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From $xxx,xxx content to newbie pop/push (20)

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Hello everyone...

Brief Background
I've been in affiliate marketing for over 10 years, mostly with eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associates. Previously, my focus was on content sites and organic search traffic. My best years my profit was 6-figures. However, that method has gotten harder and harder in recent years. Time to give paid traffic a try.

Longer background
You can skip this section if you're not interested, I understand.

In 2017, my wife, children, and I decided to become therapeutic foster family through our regional Children's Home Society. A "therapeutic" foster family/parent is like a regular foster parent, only with more advanced training and willing to foster kiddos with more traumatic backgrounds or medical issues, etc. After 2 years of training, we finally got our license and accepted the placement of a great preteen. He lived with us for over 14 months, but unfortunately, he just needed more help than he could get in a family setting. Today, we're back to our normal family of 4.

During our foster parent experience, I did not prioritize affiliate marketing. My earnings fell but I was okay with that. I have a good day job that pays the bills, and my foster son and biological children all needed me. Now that our foster son is no longer with us, my time is freed up again and I'm back baby!

Vortex's 40-day Pop Tutorial
Since content sites and SERP traffic is so different from paid traffic, I figured a good place to start with paid traffic would be @vortex 40-day pop tutorial. I've already asked a few questions, so you may have seen me there already.

My progress so far...
Here's what I accomplished so far:

• I signed up for an account with Mobidea and Clickdealer. I got accepted into Mobidea right away, but still waiting to hear back from ClickDealer. I'm worried that they won't accept me because, although I'm successful in affiliate marketing, I'm new to paid traffic. Looks like the person who interviewed me on Skype has been gone on vacation, so hopefully I hear back soon.
• After some paralysis-analysis on which tracker to use, I settled on Voluum for now. I'm not that excited though because many of the features (such as drilling down 3 categories of data) aren't available to the lowest plan. I'm still on the fence here and considering switching to Binom, but haven't decided just yet. In the meantime, I do have Voluum up and running.
• I signed up with PropellerAds and PopAds. I deposited $100 with PropellerAds and started my first test direct-link campaign, per the guide. As expected, I got zero clicks or conversions, but I did learn a lot, and realize I have a lot more to learn.
• I started to get frustrated with following the guide new each day. I'm a big picture person. I like to generally know where I'm going. So I decided to just pause any action and I read through the rest of the 40-day tutorial over the course of two evenings. I finished that last night. Now that I have a more general idea of everything, I'm going back to where I left off to continue the journey.
• This morning, I signed up for Adplexity Mobile. Just started to play with the various filter options.

Picking a vertical and geo
I'm supposed to decide on a vertical and start ripping and fixing some landers. Then I'm supposed to setup my hosting, etc. But I'm having trouble deciding on a geo, and thus not sure which language to target with landers. As the only network I'm currently in is Mobidea, I went to their Opportunities page to look at the EPC and revenue from various geos. I'm having a hard time deciding on one. Do I go with a geo getting a lot of revenue? Are the geos that are performing poorly due to they're bad geos with bad offers, or is there untapped potential there? I realize the only true way to know is to test, but what's the best approach to start as a newbie?

Hosting
As someone coming from the content sites side of things, I'm very familiar with servers and Cloudflare. The guide has us using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront. I'd love to keep using Cloudflare as I have a web hosting account with them, and I saw people like @twinaxe mention they use Cloudflare, but I can't seem to find any good information on how to set it up for pop/push landers. Specifically, do I do anything special for the CDN caching? Or just leave that at the defaults and turn security off, etc?

What's next?
Once I pick a geo and vertical (probably going to be sweeps, also I'm not interested in adult), I'm going to get busy finding and ripping landers. I'm pretty good with web coding already, so I'm hopeful this won't be a huge challenge. Then I'm going to get my hosting squared away (hopefully I figure out the best Cloudflare settings to use). After that, it's off to the races and spend money on traffic.

Any words of advice or wisdom or answers to questions will be greatly appreciated. I've gained a lot of knowledge already by reading other people's follow-alongs, so I figure it's only fair that I try to do the same. I'll do my best to keep this updated on my progress.

Last night, I stayed up until after midnight reading, and then this morning I was awake by 5:30 AM so figured I'd get started on more work. I realize that I do need sleep and need to take care of my health, but I'm just so excited to get going. Making 6-figures in a year from ePN tells me this is tangible and, while a completely different method, it's totally doable. That's my mindset at least.

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Hey,

Inspiring story, thanks for sharing.
I will reply for the tech part. I will let the experts reply on the business side.

@alice_cd from ClickDealer may help you?

If you do pop traffic, you may be hitting the monthly Voluum event cap quite quickly. A self-hosted tracker may be a better choice.

I feel you. Did the same :-)

As far as I am concerned, for affiliate marketing, I only use Cloudflare for their CDN (and Amazon AWS for the rest) .
On other sites I use the full setup. There is no that much options to play with. I would pay attention to these 2

Cloudflare Caching Level: Ignore Query String > often you pass parameters from the tracker to the lander to do some customization using JS. You do not want to trigger a cache update
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en...-Caching-Level

Always Online > In case the origin server goes down
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en...-Always-Online

Good luck!

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Yeah, I've thought about that too. It's a good point, although with self-hosted, I would have to keep server costs and server maintenance costs in mind.

Perfect! That's what I was wondering, which caching level, etc. to select. I'll give that a shot.

You otherwise still use AWS S3 buckets for hosting the content then?

Thanks!

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I think @twinaxe posted about his setup, but I can not remember where.

I use:
- Cloudflare for DNS as it resolves faster than Route 53
- Cloudfront as CDN for serving pages
- S3 for hosting

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Thanks for confirming. That's the combination I was thinking of using, so glad to know it's working for you.

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Hey, awesome intro .

Twinaxe has this setup:

You can't go wrong with Amazon for speed and quality hosting. I had it before. One problem you may run into eventually is going past their free tier limits. A couple months ago, I was using them and I was breaking past the free limits on the first day. I ended up spending ~$380 on hosting that month running pop traffic, so I switched to my own Hetzner server, set it up with Binom and Cloudflare CDN and I use that server to self host my landers as well.

Binom support will set your tracker up for you if you contact them and you decide to go with them. I can't speak for the other trackers. I love Binom though.

With Binom and the server, this will run you around ~$150 per month, cheaper your first month because of Binom's new subscription deal. It also affords the possibility of using server-side programming like php, which can have some advantages like extra landing page protection.

Your current setup will do everything you want it to though. Just might get a little more expensive when you start running more pop traffic.

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I'm already tired of going back and forth on what to do about tracking and a server. While making the wrong choices in this area will definitely lose me money, it's also not making me any money or helping me learn. I think I'm just going to switch to a similar setup as you guys and then be done with it.

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Voluum is fine, and honestly easier to use when starting out. You already paid for the first month, so I’d use it.

Hit those event caps on pops first, and then decide.

Amazon s3 is good to start. Eventually, I would get off amazon s3 and on to a dedicated server like hetzner or DO, both incredibly cheap.

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I second what jaybot says

Sorry man. Wasn't trying to confuse you. Voluum is great and a lot of people on here use and swear by it.

If you manage to crack the Zeropark code, Pop impressions don't count toward your balance since they're sister companies. Great quality traffic, but you have to sift through a lot of other traffic to find it. Be careful on Zeropark if you do decide to go that route. You can spend a lot of money really quickly. A lot of people on here don't recommend it for newer guys.

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Well unfortunately, after waiting a week, my application was denied by Clickdealer. They said my promotion methods didn’t match their offers.

Last night I put in applications to join both MOBIPIUM and Haka, so I’m hopeful there. Based on their posts in other FAs, they both seem like they’d be great to work with.

Today’s goal is to square away some tech decisions and then continue ripping more landers. I have a test budget and I’m eager to resume using it.

You didn’t confuse me at all and I appreciate your helpful replies. I get the pros/cons, it’s just good to hear what others are doing. Voluum is great, I don’t want anyone to think I’m saying otherwise. I just can’t do everything in the guide on the Discover plan. I’d need to upgrade to the Prophet plan for that, and the extra cost is a factor that I need to take into consideration and then make a decision today.

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Great background and set of useful skills! Looking forward to seeing more on your FA here. It's good that you already have some advantages which you can use in your favor. You'll be doing a lot of work on the landers once you start ripping off some good ones and you'll need to clean them up.

This is highly subjective because if you check more guides and FA's here, you will see that GEOs with lower competition can outperform T1 countries by incredible margins on the right offers. But remember, subjective is the key word here. You might be promoting certain offers on expensive countries where you will bid a lot but also get huge pay-outs for each conversion. So the trick is to really just.. test as much as you can. If I'm not mistaken, @twinaxe made a guide on a CPA network that worked well on obscure GEOs. Low competition can have its advantages.

This business is definitely able to generate 6 figures for you, but I'd imagine that the closer you get to that figure, the more people you will need on your hands. By then, it will be an operation more than a 1-man show no matter how good you get. Unless you really plan on never sleeping.

Any particular reason why you wouldn't want to touch adult for now? Just curious.

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Thanks! Landers is one of my goals for today for sure.

Thanks for the advice on that. Looks like I just need to ask my AM for advice on offers and then test, test, test, and test some more.

My wife fully supports what I'm doing and the money I'm spending to do it. She just has two conditions:

1. I can't spend the mortgage money.
2. No adult offers.

If those are the only conditions to getting her blessings and support, I can abide by them.

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Oh. Did they elaborate on that? I am planning to start with them as i got approved. Would be interesting to know why. Is that because you are doing pop?

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No, that's all they said unfortunately. My previous experience is with search traffic, so not sure if that's the reason.

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Here's an update to how I'm doing. I actually ran some campaigns so that's exciting. As expected, it didn't amount to much, but I got some conversions so that's good.

Switched to Binom
Voluum needed me to upgrade to a higher plan to enable SSL, so I decided to just switch to Binom instead. I got my own server at Hetzner and installed Binom myself from the SSH console (it was super easy). Ran into one issue that Binom support resolved nearly instantly through their support chat. I was really impressed.

Cleaned up my first landers
This was more time consuming than I expected. I hope it gets easier over time with more experience, but I managed to grab two landers from Adplexity and get them cleaned up and running.

First campaign using landers
I asked Mobidea for some good converting offers and they sent me two sweeps offers for multiple-geos to win an iPhone. I decided to try Colombia traffic from PropellerAds, so I had the landers translated to Spanish and setup a campaign. The offer had 4 paths, each of the two offers going to each of the two landers. I got some clicks from the lander but no conversions.



Each line is 1 of the 2 offers going to 1 of the 2 landers. The top two lines are the same lander, so that lander obviously did a little better. Does anybody have any suggestions? Try new offers with the same two landers? I have the landers in English and Spanish, try a different English or Spanish speaking geo with the same offers?

One thing I don't understand is I set the budget of the campaign to $10, and it's since stopped due to hitting that limit. But when I look in Binom, it thinks I only spent $3.37. When I look at the campaign stats in PropellerAds, it thinks I spent $5.335 and generated 17,238 visits. I'm not sure where all those discrepancies are coming from. Binom is showing almost 4,000 less visits and much less spend. Even PropellerAds isn't showing my $10 spend, but they shut down the campaign?

Mobipium Smarlinks
My Mobipium AM suggested trying smartlinks with pop and referred me to the $1 guide. I was following the 40-day pop tutorial, but figured what the heck, and ran a PopAds campaign direct linked to the Mobipium smartlink. I sent $3.42 worth of traffic from multiple Tier 1/2/3 geos to the smartlink and got 21 conversions and $0.85 in earnings.

I setup Binom properly in the flow and I'm going to send a few dollars more traffic and then see which geos are converting and try to optimize to just them and see what happens. It was encouraging at least to see conversions!

Final Thoughts
I'm just trying to pace myself and learn. It's disappointing to not get any conversions on the Mobidea offers they recommended. The 40-day tutorial assumes at least some conversions so you can begin learning how to optimize. Hopefully I can do some of that with the Mobipium Smartlinks campaign. Not sure though where to go next with Mobidea. Also hoping I can figure out where the tracking discrepancies are coming from (honestly, I saw the same thing with Voluum).

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I'm feeling frustrated today.

I did get some conversations pushing traffic to the Mobipium smartlinks, but the payout is very low and I haven't been able to even come close to making a profit at it.

And that's the only place where I've made any conversions. I've only been accepted into a couple networks (Mobidea and Mobipium). I've asked my AMs for good converting offers, but I haven't made a single conversion outside of the smartlinks.

It's hard to test landers and offers with zero conversions. It's discouraging.

Do I just keep spending money on low payout offers, essentially throwing spaghetti at the wall until something hopefully sticks?

I'm not against spending money. I have no illusions that this will be easy. I was just hoping for at least one conversion to one actual offer, you know what I mean?

Sorry to vent.

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Smartlinks won't make you a fortune. You have to test a lot of offers.

Assuming this is all in one vertical - take the best performing landers from that smartlink campaigns and test some offers with it. This is the most important, you have to test and test until you find converting offer. Then you can try to tweak or splittest another landers to get better results.

Good luck.

Sent from my SM-G965F using STM Forums mobile app

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Thanks for the tips. Unfortunatley, the Mobipium smartlink offers just collect new push subscribers, so there are no offers there to use as research.

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It's been a couple months since my last post. I haven't done a lot because August is the busiest time of year at the day job, that and other excuses. I could have squeezed time in for AM if I really wanted to, if I had more discipline and commitment, but I didn't. While there were real stressors in my life the past two months, more than normal, at the end of the day I was being lazy. That's on me.

Thankfully the craziness is over at the day job for the most part, and I've realized that I'm never going to make CPA work unless I get to work, that laziness won't get me anywhere important. I currently live a typical, average, middle-class life. I do not need AM to work to put food on the table or eventually retire. But I want more than that. Not to be rich, but to have opportunities that I don't currently have. To travel more. To maybe retire early. To stop running the rat race. To have more so we can be more generous to others.

So I'm back at it. Did some catching up here on the forum. I saw a post where @twinaxe linked to: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...rt-People-Make

That thread really hit home with me. I'm a pro at being in motion but not getting any real action done. I need to take action. Sure, there's no action without motion, but I really need to focus on the 80/20 rule and take more action.

It dawned on me that I can learn a lot by reading the threads and posts here at STM, but I'll never learn how to run campaigns until I run campaigns.

I know that probably invokes a "duh!" response, but sometimes the obvious can be staring you right in the face, but you don't internalize it and really get it, until you do. If that makes sense.

Question: I'm currently only accepted in three smaller affiliate networks. When I research in Adplexity, there are tons of offers for the networks I was rejected from, but very few from my networks. My three networks provide lists of offers and geos that are currently performing well. Since I'm still a beginner with very little experience at CPA and paid traffic, is it worthwhile to chase the top performing offers in the top performing geos in my networks? Is that a good place to start testing?

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Hey man - great stuff! Love the username and good for you on the Therapeutic Foster stuff - I used to work in medicaid mental health in my 20's and am well aware of how much foster parents sacrifice.

I do natives rather than what you're focused on, so can't add too much, but on the question of applying with affiliate networks, I think it's probably the same for each vertical, and definitely a relevant question...

On the one hand there seem to be so few offers that work with paid traffic that you gotta go after the good ones... but on the other end you don't want to end up applying with tons of networks and then letting them all down when you can't run much volume with most of them (or at least make an attempt to do so).

So I guess the key is just trying to walk a good balance between taking action no matter what but also pursuing offers that work. You don't want to be the guy who has run less than 50$ traffic but has applied to 20 networks seeking that 'perfect' offer, but on the other hand you don't want to just keep throwing money away on the same stuff over and over because you're not networking and building connections with new affiliate networks.

Plus, once you're doing some consistent volume the offers will come to you - someone will see your follow-along and ask you to run their offers, or you can send a screenshot of your volume on an offer when you contact an affiliate network you want to work with to demonstrate that you're actually legit and able to bring them volume.

Anyway though, great stuff and keep up the great work man!

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