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Starting Out! (9)

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Hello,

I've just joined STM and decided to invest in the 6 Week Affiliate Mastery Challenge. While waiting for that to start I'm following Amy's amazing guide. Thank you Amy!

I've signed up to Mobidea and found a suitable offer. I'm just waiting to be approved now.

I've signed up to Voluum and PropellerAds.

While waiting for my offer to be approved in Mobidea, I've decided to set up a server. I know it's not required yet but it'll let me create a website to more easily be approved for other networks, and I'll want a server soon anyway. I've already got hosting with Hostgator but based on recommendations around here, I've gone for a Linode server that I'll just use for affiliate marketing. I'm following the awesome guide to automate VPS deployment with StackScript.

Can't wait to start running some ads!

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Amazing way to start man! I'm too just starting out on STM and AM in general. Hope we learn and succeed

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Welcome to the forum and good luck!

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Hi, and welcome to the forum! I'm glad to see one more affiliate learning with our platform, that's why we've tried to make it user-friendly and accessible for everyone! Looking forward to see how your follow-along goes

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Thank you everyone! Good luck nolimits!

Things are going well. Mobidea's customer service was fantastic and I quickly got my first offers approved - thank you!

I started sending traffic and got my first ever conversion from affiliate marketing. Woohoo! I've run the optimization process and removed the unprofitable placement.



While waiting for the Amy's next post I'm going to read all the other great threads in the other Newbie subforums and send traffic to the other Mobidea offers I've been approved for.

I've also got my Linode server up and running for the near future.

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Hey! Welcome to STM! Let us know how your progress goes!

-Chris

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First of all - welcome to the forum and the AMC!

Second of all - a big part of the reason why I started writing this course, was to provide a "pre-course" to the actual AMC course, to bridge the gap for the really new affiliate marketers like yourself. Hopefully I'll have most of the main lessons done by the first week of the course starting May 1st!

Thirdly - congratulations on your first conversion! You'll no doubt go on to make many more, but that first one will always be special.

You're on the right track - looking forward to seeing more stats from this campaign once you've run a big more traffic and hopefully get to cut more placements!




Amy

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Thank you Chris! And a huge thank you to Amy for all the help and advice you're providing here!

I ended up stopping the campaign - it didn't generate any more conversions after I cut the first unprofitable placement.

I went back to the drawing board and have spent the last few days learning as much as possible about affiliate marketing.

I realised some valuable lessons from the campaign. I picked the offer (a 'Cut the Rope' game install) because it was a game I'd enjoyed playing a few years ago. However, I've realised that promoting a game that is a few years old is likely to be challenging - it's appeal has probably been fairly saturated by now.

I've realised that I should check Mobidea's average earnings per click of the offer. From a simplistic level, the EPC of my offer was very low compared to the payout, suggesting a low conversion rate. (Of course, the average EPC gets affected by everyone promoting the offer and can be skewed up or down by great or bad affiliates - in the near future I will be a great affiliate and beat the average EPC.) For the time being I will aim for a better ratio of EPC / payout for future offers I test.

I've been really impressed by some of the things VitaVee has posted about FunnelFlux, so I bought that and installed it on a VPS using his excellent guide. Although quite straightforward, it's even easier to get started with Voluum as it's hosted for us so I can see why the newbie guide uses Voluum as our tracker - however, when I want to track more complicated funnels in the future FunnelFlux will come into its own, so I wanted to get experience of both and compare them now.

I've set up a new campaign using FunnelFlux. This was valuable as it required me to learn how PropellerAds, the tracker and Mobidea talk to each other so that we can track clicks and conversions. I'll now be able to set up tracking between any traffic and offer.

I've realised that it will often take many losing campaigns before we find a profitable one. Making affiliate marketing work requires lots of small efficient tests, keeping losses small and then hitting the winners out of the park. I'm going to need a process for finding lots of plausible offers to test.

One approach is to spy on other affiliates. I've bought a VPN so I can see advertising in different geos, and bought a mobile subscription to AdPlexity.com for competitive intelligence. I'm having a look to see how other people are advertising.

Many beginners get discouraged when they find out it isn't as easy as they would like, and they don't get instant results. To help counteract that, I really liked this awesome post by Finch - he recommends having a Research & Development budget for testing new traffic sources, so that these initial losses don't offset your daily profit/loss. To keep me accountable: for the duration of the 6 Week AMC I'll invest $1000 per week into a Research & Development budget, so I can make the most of the incredible opportunity to be surrounded by amazing people and test as many different offers and traffic sources as possible. With persistence and consistent, massive action I AM GOING TO SUCCEED!

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That happens. It may just be a bad day. Sometimes if you stop the camp for a day or two and start it up again, the conversions would come back. You may also have been outbid, so can test a higher bid to see if conversions will come back. Another thing to check would be the placements - check your placement stats before and after the conversion vanished. If the placements that were giving you conversion before, you're no longer getting traffic from, then you probably got outbid - increasing your bid may get those conversions back.


Very nice!!


I nodded all the way through your post.

That last part about having a separate R&D budget, is similar to what I always suggest to new people: Basically when first starting out, just focus less on profits and aim to exhaust a certain monthly budget. This type of thinking has major psychological impact - it makes you focus on looking for opportunities - "hmm what else can I test to reach my monthly test budget?" - instead of feeling discouraged about all the red. And when your goal is to spend instead of save, you won't feel half as guilty about losing "your" money, because it's money that has been set aside for spending on testing. The day I switched to this new focus, was the day I started testing extensively and found my first success. And I wish the same for you!

See you on the AMC chat - feel free to DM to say hi!




Amy

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