Is It Possible to still Profit with Pops (10)
Hey guys,
I’ve been in the paid affiliate marketing game for a little over 3 months. I started off reading Vortex’s 40 day tutorial, which was absolutely awesome. I followed all steps and then started to expand upon some of the lessons. I can’t say that I tried many things in Pop, I’ve stayed primarily with Sweeps in tier 2 to tier 3 geos. I’ve tested well over 60 offers and had some minor success where I basically broke close to even or slightly above. I work a full time job already but still find I am able to dedicate 20-30 hours a week to testing/running Pop camps. I’ve probably spent roughly $1,500 on testing up until this point, which I know isn’t a whole lot but given the fact that most offers I test range between $.10 - $.80, it seems appropriate.
I’ve primarily stuck with Propeller Ads and Pop Ads for traffic sources. I’m signed up to 11 traffic networks and 10 affiliate networks. I’m also in a couple mastermind groups which I’ve learned a lot from, not to mention the information on this forum has been absolutely invaluable. I’ve gained a fair amount of experience optimizing some camps, although never past the point of scaling to other traffic sources.
I’m just at a point where I feel that Pop requires so much time and effort which in most cases, for me anyway, has not really paid off. I find that camps can be super unstable and offer/network compliance is getting tougher and tougher. I don’t cloak but run grey hat with slightly aggressive LPs which I know can make it even more difficult to consistently profit.
I guess my question to fellow STMers who run Pop and have a decent amount of experience is:
1) do you still feel it’s worth running Pop camps in 2018 given the factors stated above, if so, which verticals are working best right now?
2) For new affiliates who have gained some experience with Pop looking to expand there knowledge base further, what other forms of affiliate marketing would be best to transition into?
I know that answers will likely vary by individual but just want to gauge member perspective.
Thank you,
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Whats up Rondog!
With a realistic answer how much time do you spend truly working on campaigns daily? At the start it can be a grind, making your way through the space and like you said 3 months deep it doesn't feel quite worth it but a few months more down the track hitting some winning campaigns you might find your 'hourly rate' of investing into campaigns becomes huge compared to anything else you're gonna get.
The game has become more competitive and tighter then before, but doesn't mean it doesn't work - just requires more work and testing. Theres a couple guys on the boards who're having the biggest year yet on pops.
Native is only growing as an adspace (https://www.emarketer.com/content/na...ending-in-2018) but does require a bit of a budget to learn the game. There are tonnes of threads/follow alongs on here with good advice for native, the rest is being creative and testing offers and building relationships for the best payouts.
Facebook/IG is just massive, snapchat ads slowly growing too see a lot of debt related offers being pushed on it. Adult has tonnes of traffic too.
The thing is they're all gonna require a bit of testing to get it going, but I know people in every single source from above still to this day pushing good volume, FB being the biggest still and most consistent across the board for people crushing it there.
Ecom - Sweeps - BH (nutra/casino/crypto) - Solar - Refinance - WH nutra (own their own offer brands no shady marketing)
With a realistic answer how much time do you spend truly working on campaigns daily?
I typically spend 2-3 hours on the weekdays and 12-16 hours over the weekends.
Thank you for the insight Maynzie!
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Dont look at the hours you spend, but look at how you spend them. So yeah, tell us, what takes most time etc?
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Most time spent is actually on the LP/technical side as well as searching for new offers. Finding LPs on Adplexity is not so tough for me, I’m not technical so cleaning up the LPs tends to take longer for me. What I’ve discovered is that I just rip a LP replace the tracking links and make a few minor changes and that’s it. For setting up an initial test it doesn’t make too much sense to spend too much time on LPs. After initial test, if camp looks promising then I will go back and do a little more to a LP and test those variations against the initial LP. I’ve learned to make sure I test these changes one by one.
I got things down to a good flow know where I can batch test about 3-6 offers a week or 2/3 camps. Sometimes a couple more camps if I’m a little more productive. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still learning new things along the way each time a run a new camp.
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Originally Posted by rondog770
Test 10-20 offers per day, that will increase your chances to find a winner alot.
Similar to your situation, I have run pops for serveral months.
I found the same result as you.
For me, It's esay to make $x profit per day, and not hard to make $xx, But It's very hard to make $xxx per day.
Also it's very unstable, I think because the competition is very high.
I'm trying to change to native/facebook now.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Other members have already said most of what I would have said. All valuable advice!
I don't have much to add, but here are some thoughts:
-Pop IS indeed very labor intensive. It's still relatively easy to make up to low- to mid-xxx/week in profits if you dedicate the effort to it, but 1)you need to have a system in place to test lots of offers, 2)you need to have multiple traffic sources to quickly scale campaigns to before the campaign dies.
-Investing into identifying and cutting bad-performing placements in multiple geos on multiple traffic networks will help all future campaigns.
-Automating and outsourcing to save time will help a lot. There are commercial tools like theoptimizer that can save you time and money (e.g. wasted on bad placements). Outsourcing lander edits for example will save a ton of time.
I DO believe that pop is STILL the easiest and cheapest traffic to learn the ropes with. But once you're able to at least break even with pop, I would encourage you to expand into / move onto other traffic types. For the same amount of effort, you can potentially make more money elsewhere - unless you already have a solid system in place as described in my bullet points above.
Maynzie in his post above has given very good recommendations of traffic types you can progress to. I would like to add another option: SEO.
Prior to the arrival of the Great Greg Morrison, we did not have a strong guide on how to profit from SEO. We do now. 
It's here:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...nking-Tutorial
Given your busy schedule and lack of time for mass-testing offers and monitoring stats, SEO may just be a suitable option for you. Money would still be required, but if you pick low-competition keywords to rank, the amount should be much less than what you've had to risk by running pop for example.
Whichever road you may choose, I wish you the best of luck! And you deserve a pat on the back for coming this far - and now that you have a foundation, anything else you choose to do will be easier.
Amy
Thank you Vortex for your insight, much appreciated for the additional information related to SEO. This may be something that I could also explore.
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