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Vortex 40-day tutorial - complete beginner with limited budget (10)

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I thought it would be both interesting and super useful to share my journey on this 40-day tutorial for myself and others who are new at this. A few things might differ me from others taking this tutorial:

1) I am a complete 100% beginner. I have experience in corporate finance and asset management. Marketing is a whole new world for me, and I'll be learning basically everything from scratch.

2) I have a very limited budget. I come from a country where $15k/year is a decent sum. Best case I can spare $600/month on this. If I deny everything that brings joy in life and live off rice and ketchup, I can maybe raise it to $1k but then I'm left broke AF being max all-in.

3) I have a full-time job. I'm learning and doing this before and after work, around 4-5h on workdays + weekends.

I am going to post what I'm doing regarding each tutorial day, what kind of notes did I take and what were the struggles and questions I had.

Jan-31
Day 1 – Applying to various networks

Traffic sources and Mobidea accepted me no questions asked. Currently waiting on Gotzha and interview with ClockDealer.

Tracker (still negotiating).
Since Voluum is half my budget, I asked my friend (who was a speaker at AW Asia 2018 btw so knows what he's talking about) whether some cheaper trackers will do just fine. He was quite clear on being serious with a tracker and not going cheap here, and suggested ThriveTracker or Voluum as the best options.

Currently negotiating with Voluum on price (they were actually quite open about this), and considering ThriveTracker's basic $79 pricing plan.


Questions and notes:
- Have no clue what specific tracker features mean, so I don't know how much I'll be limiting myself if going with the cheaper Thrive version.
- People in this industry are more open and willing to help as I thought (Voluum offering a tailored plan, for example)

Next steps:
- Deciding on a tracker as soon as I get offer from Voluum
- Registering an Ltd.
- getting in touch with my AM's


I will appreciate any feedback so feel free to let me know if I'm missing something here.

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Very excited for this! From the looks of it, it might be a very rigorous follow along and there's always a need for that here (for all the newbies on STM who are taking their first steps in AM).
Quite ambitious approach since you also have a full-time job but as you said, people here are very open and willing to help so I'm sure you'll do just fine.
Keep us posted.

Karolina

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Feb-4 (Skipped from Day 1 to Day 14 for a bit)
UPDATE SO FAR

1. Why I chose Voluum over Thrive

Short answer: There isn't a technical reason. Both are great trackers, but people at Voluum were a lot nicer and offered something that seemed like a good deal to me.

Long answer: [you can skip this unless you're interested in conversation between me and the trackers] I signed up for trial versions and sales representatives from both contacted me within hours. I was quite honest upfront – told both that I don't know much about trackers yet, Voluum is quite expensive and I'm looking for alternatives but don't want to end up getting a cheaper plan and miss out some essential features.

Thrive went with the "yeah, we have the cheap basic plan" strategy while Voluum sold me the idea that I need this and that add-on to be successful, threw in additional million events and offered a tailored price. Eventually it ended up being a better deal (including add-ons which I might or might not need in the near future), and if you show a person something shinier for a better price, well, that's a sale.

Eventually, the guy from Thrive got pretty unprofessional and started mocking me for no reason. I think he just thought I'm pretending to be a newbie and trying to scam him for a better deal (see pic). Anyways, no hard feelings and I hope I haven't managed to piss of anyone for no reason.



2. Why I skipped to Day 14

Again, no technical reason. What I realised just now is that if I register LTD, in many cases I don't have to pay VAT (21% here), and it will save me extra trouble to redirect everything to the company later on. So I froze signing up to more subscriptions until I do that.

So now I'm learning HTML, CSS, Photoshop, reading about setting up a server etc. I personally think it ended up for the best, as learning these things takes time. I know I'd be super frustrated knowing my tracker subscription is running and AM's are waiting while I'm learning to make a banner or landing page.

3. ClickDealer interview

In this post comments sheet731 warned about ClickDealer asking to submit for screenshots of any conversions in the past month, etc. What I want to say is don't be discouraged or afraid of interviews. My experience with ClickDealer was really nice. Again, I followed Amy's advice and was honest about being newbie, and the AM said she'll give me a chance.


What I'm doing now – waiting for the government to register my ltd, learning to make landers and browsing through offers in the meantime.


Notes and suggestions
- Register a company first (or don't – I just want to do this now to avoid trouble later)
- Do a bit of research and have an open discussion with sales reps before buying any plan or subscription
- Basics of HTML, CSS, etc. are easier than I thought

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Valters, it is very nice to hear sth like this - that someone likes our approach - because we put a lot of work into delivering the best customer-oriented service possible Thanks for bringing this up. We plan on delivering on the next steps as well!
I fully stand behind what I told you earlier - I intend on being active here and helping you as much as possible with the tracking (though you might not need any of it, you seem to know what you're doing - maybe you're a natural! )

Also, just so you know, the attachment doesn't load after you click on it.

Karolina

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Thank you vestmv for starting this follow-along!

It's bold of you to start this journey with a small budget, and wise of you to keep working your full-time job while trying to make this work.

I'm not going to lie: $600/month is not a lot, but where there's a will, there's a way. As long as you're using disposable income (and not having to resort to living off rice and ketchup!) and are able to sustain living expenses with income from your job, you'd basically have an unlimited amount of time to find your success. Worse comes to worst, you exhaust your $600/month budget in the first week of the month and have to wait until the next month to do more testing, which will be fine.

I have endless respect for people that are trying to "make it" on such limited budget and time - but this type of determination is what will fuel your motivation for success. I wish you the best of luck, and will contribute what I can.

Regarding trackers: Voluum is a solid tracker of course, but with the recent price increase, it may be a bit out of range for you. If you want to save some money, Binom or Funnelflux would be awesome alternatives - I can personally vouch for both. Funnelflux will take some time to get used to but has more features than you'll ever use in your career. Binom is the most-similar to Voluum in terms of navigation and functionality and has awesome support. Both of these trackers allow you to export Voluum stats and import them into these trackers.

The only drawback though is that these are self-hosted trackers, which means you'll need to get hosting and install them. They're both easy to install though. A bigger issue though - which is the main difference between Voluum and these 2 trackers aside from the vast difference in pricing - is that they're not as fast as Voluum in terms of redirection speed. Voluum is a cloud solution which means redirection speed is fast no matter which geo you run traffic to (in general), whereas Funnelflux and Binom can be slower when you run traffic in a geo that is located far from the server you installed the tracker on. I have no idea how much impact the difference in redirection speed will have on conversion rate of campaigns though - would be an interesting exercise for the future.

So - pros and cons and I leave it to you to decide whether to switch or not.

Looking forward to your next update!




Amy

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Thanks for the message – I really appreciate it! And thanks a million for the tutorials. They are a big help in all this AM mess.

Limited budget will for sure push me to dig deep into "why" and "what" works, and I'll do my best not to waste any of it. In my mind the worst case scenario is I live frugal for a bit and don't make any money, or this takes off and everything's fine My gut tells me everything is going to be alright.

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While I'm at it, I have a question that I've been wanting to ask.

I've been to a bunch of digital marketing events where local experts claim that Pop ads are dying, and Google is thinking about banning them on Chrome. Also, a friend of mine, who is active in AM, was a bit surprised that the tutorial is directing newbies to Pop, as that's apparently crazy competitive and dying industry.

Obviously I started researching this. As far as I've found, pop makes sense because it's quick and cheap, while, for example, native works if you have a pile of cash to throw around.
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EDITED – I re-read tutorial introduction and realised I had skipped the "Apply for Mobidea" post where all this is explained. So the question has been answered already


Thanks!
Valters

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@sklena raised some questions about the state of Pop ads in 2019 a few weeks ago ('Can someone prove it is possible to be profitable with pops in 2019?') and some experienced affiliates shared their views and personal successes/struggles with running them now - I don't know if their posts answer your concerns but you'll find many opinions there.

Also, @vortex's just posted this in another follow along:
Karolina

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Feb-10 (Days 2-12)
UPDATE

So I just ran my first campaign and the results were AMAZING! Check it out:

Attachment 20597


Two things that might have gone wrong in my opinion:

1) Didn't pick offer exactly as Amy suggested, but went with AM suggestion instead.
2) Didn't set up daily limit on my $15 budget, so it ran out within seconds.

Here's the offer:


What I looked for:
- high conversion %, which in my head meant that the offer should do well. AM eventually told me it just means that many affiliates are running the offer
- high revenue & high traffic, which in my head meant higher chance of traffic and revenue.
- offer I could click myself one day. Obviously this creates a bias in picking the offers.

Tracking:
- Voluum: 10 visits, everything else 0
- Clickdealer: 10 clicks, everything else zero
- PropellerAds: everything zero (including my budget)
--> Seems that Clickdealer and Voluum numbers match, so everything should be set up fine.
- Not doing any in-depth analysis for obvious reasons

Notes from day 2-8:
- Introduction with Voluum is pretty much what Amy wrote in the blog, only in more detail. I'd suggest setting up trial version for Voluum, going through Amy's tutorial for setting up the campaign, and only then taking the introductory h with Voluum. Otherwise it's kind of like going through car's engine before getting behind the wheel.
- setting up campaign links were a bit of pain in the ass for me. I messed up creating custom domain in Voluum, so figured to set everything up witht he original dedicated domain. Captain obvious suggestion would be to go over comments in Amy's tutorial whenever you get stuck.
- I tried to set $2 daily budget on by $15 overall campaign budget but Propeller Ads didn't allow me do do it for some reason. Not sure why.
- Have 3 more campaigns set up for launching but I'm being cautious not to "make it rain" over Propeller Ads because of my newbieness.

Questions:
- Should I be seeing any traffic stats in Propeller Ads?
- Is there any point on setting $2 daily budget or is it just a waste of time?

Next steps:
- finish setting up the custom domain and update all the related links
- continuing with the tutorial and start testing different campaigns and understanding what is going on. Hopefully will get better than -100% ROI

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Let me just clarify because I think many people won't know what you mean by 'Introduction with Voluum'. Once you subscribe to one of Voluum plans, we offer you a completely free 1on1 onboarding session (call) with someone from our Customer Success team. They are there to answer any questions you have and help you create the tailor-made Voluum setup.

Not really. You're able to send S2S postback URL request to Propeller Ads (in Voluum it's called a traffic source postback URL) once a conversion is successfully registered within the related Voluum campaign. You don't see any stats in PA yet because there's been no conversion.
If you want to fire conversions back to the traffic source (PA) check if your setup is correct - you can read more about it in our Knowledge Base here.

For sure you will! Just give it some time

Karolina

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Actually, it's not wrong to test offers recommended by your AM.

It's important to test as many offers as it makes sense for your budget.

This means: Offers recommended by AMs, offers you FEEL may convert well, offers that have good stats in spy tools...anything you feel may stand a chance.

Of course, if you want to test lots of offers, you'll need to be efficient with your test budget - for example have very stringent requirements in place for cutting offers. You can't afford to make 100% sure that an offer is a dud before cutting it, if you're testing lots of offers.

With regards to setting up a daily limit on test budget, it's not wrong to NOT set one. It just means you'll collect data faster.

For an offer with such a low payout, I would suggest setting the budget to the minimum allowed. You can always increase it if the offer converts well.

Once you've run a couple of offers direct-linked (i.e. without using landing pages), please learn how to rip and fix up landers. Most good offers will require the use of landers for pre-selling. There are very few good 1/2-click offers around nowadays - I wouldn't suggest to focus on those.


You should see impressions in PropellerAds. But as Karolina has pointed out, you won't see conversions in PropellerAds, unless you set up a conversion postback for PropellerAds (similar to how you set up a postback for each affiliate network).

PropellerAds' minimum allowed daily budget is $10. For PopAds it's $2.50. And yes - even if it was allowed, $2/day would be a waste of time. Even if you're just running pop to learn the trade, you'll need to collect data in order to learn how to test and optimize campaigns, and at $2/day, it would take forever to collect actionable data.


Sounds like a plan! And yes - you will start making conversions for certain - and soon.




Amy

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