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Newbie's first Mobile Campaign (10)

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Hi Everyone,

So after reading about affiliate marketing for exactly one week, I decided to take Malan's advice and set up my first Mobile campaign following "The Mobile Cookbook: The appetizer" on STM. I eventually want to move onto Native Ads, but for now, my budget is only $3,000, so I want to start off with something small to learn the ropes.

Here's a list of items I got after reading Malan and Charles Ngo's blog, please give me some suggestions as to whether some of these are necessary!

Madsociety Forum $99 / mo
StackThatMoney Forum $99/mo
LiquidWeb for VPS $79/mo (<--is this necessary for mobile campaign?)
Voluum for tracking $99/mo
Namecheap for Domain ~$5
Adplexity $199 (<--I haven't paid for this yet, is it necessary?)

This adds up to $580 if I get Adplexity, which is leaving me with $2,420 to work with now.

But here is where I am stuck at:

1. I just signed up yesterday with the following networks, and only got approved by one of them Mobidea so far:
Adsimilis
Peerfly
A4D
F5 Media
YeahMobi
Should I apply for more? Can anyone suggest some current newbie friendly Affiliate Networks that I can try to apply to?


2. I spoke with the AM at Mobidea and asking for some top offers that have a payout of <$1 and is in the 2nd Tier or 3rd Tier countries. She recommended an offer for App download in Brazil, two sweepstakes in Brazil, and some other offers in Panama, but the Panama offer's EPC is lower than Brazil's.
I don't speak Spanish, the only Spanish words I know are Gracias and Amigo, and whatever Google translate translate to me. So I try to run these offers even tho I don't know the language in my first campaign?

3. The Appetizer thread said I should create 8 banners. I don't know how to create banners (not yet), should I just bite the bullet, get Adplexity and just rip other people's LP and banners?

4. The thread instruction suggest to use Go2Mobi as the mobile traffic source, however, that thread was written in 2015, the mobile campaign landscape seems have changed. For one, I saw an article saying that Go2Mobi's exchange "Smaato" (which was recommended in the thread instruction) was no longer as good in 2017. How do I go around that? Do any of you have any recommendation on what other good mobile traffic sources?

5. I have a Domain, I have a VPS, and I see many articles on how to create landing pages, but can someone point me to an article or some instruction on how to actually connect the VPS to the landing page, so that when people click into my domain, they will actually see the landing page? (I'm a technically-challenged).

6. Should I even start my first campaign with Mobile? Or should I try Native Ads, or other ones instead? Any suggestions?

Any form of advice or pointers to any one of the above questions are truly appreciated. Please help me save my hair, I'm only 32, I don't want to go pull all my hair out and go bald on the first campaign yet, thanks!

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Hello popodita,

I'm also new, got the same tools as you, and also using Go2Mobi and Mobidea. Waiting for first campaign to be approved on the traffic source.

I read that thread that said Smaato was no longer very good as well, but I went on with Go2Mobi as a traffic source because I didn't want to deviate from the guide too much for my first campaign.

Made a thread in the Q&A section to ask for advice.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Mobile-Content

Now that I look at it again, I'd like to know the answers to some of your questions too, especially question 5...

Anyway, cheers good luck for your first campaign

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Thanks! Hope both of our journey will be well worth the time!

can I add you as a friend?

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Your fix cost are too high for your budget.

Starting out most guys need a couple of months to become profitable.

6 months fix cost will already kill your budget without buying any traffic.

Cut down on the subscriptions or share them with other affiliates.

Sign up as well with clickdealer, mundo, mpire.

However you need to focus your revenue asap on 1-2 networks and get there on weekly payments.

Otherwise you will have a couple hundred sitting in several networks but not getting paid because you're below the payment threshold.

Brazil sweepstake is a good start, language however is Portuguese not Spanish.

The mobile cookbook is outdated and the display exchanges are not working as well as they were when the cookbook was written.

I recommend you to start with pop traffic.

Starting with mobile pop is a good strategy, you have not enough budget for Native.

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Hey!

First, it is good that you register in many different networks. Check if there are similar offers in there, as you can get higher payouts in some networks, or better conversion rates.

Regarding the test of 8 banners, strategies are different for everyone, but normally we do not recommend starting with more than 5, since we believe it is a good number for you to see the difference in their performance and start optimizing when you get enough data. If it's too many you can get a bit lost. And yeah, have you checked those that are suggested by Mobidea? All offers already have banners of different formats, you can use those! Or use Spytools, such as Adplexity and WhatRunsWhere.

In terms of the language - you should think of translating your banners to local. For the whole Latin America it is Spanish, and for Brazil, as Sebastian correctly noticed, it is Portuguese. You can do it using this tool - www.onehourtranslation.com , although if it is something small and fast to translate, don't be shy to ask Mobidea support team! We have native Spanish and Portuguese speakers there

Regarding your question about VPS, it's the same as @popodita asked, we have an article explaining the basics, you can check it here on STM and I hope it helps!

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I'll take you up on that

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Sebastian has given you very good advice. I'll add to that where I can.

If I were you, I would pick just one forum, not get hosting but use amazon S3 instead. Here's a tutorial on how to get S3+Cloudfront working:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Cost-Way-Ever!

Tracker+Domain+Adplexity will be essential though. Adplexity is almost a must if you're going to be doing pop. What I would suggest though, if you can't afford to keep renewing your Adplexity subscription in the beginning, is to decide on a couple of verticals and geos, then download a whole bunch of landers in the first month. Perhaps choose a few of the most popular languages and download landers for those. That way you'll get enough landers to last you a couple/few months, and leave more money for your campaigns.

Translations can be expensive, so if you have more time than money, I would strongly suggest that you rip landers that are already in the local language for initial testing.


Like Sebastian said, you probably won't want to be working with too many aff networks at one time. But getting accepted into a couple more than just Mobidea would be good!

I just answered a similar question in another thread so will direct you to there:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post309079


You mean Portuguese. Common mistake which I've made before as well.

There are 4 ways around promoting offers in a geo where you speak the local language:

a)Rip landers that already are in the local language (but make sure to test more than a few, because you don't know which ones will convert better, plus some of them may have been translated using google translate).

b)Use a translation service such as OneHourTranslation.com (expensive but fast) or Fiverr or other freelancing sites / freelancers (much cheaper).

c)Use English but only in geos where most people have at least a bit of understanding of the English language. When you find an offer and lander that show promise, then invest in translations.

d)Direct-link to the offer without using landers. There are offers that can convert by direct-linking and those that can't. Examples: Sweeps will not do well when direct-linked. Gaming and video subscription offers can.


You can try the ripping route to start. I don't know how effective it is to run ripped banners from Adplexity - although I've had success ripping and using generic banners (will come back to that).

Banners are not hard to make - I mean the technical creation part isn't difficult. You can pick it up in 30 minutes:

http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...mplete-Newbies

As sebastian has pointed out: It's not easy to get mobile display traffic to convert anymore. But here's a post where I've outlined a suggested approach on using generic banners to push carrier-billing offers on mobile display traffic:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post299115


Go2mobi is still working well. Actually, mobile DSPs get their traffic from mobile exchanges, and Smaato is one of the biggest (Mopub and Google are the biggest ones). You'll get Smaato on most mobile DSPs you sign up to. Mobfox is an exchanges I've been having a lot of success with, so give that a try. It's not just Smaato that isn't as good as before - I think mobile display traffic as a whole just hasn't been converting as well. Either that or recent offers have not been converting as well as offers did before.

Go2mobi has a lot of great features and they're improving all the time. Right now the carrier-targeting isn't great, so you'd need to target by IP ranges for good results. But they told me they'll be switching to a much better IP database in a month.


S3+Cloudfront+Tracker would be the cheapest and easiest way to go - linked to that above.


I'd suggest using pop and/or mobile display using generic banners to get your foot in the door. Learn the basics. Then consider expanding into Facebook or Search (Adwords/Bing). The affiliate industry space is becoming ultra competitive, and it may be more fruitful to learn FB and Google since they have so much more traffic volume.

I wouldn't consider Native with $3k to spend. You'd run out in 3 days.

For pop - here are some tutorials for you to consider:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post293497 (end of post)

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...utorial-Part-1


Haha just take it one step at a time. I started affiliate marketing a LOT later than you did. Just turned 41 yesterday and I'm not bald yet - so THAT's a good sign right?




Amy

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Thank you Sebastian! I am watching all your youtube videos today by the way, they are so informative!

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Wow, belated happy birthday Amy! Thank you very much on the detailed advice. I will keep working at it and look through the threads you pointed out to me. It's very encouraging to hear that you started later than I did and is still doing so well, that gives me some confidence that maybe I can really make this work!

I'm getting interviews from Mundo tomorrow, hopefully they will accept me! Will keep you posted!

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Haha thanks! Best of luck on your interview!

One thing I forgot to mention: If you absolutely don't want to get an Adplexity subscription at this point, there are ways:

1)Mr Payne has written an excellent post on how to direct-link to offers. See here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-to-Profits

2)I've laid out a simple methodology on how to use generic banners to direct-link to 1-click offers.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post299115

3)You can also try your hand at afflow:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...w-and-Zeropark

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...utorial-Part-1

Hope that helps!



Amy

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