Becoming Financially Free (13)
Hey Stackers,
After a ton of reading & research I've decided, it's time to start gathering some data and build some campaigns. I've just now gotten my first campaign approved on LeadImpact and am waiting for the traffic to start trickling in.
A little overview of what I've done so far:
- Picked PPV as my main traffic source after reading the 40 day guide
- Read everything I could about PPV on the forums
- Started reading Smaxors recommended book list and took a lot of inspiration from hist posts
- Scraped 26000 landers to see what creatives & niches are out there
- Contacted my AMs for verticals & offers that are getting PPV traffic
- Decided to start with 2 Biz Opp offers on 2 networks
- Created 2 simple landers
- Used clustering algorithms to group the landers I found to then find the specific targets for the different niches (the targets were in the URLs that I collected along with the lander, like keyword=.makemoney.com/)
- This netted me ~150 URLs (and a couple hundred keywords) people were bidding on with biz opp offers
- Using Google Ad Planner chose 20 medium-volume URLs that are very work-at-home / bizopp related (according to a tip of Besmir) to start out with since my budget is relatively small (~$1k USD)
- Created the .domain.com and //domain.com variants to make sure i'm not picking up other stuff like derpdomain.com
- Eat really good apple pie today
Here are the two landers I created, big thanks to maynzie for the inspiration, I mainly left his lander as unchanged as possible (although I shrunk it to 450px height as tijn recommended) to have something that I know works until I get my own conversions rolling.
Click Here starts blinking a bit every 3 seconds
To-Do:
- Get a first conversion
- Branch out into targeting not only URLs but also keywords - I'm a little hesitant because I can't accurately predict the traffic & relevance on those
- Rotate in more offers, there's some tasty looking $100 ones but I'll stick with the $30 ones I got now until I have more data
- Scale into more countries
- Create more landers
- Figure out how the tax stuff works in my country (i.e. incorporate)
I'm learning a lot about Linux, Web Hosting, Web development and Marketing, so it's a ton of fun.
This is relatively simple & sparse (still have to set up the BeyondHosting VPS today) and a lot of the stuff isn't 100% obvious, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
And of course if you have any tips / goodlucks to wish I wanna hear those too!
good stuff...glad to see your taking action!
have you done internet marketing before or is PPV your very first effort?
I found out about affiliate marketing ~35 days ago. Some guy on reddit was bragging about making $3k a week haha
Done since yesterday:
- Set up BeyondHosting VPS with 384 MB RAM for 15$/month.
- It's sitting at 338 MB RAM idle with nginx and everything running, benchmarks using phpinfo(); show >3000 requests/s so looks like I'm set.
To-Do:
- Set up SSL, so I can use https pixels.
- Start setting up some email/zip submits to play around with.
- Scout out international offers with good landers, I'm fluent in German and have a good understanding of French, so I should be able to find some.
- Get to know more affiliates, I'd love a chatroom or something where we could talk & bounce ideas off each other.
Originally Posted by polarbacon
Ya I would def look at DE and FR.....lotta traffic over there and bid prices can be alot less than the English speaking countries
Alright, set up SSL (did a little dance when I connected to my https://domain),
created 1 quiz -> email submit and 1 simple lander -> email submit. Waiting for approval.
Not getting much of any impressions on my bizopp URLs. about 4-5 of them have competing bids (up to 0.30), so I'm thinking people are bidding on shorter strings that are still relatively unique (so instead of "//makemoniesonline.com" on "kemoniesonline.c"), snatching up all my impressions, will have to investigate further. I'll also add some of the keywords I have.
Today I'll be looking into getting a proper web framework running on my server so I don't have to build HTML pages like a little Philippine virtual worker and can rather just create a template and then say
I definitely want to arrive at a point where I can - in a largely automated fashion - create dozens of tightly targeted paths, I'm terribly lazy
I built a complete campaign for an EWA email submit, and after setting everything up tried getting my https pixel to fire. I submitted some gmail address but not only did my pixel not fire, EWA didn't even count it as a "Qualified transaction" much less as an "Approved" one, the email submit only pays ~$1.10, so I'm thinking it should convert upon entering the email? It asks the user to "make sure to like" some facebook. If that's needed then I basically wasted my time setting up this campaign. Maybe my proxy was flagged pretty early ... I'll send some clicks and see what happens.
After having to do a ton of stuff for uni I'm back and - as promised - I have results for my fellow stackers!
Now I know switching traffic sources when you are just starting out is a cardinal sin, but I felt LI was a little too beginner-unfriendly since approvals took so long. I'm not done with PPV by any means, but I rather start learning with a traffic source where I have vast insight into what's running with what creatives and where I can easily recreate that.
Enter ... POF. Ryan aka rawservices from A4D (super-friendly guy) told me to run PeopleMeet offers, so I can gain a little bit of confidence and work from there.
I scraped a ton of images only to then use the POF Spy to pick some from the web interface lol
I also used some of maynzie's insights in his POF thread and uploaded my campaigns using the POF uploader (so much good shit on this forum haha)
2 genders * 5 images * 2 ad copies (different ones for m/f) * 3 age brackets (30->40, 40->50, 50->99) = 60 ads
I started the CPMs at .42 and then raised them to .62 and distr. ASAP to get a little more traffic during US downtime.
Spent $20.28
Revenue $27.50
Profit $7.22
ROI 35.6%
Solid profit while just testing! LOL I never would've expected this... Can't wait till tomorrow, gonna throw out the bad ads, scale up the good ones and test even more, flesh out more niche dating campaigns 
I was too lazy to change the campaign names to properly reflect the age brackets and didn't use the POF tracking pixel (probably should)
The conversions in order are:
f30-39 4
f40-49 4
m30-39 1
m40-49 0
f50-99 0
m50-99 2
Should I also take a peak at <30 year olds? Advertiser is looking for women 30+ so I'm not too sure...
Now I also know why the male crows converted so crap on the LP. I advertised with super hot chicks and then lead them straight to this LP:
Ugh .. I'm gonna have to change my angle on the male ads or pre-sell them with a LP. I saw people use different SingleParentMeet landers, I'm gonna see if I can get my hands on those.
I have no experience with POF... Good CTR? Bad CTR? The _awesome_ thing about collecting your own data is that you start to gain an understanding of what ads make people click.
There's one ad that had instantly got 0.5% CTR because the image + headline work so well together. This means I can seek to create that effect with more images and more headlines instead of just blindly copy&pasting from others.
-> Taking action = Awesome
Little update
Decided to add BBPeopleMeet into the mix, not really a fan of the lander, but it did OK for the women. Ironically women are doing much better for me, probably because of the offers I'm running and horny guys (i.e. all of them) are not just clicking through to where the hot pics are. I've applied for true.com on EWA so that should change haha
Spent $99.81
Revenue $74.25
Profit $25.56
ROI -25.6%
Here's yesterday. Slight loss since I just threw a ton of pics against the wall to see what sticks. I'm ok with that since it's just paying for data.
I'm feeling it's a little tough to scale horizontally on POF, I've by no means exhausted the traffic source, but I think the way to go is to set up as many different campaigns as possible.
It took me 2 days to find out how to properly track POF with P202, kinda weird no one really talks much about it but right now I'm doing it like so:
http://www.domain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=12345&c1=offername-{gender:}&c2=age-range&c3={age:-}&c4=adcopynr&t202kw=imagenr
Like this I can properly track the images over all campaigns with the Group Overview (eg. Group by a certain image) and don't have to group up all the image CTRs and conversions over multiple campaigns.
c3 also allows me to pass through the exact age through to my lander, that I have created since males just wouldn't convert on the BBPeopleMeet standard LP. I'm curious to see how my lander performs, since it's the first one I've created
If that doesn't help I'll probably change the offer for males and change the angle, not much more you can do to convert guys than put the right images in front of them I guess lol
I'm also using the POF pixel, but I don't like their tracking platform. Functionality is all over the place and it just feels really not-fleshed-out.
Next thing I will do is research images and build landers for new campaigns. I have a few more angles I want to try out: White girls who only date Hispanics/Blacks/Asians and Emo girls, although I have yet to figure out how I'm gonna word the latter one, BenPOF recommended it to the guy who was down $-1500 on POF so I'm thinking it can't not convert.
I turned the traffic for this campaign:
into this:
"But how?"
I put a landing page in between. I was initially a little afraid of these, since they add another variable to the complex equation that is direct marketing, but there was a rather large disconnect between my ad and the design of the landing page. So just direct linking confused people (Hey I came for the hot chicks .. what happened).
I made a simple lander, put a smiling chubby girl on there, and also passed the age through with my tracking URL. Then just a simple Headline (We need moar <?=$age?> Year Old Men in <script type="text/javascript">document.write(geoip_city());</script>) and a few of my creatives as girls that are "online", indicated by a little green blob. Also a big-ass CTA button to not make the guy think all that much, a list of benefits and that's pretty much it!
Pretty sick S/U rate Didn't change much about the creatives, just pruned a couple of ads that had low-ish CTRs.
Oh and I also made every single thing on that page a link, so the guy could literally click on the girl's left boob and still go to the offer
I ran a little bit of a lower CPM today, only around 0.62, for testing yesterday it was at 1.02, hence the bigger spend.
Stats:
Spent $71.12
Revenue $110.00
Profit $38.88
ROI 54.7%
Copy & pasting my campaigns over to Canada was also a good move, them Canadians convert like mad haha. I changed their targeting to be as broad as possible (threw out <50 login count) in the middle of the night to get as many impressions as I could. CTR is a little better (slightly higher off a broader demo) but CVR has been much better 32% compared to 6.2%...
Right now I'm a little worried that A4D have net30 ... I'll talk to my AM and rotate the offer with other networks that have shorter payout terms to see if it'd make sense to send my leads elsewhere. I might have to start throwing a ton of traffic at them to get to weekly payments and keep the cashflow up.
Mate, loving this!
I couldn't get POF to work for me after almost 3 months of chipping away, seems like you have a knack for it, best of luck!
Congrats on the success so far mate!
And from my experience dating has always performed better with a lp.
Congratulations! Keep it up and good work
Originally Posted by sapper
Originally Posted by bbrock32
Originally Posted by Daksneezian
Thanks guys, I appreciate the feedback a lot!
I'll be sure to follow your advice, Besmir.
Never thought ads could be this much work, running just 2 offers, split into 3 age groups, split into 2 genders, split into 2 countries it's just SOO much that needs to be done ... clickity clickity clickity clickclickclack
oh well, can't really complain. Living the life.. haha
I uploaded a ton of ads, 2-3 of the ones I made myself performed rather well, it's insane how much guys will click on chicks in bikinis, too bad POF disapproves many of the good ones, there are some seriously well-endowed chicks out there LOL
Right now I don't care too much for profits, I'd rather increase my spend, get as much data & experience as I can and then optimize from there, ROI's overrated anyways, volume * ROI is where it's at yet everyone talks so much about the latter.
Goals today:
Prune bad converting ads
Prune bad CTR ads
Build at least 4 campaigns w/ landers
Build landers for campaigns that have meh CVR
Stats:
Spent $146.15
Revenue $154.00
Profit $7.85
ROI 5.37%
Really didn't expect it to do so well, since it's Monday, but I'm happy since I tested a TON of new images w/ a bunch of copy variations. Canada has already stopped performing so well, I guess with any static demo there's that small group of people that will devour your offer no matter what ads you put in front of them, once they've seen it, the ad shows its true performance.
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