Follow Along - Building Email Lists with Popunders (6)
Howdy,
Great to find a group of guys out there actually DOING things instead of just talking about them!
Short info about me: Been a direct response copywriter for over 10 years. Written for some of Dan Kennedy's "inner circle" guys. One reason I chose copywriting was because I love marketing and there's A LOT of time/location flexibility.
I've also had a few side businesses which combined with the copywriting has allowed me to live a very flexible lifestyle and pay (almost all) of my bills (haa).
The affiliate game has always fascinated me because of the sheer numbers when you scale. All those clicks, all those sales!
I believe in leveraging strengths and I'm good at copywriting and email sequences so I want to leverage those. To keep things simple I've focused on popunder traffic (all desktop) to LPs that build email lists and then the emails pitch associated offers.
I also believe in starting (even though I don't know much) so I already put together a campaign...
Day 1:
Spend - $6.92
Revenue: $0
Emails: 1 (ouch!)
ROI = -100%
Lessons learned:
1. Not enough data/action. I planned on spending $17.50 but wasn't getting enough traffic. Contact at company said my targeting was way too tight and suggested something different (category instead of keyword) which made a lot more sense and opened up the traffic.
2. Been reading Finch's Complete Guide. (It's great!) He mentioned testing offers and landers so I think I will focus on 2 offers to find the best converting offer first. Then, work down his list of testing priorities.
I couldn't find a whole lot of info on popunders here so if anyone knows of a great source I'd be happy to hear it!
Silly day... kind of a waste I think. I noticed some weird things in the traffic coming through. A lot of the traffic had usernames appended to the url but they looked very much like computer generated usernames (wtf?). I found this odd and did some digging. Started copying urls coming through and noticed pops in super small windows showing only a letter or two.
Then, sometimes when I enlarged the window it changed or something. Weird! (Is this shit normal?)
I got suspicious and searched the Pop company's name in a bunch of forums. All bad reviews. (What's the opposite of LOL)?
Luckily, someone just posted a thread with a list of pop traffic companies (the one I was using wasn't on the list, nor does it even come up in a search of the entire forum)... thread here: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...orth-To-Master
So I signed up with two of those and hopefully I can have those funded and ready to go tomorrow.
Day 2:
Spend: $8.01
Revenue: $0
Emails: 0
ROI = -100%
Planned on spending around $20 but the suspiciousness got the best of me so I paused it. From now on I'm going to stick with stuff on STM that guys vouch for...
Chomping at the bit here but get seem to get off the ground!
8J
Good stuff! I'm a big believer in taking action too - even before you have all the answers.
Nice work on detecting a dodgy traffic source - that sort of thing can be a complete pain.
Looking forward to seeing your results on a more solid source!
I would recommend you to try out our self-serve platform (www.wigetmedia.com). We deliver 70-100m pops per day, and give you full control of the campaigns. You can sign up and get started in minutes, let me know if you need any help. 
Originally Posted by Wiget_Team
Ok, so I had a couple days of waiting around for approvals and stuff.
A few affiliate managers don't want me to send emails to people who have opted in to get more information from me and have been thoroughly charmed by my wit and personality. Can you imagine that? I figured that'd be the highest possible lead but whatevs... in this part of the game those guys get to set the rules.
During that waiting time (in addition to my normal copywriting work), I finished Finch's basic guide and bought a couple more and have been going through them. It's becoming much, much clearer that this isn't some magical, luck game.
But, it DOES take discipline, paying attention, lots of work and LEARNING from the data and the mistakes. The discipline part started to worry me. I chose copywriting because I didn't have to be all that disciplined. I could write in spurts, research, take a day (or eight) off if I wanted, go to the pool in the middle of the day, as long as I hit the deadline and the copy did it's job.
So, this is going to be an adjustment to stay focused, really focused, and have a real work schedule. I'm making that switch mentally now.
Now... back to my original strategy.
Desktop Pop -> LP -> Email List -> Offer on thank you page -> Followup emails build a persona and pitch offers
After reading and having 2.5 days at this I am a little doubtful that it is workable... but, I am going to stick with it a another day or so and see what insights I can get. Pops seem to work on fear or impulse and what I planned on using them for is more biz oppish. The traffic is soooo cheap though it just seems like you could do anything with it.
Spending a few hundred isn't going to kill me and I decided to have a bias for action to speed up my learning. I haven't read Finch's "Empire" guide that I bought yet so maybe that'll shed some light.
The pop ads are running on the new traffic source so I'm going to let them run another 24 hours. If I don't see something optimizable by that point I'm going to take a day to rethink strategy in terms of goals and take another run... perhaps along a line that is more proven.
TheInfiniteJ
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