Newbie needs help with first campaign and goal (7)
Hey Guys,
Background
I've been apart of STM for about a week now and learned alot. Special shout out to Carmen and Zeno. Also the stories/follow alongs all you guys have created are awesome. It's great to hear from likeminded people. Please take it easy on me 
.
Just a little background on myself. I decided to dive back into affiliate marketing (left in 2005). I left for the startup world to manage some Global Technical support teams for some well known companies. It was pretty intense. After 11 years I decided to resign from a six figure job to make a full effort towards financial independence. Preaching to the choir right? Well since mid Jan/2016 I've started and am here full time to make this happen. By chance I was Miami for my Bday a couple of weekends ago and caught up with Charles Ngo at a meetup he sponsored. That gave me a little fire to get things going.
Side note, if I ask anything that's already been covered in a thread feel free to tell my ass to go and read it . I've read many articles and studied the tracking (carmen) and FB entry (zeno) articles religiously.
What have I done so far? Glad you asked
Traffic Sources: TrafficJunky, Go2Mobi, ExoClick, and Facebook. I mainly wanted to get a feel of the interfaces - especially reporting. I've had minimal success so far but really honed in on principles of targeting.
Networks: Peerfly, Maxbounty, ClickBank, ShareASale and Commission Junction (old account)
Tracking:
Marketing Method: Banner Displays with landing pages for non-adult. For now Leadpages are used for landing pages.
Offer Interests: Fitness, Dating Niches, and Adult Niches
What do I want to accomplish?
Big picture --goal is +300/day. I'm not tied to interest but figure they are a good place to start. Any other ideas are welcome.
After getting my feet wet and losing some money in this learning and stressing phase, I want to run my first full campaign with all I've learning so far.
Offer: Clickback - Nutrition Ebook (10 dollar) with 7 dollar payout at sale
Traffic Source: Facebook (CPC), Desktop Newsfeed, Clicks to Website
Tracking:
Budget: whatever is cost effective
Questions
Bottom line is this the best place to start (offer and traffic source wise)?
If yes and using Zeno's FB Entry article (especially # 3) as a reference model:
1. How big should my reach be to get a valid test?
Example campaign: Male 25-30 (Dieting-Nutrition Interests) - Desktop-Newsfeed - Clicks
This produces a 3k/day reach which seems pretty small. Should I expand via age, interest, or both?
2. For Link Click (CPC), the suggested bid price ($4.87 USD($2.28–$7.47)) is high. I read via Zeno's article that it's jibberish but even for CPM its high as well. Should I target in a different manner?
I'll stop here. If there's info needed for help is missing, call me out. Glad to be apart of this forum, it's been worth the investment so far.
Congrats Broncos,
CT
Hey Cory, good luck, I am familiar with your journey, getting back into this world is pretty much just like entering a world you have never really been in, so many things are different,platforms,reporting,methods, based on your questions and post I have no doubt you will kick ass! Good luck
Glad you've been finding our tutorials helpful!
One word on goals: you can't control when you hit a specific revenue level. It might be sooner, it might be later.
Psychologically, it's a good idea to have goals that are under your control. (This is poker psychology - very relevant for affiliates.) Hence, I'd usually recommend that you set yourself a secondary goal of number of campaigns launched, optimised and analysed, or something similar. 50 campaigns is a solid target. If you reach that goal there's a good chance you'll also reach your other goal - and if you don't you'll definitely have enough data to get on with figuring out why!
As regards your offer choice: pretty much any offer is a good place to start, because your first few campaigns are just about learning the ropes. Given you're on Facebook, you might want to think about doing something in a really clean vertical, though (games are my usual go-to recommendation) - I don't run diet on FB but I believe it's one of the verticals that's easier to get banned in.
I'd also recommend avoiding the US to start with - it's the most competitive and expensive geo.
In answer to your questions:
1) Yeah, that's a pretty small reach. Are you split-testing age ranges? If not, I'd expand the age range a bit.
2) That's another reason to avoid diet. It's pretty expensive clicks-wise. The US is also expensive. Try targeting a different country (ideally a Tier 2 or 3, by which I mean "not a rich, populous Western country") and you'll see click costs plummet.
@iooley thanks for the words of encouragement
@caurmen. great advice.
"Are you split-testing age ranges? If not, I'd expand the age range a bit. "
Yeah, in 6 year ranges. Ill spread them to a decade.
Follow up question if you don't mind Caurmen
1. Im going with your advise about FB/dieting and US territories. After reading their terms of service about prohibition (before and after pics) , seems like they are very stringent. Would you suggest a different traffic source other than FB? I chose FB because of it's targeting capabilities. I know fitness/nutrition well so I can pretty easily come up with angles for any type of vertical. If there's a traffic source where i can target by age, ethnicity, country, and interest, that would be great.
2. I'll look into gaming, Peerfly seems to have some appealing offers payout wise but they seem outdated (maybe not in Tier 2/3 countries?).. Any network recommendations?
Thanks for the help!
@corytis7 - I'll answer in reverse order!
2) Sign up for lots of networks and compare them. For games, IQU and Glispa are particularly well-known, but lots of networks have gaming offers.
1) There isn't another source out there with the same targeting capabilities. Having said that, if you're good with diet / nutrition / fitness, you could try testing native ads, either desktop or mobile. You won't get the same targeting - on Go2Mobi, for example, you can't currently target by ethnicity, interest, OR age, just site, browser, carrier, geo. But you'll also get much cheaper clicks and a less paranoid platform.
hello caurmen, thanks a lot for your suggestion but I have to admit I'm a little confused. I remember in your presentation at AWA Bangkok (Dec 2015) you specifically mentioned that gaming is NOT a niche you would recommend. seems there's a conflict of recommendations here? It would be much appreciated if you could clarify on that, thanks!!
@m0bile4ffili8 - It seems like that was a pretty common confusion! I must do better on that next time.
The slide that I showed representing difficulties was assuming that you intended to create the offer yourself, not merely run someone else's offer.
So, for example, PIN submits are a nightmare to create. You need to find a partner with shortcodes and then figure out your monetisation, which is pretty tough.
Games are even worse. You'll have to create the game (which will be far more expensive than you'd think) and then you're launching into a massively overcrowded market full of sharks which functions on an inverse-square-law rule of popularity. That can be summed up as "see that game you want to make? Don't expect to make money out of it."
HOWEVER.
If you're promoting an existing offer - like most affiliates - you don't need to worry about any of that. The games offers you're promoting are usually FROM the above-mentioned sharks. They've got their monetisation worked out, they've got a massive team of programmers producing extremely polished games, and they just need you to get people to play them.
That's a completely different kettle of fish.
So, whilst I totally don't recommend creating a game from scratch unless it's a labour of love rather than a profit-making plan, I heartily recommend running game affiliate offers.
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