Hi there,
Thanks for reading by the way.
A little bit about me if you care to read:
I just turned 20 years old the other day, and bought my subscriptions to STM,
I don't have lots of money to play with, maybe another $2,000. But I'm in no rush to get profitable. If I need money, I'll just get a job. Living at home makes it easy to put money into campaigns and tools.
If I want to save a quick $20k, affiliate marketing is not the place. I'd just get a 9-5 job for 6 months and save hard. The goal here is to gain skills which allow me to build a business around CPA performance marketing. Although... we never end up exactly where we plan at the start.
The focus right now is learning as much as possible so that I can replicate successful campaigns.
For me, AM is an outstanding way to be able to live the life I want. Being able to work, travel and save a lot of money for my future all at the same time is important to me.
Anyway, let the follow along begin!
So far, I've been learning how to spy ads, apply for offers, start direct-linking campaigns and set up tracking with
From watching different videos and reading a lot of what different people here have to say, I've come up with a few guidelines to help myself as a newbie:
1. Begin with low-payout offers
2. Try to talk to other affiliates and develop some people to bounce ideas off
3. Don't give up. Don't give up affiliate marketing too easily, and don't pause campaigns prematurely before enough data has been collected.
4. Have realistic expectations
5. Focus on one type of offer
6. Focus on one traffic source
7. At the start, test offers and angles, and later optimise deeper things to cut the fat like blacklisting placements/OS versions/mobile/wifi/app/site etc. etc.
8. Try to launch campaigns in foreign language or lower tier geos
These aren't strict rules - I'm just learning here. But, they should keep me on the right path.
I also realise personal development is really important. So, I read a lot of business books and hit the gym a lot. I'm trying to restrict how much I go out with friends so I can focus on this right now.
Some books I'm reading at the moment: Emyth revisited, Zero to One, Thinking Fast and Slow, 48 Laws of Power, Lean Startup.
If your time is extremely valuable and you can't waste time on bad books, I recommend Zero to One for a quick mind-blowing read, and Thinking Fast and Slow to understand the inner workings of our decision making processes and a deep examination of cognitive biases.
Now on to actual affiliate marketing!
I'm with Adsimilis and running mobile traffic with Decisive. Having just learned to set up tracking with
I've linked up everything properly except that Voluum isn't letting me track costs with Decisive. So for now, since I'm direct linking, I'm just using the Decisive data report interface which is actually pretty neat. However, if anybody has any ideas on how to link in costs into Voluum from Decisive please let me know. I'd appreciate any help but I'll keep looking.
I've just run a few campaigns and broken a few of my guidelines (tested game of war in english geos UK/NZ, and tried out different offers antivirus/gaming). hehe
So today, I have been doing other things.
I am learning Javascript on the side and also doing a lot of reading. Spent some time doing that.
Also a couple of weeks ago, I contacted a few people in affiliate marketing on LinkedIn in my city, and actually have met with one guy a couple of times. I have been looking for someone to sort of mentor me and help me establish myself a few contacts where I am, and find some more people to learn under. I met with him again today, he's agreed to mentor me for a while.
He works for an agency that deals with affiliate campaigns for bigger corporate clients so it's a little different to this mobile CPA sort of stuff. But, he is meeting with the managing director at an affiliate network next week about a campaign they are working on, and he said he will try and get me a 4-6 week internship at the affiliate network as a learning experience. So, perhaps if I can do that, I will be able to get some contacts in the industry here and learn face to face with somebody here doing this.
Obviously, we'd all like the bigger, better known people - like some of the thought leaders on here, to mentor us and take us under their wing but that's just not possible in many cases. There is gold sitting right under our noses right in our own cities. If you can't get Charles Ngo to personally coach you, all hope is not lost (Charles, if you wanna help me out I'd be more than happy!)
Logged into my affiliate network today and saw a conversion and got all happy. It's from the UK Game of War campaign I ran, must have been a late download/open.
I guess that changes my stats a little bit.
UK Campaign: -97.2% ROI
I have another offer I'll test shortly, and am coming up with some interesting banner ideas that are at least worth testing.
One thing I've got from my data is that I am not testing enough banners/angles. Or, better put, the ones I'm testing are not different enough to yield a genuine difference in CTR.
First, I think I'll test the offer by direct linking it, and seeing which banners stand out. Second, I'll get some LPs up and test like crazy.
Just read one thread on here where I think Stackman goes and tests 50 campaigns or something and finds a winner. While it's probably the case that top affiliates do a lot of things that most people have no idea about, the overwhelming idea I get is that there is no 'secret' to doing well at this that is totally game changing. Ultimately, write good copy, try different traffic sources and test, test, test and test a lot more.
The one thing that gets to me a little bit is that I don't know what success looks like in affiliate marketing here.
Is it normal to test 10 campaigns and keep totally flopping and then have one campaign that kills it unexpectedly and you just scale?
I'm not expecting fast quick constant wins, but I also don't know how much failure is normal. What should somebody starting this expect?
"Is it normal to test 10 campaigns and keep totally flopping and then have one campaign that kills it unexpectedly and you just scale?"
A more experience affiliate can correct me if I'm wrong but yes, I think that is what happens. Sometimes it just clicks and/or you find a winning combination (right banner/offer/lander/geo), one that you may not have expected but when it does, you milk it like no tomorrow. A lot of it seems to be trial and error. Speed of implementation is super important I think.
I know that in the past, I used to focus too much on just one offer and one angle and if that didn't work, I'd get discouraged. I think one has to be stoic in that regard. Just keep pushing forward.