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Zero to $50/day (13)

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Let’s start with my goal.
I want to make $50/day, deliberately, not because of a fluke, I want to make that from logical actions that I can reproduce.


And a little about me.
Okay.. I want to take emotions out of my process, and go head first into the data. But I need help. So I'm going to expose exactly what I'm doing and trying so everyone can rip into it and help me. A little background.. I've been in software and web development for about 18 years. I manage a team of engineers, and contribute actively to code. I've worked at some pretty big well known companies and have dealt with hyper optimization of HTML/CSS/JS. I'm tired of the 9-5, I'd rather work at all hours, and get direct returns based on my performance, rather than a salary. So, I can do data, I can code anything I need, so please hit me with anything and everything under the sun.


On to my approach.
Vortex has been very helpful and I've started with her tutorial. I hit what I feel was a roadblock in that I wasn't seeing many or any conversions. So I've spent the weekend reading STM about direct-linking and pop campaigns and found this post to be very hopeful: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ing-to-profits


Here are all of my campaigns so far






The gray section are those that were before reading vortex’s tutorial. I was mostly working off of what I read from Finch’s ebooks, but those are a year or two old. Still great reads!


So there it all is.. I’ve spent some money, I feel like it’s been a bit painful, but I have learned a lot, so I’m looking at it as R&D budget/costs, like I’ve read.


On to the here and now.. Let’s zoom into the "Bulk Offer #” campaigns as those have been my most calculated actions so far.






Each Offer group has 10 random Brazil Offers from Mobidea. The idea here was to test a lot of offers. I’m not sure if I’ve spent enough to get a clear signal, but nevertheless, there have been 700+ views on each and only 2 conversations across 30 offers.


I’m not sure if I should start introducing landing pages, or if I should try another traffic source, another campaign type, such as banners, or punt on these offers and try offers from another affiliate network.


So I’m going to leave it right here and I’ll think about it tomorrow to determine my next steps. I also have the adult campaigns queued up, so I’ll see how those work out.


I’ve been thinking to purchase a spy tool to look deeper at what is getting traffic in Thailand and Brazil as those are the two geo’s I’ve been targeting.


Likely next steps:

1. Consider other’s recommendations if any come in
   
2. Purchase spy tool to get more data
   
3. Try another network’s offers
   

Thanks all!

(Edit: Oops. Ignore the two below attachments..)

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Well done on taking action!

Spy tools are very much worth the investment, particularly in your first few months. I'd encourage you to do that.

It's very hard to say if you spent enough on the campaigns where you were testing 10 offers each, but I'd doubt it. Have you read the Getting Started Guide or Vortex's tutorial about statistical significance? I'd highly recommend reading that as a priority: it tells you how much you need to spend to test offers, landers, and so on.

What were the payouts of these offers? If you're testing 10, you should spend 40x the average payout at a bare minimum to see if anything gets ahead of the pack.

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Leveraging the benefits of spy tools is a great help not only when starting out, but even along the way after you have "mastered" affiliate!
Rather than throwing a bunch of random offers on your traffic, you can focus on offers that are currently receiving a significant amount of traffic from other affiliates. On spy tools like adplexity, you can easily spot whether an offer is actually being run for several days or not, in which case, if yes - it is a good sing that this offer is worth testing.

Some Mobile content/Game offers (if those are the ones you have tested) may come without a pre-lander, so they may be sending the visitors directly to the subscription page (in case of 1ClickFlow offers). Your coding skills are a great advantage to start using landers and grab visitors attention better than showing them just the subscription button with the pricing below. Another advantage of using landing pages is to test the traffic quality or run live bot tests on the traffic you are purchasing. Check out these threads, if you're thinking on running some tests:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...live-campaigns
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...n-any-campaign
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...n-Bot-Detector

Lastly as you have mentioned above, you have to create accounts on other affiliate networks too. Build a good relation with your account manager, they can be of great help on choosing/recommending offers.

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Oh, definitely - spy tools are always useful.

When you're just starting out they're close to being essential - you'll learn SO much faster by studying what other people are doing rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

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Back to it! A bit hard to balance time between day job and AM, but I'm determined to get it done!

Since Monday, I compiled a list of all the spy tools I could find. I'm not sure if all of them were applicable, but here's the list:

At least this gave me something to start from.

I knew already that AdPlexity was already pretty popular here, so it was pretty high in my list to start with. After looking at all the costs, and offers available, I ended up going to AdPlexity Mobile (Surprise!) for $149/month. I'm sure I'll get much more value out of this, and for the initial investment, it seems pretty balanced.

I then had to get some day job work done, so I was checked out for almost two days. I did some reading about AdPlexity during that time and start to do some searches to try to orient my mind around how I can get insights out of it.

While the interface is fine and pretty easy, it isn't always easy to glean the insights from it.

I read Vortex's guide on adplexity and how to grab landing pages from there. I also watched sebastian's youtube video. So at a high level it's making sense. But I have a question for those that have found success in AdPlexity.

If I search for sweeps, such as I have an offer from Mobidea for an iphone sweep. I lookup the data in AdPlexity, and I see many of the same looking landing pages. But the thing that is confusing, is are those landing pages, or are those the offer page itself? I'm focused on Thailand, because Mobidea has a lot of offers for that country. I've been mainly using PropellerAds, and ZeroPark.

So to restate.. the landing pages I see on Adplexity, it seems that is what my offer looks like already if I direct link to it. So what is the point of putting a duplicate landing page in front of it. Should I look for pages in Adplexity that just have a call-to-action that would then go to the offer? Is there a way to exclude direct-linking ads in Adplexity so I can find those using actual landing pages?

Thanks!

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To add to my series of basic questions.

With all the self doubt and fear that goes along with working based on performance and independently, I’m wondering if others can shed some light on their experiences.

I hear people talk about $10K days. That’d be awesome! But my real goal is a sustained or average $400/day. Is that practical? Have others achieved this, here? I’m hopeful and everything I’ve seen/read/heard tells me that it is indeed possible and quite modest. But I’d love to hear some first hand experience.

If someone has made that kind of profit, how long did it take you? Not just day to day time. But really how much energy. Some people could do that in 6-12 months I guess and maybe others who go all in could figure it out in a month. Is that possible/probable?

I’m in this for good, after working 18 years in 9-5, I’m done. Mentally. I would much rather take it all in my own hands to succeed or fail. So any other advise/experience would be greatly appreciated.

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To find out if the landing page you see on a campaign you spy on adplexity is added by the affiliate running the campaign or is a pre-lander included in the offer is quite easy. In the campaign redirect chain screen you can see the following redirect flows:

A) Affiliate's LP : Tracker campaign link -> Landing Page -> Offer link (from the affiliate network) -> Offer opt-in page.
B) Offer with pre-lander :Tracker campaign link -> Offer link -> Landing Page -> Offer opt-in page.
C) Direct-link : Tracker campaign link -> Offer link -> Offer opt-in page.
Here's an example of case A: http://prntscr.com/ho9uuj

It will be even more easier for you to spot the flows once you get familiar with the offer links served from various networks (usually identified by their domains

Reaching to constant numbers in your AM journey is a matter of time. As you get more used to testing lots of offers, landers, spying things will make more sense and be more easier.
As you may see suggested on other threads as well, it is important to understanding how each traffic network works as well as master your optimization process. Numbers are our friends

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Thanks Platinum!

How much of an issue do you think bots are in networks like PropellerAds and ZeroPark? From my understanding, bots would be employed by website owners to fake the clicks of their ads, banners, redirects, pops, etc, so they get credit for the bot activity. Traffic sources still pay out as it gives them the traffic that they can get us AM's to place ads, so it's kinda a win for all but us. And from what I've seen, some people run campaigns to determine traffic that are bots, coming from specific zones that are more heavily bot driven, and block those zones. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Given that, is there any way to preemptively bounce requests from bots? Such that we don't get charged from traffic sources based on what we could detect maybe from a range of IP's. I assume not as that'd be tricky to get the traffic sources to agree to allow AM'ers to drop traffic.

Would it stand to reason that the cause of offers not converting even after 10k+ visits is because it's flooded with bots and not real people? Or maybe it just goes back to sucky offers. I'd guess the latter, but would be nice to hear a more experienced opinion. I've run 15+ offers from Mobidea up to about 100k visits combined. I'm about to get into landers as it seems what I've been reading is that while the tutorial to do direct linking is great for learning, it's unlikely to result in green campaigns.

I decided that I'm going to ask random questions along my follow-along, things I'm thinking about, struggling with, and otherwise. I hope it's not annoying. I've been digging deeper into the forums and finding areas I hadn't seen before, so some questions are already answered there, so I'll try to not ask duplicate questions.

However, on that note, I did see some nice posts about campaign success stories and such, but most are from 2011-2013. Has the traffic, success, or community of STM dramatically changed or dropped since than? I was thinking about some of those campaigns and wondering if anyone has had success bringing back some of those old flings and making them work again in 2017?

Like I said, random questions, and I hope as I learn and grow, that my questions will help others along their journey.

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Both Propeller and Zeropark have quite a big traffic inventory, along with that a percentage of that traffic might come from high bot placements. Same thing applies to other traffic sources as well. As you dive deeper into AM you will soon realize that it is not worth worrying too much nor spending much time about such traffic. If you combine or test the methods listed in this post, you will quickly have an idea of what is going on and how that traffic is distributed among placements.

From personal experience I've noticed that it would be easier to avoid bot clicks on your landers rather then try to built complex funnels that for a reason or another will still leave some doubts on the table.

This one is a bit tricky! You have to either run BIG volumes of traffic as well as have a solid technical based argument against the quality of the traffic to request any refund from the traffic source. There's a thread here in the forum where something like this happened, but I'm not able to find the link to that thread atm. Maybe one of the mods can chime in with the link.

Judging an offer's performance based on visits is a bit hard, considering that traffic price differs from GEO. Can't really compare number of visits per $20 spent between US and India. About offers, there are lots of them that no matter which traffic source/type you are throwing them to, won't generate a cent. That is why you need to test lots of them from several networks. You will notice that some offers even though the same, will have different conversion rates from different networks. Take a look on Adplexity to create an idea from which networks are the most solid offers coming from, for the geos you are planning to attack.

Yes, direct-linking is easy, but is like flying blind if you haven't previously tested your placements. It is cheaper to optimize based on placement's performance rather then spent

Pop traffic can still generate good profits if done right, and as you may notice on recent success stories and case studies there is proof to it. Check out some of the case studies mrbraun or Mr Payne have shared lately.

Any other question you might have, shoot them here

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Nice start! Big thanks to platinum for all the valuable guidance! The following are my 2 cents...

It is possible to make landing pages for 1/2-click carrier billing offers, but because most/many of them require minimal pre-selling, it would be more difficult to make landers for them than, say, sweeps or antivirus - offers that typically require more pre-selling. I've talked about this at the end of the following post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post331137

Testing more offers would be the way to go. Basically right now you'd be paying money to learn how to test offers, collect data, and optimize camps based on the stats.

Alternatively, you can dive directly into ripping landing pages from Adplexity for offers that normally require landing pages to succeed (e.g. sweeps, antivirus...) Now that AWA and STM Island are behind us, I'm striving to finish the 40-day tutorial over the next few days - and some of the lessons will cover how to test landing pages.


10K days are still very possible, yes.

But if you are to do it with pop traffic, it would be difficult nowadays. Offers are short-lived and/or capped. Traffic is expensive, consists of increasingly more bots, and campaign performance is often volatile - a campaign that's doing high ROI one day could dive into the red the next. Even when you manage to optimize to green, pop camps don't tend to remain profitable for long.

Solution?

-Get really good at spying so you can narrow down the number of offers/landers/geos/etc. to test. This can keep costs down and cut down on testing time.

-Be willing to test a lot of traffic networks, including the less-known ones, and/or negotiate direct deals with site owners, so that you have more sources of good traffic. This will allow you to scale bigger in shorter amounts of time.

-Be continuously testing different offers/landers/geos/verticals, across large numbers of campaigns running simultaneously, on various networks.

-Be willing to invest money into blacklisting the worst placement sites (publisher sites), then continue running offer after offer on the remaining, good placements.

-Have an efficient optimization process that can bring a campaign to green faster and on less budget.

In order to achieve the above, you'll need one or more of the following:

1)A solid testing and optimization strategy, resulting from extensive experience from running a ton of camps.

2)A team of people to help you set up and manage the camps.

3)Automation that will help you to set up and optimize campaigns.

Your goal of $400/day is realistic, but I can't tell you how long it will take to achieve that. It would depend on way too many factors.

One piece of advice: Pop is getting harder and harder to make profits from. Once you've used it to learn the ropes and some initial profits, expand into other traffic types - like native, facebook, or google adwords/gdn. Based on my interactions with lots of affiliates in this industry, those 3 traffic types are still very promising - especially FB and google.

Here's my rant on the future of pop vs. FB if you're interested:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post321311

Bots can be a reason. And offers can be another reason.

It is still possible to profit using direct-linking campaigns, but you will need to be willing to test a ton of offers using a low test budget for each. If an offer doesn't show promise from the very beginning - say do -50% ROI or better before any optimization - I'd say drop it.

But yes - it would be easier if you use landers, because they give you that extra element to optimize.


Any questions, random or otherwise, would be welcomed! I can assure you that you're asking great questions, that are certainly not annoying.

Regarding the decline in success stories: Please check the success stories section again. Most of the stickied threads are from 2016-2017.

The affiliate marketing industry, like any other, will experience uptrends and downtrends. I can assure you that as of now, I know lots of affiliates that are still killing it.

Don't expect it to be easy. The trick is to avoid shying away from difficulties. When faced with a challenge, ask yourself: How can I circumvent this problem? How can I do things differently to make this work?

Remember that every difficulty faced by your fellow affiliates, is an excuse to give up or fail, but at the same time, is also an opportunity to excel - IF you can conquer it.

I like your questions, although they're not always easy to answer! Keep 'em coming!




Amy

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Caurman, Platinum, and Vortex... you are all amazing. You’ve given me so many things to think about. I’ll reply again soon with my next round of testing and learnings!

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So I decided to run a test today. I had an offer that had a few conversions a while back. So I started up the offer again to see where the traffic goes. I recall seeing a similar pattern before.

In the below Placements screen, you can see that about half of the visits went to only a single placement. Once I noticed this, I paused this placement so I could see if any other placements would get traffic and conversions. As you can see, the traffic per hour in the second screenshot went way down after that pause. I even increased the bid price to try to get more traffic, and it remained low for many hours.

Placements


Hours of the day


I'm not sure I can conclude much from this, but maybe I need to increase the bid to get into other placements.

I'm also a little confused between the sources and placements. Are the sources a superset such as a vendor, and the placements, the sites that they service?

I'm giving theoptimizer.io a try in this test to allow rules such that if no conversions occur after a specific amount of traffic or cost, then the publisher would be blocked. Probably not strong enough statistically, but pretty awesome ability!

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Such pattern where a single publisher sends major part of the traffic is pretty usual. Most probably only a few affiliates or no one is bidding for that publisher so you end up getting most of it's inventory. Increasing the bid progressively might be the best way to identify such publishers if continuing to send traffic on a direct-linked campaign. On ZeroPark you can easily see an estimated prediction about the traffic inventory for your current bid, if above the medium level you are good to go.

The difference between sources and targets is pretty simple, just consider a source as a group of targets, where targets are the publishers itself.

Since you are already using TheOptimizer Mobile (which can help you a lot while taking care of your daily job) I would suggest running some aggressive rules on this direct linked campaign - 1x Offer payout. The main reason for this is because ZP has a really huge inventory and you can easily spend quite a lot when testing each publisher on a 2x offer payout rule while you don't have a reliable insight on your offer's performance yet.

Here's an example of the rule (considering offer payout $0.5):


Once you implement the above rule, it would be good adding another one to Enable a publisher again, in case there were any delays when firing a conversion.

Note: You can set the Enable publisher ROI threshold judging on overall publisher's spent and performance.

I believe it would be best to start using landers so that you can make decisions based on publisher's Visits/CTR performance rather than on spent

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