The Return to Affiliate Marketing. My Journey to $20,000 in 100 days (14)
The Return to Affiliate Marketing. My Journey to $20,000 in 100 days
Hi,
This is my follow along into returning to affiliate marketing.
I'm currently am an internet marketing consultant where I do lead gen (Facebook ads) for local clients. Business is doing very well, but where I struggle is dealing with people. I can't stand the conversations and constant selling myself. I just want the numbers to speak for themselves. The marketing is either working or it isn't, it's pretty black and white.
My history with affiliate marketing started back in 2009 where I made a good amount of money promoting adult friend finder and fling on the adwords display network (0.15 clicks) targeting particular sites. MySpace was my big money maker. Back then I had no idea what I was doing, it was just throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. I accidentally did a few thing right back then for example, negotiating better paypouts with affiliates and getting ads approved by adwords that shouldn't have been. It could take me weeks to get an ad approved but when it was it would easily generate 3 figures a day. These two things really gave me the advantage.
I stepped away from affiliate marketing in 2011 after I had started making some income via local clients and Adwords become increasing more expensive as well as harder and harder to get ads approved.
My goal is to make $20,000 in 100 days by averaging $200 a day. I choose the newbie section because while I do know PPC there is so much I don't know, especially when it comes to mobile offers.
Stage 1) Reach $50 a day via Afflow + Zero Park with volume tracking.
Welcome and great to see you setting a defined goal to hit.
Since you already have experience with affiliate marketing and currently understand how to do lead gen with Facebook, I would suggest skipping Afflow + ZP and go straight to using landing pages, test on multiple traffic sources and hit it hard.
If you still want to do Afflow + ZP at the same time (the campaigns are super easy to setup), then that is fine but I would put most of your efforts into non-Afflow campaigns right now.
Good luck!
Andrew
Apart from that... will follow along your thread.
Success!
i wish you green soon jresults
Mr Payne can i ask you a question please .
i want to do some thing and i want to ask first .
if it cool it a take a lot of sweepstakes offers (around 10) from many GEOS .
each offer in a separate campaign .
and test them in PopAds without a landing page, then when i find some offer that has potential work on it and add landing pages and optimize it well ? .
what do you think ?
Originally Posted by Tyoussef_PureLander
Your approach sounds good on the surface - expending just enough effort at first, and only putting more effort in when you see promise.
The only problem is that some types of offers will just not convert, or convert badly, without landing pages. And sweeps is one of those offer types.
And if you're planning to test so many geos at the same time for a vertical, then spending adequate time to prepare landers at first would definitely be worth it, because you'd be spending so much money on the testing for potentially large rewards.
Testing offers is more crucial than testing landers, BUT (!!!) having a decent lander is a must. Your lander doesn't need to be perfect, or be the best lander in the world, but it needs to be above-average or you would seriously limit the performance of your offers. I would suggest testing 5-10+ of the most popular landers you can find on adplexity (ones that have received the most traffic in a recent time period) to lock down the winner first, and then use that winner to test a lot more offers to find a good one.
Basically what you're aiming to do, is test offers and landers until you have an offer+lander that will make enough traffic profitable for a campaign to be worth your while in running it (e.g. $10/day in profits at >30% ROI), then cut the unprofitable stuff. That $10/day in profits, for example, could come from a group of placements, an OS, a carrier, or a combination thereof. If your offer+lander aren't good enough to make enough of the traffic profitable, no amount of cutting will result in sufficient profits.
Also: Often you'll see the same 1-2 landers convert the best consistently across several geos. After testing a few geos on the 5-10+ landers, you should be able to identify those, which you could then translate into multiple languages (or just download the same landers in different languages from Adplexity) and test all other geos. This is of course not the most accurate method, but will result in significant cost-savings.
That's it in a nutshell! Please start a separate thread to ask any further questions.
Amy
Stage 1) Reach $50 a day via Afflow + Zero Park with volume tracking.
But really - if you're wanting to go after the big bucks, nothing beats FB and Adwords in terms of scalability. Pop is getting saturated and traffic is so fragmented, that you often need to be running a ton of small camps to do any significant profits. If $200/day is all you need, then you can achieve that with pop. But if you're wanting to make substantial profits, do consider leveraging your experience in FB and Adwords. I know they have both become harder and are continuing to get even harder, but they have better potential for higher profits. So that would be something else to think about.
No matter how you decide - I look forward to participating in your journey - and wish you the best of luck and lots of fun!
Amy
Originally Posted by Tyoussef_PureLander
This will only reasonably work on the super tiny payout sweeps, like less than .20 payouts. But even then, you will have a very hard time getting profitable.
You need to use lander for almost every campaign that you launch, there's just no room to shortcut things by not having a lander.
Andrew
Wow thank you for all the input. I need to figure out why I'm not getting the email notification on my thread.
You guys touched on one of my initial concerns regarding afflow being a good place to learn but not very scaleable or consistent.
I'm going to do some reading to see what kind of affiliate offers are working on Facebook. My Facebook experience is with Lead Gen. I've never worked with sweeps, pin submits or app installs before It'd be nice to see if I can find a offer that compliments my existing traffic demographics. I have a couple of nice size North American re targeting audiences and look alike audiences separated by leads and actual buyers. But my fear is targeting tier 1 geos might be a much longer and frustrating road to find that right lander / offer. My initial budget for advertising is $1000 a month.
This week I signed up for Afflow, Zeropark and
I also setup a Zeropark CA Ron campaign to test the traffic, I wanted to see what it would do with my lead gen clients landers and offers.
So far 11 leads at a cheaper rate than Facebook. This doesn't move me closer to my own goal but I do like seeing conversions regardless.
My next steps are to do more reading, wrap my head around whats working on Facebook and see which affiliate networks I need to sign up for.
Originally Posted by jresults
(Tip: Since you have lead gen experience on facebook - try their new ad format that just recently came out.)
So far 11 leads at a cheaper rate than Facebook. This doesn't move me closer to my own goal but I do like seeing conversions regardless.
Unless your client's offers have very broad-appeal, they likely won't convert on pop.
And if you're used to the targeting capabilities of FB, pop would really disappoint you.
Pop traffic is cheap for a good reason. There's almost zero targeting when it comes to demographic/interests, so anything remotely niche won't get good results there.
But there's no harm in trying (just make sure to set a test budget you can afford to say goodbye to)! If you have an offer that have super high profit margins, it may still work, provided it's not too niche.
Amy
Friday I applied for the affiliate networks, AffiliaXe, Advidi, Adsimilis, Clickdealer and Kimia. Currently contacting these companies by phone or skype to try and push the applications thru.
While I wait for those to get accepted and because I had already done a bunch of reading on Afflow I decided to create some Afflow + Zeropark campaigns based on @vortex's tutorials.
My first campaign was approved last monday but I made the mistake of building out 5 more campaigns on Friday (learned ZP is closed during the weekend...) Zeropark approved those last night.
My campaigns are based on @Vortex's guide. I did some cutting of targets on my first campaign mainly based on profit criteria.
Today I'm going to go back over the cutting section of the guide. I'm still not 100% clear on this yet.
Below is my
Definitely duplicate that first camp and bid higher. I would do this several times, bidding increasing higher in each camp. Yes it will cost more, but then you'll also get more traffic, and access to better-converting targets.
Another thing you could play with is frequency. Duplicate your current camp and bid the same, but lift the frequency cap and see what happens. You're doing nice ROI, so can afford taking quite a hit on ROI in exchange for more traffic volume.
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Definitely duplicate that first camp and bid higher. I would do this several times, bidding increasing higher in each camp. Yes it will cost more, but then you'll also get more traffic, and access to better-converting targets.
Another thing you could play with is frequency. Duplicate your current camp and bid the same, but lift the frequency cap and see what happens. You're doing nice ROI, so can afford taking quite a hit on ROI in exchange for more traffic volume.
Amy
What kind of bidding increments would you suggest? I changed it from 0.0001 to 0.0002 is that to small of a change? Also how long do you let a overall profitable campaign go in the red? My best performing campaign will get a nice conversion with very good ROI then it will go 2 days in the Red but on day 3 it will get some nice conversions again and easily make up for the red days.
Originally Posted by jresults
As for how long to let an overall profitable campaign go in the red - that's a good question, and I can't say I'm an expert on handling this. I would ask the AM whether there's an issue with the offer. If not, I would run for a couple more days just in case it was a bad day for some/any reason. Then I would put it on pause, and may turn it back on for another test a few days later. Sometimes this type of "rebooting" can revive a camp, sometimes not.
And I'm really impatient in the sense that I don't like dealing with camps that go up and down so drastically. If I can't identify the cause quickly, I would just give up on it. Not saying I would recommend for anyone to do the same - it's because I don't have a lot of time to run camps so can't be bothered with camps that require constant monitoring and fixing of issues.
Another thing to check, would be your placement stats on a good day vs. a bad day, to see whether you're getting traffic from the same placements. Sometimes it may be because you got outbid, in which case bidding a bit higher may help lessen the volatility in performance.
Is that camp still running? Still green overall?
Amy
jresults, how`s your campain running? any significant result?
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