Beginner Series Part 2: Make $x.xxx/Month With $3/Day campaigns (18)
Beginner Series Part 2: Make $x.xxx/Month With $3/Day campaigns
I know that the title sounds a bit exaggerated but when you continue reading you will see what I mean.
In the last post of the beginners serie I wrote a bit about setting realistic goals.
When you have doable and achievable goals it´s time to find ways to reach them.
Today I´d like to tell a bit about good ways to start and how to make first stable profits without losing too much money and then moving step by step to a nice income in a rather easy way.
It took much more time than expected to write the post because I wanted to do my best that the text is not too messy and I hope it worked 
I read alot of the follow alongs here and also read alot about the struggles and obstacles of our beginners so I would like to show some ways that help to make the progress not harder than needed.
Basically all we have to focus on is „How can I make enough profit“ and luckily enough there are several ways to do so.
I´d like to tell you a bit about good approaches that are not too complicated so that they can also be implemented by beginners about how to start, make first profits and the use all the stuff you learn along the way to scale the profits.
It´s not about specific campaigns or so, it´s rather about things like
- Smart planning
- Competitive advantage as a newbie
- Bulding a winning mentality to keep you hungry
- Working towards success not failure
- Thinking longterm
In my opinion a powerful and positive mindset is very important and can make or break a career.
It´s hard enough to learn all the things, when you then even lose the motivation to continue because you are frustrated and stressed it doesn´t make it easier.
Following the law of attraction it´s very likely that you fail when you think you will fail anyway.
When you work on it in the beginning the following time can be much easier because the concepts can be applied to many different situations and not just this vertical or that traffic.
A good approach to have more „Yay“ and less „Nay“ moments is to break your big goal into several small goals and to break the big numbers into smaller numbers.
That way the subgoals and smaller numbers are much easier to achieve.
It also helps alot to keep the motivation high when you have small but constant success instead of mostly losses and hoping for that one big success.
Often when think about being an affiliate marketing beginner you only see many disadvantages and obstacles because you have to learn how to test and run campaigns, how to find good offers, how to work with a tracker and read stats, you don´t have good connection to networks yet and much more.
But being a beginner is not only bad, you can use it also for your advantage.
It´s 1000x better to be on a slow but steady successful course instead of going all in and then being gone for good after few weeks.
Each slow process forward is still better than getting nowhere and bleeding money because you try to run before you can walk 
It doesn´t matter if you are a complete beginner who needs to learn everything from scratch or if you have basic knowledge about running campaigns already and don´t know how to move on, with the right tactic it´s much easier to succeed and you will enjoy your work much more
Ok, let´s start with a very basic wisdom: Even small profits are much better than losses.
In the beginning it´s good when you don´t focus on high profits, it´s more important to lose as little money as possible.
So how do you avoid losing too much money?
Operate In Safe Environments.
This part is probably more for our real beginners who just start out but when you still have to learn how to properly setup and run campaigns or how to work with a tracker and all such basic stuff your first subgoal should be to learn these things without getting broke.
In the very first step it shouldn´t be about profit at all but rather about learning the technical stuff because this is mandatory to even run campaigns.
That´s why it´s good to first run campaigns in safe environments where you can learn the basics with a much lower risk to lose money.
These could be
- Geos with very low volume
- Low traffic prices
- Very low payout offers
- Very tight targeting
Then do something that we usually should avoid at all costs – look for very small campaigns.
Check for lowest volume and cheapest trafficprices, at this point the campaigns just have to be „big“ enough to get you few visits.
It happens very often that something goes wrong in the very first campaigns so it´s not that smart to run them in geos like US or DE.
There you can easily lose $xxx when something goes wrong, let it be because you didn´t set a daily limit, set a wrong bid or when just the redirect chain or tracking is not working.
Learning how to add landers and offers to the tracker or how to use the right links with the right parameters and tokens doesn´t need big budget.
It´s the same process for a $0.01/day campaign as for a $1k/day campaign.
When you run too big campaigns without even knowing 100% how your tools work you risk to lose more money than needed but you can eliminate that risk very easy when you just run small enough campaigns.
On a campaign where you can spend $500 per day you can also lose $500 per day.
On a campaign where you can only spend $1 per day max you can only lose $1.
Setup few of such campaigns to get used to setting up campaigns in the tracker and in the trafficsource.
Also ask your AM to setup a test conversion with you so that you can check if your postback is working should you already receive a conversion.
Get a feeling for the whole process so that you are good prepared when you feel safe enough to move to the next step.
Reaping First Profits
A good way for a safe start is to first go for small but steady profits to compensate the losses from the failed campaigns a bit.
But even when you run your campaigns on break even for the adspend, overall you are still in loss because you also have to pay for stuff like tracker and server for the landingpages.
This means these very small campaigns from the last step won´t work anymore and to make enough money to pay for all your stuff you need to run bigger campaigns…
Much bigger...
Like…
$3 profit per day.
Maybe now you think that I am crazy to tell you something about lousy $3 per day campaigns but do you at least agree that running $3/day campaigns doesn´t sound hard at all?
That´s the big competitive advantage you have as a beginner:
When you´re only looking for small numbers you have many more options to reach them than affiliates who want to run $xxx/day campaigns.
You can run campaigns that (almost) no experienced affiliate would run because they are too small and have no potential for scaling.
That´s basically the only downside: These campaigns are mostly somewhat limited so that they will never become big.
Nonetheless you can make good and steady first profits with such campaigns.
They are pretty easy to find because these numbers are so low that it can work basically everywhere and often you also have next to no competiton.
Another huge advantage is that so small campaigns often run on a pretty high ROI.
They are perfect when you are on lower budget because you don´t even need that much volume and adspend to achieve these small numbers.
A campaign that spends $5 per day at 100% ROI is the same profit as a campaign with $50 adspend on 10% ROI
For a $5 campaign at 100% ROI you only need 20 conversions at $0.50 payout.
Does it sound overly hard?
Let´s put it into practise now
Your next important goal should be to make enough profit from your campaigns to pay for your monthly recurring costs like tracker, server, STM and so on 
Breaking even only for the traffic isn´t enough when you have other running costs so it´s important to generate enough profit to cover all expenses.
I know that many beginners are afraid to use too many different services that cost additional money because depending on what you use it can sum up pretty fast.
That´s why we first make a difference between paid services you have to use and paid service you can use.
There are few things that almost all of us need because it´s essential for our work, for example a tracker and a server for our landing pages.
These are costs that can´t be avoided and you also shouldn´t be cheap with your choice because tracker and server are the backbone of your whole work and when you go for lower quality or performance because you want to save few Dollars it can easily become your bottleneck.
A good tracker and server are not expensive anyway, maybe you have to pay $100/month for the tracker and another $50/month for the server.
You would need $150 profit per month to cover these costs, let´s break it into a smaller number:
$150 per month / 30 days = $5 per day
It´s only 1 campaign that makes $5 profit per day and you could already pay for your tracker and for your server.
We can play the game even further, 2 campaigns with $2.5 profit per day are also already enough to pay for your most important tools.
And campaigns with $3-$5 profit per day can probably be found for every country worldwide, on pop or push traffic, with every offer vertical and with the easiest conversion flows – the possibilities are almost endless.
Ok, now you make $5 profit per day = $150 profit per month so that tracker and server is paid.
What´s next?
Now it´s time to think about first real profits = profits after the monthly expenses are paid.
One option is that you try to run your campaigns on more trafficsources.
When you get such small campaigns running with high ROI on one source the chances are good that they also work on other sources.
At this level it doesn´t cost much to just fire up a quick test but when you would get these $5 campaigns running on just 2 more sources it´s already $450 profit per month.
$100 tracker, $50 server, $100 STM 
and there´s still $200 pure profit left for you.
You can also stick with one trafficsource and rather find 2 more of these $5 campaigns, result would be the same $450 profit per month and probably every trafficsource should have enough traffic for these small campaigns.
Now let´s say you have 3 of these $5/day campaigns and run all of them on 3 trafficsources.
This would be 9x$5/day = $45/day = $1350 profit per month.
Think about it again, just a few $5 per day campaigns and you can pay for your whole toolkit and still have $1k profit left.
When you are at this point you already achieved more than many other beginners.
The beginning is the hardest time so there´s no need to make it harder than needed.
Making first stable profits is a huge step but you see, when you work smart it´s not that hard to succeed and can be achieved in pretty short time.
And now please tell me, what sounds more realistic for a beginner who just starts affiliate marketing - To find few $3-$5/day campaigns or to find one $100 profit per day campaign?
But here we are by far not at the end of the journey.
Let´s stick with the example numbers from above, then you would make about $1k pure profit from only few $5 campaigns.
$5 profit per day are pretty much at the low end of the profit scale but in the range of $5-$40 or so profit per day there are plenty of opportunities.
When you work clever you can use such campaigns to make rather easy but stable $1k per month, it´s only about $33 per day.
You have a $10/day campaign? - Run it on 2 more sources or run 3 of these campaigns.
When you have 3 of these $10/day campaigns and run them all on 3 sources it´s already $2.7k/month.
You see, reaching few hundreds or even thousand Dollar per month is not that hard even as a beginner when you break it down into smaller numbers.
When you play clever it´s doable even with very small campaigns.
But now let´s also talk about the downsides of such small campaigns.
As I mentioned already the biggest disadvantage is that such campaigns are mostly somewhat limited and you can´t really scale them.
Now imagine you have a campaign with potential to make $5 profit/day max and another campaign with potential to make $200+ profit per day.
The steps to test and optimize these both campaigns are more or less the same.
The earnings potential should be high enough to justify the time we have to put in the campaign so of course we should better focus on the campaign that can make more money in the same time with same workload, correct?
Here is a very basic graphic to show what I mean.
There are no real numbers or so because it shall only give a rough idea about what I mean
All campaigns in the green field would be good to run because when the earnings potential is low we also need to put only little time in the campaign.
The more the earnings potential increases the more time we can invest in the campaign.
All campaigns in the red field are not good to run because it would require too much time for too low earnings potential.
This is why most affiliates sooner or later start running bigger campaigns.
Well, these things are more or less only true when we have to do all the work manually but nowadays we have some very good options to make our lifes easier.
Let´s bring another player into the game, TheOptimizer.
TheOptimizer is a platform to automate your campaigns by rules that you set.
Pricing starts at $99/month for pops and push so when you already make few hundred or even thousand Dollar profit it´s really worth it.
Campaign testing is still a manual process, unluckily there is no way around yet but blocking bad placements can be done automatically so that it doesn´t take much time anymore.
This can be a real gamechanger because then you can run dozens or even hundreds of campaigns without spending time on blocking placements.
You can also set some kind of „stop loss“ to prevent profitable campaigns that stop converting from turning into red.
And you also don´t stop good campaigns when you find another one so the number of running campaigns can also add up pretty fast.
From reading here I know that many beginners start with small campaigns and that their next step then is to run bigger campaigns with higher offer payouts and on higher volume to make higher daily profits.
But in the end it´s only important to increase the profits and it doesn´t really matter how you do it.
So instead of trying to find good working big campaigns you could also stick with small campaigns and to increase your profits you just run more of these campaigns.
And to be honest, working with low profit campaigns isn´t bad or embarrassing at all.
I don´t feel too good for small campaigns myself so I am also running them.
I also run big campaigns but in the end it the only important thing for me is to make enough money – let it be from 1 big campaign or from dozens or hundreds of small campaigns.
It´s just about finding a good balance between the time you spend on your campaigns and the profit you can make.
And the good thing about running many small campaigns is that you can often test them much faster = more effective and that they are often easier to find.
The higher the potential profit in a single campaign the more money you can lose on it so running small and easy campaigns can also help alot to reduce the financial risk of losing money.
Ok, that´s all for today.
I hope you can see now that the thread title is not exaggerated and I also hope that this approach can help our beginners to scale their biz the easier way.
Feel free to ask when there are any questions.
Thank you so much for wrapping everything in so straightforward way. This thread is gold. Bookmarked it and will come back to it when I get to the level where I have stable penny campaigns.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Overall I think this thread will be solid information for someone that just ended Amy's 40 day tutorial. I have some questions through:
Offers selection:
1. Payout - Which payout should I aim for? You mentioned 0.50 as an example, is it the lowest, highest or did you use it randomly?
2. Affiliate Networks - I'm currently focusing on the offers from one network to avoid spreading income, is it possible to make your flow working using offers just from single AN?
3. GEOs - correct me if I'm wrong - offers should be from tier 3/tier 4 GEOs which has least competition
4. Landers - if I'm testing shitload of GEOs and offers what about landers? I currently need close to a day to prepare 2-3 landers for given offer, I think that this might slow everything down way too much
Awesome content as usual!
This is my favorite article. Ever.
Well, at least in the past hour and a half.
But still, fucking great article
The only thing I would ‘but whatabout...?’ on is stability of camps like these. I see small camps go down all the time.
Now my lame questions:
What is your secret optimizer rule for pausing a campaign? Do you do it by negative campaign ROI after X days or hours? I’ve never figured out when to pause a campaign automatically, other than ‘fuck! What is that?! Oh shit. I better turn that whole damn campaign off!’
Also. Tiny camps are not usually at the top of affiliate manager’s minds. And when you ask for a bunch of small camps that convert well and payout is small, they usually don’t know or care. Definitely won’t be the top offers list. So, how do you go about searching for offers like these?
Thanks for being awesome. As always!
This is awesome. I'm a @twinaxe Fan!! 
Will check if I can reword it a bit.
Payout is only one variable, let me give you a very extreme example.
When you have an offer with $0.02 payout that converts at 50% and traffic is all mobile, IN and ID then this offer could be a real winner and make shitloads of money.
So in the end it´s the combination of payout, available volume, CR and bid that should be a good match.
But of course it´s easier when you have access to more offers.
Another trick is to run highly targeted campaigns in high tier geos but in the beginning it´s better to run in low tier.
For me it only takes few minutes pro lander to change links, clean the code, change images and get it ready to use.
When you then have the lander in the target language already and only need to change images or so it´s really fast.
Even when volume drops just keep them running and only stop campaigns when they start losting money.
When you have enough campaigns running it doesn´t matter if some of them go down or not.
Stop campaign when ROI is < 10% in the last 3 days
or
Stop campaign when ROI is < 10% in the last 7 days
work pretty good.
That way you make sure that a previously good campaign doesn´t eat up all the profit when it stops converting so that you still have a little benefit from it.
Working with low payouts give the oportunity to test many more offers than running higher payouts.
A good approach is to check for offers with lower payouts, easy flow and geos with low prices.
And then just test
Well, it´s late already and I am tired so I hope I didn´t mess the post up
A thoughtful and theoretical post. There are indeed many things I bet beginners are asking themselves right now, like: how to find these offers, how to make them profitable, where to get the landing pages and so on.
But again theoretically it is a good post and I personally appreciate your thoughtful angle.
Originally Posted by khzidan
Sent from my HD1901 using Tapatalk
i am sure it is, that was not my point. I did not mean to underrate the post at all! my point is beginners will read the post and will probably have a lot of questions, that's it.
the post is is thoughtful
Originally Posted by blackbeard
But khzidan has some valid points.
Where to get landers or how to get campaigns profitable is something every affiliate has to learn anyway, that´s why I didn´t talk about it in this thread as well.
About finding these offers, there is no real secret, we just have to test.
That´s how I do it myself as well.
For such small campaigns and offers with only low revenue you just won´t find them in top offer reports or so.
But the offers I´m talking about have mostly rather low payouts and convert pretty easy so you should spot them pretty fast when you test them.
That´s why I wrote above that it´s not about specific campaigns or so, this is no campaign guide or tutorial how to learn the basics to run campaigns.
It´s rather a different general approach to run campaigns that can make the process alot easier when applied.
Often beginners have big dreams of big numbers and often focus more on numbers of specific campaigns instead of the bigger picture.
This is what I want to show with it.
It´s great when the goal is to make $50k per month but this isn´t realistic for a completely newbie.
So the real first goal should be to make enough to pay for all your expenses and have some additional money for a relaxed life.
When you then break it down to smaller goals and smaller numbers we can see that it´s not that hard to achieve.
Another reason for me to write the post was that often/mostly beginners think that they have to run big campaigns when they want to earn good money.
The focus is then often only on the profit or the earnins potential of the single campaigns, if they have potential to make enough money to reach their goals.
But in the end this is completely unimportant, the total profit you make is all what matters.
And there it doesn´t matter at all if you reach the total profit with many small campaigns or 1 big campaign.
Sure, this approach also has its limits and when you want to make $50k or $100k per month then it won´t work to run few $ campaigns en masse.
Then you just have to run big campaigns on high scale.
When you are at this point then this thread wouldn´t be interesting for you anyway.
But when you struggle to get stable profits at all then it can help alot to go the easier way and rather run more small and easy campaigns instead of trying to get a big campaign in more competitive geos with higher payout offers running for the same total profit.
What I realize is that although I wrote the post for beginners I did it from my perspective as an experienced affiliate so even when the stuff is pretty easy for me it´s probably still not that easy for a newbie.
I also know that just because I write such a post it doesn´t mean that suddenly all beginners will magically succeed.
But in the end this isn´t the point because it´s still easier to do so than hunting for the big winners when you still struggle with running smaller campaigns.
And this is why I posted the thread.
It´s not to promise everyone instant success and when you just start you have to learn enough things anyway and probably you will also have many fail campaigns anyway.
That´s just normal.
But when there is a hard way to go through all of it and an easier way I would choose the easier way
Is there a next issue or a course from you?
Originally Posted by aceiwish
There are more issues planned for the future but right now I didn´t have enough time and material for a new thread.
But thanks for the reminder, will do my best to continue with it soon
Thanks for the bump, this is still my favorite twinaxe post ever. And it's hard as hell to find anything on this forum once it gets lost
Originally Posted by jaybot
A very smart approach towards growing your online sales. What about such verticals as nutra, adult, gambling - do you have any case study or how-to's for the products within those segments? At ADxAD.COM we work with adult traffic as a close competitor to TrafficJunky and Exoclick, and it would be great to hear back from an expert on relevant cases. thank you.
Nutra and gambling needs high budget, gambling on CPL is also hard to maintain on pops or push because of quality issues.
Same for adult dating, there you also have to deal with quality issues so it´s not the best choice for a beginner
This post is pure gold! It's the approach I was looking for! Thank you so much twinaxe!
Originally Posted by seeds_of_60
Also thanks for bringing the thread to the surface again
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