Another Canuck looking to make it in this crazy game... CPA to start (29)
Another Canuck looking to make it in this crazy game... CPA to start
Hey everyone,
I have been dabbling in the world for affiliate marketing for about a year after a friend introduced me to it. I read everything I could for 3 months and then started setting up campaigns (banner and direct linking pop CPI) and losing a good amount of cash. Eventually I started finding some decent campaigns and I was hooked. I wish I could say that the last 6 months I worked as hard as the first 6 but life happened and I was making an easy $50-$100 a day so I just let things coast (I work a full time job so it was nice to come home and relax). Recently my campaigns have had a lot of weeks where they make $0 (or less) and so I thought this is good incentive to diversify. I am 33 years old and know nothing really about coding or any of that stuff (I work in govt in Victoria, BC) so that is the plan for the next few months: learn basics of web page building so i'm not getting my traffic diverted from the webpages I rip from adplexity. After a few months of this I want to bridge into Facebook but thought it would be good to have a base with coding. The plan is to work my job and spend a couple hours after work learning extra stuff on top of setting up campaigns. Weekends and days off will be spent on AM as much as I can.
As a side note I was recently married and we recently found out my wife is due in 6 months:S so I really want to get making more money by the time the little guy or girl pops out.
So near term plan of attack. First off I need to find an office downtown near my job so I can go there after work as I find myself easily side tracked when I get home. I have looked at three places today and 2 more tomorrow and so hopefully I will have a place picked out tomorrow by days end. After that I will start learning coding. I have found some youtube vids for some basics and heard that HTML dog and Codecademy are good places to start but if anyone reading has a better option then please feel free to comment.
I am a groomsman in a wedding this weekend so Friday and Sunday are write offs but I should be able to crush some hours on Saturday. The plan is to put my first CPA campaign up next week and go from there. I will update this journal a few times a week and anytime I need some help.
Thanks for following along and thanks for all the future help i'm sure I will get. Looking forward to learning new stuff and losing some cash along the way 
. Cheers!
Hurray! Another Canadian!
Just want to drop my 2c in here. I would say skip the office and skip the coding. How much is an office space going to set you back? Is it really worth it? Can you set up a home office or just work from coffee shops? I just really think renting an office is a waste of cash until you are up and running and really need one. I understand the getting distracted thing but coffee shops usually do the trick for me.
Secondly, you don't really need to learn coding inside and out or follow any tutorials and such. I think at this stage it's really just a waste of your time. What I would do is read around this forum for tips on how to clean up ripped landers. I think someone posted such a thread recently actually, asking how to locate traffic stealing scripts and remove them. And also, I think that whole concept is so overly blown out of proportion. Of course they exist, but I think there's a lot of fear mongering about them. I have not once coded a single lander my entire AM career. I've ripped every single one, removed the junk and made adjustments to the text, images, etc as needed. If you do really want to learn how to code, by all means, go for it, just know that it isn't really necessary and you can do some good profits without it.
As for bridging into Facebook, it's definitely doable if you are going the white hat route with ecom or something like that. I'd stay away from any black hat stuff right now as things are shifting there. Just keep in mind that Facebook can take a lot of time and resources. Only transition there if you have the cash to do so.
Oh, and what kind of campaigns are you currently running? You posted in the mobile section so I am assuming pops.
Looking forward to your journey.
Cheers,
Brad
Hey thanks for the response! I will try as you suggest with the coding and just ditch it to start and see how far I get; I did see that thread with the things to watch for. I am going to find an office though - I found one I like for only 250$ a month - so considering I can write if off its a pretty good deal. I am not worried about the money and for me its worth it. I am hopefully getting full access as of tomorrow. As for today I had a good CPI campaign I am ramping up and other than that i need to learn how to upload the pages from adplexity to my DSP which I have from beyond hosting. I just got that set up last week. I am certain I will have questions about that so expect some more writing on Saturday. Today - 2 hours of youtube watching and figuring out filezilla and transferring pages online. Thanks again for the help. Cheers!
A warm welcome from a fellow Canuck! I'm out in the east - near Toronto. Thanks for sharing your story, and for starting this FA to document your journey.
https://www.google.com/search?q=vict...-working+space
A couple of beginner's courses even now would be great though. Here's one of the FAQs I've extracted from the FAQ we've put together for 6WAMC students:
You can survive by ripping and modding. In fact, it’s recommended that you start by using ripped landers at least to establish a benchmark, because the popular ones are tried and tested, vs. your own custom-made landers which are unproven. A very goo
You don’t need to know a lot of coding in order to fix up ripped landers (i.e. to correct the errors introduced during the ripping). Take a couple of online courses in html, css, js and jquery and get some practice fixing up a few landers and you should be good to go.
Some online coding tutorials:
https://www.codecademy.com/
https://www.w3schools.com/
If you want a custom lander created for you, here’s a service vortex has used:
http://www.bannerslanders.com (Disclaimer: AMC does not endorse any products/services, so please use at your own discretion.)
Depends what kind of functionality you are trying to find as redirection could easily be triggered by a timer, complex logics, cookie-based, etc. There are a bunch of ways to make sure it doesn't fire until it's live and in position.
Although if you watch the web console for it calling out to ANY external service, and it doesn't, and then check if it's dropping any cookies, and it's not, you should be OK.
But for just checking whether it's calling out, developer tools > network tab.
To check whether or not it’s dropping cookies:
-On Chrome: chrome://settings/
-And check for your domain.
-Check before you first visit the page on your domain, and then after.
Or use something like http://www.cookie-checker.com/
Looking forward to following along!
Amy
Thanks for your thoughts Amy! In fact it was a co shared space I was talking about. I am here now and I am the only one so its more like an office today. A huge one haha. I wanted a co shared space as there are a lot of tech companies in Victoria and I thought it might give me an opportunity to meet people who are doing what i'm doing or affiliated in some way. I feel like having a few contacts in the industry is more important then anything.
I took both of your advice and have started the learning just coding basics through codecademy today and its been good. I spent over an hour getting my server fixed at beyondhosting so I could upload a ripped page from Adplexity. Beyondhosting had great response time which was nice but even after getting that figured I kept getting a "Index of" whenever i uploaded something to my server. I did some research and figured that all out (had to change the html page to be called "index") and now can upload landers to my website. next I have to figure out how to run multiple landers and how it all fits in with
OK so another day another dollar worth of information learned. Today I set up with a new traffic source I wanted to test out. I did some recon on the forum and decided to try Tonic a go. I will let you know how that goes later this week with my CPI campaigns. I looked over amys guide to setting up a campaign through
Go for it, rush! I work out of a coworking space and love it. Great networking ops and it helps to have like minded people around you who can relate (to some extent) with what you're doing. Fairly new in the pop waters myself. Focusing on carrier wap offers atm. If you're not in a mastermind maybe we can start one. Skype: scottmillion
Cheers.
Hey man! I did add you on Skype - lets connect sometime this week.
Hey guys! loving this co shared space. NIce to just sit down, no distractions and hammer out a couple hours of work with no interuptions. Still doing some basic coding on codecademy (i know I don't need to but at this point I just want some basics). I had an issue with signing up to
Hey, just popping in to say hello from another Canadian here. I am in Alberta. Will be watching your progress and will throw in my two cents where I can. Looks like you are off to a good start.
As for landers and traffic sources, there's definitely some restrictions. You will have the most trouble with landers that use trademark names or logos on them. Some traffic sources do not like that. Others can be sticky with fake virus and other aggressive landers. Check each network's terms when you sign up and make a note of what they allow and don't allow.
OK so another day another dollar. I think I pretty much have everything in place for my official start tomorrow/this weekend. It was super easy to set up subdomains. I spent today reading threads about setting up the landers in
OK - need some help now - I am waiting for approval on a few offers so I thought I would set up the
Ok, so I think i got it figured. I need to put in my click URL from
Yep that's right. You reuse the same click url for all landers. Voluum detects everything based on the campaign url that was used to get there in the first place. Camp url will redirect to the appropriate lander in your flow, which will then have your click url which when clicked, will redirect to the offer you are testing, or, in case you have multiple offers, it will rotate them.
Also, keep in mind the Voluum user guide is great for helping you get started quickly. Here's a link to the section on setting up landers. https://help.Voluum.com/userguide/#p=42
But you could for example buy a generic domain like xyz.com, then set up one subdomain per vertical, such as freeprizes.xyz.com for sweeps, virus-alert.xyz.com for antivirus, bestvideos.xyz.com for video subscription offers etc.
But I would suggest to just get a relevant domain for each vertical. Domains will get flagged by google so unless you have a way of keeping them from this fate, it would probably be less hassle to replace each vertical's domain as it gets flagged, rather than having to replace all vertical's landers in your tracker when your only domain gets flagged.
All your other questions have been answered by fellow members. What type of offers are you planning to start off with?
Amy
Nice to see fellow Canadians making waves here!
All the best in your endeavours, and if your gameplan ever involves the need for our awesome RTB platform you are absolutely encouraged to check us out and sign up! (Don't worry, signup free and only take a minute)
https://adnium.com/ref/3168
ANOTHER CANADIAN! Looking forward to your journey... i took the leap of faith 1 year ago and quit my job (i have my story here on STM )..and loving everyday since.. HUSTLE HARDER!
Originally Posted by RajPatel
EPIC!
Amy
OK so its been a while since I updated. Basically i'm still running my CPI and thats doing fine. But I was delaying the CPA because I was trying to find the right offer and was being lazy about it. I stupidly chose a Czech Republic one first and realized I couldnt' get any traffic to it as my sources had basically zip. I talked to my account manager at one of my networks and thankfully I found a thailand one and am testing it tonight - so this will be my first real CPA campaign that has traffic haha. It feels good. Even if it sucks (which it likely will) it feels good just to figure out the landing page stuff and get a better understanding of Adplexity and all that good stuff. Anyway - I will let you guys know how it goes. As for Amy's response about not needing separate sub domain for each lander... i'm a bit confused. How can i can multiple landers on the same page? Also how will i know if google has flagged a subdomain? Also i have no way of knowing that the people in thailand are seeing what they are suppose to see - do you guys have a preference in emulators along with a VPN you would recommend?PS amy im starting with a sweeps campaign. Cheers!
Originally Posted by rush4life
A subdomain is: sub.domain.com
A sub-directory is: domain.com/lander1
I'm just saying you don't need to bother setting up a separate subdomain for each lander - you can use subdirectories.
As for how to check whether a subdomain/domain is flagged by google - just google it haha! For example: https://w3guy.com/tools-check-domain...oogle-adsense/
As for VPNs - I've used HideMyAss for years. They work well - have a wide variety of geos. However, if your offer only accepts carrier traffic, then just using a VPN may not work - you may need to be using an actual SIM by that carrier in order to see the real offer. In that case you could just ask the aff network or advertiser for a screenshot, or just run it directly without seeing the offer lander first (e.g. if it's a win an iphone 7 offer then just use win an iphone 7 landers).
Feel free to ask further questions!
Amy
OK day 1! one lander - two campaigns (one direct linking just to make sure). And Voila:
Not too shabby for day 1. I originally thought when I went to bed that there was a good chance that I didn't set up the lander properly as last minute I had to make some changes (the original lander had issues). So i spent some time finding another and then getting all that stuff done. I woke up an hour earlier then usual and didn't want to get out of bed but kept thinking about the new campaign - finally after like 10 minutes i just said screw it got up and checked. So i had one conversion with the direct linking and 4 with the lander; which felt great. The campaign ran out of funds mid day. So my main concern is that I actually spent $27.85 (which means almost double the views) and yet it shows only $15.35 spent through the tracker. I am use to about 10% clickloss when i direct link to tier one. Oddly enough even my direct linking campaign was almost half the price it should have been on
OK! day 2 - optimized as much as I could and here is what we got: 
Again it looks OK for my first campaign but based on the fact that
(Vortex what do you think since you have experience with the Geo?) I'm going through a source I have used a lot and never had issues like this... any feedback is appreciated!
ALWAYS remember to check the actual cost and make campaign decisions accordingly.
Have you tested bids yet?
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Originally Posted by rush4life
As for testing bids - what's the current ROI of your camp? Are you bidding at least average? Let's start with these questions.
Amy
current ROI is about -50% (factoring in click loss) - i am well below the average bid as the average bid would give me like 300,000 views a day - probably higher in my experience. So I dropped the bid to give me half that and then throttled it as i only wanted to test about $20 or 30 over the 8 hours while i sleep (i usually set campaigns up before i go to bed). I know I could bid higher and get "higher quality" traffic through popads but in my experience it hasn't made much difference in my conversions rate - only my traffic amount. At that percentage do you u think its worth bidding higher - i feel like i should concentrate on different landers rather then bids.. if I was -10 or 20% then maybe a bid strategy would help but at that amount I feel like it won't make a big difference. Thoughts?
Hey guys just wondering if you can help me with this lander I am trying to rip. Instead of having a normal
after that the only links are the "http://track.myvoluum.website/click" -
Any ideas as to why it is set up like this?
and another techie question - when I try to upload via filezilla it gives me the Index listing (when i haven't changed the html file to "index"). When I do change one of the two html files names to "index" it won't load. The website domain shows - mydomain/&reason=key&placement=undefined
Any ideas ? I know i'm asking a lot haha. Cheers.
Apologies - missed your post somehow! Next time if you don't get a response within 48 hours, please feel free to bump it.
Originally Posted by rush4life
Also - keep in mind that when you're testing bids, the ROI you get in the beginning is just - well - a start! You need to run the staggered bid camps for a bit, to see how many profitable placements each camp will get - if there are enough profitable placements making good profits, then you can invest the time to cut the unprofitable placements. If however, a camp is not getting enough profitable placements, then don't bother cutting - just pause it.
And yes - testing landers MAY have more of a potential of increasing a camp's ROI than testing bids, but then of course each situation is different (every geo, traffic source, etc. - depending on competition and other factors). In your case though, if you've tested different bids and concluded that different bids are only resulting in small differences in ROI, then maybe you should revert to improving your funnel. Usually, testing landers and offers - ESPECIALLY offers - will have the greatest potential of increasing ROI. Get that funnel right so that you're close enough to breaking even, and THEN cut placements.
after that the only links are the "http://track.myvoluum.website/click" -
Any ideas as to why it is set up like this?
Any ideas ? I know i'm asking a lot haha. Cheers.
I have no idea where the &reason=key&placement=undefined comes from. Again, I think it would help to upload the lander somewhere and start a separate thread to get some of the talented coders to take a look.
Is this the first time it's happening? Try this: Start a text file, put a word in it (e.g. "HI WORLD"), save it. Change the filename to index.html. Upload that file to your domain root. Then browse to your domain url and see if the 'HI WORLD" comes up. If it does, then it's probably because there's a problem with your lander files, and not your domain or server.
Amy
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