After at least 5 years of being out of the business I decided to get back in. I have had some success in the past and the profit was good. I got out because family issues that took all my time and it was not possible to deal with account bans and rules changing daily on what could and could not be run.
Fast forward to today and things are much different the family issues that were holding me back came to a tragic end. This has left me in a place where I know that I am ready to get back in and do whatever it takes to be successful.
let’s get into everything that I have dealt with in the last month and a bit since getting back into affiliate marketing. How I dealt with them and where I am still having issues. Please feel free to jump in and let me know if I could have dealt with any issue a better way of with any advice that you have.
My first step to getting back into the business was find an affiliate network to work with. I dealt with this by reaching out to my old friends who where still in the business to see who they were working with or who they recommended. I ended up talking to an old friend that sent me this video https://youtu.be/WrhIsB6xQ2E. I watched this video and it resonated with me. I know that in the past a lot of the business was very shady. I am sure that it still is today as well, but the thought of creating a long term white hat business with the same amount of work as creating a Black hat shot life span business just resonated with me. This revelation of mine of wanting to do things right and working with others on the same mission got me to sign up for A4D and I have been working with them since. My AM has been amazing. He is very understanding of the fact that I may do things in a way that no longer works and he has been very patient. I feel that this relationship is a good one and look forward to working with them for the long-term.
My next problems, finding a campaign worth putting the time into. This information came from my AM and I am still working on this campaign and it is not yet profitable. I can see signs that I can get it profitable. Now it will just take work on my part. I was also suggested a traffic source.
The traffic source is where most of my problems have come from to date. The traffic source that was recommended as a good start was Facebook. I don’t know who agrees or disagrees, but this is the direction that I took. Down the Facebook advertising path I went. I put up some ads a landing page and setup tracking. Well each of these turned out to have problems.
The landing page I setup using word press like I had 100s of time before 5 years ago. For me this ended up being a disaster. I was losing landing page CTR due to WordPress load times on mobile. I think I was only getting a 5 to 7% CTR and when my AM checked my landing page. He asked me to stop running traffic until I could get a faster loading page for mobile. He sent me the google page speed tool https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and said that I need to target 80/100 or better. This sucked. Off I went to figure out what to do. I ended up re-writing the page myself using on page CSS for everything above the fold. I also learned a lot about responsive CSS. I have a lot more to learn. The good thing is the crudely re-designed site actually ended up getting a 98/100 rating by google speed test page. Perfect off I go to run more traffic.
Well what do you know another issue raises its ugly head Tracking. I was using Prosper202 that was installed on a server over 5 years ago and man where the redirects slow on mobile. I am sure that is due to misconfiguration on my part of the fact that this was not the current version. I decided to talk to my AM before upgrading to the new version of Prosper to see his thoughts. He gave me the information that for the most part the affiliate that they are seeing are not really using Proseper202 as much now. He sees that most of them are using
Well off I go happy as can be sure that profitability is just around the corner. Man was I wrong I am not sure if I was just to small and not getting enough traffic or if it was just a timing thing or if there was something up with my credit card all along. Anyway, what happened next is that I am running ads for a day and a half when all of a sudden, I try to log into my account and I can’t even get into Facebook my account has been blocked due to suspicious activity. I am like WTF I can’t log into Facebook I can’t see my personal Facebook account or my ads. In order to fix this, I had to send Facebook a copy of my driver’s license and wait 3 days for them to let me back in. I finally get back in and I am like perfect I am going to get this up and running and be profitable. Wrong again.
Facebook comes after my ad account now for suspicious activity. They close down my ad account and say that they have reason to believe that I am using a credit card that is not mine even though they have already charged $300 in smaller increments like $30, 60 and so forth. Fak, okay I go through the questionnaire answer everything they want. I also call my bank who supplies me with all the transaction info for every Facebook transaction. I supply this to Facebook. They give me my account back. I am like finally the universe has to be done testing me.
Well Facebook has other plans for that, they let me run another $60 of ads that ban the account for Policy violations. I am could not believe it. I tried multiple times to get the account reinstated with no luck.
Well I say that account is gone, but I can get another one in Business Manager. I start a second account put tame ads and start to run traffic wouldn’t you know it, the first time they try to charge money they flag the account for suspicions activity. I went thought there BS to get the account back and I called my bank and got a new card sent out. I put everything on hold for 2 weeks to wait for the new card sent out.
I then got my account disabled for using Voluum. I am not sure if anyone else had this problem or it is just me. I do know that since I have taken out Voluum and put in the new card my ads have been running and I have spent about $800 and brought in $120. I am losing money but I am sure that I can turn it around. I will keep dealing with issues as they come my way.
Please feel free to comment or to tell me that I have done things wrong. This post is as much for you as it is for me just so I can look back and see what I went through to be successful.