STM Year In Review (10)
Starting Out...
I first bought a STM membership as a birthday present to myself exactly one year ago.
My goal at the time was to recreate at least partially the success of naesm. Shortly after writing my introductory post, I set to work understanding everything I could about the current state of CPA marketing.
I very quickly realized that CPA today was nothing like CPA back in 2009 when I received my first conversion. This was back around the time when “Arbitrage Conspiracy” was launched. Some of the career affiliates here may be familiar with it.
The introduction of mobile traffic and the new set of variables required to acquire conversions presented a new challenge for me and I knew immediately that my present knowledge about CPA marketing was likely obsolete--although it was a good starting point.
I got myself a decisive account, an offer on MaxBounty for mobile traffic in a non-US country, and set to work.
I ended up running three campaigns. Two in Australia, and one in New Zealand. All three campaigns earned conversions, but the banners I was running at the time just didn’t have the oomph needed to generate the clicks to make the campaigns profitable. I ultimately ended up scrapping those campaigns and moving on to something far more useful.
Come August, I had just started up what would become my longest follow along, and almost religiously spent every day posting my results along with my best guess as to why those results happened. It was fairly boring at first. I won some, I lost more. But I figured if thedudeabides was able to reach $300/day profit after $12k spend, I could at least get close.
Getting Indoctrinated
I had attended the STM meetup held at the empire hotel in NYC. (In red)
Things were admittedly slow at first, but soon I honed my introduction, was better able to define who I am and what I do, and made a few genuine contacts as well as gained earlybird access to certain traffic platforms.
The STM meetup was followed by the a4d party, as well as an invite-only clickbank event.
I had the pleasure of speaking with a lot of the high dollar offer-owners on clickbank, learned more about the traffic that converts well on their back-ends as well as introduce myself as an affiliate who generated 1000s of conversions to their respective offers. I also spoke with some of clickbank's executives and gained some insights into how the platform works
I learned very quickly what verticals worked, what kind of traffic the traffic sources were really running, and a couple more insider secrets that are not spoken of here on the forum of anywhere else I’ve been online.
There were three people in particular who I kept in contact with following the events, and the four of us formed a mastermind which proved to be especially useful to my continued growth in the CPA space.
Innovation followed by confirmation...
Following ASE, and the events surrounding it, I went back to work grinding traffic against YTZ, and by the end of August, I had crossed a major milestone.
Around the beginning of September, my VAs told me they were getting frustrated with the increasing number of campaigns they had to pause/unpause. So I looked into getting an automated solution put together.
The first version of the campaign management software I wrote focused on pausing and unpausing campaigns. That’s it. That simple feature took an enormous load off of my VAs and allowed them to start up more campaigns. It also allowed for 24/7 monitoring of campaigns and knowing when to shut a campaign down based on the prevailing EPV for that given hour.
Over the next three months, the management software evolved. It went from turning campaigns on and off to adjusting the bids based on the overall performance in addition to pausing/resuming the campaign. The next major evolution was the addition of multiple bidding strategies to take into account the human competitors and if not out-bid them, out maneuver them.
The improved management software led to the discovery of a pseudo-unicorn late October going into November. Those couple of weeks turned out to be the most profitable weeks I had yet experienced with the YTZ method, and I was itching for more.
My first real break...
December 2014 turned out to be my next major milestone. Robert Gryn had posted an opportunity for a mastermind. There was only one catch--I didn't meet the x,xxx/day earnings requirement. So I applied anyway, putting my strongest aspects forward on the off chance I was let in because of this capability. What happened instead was even more powerful...
After posting those capabilities in the mastermind application thread, a handful of members reached out to me asking about this auto bidding system. I had no trouble explaining how the system works, and often traded questions with them about various aspects of affiliate marketing. After a bit of back and forth, one affiliate asked me to manage his campaigns on Zeropark in exchange for a cut of the revenue. I ended up earning high x,xxx during January.
STM London came around and I got a chance to meet high dollar affiliates that I had been skyping with face to face. I also ended up meeting two of the three members of the mastermind that I joined the previous summer before that ultimately dissolved. More surprisingly, I found out I had won best follow-along, and with it a talking point that plenty of other STM members used to start a conversation. It was interesting hearing everyone's perspective on what I was doing.
STM London also afforded an opportunity to speak one on one with John Alanis in the back of an uber Prius. I learned a major component of his story, now better understand what drives his beliefs and how they flow through to his emails. Understanding how all of those parts fit together to create his attractive character helped me shape my own attractive characters in my own email marketing.
Following STM London, I continued tweaking the campaign management code and started turning my attention to running my own landing pages and campaigns at the urging of several people whose opinions I value.
Leaving My Comfort Zone...
The Maypac fight was coming up, and I started split testing landing page headlines. There were a surprising amount of winners, and that same day leading into the fight itself, I quickly came up with 20-30 other slight variations that took elements of the winning campaigns and improved on them. Ultimately the campaign broke even, but I learned a very valuable lesson in scaling and quickly being able to capitalize on something that works.
The Maypac campaign was followed up by a bunch of other seemingly relevant news events, with lackluster results. Where Maypac generated 160+ conversions, the following campaigns would be lucky to get 6 each.
I spent more time networking at the After-AFFcelerator party hosted by Charles Ngo. There I met two people who I am looking forward to masterminding with in the mobile sweeps/download space and potentially get an amazing apartment in Bangkok for the Affiliate World Conference event this December.
While I was focusing on finding new angles and relevant news topics to monetize, someone approached me out of the blue on skype with an offer to financially partner up and scale ytz to a profit center as opposed to a mere testing ground with a goal to build out more reliable mobile campaigns in the major verticals. Fortunately, this partner is familiar with how these sorts of campaigns work and understands the cost of acquiring data.
That pretty much rounds out my first year on STM. The revenue and income I ultimately earned do not compare with some of the other success stories. What I'm finding to be more valuable is the network I'm building, the clients whose traffic I now manage, and the ever elusive red ocean that cmdeal alluded to.
Looking Forward...
Short term, I'm looking at potentially staying in BKK for 3 weeks to 1 month.The goal during that period is to try and make connections with the Chinese affiliates who either can't or choose not to come to the U.S. for whatever reason. Ideally, I'll build out a $x,xxx/day campaign along with the apartment's mastermind before I return to the U.S. Going about that is unclear at the moment. However, the looming 2016 election should present multiple opportunities as long as I'm open to testing them.
I'm feeling out my network to see who would be willing to split a 3-bedroom / 3 bathroom apartment that's very close to the event itself and reasonably close to other STM members who are living more or less full time in BKK.
Longer term, I want to commit more capital to developing my own mobile based lead flows, as well as grow a proper email list. I have already developed a couple of mobile-capable HTML5 games that I hope to use for this upcoming 2016 election. There surely are plenty of opportunities to poke fun at the various candidates and build out more click-bait like campaigns to get people engaged. As I'm building out those campaigns, I'm also looking to grow my own media buying teams. I already created software to handle bidding logic, testing, and knowing--with proper statistical reasoning--what to bid for each placement. On top of all that, I have automated a method of allocating available budget and prioritizing campaigns within the risk tolerances I set for the system. All that's left are the creative aspects that a machine can't really handle.
are we the chinese affiliate?
One of them.
congrats!
"What I'm finding to be more valuable is the network I'm building, the clients whose traffic I now manage, and the ever elusive red ocean that cmdeal alluded to."
Amen!
Its been a year, then Happy belated birthday
and congrats! you deserve it
It's been fascinating watching your journey over the last year. Looking forward to seeing where it takes you next!
I'm curious about the auto bidding system you made for ZP, right now it's time consuming changing the bids of 1000 targets every second day.
Can you share how you did that?
It's just a series of get requests. Provided you know the correct URL, you'll be fine. Just be careful that you have code to watch for changes. Zeropark in particular is prone to changing their back end without notice.
Congrats, that's a great story and a great year for you. Its all about hard work and determination. Probably like many others, I'm interested in this automated system you've set up.
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