💵 How I Built a Push List That Makes Me $xxx/day as a Small Time Affiliate 💵 (35)
💵 How I Built a Push List That Makes Me $xxx/day as a Small Time Affiliate 💵
Unlike typical affiliate case studies I wanted to keep this authentic. So I thought I’d start with the story behind the case study and then show a follow along-esque case study to illustrate that this can be done. But if that doesn’t interest you just skip along to:
- Part 1 - Set Up
- Part 2 - Initial Results Before I Pause Traffic
- Part 3 - Results & Final Thoughts
Note: This case study is written with affiliates that have had minor successes in affiliate (got a breakeven campaign, hit $xx a day) but struggling to be making $xxx consistently. So I will gloss over certain details.
Oh and if you found this helpful and plan to sign up on Monetizer would be great if you use the link here so I get a small credit for it
Part 0 - The Backdrop
So I’ve been a long time user of Monetizer (back when it was called Afflow) and I stumbled across their new push collection offering as I was browsing my account.
What it offers is the ability to make money off of owning a push list without managing it. They provide 80% revshare for any money they make on your push subscribers which, at the time of writing, is the best public deal I’m aware of.
At first I didn’t think much of it until I noticed that I was consistently getting $10 a day from it without really doing any work, which to a struggling small time affiliate like myself was meaningful. So I decided to set up proper campaigns and test it.
Lo and behold this was what happened next:
Not an amazing number but as a small time affiliate I could see the potential added to which this was akin to building an asset which not many affiliates do. So I knuckle down and before I knew it, I was consistently doing $xxx in revenue a day on push list alone. Of course there can be a cost to acquiring subscribers but you’ll see later that most of the money I generate from push list is actually largely profit.
Still Part 0 - Case Study Challenge
Given my results, one of the founders from Monetizer reached out to me to see if I could do a case study for them and I happily obliged. But decided that I would:
- Set up a new monetizer account to keep my stats separate and clean.
- Pay and run traffic through it over the course of 2 weeks and afterwards let it sit for a further 2 weeks to see how much passive income it generated.
- Share all my results (and hope it is good results).
This I thought would prove that this method works even if I started from scratch. But the risk being that if results turned out bad then it wouldn’t be a very appealing case study... Anyhow they agreed with the arrangement and thus I began the case study.
Part 1 - Set Up
Every good journey begins with solid preparation and here are the things I did:
#1 - Open a fresh monetizer account:
Ahhh the smell of a fresh account. Keep in mind you will need to set your account up such as buying a domain for it (I usually get mine from Namecheap), integrating it with your tracker etc. Some of this can get a bit complex for non-tech whizzes but you can always chat to someone from Monetizer.
My new Monetizer account as mentioned (interesting random avatar I got):
#2 - Set up all the other basics affiliate related stuff like tracker, affiliate network, landing page hosting...
I won’t go into details as there are guides that talk about this stuff on Google (and of course on STM here).
#3 - Find an existing affiliate campaign that is ideally breakeven or at least one where you’re not bleeding out of your eyeballs running it.
And if you don’t have one then you better start testing actual campaigns because really you should have some basic idea of what is going on). In my case I chose the following campaign that I’ve been running for a while (I switched trackers so this isn’t the full set of data but largely the same results):
Although not relevant, I suspect people would ask details on this campaign so here it is:
- Payout: $0.3 - 0.4 (Reason this is a range is because my offer got paused mid way so I had to switch between a few)
- Offer Type: SOI Vouchers
- Geo: Malaysia
- Funnel/Lander used: Prize type landers that you can find on any typical spy tools, honestly any of the standard landers can work such as surveys, spinning wheels etc.
As I said any breakeven or close to breakeven campaign you have can typically work and isn't really the focus of this method.
#4 - Setting up the funnel
Now with all the basic stuff set up you’ll have to either:
- Put Monetizer’s push collection code into your landing page header or
- Run their smartlink that will collect push subscribers for you
But for my case study I am going with this funnel:
So I will be using both options 1 and 2. If you need help setting this up you can reach out to Monetizer support or maybe I’ll do a write up at a later date if there are demands for this (let me know in replies).
#5 - Set up your campaigns on traffic sources
Now you’re ready to set up your campaigns and buy some traffic. For this case study I ran it on other push traffic but other traffic sources should work too such as pops, natives, facebook etc. Just depends where that original campaign you chose was running on.
Next we just need to sit and wait to collect push subscribers...
Part 2 - Initial Results Right Before I Pause Traffic
Here are my results at the 2 week mark (16 - 30 Oct):
Campaign:
Profit: $123.5
Revenue: $1546.05
Cost: $1422.55
ROI: +8.68%
Push List Revenue From Monetizer:
Revenue: $211.3
Subscribers Acquired: 26.1k
Cost per Subscriber: $0
Average Revenue per Day (15 days): $14
Summary:
Total Profit: $334.8 = $123.5 + $211.3
Total Revenue: $1757.35
Total Cost: $1422.55
ROI: +23.5%
As you can see I got lucky with my campaign as I turned an unexpected profit which meant that my acquisition cost per subscribers was zero. As a result I was able to get 26.1k subscribers for free which was netting me around $15-20 a day at the current EPC.
More importantly, even after I stop my campaign now, the revenue I generate from my push list will be pure profit. Kaching $$$!
Screenshots to support my numbers:
Part 3 - Results & Final Thoughts
After another 2 weeks I tallied up my total results for the period of this case study (16 Oct - 12 Nov):
Campaign (unchanged):
Profit: $123.5
Revenue: $1546.05
Cost: $1422.55
ROI: +8.68%
Push List Revenue From Monetizer:
Revenue: $329.6
Subscribers Acquired: 26.5k
Cost per Subscriber: $0
Average Revenue per Day (28 days): $12
Summary:
Total Profit: $453.1 = $123.5 + $329.6
Total Revenue: $1875.60
Total Cost: $1422.55
ROI: +31.9%
31.9% ROI over 28 days probably isn’t an amazing results in the affiliate space but personally as an ex-finance guy I am happy with it especially when we keep in mind that this method was:
- Low maintenance - I spent more time writing this case study than I did on the campaigns for it (assuming you already have a breakeven or close to breakeven campaign).
- Consistent returns - I generated $10+ in push revenue a day for the most part and could probably maintain around a $20 profit if I didn’t pause my campaign. I’ve included a day to day breakdown in the appendix for those that want to take a look at how results look like.
And if you keep at it you can definitely reach $xxx per day and reach the top of Monetizer's push revenue leaderboard (I'm currently within top 5, sorry humble brag
) and see numbers such as this:
Definitely not big numbers in the affiliate space but good enough to get started. Happy to answer any questions that anyone has and for now I'll be heading back to the grind so that hopefully I can write about how to get to $x,xxx a day soon.
Again if you found this helpful and plan to sign up on Monetizer would be great if you use the link here so I get a small credit for it
Golden
!
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app
Shhhh!!!!
This is what I've been doing too 
Though not nearly as successful as you, it's such a great way to earn money on the clicks you've already paid for while trying to make your normal camps work.
Hopefully, no one else catches on!
I was reading your thread and I was wating for the end of the story. So that's how you did it 
great job! I will definitely try it asap thanks for this info, it's golden
Wow Cham! I know some guys have been doing well with this model, but now you've broken down the process to help the newer affiliates get started as well. Well done and thanks very much!
Amy
Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app
Originally Posted by vortex
Good case study!
425k subs, that's a nice list!
Congrats on your success and thanks for sharing this case study with the community!
Very nice case study, thanks for taking the time to write it
This part got me a bit confused at first:
Profit: $123.5
Cost: $1422.55
ROI: +8.68%
) Maybe add that too, so it's more clear to whoever reads this.
Yea I thought about that, got lazy with all the repetitive typing. I'll add it back in now.
Just updated my campaigns, let's see how it works
Of course it all matters of tests (which I'm going to do) but I'm just curious, maybe someone could say something about below problem/question.
1. I used back button to my offer before. It was doing fine. Nothing special but it was giving me a few more bucks every week. Something around 10-30% ROI. But it was money for register and that's it. I change it to Monetizer Subscription Collection. So I built database of users which can earn me less on the beginning but more in long run? Do I understand it correctly?
It looks very promising because if it works as I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) it could help us built long-term source of income.
Originally Posted by caravaggio
Of course it all matters of tests (which I'm going to do) but I'm just curious, maybe someone could say something about below problem/question.
1. I used back button to my offer before. It was doing fine. Nothing special but it was giving me a few more bucks every week. Something around 10-30% ROI. But it was money for register and that's it. I change it to Monetizer Subscription Collection. So I built database of users which can earn me less on the beginning but more in long run? Do I understand it correctly?
It looks very promising because if it works as I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) it could help us built long-term source of income.
But there will be a limit, as certain % of these subscribers will also unsubscribe or become inactive.
Let's say that your unsubscribe rate will be 5% per day and you are sending 1000 new subscribers per day, so your user-base will stop growing around 20.000, because based on the 5% unsubscribe rate, you will lose 1000 users per day from a pool of 20.000, which is also the number of new subs you get per day.
This was a very rough calculation, for the sake of easy explanation, just wanted to point out that the growth will not be eternal
It can grow way longer and its also possible that those who remain subscribed will yield more revenue over time... so take this with a grain of salt.
Originally Posted by matuloo
But there will be a limit, as certain % of these subscribers will also unsubscribe or become inactive.
Let's say that your unsubscribe rate will be 5% per day and you are sending 1000 new subscribers per day, so your user-base will stop growing around 20.000, because based on the 5% unsubscribe rate, you will lose 1000 users per day from a pool of 20.000, which is also the number of new subs you get per day.
This was a very rough calculation, for the sake of easy explanation, just wanted to point out that the growth will not be eternal
It can grow way longer and its also possible that those who remain subscribed will yield more revenue over time... so take this with a grain of salt.
Incredible!! Thanks so much for sharing this!. I will take action right now!!
If you have some explanation about the
Originally Posted by caravaggio
If you can keep the volume going up for a longer period of time, it will happen later on, plus you never know how your particular subs will respond, so it can end up totally different. It's all about testing and working with your OWN data
I would add that in my case study I did purposely try to not run traffic so you can see the taper off and seems like it last 2 weeks or so before people don't click (somehow your subs remain largely the same). Of course as Matuloo highlighted it can vary based upon your own data and how you collect the subs. But I guess a useful benchmark if you starting out and need to estimate your subs LTV.
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
Thanks for sharing this!!
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
@sushiparlour - congrats on the results and great case study for laying this out to the community! good stuff.
I wanted to provide some input on comments made on the thread that might help others...
What @matuloo said regarding a "cap" or hitting a ceiling is true. The more messages that are sent, each message has a % of users that will unsubscribe. So at some point your daily growth of subscribers (assuming traffic volume remains consistent) will match your daily loss of subscribers and thus you hit a plateau.
The only two ways to counteract this... 1) continue working to increase your traffic volume so you grow more subscribers and thus increase your plateau level and 2) reduce the number of times you send out a message, this will reduce your daily unsubscribes, increase your plateau level BUT you will also reduce the growth of your revenue to build up over a longer period of time AND because monetizer has a high percentage of repeat traffic if you dont sent messages frequent enough you risk someone else getting the revenue from that push user because they are subscribed to multiple datasbases that are managed by Monetizer.
And to clarify... using a service like monetizer or propellerads, etc for your push building is not truly owning of the asset but you do get most of the benefits of owning the asset without the infastructure or costs. So its a good tradeoff for most people. The key differences are if you ever want more control of what is promoted or want to move your push subs elsewhere, that is not doable, they will always remain with Monetizer. The one key area I see Monetizer failing in, is that they mostly sent out promos for the same couple of offers repeatedly - this works no doubt and I have used this in my own strategy early on - but they should change up the variety a bit more and have a few key offers they promote that hits various demographic segments of the users, that would increase the revenue per subscriber.
For building subscribers on Monetizer I would suggest having no delay or a very short delay of say 30 mins before they receive the first message. The first message to a user is by far the most valuable message (in terms of revenue per message) that is sent out. I also would suggest that you allow them to Auto optimize delivery or make your settings very aggressive so that you have a greater chance that your users see a message promotion first and take an action before being unsubscribed or hijacked because the user clicked on the same promo from another database first.
When using their Website/Landing Page code... make good use of their Allow/Deny rules and as @sushieparlour mentioned, the backbutton helps alot too.
Allow rules = keep in mind that these users have already subscribed so they will be duplicates if the subscribe on a new page PLUS these are the action takers and have a higher CR so you can either redirect them to another domains with the sole intentions of trying to get them to subscribe again OR send them to a lander/offer flow that you have that is high performing because it will work great. Sweepstake/SOI and Utility offers produce some of the highest return on this.
Deny rules = these users have not subscribed but you can still redirect them to another domain (or 2 or 3 or 4, however many) to show them a new push prompt and increase your chances of getting these users to subscribe. If they do, this will help your overall unique subscribe count and earn you more money.
Backbutton = similar to Deny rules as in they will be unqiue users if they subscribe but they are not as valuable as the Allow clickers from the first go around. But if you redirect them to multiple pages showing them a push prompt you will recover a good portion of these as well and that will increase your push revenue because these are unique new subs.
How to forecast push revenue... this is pretty easy, after you have built up 5-10K subs you can take look at your monetizer stats and compute values from a period of 3-4 weeks to get a good idea... Total Push Revenue / Total Subscriptions = Average Revenue Per Subscriber. In the screenshot above your value is around .017 cents per subscriber. Which is about normal for most of monetizer push traffic due to so much duplication of subscribers.
This value will be different for each country the subsribers are in but as a whole you will have a good idea of what added revenue you will gain as you continue to grow. The more subs you get, in general, you will see this value increase slowly over time.
Subscriber and Revenue Growth Speed... this part has drasctically changed from when I originally got into push. It's suppppppper slow these days. So if you are getting 1k new subs per day and all of a sudden you increase traffic and are getting 3k new subs each day, your revenue will take several days to really start to see the true impact but more so 1-2 weeks in most cases to get to its true level. So keep in mind not to judge performance too quickly because its a slow build up process these days.. but it does build up.
How many users unsubscribe?... ALOT and very quickly, that is one reason why its a much slower build up process for growing. Depending on how many messages per day a user is getting (from your domains and from other domains) this will heavily impact how many unsubscribe. It's very common to lose 15-25% of new daily subs in the first 24 hours, sometimes much more. And over a period of one week after a user has subscribed, you can lose in the range of 30-50% of those subscribers. Of the remaining users, some will click on promotions multiple times, some just once in a while and others that are totally dormant and rarely if ever click but they are still subscribed. Thus this = slow growth and why when building on monetizer, faster promotions is better. In many cases, Monetizer sends out messages every 60-90 minutes during certain time frames. That is already very aggressive so leaving the option to Auto and letting them handle it is perfectly fine.
If you stop traffic and no longer get new subs, how long will the revenue continue?... typically once you stop traffic the first week or so will not change much in terms of revenue. But going forward you will see around 40-50% drop in revenue from those subs looking at month over month timeframe, so on average 10-15% drop per week in revenue.
Again, lots of factors play into this but these are rough numbers that I have observed over multiple scenarios. And it will help you to understand what to expected out of your push traffic.
Again... @sushiparlour - thanks for the share and hope my tidbits help contribute to help you guys in some way.
-Andrew
Well done, sushiparlour !
@Mr Payne - Thanks for the insight! I've actually watched a lot of your inteviews + talk and modelled some of this stuff from them.
Also I'm curious on your thoughts on the stability of EPC on different geos? Lately I've been noticing a significant fluctuation across geos on Monetizer which I suspect is also the wider market to an extent and is making it a bit harder to extrapolate revenue forecasts so seeing how you combat this issue especially as someone that acquires push subs directly where forecasing would be essential.
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
I focus primarily on the US but also some tier 1 countries. The reason is just what you mentioned above, huge fluctuations. The big influence to performance fluctuations is lack of good offers to monetize the traffic with. Smaller countries = small daily sub growth & most have just a few good offers to promote at any given time.
When those good offers are not available for a period of time or have capped out for the day, that is when you see the biggest changes in performance.
In tier 1 countries this does not happen as much, and usually very manageable, because there are a ton of solid offers and the traffic itself is just worth more in general.
For example.. india has a ton of traffic, you can get super cheap subs but no real way to monetize it strongly at scale and much less stable if/when a good set of offers come up. For countries like India, you really have to optimize granular on the carrier/ISP level and in some cases focusing on the best IP ranges for that country is important. Again, I dont deal with this too much as I focus mainly on the US.
For the most stable results, focus on high volume geos that have plenty of offers (tier 1, US/CA/AU/UK, etc), or low volume geos with lots of high value offers (nordics, possibly middle eastern geos, etc)
Working with Monetizer, you have little control over what offers to test/promote. Its best to let them handle the optimize because they are doing alot of different tests so they do the heavy lifting for you and have much more data to base decisions on. But this doesn't always mean they are monetizing the maximum value out of your users but they do a decent job and the risk/time/cost/reward benefit using them is good.
The nature of monetizer is very up and down, due to so many offers coming and going or capping out etc.
Best way to mitigate this is to get some stats and track them per geo and just understand what its worth and what you are able to pay to acquire it. If you notice traffic costs go way up or if push revenue drops over a week period, you may want to pause and revisit it.
Look through Monetizer stats and monitor which geos are the most stable and always in the top 10, perhaps just focus on those to fight this issue less.
Andrew
Thanks for great insights Andrew. I'm also interested - do you collect subs to your database with some "normal" landing page and offer like in this case? Or just LP with "skip video" (or something like that) which main goal is to click "Allow"?
Originally Posted by caravaggio
Andrew
Hey sushiparlour
Thanks for your effort. I would like to know how i can add the code of monetizer into the LP or Website to collect the subscribers ? i mean from the technical way
Originally Posted by alessaboss1212
1. Add the 1 line of code to your actual lander in the head section.
2. Save the sw.js file in the root folder of your domain.
Test to see if it works once you set it up and see the subscription (if you sub you should see a push notification within the hour if you make sure to set it at the highest frequency).
So I wanted to use the case study account to test something else and logged in today to see:
Haven't touched it since the end of the case study and you can see I've picked up another $280 since end of October which brings the total profit to $491.8 and ROI is now +43.3% Nowadays it only generates $2-3 per day but given that I don't touch it at all I'm happy to take it.
Anyways won't have anymore data going forward since it will be distorted by new tests as I'm using the account for something else now.
Nice! Right now I run my campaigns even if they are -10-20% ROI to just keep increase volume but it looks like that even up to -40% is break-even eventually.
Btw. Congrats on being TOP 1 on Leaderboard
wondering what back button script you guys are using because everything i try does not work with chrome. The back button scripts i try work fine on edge and safari but in my chrome desktop browser they just send me back to a blank page. if anyone has advice on how to make this work id appreciate it.
Originally Posted by offshore
But not everyone has the latest version of the browser
Most are using a variation of this:
function () {
var t;
try {
for (t = 0; 10 > t; ++t) history.pushState({}, "", "#");
onpopstate = function (t) {
t.state && location.replace("https://yourawesomebackbuttonlink.com")
}
} catch (o) {}
}();
Originally Posted by jaybot
But not everyone has the latest version of the browser
Most are using a variation of this:
function () {
var t;
try {
for (t = 0; 10 > t; ++t) history.pushState({}, "", "#");
onpopstate = function (t) {
t.state && location.replace("https://yourawesomebackbuttonlink.com")
}
} catch (o) {}
}();
Try the one Matuloo suggests: http://www.matuloo.com/maximize-your...ript-included/
Works with recent chrome browsers as well since the latest browsers don't allow you to change the back button to redirect outside of the current domain (so if you check out matuloo's post he has a workaround.
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
Extra steps for a newbie.
I haven't tested performance vs the generic one above... I imagine it's better, or is it?
Originally Posted by jaybot
Extra steps for a newbie.
I haven't tested performance vs the generic one above... I imagine it's better, or is it?
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