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Escaping The Rat Race and Mastering Mobile Marketing (44)

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I'm Jonathan, 29 years old from NY/NJ. I've been working in the I.T field for the past seven years for the same company and looking for a change. I do not consider myself a newbie (but still have alot to learn); maybe 3 years ago i was running traffic on POF making $xx.xx daily in-consistently, but i was enough to prove to me that this field works. Due to me being irresponsible, i blew my funds, stop running traffic and left the affiliate marketing game alone. I never stop thinking about it and regret the lost time and money that could of been used to set-up campaign and test. So i refunded my account STM account for about the 3rd time and now I'm committed to make this work.

I know in this business you have to spend for traffic, tracking, and hosting so i will cough up about 1k -1.5k monthly. I was thinking of saving atleast 4k but i rather start and work with what's available to me.

Why I need to make this work (I read that your "why" has to be real big in order to make your goals work)?

• To escape the rat race (9-5 job)
• Work from home or any tropical island
• Retire my mother and pay her mortgage
• Help others
• Build a business

Budget: Minimum 1K put aside monthly, I also have good credit, so cash flow should not be a problem when i hit a profitable camp.
Traffic Source: Mobile advertising following "The Mobile Cookbook: The Appetizer." and Decisive for traffic.
Vertical: Open to anything as long as it's making money, but for now Im focus on app installs

Goal for the end of this month (9 days) = 1 Conversion.

And introducing, my affiliate comeback (good feeling after not running traffic for so long and seeing all this data and refreshing for that first conversion )

Traffic source: Decisive
Vertical: Ecommerce-Shopping
Offer: GumTree Android ZA
GEO: South Africa
Direct linking

Budget: $10/day per campaign
Bid: 1.5 x offer price

Angles: Looking for job, want a new phone, sell your stuff fast

Banners:


Results:


Spend for the Day: $5.13
Revenue: $0.00

Looking for feedback as i am completely new to mobile marketing.

Task

• Allow each camp to reach is adspend
• Find more top offers
• Study STM and see other follow along campaign and mimic there success
• Test, test, test

I do not have a VPS or tracking and do not know if i should be using one yet. I'm following the cookbook "appetizer" and no mention of it yet.

Thanks for reading

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I love to see my fellow IT guys on here. Good luck Jonathan!

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Do you know if this is a good offer? Did you do any research on how long its been going on for? Why did you choose it?

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Don't regret anything, man. You needed this pain to prime your ambitions. You weren't strong enough back then, but you are now. All part of the journey.

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I got a list from my AM of top offers, but so far is not converting.



Im thinking of pausing and moving on to another offer, any suggestion?

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What's the CTR on the ads? Also, are you direct linking to the offer or do you have an LP?

Glad to see other people from NY/NJ on here. I wish you much success!

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Im direct linking, i was following "The cookbook appetizer" and was instructed to direct link on offers with low payouts. It looks like i might have to start creating LPs

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Try a couple LP's ( Like 2 ) and one different banner. If there are still no conversions just dump this and get a new offer.

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I actually tried mobile pornsite in 2008 when the iphone first came out and was pulling in about $200-$300 monthly with minimal maintence. Mostly due to a guy who put me close to the top of a high volume rating site. What I learned is that you can not put your time & effort into something that really isn't certain enough without data/statistics or just a plain good hookup. To really compete you have to have the tools/knowledge. Things are changing so fast on the internet that by the time you've mastered something it's already too saturated & profit margins are just twindling. I have'nt done anything with AM for about 5 years now but ready to start up again. Everything seem new to me & it's like starting over again. Good to hear your story Jonathan. I Think the only true advantage is to spy on your competitors with tools such as whatrunshere & really see what works & does'nt work. From there you can refine your own campaign. I would to see a useful case study on this.

But before you spy on a campaign, I would like to know trends that are extremely evergreen. Would love to see how someone researches & narrows down an offer that is not quite saturated yet. Good luck & fortune to you Jonathan!

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That's my next step. I'm waiting for my affiliate manager to respond to my email and approval for some offers i just submitted. In the meantime, i read about 3 successful follow a-longs on mobile and took notes of what makes a profitable campaign. The keynotes i learned was to test and gather data (losing money is part of the game), focus and do not quit and once you find something that works, start scaling. Real simple, so im not going to re-invent the wheel.

Now that i got a spy tool (Mobile ad-scout), this is what's next on my to-do list:

- Get hosting most likely Amazon CDN
- Voluum tracking solution
- Learn how to create/rip mobile LP's and load to hosting
- Create new campaign/banners with new and existing offers and test different variations

That's it for now, have a lot of work to do

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Lots of work to do but you are on the good way - keep on going.
Also don't make conclusions to fast. You've only spend 5$ until now. IMO you cant make any conclusions on a campaign before having tested it for at least 100$, otherwise its just too little data

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I agree. Tracking is always a good way to go. Maybe not the most important step at first, but definently one you want/want to learn for the future. It's important/imperative to be able to see which sites are bringing in conversions/which placements, and optimizie from thereon. I've seen myself what huge difference it can make to a campaign. Also, let your ads spend some more. 5 USD is way too little. Sometimes I see little conversions during the week-days and a huge amount during weekends. Every offer is different that way.

Good luck man, will be following this thread, hope you keep posting :-).

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Wow! It's been a month since my last update and i have a lot on my plate. The first offer i was promoting got paused on my campaign and i had to find a new one. My AM recommended that i run traffic to a USA game app that's based on football fantasy starting football season. I set up my campaigns, ran traffic and within a few hours i blew about $100 bucks and no conversion.
At this point i knew that in order to really analyze data i needed Voluum to track and a hosting for LP testing so with my limited budget, i got all in place. As soon as i got all my hardware/software setup, that offer was paused. Now im back to scratch with a new offer and couple of LPs that i need to re-design. I created a few LP's and when i load them, they do not look the same as Dreamweaver, and this is due to my lost knowledge of HTML/CSS.
So here's this month game plan

-Crash course on HTML/CSS
-Watch videos on Dreamweaver (I have a course)
-Learn how to add sub domain on Amazon CDN (Do i need a new domain for each LP ?)
-Have a better knowledge of Voluum and how to analyze data effectively
-Run offers in the meantime to gain experience

One thing i did do as part of my research was to read each thread of the most viewed follow along on "Mobile", take notes and see what characteristic each user had, also took note on what's working and what to avoid. I got alot of insight doing that!

For now, here is what i have running live. I will admit, i did a half ass job but i was really eager to get something out there just to test and see numbers.

Offer: Iphone 6
Geo: Norway
Traffic: Decisive

Banners: I did some research and found out basic banners with white background a CTA perform better so i keep them real simple:



This is one of the LP i have, very simple and not converting well either:



I have this LP rotating with the offer.

Update! Just as im writing this, i made my first conversion with Mobile . One thing that does not make sense to me is that my network stats, traffic source and tracking does not match, see below:







I just noticed , none of my conversion are being tracked by my tracking software and traffic source. I have a few questions before i continue.

Do you guys use sub-domain for Amazon CDN? if yes, how do you configure CNAME with CDN on the Sub-domains?

I think that's all now, back to work!

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Hi!

i see that you're using Voluum. As such, did you put the post back link from your Voluum account to your network's postback input area?

If not, then you should! this way when a visitor converts, the network fires off the postback link and voluum records it down

hope that helps!

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Congrats on your first conversion, mate!

You can add subdomains or subfolders, there isn't much of a critical difference here. You can use the same domain for most of your offers and buy a second domain purely for your tracking needs.

Subdomain: totallylegitdickpills.yourdomain.com/index.html
Subfolder: yourdomain.com/totallylegitdickpills/index.html

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Hello all, I still have my STM account and wanted to give a quick update to commit myself.

I went low on funds and had some legal issues not related to IM and had to take a setback and cancel my Voluum and hosting account. My goal now is save up atleast 5K (I should have about 2k in the beginning of next year to start)so i could test properly and overcome the fear of losing money. While im still stacking cheese in the rat race i thought i should utilize my time to learn certain skill that need improvement like:

- HTML/CSS/JAVA (I would rip landers but never had a clear understanding on how CSS works)
- Financing/Accounting
- Mastermind (1 or 2 people who are committed and can hold each other accountable and have a definite purpose or $$ amount)

And the most important, my mindset. I’ve already read some books on self-development, time-management business and auto-biographies on successful people to imitate their success. Anybody looking to mastermind or chop it up, send me a PM and let's see if we could work something out.

See you guys soon!

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My Iphone campaign did not convert as well:

Clicks: 121
CTR: 0.66%
Cost: $19.71
Profit: $0.00

I double checked my links, post-back, network and everything is set-up correctly.

The cookbook instructs:

My previous failed campaign did alot better as far as CTR but no conversions:

Clicks: 404
CTR: 1.27%
Cost: $19.71
Profit: $0.00

My guess is that English country are harder to convert than non English cause of the competition.

So now its on to the next offer:

Name: Lazada Shopping Mobile App - CPA - Android & iOS - Philippines
Vertical: Ecommerce - Shopping
Payout: $0.80
Top Campaign CR%: 0.81%
Top Campaign EPC: $0.01

What have I learned?

- I took the Go2mobi academy course and i have a better understanding of the platform
- How to drill down campaigns and see what placements, carrier, creatives, etc. have potential
- It's going to take a lot of testing to get a profitable campaign

Next steps

- Create 8 banners for Lazada offer
- Research more offers and find an affiliate network with more mobile offers
- Create a mastermind with 2 members that are not complete newbies so we could test and learn faster

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So im back with a different approach. I spoke to a few affiliates in this forum, got some feedback and decided to go with popup traffic. I applied to networks that have more mobile inventory and got a list of top offers to test.

I spent this week making landing pages, applying for traffic sources and spying on my competition. For this I took 4 LPs from the spy tool, modified them to match my offer and set them this morning to run on $15 dollar budget to make sure my tracking, CDN hosting is working properly. I have so many question and wanted to wait but i was real anxious and really want to start testing. I have a very limited budget this month but decided to take risk and get the ball rolling.

This is an sweep offer iPhone 6S.

Clicks: 161
CTR: 3.41%
Spent: $15.30
Revenue: $2.25
Profit: - $13.05

This campaign lasted about an hour as traffic came in quick. Im not sure if my targeting is set up right on popads:

Quality: All Websites
Freq Cap: 1 view / 24 hours
Primespot: All traffic
Type: Popup
Throttling: Disabled
Categories: all
Device: Smartphone Tablet
Max Bid: 0.004468

Is it usual to spend $15.00 in one hour when running your first test?

My plan was to wait for the campaign to reach 10-15$ spend while killing bad placements (3x payout no cr or very low CTR) along the way but i did not expect to spend the money so soon. Goal is to get to atleast -50 ROI before i proceed. I also noticed on the spy tool that everyone is running the same lander! It's time to innovate.

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I have a campaign right now that is close to being profitable. My network is recording conversions but Voluum does not.

What step did i miss?

I'm at work right now so it's hard to send screenshot. I'm going to pause for now but i need suggestion so i could properly track.

When i get home i will provide more details but if its something simple please let me know so i could continue running.

Campaign URL = http://uumny.xxx.com/2f838d18-b84d-4...123?websiteid=[WEBSITEID]&keyword=[KEYWORD]&categoryid=[CATEGORYID]&country=[COUNTRY]

Offer URL = http://xxx.com/?a=33025&c=84102&s2={campaign.id}&s3={lander.id}&s 5={clickid} URL OFFER

Postback = http://....com/postback?cid=#s2#

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I would keep letting the campaign run since you’re "close to being profitable". Because it could be likely you made a mistake on your postback to Voluum, in that case as long as ur subid,clickid to ur network are OK than you should be able to do a manual conversion upload onto Voluum.

EDIT: you made a mistake on your postback dude.
...postback?cid=#s5#&payout=#price#

You should still be able to do a manual upload on conversion and ur data should be tracked.

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You are sending the clickid through s5 in the offer URL, but in the postback you use s2, so instead of the clickid for the conversion you are getting the campaignid back to Voluum via the postback, that's why it's not being tracked correctly

This will fix it: http://uumny.voluumtrk2.com/postback?cid=#s5#

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Thanks, Im now seeing conversion on my tracker and they are coming in!

What i do not see is what websites are converting. I want to start eliminating bad placements and im not sure how to do this in order to get to green and increase my ROI.

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- @ -60 ROI I think you should keep throwing 'new style' landers in.
- An why is your you bid is 0.005999? Try bid like 0.0057 or 0.0063. Most ppl likely use 0.0060, 0.0065 etc. (I could be wrong)

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If you like to spread your money more evenly you can use throttle.

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Interesting Gray171,

Subscribed to this cause I am interested to. Thanks for the updates.

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Hi gray,

Can you elaborate more on your switch from mobile display to mobile pop? It seems that you are gettin easier conversions this way. Did you follow any guides on here??

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I took a look at all the follow along were affiliates were successful and came to the conclusion that pop-up would force me to work on my weakness (creating LPs) and i would probably have a higher chance on creating a profitable campaign.

This is what helped me get started:

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


I create a checklist on Evernote base on this workflow and i check off each step along the way

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On my next campaign i added 5 more LPs, used the excluded placement list, excluded tablets and only targeted mobile phones.

Campaign 3

Cost $19.95
Revenue $7.35
ROI: - 63%

Still in the negative and did not make any progress but i collected more data.

What to do next?

- Look at my most profitable lander's and mimic more.
- See if could make higher conversion on landers with higher CTR
- Split test this offer on other networks and look for identical ones

Questions

- Should i keep trying to get this campaign profitable on popads or move to another source?
- What is an effective bidding strategy? As of now, feel like im just shooting shit on the wall to see if it sticks
- How many landers makes a profitable campaign
- When testing a campaign do you bid low, average, or high based on your placements to get a feel if the offer is worth it?
- Did that guy on the "success" thread real make $392,120 in profit on free traffic in a few days all by banging fat chicks?

Not serious about the last one.

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On this round I narrow down all my converters and took all the winning website, browser, OS, device brand, converting LPs and came up with this:



Cost: $2.90
Revenue: $2.47
ROI: -15%

Im closer to profit now but im jeopardizing my traffic. This has come down to all the narrowing i did with my targeting.

I have another campaign set for another offer that should be running by tomorrow on a different geo.

I also have a Mastermind group were we will privately share data and test different traffic sources to optimize our spend.

Not much to post here, but want to keep myself accountable on making this follow along along a success.

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Well done gray on getting so close to profit!

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My Germany campaign that was once converting has gone back to -100% ROI. Right now im feeling very overwhelmed even tho this is only the second offer i tested. I created 6 campaigns in hopes that this last one would convert better after I made adjustments to my targeting.

Cost: $2.82
Revenue: $0.00
ROI: -100%

This is how this campaign is setup on Popads:

Max bid: 0.0053
OS: Android, iOS, Windows Phone
Browser: Silk, Chrome, Android, Safari
Form Factor: Smartphone
Device: Targeting the models that converted
Website: Only 16 Websites that converted from my previous 5 campaigns

These options leave me with this summary:



My bid position is 34 and my traffic impression is less that 1k a day. What's an ideal position to be at?

I tested 10 LPs and kept the the ones with the highest CV for this camp



So far this campaign has not reach it's budget of $15.00 and with the amount of traffic im getting, it might take another day or two.

I found a popads work flow on this forum and created a checklist with Evernote to have a sense of guidance when im creating campaigns:



Ill be honest and say that my landers are nowhere unique. From my spy account, every one is running the same LPs. I just do minor tweaks to make them work for my offer.

What's next on my agenda?

- Look for more top offers
- Spy on more LPs and keep throwing shit at the wall till it sticks
- Network with more affiliates ( My mastermind is currently at 3 members and looking for 2 more active affiliates)
- Test, fail, fail and become profitable

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Quick update, all my campaigns have gone to shit and one offer got paused. All that work from creating LPs and translating just to get the offer paused, not converting and realizing the next day that your were sending traffic to a paused offer that's redirecting, smh.

Here is my overall stats for January:

Cost: 201.04
Revenue: $63.70
ROI: -68%

I tested sweeps campaigns in Germany, Malaysia and Ghana. The 3rd tier Geo's have very limited traffic on Popads specially if the offer only allows certain carriers.


This past month has been real stressful with setting up campaigns, budgeting to pay for traffic, tools and dealing with a 9-5 that can't pay you on time, owes you $$$ and has no income generating.

Reason why i titled this thread "Escaping the Rat Race". Am I'm not too excited about brushing up my resume and finding another job.

To-Do

- Test new offer (WhatsApp - Mexico is currently pending)
- Read "Blue Ocean Strategy" and create uncontested market space
- Be more active with my mastermind group, set goals and deadlines
- test, test, and test some more.

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My Whatsapp MX offer got approved and im seeing a major click loss between Voluum and my network.

I have 104 click in Voluum and my network only recorded 34 , using Amazon CDN with caurmen's tutorial for my LPs.

I seen click loss before but this is nearly 70% lost.

Any suggestions?

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February is off to a good start but Im a bit low on cash and my current employer has not paid me for my last week of work.

For my next campaign I took 3 identical offers and split test them between two different network and found that only one was converting, so i stop all traffic to the non converter and focused on the one network that has conversions:

2/4/2016
Cost: $1.04
Revenue: $0.00
ROI: -100%

2/5/2016
Cost: $1.50
Revenue: $0.00
ROI: -100%

2/6/2016
Cost: $1.28
Revenue: $6.40
ROI: 400%

2/7/2016
Cost: $0.91
Revenue: $9.60
ROI: 966%

Traffic is very limited being that it's a 3rd tier country and Im only able to target one carrier.

I have another pending campaign and im working with 2 other individuals to share data which i probably will not share here out respect for my mastermind group.

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I kept running the campaign that is bringing me small profits since it's genarating money and it requires no maintenance . I tried to scale to another source and it failed with no conversion so i will just keep it running on popads and put my focus on another offer.

I ran another test on RON, then took all the winning placements and created a "Profit" campaign and got this summary:


RON
Cost: $9.99
Revenue: $22.40
Profit: $12.41
ROI 124%

PROFIT
Cost: $7.28
Revenue: 35.20
Profit: 27.92
Roi: 383%

This is the summary for about a week of testing. My daily ad spend is about 1$ a day so its very small camp.

I reached two milestone :

*Profitable Campaign
* $10 day (Achieved this Saturday)

My next goals are:

- $50 Day
- $100 day
- $1k day
- 2 weeks noticed and quit my job

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What i do not see is what websites are converting. I want to start eliminating bad placements and im not sure how to do this in order to get to green and increase my ROI.[/QUOTE]


Hey Gray,

I too myself is trying to figure this part out. I see that you've gotten it figured out. Could you point me to the right direction of where to look to get this info?

BTW, congrats on your profit thus far!

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In Voluum, take a look at your "Website ID". This gives you a report of what website has clicks and conversions based on your campaign.

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February Recap


Had many failures this month but i learned alot. Im starting to see how stresful this business can be and how you have to work twice as hard in order to compete with the more establised affiliates. Cash flow and the fear of losing money has been a problem for me. Instead of going through the 22 campaigns I created last month, i will give a summary of were i stand for the month of February:

Cost: $109.11
Revenue: $102.20
Profit: -$6.91
ROI: -6%

After having so many failed campaign, i thought this would be much worst. What i learned is that $10.00 testing is not going to cut it, I need to move more quickly and that means testing more offers and spending more $$$ to collect data.

March is off to a good start. I took initiative and found 3 offers on 2 different network, split tested on "RON" with a $10 budget just to make sure my tracking right (as always i forgot to add my post-back URL) and the campaign is already at -9.42% ROI.

What i noticed is that i used to cut my placements, devices, carrier, etc, too soon and always ended up with a campaign that would spend about $1 - $2 a day. I added $50.00 to this campaign and letting it rip tomorrow and gather as much data and start cutting thing out once i spend a certain amount.

Not much to post at the start of this month but im making progress and Im going to give it my best and convinced myself that i could make this work!

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Appreciate he follow along, it was a great read and interesting to see your struggles and revelations.

Just an idea for you as I saw you were asking about bid rates is that if you have a rough idea of expected conversion rates of your landers then you can reverse calculate the highest bid you can do given the payout amount. For example:

If your payout is $1
Your most optimistic CV for your lander is 1%
Then you can't be paying more than $10 CPM.

Similar maths for banners but use CR and CPC.

Believe someone wrote a more detailed post about this (probably vortex since she provides a lot of guidance regarding stats) but I don't have it saved.

Anyways good luck!

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Hey Jonathan,

Are you only interested in south Africa for a GEO? I would suggest not picking just one country but trying multiple GEO's. In regards to "top campaigns" it can be misleading sometimes since what will work for one affiliate may not work at all for you. Yes there are times there is one of those campaigns that everyone can do well on but there are times that a few people do very very well which brings a network EPC ( earnings per click) or conversion rates to rise and shows it as a top campaign. The best thing is to work one on one with your Affiliate Manager and tell him exactly what you want and need and he/she should be able to get it for you. Sweeps ( win an iPhone) can be a great vertical for countries like Portugal, Brazil, Belgium, Italy, UK and a few others.

Keep it up man!!

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Thanks for the Tip.

I am open to other GEOs, any 2nd and 3rd tier. This was a top offer on my network ....

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Why not tier 1? I know traffic can be more expensive but just wondering. Yes a top campaign should do well for you so i would keep trying and find new angles maybe but is there something you have experience in or knowledge? It is always great to test new verticals, GEO's and traffic sources but its also important to have those key verticals, GEO's and traffic sources as a source of income.

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I have not tested tier, came to the conclusion that it's too saturated, expensive and Im working on a budget. My plan is to conquer one traffic source or at least one offer, get it profitable, scale and repeat.

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Tier 1 is not saturated.. yes it has a lot of people promoting to it but there are also a lot of users looking for things. the thing i find with tier 2-3 countries is the quality. Getting on a campaign and having some conversions is one thing.. staying on and having the merchant offer things like rate increases or more cap is very hard to do with tier 2-3 traffic since its such low quality.

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This months of March was real productive for me as i encounter alot of failures and experience with mobile marketing. For one, i got banned from one offer for going against the restrictions for my creatives. What sucks is that i was just at the point of getting it profitable and ready to scale. Below are my overall stats for March:

Earnings for March:
Spent: 337.85
Revenue: 123.76
ROI Overall: -63%

Now i have another issues with getting offers to promote. Im waiting for approvals on creatives from one network and my AM from another network has been very unresponsive and pretty much ignoring me. Im thinking of reaching out to someone and see i could get another AM that's more dedicated at least on getting me approved on offers.

I knew this would be a struggle but the lack of support is overwhelming.

My next step is to look for more reputable affiliate networks that can provided me with offers so i can test.

Will post more detail when data is available.

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