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Affiliate marketing from the ground up (8)

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Hello everyone, I'm David from England


A little background of my situation, I mentioned in my introduction post that I took an interest in affiliate marketing 2 years ago, I had done a lot of reading and research but I never bit the bullet and decided to start due to fear of failure and monetary concerns. Two years later here I am working full time in a very demanding and no more money than I had two years ago and much less time, but more importantly, a new mindset. I am ready to delve into the world of affiliate marketing. It's always been a dream of mine to be able to work from home and have that freedom, and what better time to start than now. As the old proverb goes: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

My short term goal is to be able to make at least a living wage through affiliate marketing, after that, the sky is limit.

I will be updating when I can, mostly on my days off throughout the week or when I can squeeze in some time in the mornings and evening. I will update it along with a recap of that day and what I have learned, no matter how significant it may seem.

Prior to joining STM I had launched a handful of failed campaigns, with no real direction it was a bit of a mess. That said, It was still very valuable, it taught me some basic fundamentals of traffic sources, the basics of Voluum, and helped familiarizing myself with different offer types and networks. After reading a couple threads here, I soon realised that my approach was very messy and I needed to start from scratch. There is a wealth of information here and when I first joined I tried to digest a little too much of it that I didn't need at this stage, so I'm now slowing down the pace and only trying to read what is relevant to me at the time.

A big thanks in advance to the community here, I hope in due time I can offer help to others and that this thread serves as some use to Newbie like myself.

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That's a very empowering quote!

It's NEVER too late to do anything, so there's never any reason to lament the past. New opportunities are cropping up that weren't there 10 years ago, or 5 years ago, or even a year ago. Everything happens in good time and in due time. You're meant to be doing this here and now. Carpe diem!

Making a living through AM is a very possible possibility. And we'll be here to help.

Eager to see how this thread will unfold...



Amy

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Today I have trialed two offers with two seperate landers, both of which where single or double optin offers for WhatsApp content.

Offer 1: WhatsApp Emoji/Wallpaper (4 carriers) - India
Offer 2: WhatsApp Emoji/Wallpaper (3 carriers) - India
Lander 1: Generic lander with WhatsApp logo
Lander 2: Clones WhatsApp App convo with offer

Traffic: Popads
Bid: Mostly default settings with Bid just over average bid.

I picked these two offers because of the Single/Doublt optin factor but also because the flow looked rather appealing. That said, there was 0 conversions made with my budget. Here is a screen of todays test, But earlier in the week I trialed these two offer with another lander which yeilded 0 conversions.



What I learned this week / What I need to learn:

• I was really struggling with dynamic linking from URL on Voluum, I was confused as to why I had it working earlier in the week but could not get it working today.
It was such a minor error I had glazed over it, I had ripped a lander with the wrong closing on the getURL (eg:`brand` instead of 'brand') - Dudoyyy on my part.

• I still really need to refine my process of testing offers/landers/bids, I am still a bit confused as to what approach to take with this. As a newbie do I rely purely on mass testing offers to see what has conversion value? Is it too advanced for me to stick with an offer and tweak with other variables if there are no early signs of profit? Am I right in thinking in this early stage I can only really rely on the number of conversions to guide me and as I progress I will have a better idea of what I can play with to squeeze a possitive ROI.

• I have been using Adplexity purely to rip and tweak landers, I still don't think I understand it's full potential, I need to try and fully understand what it is capable to justify me spending out on it. I understand that it is there to follow trends and see what is picking up traction but at the moment all I can make out is that everyone is running sweepstakes with spin the wheel variants.

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Congrats on getting your feet into the mood, this way you'll have a better understanding how things work and face challenges almost everyone of us has gone through.

Amy already did some great job posting some of the mistakes people do when approaching affiliate marketing. Part 1and Part 2.

Can you please get into more details about this? Was it that every offer had it's own landing page where you basically were testing one landing page per offer? If that is the case you have just ignored one of the basic principles in AM to always split-test.

Since none of the offers converted, did you already check your funnel flow prior to sending traffic to your camp? I've never skipped on this, cause dealing with several camps at a time, things can get messy pretty easy. To do this, get some Proxy or VPN subscription and run a funnel test. You can also check with your AM if you can fire a test conversion just to see that the system is working.

I hope I haven't missed this part, but what are the targeting settings of your campaign in PopAds? Did you target only supported carriers so that you didn't end up paying for WiFi or Cable traffic where the offer would not convert.

If you're saying what I think you're saying - Simply NO! There are a lot of shitty offers out there that will never give you a profitable campaign or at least some reasonable negative ROI.
Get yourself to work create good relations with your affiliate network managers and focus on testing lots of offers, landers as well as lots of campaigns. At least this is what will make you generate profits from AM.

Here you are, check this 5 step guide I recently posted and make sure to clean them well as covered by Amy here

Looking forward for some numbers other than 0 on your conversions stats

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Great to see you getting started! Taking action is invaluable

What are the payouts for the 2 offers?

Plenty of these moments early on, no shame in that. All part of the learning process.

Nothing wrong with your current approach of working on a small number of campaigns to get the hang of things. You'll most likely need to launch many more to find profitable ones, but it's good practice.

You'll get more value when you start testing more landers and running more campaigns.

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I had ripped, cleaned and tweaked two WhatsApp landing pages. Lander 1 mimiced a WhatsApp conversation advertising the content Lander 2 was a generic page with the whats App Logo / and familiar WhatsApp background. So Offer 1: Lander 1 (50%) Lander 2 (50%) Offer 2: Lander 1 (50%) Lander 2 (50%)- Both offers where very similar in content so I felt the landers could be tested with both.

I tested this as best I could, I am still naive to the methods used to do this. The VPN I have at the moment has nothing for India, that said, I was able to turn the safety fallback off and check the offer page. Beyond that I could not test any further as it required me to be on one of the carriers to proceed, I was just directed to a dead page. I did not know I could ask an AM to fire a test conversion, that is fantastic. Is there any other methods other than seeing how far you can get with a VPN?

I did target only Mobile/Tablet with cellular connection as well as only targeting the required carriers, what I meant was that I did not really venture any further than this. No device targeting, Time of day so on. When running a trial test on an offer is there a method people use to test different variables with their traffic before scrapping the offer?

Offer 1: $0.70
Offer 2: $0.90


Thankyou all for your words of encouragement

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This might be one of the causes about not seeing any conversion or lowering the chances for the offers to convert - it's a mistake everyone of us has made in it's first steps. When we send traffic to offers that accept only a few limited carriers, we try to route traffic flow as much as we can so that the right carrier user lands to the right offer that will support it converting (I would avoid targeting tablets as well - on popads). To achieve that, all you have to do is to built a custom flow for this camp in your Voluum account so that you know where the visitor travels through.

Let me break it down for you step-by-step.

Step 1: When on your Voluum dashboard go to Flows -> New Flow
Step 2: Turn off Default path - so that you can have your traffic flow filtered right away.

Step 3: Build a new path for each offer by adding filter conditions based on the carrier the visitor is coming from. Example below includes visitors coming from Aircel, Idea and Bharti Mobile. You can check on Wikipedia for a full list of mobile carriers in India

Step 4: Add landers and offers you want to split-test.

Step 5: Repeat Step 3 & 4 for the other carriers by adding a new path to this flow.
Step 6: Save & Close the path editor, the assign the path you created on the campaign you are running.


After successfully creating the custom path in order to control the traffic you are receiving, you'd want to check where most of the traffic is coming from. It may happen that for the traffic you already purchased one of the carriers is dominating while others haven't had the chances to express themselves.

From what I notice on your posted screenshots you have spent only a few dollars that for a geo with huge inventory like India may be not enough to get results.

One good thing that I like about your camp is that you are using a lander before your offer. When approaching uncharted waters its always a good thing to ALWAYS use a lander, that way you can have a better picture on every publisher you are getting traffic from and optimize accordingly. And since we got to the publisher level, it would be good to check if the traffic has been homogeneously distributed among several publishers. In case you were getting a few thousands impressions from some pubs with 0 LP Clicks, then it would be good to kill them and test new ones as you send more traffic to your camp.

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Platinum has answered all your questions affmerk - and in greater detail than what I could have provided. Thanks platinum!!

Just want to add a couple things.

First of all, to 1)see whether the traffic is going to the intended offers, and 2)make sure the traffic you're targeting is what the offer will accept, simply run some traffic, and then look at the stats on your affiliate network's dashboard. You'll see how many clicks/views which offers have gotten. If the offers are the ones you were intending to promote, and the clicks are similar to what your tracker recorded (noting that a clickloss of up to around 20% is normal), then you'll good.

Secondly: Testing 2 offers using 2 landers normally won't get you very far, and in your case you haven't spent remotely enough to see whether there's promise (<$4 on 2 offers x 2 landers). Think of all the newbies trying to get started with pop - they're ALL ripping landers from Adplexity and ALL mass-testing offers! If you want a slice of the pie you'd need to be willing to test at LEAST as much as the next person, preferably more. The links in this post below may help clear up some things on how to use Adplexity and how to test offers and landers:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post324392

Any updates on progress?




Amy

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