Jesse James Follow Along of Amy's 40-Day tutorial (4)
Quick intro of me is I am a retired poker professional who has dabbled in Ecom, SMMA and now trying out affiliate marketing.
Did shopify dropshipping from Aliexpress, ended up hating all the work for small payout. 3k revenue for a few months + couldn't scale facebook ads. SMMA flopped in a competitive niche after 3 months.
Saw Jafar's 40 Day Journal at the top and read through it, figured this would be a good way to stay organized + stay consistent. I also recommend Jaybot's thread here for noobies as well.
I am on day 14 of the tutorial so I'll quickly go over what has happened up until now.
Day 1- Applying to networks
Got approved to Mobidea and Clickdealer within 5 days. Been over 2 weeks and Gotzha has not replied. Popads and PropellerAds both let me through, standard fare. Affiliate manager to Clickdealer added me on skype, nothing crazy.
Went with
Days 2-8 - Picking offers
Smooth sailing here as well. Followed the great instructions and no real hiccups.
Picked some offers and got approved pretty quickly.
Key takeaways:
Get organized to keep track of everything.
You don't lose money when something flops, we are buying data. This is a key mindset (something I am comfortable with coming from Ecom)
Feeling : very overwhelmed and have information overload. Still optimistic.
Day 9 - Setting up Tracking
Had to read this post 3 or 4 times over. I kind of understand tracking but Jimmy's post about it here cleared it up and confirmed what I thought was true.
I didn't realize until after Day 9 that these offers already have landing pages and stuff built in. Not sure why I didn't get that before but it clicked today.
Day 10+12/13 - Ran first campaigns
As far as I can tell I correctly ran the campaigns, and they predictably flopped. I am not worried about this, my mindset + understanding towards data is pretty healthy. My mindset towards making money still needs work.
They flopped but I was mostly happy everything ran correctly.
Day 11 - First lesson on optimization + testing
This is what excites me the most. Looking at the numbers, understanding what makes people tick and how best to solve their problems + catch their attention.
Had a hiccup where I could not drill down into
Day 14/15 - Introducing Landing Pages (today)
I spent a few hours today reading through more forum posts and really trying to digest what exactly I am learning here. The popads flopped, but my computer has been infested oddly with notifications on my desktop. I assume these are called the "push" ads?
I found the "What's working in 2019" Pdf and flipped through it. It seems a lot of people say pop is dead, and push is going to blow up and die as well. It was a pretty discouraging read really.
It got me thinking about what I want to pursue, what vertical and whether I should be blackhat/whitehat etc.
What made you know Affiliate Marketing was for you?
I am really struggling with this question right now. I never thought I would have to learn coding but, beyond that does affiliate marketing have a positive impact on people?
I tried dropshipping cheap products from china, and I never lied or misled people about what they were. At most it was an omission, and my products were quality! People just hated buying something dropshipped.
Is there a place for affiliate marketing for me? I don't want to install spyware or scam people. I don't want to black hat. Selling lies about diet pills, embellishing half truths or sending lonely men to a dating site...it doesn't rub me the right way.
This could be a case of me simply not understanding ways to use affiliate marketing, but I don't quite understand it all.
Don't take this for complaining, I am simply trying to brainstorm a way I can do this in a way that aligns with my values. It's very clear to me you guys have a great community of positive people.
I am still a noob and I believe I just need to seek more understanding of the topic and what I am learning.
Feeling: Discouraged. This could simply be a roadblock I need to work through. Will learn a bit of coding for the landing pages. I have a bad gut feeling though and I've learned to trust that.
Spent a few hours learning HTML today and will finish the tutorial tomorrow.
Amy was kind enough to leave many links and things to learn which I am sure you have all seen.
It IS pretty amazing the feeling of accomplishment you get when you create something. Even if this is a silly little thing I was kind of like "WHOA I made this?!".
Feeling: Better today and will complete the 40 day tutorial before judging.
Push ads are annoying for sure. If you're planning on running push traffic after "graduating" from the 40-day tutorial, by all means keep subscribing to more push ads so you can spy on them to see how other affiliates are running their campaigns. Otherwise, you can stop them by going into your browser settings.
It got me thinking about what I want to pursue, what vertical and whether I should be blackhat/whitehat etc.
This business is mostly about jumping on whatever IS working at the moment and milking it for all you could before it dries up. And when it does, you look for something else - there's always SOMETHING that's still working, or some new opportunity will always appear.
Having said that, there ARE business models that will last longer. Lead generation for instance. Or if you have your own service and product. But most business ventures don't stay profitable forever.
However, no matter how you want to make a living online, marketing skills will very likely benefit you in the long run.
And if you're looking for more scaleable and sustainable traffic, you can't go wrong with FB and/or Adwords. And it doesn't look like Native is going anywhere anytime soon either.
Trouble with FB and Adwords is they're really strict in terms of the type of offers you can promote, and most of the CPA offers we're accustomed to promoting are not very welcomed on these sources. Meaning, you'd need to be very creative when finding a balance between misleading the visitor into converting, and staying compliant with FB/Adwords TOS. And account bans are almost always either a possibility, or a reality that will occur on a regular basis.
There are whitehat offers you can run on FB and adwords that will minimize chances of getting account bans, but most of them you won't find in the affiliate networks. You can check places like Commission Junction, Link Share, Share-a-sale. And then of course many products and services have their own in-house, standalone affiliate programs you can sign up to at their websites.
Wait - I lied. There's one type of offers you CAN find on affiliate networks, that's whitehat and mostly safe for running on FB and Adwords: Ecom offers. As in physical products like electronic massagers, make-up, consumer electronics etc. etc. (Stay away from nutraceutical products though unless you know how to run blackhat.)
Then of course you can collect leads, either for yourself, or for selling to other services and products. There are affiliate programs that will pay for leads. Or you can approach businesses yourself and negotiate a rate you want to be paid per lead or actual sale.
There are so many things you can do. But whatever it is you end up doing, I feel that the 40-day tutorial would still help to get your feet wet. Get the initial experience on how to get offers, how to implement tracking, how to set up campaigns, how to get landing pages and do pre-selling, etc. Once you have some experience, you'll be in a much-better position to decide which path to go down.
Did you manage to fix up some landers successfully? And optimized them for display, functionality and (most of all) speed?
Amy
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