AM Beginner Progress Record (22)
Hi Everyone.
As I'm new to AM I'll be working my way through the 40-day beginner guide. I've decided to start my own follow-along to record my progress, and document anything insightful I might come across, that isn't covered during the program.
Unfortunately I can't go "100% in" due to other commitments occupying my time, so my progress may be a bit slower than I've seen from other members of the community, but I'll grind through slowly.
Day One - 19th Feb 2018
I'm familiar with setting up domain names and hosting, so today was a relatively relaxed start to the program.
- Created a custom domain name for tracking.
- Registered an account with
Voluum . - Signed up to PropellerAds
- Registered an AM account with
Mobidea .
Looking forward to get my first campain up and running!
Great start Peter!
Getting your first AM campaigns documented through a follow along is the best way to learn and get additional help from other community members.
Since Amy has already covered pretty much everything in the "40 day beginner guide" making things a lot easier for everyone, I'd like to add a few suggestions as you're just starting out.
- Focus on one traffic source first then scale on other sources once you get some decent results. Jumping around from one traffic source to another will make things a little bit harder at the start.
- Sign up to more Affiliate Networks - This way you have more options, then focus on the ones that work.
- If you're comfortable using landers, then go for it. It'll make optimization much easier 
Cheers!
Let us know how it goes. Good luck buddy 
Day Two - 20th Feb 2018
I've started familiarising myself with
Following the guide, I selected a low payout video offer for the India Geo. I clicked apply, and the offer is now approved. Once I set up the tracking on
I'm going to spend more time doing research into each of the offers available. While I'm not 100% certain on how Mobidea polices its offers, one concern I have is that I don't want to find myself promoting content that is pirated or illegal within local laws. Due diligence needed on my part.
Good start! 
Since carrier-billing offers make it necessary for the mobile carrier to charge the phone-plan customer directly, chances are high that the mobile carrier would already have done due diligence to avoid involving themselves in illegal activity. Still, it is possible for some shady offers to slip through.
It would be quite difficult to verify the validity/legality of these offers though. In order for you to be able to access the offer page and subscribe to the offer (to see what the subscriber would actually be receiving after they subscribe), you'll need to have a SIM card and an active data plan with the associated mobile carrier. There are services that can help you achieve the same without a SIM card and phone plan - but such services tend to be expensive.
Also - there are SO MANY of these offers, I really wouldn't spend too much time on researching or testing any particular offer. Spending a little bit of money testing each offer would be the way to go. I have a process flow in the tutorial on how to test these offers via direct-linking (i.e. without using landing pages). But really, you could spend even less money than what I suggested in the process flow.
For example, you may decide to ditch an offer if it hasn't converted once after spending 5x the payout in traffic cost.
Pop traffic is very competitive these days, so it's not very feasible to be expecting long-term consistent profits from direct-linking to carrier-billing offers. I start every newbie on this method simply because it's the easiest and cheapest way to learn how to run paid traffic. All we're trying to accomplish here is: Test lots of offers on low spend, find a couple that convert well enough to be worth optimizing - for the sake of getting that experience. Once you've optimized a couple of direct-linked campaigns, it would be easier to move onto using landers.
This post includes several links you can check out, that are relevant to the topic of testing lots of offers on low budget:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post336436
Looking forward to seeing further progress from you! Thanks for starting this follow-along.
Amy
21st Feb 2018
Today I decided to pause working through the beginner guide for the day.
After reading the "Treating Affiliate Marketing as a Business" section from The Onboarding Zone, I went out and registered a business, and opened a separate bank account (Pending Approval). Keeping everything I do independent of my personal accounts should make things easier come tax time, especially further down the line when I get more involved in AM.
Nice. Every day, you make progress, and before you know it, you are at the top of the mountain.
Day Three - 1st March 2018
The past week I was held up with arranging the new business, and setting up accounts. This stalled my progress with the 40 day program. Fortunately, everything is now sorted, and I can get back to starting campaigns.
Importantly, what I learned over the week was the following. If you are new to the program and establishing your business for the first time. Be EXTREMELY selective about the companies you choose to work with. If for example, you choose the wrong bank, you are going to spend a lot of time trying to fix issues you wouldn't have elsewhere. There were a number of technological issues immediately apparent with the business account I set up with my bank. I had to resolve those before I could continue.
Today I linked the offer from
Hey Peter,
Looks like we're at the same stage of the newbie guide, hopefully we can both get some wins on the board really soon and get some useful data to work with
Just based on my own experiences in the past, i would personally forget about creating specific bank accounts, registering an official business and anything else like that and just solely focus on AM. Once you've got significant money coming in then you can figure out the business side and set yourself up properly, you don't want to bog yourself down early on the unimportant stuff (aka anything that doesnt generate revenue) early on.
Good luck
Completely agree Captain Calypso. I was hoping the process would be a lot faster, but I ended up just wasting time. Fortunately, everything is now complete, so I won't have to go through it again for a long time.
Had the exact same experience just today. I'm guessing it's not a profitable offer or a shady one. My friend in Thailand signed up for the mobile offer using my link with the correct carrier using his data and all other requirements and it still did not show up as a conversion on
Update
I read elsewhere from one of Amy's posts that the clicks being 0 is correct, because this is a direct linking campaign.
As long as in the aff network's stats, you're seeing that the traffic is ending up at the correct offer(s), then we're good.
The conversion postback from the aff network to
As for the amount of recorded traffic being different in Voluum vs. the aff network: This is normal and is referred to as clickloss. Anything up to 20 or even 30% difference is normal, but if you get a discrepancy larger than that then it may be time to look into why.
As for not getting your first conversion - that's normal. When testing direct-linking to carrier-billing offers, the key is to test a ton of them at a low budget. Please see this post - I have the same advice for you:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post338304
Don't expect the path to profits to be easy! This tutorial is designed for easy and fast learning, but it will still require a lot of testing before you'll be able to find profits. Keep testing until you find a couple of offers that convert well enough to optimize, just to get that practice and experience. Then move onto testing sweeps offers using landing pages.
Great progress so far! Keep up the good work and we'll get there.
Amy
Monday 5th March 2018
Continuing with the day 4 tasks, the past couple of days I have been experimenting with a variety of different campaigns on
Unfortunately, for close to all of them, I have had no success with converting any of the visitors into subscribers. One offer I ran, I was contacted by PropellerAds that the campaign had been cancelled as one of the url's in the redirect path was hosting malware!! That was an interesting experience to say the least.
As I was having no success with the offers I was running, I contacted the team at
After running a new campaign on PropellerAds, one of the offers they gave me finally made a conversion! It was only $0.19, but for my first conversion, it was pretty exciting.
At the moment I'm going to try run a couple more campaigns and see if I can get anything else to convert. It would be nice to get an offer that is somewhat successful so I can actually optimise it properly during the Day 5 & 6 tasks.
Originally Posted by peterj
Did you report the malware link to Mobidea team? Please do so, in order for us to clarify it with the offer's owner, such things shouldn't happen. Best of luck with your campaigns!
Originally Posted by peterj
Although direct-linking to carrier-billing offers is meant to be a learning exercise and not a long-term profit-generating method (it once was though!), I did not expect it to be this tough. When I last tested direct-linking a couple months back I was still able to find decent offers. But things may have changed for the worse between then and now.
Over the next couple of days I'm going to do some testing on various networks to uncover good carriers to target, and make a post to help all the 40-day students. Please stay tuned!
Amy
Originally Posted by vortex
Originally Posted by vortex
Tuesday 20th March (Day 5 to 11)
I decided to stop my UY Main DL Claro offer. Although it made 8 conversions, once I attempted to optimize by removing poor performing zones, different bidding prices, Anti-Adblock zones, traffic boost, frequency adjustment, (I tried them all to experiment) I ran out of enough traffic to keep the momentum going. Delivering 1000 impressions per day isn't enough to see any worthwhile results.
I've kept up to speed and made sure to follow all of the tasks from Day 6 through to Day 11, so I'm more familiar with optimizing campaigns and keeping good documentation.
My plan now is to continue testing offers, and start signing up to other affiliate networks and advertising sources (Day 11). I also watched the
You're doing everything right! And glad to see you taking advantage of the supplemental material!
Just please continue to keep in mind that direct-linking is just a tool for learning - only keep running a campaign if you're still getting practice on cutting stuff, analyzing stats, or testing SOMETHING or other (e.g. campaign settings at the traffic source such as the ones you mentioned:
different bidding prices, Anti-Adblock zones, traffic boost, frequency adjustment...)
Looking forward to seeing you have fun with landing pages soon!
Amy
Monday 16/04/18
It's been a while since I last posted, so I just wanted to share my progression through the guide.
Although I've been slack on the publishing, I have managed to work my way through Amy's 40 day guide. The setup process went smoothly, my landers are hosted nicely on AWS, and everything is being routed correctly through Thanks Amy for the excellent introductory guide!
I've been experimenting with ripping landers off Adplexity and running offers on
Now that I'm at this point where I'm through the guide, I have a couple questions to ask if anyone is able to help. 
I've registered an account with Clickbank, and am going to experiment with running some of the offers they have. As a beginner, is this a good strategy?
To anyone with more experience, if you were to start again as a beginner, what would be the space you recommend one focuses on?
1)The high payout will make blacklisting placements an extremely costly endeavor. (Say your product's commission is $20, even if you cut placements at 1x payout without conversion, it would take $200 to cut 10 placements, $2000 to cut 100 placements, $10k to cut 500 placements...)
2)Many clickbank products are niche products, whereas pop traffic is broad-intent traffic - the audience is just, well, the general audience - not of any particular demographic, and does not have common interests/behaviors.
3)Clickbank products are mostly pay-per-sale with high price points, which will usually not convert too well on pop because it's low purchase intent traffic and interruption traffic. Pops are just annoying ads that usually have nothing to do with the visitor's intentions, that appear out of nowhere to interrupt whatever it is they happen to be doing on the publisher/placement site. Usually not good targets to sell higher-ticket items to. SOI/DOI pay-per-lead offers with low payouts would work much better.
Clickbank products will typically convert much better on a targeted mailing list or a niche website in a niche relevant to the product, or on search traffic where you can target relevant keywords. These are all methods I've used with success in the past when promoting clickbank products.
Having said all that - it doesn't mean it won't be possible to promote clickbank products successfully on pop. Like I said, I haven't really tried to (aside from a small test I did, as I'll describe below). But if you really want to give this a shot, this is what I would suggest:
-Create a landing page that is concise and to-the-point. Study a bunch of pop landers on Adplexity (any/all verticals) and jot down some elements that you feel would help conversion rates. Concise copy is only one of those elements (because you only have less than a second to capture their attention - as pop traffic is interruption traffic which is annoying as heck to most web surfers). Click-baity headlines and misleading copy would be other typical pop lander tactics, but I cannot advise you to do so (you can lose your clickbank account - or worse - by using misleading ad copy - you've been warned!)
-Only pick products that are broad-intent, that a lot of the general audience would potentially be interested in. This means for example products for weightloss/dieting, work-from-home businesses, forex/binary, male enhancement (for adult traffic only obviously). Stay away from niche products.
-Start with products that have high gravity, because chances are they have optimized their sales funnel through a ton of split-testing. You definitely want conversion rates to be as high as possible in order to offset the low purchase-intent.
-Choose products that have high profit margins, for example with multiple upsells and/or recurring commissions that will maximize the lifetime-value of each customer you refer. You need high profit margins to offset the low conversion rate of pop traffic.
-Something you can also try: Examine the affiliate tools that come with the more popular products, and test those that give you the option to drive traffic to an opt-in form. As was mentioned before, it's usually much easier to get leads than sales on pop traffic. The snag is that here you won't be paid for leads, only sales. So if you generate a bunch of leads but they don't end up generating sales, then that's no good.
The small test I did was exactly this: Running pop traffic to a product's opt-in page where visitors would get a free ebook as a lead magnet. Although I got a few leads, none of them turned into sales. However, I've only tested all of 2 products before getting side-tracked by other projects. So you can say I didn't give it a good go.
-Do NOT count on cutting placements as part of your optimization strategy! As was mentioned before, it would cost too much to cut placements based on an x-payout-without-conversion rule. The product will need to either be profitable or at least close to breaking even without cutting placements.
Alternatively, a good strategy would actually be to run a low-payout CPA offer and use THAT to cut placements FIRST, before running the much higher-priced clickbank product. That way you eliminate placements with unresponsive visitors, and/or high percentages of bot traffic.
-Either target desktop, or if targeting by mobile make sure the offer page has very persuasive content above-the-fold. Visitors are not likely to scroll down unless the content above-the-fold has captured their attention.
Hope I've provided some food for thought!
Amy
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