Getting back into the Industry. Feel like a complete newbie. (28)
Getting back into the Industry. Feel like a complete newbie.
From 2009-2012 I was a relatively large affiliate, did quite well for myself and built a pretty solid reputation for myself in the industry. I blogged at RileyPool.com, built out an information product, POFPrimer.com, managed a small, boutique affiliate network to help new affiliates, or established affiliates, get started in the dating niche. I ended up slowly walking away from the industry in 2011/2012 to focus on a local brick and mortar investment. Fast forward a few years and now I have a lot of extra time on my hands and I'm ready to stack that money, again.
Now that I'm getting back into the industry I feel like a complete newbie. Upon acclimating myself to the industry by reading this forum and another and logging into my old accounts I’m astounded at how much the industry has changed in a just a few short years. Affiliate Networks have changed. Traffic Sources have changed. Even Tracking Solutions have changed. I have a subscription to
My plan for getting back into the industry is to do some traffic arbitrage to build up my war chest again. All the while, planning on building out some more assets in the industry that I can hopefully reap the benefits of for years to come.
I'm creating this thread to help keep me accountable. After three weeks of being signed up to
Campaign: WhatsApp Wallpapers
TrafficSource: ZeroPark
Landers: Rotating 3 different landers, with different features on each (pops, sound, etc)
Offers: Rotating 3 different offers between 3 different networks.
I’ll keep you guys updated on it’s progress. I also plan on launching a couple other campaigns to get these old, clunky gears moving again.
Best of luck to you!
It definitely is a fast changing industry ... 6 months in the AM industry is probably equal to 16 years of change in most other industries. Keeping up to date on the latest development and changes is absolutely essential for adapting and succeeding in this game.
First conversion already so that's always nice to see. I just need more data. I'm in Bid Position 2 in ZeroPark, but I'm not even to 20 Visits yet. There's 20mil+ volume in this category based on ZeroPark's estimation of traffic. I'm running RON and I do have it narrowed down to non-adult and to two specific Carriers. I may just bump up to Bid Position 1 to get the data.
I'm also having a problem, how do I navigate around
Hey I remember you! Used to follow your blog back in the day, good stuff. I'm kind of in a similar position now, so much has changed over the last few years. I'll be following your thread, I'm sure you'll start stacking in no time!
Funny. i used to follow your blog back in the day.
Welcome back Riley. Wondered what happened to you as well.
Welcome back homie!
I'm glad to be back. I love the freedom of this industry. I never really went anywhere. I always kept tabs on the industry, just never had enough time to devote to the industry, but now I do.
If anybody would like to reach out I'm always available on Skype. There's a ton of you I would like to catch up with. Especially those of you that followed my blog I would love to hear what you guys are up to these days.
Skype: rileypool
As far as the campaign, still not getting much data. May try the campaign on a couple other traffic sources and/or create other campaigns where I know there's much more volume.
Hey Riley!
awesome to see you back! Ill hit you up on skype and say hello!
I stepped back and looked at this campaign as a whole. I paused it. Simply not enough traffic to be worth my time. I want to run campaigns that can scale massively. I will post stats when I get back to the house.
On another note, my son was born Saturday afternoon. He's having a few issues and we're in the NICU (ICU for babies). We're up here with him and will continue to be until Wednesday, possibly Thursday. He won't get to come home for probably another week. However, in the mean time, I am doing some brainstorming, spying on campaigns and figuring out new things to run. Come Thursday (or Friday) when I decide to focus back on work, I will be ready to launch a couple campaigns. When those campaigns get live I will update this post with the details.
For those that have tried to hit me up on Skype, I do apologize for not getting back to you yet. I'm giving my attention to my son at the moment, but once I get back to work I will touch base with you all.
Congratulations on fatherhood!
Welcome back dude! It's been a while!
Congrats! Good luck to you and your family 
Congrats!!!
Great, congrats!
Congrats and welcome back !!
As a father myself, I can imagine it must be stressful for your wife and yourself atm, how long does he have to stay in the NICU? I hope the little man will come out tougher and gaining strength.
Welcome back - I'd also focus on running mobile CPI campaigns (ios/android) if I were you. Easy converters so easy to get a lot of data on to finetune performance - since that is what you mentioned you're looking for
My infant was diagnosed with Hirschprung's Disease. Nerve cells didn't develop in his colon so he didn't know when he needed to poop. It requires surgery to fix. When they got in there they found that his colon was pretty badly diseased and it will require two surgeries to fix. The first surgery was a colostomy. So for now he has a colostomy bag and will for 6-9 months until they can do the follow up surgery to finish everything up. At that time, his body will function normally, but he will have the disease for the rest of of his life. It may give him diarrhea and/or constipation issues, but it's definitely manageable. He spent 2 weeks in the NICU before being allowed to come home. And this past week we've just been trying to get accustomed to a colostomy bag.
Come Monday, I will be back in full force and plan to launch a campaign that day, hopefully two. As those two campaigns come to fruition I will keep this post updated.
Congrats! My daughter was born on the 16th. Everything is fine with her but even so, it's very busy and my daily schedule has turned to chaos. I can only imagine how you are coping.
I will keep an eye on this follow along. It will be interesting to see what it's like for someone who's been out of the industry for a few years.
Originally Posted by rileypool
My brother, my heart goes out to you and your family. I know what it's like to be in the NICU and going through that. My second son was born with a little bit of fluid in his lungs and had to be in the NICU until there was no more fluid. I remember the stress and worry that I went through.
Your son deserves all the love in the world from you and your wife. He's gonna go on to live a great life and do great things. From one dad to another, we get caught up with affiliate marketing and all these others things but at the end of the day, spending time with them and showing them how much we love them is the greatest thing we can do.
I send my sincerest wishes to you and your family.
Thanks for the kind words everybody. We have a meeting with the surgeon next week to develop a timeline for his second surgery. All is well so far and we couldn't ask for him to be doing better, all things considered.
On another note, I've launched two more WhatsApp Wallpapers campaigns. Both in countries outside the United States. I've created a different approach for these campaigns so we will see how they work out. I launched the campaign late Friday afternoon and they weren't approved before the ZeroPark team left for the weekend. Once that stats start come in I'll post more details.
I also plan on launching a Sweepstakes offer sometime this weekend hopefully.
G-d Bless you and the fam!
Here's the update I should have made from the very beginning.
I was afraid to admit it at first, but I was overwhelmed by everything. I thought that I would be able to jump back in the saddle and my gears would start turning. However, that was not the case and I was really struggling to get campaigns up.
If any of you paid attention to my blog a couple years back you were probably familiar with the amount of transparency I would provide. I prided myself in that. I want to do a better job for everybody and be more transparent about the WhatsApp campaign I ran and the Sweepstakes campaign I just launched.
KILLING OFF WHATSAPP
I ran those WhatsApp Background campaigns on Zeropark and targeted English-speaking Malaysians. I tried using landers and I tried direct linking. Regardless of what I did, it was a massive failure all the way around. For the few conversions I did receive I tried targeting those sites specifically, but upon doing so no more conversions ever came in. That’s exactly why statistical significance is extremely important in this business! My final stats were as follows…
SPEND: 48.54
REVENUE: 6.60
ROI: -86.40%
As I was researching the WhatsApp offers further I realized the advertisers appeared to prefer for you to direct link to the offers, which I tried. I swore it would work and launched a campaign in Malaysia and South Africa because I thought in my head that it would absolutely work (like I do every other campaign) and it was a bomb. I included the failed Malaysian stats above. My failed South African stats are below.
SPEND: 20.30
REVENUE: 0.00
ROI: -100%
HELP WITH
I’m having a little trouble understanding how
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ultiple-Offers
ON TO THE NEXT ONE - SWEEPSTAKES
On the advice of my AM, I’ve decided to run a Sweepstakes campaign in the United Kingdom. I’ve used the spying tools I pay for to find a handful of different landers to run. I installed Ampps, which pretty much lets you do PHP development on your local computer and the PHP code runs properly. It’s a useful time-saving feature. As I was digging through the code on these landers I must say that they’re very hastily put together. [SIDE NOTE] Why some people use 20 lines of java code to display the same thing that 20 characters of PHP code can display is beyond me. Surely the PHP code loads quicker, right?
I’m running 3 different landers for now and they all have offers that are great converters network-wide at Adsimilis. They are an iPhone 6 giveaway and an Amazon Gift Card with payouts around $1 - $2. I’m a little hesitant to divulge the landers at this time, but maybe I will once the campaign is over. The landers all have the same angle, that the end user has been chosen to receive a prize and they have to select which. The landers incorporate different tactics (back button redirects, interactive count down timers, etc…) and are much different than any other campaign I’ve ever run. Believe it or not but I generated millions of dollars of leads using strictly direct linking when I was an affiliate. None of my profitable campaigns ever had a landing page. I've created two separate campaigns to run. I'm running two RON campaigns, one for Domains and one for Premium PPV. I'm curious to see how they both perform.
Offer(s): iPhone 6 Giveaway & Amazon.com Gift Card
Country: United Kingdom
Lander Style: Lucky Visitor gets an Award
Payout(s): $1 - $2
Traffic Source: ZeroPark
Traffic: Domain - RON & Premium PPV - RON
Bid: 0.02 (to start)
Daily Limit: $40
I’ve launched the campaign on Zeropark right now, but I may move over to Propeller Ads as I have heard the traffic quality over there is much better. I’m hoping they turn out well once approved. Or at worst, something I can work with and turn into a positive margin campaign.
If any of you have any questions about the details or pointers on things I should work on, please feel free to ask or let me know.
Originally Posted by rileypool
On the other hand Javascript runs on a user browser and it's pretty much fast if user device is fast i.e. iPhone 5, Galaxy S4, etc. Javascript code loads terrible when you have dependencies like jQuery, Boostrap, MooTools, etc. it requires extra time to load dependencies in the browser and it also slow downs user browser. Hope you got the whole point
Definitely understand. I don't understand all the mechanics involved with loading PHP code versus Javascript, but that was pretty much the answer I was looking for. I may do some digging to see what research I can dig up about the differences.
Campaign was approved overnight, like usual with Zeropark.
As of right now the stats are ugly and look somethin like this...
DOMAIN - RON
Spend: 8.50
Revenue: 2.10
Profit: 6.40
ROI: -75.29%
This is showing a little bit of promise, but I'm not getting very much traffic, just like my WhatsApp campaign. I've upped my bids in hopes of more traffic. Two conversions already give me a glimmer of hope.
PREMIUM PPV - RON
Spend: 45.09
Revenue: 2.10
Profit: 42.99
ROI: -95.34%
I blew through my $40 budget very quickly. I have a couple conversions to work with. I'm going to make some optimizations and up my budget to $80. Once the campaign finishes up today I will post screenshots of the lander and offer stats.
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