What Does It REALLY Take (14)
Hi, I feel like giving AM up. I've done 10+ campaigns with 0 conversions (actually had one smartlink w 7 conversions but literally cents in revenue which is weird). I can't seem to find a good roadmap to this and feel like there are a lot of empty words spoken - no one really says anything. So, can someone please enlighten me on what's working even just working verticals. (cuz even with verticals only people always say, "Oh, just test it to find out." Which is a good general advice, but obviously there has to be at least something that is working in the market rn)
I feel like doing free traffic (Pinterest comes to my mind) instead and building an "asset" that'll last for a long time vs. always finding the gold (with very high chance of not even breaking even despite spending 4-figures).
Any actionable is extremely-greatly appreciated! Thanks 
)
Hey man-
Here's my thoughts:
-10 campaigns isn't that many... especially if you are doing 1 or 2 key things wrong its very possible to do that many campaigns and not make any conversions. You only have two posts on here so hard to tell what all you are doing. I looked at your other post and it looks like you are using Bing.
I tried Bing too and spent about 500$ and never made a conversion, so I feel your pain. Plus I got my account banned (I believe for using a VPN which I didn't even purposefully do I just had it on because I had been using one generally).
With that said though there's other folks who kill with Bing, so its not that there's something wrong with it, you and I both might have just done a few things wrong.
I just moved on from there, to Youtube ads, then to MGID, now Revcontent. I massively prefer Natives over PPC, but that's just my personality, there's no way to tell what's the best fit for you or what you might be best at.
-Next, this is not something that's easy to do by any means. You need to quit thinking of it in terms of "I am doing internet marketing because I want to succeed and get X,Y,Z results", and think of it in terms of "I am pursuing internet marketing because pursuing it is the right thing to do, because I'm committed to being an exceptional person and building wealth and challenging myself and I'm going to do that no matter what results I get".
Its kind of like game. If you try to hit on a girl while in the frame of mind of "I'm hitting on her because I really want it to work out with her specifically and her and I specifically to get together" your frame is wrong and you're gonna be all awkward and nervous. You gotta think of it as "I'm hitting on her because I'm a stud and I hit on lots of girls and lots of girls dig me and I'm gonna keep hitting on girls no matter how this specific one responds". (sorry for the crude analogy!)
In other words, if you died three years from now, wouldn't you want to have pursued IM even to failure rather than giving up? You are trying to do something that only 1 out of 10,000 people will ever accomplish, and success is only going to come from tons of blood, sweat, and tears.
I feel like I am uniquely well-positioned for this: I have made six figures in other businesses I've started, I have lots of experience with creative digital endeavors, I have enough funds to buy all the educational products I want and experiment with traffic quite a bit, etc, and I STILL have had an insanely tough time with it. Its coming together for me now and I have the experience to ignore the doubts that creep in and all that stuff, but I remember with the first business I started I felt just like you do and was just utterly filled with frustration from wanting it to work but it not working ( at least at first).
-Next, if you want to work on an organic traffic endeavor go for it. There's no rule that says you can't do that AND do paid traffic. Doing both is probably a great idea as it will get you more diverse experience. Start a Pinterest or Instagram account or a Youtube channel or whatever... you could even later combine that WITH paid traffic. All action is good action.
-Finally, the reason it seems like there's no "roadmap" is to some extent because the world of internet marketing is so vast. If you look at other businesses like house-flipping or running a cleaning business or any other entrepreneurial endeavor, there's usually a pretty basic roadmap, but in IM there's literally tens of thousands of ways to make money- that's both one of the difficulties of it AND one of the advantages.
With that said though, you need to figure out how to find and copy profitable campaigns in your space. On Natives that is from looking at spytools, getting the ads + landing pages + offers other people are succeeding with, and then running them yourself to test them (and adding your own creative faculties on top of course). On Bing it might be harder because there's no Bing spy tool, but I would imagine you could just search Bing from an Incognito browser until you find some ads that link to affiliate products. Then just copy their ad on those type of keywords and outbid them. You might not be profitable but that might give you a conversion to give you that dopamine jolt and proof that "this works".
You might want to get on Clickbank and look through products- a lot of those affilliate pages will give you giant lists of PPC Keywords. Also check out 'Surfside PPC' on Youtube, and 'Online Marketing Essentials'. And then what tracker are you using? Crucial to have a good tracker on any paid traffic obviously, but I know when I first started I was dumb and wasn't doing that, so always like to ask.
But yeah, I wish you luck man. Just remember, if it was easy everyone would do it. I doubt there's been more than 1 out of 1000 affiliates who broke even on their first 1000$ in ad spend. You're right that there is a lot of talk, often from people selling courses, but at the same time, there's trillions and trillions of dollars of commerce online in this world, and the biggest affiliate networks pay out tens of millions of dollars every month in commissions, so its definitely real. Its just extremely hard, and you gotta have skills and work ethnic and tenacity greater than 99.9% of other people to succeed. On the bright side though, the mere fact that you already put together 10 campaigns and ran real traffic to them puts you ahead of at least 99.2%, so you're dang, dang close brother Don't give up!
My man,
First off @Jack cheers for a great response bro!
Its exactly that, if it was easy everyone would do it, was your first campaign from the date you joined STM? Because if so only one month into this industry you can't really expect too much and if you've been sold a dream I'm sorry to shatter the reality that the wave of luck didn't pick you up sooner.
I'll never forget one of the quotes I read when I first started -
10 campaigns is really nothing bro its a little drop in the ocean and who knows if your 11-12-13th kicked off in profit and how much your mindset would of changed in that experience right? Heck it can take seasoned veterans a lot more then that to strike a winner, we're all constantly failing man but eventually things do stick and I also am sorry that you feel like you've fallen on empty words but if you came to a conference like AWA you can see how real this game is. I can speak with conviction that I've seen many many people over the last 7-8 years rise and fall, fall and rise, you name it I think I've seen it and like everything else in life everyones own path is going to be different.
A key to making this game work is consistency, its not about false hope or empty promises, its understanding that there are down periods and up periods and you learn to really take advantage when things are working and saving for a rainy day when things are off.
-Finally, the reason it seems like there's no "roadmap" is to some extent because the world of internet marketing is so vast. If you look at other businesses like house-flipping or running a cleaning business or any other entrepreneurial endeavor, there's usually a pretty basic roadmap, but in IM there's literally tens of thousands of ways to make money- that's both one of the difficulties of it AND one of the advantages.
- I found from working with heaps of people (I honestly say its 100+) from real life friends to people I met online that the ones I lead to the source of profit - of course saw the initial profitable campaign - but when it dried up they were fast to fail as the process I gave them was unique to me, where as the ones who came in developing their own methods of tackling campaigns which was unique to them are still around today or perhaps moved onto other successful ventures outside of traditional AM.
Also sometimes I think people would be shocked at what people are doing well are willing to do to make this game work, crazy crazy time schedules, anxiety of being away from the laptop, the stress of low months if you've built in overheads, a lot of time alone and the rollercoaster of campaigns etc. But the thing is the duality of the beautiful times you can create when things are working well and the freedom it can give you is huge - but you must earn it first. Its true the game is a lot harder then it has been before, as the competition in the adspace is rising but there is still virtually INFINITE POTENTIAL of making income online as more and more of the world is joining the online world. There is a lot of sacrifice and stress - same in anything if you want to learn and become good at something and its important not to sugar coat it. But the reward can be fruitful.
I know in nearly every source mentioned here in the forum at least one person (but in most cases a lot more) making a very good living in all threads mentioned here.
I'm guessing you've tried pops? 10 campaigns in pops is not the same as 10 campaigns in FB, as it can take a fair bit more then that to crack the pop code but testing tends to be a lot faster then building up campaigns for facebook.
I wish I could give real solid advice in the pops space if thats what you want to pursue but I haven't used that traffic source in ages so maybe someone else can chime in here on verticals that are working (but I do know a guy doing very well in the sweeps space but its probably because he has tested 100's of campaigns and built relationships and pushed on to creating higher value for the networks/advertisers and has leverage in the space and that can happen for anyone).
This is a business too man, for so many business if you turned a profit in your first year you would be quite stoked, things can change very rapidly for the better.
Maybe you can give some more outline of what you have tried in those 10 campaigns, the geos the offers - heck start a follow along and you'll get some good minds helping you (keep in mind AWA is on right now).
Things that do work:
Facebook - e-com, leadgen, nutra/casino/crypto (quite advanced method), sweepstakes
Adult - Dating, nutra
Native - leadgen, info products (clickbank etc), ecom, nutra/casino/crypto (advanced method in some cases)
Pops - Sweeps, dating, nutra/casino (not super familiar sorry)
Search - Leadgen
I would really suggest checking out @wakeboarders threads for hes follow alongs, they're all recent successes and there is a lot of valuable information in those threads. I really wish you a lot of success man, its not easy I promise you that - but I also can promise it does work - its early days, patience and consistency attack it everyday. Rome wasn't built in a day as cheesy as it is, day in day out fail early, fail forward I know you can do it, but also don't put pressure on yourself if it isn't for you.
(apologies I don't have time to re-read this about to head off for the day so I hope it makes sense in some way lol)
Above feedback should give you enough motivation to proceed. On the other hand AM isn't just made for everyone, for example testing 10 campaigns and already being on the spot to quit isn't the way to succeed in AM indeed. And that is not a problem, I am sure most professions aren't made for me either.
You received some outstanding advice here mate!
I'd also recommend that you show us what you've tried so far - landers, offers, traffic sources, thoughts, stats. Start a follow along and get help. The truth is that everything can make you money and people are making campaigns work everywhere. No one's going to open up their tracker and show you their campaigns.
It seems you've run a bunch of pop campaigns and some Bing and you're about to give up after 10 tries. Show us what you've tried, what your testing approach is, whether you have some sort of a systemised approach in place etc.
I personally do not believe you should ever do AM with a hit-and-miss approach and just going in blindly testing dozens of campaigns and wondering why it doesn't work. Understand the whys first, refine your testing approach and start fresh. It's not about "what's even working right now", but instead about what you can get to work.
Can you write decent copy? What do your ads and landers look like? Who are you targeting? Do you know why they'd subscribe/sign up/download/buy? What's the reasoning behind your campaigns? Do you understand why people take action on your ads/landers/offers? Have you done prior research? Have you networked with others? Have you spoken to your AM? What about spying on Adplexity? What kind of offers have you pushed? How are you approaching your campaigns? What have you learned from your failures? .... and the list of questions goes on and on and on...
It takes around 1000 hours.
Did you put them in ?
The 1k is doable in 3 months, 12 hours per day.
Wow, there's some great advice in this thread. Thanks! 
You've received some great info here.
I'm not suggesting that you're doing this, but I've found many new affiliates will simply buy traffic and point it to their affiliate link. I suggest that you break down each step of the process and explore each issue that you could be encountering.
Look at the data. Data will tell you a lot.
For example:
- Doing PPC, getting a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks? Improve your ad copy.
- Still not getting enough clicks after improving ad copy? Check your ad targeting.
- Getting click-throughs but no clicks to the offer from your landing page? Check your landing page copy, call to action, and any exit ramps that are causing a consumer to not go to the next phase.
I'm sure many people here (including myself) would be happy to review a segment of your campaign and give you some additional input.
Not going into posting more advice now, since it's all been covered by the beautiful people above my post.
But just had to quote this :
Cheers,
Matej.
You got some great advice on "what it takes" but personally i haven't seen a successful AM with only "10+ campaigns" for sure.
LeadCloak
Oh btw, I've been in a similar situation to yours carloespino, I wrote this article some time ago, to sum up what I've going through : http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ally-master-it Check it out if you haven't already
I strongly agree with doing detailed follow-alongs and sharing as much as you can. This has been HUGE for me (on a different AM forum, not here). The major benefits I found are: 1) people will give you tips on things that your'e doing that you would never have thought of, 2) it'll force you to analyze your work in more detail and you'll end up making your own discoveries, and 3) by this process you'll earn credibility. You never know who will read your posts and will want to work with you.
Some more notes:
- many people have a paranoia that their campaigns are going to get 'stolen'. This is mostly just paranoia. Ignore it. It doesn't matter
- stay positive and keep a very glass-half full mentality. Otherwise its very hard to make it in this industry in the long run
- commit to AM until you make it work. If you are just taking the approach that you are going to 'try it out', then it'll probably not be worth it for you IMO
Originally Posted by jack01
So much gold and ideas to find for those who seek in this thread!
Also, if you tried let's say pops. How many traffic sources you tested?
There are sometimes huge differences in terms of traffic quality in each geo / traffic source.
It takes lot of testing and experimenting to find those pockets of profit.
Let us know how it's going for you now and definitely start a follow along!
All the best mate!
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