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What to do as a beginner? (18)

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Hi,

I'm on this forum over one month and I've read really lot of interesting articles about Facebook, e-commerce, POP/ PPV, Follow Alongs etc.

I started with Facebook with short term loans in Poland. I spent around $2000 and revenue was around $1800, so lost ~$200. Moreover short term loans have something like "hold", so I need to wait around 60 days for a possiblity to withdraw money from affiliate network. Moreover payout is a little big - around $40. Later I've read that it isn't good, because I need to spend really lot of money to get positive ROI if payout is so big. That was right.

Both (hold and big payout) resulted in difficulties with cash flow, so I've decided to stop this project for a while.

I've decided to go with POP and offers with payout below $1.5. I've also read a lot of articles about this one and then realized that Google Chrome introduces new changes (blocks POP, redirects etc). I know we don't know too much about it now, however I think there will be always fight between browsers and annoying POPs.

In summary I'm not sure what to focus on as the beginner.

1. I heard that POPs are the best and the easiest for beginners, however I think it's going to be harder now. Not sure if I want to go for it.
2. What is the best option for beginners if not POPs? I've thought about Native ads. I think it's very similar to POP (take offer, make landings, advertise using Native ads instead of POP / PPV). Am I right with this one? Is it a good choice for the beginner? How much money do I need (I know it's more expensive than POP)? What affiliate networks / kind of offers would you suggest?
3. I'm thinking about E-commerce with Aliexpress, but I'm not sure if it's not a little hard without any experience in affiliate marketing. What do you think? Is it very expensive? I wouldn't like to finish like with loans (too expensive, bad cash flow).
4. Any ideas where should I follow if not POPs?

I heard POP / PPV is grade 1 in affiliate marketing. What is a grade 2?

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Higher Payout offers like padyday loan, financials, FX/BN will tie down your cash with Aff Networks.
Pop is generally cheap and with good lander, you are sure to make cool cash and get easy Cash flow.
Shortform Surveys, 1 click Mobile subs, especially general billing and iframe 1 click , sweeps, are cool here...
Only challenge is Optimization (both demographics, devices and landers, split test).

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Hey Zyggmunt,

your initial results with facebook isn't bad, only -10% ROI, thats actually pretty good to start, maybe if you speak to your affiliate network they could release the payment quicker? over 1000$ you should receive a payment imo.

1. I still believe pops is the best way to start for a beginner, you will learn a lot and not spend a lot of money testing (way less than 2k to test many offers).
2. Native ads is different than pops because you would also have to make widgets (banners) which adds an extra variable aside from the landing pages. I have always ran Nutra successfully with Native, However the budget should be much higher to start at least 3-5K (maybe more if your beginning). for other verticals aside from nutra, you could start with a lower budget, but I don't have that experience.
3. E-commerce is great on Facebook, Also can be whitehat so very scalable, without worrying about cloaking and account bans.
4. I would try to find a network that can give you weekly or biweekly payouts so you can scale your facebook campaign, 2K spend & 1.8K Revenue is great when starting out!

hope this helps!

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There's no question in my mind that if I were you, I would stick with Facebook. Absolutely no doubt in my mind at all.

I agree with optifyme - -10% ROI is a feat for a FB beginner, and operating in such a difficult vertical no less! If cashflow is an issue, try to get additional funds - by freelancing or however else. Or, do some testing with more offers in the same vertical, or even an entirely different vertical.

FB has so, much, profits potential! You can promote aff products, CPA offers, start an agency to generate leads for other businesses, do ecommerce, do coaching to teach others how to drive FB traffic - the list is practically endless.

Pop has become very saturated and competitive over the last while. I would only recommend pop as a learning tool and an initial way to make SOME profits because the learning curve is the most shallow. But for long-term consistent profits, I would definitely recommend FB. I've expressed my thoughts on the various traffic types in the following posts:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...223#post335223

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post335169

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

Native bears a lot more similarities to pop than FB does. You can use Native Adplexity to get ideas on what to test and how.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ative-spy-tool

If you wish to give Native a try, be prepared to spend money on cutting placements - and this won't be cheap because products that are typically promoted with Native traffic have higher payouts (than the $2 CPA offers you see promoted on pop). In the beginning try to target tier 3/4 instead of tier 1, e.g. avoid the US where you could be spending 1k+/day on cutting placements.

Regarding ecommerce - our Caurmen has written a comprehensive newbie guide that can really help you get started:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...merce-Cookbook

Haha that was my spur-of-the-moment analogy - to illustrate that POP is the easiest to learn. There isn't a hierarchy that is recognized by everyone.

But if I really had to rank the traffic types by difficulty, I would rank them as follows from easy to hard:

-pop
-native, mobile display
-search (adwords/gdn/bing) and FB


Hope that helps! Lastly - whichever traffic type you choose, try to stick with one thing for at least a couple of months and do extensive testing on it. Each time you jump to a new traffic type or vertical, you lose a lot of the experience you could be building on. This will drain your budget in an unproductive way. So beware!



Amy

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One more vote for staying with FB after so promising initial results. You already learned something about the platform and how it works, so if the long wait for payouts is a problem, try some different vertical where that problem isn't present.

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Thanks for all your answers. You're right and I think I should stay with Facebook.

I wouldn't like to focus on short term loans, because as I said I need to wait 60 days and moreover I'm not always sure if my conversions will be accepted, so my data is never accurate. It's a little annoying.

I would need to focus on something with instant approve to feel better in my mind.

Any ideas how can I spy for good offers in Poland (I live here, so I know mentality of people) that converts good in other verticals? I have Adplexity Native, can it be useful here? Any useful tools to spy Facebook?

I would be really happy to stay with FB, but I'm not sure how to find good offers. I've found short term loans accidentally. I would like to look for what other people promote.

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If you are working with a network, then try asking your AM for offers running well on Facebook in Poland. Have you tried looking around for other networks who could give you a better payout term than 60 days?
You could try adplexity Native to get a feel of what is running, a lot of affiliates who started running with native, end up scaling with Facebook, so you should find similar offers. Since you have adplexity make use of it, lots of good motivation to be found there.

Hope you crush it!

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Ecom is the best one to learn on when you are a newbie. Also SOI that stands for Single Opt In Lead Generation, lower the payout the better, but you also have to do the math if the traffic source is the right option for said offer. You can't run a 50 cent payout app install on Facebook, because the cost of FB Ads is so high that you'd need something like near 100% Install rate from every click - unless you get clicks for free, which is a different story.

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Adplexity will definitely give you an idea about what kind of offers are popular in any GEO.

FB spytools are usually shortlived, check this thread for a recent one... https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...B-IG-AdSpy-com

Not sure how good it is or whether it still works at all, just remembered the post so thought you might want to have a look.

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I was just about to create a new thread and ask about this. How common is this? I signed up for a fb ad spy tool a few days ago and it's dataset is either super limited or I suck at using it... either way I'm not finding enough valuable intel on what's being ran on fb and what seems to be working well. I already know what types of offers should be ran on FB but I wanted to spy to see proof of working ads, angles, and landers that I could base my campaigns off of and then tweak. Last night I had the idea to use a proven good tool like adplexity native, see what's working there, and if the same offers are WH / compliant for fb then just porting them over. It looks like you confirmed my idea.

Is that a common thing where a lot of affiliates get an offer working on native and then port it over to fb to scale? Can you explain why that is? I'm curious why they just don't start on fb? Also are we mostly talking ecomm offers or are there other opportunities like low payout leadgen? I've been focused on low payout WH leadgen since I'm just a beginner but not sure if those even get pushed on native. I feel like the only thing I ever see there are ecomm style offers which have higher payouts.

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What does your thought process look like then when deciding whether an offer's math will work out on a source like fb? Obviously it will vary based on GEO but do you have any rules or guidelines you follow when deciding what to actually test in the first place and what's not worth testing due to payout being too low? I have some offers in the survey niche I've been spying on FB but the marketer is the aff network and I worry they only make it work because they have the direct payout which could be much more than my aff payout even with payout bumps for good quality.

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Regarding FB spy tools - I've heard good things about bobliu's tool, but don't expect it to be cheap:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ed-internally)

(Disclaimer: STM does not endorse this tool, and I have not personally used it - please check it out at your own discretion.)



Amy

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Like others have said, your Facebook numbers are REALLY good for a beginner.

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Hey Mitchell, I was talking about trial nutra offers, such as skin, diet, muscle.. these offers are usually run aggressively on native and facebook, you should see similar landers on native as well as on facebook, such as fake news landers.

Having said that, these offers are not beginner friendly, as their payouts are usually over $35/40 per (single step) conversion.

I honestly couldn't tell you about lower payout offers such as leadgen, however there are lots of guides on here: check this one out: Back-To-Basic-US-Sweeps-on-FB

Hope this helps,

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Solid advice. I would like to add to that.


Free trials / nutra offers, as optifyme has pointed out, is really not newbie-friendly. The difficulty does not lie in creatives and targeting or payout - the main issue is having to deal with constant account bans as most of these offers (and the aggressive manners in which affiliates typically run them) are prohibited by facebook.

So, unless you either have a reliable source of accounts that don't cost an arm/leg and/or will last long enough for you to make back your investment and more, OR have the know-how to farm accounts yourself, I would suggest to stay away from this vertical.


As for sweeps: These are not exactly allowed on FB either, but I have it on good authority that if you run them in a non-aggressive manner, your accounts will stay up a lot longer compared to running something like free trials / nutra. Still, be prepared to lose accounts, at least occasionally. Optifyme has provided the link to an informative post on the topic, here are others:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...t-No-Cloaking)

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...acebook-Sweeps


Another alternative: Run 100% whitehat. There's never any promises that you won't ever get an account banned, but the risks would be very low based on what I've found out from FB veterans that run whitehat. FB's been cracking down on blackhat increasingly aggressively, so for long-term viability I believe whitehat to be a wise route to go.

Here are posts that talk about running whitehat on FB:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...f-being-banned (older post but still relevant)

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...tehat-facebook

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...on-fb-whitehat

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...till-make-bank (not specifically for FB but the niches are certainly whitehat)


Hope that helps!



Amy

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Just to let you know.

Yesterday they validated all conversions and I have -50% ROI now, not so good. This is the worst thing with their 60 days "hold", you never know how much money you have, because during the "hold" time they can approve or disapprove conversion.

In fact I had really lot of conversions and I would have even positive ROI if all of it would be accepted. Unfortunately a lot of people in Poland don't have adequate creditworthiness even to take short term loan.

I've decided to start Shopify with Aliexpress campaigns. My Follow Along will start as soon as my store will be finished.

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Hey Zyggmunt, Sad to hear that you lost so many conversions.. Usually -50% ROI is a regular benchmark to start without optimization. However, seems like this offer is difficult for beginners due to the reasons you mentioned..

I believe drop shipping to be a good place to start on FB, since you can run completely whitehat, without worrying about account closures/banned. I have had some experience selling the "Black mask" through FB drop shipping, went good.

Caurmen RIP has a great series on Ecommerce, start here

I'm eager to see your follow along and where you will take it,
Hopefully you crush it!!

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I really don't have experience in the loans vertical, but if I were you, the first thing I'd do would be to check out other offers in the loans space - perhaps other short-term loan offers targeted at other countries, and then also look for offers for other types of loans - as long as they're not the following types which are against FB's ad policy:

(Reference: https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/)

It sounds like you're wanting to push other types of offers for now. But if you ever want to have something to fall back on, I think your experiences with the loans niche will stand you in good stead for similar offers. After all, you've been making it work. It's just a matter of finding offers that will pay upfront instead of waiting 60 days, so that you can test more angles to improve your conversion rates faster.

Have fun and best of luck!



Amy

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