather info no matter where you are!

Powerful features
-Get weather info anywhere in the world!
-Get weather info for today, tomorrow, or even next year!

Other taglines
-Is it going to snow today? Download Nice Weather!

"Negative" Style
-Don't want to freeze in Canadian weather? Download Nice Weather and get weather info on your phone.
-Find out when storms come before it's too late. Get Nice Weather
-Protect your car from hail, download Nice Weather for free.

I'm leaning toward one of the earlier angles, and will create some banners.

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Those EPCs and CTRs do look juicy - even if taken with a grain of salt.

Would love to know how you get on with this app!

Have you downloaded the app yourself and played with it? I find that doing so gives me ideas for angles...

Amy

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Yes, I have gone ahead and taken a look at the app - it's biggest feature is that it looks extremely nice, but I've decided to go with angle going for the convenience of checking the weather with this app -


I've submitted the campaigns to creative, they'll likely get crackin' tomorrow.

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People don't need to know whether it's raining currently - they could just look out the window.

To create good angles, ask yourself the question "why do people want to check the weather?"

These results will give you some great ideas:

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+...utf-8&oe=utf-8

I love the simple and minimalistic design you use for your banners! If you make the text stand out by adding shadows and/or glow it should help CTR. Another idea would be to test animation - like a 2-frame "raining" animation (only need to make the raindrops "move" - cloud can stay static) or sun-coming-out-from-behind-the-clouds animation (1 frame with sun the other frame without). Animation can attract eyeballs to the banners to increase CTR and potentially CR.

Amy

P.S. Just thought of this headline:
"How frequently do you check the weather?" (with some numbers to "choose from" such as "0/1/2/3/4 per day")

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On choosing the offers: why didn't you just go with an offer on F5 instead of applying for other networks? And did you pick one of the top offers?

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"Do you need to carry an umbrella? Find out In 10 Sec »"

"The Best Time Today To Go Shopping Will Be..."

"Don't Get Rained Out Of The Park - Install Weather Predictor Now »"

"When will the rain stop? Find Out »"

"Don't Risk Heatstroke - Fastest Way To Check Weather Predictions »"

Just a few angle ideas for you - this app's great for unique angles!

Keep an eye on the news headlines in the country you're targeting, too - freak weather occurances are pretty common, and all you need is a bunch of folk worried about flooding, for example, and the right angle to get a super-high CVR suddenly...

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Looking forward to following along and seeing your progress Oscar. I'm just about to pick some new offers and you've helped with my thought process for a few things!

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Thanks everyone! I'll be keeping most of the banners I've created, but I'll also gut 2-3 that I feel are weak, such as the "is it raining?" one for a new banner that'll have some more "powerful" text than if asking if it's just raining. I'll take all of your suggestions into consideration.

I have a few offers on F5, but most of them aren't direct-linked to the Play Store/App Store, so I'd rather not use an LP at this point in time.

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Update #12 - After a short break, I've replaced two of the banners and submitted them to Decisive. Now, my banners are:


My campaign should go live tomorrow!

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I'm interested to see how those different banners do, not sure which ones will be best.

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Banners look great! Do keep us posted on how they do!


Amy

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Oh boy. The offer literally just expired. I wasted $4, not a huge deal, but it's incredibly annoying to lose the banners, angles, etc. One of the campaigns had a 2.4% CTR, but I can't tell if it would have converted because the link was dead. It was working yesterday, I guess the plug was pulled today.

Back to the old drawing board. That said, I'm glad to see that I saw some success in my ability to create banners. Big thanks to Mr. Green on his thread about his research on mobile banners.

Tomorrow I'll be looking at more offers.

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Wow what a bummer!

Unfortunately these things happen - especially with apps (offer lifespan for those are typically pretty short although a few did run / have been running for many months or even years). Glad to see you're not dwelling on it, but instead moving onto other opportunities. All in all, I'm sure you'll agree that that campaign was a great learning experience!

Will you be looking at other app install offers? It wouldn't be a bad idea to consider other verticals / traffic types as well. Have you seen caurmen's latest guide? That will give you some ideas!

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ticals-EXPOSED


Amy

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Yes, I will be looking into PIN Submits and Sweeps as well! I'll look through the guide, for sure!

Also, for non-App Installs, I assume I should look into proper tracking solutions (probably the STM mobile tracker) since they'll need their own LPs?

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Update: Seeing the resources required in order to get the server, get the Maxmind GeoIP Organization Database, etc that's needed for non-app installs, I'm wondering if I should try and work with app installs on non-saturated apps for the time being? What do you all think?

Do you think I could get away with following The Main Course of The Mobile Cookbook with only about $900 to spend on: a VPS, tracking (Maxmind GeoIP Organization Database, is $100, and required for the STM Mobile tracker), and of course testing (probably on offers paying less than $2)?

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For sure! And the STM tracker will do the job just fine.

AFAIK: There's a serious lack of high-converting, non-saturated app install offers as of late. You'll definitely have a lot more good offers to choose from by going with pin submits and sweeps like you mentioned. However, it's not to say good app install offers don't exist! If you find an offer that you feel may be worth a shot, give it a try by all means! (Such useful advice eh? LOL!)

AFAIK, you can store static files on amazon (AWS) for free without the need to get a VPS. Would someone please confirm this?

Oscar if you get stuck at any point while setting up the tracker etc. and need help let me know!



Amy

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I would advise against using your own tracking server, if you haven't got already skills in server management. This could cost you days of work and cause a lot of headaches. If Voluum is too expensive you could try https://www.adsbridge.com/ - haven't tried it, but it looks promising (of course it won't as good as the 1337 stuff from the Codewise guys - yes, I'm a fan )

Amy is right, simply use AWS, it's free for low volume users. Create a S3 bucket, make it public ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...c-in-amazon-s3 ), map Cloudfront over it and you're good to go. I wouldn't even bother to get a domain if you are starting out. If you need help, shoot me a PM.

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