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Old Guy on His Mission to Make It (43)

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Hello people,

after extensive reading and my first tests I think it now is time to share my journey and to connect with you through this follow along.

Short background:

Am a 45 year old German guy. In the past have played a bit with botting social media and made a few bucks in the Quora Partner Program. Primarily did that for fun and to prove to myself that I can make things work (kind of a brain challenge for me). After that somehow worked out I am now curious if I can make decent money and maybe become independent (meaning not having to work for a company).

What I did so far:

First: Big thank you to Amy / @vortex for your brilliant guides. I had a lot of "angst" that I could do things wrong, f*ck everything up and would never learn the "mechanics". But your guides gave me confidence, were easy to understand and best of it --> they worked.

Results 1 USD guide:

One hour after the mobipium campaign went live I had SIX conversions and was actually in the profit zone. Man... that felt great. Well... was sort of beginners luck. In total I had 209 conversions, 3.5 USD revenue and 10 USD spend. Didn't bother about the 6.5 USD loss. Basically I was happy that I was able to set things up and that everything worked (as it should). Only made a minor mistakes and forgot to add the tags for the postback (so the first few conversions weren't reportet back to poppas).

40 day tutorial:

Uuuuh this was a big challenge for me in several regards. The plenty of information was overwhelming in the beginning. Thought: "Nah, I will never be able to understand that". But after reading the guide for a week things seemed to make sense and became a little bit clearer to me. Next challenge for me was to overcome my fear of spending / investing more money. Voluum subscription here, funds for PropellerAds there... woow these dollars go fast.... After mentally vomiting a few times I thought... ok lets put the trigger and make use of the defined budget.

First Voluum / Mobidea / Propeller direct link campaign:

Started on day 10 to configure things in voluum. Found 4 offers on Mobidea and put them in the same campaign. My idea was to see, if voluum really splits up the traffic. After each offer got 1.500 impressions but no conversions I thought --> mabye wiser to direct the traffic to one campaign. Ad budget was 10 USD and payout 1.40 USD. Then I prayed that I get at least one conversion over night.... And I got :-)

Yeah... lost money again.

BUT: I am happy that I got voluum running and everything worked as it should. Used my own customized domain which also had ssl activated. Was very irritated about the dot at the end of the domain when doing the cname in namecheap because I thougth I was to stupid to enter things properly. Well, turned out that it works with the dot as well :-)

Day 11 (today):

Since there was not much to analyze with one conversion I decided to make a direct link campaign on popads. Reason for this is to have an idea about the traffic (to compare popads with propeller). Not hoping for profits since it seems like that without a lander things are more luck than skill.

Right after my campaign was approved on popads Mobidea sent me a message that the payout for my chosen offer wil be reduced. Hope this is a good signal in terms of conversion potential.

Next steps:

Will have to bite another (cost) bullet and signup for adplexity. Have bought lander domains already and pointed them to SiteGround. I have a wordpress site hosted there and the stats show that there is plenty of room for more traffic. Also they already have letsencrypt and cloudflare support. Hope it works for the landers the same easy way as for the wordpress.

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Moin Lars ( I just assume your name is Lars ).

Great that you start your FA, let´s make the best from it.

Probably you are not alone with such feelings but the truth is, affiliate marketing is no rocket science.

Try not to overcomplicate the stuff and find a good working system for you that you can repeat over and over again.

A big part of the fun is dealing with repetitive tasks so an effective system can make the affiliate life a lot easier.

Sorry but I am a bit confused.

You found 4 offers, put them in the same campaign but later you thought it´s wiser to redirect the traffic to one campaign?

Or did you mean to redirect it to one offer?

If that´s the case then you were right.

Of course it´s better to send the traffic to only one offer.

But to make it worth it the offer has to convert.

And to find out if it converts or not you need to splittest

Try to go to the lander part as soon as you feel safe enough for it.

Direct linking is ok to learn how to set up a campaign but when you want to make money better learn how to deal with landers.

Yes, unluckily there are few investments.

But with Adplexity you can´t go wrong.

Don´t forget to get a nice discount from HERE

What kind of hosting do you have at Siteground?

Shared hosting or cloud hosting?

When you have shared hosting better get another solution, performance on shared hosting is mostly pretty bad compared to dedicated server or VPS or cloud solution.

And especially when you´re running Pops it´s importan to have good, fast and reliable hosting or it can become your bottleneck.

Digital ocean is pretty good and not too pricey when you don´t run huge volume.

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Thanks for your speedy reply.

Sorry for confusion. I had 4 offers in one campaign with each 25% distribution. But then I put 100% to just one offer.

I am not really sure. I guess it is shared hosting (having the grow big plan, wordpress site runs within 2-3 seconds). Idea was to use this for the start and then switch (in case performance becomes an issue).

Concerning VPS - what do you think about hetzner and contabo?

And yes... my name is Lars :-)

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How did you decide for that one offer then?

You already use Voluum so you don´t need a server for your tracker.

Then you could go with Digital Ocean, there you can get cheap servers for $10 or so per month that can handle good volume.

On Hetzner I have my dedicated server that I use for my tracker and landers.

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I chose the one with the most promising "opportunity data" from Mobidea. It was some racing game. Basic idea was to concentrate traffic on one offer. So I did not think that much. Better would have been to think before starting the campaign. Was a bit like when you give a new toy to a boy he will push all buttons first until he finds out pressing one after the other is better.

After sleeping over it I will go the digital ocean way. Cheapest droplet is 5 USD and comes with 1GB memory and 1TB traffic. Is that enought? If not what is usually the bottleneck?

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Just a short update....

Was struggeling quite a bit with setting up a Digitalocean droplet but in the end I got Nginx with letsencrypt running. Actually it was not that hard but I made some small mistakes that I was not aware of.

My droplet is located in SG. Reason for this is that I want to try with tier 3 & 4 Asian countries first. Didn't bother about cloudflare yet.

Tomorrow will be ripping day. Have signed up for adplexity mobile already.

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Sorry, somehow forgot to reply.

But good that you got it running

Happy ripping

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Good question, in the end www is just a subdomain so I can´t tell why it´s faster.

Can you post the waterfalls of the two tests?

Maybe we can see a bit more there.

Btw, it´s better when you insert the images in your post and not attach them.
Then they are better displayed

In THIS POST I explained a bit how to do it

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Thanks for your speedy reply. Was about to take new screenshots with the waterfall and suddenly the differences were sort of gone. Seems like load times are a bit dynamic. Will sign up for imgur tomorrow.

Another question I do have.... I understood that I need to put my click url on the lander (am using Voluum --> https://myvoluum.magic/click). As I understood the click url is always the same (no reference to campaign). But how the hell does the tracker then know from where the click is coming from?

Is it using the referrer? In my lander the buttons have follow code for click:

<a href="javascript:void(0)" style="cursorointer!important" onclick="exit_a1();PreventExitPop=false" rel="noreferrer">

And at the bottom there is:

<script type="text/javascript">var page=getURLParameter("page"),brand=getURLParameter ("brand");function exit_a1(){window.onbeforeunload=null,window.locati on="https://myvoluum.magic/click"}

When I click the button it direct me to the page I want (have tried with a google.com url instead of click url).

So my question:

Does click url need a referrer in order to work? Do I need to have to change the code for the button?

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Cookies man, cookies

To get it working you need to visit the lander through a campaign link so that your tracker sets a cookie.

No cookie, no redirect because the tracker then doesn't know to what campaign the user is connected.

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Hmm.... it is not working and the lander is not dropping cookies. Have checked in chrome. Am getting a 400 bad request when clicking on the button in lander that should lead me to the offer. I think I should call it a day and continue tomorrow.

EDIT: Uuuh I need sleep. Have deleted the Voluum campaign and just created new one. Now working :-)

So... soon I hope I am less helpless and can post my numbers :-)

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Your lander will not go anywhere until you go to your lander from a campaign link.

So, after you setup a campaign in your tracker, it will create a special link at https://yourawesometrackingdomain.co...efghjkl9897653

When you go through that link, it will redirect you to your lander and the browser will be waiting for someone to click on that /click link, when it does, the tracker will say, 'ah-ha! here we go!' and then route you through to the offer link you setup in the campaign.

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Yes clicked the campaign link. That brought me to the lander. Guess I made a mistake on Voluum. Have deleted the old campaign and just started new one. Now it works and I am another 5 years older.

Oddly enough just before mental breakdown solution comes.

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The lander doesn't drop cookies but the tracker does.

But good to see that you got it solved

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You're cracking me up man! I sympathize with your struggles and late nights. I'm "old" too. Turning 44 this year. Onward and upward! So we can laugh at all of this at one of the Conferences in the future.

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Time to think about a STM Oldie Crackerbarrel

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Just by itself it doesn´t say anything, neither good nor bad.

Also don´t forget that you are running the campaign in many different Geos, maybe even worldwide (IN excluded).

So 130 clicks isn´t that much.

Next thing is that your lander is in English and we don´t know in what language the offer page is.

So when it´s no multi language it can also have a big impact on performance.

Try to find good offers first and build your campaigns around it, don´t try to find high CTR countries and then test random offers there just because the users click on your lander.

A good offer is much more important than high CTR when there are no good offers for your targeting available.

The lander could be the reason, same as above with the language.

It´s not really needed to check the offer, when it´s an iPhone X offer then it´s an iPhone X offer and your lander should match it.

That´s all

But as jaybot says, your lander is in EN so it would be better to test ir in Geos where EN can work.

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Small update & strange occurrence

Have started new campaign (this time on propeller) and chose another offer for iPhone XS (so I do not have to adjust my lander) and have ZA as only geo.

Camp is still running. People click it and I already have one conversion (YEAH --> so I know my lander setup works somehow).

But... a strange things with Mobidea.

According to offer payout should be 1.23 but Voluum only shows 0.61. First I thought it is a joke. But then I had a look in Mobidea stats and it also says 0.61. Hmmm... Offer still says 1.23. And since the conversion was in ZA I don't think that there was a smart link redirect.

Question:

If Voluum says the lander was clicked --> does this always mean that Voluum directed the user to the campaign offer (through the click url)?

Maybe sounds a bit odd. But is it possible that that when people click a button on my lander that the click url is activated but some magic js-code directs the user to another site instead?

What I mean is: If a user on a lander clicks button and thus opens a new site (like tracker url) does that always mean that scripts from lander cannot work on the new site?

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Most likely non targeted user (wrong geo, not 3G, etc), getting redirected to another offer within Mobidea and converting on that new offer.

What does the dashboard on Mobidea say? Which offer converted?

If it says it was the exact offer that converted and the amount is still off, then ask your AM what's up.

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Aaah... thank you @jaybot. Found my mistake finally. I forgot to target the right carriers. Campaign is finished now. All 4 conversions (yes 3 more) were not coming from the carriers mentioned in the offer. So smart link makes sense. And I just paid 10 USD to learn something Well actually I only paid 7.6 USD for my mistakes since I got some payout from the smart links.

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Glad you caught it. Happy mistake though, 4 conversions is still nice. It means your lander is solid and converts something.

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Yes my lander is ok. Corrected my mistake and ran an adjusted campaign again. Another 4 conversions on an ROI of -53% WIFI traffic only.

Will need to fix some more landers and then run a bigger campaign to get some more solid numbers. Volume this time was just 8k on propeller. I guess 4 conversions not really significant. Only thing I could see is that all conversion happened 8pm to midnight.

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Especially in the beginning always double check offer requirements and your settings.

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Jesus need 3 days to overcome death... I needed a few weeks to overcome a flue that I got right after my vacation. Anyhow... now I am back

Have fixed three landers (spinner, questionnaire and twinaxe gold standard giftbox). Have tested them with a DOI sweep offer in ZA.

Results are good enough to get back my motivation.

Spinner has best CTR, but gift box has best overall results and highest CR. So the questionnaire is out. Not sure yet, whether I will focus only on the gift box or if I split test it with the spinner.


I guess it is a bit too early to cut zones already. However will cut out Android 9 and above. Seems like the older the device OS the more hungry are the users for a new gadget.

And yes... I finally have figured out how to post pics properly :-)

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A good oldfashioned flu, good to see you back

Your landers basically reflect partially what I also experienced many times.

Questionnaires often have lower CTR but good CR, spinners have higher CTR but lower CR and giftbox is perfoming pretty good overall.

I would keep them all 3 running for some more stats, at that level every additional conversion can change the situation alot.

About the Android versions, when you have to optimize a campaign by such elements it´s often not worth it.
Better go deeper into the stats and check if 1-2 big zones send the non converting Android 9 traffic.

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Have run the campaign again (same time next day). Blacklisted 4 zones with cost > 1 x payout and no conversion.

Was exciting to see the horse race / running campaign. In the end the picture didn't really change. Sort of started to emotionally understand what statistical significance means aka don't trust guts, trust numbers.

Seems like I need a much better converting offer. Will concentrate on that now and will pick cheaper offers so that I don't waste too much money on the search.

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Did you only run the campaign at specific hours?

If yes, why?

And more important, trust your own numbers.

Is the offer SOI or carrier billing?
On what connections do you run it?
What are the overall stats?

You had it profitable with the giftbox lander already, now it´s at -36% and ZA has lots of volume.

Before you just stop it let´s check it together

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Hi can I also have the guides please ?
I would love to get better results and maybe from your article/ guides i'll learn more which is pretty amazing!!
I'll be very grateful for some tips
Thank you man for sharing your success after a long try and good luck !!

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Not sure which guides you mean. Haven't written any yet.

Have used twinaxe's guides several times and what he laid down still works. Of course you need to add your own flavor here and there.

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It´s always good to see when people say that my stuff works

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This is my last post.

The day has come to write the final chapter of my Follow Along.

The reason for this is pretty simple: Every book ends once the story is told.

My mission was to make it in the AM World. More specifically: I wanted to make enough money so that I could live from it.

Last year I already had several months were I reached that point. However it didn't feel like "mission accomplished" yet. The problem was: I did not trust my new skills.

Whenever one of my good camps tanked I thought: This is the end, I was just lucky and now all the luck is over!

But hey, somehow I made it through all the dark days and even weeks, again and again...

Looking on this year's performance I have reached a level of consistency that I feel comfortable with. In other words: I have sufficient trust in what I do.

Yes, there are still ups and downs, even 4 slightly red tracker days. But there is also propush and monetizer revenue which has proven to be a nice safety net escpecially when it adds up to triple digits/day (not included in chart).



All in all I needed a bit more than 2 years to learn the ropes and get some traction. I am not the fastest but therefore I am old.

Afterword:

There are many things that I had to learn. Most of them are laid down here on STM. With the lovely help of the community I finally understood the technical and process related parts.

Sometimes it is really hard for me to express all the gratitude that I have. Could say a thousand times "thank you" and still would feel like this is not enough. Helping new members with my experiences feels much better tho. So I try the best I can to bank on this approach.

Anyways... there are also lessons that I had to learn for myself where almost nobody could help me... and that was basically fighting with my demons and taming them.

That might sound a bit abstract. In my case these "demons" were basically fears I was totally unaware of. Tricky thing is that fears can show itself in many different colors such as:

- perfectionism
- controll issues
- catastrophizing
- feeling too stupid / not enough
- being unable to concentrate / getting distracted by little things (basically being in alarm mode)
- being unable to relax

Mother nature finally gave me the lesson I had to learn. No worries.. no voodoo stories to come. The only thing I needed was a visual example to gain some understanding.

Long story short... all of the sudden a red squirrel came to visit me every morning. We became friends, squirrel learned to trusts me and finally brought all his friends to me.

I had ample opportunity to study the behavior of red squirrels (the most awesome breed). My findings show that red squirrels are:

- extremely curious
- they move quickly and know no obstacles
- committed to the max, when they smell a nut they try everything to get it (really everything, no matter how sneaky)
- they crack every nut no matter how big
- playful and lighthearted (they don't take things personal) --> when they fail, they come back and just try again
- they "work" systematically --> when you place several nuts in a row they always pick nuts from left to right or right to left but never in chaotic order
- they watch where the big guys get their nuts from and just follow
- when alone they are really cute... when another squirrel wants to enter their territory they know how to defend it (killer instinct)
- they learn to trust rather quickly, only needed 4 weeks to make a squirrel eat out of my hand
- they are not afraid of falling since they have learnt to glide down softly

So... I just tried to apply what I observed from the squirrels. Key lesson was to find back to childlike curiosity, lightness and trust in my own abilities.

Hope the following picture make things a bit clearer:

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@larsometer

To my good friend Lars, who has helped me already through many high and lows, you deserve the success. Couldn't be happier for you. You are very smart, kind and overall good person with a strong will to succeed.

The cosmos rewarded you with for your hard efforts and there is more to come. The best days are always ahead, not behind. Keep it up dude.

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Wow what a great final post to end off this thread!

Keep it up!

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Hats off, I have almost tears in my eyes while I´m writing this post.

It´s like a TV show that you follow emotionally finally comes to and end.

But it´s not just an end, it´s a happy end

Seriously man, this is probably the best way a follow along can end.

And you know, where one thing ends will other things start

I hope this is just the end of the follow along and you still stay with us here.

But the greatest thing about your post is: Squirrels are my absolutely favorite "wild" animals here.

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Yes, only the end of this follow along.

I love reading follow alongs. Sometimes I wondered how the stories "ended". So I thought I can improve on that and give my apprenticeship a final chapter.

Usually the fun starts once the ropes are learnt. In this regard I want to bank on what I have learnt so far and strive for mastery.

Next goal is to build up some buffer both financially and time wise to have room for some side projects.

Once I am there I will either start a new follow a long or share my insights in a case study here.

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Great thought

I'll post something soon that could be very interesting then

What would you tell beginners were the most important factors that lead to your success?

I could imagine that persistence and overcoming the fear to lose money played a significant role there.

Edit: This morning I was lying in my bed and had the window fully open.

Then 4 or 5 times a swallow flew through the window into the bed room, went for a spin and flew out again.

Reminded me a bit on your squirrel

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The most important factor: Initial curiosity which changed into a mission after I received first positive signals.


I wanted to prove to myself that I can make it. Since I couldn't find any excuses I fully committed to that mission.

Whenever I had dark days I reminded myself that I don't want to have a life with regrets. No giving up unless it would be really necessary or wise...

May sound like a bold statment but this mindset let me climb high mountains and survive a three day solo hike in high altitude.


Of course there are some more general success factors such as:


1. Following the STM standard process:

Read 1 Dollar Guide & 40 day tutorial and apply what is in there. Start a follow along.

You save tons of money by avoiding or at least not exploring the full potential of some of the beginner mistakes.

Also you will have some direction and not run like a headless chicken (don't underestimate the options you have in this industry).


2. Find people on your level or slightly above and committ to a weekly mastermind:

Committment is already half the journey.

The other half is learning from your peers who all have different strengths.

Share as much as possible. As a beginner you have nothing to lose anyway. The better you get the more you will understand the value of sharing.


3. Take action and focus on incremental improvements

Losing motivation is so easy. Just compare yourself to anybody who posts a nice case study and then look at your numbers aka initial misery

It is quite normal to be a sucker in the beginning. The best is to just accept that as a fact and strive for getting slightly better every day.

A camp journal can come in quite handy. It helps getting aware of what didn't work and then just try a different approach (avoiding to beat yourself up).

In the beginning you are sitting at a desk with thousands of buttons. You don't know what each button does. So you need to press all of them to eventually find out what they do.

This process is called testing and it will never end.

You can read as much as you want about buttons... but finally you will have to press them to get the real experience.


4. Networking

Life can be so much easier when you exchange with people around you and try to understand their perspective and see them as a human (like yourself).

Sometimes it can take a while. But once a connection is there most people do actually love to support others on your mission.

Good thing in this industry is that you can choose to quite some extend who to work with.



Yes that were hugh factors indeed.

In my case persistence was not so much based on will power. For me the imagination of having regrets was pure horror. The only option I saw was to keep on going as long as I could.

When the load was too heavy I took a break and then moved on, just like mountain climbing. Focusing on the next rock rather than on the summit helped a lot.


Fear in general is a tricky thing. I wouldn't even say that I have overcome any of my fears. The only thing that changed is that I have become more aware of them.

Once I know I have a rising fear in my body I now can ask myself: What can I do?

Sometimes the answer is taking a long walk, other times it is a risk assessment. So I define clearly why and how I want to test something and how much money I want to put on it.

Taking money as a primarily goal out of the equation also helped a lot.

Of course I want to make money. But it is far less pressure to first test if something could work and then see how well I can make it work.

Last but not least... I have experienced several times that I can make XXXX profit from a few cent offer. That fact alone helped me a lot to not fully lose myself in catastrophizing.



I am ready for that. If it turns out as golden for me as the finance survey my next case study is to come

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This is AWESOME! I wish every single follow along would end this way, wouldn't that be amazing?

A huge hats of to you Lars, you really deserve this, I'm seriously impressed!

You're da man

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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooo!

All FAs must go on infinitely and way past their expiration date, like mine

Congrats, and looking forward to your next one, which will also be a huge success!

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What did it win after the 3rd spin?

One Free Fly (insect)...?

Feeding them can do magic. Maybe your swallow will serve as an awesome mosquito repellent. As long as it doesn't shit where it eats

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I'm so happy to know that this isn't goodbye - you've become such an integral part of this community, I would be genuinely sad if you were to say goodbye.

I'm curious to see what types of projects you'll be tackling next! All the best!



Amy

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What an awesome thread and great closing words..."Focusing on the next rock rather than on the summit helped a lot." This one really resonated with me as I'm just getting started on my journey. Thanks for putting this together!

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very last post for this FA

Newsletter curse is real... (sometimes and especially this time).

Today one of my bigger camps tanked. Tracker displayed SSL error on ALL my domains.

Tried to fix it and managed to break my tracker. Got a 504 followed by an almost heart attack. Pants stayed dry tho.

Managed to get access to tracker again and thought I should now do the long postponed update. Tracker broke again / got stuck in the update.

All thinking left my body followed by loads of sweat. Pants stayed dry tho.

Lessons learnt:

- Dont mess with cloudflare SSL settings

- Don't fix things too quickly when there is no immediate need for it + don't confuse correlation with causality

- Binom doesn't break so easily. Yes, I thought it was dead but it worked like a horse in the background all the time. Only accees to frontend was impacted.

- semper ubi sub ubi (Latin) / always wear underwear

- when you can't think no more... don't even try it, things will just get worse.

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