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Serial Entrepreneur jumping into everything paid ads (55)


09-28-2018 07:35 PM #1 jack_l (Veteran Member)
Serial Entrepreneur jumping into everything paid ads

What's up everyone-

New stm member here.

Sort of a serial entrepreneur.

Fulltime house-flipper/real estate investor for last few years but decided I wanted to completely commit to making money online.

Did organic stuff part time last two years, made maybe 25k, then jumped into fulltime organic stuff earlier this year. Have decided I like the idea of paid ads/media buying far, far better though and my goal is to completely immerse myself in this world and master it and hopefully make it a long-term business.

Just signed up with MGID and Revcontent and google for Youtube ads.

I have experience with video editing/making VSL's so I really like the idea of video ads, but am having a blast coming up with native ads too.

Education is basically every single charlesngo.com article, every Alex Becker video lol, other assorted IM'ers I follow, and now immersing myself in YT channel 'Surfside PPC'. Considering buying the iStack native ad course as well. Am also pretty good with Clickfunnels as I've been using it for a couple years now.

Am signed up with Clickbank and Maxbounty. Really like Clickbank and am planning on start experimenting with their offers first.

Been researching everything on Adplexity like crazy.

Only difficulty so far is that I use a VPN and I think its causing logistical hassles- Revcontent won't approve my credit card so I have to do wire transfers (which is fine), my Youtube ads account is still under review, and Bing flagged my account (think I'll skip them for now anyway though)...

But yeah, anyone else had troubles signing up when using a VPN? Any feedback is much appreciated! I'm also trying to run everything through an LLC but I noticed Clickbank would only let me sign up as an individual but not as an LLC for some reason.

And then yeah, am based in US

Will keep you all updated!

-Jack

PS Again- any feedback on similar problems using VPN is highly appreciated!


09-29-2018 01:19 AM #2 maynzie (Moderator)

Yoo Jackyboy, good stuff man excited to see where your journey heads next!

Just signed up with MGID and Revcontent and google for Youtube ads.
I suggest having a read through this, there is solid posts and will give you an idea of what to expect for native https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...446#post354446

Its a source that takes a little time to adjust to with effort into campaigns, but the reward is juicy with the amount of scale (traffic volume) behind it Adplexity is a monster of a tool too so thats good to have in your arsenal

Not sure on the VPN stuff sorry haha :S


09-29-2018 02:17 AM #3 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Nice- thank you maynzie- reading through the thread now- very helpful!

I'll keep ya'll updated and if anyone else has advice/thoughts/etc please hit me up!

Same w/the question re: the VPN!

Appreciate the massive wisdom on here


09-29-2018 03:23 AM #4 leadcloak (Member)

Hey Jack!

Best of luck for your journey.

Most of the VPNs are detectable and the VPN's IPs are already spammed by many peoples to create accounts.
So Bing and Youtube accounts can cause problems for using VPN but i don't know Revcontent...

It's not very hard to block use of VPN.



LeadCloak


09-30-2018 02:22 AM #5 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Hey Leadcloak- Thanks man! Much appreciated.

And thanks for the info on the VPN stuff.

I decided to turn off the VPN. I did download a new browser to only use for Affiliate Marketing, but will just use my residential IP to try to minimize any problems my VPN causes. Will only use the VPN for my personal use on the old google chrome browser.

I did find an old Bing ads account though I created like a year ago and so far (knock on wood) it hasn't gotten flagged since I logged back on a day ago. Building out a big campaign to test for Bing as well.


09-30-2018 02:30 AM #6 leadcloak (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by jack_l View Post
Hey Leadcloak- Thanks man! Much appreciated.

And thanks for the info on the VPN stuff.

I decided to turn off the VPN. I did download a new browser to only use for Affiliate Marketing, but will just use my residential IP to try to minimize any problems my VPN causes. Will only use the VPN for my personal use on the old google chrome browser.

I did find an old Bing ads account though I created like a year ago and so far (knock on wood) it hasn't gotten flagged since I logged back on a day ago. Building out a big campaign to test for Bing as well.
The account purge is going on. Every company is hitting hard on fake accounts (fb, ig, twitter etc). So it can be a mistake by bing.
Google, Bing and FB is banning many accounts daily without any reason. So the VPN was just a one extra red flag to get your account blocked.




LeadCloak


09-30-2018 04:10 AM #7 init2017 (Member)

Thanks for making this follow along Jack! Interested to see your progress, especially considering your experience with video. Subscribed!


09-30-2018 06:52 PM #8 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Thanks init2017 I'll be trying to update it regularly!


09-30-2018 09:51 PM #9 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Hey everyone-

Brief update this sunday afternoon.

Waiting to talk with MGID rep yesterday + waiting to deposit funds to Revcontent + waiting for Youtube account to be approved, SOOO... spent the day working on building a Bing campaign.

Here's the brief outline, probably did it wrong but just trying to take action:

-One offer
-3300 keywords from affiliate tools page on CB, split into 8 groups by me based on category. From my research in incognito tabs there's two people running ads to this offer on about 50% of these keywords, one is direct linking (the vendor?) and the other is linking to a really plain, basic landing page set on blogspot with nothing but an image of the video.
-Each category of keywords has a slightly different landing page based on wording, is its own campaign in Bing, with two ads per campaign.
-Did landing pages on a custom domain in clickfunnels. Mixed up different headlines/sub-headlines/a few arrows along with the video image set to open the offer in another tab.
-Probably went way overboard on link tracking but created a different tracking link for each ad (16 total) plus one for the image link and one for the text link on each landing page (another 16).

All campaigns are U.S., all are bing/yahoo only no syndicated.

Started with 15$ per day per campaign with .20$ bids.

Their prediction algorithm suggested I'd spend around 1400$ a month and get about 7000 clicks with that, but so far I'm getting way less impressions/clicks than that.

Anyway though now that I got it all set up, going to just try to keep track of it.

Mostly I am considering this a good learning experience.

The product is low upfront but high long-term average recurring, so I would guess on Bing its a battle of who is most optimized + who is willing to spend the most to get that average recurring income (money back in 2 months vs 4 months, etc).

Hopefully will learn a lot and get a few sales and then once I've optimized it for awhile can determine whether or not its worth keeping long term.

I think Native/Video ads match my personality better than Bing/Google ads but I want to master the entire paid ad universe so want to dive in anyway!

Still trying to figure out the relationship between bid per click and total clicks. Sometimes when I would reduce the bid on their estimator it would say I'd get more clicks... but it seems like the more you bid the more clicks you should get doesn't it?

Any thoughts/feedback is much appreciated!


09-30-2018 09:53 PM #10 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Hey everyone-

Brief update this sunday afternoon.

Waiting to talk with MGID rep tmrw + waiting to deposit funds to Revcontent + waiting for Youtube account to be approved, SOOO... spent the day working on building a Bing campaign.

Here's the brief outline, probably did it wrong but just trying to take action:

-One offer
-3300 keywords from affiliate tools page on CB, split into 8 groups by me based on category. From my research in incognito tabs there's two people running ads to this offer on about 50% of these keywords, one is direct linking (the vendor?) and the other is linking to a really plain, basic landing page set on blogspot with nothing but an image of the video.
-Each category of keywords has a slightly different landing page based on wording, is its own campaign in Bing, with two ads per campaign.
-Did landing pages on a custom domain in clickfunnels. Mixed up different headlines/sub-headlines/a few arrows along with the video image set to open the offer in another tab.
-Probably went way overboard on link tracking but created a different tracking link for each ad (16 total) plus one for the image link and one for the text link on each landing page (another 16).

All campaigns are U.S., all are bing/yahoo only no syndicated.

Started with 15$ per day per campaign with .20$ bids.

Their prediction algorithm suggested I'd spend around 1400$ a month and get about 7000 clicks with that, but so far I'm getting way less impressions/clicks than that.

Anyway though now that I got it all set up, going to just try to keep track of it.

Mostly I am considering this a good learning experience.

The product is low upfront but high long-term average recurring, so I would guess on Bing its a battle of who is most optimized + who is willing to spend the most to get that average recurring income (money back in 2 months vs 4 months, etc).

Hopefully will learn a lot and get a few sales and then once I've optimized it for awhile can determine whether or not its worth keeping long term.

I think Native/Video ads match my personality better than Bing/Google ads but I want to master the entire paid ad universe so want to dive in anyway!

Still trying to figure out the relationship between bid per click and total clicks. Sometimes when I would reduce the bid on their estimator it would say I'd get more clicks... but it seems like the more you bid the more clicks you should get doesn't it?

Any thoughts/feedback is much appreciated!


10-05-2018 01:34 AM #11 jack_l (Veteran Member)

What's up everyone!

JUST GOT MY FIRST SALE!!!

Here's the details...


I actually haven't started native yet because I am finishing up the James Van Elswyck course first (very good stuff!) but I had put a campaign into both Bing and Youtube just for fun/learning.

The Bing ones were starting off slow and I was upping the bid a bit each day (.20 then .30 then .40 today), and the Youtube account was under review so nothing was happening there.

Today though I suddenly noticed my Clickbank dashboard said I had made 60$... I was like like what the heck?

I figured it was Bing but then found out to my surprise it was Youtube!

I had been refreshing the Youtube ads page but forgot to move the calendar feature up so it included today lol.

Turned out I had gotten a ton of views today, and one of them led to a sale

Was from a 60 second whiteboard ad I made for a Clickbank product via landing page.

50$ in ad spend, 60$ upfront commission not counting any future recurring

So yeah, very cool!

I have made money online in the past with organic stuff obviously but this is the first sale I've made online purely from paid advertising, so it still feels absolutely awesome

Excited to keep diving in fuller and make this the first of thousands...tens of thousands... millions... etc!

Appreciate you guys commenting!

-Jack


PS I have Clickfunnels set up for lander design+hosting since that is what I've always used... but researching on here and everywhere else over the last few days I am getting the impression that it is too slow to really compete with in Native- is that accurate? I am thinking of trying Landerbolt since I already have Adplexity and they have that nice link feature. Any feedback? I am NOT tech-savvy when it comes to coding/hosting/etc so that is one important variable, but I tested my Clickfunnels landers out on some of these speed-testing sites and they all got pretty bad grades... is switching to another solution (like Landerbolt) a good idea/necessity or am I overanalyzing?

Appreciate any wisdom/feedback!


10-05-2018 01:54 AM #12 maynzie (Moderator)

50$ in ad spend, 60$ upfront commission not counting any future recurring
Haha sick man!!!! I truly remember the first time I saw a clickbank conversion from a Squidoo article in the dashboard and freaking out that it was real ! - I would continue to pursue this campaign a conversion into green on your first go is a good sign.

PS I have Clickfunnels set up for lander design+hosting since that is what I've always used... but researching on here and everywhere else over the last few days I am getting the impression that it is too slow to really compete with in Native- is that accurate? I am thinking of trying Landerbolt since I already have Adplexity and they have that nice link feature. Any feedback? I am NOT tech-savvy when it comes to coding/hosting/etc so that is one important variable, but I tested my Clickfunnels landers out on some of these speed-testing sites and they all got pretty bad grades... is switching to another solution (like Landerbolt) a good idea/necessity or am I overanalyzing?
A tech-head reply to this will come, but lander speed is very important in successful campaigns and conversion rates


10-05-2018 02:04 AM #13 jordans (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by jack_l View Post
PS I have Clickfunnels set up for lander design+hosting since that is what I've always used... but researching on here and everywhere else over the last few days I am getting the impression that it is too slow to really compete with in Native- is that accurate? I am thinking of trying Landerbolt since I already have Adplexity and they have that nice link feature. Any feedback? I am NOT tech-savvy when it comes to coding/hosting/etc so that is one important variable, but I tested my Clickfunnels landers out on some of these speed-testing sites and they all got pretty bad grades... is switching to another solution (like Landerbolt) a good idea/necessity or am I overanalyzing?

Appreciate any wisdom/feedback!
Post your results of your speed tests on sites like gmetrix and pingdom so we can see if they are too slow


10-06-2018 05:09 AM #14 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Update:

140$ spend, 60$ commissions on Youtube... (though that product has 200$+ average recurring).

HOWEVER...

I realize that my Youtube ad ended like the split second I said the CTA aloud... plus I didn't tell anyone where to click or anything else... none of that 'click the bottom left if you're on mobile and the top right if you're on desktop' stuff.

You'd think I would have remembered to include that after hearing so many Youtube ads over the years lol.

Just paused them them as a result and am going to redo the ad and then put it back up

Hard to figure out the split testing on youtube but I think I'm going to do all US and just try it between the three most relevant in-market groups and see how it does in each, and then maybe come up with some ad variations as well later on, landing page variations, etc. There's so many variables one could test its rather intimidating, and I haven't many videos on Youtube re: best practices for Youtube ads, the way you do for Bing ads, Facebook ads, etc.



On the native front, I have my first MGID campaign ready to roll and am just waiting to hear back from the rep that we are ready to go.

About 80% of the way done with James Van Elswyck's course which has been extremely impressive.

Will do another post with further thoughts on it in the next couple days


10-12-2018 03:48 AM #15 jack_l (Veteran Member)

What's up everyone - another update!

I now have two native campaign attempts under my belt! (both failed sadly lol)

The first was the Clickbank product I made a sale with on Youtube just dinking around trying out video ads - I tried it on MGID with the assistance of my rep, but sadly we spent about 500$ without a single conversion :/ That's 2X average commission including recurring, so not as much as it seems, and I spent more than I normally would since I had had that sale on youtube and felt pretty good about the product.

I still like it but I just think it wasn't a match for MGID's traffic, even with the rep inputting a white list to try to maximize our chances. (US Desktop traffic just for reference). It was an educational/kids/parenting product and I just don't think it was the right offer for MGID.

I also spent 100$ on Revcontent today trying out a product I have seen working on Adplexity.

It is a 33$ commission, gravity of 15 or so, very well known vendor with other 100+ gravity products, and I've seen it working on Adplexity for other folks on Conservative News/Breitbart/WSHH/Tom'sGuide/etc.

I followed the James Van Ellswyck formula and used three ripped images plus one new one, three ripped headlines plus one new one, and three ripped landing pages plus one new one.

Did it on Breitbart only on US Desktop.

LP's averaged 30% ctr so I got about 340 clicks to landing pages and 113 clicks to offer, but zero conversions.

Went through 100$ today which is 3X average payout. It went through it in about 3 hours though so I'm not sure if my bid was too high or what that means.

Again, no conversions though :/

I did find my best ad though (.2% ctr) and best landing page (42% ctr), however, so while I shut down that campaign, I am going to give it another try on a different geo that I think is a good one to try, and with it on Conservative News instead of just Breitbart.

Also doing more research to find my next offer on MGID. My rep gave me a list of recommended vertical/geo combinations, and I think from now on I'm going to try cheap geo's where I can get more data/experience/practice less expensively, as well as trying more 'lowbrow' products.

I also shut down my Youtube and Bing campaigns because I figure it is a better use of my time to focus 100% on mastering natives, especially since I bought that James Van Ellswyck Native Course and have a 'map' for Natives but don't have one for Bing/Youtube.

I'll keep ya'll updated and hopefully have some conversion numbers to share soon I'm happy to start with a losing campaign and optimize the heck out of it, but with zero conversions on these two I figured I should keep trying new offers/geo's/etc.

Hit me up with any thoughts and feedback and thanks for reading!

-Jack


10-12-2018 04:50 AM #16 morgainefreewoman (Member)

That awesome! Tbh MGID is kind of low-quality traffic. RevContent slightly better. I'd look at Taboola, Gemini, or Outbrain (process a little annoying, but worth it). Seeing lots of YouTube ad talk lately -- wonder if anyone here knows of any solid spy tools for it? If not, whoever's the first to come out with YouTube Video Spy--$$$$


10-13-2018 02:52 AM #17 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Yes, I agree morgainefreewoman - I would LOVE to master Youtube later on. I've never seen any spy tools for it or even really any courses on advertising on it for that matter.

But yeah, I want to try Taboola and Outbrain next for sure. They seem more congruent with leadgen offers, which I have less experience with than VSL offers.

Going to try to master VSL's on MGID and Revcontent first, and maybe test some ecom (flashlight, etc) stuff, but would very much like to get into more highbrow leadgen/finance/refi/solar type stuff later on.

I'm absolutely loving this whole natives thing so far but just gotta get my first campaign profitable!


10-13-2018 06:28 AM #18 leadcloak (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by morgainefreewoman View Post
That awesome! Tbh MGID is kind of low-quality traffic. RevContent slightly better. I'd look at Taboola, Gemini, or Outbrain (process a little annoying, but worth it). Seeing lots of YouTube ad talk lately -- wonder if anyone here knows of any solid spy tools for it? If not, whoever's the first to come out with YouTube Video Spy--$$$$
If someone creates a Youtube Video Spy Tool with great accuracy then -- $$$$ for sure.




LeadCloak


10-13-2018 07:05 PM #19 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Agreed Leadcloack

Also on that note just wanted to let ya'll know that I just got my first ever Revcontent sale!

24$ Clickbank commission info product.

Its the same product I spent 100$ on in US-Desktop-Breitbart without any commissions.

I changed it to New Zealand-Desktop-Conservative_News and got a commision in first 12 hours.

Actually the problem though is that despite bidding 3 times what my cpc is, I can't get New Zealand-Conservative_News to give me more than 10$ or so a day in spend... so after two days its 'profitable', if you can call it that, but I can't get any more clicks than that so far...

Anyway, I decided to also try Germany (English)-Desktop-Conservative_News, and UK-Desktop-Conservative_News.

The LP is at a 50% ctr, and my ads were in the .2-.4 range on both US and NZ, so I like those numbers, and the offer converted at least once for me so far on 120$ spend, and other folks are succeeding with it.

All my 100$ of Breitbart-US spend was from 9 am -noon the day I did it too, so maybe that was part of the problem.

Anyway we will see how things go for it in Germany and the UK!


10-19-2018 03:15 AM #20 jack_l (Veteran Member)

What's up everyone!

Only been 4 days since I posted on here but feels like eternity lol.. Guess that means lots of learning which is good

Here's my updates:

-On Revcontent I stopped my 'Combat Fighter' (Clickbank) campaign.

There's someone making money on it from my research on Adplexity, but I spent like 350$ and made 25$ and then gave up. That was my first attempt on Revcontent though and I think I spread it too thin over different geo's instead of just focusing on one and getting more data for blacklisting.

-On Revcontent I then tried the Ape Survival Trump Coin on US Desktop Conservative News, but spent about 75$ on that without a conversion and gave up (about 120 clicks direct linking). I was really surprised about that as I thought it would be good, and I made sure my ad even referenced that it was a free+shipping rather than just free. Not sure why it failed, I think it might be because the check out page for Survival Ape for some reason doesn't seem to work on Firefox I believe and I can't figure out on Revcontent how to select by browser. I might try it on MGID where I know you can select by browser and only do Chrome and see if I get better results.

So those ones and my educational product I spent 600$ on on MGID with no conversions were my first three attempts. But my one that is semi-successul so far (not profitable- but one that I am in process of optimizing), is...

-My big 'Weight-Loss' funnel that I am experimenting with on both Revcontent and MGID, in US and India on Desktop. I started with two offers to test against each other, both VSL's, as well as 4 landing pages (3 ripped 1 I made up) and various creatives I both ripped and made up.

On this one I'm definitely not profitable, but after a couple days I have made 4 sales. All of them are just one of the two offers, so I think I'm going to take away the other offer and focus on the one that's converting. I'll keep trying to find better ads, keep split testing tons of lander variations, and keep blacklisting widgets. I figure that with Weight Loss, there's gotta be SOME offer worth a darn, so if I keep optimizing it and blacklisting more and more bad widgets, I'll eventually have a decent funnel that I can test various offers in.

Its really illustrative how importing the blacklisting/whitelisting is once you start doing it. On Revc US my 4 LP's started out day one with an LP CTR around 50%, but the exact same LP's were at 25% CTR on MGID US, and 10% CTR starting out on MGID India.

I'm presuming that's because of traffic quality, and the widgets I've been blacklisting are all ones where its like 40 clicks and 0 lp clicks, or 152 clicks and 2 lp clicks, that sort of thing.


And then yeah, I am hoping to try out some lead gen email submit offers from other networks next. Its expensive testing these big expensive info products on Tier 1 traffic so I want to do more international traffic and more low payout offers.


It also seems like really high-paying recurring info products from Clickbank would be better, and there's a couple I really want to run, however its interesting because on Adplexity it seems like 90% of the CLickbank products people are succeeding with are ones where the commission is in the 25-40$ range.


Another interesting thing is that of the top 10 or top 20 highest gravity Clickbank offers, not that many are visible on Adplexity (maybe 2-4 at most). I count 25-30 English Clickbank offers getting lots of traffic (like 15 days or longer) and most are in the 5-60 gravity range rather than the 200+ gravity range. This kind of surprised me. Possible too though that Adplexity's spiders aren't catching everything I guess though.



But yeah, gonna keep optimizing my weight loss funnel, and then keep trying out more and more Clickbank VSL offers and lead-gen/email submit offers from other networks


Please hit me up with any thoughts or anything else I really, really appreciate you folks who have replied- its nice to get feedback- and I've been trying to comment on other newbie threads myself when I see them, even though I don't have a ton of knowledge to offer yet


-Jack


10-28-2018 03:08 AM #21 jack_l (Veteran Member)

What's up everyone!

Had my first profitable campaign day ever today!

Its one of my MGID campaigns I've been working on. Overall its at like -75% but its been slowly improving and today specifically was just barely profitable for the first time- 80$ revenue 70$ spend!

Nothing too exciting but another important milestone right!?!

Going to keep working on that one trying to optimize more, and split-testing in some different offers since its a major niche with lots of things one can run.

Also had my first day of 100$+ in sales overalls if you can't the other campaigns too, but the other ones weren't quite profitable (-10% so close though).

Here's a brief run-down of everything so far:

--100% big loss on first MGID campaign (kids educational product that was NOT the right match for MGID plus I was clueless)
-90% loss on Clickbank Self-Defense info product on Revcontent.
-100% loss on Survival Ape 'Trump Coin' tripwire offer on Revcontent (although might have been my fault due to ignorance rather than offer).
-100% loss on another niche on Revcontent (my LP's were only at 10% ctr on that one so that was a big fail on those- going to revamp and try again).
-100% loss on a Max Bounty lead-gen offer on Revcontent. This one I direct-linked which I will never do again because I feel totally unsure whether it was bad widgets that made it a loser or a bad offer. From now on I'm always doing LP's every time unless I start using that bot-detector thing that scans for them. So yeah good lesson learned on that one at least
-Two MGID campaigns that I got to the +10% and -10% today and am continuing to work on

So yeah, a couple of those losses were bigger ones but most were relatively small ones I called off within a day or two.

Has been a HUGE learning experience so far.

Have learned a ton from Adplexity and have also been doing a lot of manual spying too on various sites. I notice things spying manually that I never notice on Adplexity so I really like doing that. Could not imagine doing this without Adplexity either... it would be like being blind..

Have a giant word doc full of ideas to do in future And working on a couple more 'creative' things right now I'm hoping to do

Also have two campaigns loaded into MGID waiting to get approved that I think are good matches for MGID- aggressive vsl type ones. So will see how that goes

Also have been learning all these various products... Adplexity, Landerbolt, TheOptimizer.io, the ad platforms, etc

Still a few technical difficulties I'm dealing with but overall very pleased at that side of it.

On the business side I'm just trying to keep investing lots of time and energy and what I hope is 'appropriate' amounts of money (not wasteful but enough to gain the experience I need) and hopefully keep improving!

Appreciate you guys following along and please hit me up with any feedback you might have!

-Jack


12-01-2018 10:45 PM #22 jack_l (Veteran Member)

What’s up everyone!


Wanted to add more to this to keep documenting the journey


I was just reading my first post in this thread and its funny because even though it was just a few months ago, I feel like I have so much more knowledge/perspective since then and its almost like reading something someone else wrote lol.


At this point I’ve started around 70 campaigns, and I am absolutely, unequivocally ADDICTED to native ads. I absolutely love everything about them.


I’ve definitely struggled a ton but I finally feel as though I am finally in a ‘rhythm’ now…


I upload money every week or two to my native accounts… get the affiliate checks/deposits every couple weeks in return… upload new ads every few days… test new offers, etc…


I have definitely struggled a TON since starting, but I am starting to have lots of profitable days/etc and am starting to get past the ‘Unconscious Incompetence’ realm into the ‘Conscious Incompetence’ realm and hopefully even the ‘Unconscious Competence’ realm soon too




Here’s a breakdown of various discoveries/thoughts/etc I’ve had since the last post (they’ll be pretty native-ad centric but hopefully beneficial for anyone).





-The biggest thing conclusion I’ve come to is to test tons of offers. Its far easier to test a bunch of offers and go with what works than to try to make something work that isn’t.


-I started having way more success when I quit running ‘raw’ on Revcontent and started only testing things on brands and whitelists. This way you actually know that the traffic is decent and you can have clarity on whether the offer/lp’s/ads/etc are working or not.


-I have made about low 4 figures in revenue on MGID and am still struggling with it, although I just started a new campaign aimed at MGID’s very specific demographics. My weight-loss campaign I had going on MGID in the US and India was my first semi-successful campaign, but I just think a female-centric weightloss offer was never going to work on MGID’s traffic, which seems to be almost all sites for young men. As a result I finally turned that one off after over a month of trying. I made lots of conversions and even had some profitable days, but overall I just could not get it to work for the life of me. Now I’m trying to go ‘with’ the flow on MGID instead, focusing on the kind of offers that seem to work on that network.


-I’ve made far more money on Revcontent (well into 5 figures total now) and the same things I hated about it at the start (the insane power of the ad server, the ad server deciding what ads to show, the tons of sites you don’t know the names of, etc) are the same things I love about it now.


-I’ve tried to focus on figuring out what the ‘unique’ advantage is of each traffic source/affiliate network/etc and build upon that. In some ways the ‘advantage’ is- as I said above- what seems like the biggest ‘disadvantage’ starting out. So in the case of Revcontent, it’s the anonymity of widgets. So if you take the time to manually spy or spy on Adplexity and find lots of good widgets, you have a huge advantage (at least until you’re spending tons of money and need to run raw to get enough volume). Really though you could make 6 figures a year on Revcontent on a single brand… so if you’re just starting out there’s no need to even run topics really. Same principle with networks… I was very thankful to get approved for GiddyUp, which is a fantastic whitehat network that you can run on Outbrain, Taboola, even Facebook… (not that I’m on Facebook). But at the same time, I absolutely love Clickbank, because there’s so many offers and because you can do deals with vendors for higher payouts/customize things/etc.


-Following from that, I’ve realized that what works for the biggest affiliates you see on Adplexity isn’t necessarily going to work for the small affiliates AND vice versa. I think a lot of folks get frustrated starting out when they run offers they see huge affiliates running that don’t work for them… but at this point I realize that its very possible they might be getting discounted rates on traffic due to volume, higher than normal commissions due to volume, are doing massive retargeting campaigns on a bunch of networks, various scripts they can get away with, etc. At THE SAME TIME THOUGH.. if you’re a beginner only wanting to make 100k profit a year, you have your own advantage, in that you can focus on just a few brands and find the perfect offer for them, and have a much easier time just making 100-300$ a day profit in that super targeted fashion. With that said, its certainly my goal to make insane amounts of money and totally master this, but it took me awhile to realize that there are advantages and disadvantages both ways on that. Especially on Revcontent where there’s so much traffic… you could become the world’s foremost expert on Breitbart Tablet Traffic in Brazil or something crazy like that and probably make decent money…



-I’ve started compiling a massive database of widget info on an excel spreadsheet. My goal is to eventually have a list of thousands of Revcontent widgets with the widget ID, site name, average cpc from past campaigns, average epc from past campaigns, etc of each. Then when I want to test an offer, I can just go through, copy and paste 100 widget ID’s that I think match it well into a whitelist, and see what happens. This might seem like overkill to some folks, but the way I think about… the only way to be successful at something like this is to really treat it like you’re going to war everyday. We’re trying to do something that only 1 out of 10,000 will ever be successful at (make tens of millions of dollars online), and it seems logical that to accomplish that, you need to really treat it like a military campaign or something where you are maximizing the data and intelligence and everything else you have.




Conclusion



So yeah… the above is all my thoughts after my first few months doing this. I have one campaign going right now that I would label as ‘profitable’ that I'm trying to scale upward, and have had profitable individual days on a variety of campaigns, but I’ve certainly lost more money overall than I’ve made. At the same time though I think the knowledge/wisdom/data I’ve gleaned is invaluable, and I am extremely, extremely excited to keep testing out offers from here.


I’m gonna do another separate post with my ‘Progress Chart’ I use to keep myself motivated, but wanted to add this update in my official ‘introduction’ thread from when I joined the site.

I'll do another update in a couple months and I'm sure I'll probably read the above and think 'God I was dumb back then' but I guess that''s how it goes lol.


Finally, thank you a ton to all the forum members who have been so generous with their time and wisdom in answering my questions. I am very grateful to be a member of this amazing community!


-Jack


12-14-2018 11:04 PM #23 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Wow Jack!

That was some generous share of tips and tricks you've spent much time and money (and brain juices!) to accumulate!

Thank you so much for that post - and for the entire follow-along. A journey like this can be extremely valuable - not to mention motivating - for fellow members with less experience in native (myself included).

This post is going straight into this week's STM Newsletter (and our blog at stmforum.com/blog).

Thanks again and congratulations on how far you've come!



Amy


12-15-2018 09:00 AM #24 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Thanks Amy

Everything is going quite well. I made about 250$ dollars profit today on Revcontent and am about 35 days into my first long-term profitable campaign. Working on scaling it upward as much as I can and trying out new campaigns trying to get a couple more good going. Also just started on Outbrain so excited to try to master it as well

My goal is to invest all my time and energy into mastering natives and hopefully get up there with the top masters of the craft and be spending/earning massive amounts

I appreciate all the wonderful info on STM and especially your ever-present encouragement of everyone

-Jack


12-15-2018 09:05 AM #25 jack_l (Veteran Member)

I've been fighting a hell of a war trying to get a profitable listicle going on Revcontent too... but with no success yet.

I see these folks like WeeklyPenny.com just absolutely killing it with listicles, and I've had 4-5 profitable days on mine (GiddyUp offers mostly and a few things from other networks) but just haven't quite got it whipped yet... trying extremely hard though and hopeful I'll get it down soon!


12-20-2018 01:12 PM #26 osmiumman (Member)

Keep going Jack, thanks for your updates!


12-20-2018 03:07 PM #27 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Thanks osmiumman

Was very kind of Amy to feature this in the newsletter...

Just to clarify for full transparently, I've done 5 figures of revenue so far, not profit. I have been net profitable in December though, with best day being 500$ profit (1650$ revenue over 1150$ spend). I'm averaging in that low 4 figure revenue per day now, and my main campaign is profitable, but I am reinvesting a lot of that profit into learning new platforms (Taboola, Outbrain, etc) rather than just letting it accumulate in the account.

But yeah, I'll keep adding updates to the thread


12-20-2018 04:16 PM #28 thepinkcat (Senior Member)

Dude you literally started months ago? I've been at this almost 2 years and I have a feeling you're gonna clear more profit in December than I've cleared in any given month since I started... I gotta get my shit together

Big BIG congrats on the early success. Very few find green this early.

I have a feeling the bigger #'s with one camp are partially because you're running US, which I have never touched, although apparently I should. Really the bigger volume is gonna offer better results--more money to make in bigger geos but also more to potentially lose. I think this thread just encouraged me to try US for the first time because if someone 3 months into AM can get it working, holy crackers man. Good stuff. Do keep this updated I'm excited to see where you're at in 6-12 months.


12-20-2018 05:08 PM #29 jack_l (Veteran Member)

@thepinkcat Thanks brother- I definitely had/have a lot of advantages though- I've done creative internet endeavors for years, I've been a fulltime business owner for years, I have the funds to afford SaaS's/courses/etc, I can devote myself fulltime to it, and all that good stuff... there is ZERO chance I could have been successful with this in my early 20's like a lot of you younger dudes. I totally lacked the knowledge/discipline/etc necessary, and that's what I find truly amazing is these 19 and 22 year olds who find success with it.

But yeah, still just figuring it out as I go, but I'm definitely trying to reach for the sky.

I do really like US though. I like to be able to go visit the sites I'm running ads on, so I can make sure they're working, see how they look 'in the wild', make sure their congruent with the audience in question, etc.

Malan Daras recounts something Jason Akatiff (sp?) said once and it really made an impact on me, he said that the best thing you can do is totally master one traffic source or even one aspect of one traffic source, and then just flip offers over and over through it until you find the perfect one. So that's what I've tried to do, and run a lot of traffic on US sites that I myself read, that way I can make sure the offer is applicable to the demographic.

But yeah, I will definitely keep the thread updated.

As I said above, I've been trying to master listicles for the last month too, and have not had success yet. I can get a few profitable days, but just can't get consistently in the green or scale at all. So that's my current obsession, other than the main profitable campaign. I also want to try life insurance and refi lead gen.

Thanks again for the comment and kind words.


04-06-2021 07:41 PM #30 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
Makes perfect sense, I'm exactly the same actually. I hate to rely on just one vertical or one offer or one GEO. Running several verticals can be hard at times, but I always make sure that I'm promoting several offers in multiple GEOs, at least. Gives me that much needed piece of mind... if anything like that is even possible in AM

Keep posting the summaries please, it's very interesting to watch how someone performs from one month to the next!
Thanks @matuloo - very much appreciated!

Yep - am hoping Q2 will be a good one and will definitely keep that format going forward on these updates!


07-02-2021 02:55 AM #31 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Alright gents and gentesses -

Have another of my quarterly updates here

If you're looking for profit-porn I must tell you you will be disappointed though lol.


Synopsis

This was our worst quarter in a couple years, due to me being highly distracted

Partly this was a month-long trip with my wife and kiddo to Texas + Florida, but mostly it was because I fell down the crypto rabbit hole and didn't emerge until recently lol.

Starting in February and March actually I just began being obsessed with it...

At first, I knew just a little (I had basically hodled a bit of Bitcoin for a few years but that was it), and I was watching a lot of Digital Asset News/Alex Becker/JRNY Crypto type stuff, and really focusing on the whole "Altcoin go up/Altcoin go down" stuff.

I quickly realized though that that is a horrible way to try to make money, and found- with amazement- the emergence of defi and smart-contract based yield, which only really began in 2020, and which, in my opinion, is almost a bigger revolution than the original advent of blockchain technology itself.

So for the last few months I have spent the vast majority of my time delving insanely deep into that space, like Gandalf in the bowels of Minas Tirith's ancient libraries, reading whitepaper after whitepapers, and docs section after docs section, and navigating the deepest recesses of frog-avatar crypto-twitter in search of alpha.

Eventually though (a couple weeks ago) my obsession started to subside, and my obsession with native ads has re-emerged.

As you will see below, my results these last two months have been dismal, and I actually made more money yield farming on these defi protocols than I did in natives... HOWEVER... while I still believe crypto is an insane once in a lifetime opportunity, I think digital marketing represents even greater potential to make large amounts of money over the next 1-5 years.

Best case scenario in yield farming is maybe 50-100% per year yield on principle if doing it in a sustainable fashion, whereas in media-buying/affiliate marketing one can make probably 5-10 times principle in a good year (or more if you use credit cards/lines of credit/partnerships/or have super-fast affiliate payouts).

So, my plan going forward is to devote 95% of my time to media-buying/affiliate marketing, but tend to my yield farms for a couple hours once every four days or so, and primarily only farm more well-established protocols like Sushiswap, Quickswap, Curve, etc, rather than full-on degen farms/new stuff/etc.

(more on future media-buying/affiliate plans below)


Quarterly Results By Month

April:
104 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
27 of them were in the green overall
77 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was a lead-gen listicle on Outbrain at 6.6k profit.
Worst campaign was a different version of that same listicle on Outbrain with -0.8k loss.
We were in the green 27/30 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 23.3% of our "Best month ever" on natives.


May:
42 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
21 of them were in the green overall
21 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was that same lead-gen listicle on Outbrain at 4.3k profit.
Worst campaign was a different version of that same listicle but on Taboola, with -1.7k loss.
We were in the green 26/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 12.2% of our "Best month ever" on natives.


June:
55 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
22 of them were in the green overall
33 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was a Taboola single offer lead-gen campaign at 2.4k profit.
Worst campaign was a different lead-gen listicle on Taboola, with -1.8k loss.
We were in the green 18/30 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was a tiny fraction of our "Best month ever" on natives.


Conclusions/Lessons Learned

First lesson was obviously not to get totally distracted from your craft... however, I wouldn't change that, as I'm immeasurably glad I fell down the crypto rabbit hole now. I will be shocked if crypto doesn't at least hit equal market cap to gold eventually, which would be about an 8x rise compared to now, so between the opportunity to yield farm plus that 8x upside, I think crypto is an insane opportunity and I'm glad I am now fully participating in it.

With that said, I think "internet marketing" or whatever you want to call it is an ever bigger opportunity for those of us who invest the insane time+effort it takes to master it.

Indeed, I think its likely that 99% of all the millionaires/billionaires in the Milennial Generation will have made their wealth either through IM or crypto.

With IM, this last quarter has really demonstrated just to what extent your success in media-buying/affiliate marketing is based on momentum.

Even though April was when I was most distracted by crypto/travel, it was still a good month, because I was seeing the fruits of my labors from 2-4 months previous. Whereas even though the latter half of June I was fully back in the game all day/everyday on natives, my momentum had slipped so much that I was still seeing very little green.

I've also come to the realization, partly through the above, and partly through the EXTREMELY good '7 Figure Entrepreneurs Podcast' on YouTube, that the main metrics of success in this paid AM game are Total Campaigns Started/Average Loss Per Failed Campaign.

To wit, I do WAY better when I'm starting tons of campaigns and failing on 80% of them, than when I'm only working on a few big campaigns and allowing myself to go deep into the red on them when they're not working. You just gotta try TONS of campaigns (though picking offers smartly of course) and kill them super quickly if they don't work.

You also gotta really aggressively put yourself out there to find good offers and good people (affiliate networks) to work with.

You also gotta try lots of traffic sources, and lots of geo's, etc.

In that vein, my goal for the next two quarters is to work like CRAZY on natives, start tons of campaigns, kill the losers quickly, and beat out my all-time most profitable month up to now.

My other goal is to finally attempt Facebook. That same podcast I mentioned above has really opened my eyes to what's possible with facebook, as the two hosts of it are making like 6 figure profits some months running the exact stuff I'm running on native but on Facebook.

I'm sure its not that easy, but if the rewards for success are that great, I think it would be foolish of me not to attempt it, especially as- it seems- renting agency accounts is becoming a bigger and bigger thing, minimizing the effect of insane account-banning Zuckery type issues. So watch out for that in the future too!

Again though, primarily, I am doubling down on natives.

I am going to go to war every day, and work harder than I ever have before, with the goal of amassing insane profits.

Carthago delenda est.


07-02-2021 03:00 AM #32 ScottyG (Senior Member)

I had no idea you had this insane follow along. Wow.

Amazing content and huge insight. Love it man!


07-02-2021 07:19 PM #33 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Thanks man, yes I started it right when I joined STM in fall 2019 and have been updating it every quarter since


07-03-2021 08:20 AM #34 jaybot (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by jack_l View Post
Carthago delenda est.
Only on STM will you get Latin lessons from Ancient Rome like this.

To the mattresses!


07-04-2021 12:19 AM #35 vortex (Senior Moderator)

To wit, I do WAY better when I'm starting tons of campaigns and failing on 80% of them, than when I'm only working on a few big campaigns and allowing myself to go deep into the red on them when they're not working. You just gotta try TONS of campaigns (though picking offers smartly of course) and kill them super quickly if they don't work.
We really should shorten this into a motto! Amen!

Looking forward to seeing you double down on your native success - and to brave the Facebook beast!

Thanks so much for the update!



Amy


07-05-2021 06:20 AM #36 eurosen (AMC Alumnus)

Great to see that you are still at it Jack!

The same happened to me, I went deep down the crypto rabbit hole over the past months and my work has suffered from it.

I also took some time off to spend with my wife and I woke up this morning and decided to switch my focus from crypto back to affiliate marketing.

Funny that pretty much the first thing I read this morning was your post.

I am with you on this one! I am going to go to war every day, and work harder than I ever have before, with the goal of amassing insane profits.

Good luck!


07-06-2021 12:19 AM #37 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
We really should shorten this into a motto! Amen!
I just wanted to quote exactly the same part of the post, but then realized you already did that

Excellent update jack_I, thanks for sharing this with us!

Crypto is easy to get obsessed with, I did the same during the previous bullrun, then got my fingers burned a bit but I'm still in to some extent.


10-15-2021 02:09 AM #38 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Howdy everyone -

Back for another one of my quarterly updates

As you'll recall... on my last update I had had a horrible May+June due to falling down the crypto rabbit hole in March-May, but was going to dive back into natives insanely hard while still tending my yield farms on the side.

I was also going to finally try facebook...

The first goal (diving back into natives) I absolutely did, but re: the second one, I decided to dive into TikTok instead of Facebook (and started a separate follow-along for that).

So yeah... last three months have been TONS of offer testing and hard work on native and (to a lesser extent) TikTok.

I'm working as hard as I ever have in my life, and as hard as I was when I first stated natives 3 years ago, and since I know what I'm doing now I'm probably starting 10x the number of campaigns I was starting then.

Honestly though I'm still recapturing lost momentum from this spring... I was thinking there was maybe a 2-4 month lag but in reality I'd say its more like a 6 month lag... as, when I think about it, most of the most profitable campaigns/verticals we've run are ones where we started it and worked on it consistently and then about 6 months in everything clicked, or 6 months in I noticed that it had suddenly become really solid and then slammed on the gas budget-wise.

Our results for this quarter were much better than May and June, but still nowhere close to where I want them to be.

We also had our two most profitable campaigns/verticals get messed up because the main 'keystone' offer had cap reduced by 80% due to backend logistical issues...

And then, as I mentioned on the TikTok thread, we were having INSANE success in one vertical right off the bat but then TikTok denied the ads and disabled the account, and we've been working since then to get them to whitelist us to run the offer in question.

Anyway though... no excuses... all that kind of stuff is part of the game.

Just gotta keep working hard, testing tons of offers, building relationships, and mastering the craft.

In short, going to war every day and taking MASSIVE DAILY ACTION.

Here's the results by month for Q3:


July:
74 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend (this # would have been double this but I stopped running search-arb, so is actually WAY more non-search arb camps than we had in previous month)
35 of them were in the green overall
39 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a lead-gen listicle on Taboola at 6k profit.
Worst campaign was a software download on Outbrain with -1k loss.
We were in the green 31/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 28.4% of our "Best month ever" on natives (this sounds low but our 'Best Month Ever' was insanely good so its a tough bar to compete against - though I definitely plan on surpassing it!)


August:
92 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
45 of them were in the green overall
47 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a single-offer lead-gen campaign on Taboola at 4.1k profit.
Worst campaign was the mobile version of that same software download as last month, also on Outbrain, at -1.1k loss.
We were in the green 29/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 31.3% of our "Best month ever" on natives.


September:
95 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
47 of them were in the green overall
48 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a single-offer lead-gen campaign on Taboola at 2.4k profit.
Worst campaign was one of several sub-camps of a Clickbank health vsl offer on Outbrain, at -.7k loss.
We were in the green 20/30 days for the month (these darn Clickbank vsl's killed me this month... thought I was scaling a couple of them to the moon with some red along the way... but unfortunately never made it to the moon and got rekt trying to master them!).
Overall profit for the month was 17.7 of our "Best month ever" on natives. (reduced profits were due to testing INSANE amounts of new offers, so hopefully it will pay off later on)


So yeah... decent profits with tons of offers tested isn't too bad... really, really want to crack some high-volume offers though... we've done really well with consistent, low-volume lead-gen offers the last year, but its hard to really get to huge numbers like that, hence why we've been testing more ecom, more vsl's, etc...

On the flipside its WAY more expensive testing ecom and vsl's, so gotta be super purposeful about how you do it...



Finally... in case vendors/offer owners/AM's are reading this... here's what we are really looking for offer-wise right now:

-French lead-gen offers
-Canadian (English) lead-gen offers
-INTL Lead-Gen offers (stuff like security, hearing aids, etc)
-Non-English health vsl offers
-English vsl offers that can run on Taboola

If anyone has anything in those categories I'd love to talk more with you!



In closing, my STM brothers (+ my good friend Vortex)... the battle continues



10-15-2021 09:00 AM #39 Rhino (Senior Member)

Wow dude, how are you able to launch 90+ native ads campaign in a month? That's like 3 campaigns per day. From where do you even find so many offers/landing pages to promote? do you have a full time employee...who keeps searching offers for you on spy tools?

On the contrary, when i launch my native campaigns, first i have to get my landing page made, negotiate payment with my coder, wait for my manager to give me some cap, wait for revcontent to approve my ad. etc.etc. At the end, i am only able to launch 1 native campaign in 3/4 days...Which eventually doesn't works and then i have to repeat the whole process again. lol.

Last time you had mentioned about filipino freelancers, are they helping you....with your campaigns or you have full time employees in your office?

Quote Originally Posted by jack_l View Post
Howdy everyone -

Back for another one of my quarterly updates

As you'll recall... on my last update I had had a horrible May+June due to falling down the crypto rabbit hole in March-May, but was going to dive back into natives insanely hard while still tending my yield farms on the side.

I was also going to finally try facebook...

The first goal (diving back into natives) I absolutely did, but re: the second one, I decided to dive into TikTok instead of Facebook (and started a separate follow-along for that).

So yeah... last three months have been TONS of offer testing and hard work on native and (to a lesser extent) TikTok.

I'm working as hard as I ever have in my life, and as hard as I was when I first stated natives 3 years ago, and since I know what I'm doing now I'm probably starting 10x the number of campaigns I was starting then.

Honestly though I'm still recapturing lost momentum from this spring... I was thinking there was maybe a 2-4 month lag but in reality I'd say its more like a 6 month lag... as, when I think about it, most of the most profitable campaigns/verticals we've run are ones where we started it and worked on it consistently and then about 6 months in everything clicked, or 6 months in I noticed that it had suddenly become really solid and then slammed on the gas budget-wise.

Our results for this quarter were much better than May and June, but still nowhere close to where I want them to be.

We also had our two most profitable campaigns/verticals get messed up because the main 'keystone' offer had cap reduced by 80% due to backend logistical issues...

And then, as I mentioned on the TikTok thread, we were having INSANE success in one vertical right off the bat but then TikTok denied the ads and disabled the account, and we've been working since then to get them to whitelist us to run the offer in question.

Anyway though... no excuses... all that kind of stuff is part of the game.

Just gotta keep working hard, testing tons of offers, building relationships, and mastering the craft.

In short, going to war every day and taking MASSIVE DAILY ACTION.

Here's the results by month for Q3:


July:
74 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend (this # would have been double this but I stopped running search-arb, so is actually WAY more non-search arb camps than we had in previous month)
35 of them were in the green overall
39 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a lead-gen listicle on Taboola at 6k profit.
Worst campaign was a software download on Outbrain with -1k loss.
We were in the green 31/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 28.4% of our "Best month ever" on natives (this sounds low but our 'Best Month Ever' was insanely good so its a tough bar to compete against - though I definitely plan on surpassing it!)


August:
92 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
45 of them were in the green overall
47 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a single-offer lead-gen campaign on Taboola at 4.1k profit.
Worst campaign was the mobile version of that same software download as last month, also on Outbrain, at -1.1k loss.
We were in the green 29/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 31.3% of our "Best month ever" on natives.


September:
95 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
47 of them were in the green overall
48 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a single-offer lead-gen campaign on Taboola at 2.4k profit.
Worst campaign was one of several sub-camps of a Clickbank health vsl offer on Outbrain, at -.7k loss.
We were in the green 20/30 days for the month (these darn Clickbank vsl's killed me this month... thought I was scaling a couple of them to the moon with some red along the way... but unfortunately never made it to the moon and got rekt trying to master them!).
Overall profit for the month was 17.7 of our "Best month ever" on natives. (reduced profits were due to testing INSANE amounts of new offers, so hopefully it will pay off later on)


So yeah... decent profits with tons of offers tested isn't too bad... really, really want to crack some high-volume offers though... we've done really well with consistent, low-volume lead-gen offers the last year, but its hard to really get to huge numbers like that, hence why we've been testing more ecom, more vsl's, etc...

On the flipside its WAY more expensive testing ecom and vsl's, so gotta be super purposeful about how you do it...



Finally... in case vendors/offer owners/AM's are reading this... here's what we are really looking for offer-wise right now:

-French lead-gen offers
-Canadian (English) lead-gen offers
-INTL Lead-Gen offers (stuff like security, hearing aids, etc)
-Non-English health vsl offers
-English vsl offers that can run on Taboola

If anyone has anything in those categories I'd love to talk more with you!



In closing, my STM brothers (+ my good friend Vortex)... the battle continues



10-15-2021 01:21 PM #40 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by Rhino View Post
Wow dude, how are you able to launch 90+ native ads campaign in a month? That's like 3 campaigns per day. From where do you even find so many offers/landing pages to promote? do you have a full time employee...who keeps searching offers for you on spy tools?

On the contrary, when i launch my native campaigns, first i have to get my landing page made, negotiate payment with my coder, wait for my manager to give me some cap, wait for revcontent to approve my ad. etc.etc. At the end, i am only able to launch 1 native campaign in 3/4 days...Which eventually doesn't works and then i have to repeat the whole process again. lol.

Last time you had mentioned about filipino freelancers, are they helping you....with your campaigns or you have full time employees in your office?
Hey @Rhino! Thanks for asking man... its definitely a fascinating topic...

Right now we actually only have one fulltime Filipino and she's working on our content sites wholly right now...

I guess the answer would be:

1) I use Clickfunnels - I know it loads slower but when I split test it against super fast options it usually does just as well.. and it lets me iterate extremely, extremely fast... and lets me be super creative... usually the stuff I get to work has some kind of creative element to it... whether its quizzes or popups or whatever...
2) at this point we just have lots of old lp's sitting around we can re-use, so if I want to test x,y, or z thing I usually have a landing page already ready to go that just needs a slight tweak
3) when testing ecom products I always use the hosted advertorial rather than build my own... then IF I can get some traction with it I'll build my own... but for testing I prefer using their hosted one...

And then yeah as far as finding offers that's like 80% of the battle... but usually from looking through affiliate offers... spying on what other folks are running... building relationships here on STM... etc...

And then finally I should add that alot of those 95 camps we ran last month are various iterations of the same thing... like same offer different geo's... etc... so its not 95 totally different offers...

Like I said though its all about momentum... there's a few vendors/networks we've worked with for 3 years at this point... so its way smoother than when I first started and everything was new - all the offers, all the networks, all the people, etc...


10-18-2021 03:07 AM #41 jack_l (Veteran Member)

So I had some people ask about the content sites that I mentioned I was building in this thread about 15 months ago... so wanted to do an update on that too..


Content Site Update:

So about a year ago we built two content sites...

The first is a senior discount site.

Here's the traffic:



This one has had about 10k invested into it, mostly in terms of article writing + backlinks, and having our VA do some social media stuff.

It has produced about 13k in revenue, all of which has come from affiliate review articles of GiddyUp/DFO/Clickbank offers.



The second site is IM-oriented and was the more ambitious of the two.

Here is the traffic thus far:



So far it has had about 25k invested into it, mostly in article writing and some backlinks, and having our VA do some social media stuff.

It has only produced about 3k in revenue though... have tried lots of affiliate offers without much success, but now has Ezoic and is making about $300/month.


So yeah... majorly in red overall, but that's not factoring in the resale value of the sites, as I suppose they would sell for a modest amount each too, as they both have hundreds of unique articles and decent backlink profiles.

Original plan was to do some cross-polination by using them for campaigns in native ads (akin to Penny Hoarder if your familiar with them), haven't really done so yet though as I've struggled to find good affiliate offers for the IM one, and for the Senior one we haven't had much success with US senior listicles in the last year... definitely still planning on trying to use both within media-buying campaigns eventually though.

Over the winter I worked super hard on them but honestly I've kind of had them on the back burner lately... as I just really prefer media-buying vs SEO...

Still adding articles to them though and doing some link-building, so am hopeful they'll just slowly grow in the background and eventually achieve some success


10-18-2021 10:27 PM #42 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

I totally forgot that you were building some content sites too, doesn't look too bad at all, the traffic is rising so it should be just a matter of time for them to start making more.

May I as one thing? How do these search console results compare to actual traffic on the site (google analytics if you're using that)? I'm building something too so I'm trying to figure out how much accurate these figures are for others as they do not match the reality in my case at all


10-19-2021 12:56 AM #43 jeremie (Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
May I as one thing? How do these search console results compare to actual traffic on the site (google analytics if you're using that)? I'm building something too so I'm trying to figure out how much accurate these figures are for others as they do not match the reality in my case at all
Search console measures clicks from Google Search to the site. It is usually a bit higher than the amount of visits from Google Search in Analytics, as 1) it counts all clicks, including when it is the same visitors, and 2) sometimes the user goes back before the GA pixel fires. But this metric won't show the direct access, or the traffic from Bing / Yandex / social medias. So comparing overall traffic does not make lots of sense.

Both tools serve diffent purposes. Search Console is useful to check ranking and CTR by keyword, especially connected to ahref, to decide which page to focus SEO efforts on.


10-19-2021 01:06 AM #44 jeremie (Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by jack_l View Post
It has only produced about 3k in revenue though... have tried lots of affiliate offers without much success, but now has Ezoic and is making about $300/month.
Do you know if Ezoic accepts non English websites?


Quote Originally Posted by jack_l View Post
I suppose they would sell for a modest amount each too, as they both have hundreds of unique articles and decent backlink profiles.
I see most small sites sell between 30-40 x monthly revenue. A bit higher on the Finance / Nutra, and/or if the domain is a nice brandable.


10-19-2021 03:55 AM #45 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
I totally forgot that you were building some content sites too, doesn't look too bad at all, the traffic is rising so it should be just a matter of time for them to start making more.

May I as one thing? How do these search console results compare to actual traffic on the site (google analytics if you're using that)? I'm building something too so I'm trying to figure out how much accurate these figures are for others as they do not match the reality in my case at all
@matuloo @jeremie yeah, I think my google analytics numbers are usually a bit higher, but at this point 99% of the visits come from seo so I usually just check on google search console...

We did get linked to a couple times on twitter and got a lot of clicks, but that was about it other than seo...


10-19-2021 03:57 AM #46 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by jeremie View Post
Do you know if Ezoic accepts non English websites?




I see most small sites sell between 30-40 x monthly revenue. A bit higher on the Finance / Nutra, and/or if the domain is a nice brandable.

I believe so... they seem to be a pretty massive operation so I'd be shocked if they don't...

I heard a lot of bad stuff about them but so far has been fine for me (knock on wood)... definitely a behemoth corporation though for sure, but they do give you a rep to talk to even when you're doing tiny numbers like me...


Re: site value, yep, that matches what I see too...

From spending tons of time flipping through Flippa listings it appears to me that SEO traffic is by far the most valuable thing people look for in sites, since other forms of organic traffic aren't really 'trusted' as much.

And then the email list + social media accounts can add a lot of value too.


10-19-2021 10:07 AM #47 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by jeremie View Post
Search console measures clicks from Google Search to the site. It is usually a bit higher than the amount of visits from Google Search in Analytics, as 1) it counts all clicks, including when it is the same visitors, and 2) sometimes the user goes back before the GA pixel fires. But this metric won't show the direct access, or the traffic from Bing / Yandex / social medias. So comparing overall traffic does not make lots of sense.

Both tools serve diffent purposes. Search Console is useful to check ranking and CTR by keyword, especially connected to ahref, to decide which page to focus SEO efforts on.
Yes of course, I'm aware of this and not trying to compare the overall traffic. The thing is, I see way lower numbers in search console compared to the organic search traffic numbers in analytics so I was wondering whether its normal or there is some reason for this.


10-19-2021 11:32 AM #48 gunnar (Member)

Hi Matuloo,

for GSC http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com, https://domain.com and https://www.domain.com are 4 different domains. Do you have all redirects in place?
If not this could explain the lower numbers in search console.

cheers, gunnar


10-19-2021 08:46 PM #49 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by gunnar View Post
Hi Matuloo,

for GSC http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com, https://domain.com and https://www.domain.com are 4 different domains. Do you have all redirects in place?
If not this could explain the lower numbers in search console.

cheers, gunnar
All these 4 redirect to https://domain.com so I guess thats fine in terms of GSC, right?


10-20-2021 05:41 AM #50 gunnar (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
All these 4 redirect to https://domain.com so I guess thats fine in terms of GSC, right?
Yep, should be fine, than.


01-11-2022 11:59 PM #51 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Hey there friends -

Time for another one of my quarterly updates

I must confess that I have actually dramatically scaled back my media buying in order to focus on other business interests of mine that I am currently more passionate about.

As detailed throughout this thread, we have our hands in quite a few pies beyond media-buying, everything from real estate investments to small cap/venture capital gold/silver mining, other macro investments, a couple content websites, and a healthy obsession with on-chain defi/yield farming.

I won't explicitly state what area is currently taking up all my time and focus, but those of you who have followed this thread for a long time can probably guess

But yeah, I still think media-buying is a wonderful opportunity and have absolutely loved doing natives the last 3 years, but passions shift with time, and I've learned to let mine lead me where they will.

And with that said, I still intend on talking up a storm about all things digital marketing here on STM, so you'll be inundated with just as many of my lengthy posts as you normally are

But yeah, here are the stats from Q4 (way lower volume/profits than past quarters bc of the above):


October

121 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
44 of them were in the green overall
77 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a single-offer Canadian lead-gen campaign on Taboola at 5.1k profit.
Worst campaign was one of several sub-camps of a lead-gen listicle on Outbrain, at -.7k loss.
We were in the green 24/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 11.2% of our "Best month ever" on natives.



November

77 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
32 of them were in the green overall
45 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one of several sub-camps of a lead-gen listicle on Outbrain at 5.4k profit.
Worst campaign was one a new attempt at a French lead-gen Senior Listicle at -1.5k. (I worked crazy hard on this one and even had it professionally translated, had a bunch of good offers, and had a couple days in the green, but overall just could not make it work. One problem was that while the clicks were way cheaper the payouts were also way less, and then I just couldn't quite get the CVR as high as on my lead-gen listicles from other geo's).
We were in the green 24/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 6.9% of our "Best month ever" on natives.



December

26 campaigns or "sub-campaigns" that got some level of spend
16 of them were in the green overall
10 of them were in the red overall
The most profitable campaign was one was the same CA lead-gen camp from October, at 1.5k profit on Taboola.
Worst campaign was one of several sub-camps of a lead-gen listicle on Taboola, at -.6k loss.
We were in the green 27/31 days for the month.
Overall profit for the month was 11.7% of our "Best month ever" on natives.


So yeah, natives have been a tremendous blessing for me and my family, and I've generated meaningful income and wealth from them the last three years (nothing insane, but more than most doctors make per year so definitely significant), however, I do not have the ambition to build a big media-buying company or network like some of my close friends and colleagues in the space are doing or have done.

My ambitions have always been to reach a point where I could focus primarily on a) investing, and b) writing + other creative endeavors.

As a result, I'm going to focus on some other areas of the business world more within the framework of (a), as I think I can generate more income from doing that then I can as a solo media-buyer, since I don't have the desire to grow into a larger media-buying outfit.

Media-buying is a relatively mature industry at this point, however I definitely still think its one of the best areas young, hungry dudes can get into, as the pace at which it moves and the creativity required will- I think- always benefit smart, creative individuals or small teams and act as a barrier to large corporations succeeding in the space.

I will continue to update this thread periodically, and I am unbelievably appreciative of all of you who have followed it these last three years. STM is truly a treasure, and I am extremely grateful I joined it - and look forward to hanging out on here with you all long into the future!


01-12-2022 02:25 AM #52 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Hi @jack_l it's always a blessing when a person lets himself follow his passions. Media buying / paid traffic can be incredibly exciting, but it must be nice to diversify into building more long-term assets too after a while.


And with that said, I still intend on talking up a storm about all things digital marketing here on STM, so you'll be inundated with just as many of my lengthy posts as you normally are
That's amazing to hear! You've become one of the top-thanked members on this forum. Inundate away pleeeeease!

All the best with your various endeavors my good friend!



Amy


01-12-2022 11:57 AM #53 matuloo (Legendary Moderator)

Thanks for the update Jack!

I can relate to so many parts of it, somehow I feel we do look at a good bunch of things in the same way.... for example the absence of ambition to build a large company or network, nothing for me either

STM is truly a treasure, and I am extremely grateful I joined it - and look forward to hanging out on here with you all long into the future!
Thanks! We are very glad that we have you here with us.


01-18-2022 07:35 PM #54 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Hi @jack_l it's always a blessing when a person lets himself follow his passions. Media buying / paid traffic can be incredibly exciting, but it must be nice to diversify into building more long-term assets too after a while.




That's amazing to hear! You've become one of the top-thanked members on this forum. Inundate away pleeeeease!

All the best with your various endeavors my good friend!



Amy
Thank you Amy - I appreciate it tremendously!

And yes - am honored that's the case! Literally cannot say enough good things about STM


01-18-2022 07:39 PM #55 jack_l (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by matuloo View Post
Thanks for the update Jack!

I can relate to so many parts of it, somehow I feel we do look at a good bunch of things in the same way.... for example the absence of ambition to build a large company or network, nothing for me either



Thanks! We are very glad that we have you here with us.
Yep for sure...

Maybe if I had gotten into digital marketing earlier, like at age 18 or 20, I would have tried to build something big, but at 36, I want everything I do the rest of my life to be 'legacy' stuff that lives on after I die (art, writing, having children, politics, etc)...

Some people love building companies though so more power to them


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