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40 Days of Tutorial Awesomeness (10)

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Hi,

I'm very new here. This is actually my second visit in the STM forums, the first I got so overwhelmed after a couple of days that I tapped out and asked for a refund after a couple of days. I've been doing other internet marketing things, but paid traffic has been something I've wanted to get involved in, but every time I tried to get started I ended up just getting buried in little details and never made it to launching my first campaign. So lame.

Last week, I shelled out a dollar because I was bored on a train ride and wanted something new to read for Vortex's Newbie Tutorial. Sadly, because STM seems to not just automate everything, it took awhile for the guide to be emailed to me, so I couldn't just read it for shits and giggles on the train and store it with all the other marketing crap that is in my head that I just haven't gotten around to using yet (but I will, I'm sure, one day). But it did arrive later that evening and as I read through it the first time just started following along and doing whatever I could. And then did some more the next day as I got approved to the network and talked to my AM. And then started running traffic the day after that, and did a bit of optimizing and by that evening I actually had a campaign going that had a positive ROI, woohoo!

I had no idea how I could replicate doing that once, unless Vortex wrote another guide that took me by the hand and showed me exactly what to do.

Instead I decided on the next best thing, I'd join STM again, and follow along with her 40 Day Newbie Tutorial.

I'm sure there is lots of other amazing information on here, but I also know that I have a tendency to want to learn everything and take no action, so I'm limiting myself to the tutorial, what is recommended to read, and using the rest of the forum just to look for answers to specific questions. After I get through this I can treat myself to gorging on all the other sure to be cool stuff hidden in the various topics.

So this is my follow along. I sort of like to ramble when I write.

Day 1

Today was very straight forward. I applied to the three affiliate networks and also propellerads for traffic. I'd signed up last week for popads, so I guess I'm 20% done with this part now. It was late in the afternoon when I applied, so I didn't really expect to hear back from anyone yet.

After that, decided on Binom for tracking. I liked the first month free idea. And then I liked that Binom gave enough credit to get just about a month free of Digital Ocean to host the tracker on. I have no idea if these are the best options, but I noticed other people use this, and I don't want to get too lost in pondering the pros and cons.

After I signed up for both, I had no idea what to do.

So I bought a domain name, following Vortex's comment that you can just buy a cheap one instead of a dot com. So I got an .xyz. It's like being back in my building spam website days!

This thread by @affiliatecase was very helpful in getting me to figure out what to do next after I had Binom and Digital Ocean but no clue what to do with them or how to get them to work together

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...iate-marketing

And I got up to the point where I'm waiting to have Binom installed. Hopefully tomorrow I'll hear back from the networks and get the tracking up, and also move forward on whatever day two has in store.

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Welcome on board!
Just write to our support: https://support.binom.org - they will do the installation for you

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Thanks! They got it all done in no time for me. I'm impressed by the support for a service that hasn't even asked for a payment method to be set up yet!

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Days 2 Through 10

After signing up for the affiliate networks I amazingly was able to miss the emails from two of the three. No idea how this happened since I was checking and waiting to hear back from them. Mobidea I guess I was approved for without having to talk to anyone, I found out when I got an email today asking why I hadn't started to run a campaign yet and if I needed some help.

Clickdealer wanted some screenshots of traffic and payouts from other networks. I had traffic from Vortex's newbie tutorial, and I used some payouts from an affiliate network I'd used for some grayhat SEO stuff a couple of years back. I don't know if I was completely new if I would have been accepted?

I had already read through the lessons and took some notes choosing an offer and setting up Binom so this morning I choose 3 offers from Clickdealer and 5 from Mobidea, added them into Binom and inserted the postback URLs in my settings on the networks.

I was a little confused about the changes I had to make for the Postback URL for Clickdealer.

Can anyone tell me is this is the right ending to the URL for Clickdealer?

cnv_id=#s2 #&payout=#price#

that is the postback URL I specifically for clickdealer out of Binom, but at first I thought that maybe instead of #s2 #, it was supposed to be #tid #.

I had a little trouble with getting the postback right during the first tutorial, so I'm a little anxious, but I figure I'll see if it's wrong and if it is the worst that happens is I lose a little bit of money running the first bit of traffic.

Feeling a little anxious but still motivated, I moved on to the next day and set up a campaign in PropellerAds. It was pretty cool that they had an offer for an extra $25 with the first deposit, I'm sure I'll be able to use a little extra for tests starting out.

I ended up setting up two campaigns, one from each network. As I'm writing this those are just starting to run and hopefully I'll get some decent data to move on to day 11 with.

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I'll write more about the results soon. I'm trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. One of the offers on Mobidea I ran said the payout was .56, I got a 8 conversions, but the payouts were either a .011 or .001. I tried messaging them today to find out what I was doing wrong, or what I read wrong, but I haven't head back from them.

Any ideas where my mistake was?

The other offer I ran from Clickdealer got one conversion and had a -56% ROI.

I'm happy I got a few conversions at least, just so I can see the data. I wasn't expecting to make anything on these initial direct linked campaigns but it was a good learning experience how to get everything set up on the traffic sources and in Binom.

Today I spent about 2 hours working through some Code Academy courses, I have a bit of a background in HTML and CSS, I'm too rusty to write it but I can read it and know what will happen on the page, so it's so far mostly a refresher, but I'm going to follow along and do everything recommended!

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Sorry for the late arrival! Missed your thread somehow.

I'm so, so glad that you've finally decided to take action! And so, so honored that it was with my $1 guide - as it was designed for that exact purpose.

This is such valuable insight!

I would recommend either writing this on a piece of paper and sticking it on the wall next to your computer, or take a photo/screenshot and make that your desktop/laptop wallpaper.

It's so easy to get distracted. I still catch myself doing it from time to time.

I'd start off trying to do one task, then all of a sudden remember another one and start doing that, forgetting to finish the original task.

And/or, I'd be doing research on something, and something else would capture my interest - and an hour later I'd find myself researching something that's a thousand miles away from the original thing I was doing research on.

Now I make it a habit to stick to a task until it's either done or hit a snag that needs to wait on someone/something else before I could continue making progress. If I encounter distractions or detours, I just write them down so I could get back to them later.

More importantly, I don't reply to messages in real time. I would reply to what I feel are urgent ones the same day, and the rest maybe once every couple days to a week. And many I never reply to at all. Otherwise, with so many platforms these days - multiple emails, skype, messenger, wechat, telegram, whatsapp...we could be replying to messages all day and STILL not be done. I struggled with this a lot in the beginning, because I like to be polite and get back to everyone - until it was very clear to me that it would be an impossible task.

In this day and age of information overload, the ability to focus has become ever more important. Aside from the tips above, taking care of our health can help a ton. Getting enough sleep and exercise (something I'm for sure not doing enough of) and keeping a good diet (guilty here too) will definitely help. Taking breaks to relax the brain and meditating daily can be invaluable also.


*whispering* You're not alone. *wink*

We should form a group called Chronic Ramblers Anonymous (CRA )


Binom is famous for outstanding customer service! I can vouch for that 100%.


Congrats on your first conversions with Binom!

Are the conversions being posted back to the tracker? If not, let's take a look together.


This is common for this type of offers. I don't remember what the reason was - I did ask my AM way back when I was running big volumes but have forgotten what they told me.

It isn't really important though - because you probably won't be running a lot of this type of offers.

But you can always ask your AM about this - if you get a response, could you please give us an update?


Very good! Sounds like you may already know more coding than I do. You don't need much knowledge to fix up ripped landers - what you know is probably enough. It's almost always the same few things that need fixing.

Looking forward to your next update!



Amy

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I never found out what the problem was with the payout. My AM told me that when the traffic isn't the right for the offer they will use a smartlink instead so the traffic isn't wasted. Looking at my conversions in Mobidea, they were from a smartlink.

I could see the conversions in Binom, so I figure I did get the postback URL correct. And I did see that the conversion were from the the right GEO (Jamaica), and were from 3G connection, which the offer was good for 3G and Wifi. After spending a bit of time one trying to figure out the problem, I realized what Amy said in the response, I'm just running this as a test to get used to everything, if I was going to run the offer for real I'd spend more time figuring this out, and bothering my AM about it. What he did say was that it was usually happens when the offer is for 3G and wifi traffic is run to it.

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100% correct - no need to spend time trying to figure this out.

I remember the reason now though: You've reminded me (thanks!) Affiliate networks, traffic networks, and trackers all use IP databases to determine whether a visitor is using wifi or carrier (and which carrier). And because different networks use different IP databases, there may be discrepancies, so even when we're targeting traffic from a specific carrier, when it's received by the aff network, they may "think" it's NOT from that carrier, and redirect it to an offer that does accept what they think that visitor is using (another carrier, or wifi).

This happens quite often, which is why we'll often see conversions from offers other than the one we're actively promoting.



Amy

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Thanks Vortex for the explanation!

I don't have too much of an update. I've gotten hung up on finding landing pages through Adplexity. I think that I'm probably overthinking the process and trying to figure out if the landers match the offers that are available through the networks. Like how important a consistent message from the prelander to the offer page is, and things like that. I'm also overthinking the fact that I only speak English, so I've been trying to download zip files and then getting chrome to translate the pages for me to have an idea of what is on some of them (I'm doing sweeps and realized some of the ads I was looking at were for virus protection).

I feel like I'm not doing this simple enough, so I'm going to go back and re-read the lesson on using Adplexity and lesson on landing pages and see if maybe I can figure out how I'm over complicating this.

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That's very natural to do. Eventually you'll find some sort of balance between overthinking and underthinking - what's more important and what's less important, and what needs to be right from the start and what can come after.

There are many ways to do any one thing. For better/worse here's my suggestion:

-In the beginning, no need to worry too much about look-and-feel consistency between lander and offer. For a quick test, using landers as-is or with minimal editing should be good enough. This is one of the reasons why I suggest testing at least 5 landers that look quite/very different - so that chances are at least couple of them would be suitable for any specific offer.

In the beginning if you have no idea what kinds of landers will convert well, it would be better to refrain from customizing too heavily. Landers that have received a lot of traffic over at least a few days have a solid track record, which means chances are high that it's a good converter. Once you have a benchmark winner lander, you can get crazy with customizing and even designing landers from scratch and split-test these with the benchmark.

-As for translations, again, if you choose landers that have good track record, chances are the translations are not too bad. And again, if you test at least 5 such landers, chances are good that at least a couple of them are good converters with decent text and are suited for the particular offer(s) you're testing.

When you find a promising offer and lander, you can always then spend more time on making the lander flow better with the offer, and get translations done (perhaps even split test multiple translators) etc.


Hope that helps! Keep in mind though that this is just one approach. As you gain experience you will certainly deviate from this. But my approach would be a good starting place.



Amy

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