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40 days challenge accepted (18)

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Hello everyone!

This is my first post in STM, even though I've stalked posts for a while now

It's October, and it's dark and getting colder here in Nordic. I am utterly fed up with the seasonal affective disorder, and I would love to enjoy the sunlight and eat exotic food whenever I want. To be honest, I'm not even looking for riches, just freedom to travel whenever I like. Affiliate marketing would allow me to earn enough to live a comfortable life anywhere in the world. I know its bit cliche, but this is why I signed up for this journey.

Here is what I've done so far (15.Oct):
-Register to Clickdealer & Mobidea
-Register & added funds to Adcash, Propellerads, PopAds
-Setup Funnelflux (Self-hosted)
-Register domain for tracker & landing pages
-Register to Adplexity
-Write a follow along for help and motivation

To do list:
-Get Zeropark accepted, they have more strict restrictions for newbies?
-Get accepted to more Affiliate networks
-Find 5-10 offers to test

Notes:
I've decided to skip direct linking because of low CR and I have Adplexity.

Questions:
Nothing so far, newbie tutorial and STM have been really helpful

I will try to update this 2-3 times a week. Any comments or ideas are appreciated

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Good Luck for your journey, bruster!

Don't forget to checkout this follow-along - https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...g-(with-Binom)
This is one of the best and detailed follow along on STM. Most of your coming questions and what to do next is already covered there and checkout this great pop ups success follow along too - https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...me-POP-Working



LeadCloak

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Your trafficsource are a good choice although I wouldn't recommend to start with Adcash.
For testing the other sources are better because of their bid models.

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Day 2. Here is what I've done after work (16.Oct):
-Got approved to YepAds
-Ripped two Italian landing pages
-Found only three viable offers to test
-Launched my first campaign with PropellerAds


To do list:
-Find more offers to test
-Launch two or more new offers
-Read follow-alongs


Notes:
I've launched my first campaign with $0.5 bid and $10 budget.
Used two landers, one is very basic HTML with simple CTA and other was more "interactive" with questions before presenting CTA:

The one with simple CTA had 3% CTR, and no conversions. Maybe I should stick to just simple ones first


Questions:
Should I just test a lot of offers with a single ripped landing page before split-testing landers? Or should I test 2-5 landers straight away? Right now I'm just looking for offers to get my first conversion.


Any comments or ideas are appreciated

Thank you!

Great Follow-alongs! Definitely subsribed


Thanks for the tip! I've started with PropellerAds as recommended by Vortex. Looking good so far.

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Day 3 (17.Oct)
-Properly go through days 1-17 of The 40-Day Newbie Tutorial
-Read a bunch of other STM threads and follow-alongs
-Slow day


Day 4 (18.Oct)
-Decided to stick to the tutorial and launch a direct-link campaign which resulted in first two conversions!


With $8.78 Adspend I returned two signups with $0.7 payout each! -84% ROI.

Notes:
-Unfortunately, the tracker was not set up properly so FunnelFlux did not record the conversion. Fixed.
-Used SmartCPM instead of CPM bidding. Definitely got way more traffic.

Day 5 (19.Oct)
-Did bunch of network applications in hopes for more offers
-Launched one additional direct-link campaign. Did not return any conversions, but the previous one returned one more conversion.


-92.6% ROI and -100% ROI


Notes:
-This time Postback URL worked, so it was fired in FunnelFLux.
-Started a campaign journal


To do list:
-Read The 40-Day Newbie Tutorial and other posts
-Try to apply Vortex's "Kill-Whitelist" into campaigns and try to figure out how optimization works

P.s. Super excited about first conversions

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A good beginning for sure! Sorry for arriving late!

The CTR is not very important most of the time - it's CR that matters. Although, if the CTR is REALLY so low such that it would require an impossibly-high CR in order for the campaign to turn a profit, then you can cut a lander based on CTR. Mostly though I would recommend cutting landers based on comparison with other landers using the stats calculator:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Banners-Part-1

Simple or complex - DO include some of the really popular landers you're seeing a lot in Adplexity, especially ones that have "received most traffic". In the beginning when you don't have ANY benchmark in terms of offers or landers, you NEED to use something with a great track record. Otherwise, you may not even be able to generate conversions - and without conversions you can't test anything - neither offers nor landers.

As for your suggestion of testing multiple offers with a single lander first: The thought is good - trying to keep things as simple as possible in the beginning. But what if the lander you happen to be using, doesn't convert at all for some reason? It may not be persuasive enough, or it may not be functioning correctly due to a mistake in the coding, or it may have sneaky redirects that you didn't catch, that's stealing a good portion of your visitors...etc. etc. etc.

In that case, you'd be testing offer after offer after offer, wondering why none of them are profitable, when it's your LANDER that's the underlying issue!

In order for a good lander to convert, you need a good offer. And in order for a good offer to convert, you need a good lander. In the beginning you have neither, so you're in a catch-22 situation. That's why you need to use 1)popular landers on Adplexity and 2)AM-recommended offers - to establish a benchmark.

All you need to do is:

-Rip around 5 popular landers that have received a lot of traffic, and make sure to fix them up so that they function correctly, display well on popular devices and browsers, and load fast.

-Get a few AM-recommended offers, or offers with positive indicators on Adplexity (for example lots of traffic was run over a few days), to run with the landers.

-Start a campaign with those landers and offers. Identify an offer that seems to be converting decently (first offer to reach 2 conversions), then run just that offer and use the conversions to cut landers down to a winner using the stats calculator.

I always recommend to test landers first, because at any one point in time there would usually only be a few popular types of landers being run by affiliates, so it would be easy to find a "winner" that performs reasonably well. So - get the easy task out of the way, then focus on testing offers.

-Use the winning lander to test more offers, and hopefully then be able to optimize a campaign to profitability using the best offer+lander combo.

-Testing more landers would also be highly-recommended, either by innovating on the winning lander to create lander variations, or coming up with completely original lander designs on your own (just keep in mind though that unless you can keep them out of spy tools, they'll be ripped in a heartbeat, so creating variations to stay under the radar may be better in you don't know how to keep landers out of spy tools).


Good for you! I'm rewriting the tutorial at the moment and recommending to use SmartCPM - which didn't exist when I wrote the original 40-day tutorial.


This is just a tool to determine whether your campaign has reached a point where keeping it running WITHOUT CHANGING ANYTHING would result in profits or losses in the long run.

But since we're always optimizing a campaign by testing offers and landers and cutting placements etc. - that actually isn't a very useful tool.

I suggested to use it in the tutorial only for direct-linked campaigns, because when no landers are used, the amount of optimization that can be achieved is more limited. Also, that tool is only meant to prevent newbies from wasting too much money on testing any one offer - if the tool says "KILL", it usually means things are very hopeless. An experienced affiliate though would know to stop running something even before that point is reached.

So that tool is to identify the point of hopelessness and not really useful for much more when it comes to pop. You probably don't need to figure out how it works - proceeding to learn how to use landers would be a lot better use of your time IMO!


Congrats! That was partially why I recommended direct-linking - to allow a new affiliate to set up their first campaign quickly and easily and HOPEFULLY start seeing some conversions. This makes things "real" for you, and the excitement will help you to bear with the learning coding and fixing up landers portion of the tutorial - which takes more time and patience for sure.

Looking forward to seeing further progress!



Amy

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Day 6 (20.Oct)
-More direct-linking with few low-payout offers. Got 14 conversions and -91% ROI.
-Finished more readings up to until "Day 21: Setting Up Hosting and CDN"



Notes:
Some offers had internal prelanders with surveys, so be cautious so you don't bombard with more lander surveys


Day 7 (21.Oct)
-Spent a whole day setting up servers.
-Bought a separate domain for Landers and Tracking.
-No more direct linking campaigns running at this point.

Now my backend setups are:
-FunnelFlux with Vultr VPS (2 CPU), and CDN, DNS, SSL with CloudFlare. Extremely easy DIY install with the tutorial: http://docs.funnelflux.com/technical...vps-from-vultr
-Lander Hosting with Amazon AWS. Server: S3, CDN: CloudFront, DNS: Route 53, SSL: Certificate Manager. Could not get NS1 from the tutorial to work properly, and I feel like working with just one service provider is less hassle.

Notes:
-Prepare to spend some time setting these up, especially Amazon AWS.


Day 8 (22.Oct)
-Introduction to landing pages. Wow, there was a lot to read and learn,! Up until this point, everything was straightforward and easy to follow.
-Went through Codeacademy courses: HTML, CSS.

Notes:
-JavaScript and JQuery definitely take more time and will be learning them throughout the week. Also, w3school is very helpful to reflect the learnings from Codeacademy.


Day 9 (23.Oct)
-Slow day, other life duties
-I've been working late and learning so with lack of sleep, I totally messed up my sleeping habits (Slept a lot).
-With the leftover time of the day, I spent the time to dive deep into Adplexity functions and possibilities.

Heres three presets I like to use for spying:



Notes:
-Getting better with Adplexity, but I'm nowhere near exploiting all the possibilities available yet.


To do list:
-JavaScript and JQuery work in progress...
-I've got a bunch of potential offers which I'd like to test this week with landers.
-So all in all, this weeks agenda: Coding and working with landers. There is definitely a lot to learn and I can see why cutting corners is not an option.


31 Days to go

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I might have gone too far ahead with launching campaigns with landers before properly reading your tutorial about landers. Many of the mistakes could've been avoided with patience, and I also see why you recommended direct-linking first.


Understood. I've got a bunch of potential offers which I'd like to test this week, these were recommended by AM. But I'm putting finding a good lander as a priority of the week!


Thanks for summing-up! Going to follow this recommendation moving forward.
Some popular landers have lots of scripts that need to be reviewed and/or fixed. Its definitely slowing me down as I have next to none JavaScript and JQuery skills, need to fix that ASAP.


Thank you Amy so much for helping a newbie, its been years I had this much desire to win!

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Please try to tend to your health more. Coincidentally I just had the same experience - was so tired, I slept for 12 hours straight, got up to eat lunch, then went back to sleep again until the evening.

Going into sleep debt isn't good - when the body asks you to pay up, try to comply. Otherwise, sooner or later, it will settle the score in other ways - getting sick for example.


I like your presets!


If you like, we could fix one up together - simply put the files into pastebin or similar and put the pastebin links in here.


You're very welcome! This is what your STM subscription is for. Thank YOU so much for being a part of this community!



Amy

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Day 10 (24.Oct)
Traveling to Berlin. Procrastinating as I wasn't quick enough to learn Javascript and JQuery in order to "sufficiently" fix landers.


Day 11 (25.Oct)
-New day. Sent a screenshot of contents of JQuery.min file to a fellow STM member, wondering how to "fix" it. Turns out the file can be deleted, and there is an official hosted library for JQuery. I felt like a dumbass for trying to "fix" the JQuery file.
After this revelation, fixing landers wasn't that difficult after all and everything started to make sense to me


Day 12 (26.Oct)
-Friday. Pulled 2 Thai landers from Adplexity. A little bit slow and careful at the beginning, but managed to launch the campaign with two landers till called the day. Was just happy to finally start testing landers.


Day 13 (27.Oct)
-The Thai offer pulled 17 conversions at -80% ROI



Excited about first conversions using a lander! Decided to get more landers

Day 14 (28.Oct)
-Killed the TH campaign after $18.21. CR has gone down overnight and none of the placements was looking promising.
-Got 4 Indonesian iPhone/Samsung offers. Again found and fixed 2 landers, and placed them to 4 offer rotation. Less than 2 hours after launching them, I get an email from the network informing 3 of the offers have been taken down, no smart-links to replace them meanwhile
-No alternative & potential ID offers found, decided to try something else. Calling it a day

Day 15 (29.Oct)
-Sunday, relax with family.

Day 16 (30.Oct)
-Found two potential Jordan offers. Decided to launch them, so I found 2 familiar and 2 "new" landers I've never seen. After spending some time "fixing" Arabic landers, I launch 4 lander & 2 offer test campaign.
After 1000-2000 clicks lander, my site gets red "Warning: Deceptive site ahead!" and whole domain got blacklisted by Google!

Also got an email from Propeller Ads:

I almost drop off my chair. I was glad I didn't get banned from PropellerAds, as I probably would get an automatic ban from ZeroPark.

Rest of the day I spent time investigating the situation. Turns out one of the landers had a shady piece of code, that I wasn't aware of. This is where my non-existing coding skills got me into trouble.
Anyways, I followed the Goodfella's instruction here to get out of the blacklist: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post352139
At this stage, I'm very glad I had another domain ready to roll, as Google's manual review can take days!

Notes:
Go through the lander codes properly so you won't get banned. Malware is no joke :/


Day 17 (31.Oct)
-Leaving the yesterday behind, and decided to launch a Korean Campaign. This time I used two landers and used the extra time to make sure there weren't any suspicious scripts.
-After sending about 25k visitors to each lander, I decided to send all the visitors to lander 2 (CTR was 2-3x higher and CR was 50% higher):




Which was an excellent decision because before heading to sleep I found my first GREEN campaign:




Super excited!


Question:
How would you increase the ROI at this point?


23 Days to go

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Been better with this now, and results have been better as well Hope you're well



After knowing that I don't need to touch the JQuery.min file, everything has been smoother. Also getting faster with fixing landers. However, I could've used some help to see what script/line of code caused Google to blacklist my domain earlier, but I've already deleted the lander from my computer and hosting sites.

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OMG was THAT what was holding you up?

I was discussing the same thing with another member in their follow-along!

Basically if the file is from a public library, it will have a file and version name at the top.

Even when it doesn't have one at the top, you can try your luck by copying one line and doing a search for it on google - it still may be a library file.

And then of course, sometimes the functions in the file isn't even used by the lander. If you delete it and click around the lander and everything still works, then you know.


Very nice!


Valuable first campaign experiences! Next time, please feel free to post detailed stats (offers, landers, placements, OSs, browsers, devices etc.) so we can look at the campaign in greater detail.


Mega important!


This is a common problem - and a very frustrating one. And I wished I had a solution.

This is yet another reason why I advise newbies that pop should just be a learning tool. It's the easiest to learn, and you can learn a lot from it, and yes you can make money, but if you put the same amount of effort on another traffic type, you can make more profits with less headache. Something to keep in mind for the future.


You need to use stats tools to tell you whether a split-test has reached statistical significance or not.



90% "probability of being best" is the minimum you need to reach before cutting the inferior(s).

But don't go back and rerun the test this time - for future reference though, it would be a good idea to wait until you reach at least 90%. I wait until 95%. I rarely get so anal about accuracy as it sacrifices efficiency, but split-testing of landers and offers is something that can make/break a campaign.


YAY!! That's AWESOME! Congratulations on reaching green so fast!!

There are only 2 major ways of increasing ROI:

-Split-test more landers and/or offers (especially more offers) to find better-performers.

-Stop targeting traffic segments that have low ROI (by cutting placements etc. etc.)

Also keep in mind that ROI isn't what you're aiming to maximize - it's PROFITS.

Please post some stats and let's take a look! Placement stats, OS stats, browser stats - anything you think is worth taking a look at.

Good job!!



Amy

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Short update!

I haven't updated for a couple weeks as I've been abroad and working on personal stuff. However, I've been launching new campaigns, but nothing special has been happening since.

My first "Green" day on 31st of October turned Red by end of the day and died slowly on following days. I tried to relaunch the same campaign next week but did not get similar results.

The results of my first 36 days of Affiliate Marketing:





I've been participating in a 20hour hackathon project and other not so interesting events, and because of that, there have been some zero traffic days.

Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the results of the first month. 498 conversions, $134 revenue, $255 spend, -$121 profits, and -47% ROI.

Almost 500 conversions definitely motivate me to test new lander/offers and push harder. The trend is steering upwards.


Day 36-37 (20-21.Nov)

Before this day, I've been only launching single-opt-in sweepstakes (99% of the impressions), and after some experience and ~500 SOI conversions, I decided to move to MT flow for higher payouts.

The first MT flow campaign turns out to be promising (you never know). Yesterday I got 4 conversions with $0.58 spend and 341% ROI. This morning I got 4 conversions as well with 0.29 ads spend!



Currently, I'm still split-testing 4 landers, and each of them has converted twice! The problem is that I'm not getting enough traffic at $1 bid.
Just increased my bid to $1.5 and now waiting for more data coming in.
Will update soon...

3 Days to go on 40-days challenge

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Yup, that was it! Definitely gotten faster with fixing landers
Also found some landers with Hexadecimal Codes included, decided not to even try to fix them.



This was one of the landers where was Hexadecimal Codes included. As a newbie, I had no idea how to decode and fix them. The great news is that I've already gotten a decent database of landers so I can just use the landers I know that are clean.


Ohh I remember this one! Should've used that tool. I was so overwhelmed by information overload that I didn't know/remember what to do when I actually had to act!
I'm following and reading your 2018-2019 tutorial! Have to read this again


Thanks! (even though it turned red by end of the day )

I've already killed this campaign, but I saved the stats as I switched to Binom.
The majority of the conversions were coming from one placement. After experimenting with various ideas and that single converting placement went RED as well I decided to kill the campaign and move on.

Placements:


Browsers:


OS:


In this campaign, I only blacklisted placements with 0 conversions & 2x payout at loss AND/OR placements with 4x payout at loss. Correct me if I did something wrong or any other improvement tips?

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Update!

Raised gradually my bid from $1.0 -> $1.5 -> $2.0 -> $2.5 over the day
Still not getting as much traffic as I'd like to...





was split testing 4 landers, killed one of the landers and waiting for more data coming in.



Expeting to get better results as Lander C is the only lander with negative ROI

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40-days update!

The results of the 40-day challenge:






Campaign update!

After the $2.5 bid, I raised to $3 bid and started to get tons of bad publishers.
That day ends up -35% ROI, but I got lots of data so I could cut bad placements and also found a winning landing page.



By slowly cutting out bad placements, I managed to get from -35% -> -19% -> -14% to +25% ROI!



My first $5 day


THANK YOU, Amy, for the 40-day tutorial. I do consider this challenge as a success! Next goal: a $xx/day


Will keep updating the follow-along, but not as frequently.

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Update!

Ok, I achieved my goal sooner than I expected:



My first $1x day!

Next goal: a $5x/day

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All newbies can expect to lose money in the beginning while learning the ropes - so -47% ROI is certainly a feat!


Have you checked with your AM to make sure it wasn't because of anything wrong with the offer?

And have you checked to see if your lander domain was blocked by google? (Unfortunately, it seems to have become a frequent occurrence.)

And for future reference, here are some other things you can try when campaign performance plummets:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...formance-dives

The stats looked really promising! Practically all placements that have converted, are in the green. I would give it another chance if I were you!


In the optimization lessons for direct-linked campaigns, I gave a very conservative method of cutting, because some of the geos I suggested had little traffic volume. Plus, I didn't want to go into the method of blacklisting aggressively and then retesting later on, because I didn't want to make the tutorial too complicated.

I've decided to change that in the new version of the tutorial, because newbies will need every tip I can think of to succeed - this is why the new version is more complicated than the last version. As you've found out for yourself already, this game has become competitive, and babying newbies won't get them anywhere.

So here's the "new" approach: Try to target geos that aren't super-small (basically if you can't get at LEAST 3-5k+ impressions/day, don't bother), and cut placements that are in loss by 2x payout. For bigger geos that have a lot of traffic volume, cut aggressively in the beginning to minimize losses - at 1x loss or even 0.5x loss for the big geos - and after you've found a promising offer+lander combo, retest some of the bigger placements you've blacklisted - because they may be profitable then (with a better offer+lander combo).

Here are more details related to the retesting process:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post358386

Basically try to get profitable first, then retest the biggest blacklisted placements in batches to try to increase profitable traffic, without cutting into profits too much.

The key here is to only retest the biggest placements. Pop is not about being accurate in most cases - it's about being efficient. Extensive testing at as low a budget as possible + picking promising gems to optimize + not too much optimization required to get green + scaling as quickly to as many networks as possible is the formula.


It may be good to just leave it running to collect more conversions while you start other campaigns.

But if you're REALLY eager to finish split-testing landers, you CAN just jack up the bid until you get lots of volume (of course it will cost you).

One question to keep in mind though is: Is the traffic volume available enough to make decent profits on? If you're having to bid sky-high just to get enough volume, then it may be difficult to find an offer+lander combo that converts well enough to result in profits. But don't make a decision based on just the traffic volume available at the current traffic source - if there are several networks you can scale the campaign to later (if it becomes green), and they jointly have lots of traffic available, then it may be worth it to do more testing to "crack" that geo (or carrier etc. - whatever it is your're targeting).


NOTHING makes me happier than see newbies go from x/day to xx/day to xxx/day to xxxx/day and more!

Congratulations!! And know that you're capable of going a LOT further - sky's the limit in this business for those that are willing to test and innovate and persist.


Next, some advice:

-Now that you have the optimization process down, next time try to target geos that have more traffic volume.

-Focus more on testing landers and offers FIRST, so that you can make MORE Of the total traffic profitable, before focusing on cutting unprofitable segments (including placements; not to say "don't cut placements while testing landers and offers", but try to focus on testing first, then cutting, and remember - you can always retest the biggest placements once you have a promising lander+offer combo).

-It has become harder to make major profits from pop - consistent xxx/day is still not too hard, but consistent xxxx/day is no longer easy. Pop gave you the low-barrier to entry you needed, and it has become a familiar traffic type, but DO consider expanding into Native when you're ready and if you have the required capital - Revcontent is newbie-friendly so would be a good place to start.

-Alternatively, FB or Adwords are both great sources to play in - those aren't going ANYWHERE anytime soon. So if you get even one of them figured out, you'll be able to make profits for a long time to come.


I'm very happy to see that your dedication is starting to show positive results! Now that you're at xx/day, xxx/day is likely just around the corner. Please DO report back when you reach that milestone!

Lastly - thanks so much for having started this follow-along and updating it so diligently!

All the best!



Amy

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