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I have no idea what I am doing. Let's figure this out. (30)

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I have been a member of this forum for 2 months and I can say that while I have learned a lot and definitely do not regret joining. Every single day has come with it's own surprises...

• Spending hours learning how to code the most basic javascript
• Messing up tracking links, postbacks, and offer links
• Wasting $50 on bot traffic
• Countless hours nagging the Binom support team
• The Mobipium smartlink from the $1 guide is the most profitable campaign that I have launched. I had one $3 day and two $1 days.
• 10 total conversions not including the mobipium smartlink
• Trying to translate Spain spanish with my broken conversational mexican spanish and then it doesn't work and then being told by my new translator that it is obviously a mexican dialect and that it gives off a weird vibe that will put off spain spanish speakers
• Accidentally setting my campaign to automatically turn on with Popads once approved and then it ran at 3am and was 99% bot traffic and I lost $10
• My misadventures with UNIX where I spent 3 days learning how to set up Amazon S3 with UNIX on Microsoft and vortex guide was in Mac
• Today and yesterday trying to force a campaign to be profitable and then wasting $40 on 60,000 impressions with only three total conversions and I messed up the offer link
• Getting my credit card locked multiple times due to sending money to various SaaS and the creditor thinking I am getting scammed/or my info was stolen
• I spent an entire day trying to fix my CDN which I set from Vortex 40 day guide. But there was nothing actually wrong with it I just didn't understand how CDN's work.
• Spending hours trying to create a unique lander and then it gets zero conversions
• Starting a campaign then getting 3 conversions on an offer and then quitting because I thought it was a dud when I should have been split testing. And then some dude on the same network somehow made it work and got a lot of conversions with it.
• Targeting Spain as a geo. I am starting to think that Spain is a terrible geo for newbies.

At this point I have broken every single thing that I have touched. I am not complaining. I am just telling you exactly what happened. After the first month in this industry I have accepted that things are going to go wrong. And even though I have made countless mistakes there is a lot that I have going for me:

• I have $2k as my monthly budget
• I have gotten into a dozen affiliate networks with some pretty good quality offers by simply acting professional, messaging each affiliate network on skype before they messaged me, and the showing them that I sounded like I knew what I was talking about (in regards to pop traffic)
• A lot of the stupid mistakes that I have made, I know better not to make them again.
• I have completed Vortex 40 day guide
• I am a member of the STM forum and that alone has done a lot in helping me to access valuable threads of information

In this thread I am not promising the world. In fact at this point, I find that I have taken so much action to the point that I constantly find myself having to stop and figure out where things went wrong. And sometimes it takes me hours to solve something incredibly simple or sometimes I find the answer through trial and error. Although I must say I have found information the fastest when I ask questions. Whether that be on the forum. Or talking to affiliate managers. Or the Binom support team. Even though at this point I am a one man band I still find that I need people to talk to in order to fully understand what I am doing and WHY I am doing it.

There are so many moving pieces in this industry and while nothing is notoriously difficult, what is most difficult for me is putting every single piece together correctly and making sure that nothing goes wrong that sets everything else out of balance.


My current situation: At this point I have learned exactly how not to run a campaign. Unlike last month, ripping landers is really not that much of an obstacle for me anymore. However my new problem is that I must learn how to properly run a campaign. And what to look for when running a campaign. And then how to properly set up offer links and the postback and etc.. I have a list of offers I want to try out and every time I join a new network I find myself staring at the offer link thinking, okay how do I actually set this up? My main goal right now is just reading.

So for now, this Follow along will start off slow but I will pick up the pace very soon as I begin to better systematize how to run campaigns correctly and efficiently. Being that I am still trying to get the fundamentals down, I will aim to post here once a week as a minimum. Although depending on how I feel I may post here day to day or every time I run into a problem that I cannot solve. As I get more efficient, day to day sounds better.


To be continued....

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It's not easy starting out!

Definitely know how you feel when you said "I have broken every single thing that I have touched". What separates winners from losers is mindset. You have actively sought to resolve every issue and learn from every mistake - this is a very good indication that you will succeed in life (which you probably already have in other areas). Mistakes are inevitable, and aiming to "fail fast" to get it over with is the way to go.

Even experienced affiliates will continue to make mistakes. As you've pointed out, there are so many moving parts, and failing to get one thing right can make everything crumble. I still remember the time when I assigned a few thousand dollars (daily budget) to an international campaign while I was feeling sleepy, went to bed, woke up to find the whole budget had been spent with 0 conversions just because I either set up the links or the targeting incorrectly (don't remember specifics anymore). After that, I made a mental post-it note to ALWAYS take a second look at everything before turning a campaign live.

It certainly sounds like you're on the right track! Give me a day or two to resolve that linking issue. In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to apply to other networks?
@twinaxe's recent case study here is a must-read for every newbie - it's so easy to implement (direct-linking):

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Direct-Linking

Nice start of a follow-along! Looking forward to participating in your journey.



Amy

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Great follow-up and attitude. Expecting to see more, including some screenshots with stats and hopefully some green numbers to encourage everyone else around here in giving it a shot

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Nice intro! I'm excited to see you grow and where you go with this. I'm pretty new to the forum too.

It's definitely not easy starting up in this. Whatever your skill set is, it always seems like there's something new to learn in AM and I think it's awesome how you're tackling things head on. Problems pop up, you figure out a way past them.

Whether it's AM or any other thing in life, the most common thing I've heard time and time again from successful people is that you have to keep getting back into it and not give up.

I was at a point about a month ago where I was bringing in $XX profit daily, then I dropped into losing ~$200 daily and now I'm roughly negative $30 right now. I've had $XXX days. I'm gunning for those consistent $XXX days and eventually those $XXXX days. I'm not giving up. I'll see you up there .

It's been about a week since I posted last and you brought me out of hibernation.

I'm looking forward to conquering this alongside you!

Sent from my SM-G9550 using Tapatalk

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I appreciate your response. You yourself in terms of testing campaigns are a couple steps ahead of me. And I have read your progress thread. It is good to follow someone not so far away because it helps me understand what problems to expect very soon!

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That was difficult to read. Losing my monthly budget ($2k) in one night to bot traffic or links would probably make me dead inside for a couple days. So I will remember this post.


I am going to apply for Haka Offers and see what happens. If it's direct linking then why not give it a shot.

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I wouldn´t say it like that, better say "Lost $50 on non converting traffic".

You can have placements with very high bot % that still convert good and run on profit and you can have placements with 0% bots that are totally crap and don´t convert at all.

So I better like to see traffic as good/converting and bad/non converting, independent if there´s big % bots or not.

How do you know that it was 99% bots?

Did you run a real test or do you just assume it?

I also had it few times that my CC got locked when I wanted to fund traffic sources.

Usually a quick call was enough to get it unlocked again.

Don´t try to create own unique landers.

There is a reason why you see always the same landers on Adplexity - because they work.

11 or 12 years ago I ran a US campaign on Mediatraffic and set my bid to $1 CPV.

Luckily I had a daily limit of $100 but that was blasted in few minutes.

Then last year I ran a campaign on Megapush where I targeted IT, mobile.

I ran a good competitive bid and forgot to set a limit so on that campaign I lost about $88 or $1k that day.

Good decision, the offers work good.

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As long as you remember to set a low budget until you're ready to scale, you'll be all good!

Trouble comes when you feel "I'm an experienced affiliate now" and get cocky. Cocky = careless. Setting up a big campaign when I was sleepy and then leaving a big budget to run while I was sleeping was the mistake.

Setting a low daily budget and not depositing too much money into any traffic network at one time will protect you from major losses resulting from careless mistakes.



Amy

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I learned how to set up a bot test with javascript by following the instructions of Binom.
https://docs.binom.org/events.php

With that specific campaign I admit I did not know how to set up a bot test yet. I hadn't really considered that the offer would be bad. As that campaign was the first one I ran with Binom and I thought, well who doesn't want an iphone 11? I was thinking that because the top 10 placements took thousands of impressions with very low CTR it was all bot traffic. I thought that if I could weed those placements out and keep going that I could eventually make the offer profitable. Well it did not work.

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That's how I have mine set up too. Twinaxe brought up the good point that you can get converting placements that also have a lot of bots. You may not want to exclude them just based on the bot data alone. An obviously, if you've spent any amount of time on here, you know. Twinaxe's word is law.

But in the beginning, I would follow the 80/20 rule which pretty much says that you'll likely get the best of your results from a few handful of good placements.

iPhone offers work, but they also can be very saturated. Newer offers may be fresher and less saturated, so they may convert better. You can also ask your AM which offers are doing well, but take that with a grain of salt because their data will come from what's currently bringing the network the most revenue, which means a lot of other affiliates are promoting it. After all, who doesn't want an iPhone 11 ?

The newer an offer, the less likely a visitor you've sent has already converted and become a lead from another affiliate.

I may not have the best system right now, but I'm focusing pretty much exclusively on iPhone and Samsung offers. There are tons of offers out there, so you should split test them to find which one works best for you. Consider it a goldmine when you find a good offer that converts well .

In the beginning, I would cut those placements with a lot of traffic and a lower CTR so you could focus on some of the smaller placements with lower volume and higher quality. Then, once you've found a converting offer, you could maybe re-introduce the placements with more volume to test if they are worth using again.

I've had problems with CC too. Seems like it comes with the territory. I don't know where you're located but an option might be a virtual credit card. I live in the US and I've used privacy.com to connect my bank account to their virtual credit cards which I've had to use for a few affiliate networks, since they didn't like my other cards.

Just another hurdle you have to hop over, haha .

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Something that I see a lot of people doing on these progress threads and a mistake I keep doing myself is forgetting things. This is a data driven game with a lot of factors to remember. I can take vortex 40 day guide for instance. Even though I completed it and it was an extremely helpful guide, it is very difficult for me to remember much of it. There is so much information and so many variables to this industry that I find myself incapable of retaining information.

My discovery has been that the reasons for many of my mistakes has been that I just haven't wrote very much stuff down. And because I haven't written it down, I don't actually use the information that I read because I forgot about it. So that's what I have been working on lately. I have compiled a lot of information from previous threads and follow alongs that I need in order to run a campaign and made a basic outline of some sort. In this way I can just look at the outline and check everything off as I go down the list. I am trying to come up with some sort of system that fits my schedule because I am doing this part time, 30 hours a week, and need to be as efficient as I possibly can.

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Glad to see you liked the MOBIPIUM Smartlink!
And don’t worry for the rookie mistakes, we’ve all been there. You can always ping me or to your AM in MOBIPIUM for advice!


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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My current state of affairs is that I am waiting on translations while I come up with more campaign ideas. I must say, after running the numbers on One Hour Translations the cost terrified me. So much so that I decided to switch over to Fiverr. There are a lot of people on Fiverr with 5 star ratings who will do 1000 word translations in under 24 hours for 8 Euros (including Fiverr Fees). That's $0.008 per word.

I got a quote on One Hour Translations for 1000 words from English to Indonesia for $80. Screw that.

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In my mind, OHT is like the Apple of translation services.

$1200 USD for a phone. You can get a different phone brand, with exact same specs and components for $400 - $600.

Unless you win that phone in a sweeps contest, of course .

I think you have a good chance of getting the exact same quality translation for less on fiverr.

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I usually use deepl.com to translate, and then i hire a freelancer to proof read the text. On upwork, it costs the same to translate and proofread. Around 10 to 30 usd per 1000w, depending on the languages. Japanese being the most expensive.

For French and Spanish, i proofread myself, and deepl.com quality is not bad, except when dealing with idioms.

Sent from my ANE-LX3 using Tapatalk

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Another thing I learned as well, in order to quickly find elements within your code you need to open up the page on your browser. Right click EXACTLY on the element you are looking to find and click inspect. Any newbie trying to rip complicated landers I just saved you 3 hours.

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You seem quite organized which is good. Also you have some of the most knowledgeable people here to help you like vortex and matuloo among tons of others. Now you just need to take action, and get your feet dirty in the game of weeding losers from winners.

My 2 cents

cent #1 - spy and run winners


if you decide to run low payout offers then..

cent #2 - follow a piramid of optimization, first kill bad zones/placements (offer payout x1), then kill landers (offer payout x3-5)

good luck

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Interesting! Never seen any one recommend cutting placements before landers.

Just goes to show there are a million and one ways to doing this. You just have to figure out what works for you. And if you're lucky, you won't make as many mistakes as me .

Side note, just finished watching the zorbasmedia interview with you iamattila .

Sent from Maui using Tapatalk

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Optimization is an art, and yup everyone does it differently. Heck, even the same person can optimize each campaign differently, depending on geo and traffic source and a slew of other factors.

If you're running on a traffic network + geo that has a million placements (US @ Zeropark), and you don't yet have a proven lander (i.e. the winner from split-testing at least a few popular ones), then cutting landers from the very start would definitely be recommended.

Once you have a solid lander+offer combo, you can always retest some of the placements you've cut from before.



Amy

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you must wonder, how can you test landers properly with shitty placements (bad traffic and/or bots). you can't! so weed out the crap to have results based on "real" traffic!

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Haha, this will be my second post referencing the matrix, but so many times in starting and optimizing campaigns, I feel like I'm looking at the matrix with the green characters scrolling not knowing what I'm doing, and then in chimes in one of you awesome super-dupes with a golden nugget of knowledge . Appreciate you Amy . Appreciate you guys. Hope I can be as helpful as you guys some day.

I especially feel that matrix feeling when looking at Zeropark.

Sent from Maui using Tapatalk

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Can't argue with that logic!

I think I figured that since I was testing the landers with equally good/bad traffic that those tests would be somewhat accurate.

Now in saying that, lately I've been testing new campaigns and landers on whitelists, so here I am eating my words.

Sent from Maui using Tapatalk

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Another thing I have been thinking as well.

Fixing landers takes way too long. I lost all that time trying to put my translations into a lander I could not even get to work. If anyone has any input on this please do:

The vast majority of pop ads I see on adplexity that are successful are similar for the most part. The same couple of concepts. I would probably be better off just taking any finished landers that I have and then swapping out the creatives, switching the offer/angle, or changing certain design aspects before trying to rip a lander myself with sneaky redirects or did not even download correctly. Basically taking a lander that obviously works (that is shown to be popular) and tweaking it.

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The thing is, when you don´t have a good combi of 1 LP and 1 offer yet then you don´t know if the lander is bad or if it´s the offer or if it´s the traffic.

In other words, you just can´t tell accurate if you cut good or bad placements.

But it definitely makes sense to cut high volume placements in the test stage to make sure that your traffic is coming from many different placements instead of only coming from a few big placements.

At this stage you only cut the high volume placements because they bring much traffic and thus have a high impact on the overall campaign performance but you don´t cut them because of bad quality yet.

That way you can be sure that the traffic is more diversified and then single placements itself don´t have such big impact on the overall performance.

When you then find a good converting funnel you should still re-test the previously excluded high volume placements because then you can test them for quality.

The only way to know if a placement is good or bad is to test it on a good converting funnel.

Otherwise you can´t tell if the traffic is bad or if the funnel just isn´t good enough.

Exactly, probably everyone is doing it a bit different and some are doing it completely different

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I ran into this for the first time last night too. I sat down to rip landers and the first couple were very straightforward. It did take a little time, but I was thinking "this isn't that hard." LOL and then I opened the next one that referenced 3 separate js files and was full of embedded js. I gave it a shot and then just gave up.

I realize this is partially because I'm not very good at javascript yet. I can program, I've just never worked with a language like javascript (I have background with PHP and .NET).

I'm determined to take the time to learn javascript because I can see that will be a very valuable skill to learn here. I'm not going to let it stop me from moving forward, I'll start out with the landers I was able to successfully clean, but I'm also not going to give up on the more js heavy landers. I just need to improve my skills in that area. If that makes sense.

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I am fully focused on a tool that takes care of this. I will let you know!

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I was also thinking about automating the lander cleaning progress but then I decided against it.

Although most landers are similar there still can be smaller or bigger changes that could make it difficult to make a script to consider all of these changes.

In the end I would probably still check everything manually so that I wouldn´t save time from such a script.

When you get used to it then cleaning and fixing a lander only takes few minutes max and when you do it manually you know at least exactly what you did there.

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I can totally understand that point of view, especially coming from a seasoned affiliate. I still think newcomers could benefit from it. STM is probably not my best target market, but I have wandering around (shame on me ) and I think what I have in mind could suit some affiliates.

Anyway, if you don't mind, I will send you a link when I have a decent beta. I am always keen on getting feedback from people who are against an idea, because that is usually where the critics are the most interesting.

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Noice discussion!

Haha great to see our in-house FB expert on a pop follow-along thread!

This "catch22" situation only exists in the beginning, when you don't have ANY of the following:

-A proven offer

-A proven lander

-A proven traffic source and converting placements

This is exactly why I would suggest this testing approach:

-Test multiple offers and stick with AM-recommended ones in the beginning.

-Test multiple landers and stick with the most popular ones that have received the most traffic, according to spy tools.

-Start on a traffic source that a lot of other affiliates have experienced success with, and don't bid too low - which will guarantee you won't get all garbage placements.

Then you:

-Cut placements that have spent significant money without converting (for example 2x in loss).

-Cut offers down to the best.

-Cut landers down to the best.

-Use the best offer+lander to retest all but the most hopeless placements, that got blacklisted before - because some of them may be profitable now that you're running the "best" offer+lander combo.

Then you can run more split-tests - either use the best lander to test more offers, or use the best offer to test more landers.

There are other optimization tasks that can be done too, such as testing bids. But you get the idea!

And this is how you make a pop campaign perform better and better!




Amy

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Personally I don't like to spend too much money on initial testing. Just ripping landers you're seeing the most often on spy tools, that have received a lot of traffic, should be good enough to use as-is. When you find a promising offer you can always invest in better translations.

That way you can maximize the use of your budget, by testing more offers for example.

Google translate has really improved as well, especially if you feed it really short sentences and keep it literal (e.g. without using slang or figures of speech).


Yes that's what I do as well! I should make a note of this in the 40-day tutorial too.


This is good practice, and will get you results that better represent performance throughout all hours of the day. Collect data for a few weeks and you may have enough to start cutting out hours that convert the worst for you.


@jeremie Yes please! I wished I had your coding skills! Looking forward to what you come up with!



Amy

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