My Success Story (failures included inside lol) (6)
Hey guys,
After a very long time inactive or just lurking around from times to times, now it’s time to post my success story.
Before 2015 I used to be an SEO affiliate ranking tons of sites, running mostly whitehat offers and ecom (you know the kind of e-com offers where you get payed 2.5% of what the people buy in your customer store… not gonna get rich that way lol...).
It was stable but not scalable at all… once you’re #1 in google and your site is making low 4 figures a month revenue, where else are you going to get SEO traffic?
At the start of 2015 I joined STM and started testing some campaigns:
- got total sh*t results on the now defunct Decisive DSP, I also hated to see the totally shit quality of sites I was buying traffic from
- got sh*t results too running FB Ads on my whitehat SEO sites (I was trying to generate leads pushing my seo sites on facebook), restrospectively I was clearly doing a tons of mistakes and my Ads were just as bland and borring as it can get...
During the summer of 2015, STM announced the second round of the 6 Weeks Affiliate Mastery Challenge and I joined.
The 6WAMC was a blast and a really intensive and mind opening experience. Long story short :
- after the first few weeks I was pretty pissed off... I was following the instructions to the letter and getting all the times -75% to -90% ROI… even after my 20-something campaigns..., needless to say I wasn’t a happy bunny
- then my mastermind partner and I decided to ask around for the best perfoming App Install offers and found 2 good looking ones : we tested a shit tons of angles. The results were still not in the green but looked somewhat more do-able, e.g. -35% on some gigantic DSP placements.
- I kept testing angle and angles and I was really about to quit this offer until I woke up one morning and saw my latest Ad doing +350% ROI. Funny thing : my angle was taken from porn sites and dating offers and adapted to a mainstream placement and CPI offer...
- I then bought pretty much every traffic I could and reached $2500 daily revenue (with $1500 profit/day) during the 6WAMC… that was 10 000 App Installs per day and my retention rate was very good. I kept my mouth shut… you don’t want to create competition just because you bragged 5 minutes. I think I only opened my mouth 1 year later to thank Zeno and tell him the success I got.
- Obviously since I still was a noobie I forgot that buying millions of impressions per day was the surest way to get banner blindness at lightspeed and after 10 days I saw some pretty huge drop in performance and was again barely making any profits.
- Long story short again : after this I adapted my original angle (very similar images but slightly different) to run some more weeks, then when this died too, I used all the targeting options offered by the DSP to make all sorts of angles targeting a subset of the « broad » audience, and so on.
- Then the offer died, I found a « twin » offer on some other network, it worked well too.
- Then this offer died completely too and there was no twin offers anymore… so I took my winning angles and adapted then on some new offers : it worked again.
This whole Apps / CPI thing kept me busy until mid-2016. During that time I was always very worried about my angle getting discovered and ripped so I was only targeting placements that never appeared on Adplexity…
Then during the summer of 2016 I gave a try to native and PPCall but didn’t like any of them for various reasons:
- Douchebag rep at Revcontent (there is enough good guys in this industry to say F-Y to idiots). Plus didn’t like the fact angles could get ripped that easily (at that time I even coded my own bot to spy on some placements and it didn’t take me more than a week to build...).
- and for PPCall the main problem was the « human factor » of this kind of offers : if you send calls to an overbusy call-center, no one answers your calls and you won’t get payed anything...
Fighting against the spies was a cat and mouse game and one thing was clear to me : since I’m running whitehat things I don’t want the first noob to copy/paste my campaign out of Adplexity. It’s hard enough to make profits WH.
Basically I decided I wanted to build a « moat » around my business, so no-one could easily rip my campaigns. I also wanted full access to high traffic sources such as FB and Adwords, without handling the account-generation logistic, so I would run whitehat offers (and have my mother proud of me lol).
I then decided to run FB Ads again, mostly thanks to all the intel I had gathered at the AWE Berlin 2016. Funny things is I was still sending traffic to the same LP I tried in 2015 but now with all my affiliate knowledge it worked incredibly well.
I guess that’s the somewhat experienced affiliate superpower : looking at some images/banners/LP and having a relatively good idea whether or not it stands any chance to be a winner. We have a « bland and borring » detector in our DNA ;-)
The good thing is that these offers were all private CPL deals and/or I pretty much had the exclusivity with the network offering them, so even if some guy would find my angle, he would still have to convince people to let him run the offer.
At one point there is another advantage running these CPLs offers : the customer call-center NEEDS your leads or they would have half their people doing nothing all day long, so there is a healthy dependance between me and my customers.
Later on that year I was still running these offers but wanted more offers to run.
I also wanted to have full control on the offer page… so I used what Tim Burd calls a « host and post » setup (he used to do this when working on CPL with attorneys). Basically the CPL form and thank you pages are all on my sites, and I send the lead to the end customer through webservice/API or even emails for the less tech inclined customers. You can also optimize the hell of your form and LP conversion rate, speed, etc, what most customer don’t do properly (if at all).
Fastforward to 2019 : I’m running the same kind of « host and post » setup and I still enjoy the protection of a moat surrounding my castle lol 😉
Inbetween I’ve expanded into most whitehat leadgen verticals : insurances, credit and banking related offers, edu, tax saving, etc… obviously since there is still a call-center involved I still have call-center related issues from time to time but since I’m payed on CPL it’s not as critical as with PPCall.
Next moves : hummm not 100% sure, I'm just coming back from AWE Barcelona and all these AW Conferences show you sooooo manyyyy possibilities it’s hard to stay focused, but I’ll continue leadgen on FB for sure, and probably either extend to having my own or partner call-center for some offers, or even own the offer when possible (and when it’s not a headache-generating business lol…).
To be honest I could probably generate 3x more leads if my customer call-centers and pockets were bigger so that's a pita to not be able to run full speed.
One thing I’m 100% sure of : I’m not monetizing these leads enough… after all they are mine, I’ve only sold them exclusively for one type of offer so I could monetize them further with other offers.
Cheers,
Great post man! Much appreciated 
Hi wiifmdude
Amazing post!
Thanks for sharing!
I remember you from 6WAMC! Don't remember our discussions but definitely remember your username.
Thanks so much for sharing your success! Especially the upcoming affiliates need this kind of motivation to keep pressing forward. Success almost never come easy, and CONTINUED success is never an accident.
Thank you for the inspiration!
Amy
(EDIT: My memory is too faulty - we've hung out at conferences more than once, and it was at AWE a couple weeks ago that you told me about your success and I asked if you could post a success story and you kindly said yes. Thank you Ben - thank you, thank you, thank you!)
Very nice wiifmdude, I love how you went from the losing campaigns all the way up to conquering the leadgen space for yourself! The losing phase can be extremely frustrating and many people stop right there and give up. But you're another example of how strong will and the the refusal to give up can break all the barriers
I hope you're not gonna stop posting now again! Based on your journey, you surely have a lot of experience to share with us, would be awesome if you could post a bit more
Persistance, persistance & persistance, great job man!.
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