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Ex-poker player trying to make it work... (19)

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Welcome in my follow along!

You know how it goes. I thouht that I would start this thread from the beginning of my journey, but waited as always till I get stuck with something and need help .

But let's start with a bit about myself:

I have no experience with marketing, coding or any other useful stuff. I have a master degree in aviation engineering, which I dont think would be much of help either , but at least it provides me with steady income. During college studies I used to play poker which is where I first came across STM forum and online marketing. Though I dont play anymore I still have few bucks I could put into this plus I will put aside some money from my regular job.

Progress so far:

I started with 1$ guide which is great and fairly simple to follow! What really suprised me that I was up few dollars, though after a day green campaing turned red and since I had no idea what am I doing I deceided to get back to STM to learn more.

So far I am following 40-day tutorial and I must admit that without this guide I would never be able to get started. Being a completely lost in tech sucks. Everything takes me ages to set up, but I am steadily working on it.

I got accepted by all recommended traffic and affiliate. I also got adplexity and Voluum so I should be all set up to get it rolling.

Atm I am finishing day 25 and going to start day 26. Hopefully by the end of the week I will have set up my first campaings. Dont expect any profit, but not having -100% ROI would be a great achievement.


Ha I got stuck with the last part of day 25 where we should check our landing pages browserstack.com. It didnt work for me last couple of days. I checked all landing pages on my phone and the work and now it show correctly even on browserstack.com. But strange since I haven´t changed anything, but what ever as long as it works.

Wish me luck and hope that next post will be with some numbers!

Enjoy the rest of the week!

Jan

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Good luck man! Great job taking action!

I would actually think the engineering background would help quite a bit, as I'm sure the discipline required and the analytical nature of things corresponds heavily with success in IM.

Look forward to seeing the results of your follow-along!

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Hi Jan and welcome to the forums! Thanks for taking the 40-day tutorial out for a spin - sounds like a case of "so far so good"!

I was an engineer as well (mechanical) but had never liked sitting in an office Mon-Fri 9-5+. Was in the automotive industry - fast-paced high-stressed job where lots of things were beyond my control but were still my responsibility (e.g. quality issues, suppliers not meeting product specs).

Every night I was reluctant to go to bed, feeling like I hadn't had enough time to myself (work -> commute -> eat -> shower -> almost time for bed!) Every morning I felt like staying in bed because the prospects of having to get up to repeat another work day was just....bleh!

By Wednesday I'd be looking forward to the weekend. By Sunday I'd be dreading Monday. Same with vacation time - would start anticipating it months in advance, just to have it come and go seemingly in seconds. Then I would start anticipating next year's vacation.

One day in January 2006 I chanced upon a way to make money online. Registered my first domain and was trying to build my first website. Next day I went in to work and was told I was laid off. (A month later the whole plant got shut down - I was among the first to go because I had just finished a few big projects and had become disposable.)

Couldn't expect Fate to send a stronger message than that! And things have worked out beautifully in the end - although not without a LOT of trials and tribulations.

Sorry for the rant! Your self-intro sent me on a walk down memory lane. I'm not going to lie to you - if you're trying to make the switch from a 9-5 it may not be a smooth/easy process, but as long as you keep the dream alive, you will get there eventually.

And if I may make a suggestion: Try not to quit your job before you're making consistent profits online. It's mega hard on the heart and soul to be spending your savings when trying to make this business work. I was scrambling for many years myself. It's not fun, at all. You're very wise in your decision to learn paid traffic part time while you still have money coming in from your stable job.

That is so weird!

Perhaps it's a CDN caching issue.

When you said it "didn't work" what was the issue exactly?

Looking forward to seeing stats when you have them!

Have fun!



Amy

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Good luck man!

Based on historic data a lot of poker players turn into pro affiliate marketers B-)

Like Amy said, don't quit your job and use the money to invest in marketing. That way you are able to run negative which is inevitable when you start out.

Your revenue is zero because you did not setup Voluum postback in your Clickdealer account.
When a conversion happens clickdealer will know it, but how will Voluum know? That happens through a system called S2S postback. You need to go to your Voluum settings, and look at all the tabs. You will find a postback link, and give it to Clickdealer AM. He or she will set it up for you. A postback link will have two tokens -> clickid and payout which will be filled by Clickdealer. Clickid will identify the conversions and payout will be used to compute revenue, so both will not be zero like in your image.

Its a little hard to understand all this in the beginning, but soon everything works like clockwork!

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I'm so glad you like your job! You're in a really good place then - not in a hurry to make anything happen, but have your ideal future all mapped out.

This is the PERFECT place to be vibrationally speaking - I trust that everything will unfold beautifully for you.

It's funny you should mention ecommerce, because I'm working on a FB tutorial as we speak, and the first module is on ecom!

Eventually, that tutorial will be more comprehensive than the 40-day pop tutorial - ecom will only be one of the modules.

For ecom, I'll be covering how to run ecom CPA offers (from aff networks), and how to do dropshipping and leading into how to import and fulfill locally through FBA.

Just this first module will take me 1-3 months to finish though. In the meantime, if you're interested in starting ecom, check out caurmen's Ecommerce Cookbook (in the ecom subforum) - it's a wonderful way to get started.


Conversions!! Congratulations! This is a major milestone!

Those first conversions are not easy to get. How nice to see then happen on your first campaign!

Next steps: At less than -70% ROI, it would take considerable optimizing to get this offer to profitability. How many landers have you tested? If less than 5, I would encourage you to test more (after the current lander split-test is finished - i.e. when you've cut down to the last "winner"). After that, test as many suitable offers as you can find, using that winner lander.

And thanks for showing all the screenshots - I love seeing stats! Tip: Next time, upload the images to imgur.com, go to share links > bbcode and copy the bbcode link, and paste that directly into the forum post. That way, images appear nice and big, plus this method always work. The default forum attachment function sometimes fails to display the images.


Agree with @profit-rex - that's exactly what I'm thinking.

Jan - could you please go into Voluum > little gear icon (settings) > Domain tab, and check the "Main domain" to see whether it's the same as the domain in the postback url you pasted into Clickdealer?

Let's get to the bottom of this - without conversion postback, there'd be little point in using a tracker.

You're making very nice progress - so far so good!




Amy

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Good evening,

thanks a lot for your support both of you! You actualy made me to sit behind the computer after very very long day at work and check my domains instead of getting some proper sleep.

I checked my domain in Voluum, on clickdealer and on namecheap and it seems the same. It is bit late to try to do something about it today, but tomorrow if I dont get a help from my clickdealer AM, I am gonna try to switch the domain from custom to dedicated and try out the test conversion again to see if there is a problem with my custom domain or somewhere else.

Gonna response to the rest tomorrow as well, now it is time to go to bed.

Thanks a lot guys! ttyt

Jan

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Greetings from another ex poker player here. Interestingly, there are many ex poker players who became affiliates. I wish you good luck! (and you know from playing: you don't need luck, it's just a numbers game and about making the correct decisions).

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If you don't end up solving this, let me know. We'll figure something out.



Amy

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try using xxxxx.trackvoluum.com rather than track.confitracking.xyz -> which xxxxx is your account code at Voluum

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He is trying to use a custom domain.
Voluums default domain is heavily abused and might be flagged by traffic sources.

My doubt is that he did not do his DNS properly.
Otherwise he should try using the Voluum dedicated domain.

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How is it going everyone? It has been couple of days since I made a last post, so lets take a look to what happened, but firstly lets response to some of the posts:

Huge fun here as well. Have you read his Biography from Ashlee Vance? Definitely book to read!

No need to hurry. It will take me a while to figure out sweepstakes



Tracking doesnt work:

Thanks everyone for coming by and making recomendations. I have solved it with my AM from clickdealer.



Turned out to be quite simple problem with Voluum. Firstly it didnt work because my postback url was wrong in clickdealer account. After double check with lesson 9 I managed to get it right, but I didnt bring any real traffic to the campaign to test it but I rather used test conversion fire. Didnt know that it doesnt work for Voluum. But my AM managed to do it for me, so now I have some stats finally:
I have two offers for 4 landers so far.

Firstly I have runned test for single offer (71067) with all landers. Then I modified the landers slightly to be usebale for other offer as well and created multioffer campaing (double test) again with these 4 landers.



No luck so far, but at least I have some stats for other lessons.



Here are the landers for th single offer 71067. What I would like to ask is what CTR represents? Does it say what persentage of visitor clicks on something on the landing page? Because there is one landing page which has over 62%, so that is way more than te rest so there might be something good on this page that I might fix and improve the conversion of this page and the others.


For the rest of the week I plan to got through the remaining lessons and get more familiar with voluum so I understands the stats at least a bit. Next week I will start working on new set of landers to test some more offers.

Enjoy the rest of the week!

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Wow - so sorry I missed your last post! Was busy getting ready to leave for AWA, then busy with the conference and vacation - just got back and playing catch up now!

I see that one of your landers reached -5x% ROI - looks promising!

I hope you've been cutting landers using the stats calculator!

CTR is exactly what you described - it stands for "click through rate" and is the percentage of visitors that click through the lander.

One important thing to note about CTR: Higher CTR does NOT always correlate with higher conversion rate (CR). I could promise the moon to get high CTR, or I could program the lander to automatically redirect to the offer after 2 seconds to get high CTR, but when visitors land on the offer page it doesn't necessarily mean they'll convert. On the other hand, some landers have lower CTR but high CR, because they presell the visitor adequately - but ONLY visitors that are actually interested in the offer will click through to the offer, so that a higher percentage of the visitors will go on to convert.

When you look at stats calculators, you'll notice that they don't take CTR into consideration at all - only the number of conversions vs. impressions matter.

It's been a couple of weeks - how are things looking for you? Any progress?

Now that AWA is over, I promise you won't need to wait many days before getting a response.



Amy

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Hello,

I am sorry for a very late update, but I was never a good blogger, though I have tried plenty of times already.

There was not much of a progress so far. I have stopped all the offers after 10 day of running of traffic since the ROI was still around -60-70%.
The thing that I have learned is that bot traffic can be a big part, unfortunately I have tested it quite late to see 60% of overall traffic being bots.

Anyway one thing I wanted to ask, if you start with blacklisting do you keep the bid the same or do you always go with the recommended one? I was always modifing it, but know looking back at it, I think that I should have kept it as is, so I had relevant data for other blacklisting. Is that assumption right?

If you have been wondering what I was doing sine the last update I was working quite a lot at 9-5job during the christmas and with all these family and friends visit it was qutie challenging to get anything done. But I didnt give up, I have worked on landing pages for new offers I have applied to and my AM confirmed that are solid. But I got a bit stucked since I havent checked the offers well to now realize that I got to use their own landing pages. Still waiting for a reply from my AM if it coud get changed somehow.

If there is no update I am gonna pick other offers on Monday, get my prepared langind pages translated and start running traffic again. There is no other way to learn this, so it is time to get it running.

Btw could you recommend any coder or any service that would improve the loading time of my pages? I am still having a hard time to get it under 1,2-1,4s and since I am not on a really tight budget rather on time budget, I have decided, that I would try to get couple of landing pages fixed.

Thank you and all the best in 2020 to all of you!

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Hey there! Thanks for coming back to update - I've been wondering where you've gone off to!

Glad to hear you spent time with family and friends over the holidays - running campaigns can't take priority over that!

Regarding bots: Yes, bot traffic is a reality. However, here are a couple of thoughts:

1)Bot tests are usually not 100% accurate.

2)Traffic prices are determined by how much advertisers are willing to pay, which in turn reflects how well the traffic converts. Nobody will continue to pay for traffic that isn't profitable for them. So, if there's a high percentage of bots, the prices should reflect that.

So, don't let bots discourage you.

Regarding lander page speed: Try to post a job on UpWork. If you're going to be outsourcing that, you may as well just outsource the entire fixing/cleaning-up of ripped landers. Offer $5 per lander - that's how much I'm paying. Make sure to point out that if all goes well, this has the potential of turning into a long term gig, and that many landers require similar corrections so that the VA should be able to work quickly after the first few.

If you need a job posting, I've included a sample one in one of the landing page lessons of the 40-day tutorial. Please let me know if you can't find it and I'll drop a link here for you.

2020 will be a year of growth for a lot of people - all the best! Eager to see further updates.



Amy

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Thanks a lot Amy for recommendations. Today I posted a job on the Upwork, so hopefully I will find someone within couple of days.
Unfortunately yesterday my AM told me that I got to use the offer´s landing pages instead of mine, so I have applied for other recommended offers instead.

Could you please take a look to this as well:

Thanks a lot for your help, without STM I would never launch a campaign.

Jan

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I tend to keep the bid the same, for the reason you implied.

Only if you keep the bid the same, would you be able to conclude e.g. "all these placements I'm blacklisting, are not profitable at this specific bid".

Instead, I prefer to duplicate the campaign at a different bid.

But it doesn't mean it's bad to change the bid of your original campaign. You just need to have a plan and know what you're doing, instead of keep changing the bid sporadically.

For examples of such bid-testing plans, please see here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...7-testing-bids



Amy

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First of all lets start with the accomplishment. I have managed to score the frst green today. That is a good new, but honestly I am quite clueless why did it happen, but about that later on.

It has been quite a while since my last post. I was inactive for a while. Had a great trip with my girlfriend to Mexico in February. Tried for the first time surfing among plenty of other highlights . But now the Covid19 changed a bit my future plans.
Since the last month I have been quite active in my fulltime job. For the last three years I was working on my licence so I could certify repairs performed on the aircraft and release them back to service. I had plans to get a job abrad this year. Increase my salary significatnly and then really focus on other adventures like AM. The licence is almost ready and should be done by the end of the month or the next one. As well I have passed my Airbus A320 type certificate, but now when the aviation basically stopped there wont be much demand for engineers anywhere. Luckily our job is so far safe so I have still my cashflow for AM.

Funny thing is that I dont mind to much. When things changed, I saw this as a huge opportunity to start learning whatever I have been postponing till later. I am working from home now, so there is plenty of time for everything.

I have been running campaigns for the last couple of weeks trying to figure out what is going on. Thing is that every tiem I try to optimaze something that should improve the ROI I wake up and see quite the opposite . I started to go through some older post from the forum as well and figured out that even though I am not a great blooger it is time again to do the follow along and try to get as much help and insight as possible

So lets start wit some campaing talks:

I have now two offers that were doing well and one winner lander that outperformed the rest. I have been running one on propeller ads and one on pop ads to increase learning curve. I did the bid test on both since I have read one older post from Amy and made me curious to see how bid really works and how much should you be paying on the traffic.

I had following results:



Quite bad results all in all.

Lets start with the Popads campaing. The best usable bid of all was 0,000284 so I tried to dig into the stats to see what can be improved. The campaing was tested with previously farmed bot traffic placement being black listed and only the android traffic allowed since the desktop and other OS previously didnt perform well.

I have checked several stats and the most obvious candidate for blacklisting to me was the connection type:



So for the next test I have tried to blacklist the broadband and guess what, the campaing dropped to the -86%ROI. Question is would you black list it so soon? Or is there any explanation why this happened? There were some other stuff that I could modify but I started with the connection type since it was quite obvious.

I know that it will leave me with quite a little traffic and I wont be able to yiel much profit of this campaing, but so far i am trying to go with whatever converts semi decently to learn the ropes. I am sure the money will come one day once I test more offers.

Second one was with the Propellerads:


I thought that I would kill this campaing alltogether since it seemed to be dead afte significant drop in the ROI. Both of the campaing were doing around -30% previously. But I have worked ony my top performng lander yesterday trying to improve it and prepare for other offers as well and I wanted to test it if the changes I made make any improvement.

So I picked the best performing bid and split tested three versions of the winner landing page.



I bet you could guess why I was not happy at all when I woke up seeing the performance of my yesterday work.
But what really suprised me how the ROI came up with the original lander.

Only thing that comes to my mind, that when doing the bid test I was killing the ROI with the higher bids. Basicaly doing a bid war against myself. OR just pure randomnes .

Again the campaing is a bit optimized already. On the Propellerads I do run only the wifi traffic and use previously farmed bot traffic placement blacklist.

For now I stopped the loosing landers and let it run over the night to see if we can sustain the positive ROI.

That´s all for now. Tomorrow I should have more stats and new offers prepared for split tests.

I am trying to get the bonus on the Propellerads for the next month with "Stay home - Run ads" . Need to do around 650$ of traffic this month so wish me luck to get it.
It is quite nice promo which pushes me to test more, since I dont want to run the traffic just plainly with the negative ROI, so should learn quite a bit today.

For all of you, who managed to read it all and hopefully give me some feedback, I wish you all the good luck!

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Quite funny times these days. last two day I havent focused on the AM. I was working my regular 9-5job. My both campaings got paused by Clickdealer. So today I have spent some time applying to new offers that still run. Bad thing is that on clickdealer there is quite limited number of offers so with one set of lander I can only try one offer.
That is not really effective for testing so I am going to apply to other Aff networks as well to Traffic networks. So far I have an account at Gozha, Mobidea, Mobipium and Proppelerads, Popads. So if you have any recomendation for other good networks for sweepstakes feel free to advise.
Last couple of days I have been going through some other FA to see what mistakes I can avoid, so hope to get better and more stable results soon.

Jan

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In my opinion there is something wrong in your thinking.

You shoudn´t look for networks that have offers for your one set of landers.

Better look for networks with good offers and get landers for these.

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