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$5000 Budget - Will I Succeed?? Follow Along And Find Out!! (14)

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Hey what's up everybody! Joined STM a few days back and jumped right into the Vortex 40 Day Tutorial. Making some great progress so far, will be documenting that below and along the way.

I've given myself a $5000 budget to start with over the next two months for running ads, tools, etc.

My background is in technology, mainly working for huge companies in the US, although I did run a startup back in the dot com era and have dabbled in a bunch of things on the side but never hit anything that could pull me out of the money that I've made in the corporate world. I plan on changing that now, starting here.

Please say hi in this thread or send me a PM, and follow along to see what happens!

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Hey goldfinger!
Looks like you are starting things off on the right foot!

Setting a budget to spend with a light heart ----> √
Starting a FA thread ----> √
Good and positive mindset ---> √

I think you can go far... all the best for your journey

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Thanks lukeexperience! Looking forward to sharing my findings and helping out others along the way!

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@goldfinger You certainly are in the best position to get something going. It's always better to have money coming in rather than seeing that money dwindle - while being uncertain whether things would pan out.

Thanks for starting this follow-along!



Amy

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Thanks @vortex ! I really want you to know how much I appreciate you putting this tutorial together. It has been enormously helpful to me to read your walk thru on how to run a successful campaign.

I’ve been heads down testing out a few campaigns for the past two weeks and starting to see some success. The first campaign was a dud and was time sensitive for Halloween so it killed itself thankfully. The second is a SOI sweeps in a tier 3/4 geo and has been gathering data for a few days. I’m seeing conversions and starting to notice trends that I never would have seen if I wasn’t starting in a lower budget offer. It’s really quite eye opening.

In the past when I’ve dabbled in AM, I always went for the high payouts and never understood how hard I was making it for myself, thus never getting profitable and giving up too soon.

Now thanks to you Amy, I’m starting out on solid ground and have great direction and confidence that keeps growing as I see things come into reality. I know I’m just getting started on this journey but I can already see the insane potential. Planning on buying you a drink at one of the affiliate events when I get there!!

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Also, need to mention this... One rookie mistake that I made that I want to pass along is to make sure you size your server properly if you are using a self hosted tracker. I’m running Binom and went with the base recommendation for a Digital Ocean server thinking I wouldn’t hit any performance issues since I was just starting out and not running much traffic yet.

Definitely got that one wrong as I started seeing HTTP 502 Bad Gateway errors while checking my stats during a huge rush of traffic. Was able to compare traffic numbers from Propeller and what Binom registered and they were way off, as much as 50% of the traffic was lost and saw those same errors. I also ran the traffic full throttle instead of spreading it across the day so they just slammed me with traffic for like 15 mins every time I ran a campaign.

TLDR - Buy more than 1 CPU / 3 GB RAM if you are running pop traffic full throttle or go with a cloud hosted tracker which should hopefully be able to handle whatever you throw at it. And check your stats to make sure the numbers are close from how many visitors you were sent vs how many your tracker saw.

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Haha yeah bro, many little lessons like this happen along the way don't worry at all part of the learning curve but cheers for the heads up

Yeah try your daily budget divided over the day first and if you notice specific times when you're heavily profitable you can focus on more traffic at those points but in the beginning best to always have it divided through the day for sweeps

Hows your campaign looking now, manage to get any stats with your updated server?

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Woke up this morning to a green campaign!! Took the best performing zones from my testing over the last few days and whitelisted them in a new campaign. Couldn't believe my eyes!

I know it won't last long as the audience is small and they'll burn out on the lander, but wow, what a great feeling.

Next things I'm planning to do are bot testing, testing more landers and testing out some other geo's with this same offer.

Thanks to all for your help and motivation!!

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Thanks for the tip! This is the drawback with self-hosted servers - unless you throttle your traffic like @maynzie advises, you'll need to make available server resources that can handle the spikes - which, for pop traffic, can get expensive.

On the other hand if you use a cloud-based tracker that charges by amount of traffic (e.g. "events") that may be even more expensive.

Pop traffic itself is the cheapest traffic there is, but boy does it rack up some hefty tracker bills when you run bigger volumes!

Pop is a good way to get your feet wet, but later on, you may want to consider "graduating" to other types of traffic. For example push, native, facebook.


Wow - seeing green already? Kudos!!

Your plan sounds great - eager to see how you'll do!




Amy

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Just fixed another rookie mistake that I want to share. I was comparing the numbers from Propeller to Binom on one of my profitable POP campaigns and noticed that Binom was showing a much higher cost for the traffic than Propeller. Couldn't figure it out for the life of me for the past few days.

Then it hit me. The campaign was set up as CPC instead of CPM in Binom.......

And then I realized how bad that was. Here I was with a nice profitable campaign, but my numbers were way off (luckily I was making more profit than Binom was showing).

Thinking back, it means that I'm sure I was killing off zones that may have been profitable but were showing red all because I was rushing along and hit the wrong button.

Hope this helps someone!

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LOL! Thats not a bad problem to have bud, could of been the other way around.

Time to dig through your data, you might have a bit more scale like suggested in this one off to a great start mate

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Just wanted to come back to this thread and give a final update. I ran the sweeps campaign above for a few weeks and made a profit after optimizing. I had found one really insane zone that had crazy high ctr’s and cvr’s that I was paying pennies per cpm. Unfortunately they must have realized how good the traffic was and went somewhere else as it disappeared from Propeller. After that I couldn’t really find much left to turn the campaign green so I stopped running traffic. I might have been able to optimize further but the volume and payouts were so low that it was getting pretty difficult.

I’ve taken a few days to contemplate my next steps and think about my original goals for this adventure. I can absolutely state that this was a resounding success for me, so thank you @vortex for putting this together. I’ve run paid traffic in the past but never caught on to the optimization piece which is so crucial to this whole thing. I’m now confident in my ability to build a campaign based on the method taught here and get it green or at least now know when to kill a hopeless campaign.

My plans now are to launch more campaigns, try new traffic sources and ultimately run traffic to my own ecomm offers.

Thanks everyone who helped along the way and good luck to all of you who are getting started on Vortex’s 40 Day Tutorial!

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I'm very happy to hear that the 40-day tutorial has been a worthwhile endeavor for you!

When you say your own ecomm offers, are you referring to your own product?

(Coincidentally, I'm writing a beginner's guide on how to run ecomm on FB - which is why I'm curious.)

I wish you much enjoyment in the rest of your affiliate marketing journey - and look forward to hearing about your future adventures!



Amy

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Amy,

Yes, exactly! I’m researching my market now and talking to manufacturers to get pricing, insider info, wisdom from the people already there. My next step is to build some campaigns to test out my market to gauge the level of competition, interest, etc and ultimately see if I can turn a profit based off of the prices that I get from manufacturers and what it costs me to run my campaigns. I’m going to try to pre-sell my product to get some real numbers that I can use in my estimates. Then if that goes well I will place a small order on the best selling products and go from there.

I’d love to see your guide! If you’d like anyone to review it before you publish, I’d be happy to help.

Thanks!!

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