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Starting in 2019 - An attempt to build a better life (39)

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This follow-along is meant as a log for me, but also to possibly inspire others. I've been spinning my wheels for so long wanting to work for myself and actually feel successful. I have a regular full-time job that is long hours, constant stress, and leaves me mentally drained. On the side, I have a small web design business with SEO added in. When I say "small," I mean that I tried to start it in 2017, designed two sites for people I know, but I'm too afraid to go out there and try to sell my services. I don't feel good enough. I put too much pressure on myself and ultimately end up doing nothing. Many years ago, I worked on some internet marketing, but it wasn't making much progress and so I let the site expire.

I'm diving into affiliate marketing in 2019 because it's something I can do from home, do online, and can avoid a lot of the pressures of "selling" -- maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into?

I'm new to the forum as it was recommended to me from multiple sources. I've read Charles Ngo's ebook, I've watched many videos with Gerry Cramer, and spent hours watching other videos trying to learn. Now, I'm here and following @vortex's guide, which is a great starting point to learn and build a foundation.

If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations, please post and let me know.

One thing I want to do is track the costs of getting started to add a layer of transparency.

The tutorial began on 3/8/2019

Day 1

1. Joined STM ($99).
2. Applied for Mobidea, Clickdealer, and Gotzha. As of right now, I've only been accepted into Mobidea.
3. Signed up at PropellerAds and PopAds.
4. Signed up with Voluum after seeing they discounted their Entry plan to $69/month. I'm not ready to pay for an entire year. ($69)
5. I bought a cheap .xyz tracking domain from Namecheap. ($1.17)
6. Added money to PropellerAds. PropellerAds charged a $4 service fee. ($100) -> ($96)
7. Added money to PopAds ($100)
8. Started two campaigns on PropellerAds with offers from Mobidea.

Total costs: -$369.17

Notes:

- I'm getting a ton of offers on Mobidea that are showing $0 even when I have the slider set to $.01. Offers that meet the requirements are few and far between. I hope Clickdealer and Gotzha come through as Mobidea seems vacant.
- One campaign in Argentina was running for about 4 hours as of the time I typed this yesterday. I had 2,105 impressions, 0 clicks, and 0 conversions.
- The second campaign in Egypt was only been running for about 1.5 hours and had 262 impressions, 0 clicks, and 0 conversions.
- Ending the first day (going to bed), Voluum said I was down ($0.82) total.
- I tried to set up a campaign with PopAds, but the traffic is so low for the offers I found in Mobidea that it didn't make sense to start the campaign. Out of the 5+ I tried to setup, they weren't expecting more than 1,000 impressions. The guide wanted at least 3,000. So, as of right now, I haven't started any campaigns with PopAds. If anyone has any suggestions or advice, please share. I might have to wait for Clickdealer and Gotzha to come through.

Going Forward:

I am excited to see if I can make even one conversion at all. That will be the starting point of me believing that this is possible for me. I have a tendency to try something new and quickly give up. I have a limiting belief in most things that tells me, "It won't work for me." I usually find that is true because I give up too quickly when I meet resistance. I'm trying to change that now. I'm really looking to catch a break. I've had so many failures with no real progress. I want to stop holding myself back and do what is necessary to create a better life for me and my family.

My long-term-short-term goal is to find a way to scale this, to see success like others, and eventually quit my full-time job and get my life back. I'm tired of being tired, I'm tired of being frustrated and disappointed, and I'm tired of not reaching my potential.

I believe that if I can make this work for me, then it can work for anyone!

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Day 2 - 3/9/2019

I woke up today and checked my two campaigns on PropellerAds. I still have no conversions. I'm half-thinking to end the campaigns as I read that Direct-Linking is pretty hard to get conversions. I've been learning a lot, but I also don't want to burn money. My hope was to wake up today while the campaigns were running all night and see at least one conversion; however, that wasn't the case.

I tried to find some more Mobidea offers, but I've pretty much been accepted to all of the Mobile Content (CPA)'s that have an EPC of 0.01 or greater. There are so many that are $0. I'm figuring since it's the weekend that Clickdealer and Gotzha are going to take a few more days. The problem with that is that I go back to work Monday and Tuesday. So far, I haven't had any campaigns running on PopAds. I'm trying to not jump to any conclusions yet as I still haven't tried campaigns through Clickdealer or Gotzha and PopAds. I'd like to backtrack into the tutorial if I get access to both of them and can find more traffic on PopAds.

As far as the progress made today:

1. Joined Adplexity Mobile using the forum's discount ($149).
2. Bought a landing page .com domain through Namecheap ($9.06). An easy way to come up with an idea is to check out leandomainsearch.com, put in some words that you want to use and it'll give you prefixes and/or affixes for available domains. I spent about 10 minutes looking around and decided to just pick one. I don't know if it's proper to mention the domain right now so I'm just going to keep that private. It's nothing special.
3. Signed up for Amazon AWS - Free. I went through the tutorial and got everything hooked up on S3, CloudFront, and Route 53. DNS Propagation happened instantly. Once everything was up and running, I had no problem viewing the sample landing page.
4. Downloaded CrossFTP and Sublime Text 3. I thought I had Sublime Text, but it must have been on an older computer. I normally use Brackets and most recently I develop in WordPress, but I downloaded Sublime to stay consistent with the tutorial.

Total costs: -$158.06
Total overall: -$527.23

I then started working on Adplexity to try and grab landing pages. I feel like I'm becoming slightly unorganized. There wasn't a lot of variation on the landing pages if I searched for "iphonexs." I found about 8 or so and downloaded them. The one I dug into was quite a mess with the code. It had a Google Analytics tracking code in it. It was pretty difficult to follow along. I know quite a bit of HTML and CSS so it relatively all makes sense, but I'm not so great with Javascript.

I'm not sure how deep I'm supposed to go with ripping the landing pages and cleaning them up. I guess, at this point, it's important to pay close attention to the details and look at it line-by-line?

Eventually, I just cleared out all the .zip files I grabbed and wanted to start over. Being only two days in, but around Day 19 in the tutorial, I feel like this landing page section is going to be the most difficult and time consuming for me.

My thoughts are that I need to get the landing pages down to their bare necessities as if I designed it myself. I'm going to look into a few more and see if I just had a couple bad ones.

As of typing this:

Campaign 1 - Max Bid: $.80, Spent: -$3.08
PropellerAds: 6,172
Mobidea: 3,217
Voluum: 5,042
No Conversions

Campaign 2 - Max Bid: $.82, Spent: -$3.67
PropellerAds: 9,545
Mobidea: 6,019
Voluum: 8,392
No Conversions

I'm guessing the Offer probably has something to do with the conversions. I don't know. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? It might be time to pull the plug and try something else?

From a best guess, it looks like based on the location of the Offers that traffic died down a lot during what I consider the day, but that it'll pick up quite a bit as night sets in and day begins for those countries. I want to let it run through the night again and see what happens when I wake up tomorrow.

Again, if anyone has any recommendations or advice, please share! As much as I'm learning, I also want to put myself in the best possible position to succeed!

Over the past 2 days, I've probably spent 20 hours going through the tutorials, getting everything setup, and trying to figure it out. My brain is pretty exhausted. I think it might be time for a little break and maybe just casually read through the different threads and try to get some extra sleep tonight.

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Great stuff man!

Congratulations on taking the plunge!

Obviously on boards like this the primary objective is logistics/specs/hacks/strategy/etc but on the emotional and metaphysical level I don't think one can underestimate the significance of someone making that decision to pursue self-supporting entrepreneurial endeavors. It really is a massively powerful, transformative step and should itself be something massively commended.

There definitely seems to be a correlation between those who keep progress logs/walkalongs like this and success, so definitely keep it up. It's great for keeping committed and also good in bringing to light any errors your making quicker since more experienced people will see them and can alert you.

I don't have any expertise in the strategies you're focused on but just wanted to offer encouragement. Entrepreneurism is a lonely hard road but I always remind myself that 1) it is in and of itself the right thing to be doing, and that even if I failed at it completely I would feel better having tried and failed than never having tried at all, and 2) in the world of performance marketing, even just the basic skills your building while you fail at the beginning are highly valuable, as if you know how to set up trackers/build landing pages/etc you can make a decent living just selling such skills on fiverr. Not that that's the goal of course but I think that kind of 'reverse optimism' is better motivation for most of us than are the Lambo's and mansions and all that jazz

But yeah, good luck man and very much look forward to seeing your progress!

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Thank you for the encouragement! I tend to get ahead of myself believing that I'll just have to "show up" and the money will start rolling in. I started a business a couple years ago thinking that all I had to do was get everything set up and it would be easy and consistent money. I was quickly disappointed when that didn't happen and it took a lot more effort than expected. It caused me to lose interest pretty quickly and I closed it.

Then, I got into web design thinking that I had the network and all I had to do was follow the process and I would be free. That didn't happen as well. I sent a few emails and made a couple phone calls and after getting yelled at on the phone, it took all of my motivation away.

Right now, I've just been following the guide. It seems like once we get to the sections on Landers, that the options open up and it will be up to me to find the vertical. I'll have to go through those sections again.

My first goal is my first real conversion and then figuring out how to duplicate that. I'd like to eventually navigate my way to Facebook ads since I like the idea of audiences and being able to drilldown to specific groups of people.

Thanks again!

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First conversions are in! So pumped! I know it's not much, but it's a sign of something good! There seems to be something not working correctly, though.

PropellerAds is showing 2 conversions.
Voluum is showing 2 conversions.
Mobidea is showing 3 conversions.

2 of the conversions seem to be consistent, but the 3rd conversion on my second campaign isn't showing in PropellerAds or Voluum.

The visits and costs statistics are showing, but not the actual conversion. Everything should be right, I think. I set it up the same way as I did the first one. Maybe it just came in. I'll have to keep an eye on it for now.

Mobidea is also showing some traffic from Korea (2 visits), the US (4), and Czech Republic (3), which I didn't target at all. The visits were very minimal.

For some follow-up questions. I want to dig down into the data a little more:

The one campaign with the 2 conversions is showing that the conversions occurred on Android devices at 22:00 - 22:59 and 23:00 - 23:59. Both of them were on Android.

1. At what point do I focus in on the specific times and/or focus in only on Androids? Should I exclude the Windows OS and iOS to keep traffic away from them (or only INCLUDE Android)? The bulk of the traffic has been going to Android, but a little bit has been filtering out to iOS and Windows.

2. In PropellerAds, I have a Zone ID with 2,146 impressions, but 0 conversions. It's also the highest cost by about 2x the next zone and 30% of the total cost of the campaign. The impressions are about 24% of the total impressions for the campaign. Should I EXCLUDE that zone since it's not converting?

I'm afraid that I might optimize too soon or over-optimize since I'm not familiar with the strategies yet.

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This is an interesting follow along trizen, thank you for sharing.

I honestly think you are on a much better path than with web design and seo. Those can be great skills to have still I think, and SEO is how I make my living personally. But the whole web design thing, nah that is just super stress. And you are seen as an expense to clients. At least as an SEO people see you as a part of the profits, not a part of the expenses. Still, just earning money for yourself like that is definitely going to lead to a happier life style IMO.

Quite encouraging for you to have 2 conversions too so soon.

May I ask which of Vortex's guides you are following? He seems to have authored a few of them. I would be interesting in taking a closer look at the details of what you are trying to execute with.

Best of luck, I will be watching and cheering for you! =)

-LD

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Thanks for reading and the reply! I hope we can talk more soon! I am in a web design group that isn't so focused on design, but rather all about sales. It's definitely attractive and many in the group are making good money, but I'm just bad at cold sales. I mean, if I got beyond my limiting beliefs, maybe it would work well for me. It would be so much easier if it wasn't so hard to get people on board. The thing I like about SEO is being able to research, edit, and optimize pages and watch the pages come to life behind the scenes. I enjoy the data and statistics and seeing pages climb in the search engine ranks. The good thing about having been involved with web design, seo, and having learned HTML and CSS is that I can somewhat understand the code behind the landing pages.

I have been following this guide: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ntro-and-Index

It is quite dense, but easy to follow. @vortex did a great job with it. I haven't had much time to continue with it today, but I'm mostly hovering around the Landing Pages section as that seems to be the difference between beginner to semi-intermediate level. I need to set more time aside to go through it again and figure out how to do it. I'm still watching on ClickDealer and Gotzha to see what kind of offers they have. I'm learning a lot with Mobidea and PropellerAds, but the conversions aren't really coming in at all and I'll hit my max budget through the night tonight or tomorrow so the campaigns are going to end soon.

Mobidea is saying I have 3 conversions, but one of them isn't tracking in PropellerAds or Voluum so I'm not sure what the deal is. If the stats are tracking for the first campaign, I am not exactly sure why they aren't tracking for the second.

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Congrats on taking action trizen, the first few steps are always the hardest to make, but don't let that take you down! If you ever feel like quitting in the next few days/weeks, read this : http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...ally-master-it We've all been there ...

Let me quote some parts of your posts and comment:

Some small discrepancies are normal and it's ok to miss a lead here and there. But sometimes it's just a problem with the date/time settings ... are you sure you are checking the same time frame on all the places?

Your main goal is to reach solid volumes, if you start by cutting large segments such as iOS, you will limite the volume a lot. So this should come later on, and only when you have enough data to confirm the patterns such as focusing on certain parts of the day (day parting). But in some cases it's ok to do such targeting limits of course ... some offers only wan't certain OS or device type and some offers naturally convert with a specific traffic type. You will learn to spot these with experience.

You need to set certain limit that you will follow during the initial optimization process ... 2x payout per placement/LP is a commonly used rule of thumb to start with. So if an offer pays $1 per conversion and you still don't see any conversion after $2 worth of traffic from a placement, cut it. Some people use more aggressive approach, some wait for a bit longer ...

Yup, get rid of everything that doesn't directly influence the functionality of the LP.

True, Mobidea used to have way more better offers, they slowed down a lot recently, since they were entirely focused on the carrier billing mobile offers which ogt regulated a lot and stopped working well. Gotzha and Clickdealer will work better for you now.

Another piece of advice: Amy (vortex) wrote the 40-day tutorial with POP traffic in mind, but these days there is another popular format that's working better, PUSH traffic. So once you are done with the tutorial and understand the basics of AM, you might want to consider moving into PUSH.

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I only started two days ago so I don't have a lot of data. On each platform, I just click "Last 7 Days" and it shows all of my data. I can't remember how I found it, but I think something was saying I had a conversion from Pinterest, which seemed odd. I've been trying to play with the data in Mobidea and on one set of data it'll show 3 conversions, on another it'll show 1 conversion, on a different set it shows 0 for the campaign. I'm not sure what the discrepancy is, but they seem inconsistent. So far, my Mobidea account is showing $.93 (93 cents).

Makes sense. All-in-all, over the last 3 days of doing this, Voluum is showing over 26,000 impressions, but still only have those 2 or 3 conversions.

Thanks for that advice! This morning, after I posted, I went ahead and made the decision to exclude that one zone. Now, looking at your advice, it seems to have been the right call (I think). The payout is $.63 and I had spent $1.25 so a penny less than 2x. I think I'm reading that right. The zone that gave me a conversion has now pulled into the lead -- maybe I'll get another conversion? I also just went in and bumped up the cost for the second zone that gave me a conversion. It was showing a CPM of $.492 so I bumped it up to $.50. Please tell me if this is the wrong approach.

Makes sense as well. Thanks!

Still waiting on those. I figure the weekend is the reason for it being slow. I have to work the next two days so hopefully by tomorrow night when I get home, I'll be in one or the other (or both) and can try some campaigns.

Thanks. I've heard about PUSH in passing. I am going to have to learn more about what POP and PUSH actually mean. I probably should know this already, but I think with the amount of information I've been trying to learn over the weekend, I haven't retained everything. Eventually (soon), I'd like to get into other areas and try out Facebook Ads. I'll check out PUSH as well. I pretty much know nothing about other forms of marketing, which networks to get set up with, or how I will proceed from where I'm currently at. I'm still working through the tutorial so maybe it is explained later.

I have a budget I'd like to stick to. In the back of my mind, I'm a little afraid that I'm going to blow through that before I really get a chance to build profitable campaigns and see if I can really make this work for me. Thanks for your link above. I'm reading that now.

Thanks again for your reply! I super appreciate it!

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Day 3 - 3/10/2019

If you read through my other posts for today, you'll see I had 2 (or 3?) conversions after I woke up this morning. Both were from my Argentina campaign. I was sort of hoping to see some more conversions roll in throughout the day, but they didn't. I have 1 conversion showing on my Egypt campaign, but it's still not tracking in PropellerAds or Voluum. I'm not sure what the deal is with that.

I did mostly reading today as I had a bunch of family things to do. I don't feel like I made much progress today in the form of taking action.

My plan is to review the tutorial from the beginning just to refresh my brain and then try to dig into Landing Pages some more. I'm a little overwhelmed with the thought of it, but I'm going to take it slower. I think I might have missed the part about picking a vertical. I have to review that. It's a little fuzzy. 24+ hours of this stuff in 3 days has made my brain hurt.

Other things I did was to do my first EXCLUDE on a Zone in PropellerAds that was taking up the most money with no conversions. It was at 2x the payout with no conversions. I also went back into where the one conversion was and bumped up the cost to hopefully get some better traffic going to that Zone. I'm expecting that by tomorrow morning both starter campaigns will have hit their max-budget.

I also decided to break out a little bit and try a sweepstakes offer on PopAds in Kenya. It wasn't a part of the initial guide, but it was the first offer that gave me at least 3,000+ impressions. I figured I have to be willing to get in there and try new things so I set it up quickly to see what happens. I'm not sure what to expect from it at this point as I haven't used PopAds yet and the budget is lower at $2.50. As of writing this, I'm still waiting for the campaign to be approved. I have nothing to base this on, but if it's approved, I'm expecting the campaign will be maxed out by the time I get home from work tomorrow night.

So, as the weekend is over and it's time to go back to work where my free time will be limited for a couple days, I will end this post with my current stats from Voluum:

3/8/2019 to 3/10/2019
Visits: 27,420
Clicks: 0
Conversions: 2
Revenue: $.82
Cost: $11.69
Profit: -$10.87
ROI: -93%

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Hey Trizen,

I was in the same exact boat a couple of months ago:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post362085

I think it's a bug with Mobidea -- I never did figure it out, and never really had issues outside of that.

I see you're feeling a little bit discouraged at times! I had probably a dozen or so points where I felt like nothing was making sense when trying to go through all of this stuff. Those are the parts you should anticipate and welcome, since it means you learned a sh*tload once you're finally able to move forward.

It's about learning what doesn't work as much as it is learning what does work.

Keep it up!

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Hey @trizen!

I guess congratulations are in order for starting a new career path! Good luck, looking at how motivated and meticulous you are, you're setting yourself for a great success. Just keep up the hard work!

As for the discrepancy between Voluum and Mobidea on the no. of conversions, there are 3 more things you can check:

1. In your Voluum settings, check your conversion registration time reporting.
   The default setting for conversion reporting is set on a visit timestamp basis. What's the difference between the 2?
   
   
   • Visit Timestamp : Time of when a user visited your campaign.
   • Postback timestamp : Time of when a conversion is registered for a user that visited your campaign.
   
   In Mobidea, I believe, the conversions are registered on a postback timestamp so to have your Voluum reports more accurate towards the AN - change the default setting to postback timestamp and check if it makes any difference in the no. of conversions displayed in reports for this particular campaign.
2. Check the Error log. The Error Log tab provides you with information about errors that occurred and were reported to Voluum. These errors are also connected with problem occurring in external platforms.
   
   If there was any problem with firing the conversion to Voluum - you should see it in the Error log.
3. Check your tracking setup. I know you said you'd done it the same way as for the other campaign, but it won't hurt to double check if the points above haven't given you answers.

If still no luck, just contact us at support@Voluum.com with the name of the campaign (or campaign ID) and screenshot of what you see in Mobidea, so we can chase this down.

P.S. you won't see a conversion in PropellerAds if you don't see it in Voluum because it's fired to PA only after being registered in Voluum.

P.P.S As for getting offers, I don't know if you've heard the news. Voluum's recently introduced Offers Marketplace, allowing you to find, compare and apply for the finest offers from selected top affiliate networks and all from inside your Voluum account. I cover this release in this thread - https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post365962 - check it out to learn more.

P.P.P.S. () Remember you can track all Zeropark events free of charge.
Zeropark is one of the best sources of pop traffic. And when you get more experienced - ZP push is booming! So give it a try and benefit from the full integration between Zeropark and Voluum.

I think that's it for now Sorry for the long post!
I'll try to keep it more to the point next time. But I thought - since you're only starting - you might like the details.

Karolina

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Do not try to learn it all in a few days, it's just gonna leave you confused and frustrated. Many of us here on the forums have years and years of experience, and it took us a while to master the game. It's not something you can learn in a few days. Just like with anything new you're learning in your life, it takes time

Take it slowly and give it time, if you need to reread the tutorial 3 times, then do it. It's also easier to understand all the things in all the tutorials once you have at least some basic AM experience, it all starts to come together on it's own as your understanding of the subject increases.

This is another thing you have to set your mind to accept ... you're investing in your education now, the initial loss is inevitable, we all had to go through this. Remember how much $ you invested into your education in school and how much time it required. Education and skills come at a price, it's absolutely normal.

Do not worry about this at all, a conversion will get "lost" from time to time, it's not a big deal. 2 or 3 conversions worth a couple cents, that won't make or break your campaign or have any impact at this stage. It would be a different situation if it was an ongoing problem, so if it keeps on happening again and again, then it would have to be solved.

For more detailed explanation on these traffic types, read this for POPs: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...inition-1-POPS and this one for PUSH (I explain it at the beginning of the case study) : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ffic-campaigns

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Hello and thank you for your response with helping me. I'm sort of scrambling at the end of the day since I had to work all day and now trying to troubleshoot the problem.

I went in and reviewed my Voluum campaigns and found that the Offer URL under the OFFER tab had a space in it after "...placement ={campaign.id}". The space was in there for all of my URLs, although only three of them had been active. It didn't appear to have actually affected anything. Maybe it did, I'm not sure what the campaign.id would show differently whether it was working or not. That didn't fix it.

I changed the Postback timestamp, but that didn't fix it either. It's showing 3 conversions from my Argentina campaign, but still not showing the conversion from my Egypt campaign.

I checked the Error Log and I found I had 72 errors. So, now I'm stuck...I think. It's saying it is an Invalid Conversion Request saying "Postback request invalid. Click ID argument: null." It's also showing that the Postback URL is missing the "cid=" So it shows "[domain]/postback?cid=&payout..." Is there something that should be after the cid= ? I looked in Mobidea and my Global Postback shows cid={{EXTERNAL_ID}}, but I can't figure out what Mobidea is supposed to be grabbing there? Maybe that's the issue! But then again, why would it be working for one and not the other?

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Day 4 - 3/11/2019

Today, I was back to work so I couldn't really do much. I was trying to keep track of things on my phone, but it was too difficult. I had too much going on at work that needed my attention.

Just a couple updates:

I had another conversion on my Argentina campaign bringing it to a total of 3 conversions. It's still showing 1 conversion on Egypt. After spending however much on that campaign, I got an email today saying the offer was rejected. All it said was because of Advertiser Restrictions. It approved me instantly when I applied for it and it let me run traffic to it all weekend so I don't know. Will that screw up my conversion? I send traffic to it all weekend and then just lose that money?

Anyway, moving forward, my Kenya campaign on PopAds was approved and was sucked dry in about 7 hours. There was over 1,000 visits, but no conversions. I don't know if there was enough data on that one. The max budget was only $2.50 per the tutorial so I don't know. At this point, I might just continue trying to move forward with the tutorial and give the Pop ads a break. It doesn't seem like this initial testing phase is going to bring me to the promised land!

After looking at @Voluum's post, I had over 70 errors in the error log on Voluum. There appears to be a problem with a postback URL not grabbing the external id (click id?). I spent a good 2.5 hours after work trying to figure out what the problem was. @vortex specifically mentioned to watch out for spaces in URLs and I found that there was at least one. I fixed them in the Offers, but I don't know if that would have affected the campaign overall. Does that change the campaign URL then?

One thing I can't figure out at the time is why it's not grabbing the click id. Is that a Mobidea issue with the global postback? I'm not experienced in exactly how the postbacks work and how tokens work and how it all 'just' works.

It felt wrong to not have another campaign running so, since I wasn't able to dive more into landing pages tonight, I'm going to take another stab at a Mobidea campaign on PropellerAds in Honduras.

If this one doesn't seem like there is any hope, then I will have to set things aside until I can get involved with landing pages.

It seems wrong to keep jumping around from country to country. I read about the testing and optimizing, but I feel like I should be seeing more conversions than just one or two. Doing direct linking based on the preset offers feels like a lot of it is out of my control.

So, as I go into another work day, my time will be limited again, but I have been visiting the forum on my phone when I can. I've been reading and absolutely appreciate all of you who have come in to offer encouragement and help! I look forward to getting back home to check my campaigns, although it's been overwhelming trying to internalize all of it! Thanks again!

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Hey man-

Just wanted to offer more encouragement Very cool you're already having conversions- that's far better than many people when they start out!

And it seems as though you're getting a good education in tracking as well

But yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about jumping around from country to country or traffic source to traffic source... I kind of like the analogy that internet marketing is akin to learning to operate a well in the pitch black while blindfolded. Eventually you may focus most of your energy on cranking the one rope in the one position to draw water, but at first you're just trying to get your bearings and stumble into enough things you can generate a halfway decent outline of everything in your mind

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Hey man super inspiring progress so far! I am starting a little discord mastermind for a group of newbies who are just picking up affiliate marketing.

You're welcome to join! Here's this discord link: https://discord.gg/eQEvFRu Feel free to join.

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If your offer URL had contained a space, it was replaced with %20. So your URL didn't look like this: "...placement ={campaign.id}", it looked more like this: ""...placement%20={campaign.id}".

What does it mean in connection with tracking?
You didn't map the campaign ID values with placement parameter, but placement%20 parameter. Since Mobidea's parameter for placement is only placement and no variations of it, the passing of this parameter to Mobidea was affected and the dynamic values under the {campaign.id} token hadn't been understood or saved on Mobidea's end until you fixed your offer URL.

Apart from that, your offer links should have worked fine - as I said, it only affected the passing of the placement parameter to Mobidea, and it's additional info anyway.

Yes - unless you fix your postback URL so it actually maps clickid parameter with Mobidea's token for it, you will not see any conversions for this campaign.

Let me dig into this subject.

In order to track conversions and make the postback URL working, you need to have 2 things set up properly:

1. Pass Voluum click ID value in an offer URL in a {clickid} token to an affiliate network platform (Mobidea). ✔
   
   *What actually is a click ID?
   It's a specific to Voluum string of 24 characters that starts with a lowercase and is used to uniquely identify a visit.
   
   It works like this: you have to firstly pass the click ID value to Mobidea, so when conversion occurs, Mobidea can send this information back to Voluum and help Voluum identify to which visit it's supposed to connect the conversion.
   
   
2. Submit postback URL to an affiliate network platform to receive Voluums click ID passed in an affiliate network specific parameter. ✗
   
   Now I know you've completed this step but the postback that Mobidea fires when a conversion occurs doesn't pass any value in click ID parameter, so the conversion can't be registered properly in Voluum (we know that from the Error log).
   
   Pls provide me with a screenshot of what your postback URL in Mobidea looks like.
   
   Here's an example of what it's supposed to look like:
   
   
   
   If you selected the Voluum radio button, then, in the text field, there should be ONLY your domain name - No HTTP or HTTPS, No tokens, Just the domain name.
   
   If you didn't select Voluum radio button but went for the Custom radio button, then, in the text field, there should be the full postback URL (with HTTP or HTTPS and tokens) - @vortex explained how to adjust and submit it in her Lesson 9 on setting up tracking.

Karolina

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If you want some additional meterials on setting up integrations between Voluum and Mobidea - here's a full article on the subject. It walks you step by step through

• getting an offer in Mobidea (both single offer and smartlink)
• configuring postback
• and adding an offer to Voluum.

Tracking Mobidea Offers With Voluum

Karolina

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@trizen Apologies for my late arrival! But I'm happy to see that you're getting lots of help!

This is a familiar story that lots of people can no doubt relate to. You're definitely not alone.

I know that many self-help books have been written on motivating people to get out of their comfort zone. To face your fears by doing what you dread doing most. But that's not the only way. Personally it's the LAST thing I'd want to do.

I believe that a better approach would be to find what we each like to do, and then just spend a lot of time on getting good at it. The hardest part is actually finding that SOMETHING.

And the more stressed out you are, the less intuitive you'll be, and the more elusive that "something" will become.

My personal recommendation is that you set aside half an hour each day - 15 minutes in the morning (and if you have the time, also 15 minutes at night either after coming home from work or just before going to sleep) - to meditate. We're not just flesh and bones, but are spiritual in nature and need to maintain a connection with the greater energy (it has many names: Source, the Universe, God...) When we're too caught up in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we'd sometimes cut ourselves off by stressing ourselves out. THAT is what's leaving you mentally drained.

I know many people would say "I don't have time for meditation", not knowing that if they would only spare that 15-30 minutes a day, that ALL aspects of their lives could stand to run so much more smoothly, that they'd make further progress in less time.

Even while you're at work, when you're feeling stressed out, closing your eyes for a couple minutes and clearing your mind while doing deep yoga breathing can GREATLY reduce stress levels and help you get through the day with more ease.

The other added benefit of being more in tuned with yourself, is that you'd be more open to receiving inspiration. The Universe knows what you want and EXACTLY how to deliver it, but you'll have to be receptive in order to pick up on the hints.

There are a million ways to make a good living online. And even with paid traffic, there are many different types of traffic, types of offers we can promote, different promotion strategies, and different advertising angles. Surely, a part of it involves logically doing research on all the different options, then dabbling in this one and that one until something "feels" promising enough to continue pursuing, then buckling down on that something until you "crack" it enough to be making consistent profits.

But that process can be so much faster, simpler, and less painful if we'd let it be. And this is where being more receptive to inspiration (by meditating daily, among other things) will help us greatly. (Abraham Hicks refers to the same as being in a "state of allowing", being "in the vortex", being "in energy alignment", being in "receiving mode", "going with the flow".)

When you're in receiving mode, and receiving inspiration from your high-self or the Universe, you'd come across the right websites that will provide guidance, or trigger certain ideas. You'll "chance upon" this site and that site where you'll pick up the different ideas you'll need to start your next project. You'll meet the right people that can help you in some way, or say something to you that will lead you down a fun rabbit hole.

Even right here on the forum, being more intuitive will lead you to the right posts that contain exactly what you may need at the particular point in time. You'll know when you feel excitement and think "hey this makes sense I think I can do this!"

That kind of inspiration, combined with logical deduction, can be so powerful. We really don't need to put too much pressure on ourselves to find the path - when we can just choose to relax and let the path come to us.

So yes - daily meditation would be my first suggestion.

Secondly - this post may also help:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-are-some-tips

You're in a REALLY good position to be trying your hand at building an online income stream. You already have experience with web design. You have a full-time income from your job so have some disposable income you can spend on learning and testing. You have the desire to learn.

You're already ahead of 90% of all the people that are just complaining about their lives and jobs and not ever taking action.

You just need to change your perspective - your limiting beliefs like you've mentioned. You don't believe in your own potential. We all have unlimited potential to achieve anything we want and more. I believe that you've just been closed off to the greater energy and inspiration, and relying solely on yourself to find the way. And when you didn't find it right away, blamed yourself for it. And because you weren't confident that ANYTHING would work out, that negative thinking made you give up on anything that didn't show promise right away.

You have NOT failed! You've merely dabbled in many things. Many of the most successful people that have ever lived, have run multiple businesses before hitting it big. Some have gone bankrupt several times. Others have lived out of their cars or were homeless at one point. No need to look back - always look forward.

The post I've linked to above will help you to look for possibilities. I know it's a long exercise, but I truly believe it can help you.

Apologies for being long-winded! You've struck a chord/nerve with what you said. I hope that at least a little bit of what I've said has resonated with you.

Try to keep all this light and fluffy and FUN! Don't be in such hurry to make anything "work"! Just explore and have fun and test different things, get into the groove, and go from there. There's no need to hold yourself accountable to making this work - for others this may be suitable advice, but not for you. There's no need to stress yourself out any further. If you're thinking "I've failed so many times - I NEED to make this work!", stop it. And I mean it.

I'll start a separate post below to provide practical feedback on your other posts.



Amy

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@trizen You're doing a lot of the right things! Below is some feedback/suggestions:

Mobidea indeed no longer has many offers, but I left it in the tutorial because it's interface is so simple - people can NOT get it wrong there.

But yes Clickdealer and Gotzha have plenty of offers - way more than enough to get you started!


You won't see anything other than zeroes for "Clicks" in Voluum, because you're not using landing pages. Clicks will record how many visitors have clicked through your landing page to go on to the offer page.

PopAds' traffic volume is indeed low, so it would be best to stick to either big carriers in large geos, or wifi traffic in mid- to large-sized geos. Either skip PopAds for now when you're practising with carrier-billing offers, or pick a big carrier that has enough volume. Later, when you start running offers that use landing pages and accept wifi traffic, PopAds would be a good source for profits, or at least a good testing ground where you can testing offers and landers for cheap (and then scale the best to bigger networks).

Don't bother running a lot of direct-linked campaigns. Running a couple of offers to 10x payout's worth of traffic each should be plenty. Try to move onto the landing pages portion of the tutorial as quickly as possible.

And with pop: Don't place any high expectations on any single offer to "work out". Instead, lock down a decent lander, and then test as many relevant offers as you can find. Mass-testing of offers is the key to success with pop traffic. Basically test a whole bunch and scaling the gems as quickly and to as many networks as possible before the offer/campaign dies is the way to go.


Yes, looking at the code line-by-line is necessary. No need to redesign anything. If a lander's coding looks too convoluted, ditch it and work on another one. This is why I usually download twice as many landers as I feel I'll need in the first round of split-testing. There are usually only a few things in the code that need to be edited and I've outlined them in the tutorial.

The goal is to have a lander that 1)functions correctly, 2)displays well on at least all the popular devices, and 3)loads quickly. I know that as a designer, most of the landers you see probably seems primitive/sub-par, and you're likely itching to edit them to your standards. But doing so would be overkill. Pop is a numbers game. Picking popular landers from Adplexity, you need to have faith that at least a couple of them will convert well. So just quickly fix up a bunch and start testing away.

After you find a good offer, you can always innovate on landers and try to beat out your current-best lander. (Even then though, unless you have a way of keeping your custom-designed landers out of Adplexity, other people would rip it - so it wouldn't be much of an edge. This is why I would suggest to focus on testing many offers and scaling hard and fast.)


Yes!


Sleep is important!


@jack_l Everything you said resonated with me - thank you for your thoughts! We should start a metaphysics mastermind haha!


I'm glad you already have plans to expand into Facebook! It's a very worthwhile traffic source to master for sure.


Great congratulations on that first conversion @trizen!

I wouldn't worry about the discrepancy - it happens a lot with carrier-billing offers, which you should stop running soon (if you haven't already!)

Usually, the conversion postback would either 1)work, or 2)not work. Since most of the conversions are showing, it means it's working.

There may also have been a delay in the aff network posting back to the tracker - that does happen.


All traffic sources will send the odd visitor from outside of your specified targeting. If the number becomes big, try asking the traffic network to reimburse you. It doesn't usually come to that though.


I would wait for a few more conversions to roll in, but yes, if the trend keeps up, you can target Android only (either that or exclude every other OS).

If the ROI is looking hopeful, you may want to cut in smaller chunks (e.g. placements) instead of bigger chunks (e.g. OSs).

Or, you may want to get green as quickly as possible by cutting in larger chunks, and THEN go back to gradually retest some of what you've cut before.

There are lots of approaches you can take - just do what makes sense and observe the results and go from there. This is how you get experience. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. As long as you set a reasonable campaign budget, you can't go too far wrong. Have fun with this! There's not really a right/wrong way since everybody does things differently. No reason to get stuck in "deer in the headlights" mode where you're too scared to make a mistake.

Regarding the zone that isn't converting - like matuloo suggested, 2x payout in loss is the common rule-of-thumb for cutting. But since it's a very big zone, I would run it to 4x payout before cutting it (if it doesn't convert). That is, unless you want to take the "get green as quickly as possible by cutting in larger chunks and then retesting later on" approach mentioned above.

How aggressively you decide to cut placements will depend on how much total traffic you have and how quickly you wish to get green. Feel free to skip ahead to the lessons on optimization if you want more food for thought.


@lorddevi @angle-lytics It's really nice to see the community giving each other encouragement and emotional support! You guys made my day. \
@voluum Karolina you amaze me with your extremely-detailed answers - thanks for all the help you're providing to our members!


It just occurred to me to ask a very obvious question: Why not build sites and monetize them yourself? There are a million and a half affiliate programs you can promote, as well as contextual ads such as adsense. It won't be quick money, but can turn into long-term assets that can pay the bills when you're in-between profitable campaigns.

In fact, I have plans to start a follow-along for this type of project. Hopefully when that happens, you can drop in on my thread and give me some pointers!


Push traffic is indeed very hot right now!

The 40-day tutorial will provide a good foundation if you're completely new to paid traffic. Pop is the cheapest to learn with. If you have plans to expand into push and/or FB, then just run a few pop campaigns to get the testing and optimization process down, without needing to register on lots of different pop networks to prepare for scaling.


Oh brother...I hope it wasn't because I had a space in one of my examples in the tracking lesson! vBulletin is buggy like that - it would introduce a space where there is none, and there's nothing I can do about it except point it out in the lesson.

At any rate, it wouldn't have broken your link. Visitors would STILL be sent to the offer. It's just that the aff network wouldn't have a record of the campaign id - which would be fine. Passing this parameter is optional.


Mobidea's tracking tokens are set up a bit differently compared to most aff networks. I wouldn't even try to figure it out - you've obviously followed the setup in the tutorial and the conversions are being posted back.


It would depend what time they actually rejected you. The valuable lesson is to check your emails constantly, and to stop traffic if conversions stop coming in.

This stuff happens with affiliate networks. Most offers don't stay active for long, and affiliates get kicked-off offers due to various reasons when either the network or the advertiser isn't happy with something (lead quality, too much traffic without conversions, aggressive landing pages....)


It shouldn't. The tokens in the campaign url are for the traffic network, not the affiliate network. Voluum would REDIRECT the visitor to the offer url you specified in Voluum's offer settings. So as long as the offer url is corrected, then no need to change the campaign url at the traffic network.


Again, since conversions are being posted back, I don't think there's a problem. I don't get what's causing the voluum errors either.


Yes and no.

Because you're learning, you're only running in smaller countries in tier 3/4, which does not require very heavy cutting of placements etc. So jumping around testing lots of stuff is definitely a good idea.

However, to maximize profits, a better approach would be to conquer one or more big geos - for example the US. Doing so would require testing a lot of offers and landers to find a promising combination, and then using that combo to cut a ton of placements until you reach green. All the testing and cutting WILL bleed money - in this case it would be wise to keep running in the same geo again and again to take advantage of the fact that you've already blacklisted the worst traffic.

Great progress so far! Please don't be too hard on yourself or too serious about all this. I understand you're spending money - but that's a necessary part of any journey. A good course on mastering paid traffic can cost upwards of 3k+. By doing the initial learning using pop you're saving at least 2k. So really, try to have fun with all this - this should excite you (and if it doesn't, it may be time you did something else!)




Amy

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Finally have a chance to catch up a little bit. I appreciate the help. It's amazing how helpful this community can be!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around tokens and postbacks, etc. The language is still pretty foreign. I'm sure it will all come together in time. I used @vortex's link for the global postback exactly how it was written in the tutorial. I now switched it to the regular domain number under the Voluum radio button. Nothing has changed, though. The Egypt conversion still isn't showing. I think I'm just going to move on for now. Mobidea has it credited to my account, but Voluum doesn't have it tracked in the data. I don't want to get stuck on 1 conversion and have it delay my process when the goal is to work on profitable campaigns and generating consistent income. 1 conversion out of 100 isn't going to make or break the data.

I fixed the spacing issue and haven't had an error since. I'm still not sure I understand what the issue was, but it's okay. The goal now is to move onto landing pages so I'm sure that will come with a lot more questions.

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Good call! And you shouldn't see this too often when NOT dealing with direct carrier-billing mobile content offers. I really wouldn't worry about this. No need to be too much of a perfectionist here.


Awesome to hear!



Amy

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Great advice. I love these types of posts. I appreciate you giving me your time to write out all of that. I definitely need to do some meditating. I am often in a hurry to do everything and get overwhelmed thinking I don't have enough time to do any of it. And then when someone gets in my way, I get frustrated and annoyed. I use meditating principles when I go to sleep so that I can shut off my brain and finally relax, but I'm usually stirring quite a bit right up to then. If I listen to the chatter, it's pretty crazy how many thoughts are bouncing around in my brain.

I've read before that the purpose of meditating isn't to fall asleep so it's not as beneficial. I need to give myself some time at night to meditate and wind down.

The one hard thing now is that at my work I am training some new guys for the next month so my "alone" time is nearly nonexistent. There are times where I'll try to get away for a few minutes, but due to the nature of the training, I can't leave them alone. It's wearing my patience thin, a little bit. I'll be back on my own mid-April, which will 1.) give me the space I need to destress when I need a few minutes to myself, and 2.) give me the opportunity to research affiliate marketing during my down time. I like to take advantage of the downtime at my job to educate myself on various things -- or work on my side project.

I try to believe that I'm on the right path. I try to believe in myself, but I'm trying to find my "lucky break." It's like, I know I can do so much more (potential), but yet, I'm not, so my subconscious says it works for everyone else except for me. If I can just see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, then it'll give me the drive to keep going. It's awesome to have 4 conversions now, but it's not reoccurring income at this point. It's just some random conversions from an offer that I ran traffic to. I didn't really have any creative control over it.

It's encouragement like this that keeps me going. Part of me feels like I need this encouragement as a little bit of validation. Too often, I've had people tell me "it's too hard," "you can't do that," "you're not good enough," "you don't have any experience doing that," and so those negative beliefs become the thoughts in my mind. And hearing it enough times, I started to believe it when things got hard. Like, right now I'm facing the uphill battle of Landing Pages. It has put the brakes on a little bit while I backtrack and work on stepping through it slowly. I would love it if I was able to get through it, get a campaign running, and then see a profitable campaign shine through, but I know it will take some work to get that up and running and it probably won't happen overnight since I'm still learning a lot.

I'm going to keep going at it, though. So far, I'm still enjoying the ride and I have to give myself the opportunity to succeed.

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I've thought about this and thought that would be my starting point before learning about this "paid traffic" thing where you literally pay to have traffic go to an offer. I have a website that I want to use as a self-help/self-promotion/inspirational site for others, but I just haven't had the clear vision for it to build it out. Just before getting into this, I was starting over with it and redesigning it since I've learned how to design in Wordpress, but it's taking some time to organize it and redo it from scratch.

Clickbank is another thing I would like to learn how to use. It's just that, Adsense, monetizing sites (which niche to target), using clickbank, are all things I have to continue learning about. I like designing and doing SEO and seeing data come to life while everything grows. I need to sort it out and be consistent. I'm trying to get the most out of STM and paid traffic/affiliate marketing at the moment since there is quite a bit of monthly costs. I don't want to end up in a situation where it's like a gym membership -- sign up and then never use it.

This was my fault. Your tutorial said to watch out for it and I didn't catch it. Doesn't look like it was an issue anyway.

Thank you, I am looking forward to seeing some green across the board. Even if it's slightly breakeven, the experience will be huge. I've been having a great time with this so far. I tend to be tight with my money, but I'm giving myself the budget to succeed. I can't keep holding myself back because I'm afraid to lose a little bit of money. I often check the tools on my phone during the day to see if there were any conversions -- maybe a little bit too much.

The big hurdle will be learning landing pages. Once I can get over that, I think things will start to open up for me as it will come down to replicating it and learning how to be more creative.

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UPDATE - 3/13/2019

I'm not sure what day it is, Day 6 maybe? Going back to work has thrown off my schedule as I have limited free time at night on my work days.

Without going back up and rereading, all of my campaigns ended. It didn't feel right to not have something in the works, so I started a campaign in Honduras. There was a time restriction so the offer was basically shut down during the night. During the day, there was barely any traffic so I just shut that one off. It wasn't worth it.

This morning, I had the idea to try something. I figured testing is something I should be doing, although doing this direct link campaigns are not recommended after the first initial learning campaigns. I wanted to try the Argentina campaign again, but only targeting the three Zones that gave me conversions. Traffic is extremely light. I only have 9 impressions since I started the campaign about 10 hours ago (as of writing this). I want to let it ride, though, and see what happens.

As my free time opened up later in the day, I started to review the tutorial on Landing Pages. It's the one thing I need to learn how to do and start testing. It was recommended to look for a high conversion rate and low payout. That sparked an idea in my head so now I am running a campaign in Pakistan to see if a high conversion rate and low payout proves to be worth it in any way. One thing to keep in mind is that the "high conversion rate" is all relative. I was basing it off of the other offers in Mobidea so it's only considered a high conversion rate because it was one higher up on the list of other offers. I just looked for one in a developing country that was higher up on the list of conversion rates and had a low payout.

After these two current campaigns, I'm going to put things on hold until I can get into Clickdealer and/or Gotzha and see what their offers look like and learn how to get a landing page up and running. If these direct link Pop offers aren't recommended (anymore), then there is no point in trying to throw money at the wall hoping something sticks.

I might have mentioned this before, but, through my limited experience, it seems that it would be hard to have any significant progress doing these offers when you don't have much control over the ads that are running. It's basically just taking an ad that is already there and paying for the option to get in a long line with others so that someone in another country can see an ad when it's your turn to get the conversion and hoping that that person clicks at that specific moment in time. Does that even make sense? haha

So, other than that, I don't have any thing else to report. I haven't gotten any more conversions, but, then again, the campaign activity has slowed down since I had to work and I'm beginning to move onto the landing pages part of the tutorial.

One final note -- I've been reading every post in here so I'm sorry if I haven't directly responded back. You all have been so encouraging and helpful. It's amazing to see you all so dedicated to helping others succeed! I probably said it a hundred times now, but I really do appreciate it!

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Day 7 - 3/14/2019

Time was limited again today so I didn't get a lot done.

My Pakistan campaign brought in a conversion over night. So, in my first week doing direct linking, I have 5 conversions for a total of $1.69. Voluum still hasn't tracked the one conversion, but I'm over it. Going forward, I will just be using my tracker's data for updates and also trying to keep the conversions accurate over all platforms. Eventually, I hope, that the data will be significant enough that we won't be talking about singular conversions, but will be talking about massive amounts of data, ROI, and profits!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around ripping landers and fixing them up. I was interrupted quite a bit today so it was hard to focus. Just for an exercise, I was looking at some sweeps ads on Adplexity and found one that is very barebones HTML, CSS, and a little bit of Javascript. It's a small, screen-sized sweep offer for a phone with a picture of a phone, a headline, and a call-to-action for a button. The Javascript only refers to a URL that looks similar to Voluum's click URL, like domain.com/click. It's in about 5 different places. Is that all I need to do is put my own click URL in all of those same positions?

Secondly, I'm trying to think about how this works so please correct me here. It probably shows either my inexperience or lack of attention to the tutorial.

I want to get in on sweeps for, say, the iPhone X. I rip landers for iPhone X sweeps. I then go into the affiliate networks and find offers for iPhone X sweeps?

As an example (I'm making this up), the offer in Clickdealer is for an iPhone sweep in Egypt. It's then up to me to create the lander for that offer whichever way I want to create it, and then have my tracking URL set up inside of the lander's code, which tracks back to Voluum, which is setup with a campaign to handle the Offer, which I got from Clickdealer?

Other than staying within the guidelines and restrictions, it's completely up to me on how I want to create that landing page? Is there a way to see what the Offer page looks like so I might be able to style the lander in a similar way? (This might have been mentioned so I probably missed it since I'm asking)

Lastly, I got in touch with a contact at Clickdealer and after about a 10 minute conversation over Skype, I was approved. There was some concern because their minimum payout threshold is $500. If I'm not initially sending a lot of traffic, then it's going to take quite a bit of time and money to get to $500. I hope I don't just have $5 sitting there and never be able to get it out. The contact said that landers were the most important thing so I needed to have very good landers from the beginning.

My contact also started sending me some offers. I wasn't quite ready for them since I'm still not sure how to create these landers and how to fix them up in the code. I'm not sure what is needed and what isn't to make sure tracking is all squared away properly. But, it definitely looks like Clickdealer has quite a bit better selection of offers so I'll be looking forward to working with them. I still haven't heard back from Gotzha so I'll probably reach out to them at the beginning of next week.

Currently, I have two campaigns running. I have EXCLUDED some zones in Pakistan as the costs have been going up with no conversions. The Argentina campaign only has INCLUDED 3 Zones total so impressions are pretty much nonexistent. I'm going to let it keep running for a little while longer, but if the campaigns don't look like they are going anywhere then I'm going to end them early. I've done enough direct linking that I get it and it's time to focus in on what's most important -- those pesky landers.

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Basically yes. All the click urls on CTAs need to be linked to your tracking domain click urls. Sometimes there are hidden links in the landers, that can be responsible for a traffic leak, that's how the LP authors protect their work, so it's a good idea to show the code to some coder or learn how to find these. The simple LPs are usually easy to copy though.

Yup, you need to create and prepare the LPs so they correspond with the offer. And yes, the tracker takes care of serving the right offer, based on the campaign setup.

Yes, as long as you respect the rules, you are free to experiment with the LPs. Some of the offers can be loaded when using a VPN and a device emulator, basically you need to "pretend" you are browsing from the country and on the device that the offer requires. In some cases it's not really possible, because they are able to detect VPNs. When that happens you have to use what you have and simply test the flow to see if it has a chance of working.

Every network has some payout threshold, paying out small amounts of $ is simply not feasible for them, due to the fees and administrative costs. You might be able to negotiate a lower one, but the name of this game is volume That's why it's recommended to work with a limited amount of networks when starting out, so you don't end up with a few $ locked up in multiple networks.

Did you read any tutorials on tracking, there are multiple ones on the forum. It looks complicated at the beginning, but once you get it, it will be easy to go on. Here is a good one for example : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Read-This-Now

Landers are a must, the sooner you learn how to work with them, the better for you. Make this your priority

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Great information, @matuloo. I checked out that link on tokens, which was super helpful. I'm not 100% there, but I definitely understand it a lot more.

So, I lost a little momentum this weekend. It was my work weekend at my full-time job so the entire weekend was dominated by working. Since I'm training some new guys, I'm drained by the end of the day. I tried getting back into reading about landers last night, but I couldn't concentrate. I went to bed early.

At this point, I feel like I'm stalling. I hit some resistance with figuring out these landers and/or having a routine for finding offers that can be used with landers. I guess a good starting point would be the recommended Offers from my AM and then go out and find landers for it.

I watched a tutorial video on Adplexity last night, which gave some small tips on what to look out for in finding landers that have a higher probability of working. At the same time, I feel like I'm just wandering around aimlessly. Like I said, I think I need to find the Offer, which will then give me some direction on finding an appropriate lander.

This is the point where I start to put off everything because I'm hitting some resistance, it feels like it's getting a little harder, and so I go back to my comfort zone. I have to not let myself do that, even if I just get up a simple lander and throw some traffic at it. I hate the idea of doing that because it's not the most optimal, but it's also testing and taking action.

I stopped my last two campaigns because they just weren't going anywhere. I was getting pretty much no traffic on the Argentina campaign that only INCLUDED the three zones that gave me conversions on the first campaign and the Pakistan campaign wasn't really giving me any traffic. So, right now, there is nothing in the works. I have to figure out this lander business. Hopefully, I can get back into it tomorrow when I have more time and into the late afternoon/evening.

Just coming home from another long day, eating dinner, and getting things cleaned up, I'm wiped. This is the feeling I want to rid of my life, but I'm just not there yet with any progress.

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If you still find the tracking unintuitive when using the landing page, check out the webinar CREATE YOUR FIRST ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN IN Voluum here. You can skip the first 20mins as it covers the basics of creating a Traffic Source and an Offer (you've already completed these parts before), and go straight to adding and setting up a Lander in Voluum (starts around 19:00). Since Sylwia is explaining the steps as she goes, it might be easier to understand exactly how the whole thing works.

Don't give up yet, remember it always takes time to learn and master a new skill. Give yourself that time!

Karolina

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You are over-complicating this a bit. It's not like you need to find THE offer and then build everything around it.

Just pick a vertical and move from there. Want to do sweeps? Fine. So look for sweeps landers and then looks for sweeps offers and test them all. There is not that much variety in running sweeps, you will see a limited amount of LP styles running around and if they work with one offer, they can also work with another. It's true that you need a solid offer to reach profits, but you also need a solid LP. So what will you start with? Testing offers with one LP that might be bad? Or will you start testing LPs with one offer that might be bad again? Since you're starting out, you simply have to swallow the loss and test both of them, because you don't have anything proven yet, to use as a benchmark.

This being said, you are not experienced enough yet, to tell a bad offer from a good one ... the same for LPs. So stop looking for the best offer or the best LP... simply test it and start identifying the good/better ones, one by one.

This is exactly what I described above, you're worried to do something, because you think it's not optimal. Well, of course it's not, but it's better than not trying anything. And yes, it's gonna be hard, but so are all worthy things in life Try to browse a couple follow alongs here on the forum, there is something that all the successful ones have in common ... those people took a lot of action, they tested, looked for ways to improve, tested some more, tried different things, looked for more sources and tested all of them, ripped tons of LPs, made lots of creatives ... that's how it works. Forget about what's optimal or the best or right, just test whatever you can get your hands on and something will fall out of this

Stay strong!
Matej.

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A couple tips on meditation I can share based on personal experience:

1)When a thought comes into my head, I just acknowledge it, then gently let it go with a "thanks but I don't need you right now - bye!"

No need to get frustrated at all. We've spent a lifetime training our brains to be active and creative. Certainly we can't fault it now for the same habit!

Sometimes, minutes will go by before you catch yourself thinking about something - when that happens, just acknowledge it and let it go, and return to the meditation.

These things take time. If you do this daily, over time it gets easier and easier, as your mind learns to become calm at your will.

2)If clearing your mind is really difficult for you, maybe start with something easier, like guided meditations.

You can find a gazillion of those on youtube. Try different ones that have received a ton of positive comments to see which ones you like.


Try to focus on what they're doing right, and get into a feeling of gratitude.

Ignore anything they're not doing right - yet.

Have faith in the Universe/Fate when it comes to allotting time for AM - just focus on doing what you feel you should be doing at the moment. Feeling impatient and frustrated will attract more of the same. And the more you're "noticing" the lack of time, the more lack you're get.

If AM is meant to happen, it will - and at the right time too (which may be in April!)


This faith thing is very "catch 22", in that you have to believe it blindly for a while before you'll see it.

With pop, it's best to not expect success - just see it as a learning tool. Pop is easy and cheap to learn compared to some of the other traffic types. You're building a foundation. Try to focus on learning and not profits at this point.

When you're at the point where you have some experience, and everything "clicks" and you start to see the potential for profits, THAT will keep you going. But before that, you'll just need to go on blind faith.

If you want to do something big, you can't expect to see good results right away. Focus on learning, focus on fun, have faith in the Universe - and eventually you will get somewhere.

That "lucky break" is not really your responsibility to find - but if you'd keep noticing only the positive and ignore the negative, you'll attract that lucky break - it will come to you.


Fixing up landers really doesn't require a lot of knowledge in coding. I know very little html/javascript, but it's enough for fixing up landers.

Every difficulty you encounter will be an OPPORTUNITY. Can you imagine how many people must have given up just because they don't want to deal with coding and landing pages?

Every time you figure out how to jump through another hoop, more competition (or potential competition) gets left behind. If this business was easy, everyone would be making the big bucks.

So - start getting excited about "difficulties" and start seeing them as opportunities.


Good for you! That's the spirit!


I'm starting to build such a site myself - perhaps you could start a separate thread on the topic, and we can discuss that in greater detail.

And other talented members will likely help us with some advice as well.


Yeah I hear you there. You're working a full-time job, plus doing AM - don't know if you can find time to do SEO as well.

Again, this kind of "choice" is best made by following intuition/inspiration - which will only be possible if you're in touch with the greater energy/source.


The big hurdle will be learning landing pages. Once I can get over that, I think things will start to open up for me as it will come down to replicating it and learning how to be more creative.


If having some traffic running makes you feel good, by all means keep it running.

Generally speaking though, keeping such a low-traffic campaign running is a bit of waste of valuable time. But like I said, if it's fun to you, keep it running just to see what happens.


Exactly as you've described.

You'll still have an edge though if you invest the money into cutting placements.

There really aren't that many moving parts in pop (relative to other traffic sources). For any given niche there are usually a few popular landers being run, so you split-test those to find a decent one. Then you use that lander to test as many relevant offers as you can. When you see promise, scale to as many networks as you can. That about sums it up.


Your appreciation is felt, and we are also grateful to you for taking the time to maintain this follow-along!

Gratitude is a good feeling - I love to bask in it! And the more I look for things to appreciate, the more "appreciate-worthy" things I see.


When in doubt, just test and see for yourself!

Edit the lander, add it to Voluum, create a campaign and specify the lander and an offer - then browse to the campaign url to arrive at your lander, click on the links to make sure you reach the offer (this is assuming the offer accepts wifi traffic - if it does, use a VPN and you should be able to reach the offer without getting redirected by the aff network).


All correct!

By using voluum's click url in every outgoing link on your lander, you allow Voluum to control the traffic flow. When you're rotating multiple offers, Voluum will automatically replace the links with actual offer urls - a different one for each visitor.

Yes you are free to create your lander however you like - like you said, as long as it gets approved at the traffic network (and they all have various degrees of leniency). You CAN of course tweak your landers to effect a smoother transition to the offer, but for initial testing that's not really required (although you could!) I would just rip the most popular ones for that offer type in the respective language, run a test, and THEN if I find an offer that converts well, I may tweak the lander to increase conversion rate.

Pop is all about mass-testing of offers. Test lots of stuff and picking the gems to scale. Spending too much time on unnecessary details will only hold you up in the beginning.

To check out what an offer looks like: If it accepts wifi traffic, just get a VPN and fire it up, then browse to the offer link in your browser. If it only accepts mobile traffic (i.e. 3g/4g) then it would be difficult to see unless you live in that target country and have a data plan on your cell phone. If you browse to the offer link from a wifi connection, either the aff network or the offer owner will automatically redirect you to another offer or page. Some aff networks provide screenshots of what the offer pages look like - but again, that's the kind of trouble I'd only go through if I find a promising offer that converts well.

And with regards to lander innovation: These days, innovating on landers does not give you as great an edge as it once did, because of all the spy tools that have leveled the playing fields in this respect. I would suggest to test VARIATIONS of your best ripped lander to increase conversion rates while staying under the radar - because your lander would blend in with all the other ones.


Very nice! Clickdealer has lots of offers you can play with.

Don't feel pressured by your well-intentioned AM - just go at your own pace. They'll have to understand and be patient.


LOL!

Yup time to stop those direct-linking camps!



Amy

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Time for another update -- I haven't disappeared.

The last, whatever, couple weeks?, I've been pretty busy with life. This whole idea of landers has gotten me all messed up and put some serious brakes on my progress. I end up going down the rabbit hole of threads on this forum, end up getting sidetracked, and end up doing nothing.

I finally had some free time today. When I found myself distracting myself from doing what I actually needed to do, I stopped myself and tried some meditation. I went into a quiet room and tried to slow myself down a little bit. Meditation is like opening a giant black hole in your mind. As soon as I start entering the zone, so many thoughts come rushing in. Some of them I don't even know where they come from as they are really random thoughts. For example, for a little humor, I was sitting on the rocker in my baby daughter's room and I started to think about the warning card that is attached to the springs of her crib. Like, wtf did that come from?

Eventually, I got to that point where everything just stopped and I found myself in a very peaceful state. I'm not sure how long I sat there, maybe 5 minutes, but it was very calming. Afterward, I spent some time reading a book that I'm trying to finish. It was a good chance to just slow down, get away from my phone and computer, and bring myself back to the present moment.

So, then, back at my computer, I started researching landers on Adplexity. I need to get some momentum back up so while looking around, I decided to apply for a sweep on Clickdealer that was recommended to me by my AM. After I was approved, I saw that it had a nice lander/creative already built into it. I guess it's not really an official lander?

Instead of sitting here doing nothing, I went ahead and just fired up another campaign again using that offer directly. There was no carrier mentioned so I'm guessing that means all carriers are eligible? PropellerAds was showing the recommended CPM was over $3. That seemed like a lot. I did more digging on Adplexity and found the lander directly so I just INCLUDED 10-15 placements. The impressions came down by a lot, but so did the recommended CPM. I set it at $1, which will be about 1,800 impressions.

I'm still probably doing quite a bit of wrong things. It feels not right. I don't know. I'm just having a tough stretch. I can't give up on this. It's too typical of me and is exactly what I've been going through with everything else. It's super fun in the beginning to learn, but once the freshness wears off and it's time to really get dirty, I float back to doing nothing except distracting myself.

Mid-April can't come fast enough when I'll be back on my own at work and I can spend more of my free time on this and not feel in a rush to try to cram everything into a few hours a day. I can literally feel my mental energy draining as I sit here trying to figure out how to do everything. I hate that my energy levels are so low all the time. I still feel like I'm in a state of being stuck at my job. I say it so much, so often, and yet, nothing has changed. It will probably be the theme of this follow-along that I constantly feel down on myself. Something has to change -- soon.

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Some offers have landers built in, or let's say they design their tours like the landers affiliates are using. In some cases, these can work directlinked. So if you still want to test directlinking, at least pick offers with these built-in landers.

Based on my own tests, usually I was still able to get better results by using my own LP, but offers like these have a way bigger chance to work compared to standard offers.

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Hey Trizen,

Did someone ping you already? Add me on skype if you're not in the network yet.

Cheers!

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No real progress made into the end of March. Just to start, here are the final numbers:

Mobidea (5 Offers):

Visits: 35,286
Signups: 5
Revenue: $1.70

Clickdealer (1 Offer):

Clicks: 85
Conversions: 0
Revenue: $0

Voluum:

Visits: 48,182
Conversions: 4 (1 didn't track)
Revenue: $1.58
Cost: $22.47
Profit: -$20.88
ROI: -92.96%

The one offer I have running with Clickdealer isn't doing much. I only have a large handful of zones included so it's either, stop the campaign or don't narrow it down by zones and let it run with no restrictions. My CPM will go up, though.

The idea was that I would look at landers from Adplexity, take the top 10 placements, and only include them. Is it normal to only include, say, 15 zones and then getting nearly no traffic? I probably need to get back into reading the tutorial.

At this point, I have 2 more weeks of being in training and then I'll be back on my own and will be able to do all of my "educational" learning while at work and won't necessarily have to try to cram everything into my limited time while I'm home. I've been casually browsing, but since my last post, I haven't done anything. I was hoping to just give my current campaign some time to work, but it doesn't seem to really be doing much of anything.

I would be happy with starting with $1 per day, but it seems that I'm missing something. I can't even imagine doing something like $10 per day or $100 per day or even $100 per month! It seems like such a distant dream still.

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In case you are picking zones that have good traffic, these are most likely very competitive. So yes, it's possible that with a low bid, you won't get any or very low traffic from them.

It can certainly feel like impossible, been there myself at some point too. I can only assure you that it can work, we're not doing this for fun or to feed the pockets of the traffic network. Always keep one thing in mind, the traffic prices are set by AUCTION, so those paying the high prices are doing so, because it backs out for them.

All it takes is testing stuff out and slowly improving.

I see that gotzha replied to this thread above, have you been in touch with them already?

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It's not a lot of traffic either so maybe my approach to that wasn't exactly the best. I was following the recommended CPM from PropellerAds based on the limited amount of included zones.


I'm considering stopping the campaign and redoing it with a full recommended CPM. That was upwards of $3.50, though. Or it might be best to just go after something else. The whole lander thing is throwing a wrench in my plans, but I have to figure it out.

Yes, I got into Gotzha. I'm not sure how I didn't see it originally, but I saw it yesterday and contacted them on Skype. I'm now in on them and going to get working on that soon.

I'm really looking forward to mid-April when I can get more done with my available free time at work. Since the weekend after I started, I'd put my daughter down for a nap, but then feel like I have to cram reading in to learn and then try to put that to use. It was easy with direct linking, but now landers take some time. So between reading, cramming, and trying to figure out landers, I lose a lot of momentum when I have to go back to work and can't do much for a couple days. So, I want to go back and re-read the landers sections, which then I have to cram in. Once I'm back on my own at work, I can do the reading at work since it'll be a good opportunity to pass the time and then when I'm home I can just get into doing.

I'm often in a rush because I desperately want to see progress and make this work for me. Being in a job I don't like, I'm still having trouble seeing any way out.

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Meditation is so important to one's well-being! Definitely the most important part of my daily routine. Thanks for sharing your experience!


Some offers will have landers built into them (only, aff networks and offer owners call them "pre-landers" - to them "landers" are offer pages).

For those kinds of offers, you can test direct-linking. Depending on the type of lander built into them, you can potentially try adding another, very simple one before them. For example, if their lander is a quiz lander, you can test a 1-page lander that shows different colors of the sweeps prize (iphone, whatever) to allow the visitor to pick their favorite color.


Usually, yes!


This is worth trying, but doing so may get you little/no traffic. Personally I still prefer to invest into finding good placements myself by targeting all placements and narrowing down. But if you can find some good placements to target from the beginning, you can do your testing for cheap. Then once you find a good offer+lander, can test all placements.

But by doing so, you'd be counting on those 10-15 placements actually being good converters. If you're wrong, then all the offers you're running "without success" may be because your placements just aren't the good converters you assumed them to be.

That's a risk you'll have to decide whether or not to take. Just make sure that there's SOME indication that the placements are performing well - by setting your search filters to only include campaigns that have run for at least a few days, and preferably with an upwards trend in the graph.


Many people have this problem. You're certainly not alone.

It would help to meditate more, because then you'd get inspiration from the Universe that you wouldn't otherwise. Our left brains can only do so much.

Doing some soul-search may help also. Make sure what you're doing is actually resonating with you, and not just because you feel is what you SHOULD be doing.

If you want to test something new, I would suggest testing push traffic. It's more promising than pop - pop is really just a learning tool.

You can even test offers and landers on pop first (for cheaper), then scale the best to push and just test ads there. You don't even need to wait until you have a profitable pop camp - just test a bunch and scale the best to push. Campaigns that aren't profitable on pop may be profitable there.


Everything changes with your choice of thoughts.

Thoughts drive emotions, and emotions will attract circumstances to create your reality.

Keep reaching for better-feeling thoughts one at a time, and you'll change your emotional state, which will in turn change your point of attraction, which will in turn change your reality.

Most people will try to change reality DIRECTLY by meddling with the circumstances - trying to get a new job for example. When people do that, the outcome can be positive or negative depending on whether the change was inspired or forced.

If the new job opportunity has arisen because the person had changed their point of attraction for the better to attract it, then the new job would be better than the old.

If the new job resulted from a desperate attempt to escape the old one, then it would just result in more of the same old.

Your energy is low because you're not doing something you enjoy. That's natural.

But that's not the way it has to be. Your current reality is what it is, but your future reality will change - if you'd start changing your thoughts now.

Here's an exercise for you: Make a list of all the things you appreciate about your job. The fact that you're providing value and making money to sustain daily living would be a great start. Write down every little thing you can think of.

Read it as often as you have time for.

Do this continuously for a month - and I GUARANTEE you that SOMETHING will change. In the very least, you will FEEL different - and that's a sure sign that your reality will start to change with it soon.

Don't be deceived by the simplicity of this exercise - it can work miracles. But you must feel truly appreciative every time you read the list and not just treat it like a necessary routine by going through the motions. It's not the ACTION itself but the EMOTIONS associated with the action that will change your point of attraction.


Initially we all have to go on faith - until we start to see actual results.

It's the BELIEF that you can succeed that will drive actual results. This is why early accomplishments are so hard to come by - it's difficult to anticipate something you haven't experienced before.

So that first conversion, that first $1/day, $10/day - will be MUCH more difficult than that first $100/day or $1k/day.

This is why seeing other people's success can help so much. Read more case studies to instill more faith. It helps.

Also, know that pop has become difficult and competitive. It's still the easiest and cheapest to learn, which is why I start newbies on pop. If you pay your dues here, you'll lose less money when you transition to other sources.

And after running a few pop campaigns to get the basics down, don't be afraid to challenge bigger geos. When you have more traffic coming in, you can test way more landers and offers, and there's more room for optimization (i.e. you can cut a lot of stuff and still have enough to profit from).

And of course, feel free to give push traffic a try. Do your research first though by reading every thread in the push subforum, and stay away from certain networks that have a reputation of overspending - those kinds of networks are definitely not for newbies with small budgets.


Congrats! They have good offers - should keep you busy!


Try to download 2-3x the amount of landers you need, so you can pick the easier ones to fix.

I heard Landerbolt can help but I have yet to try it myself.

Don't get discouraged - starting ANYTHING is tough in the beginning. I know people that had a job or even 2, kids to take care of
and STILL managed to make this work. If the desire is there, it will happen eventually. There's really no such thing as failure - there's only giving up before finding success. Hang in there! And most of all, have fun with all this! This stuff can be so much fun - and if you're not finding fun in it, then maybe you should try something else.



Amy

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