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How to make progress when saving money for next campaign? (14)

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Hey Gang,


I'm hitting pause on everything for a few weeks so I can set aside $X,XXX for my next campaign. I ran a few campaigns, got some conversions, but never hit profit. I'm eager to attack it again when my wallet is ready.


I want to keep building skills that are applicable to affiliate marketing in the meantime.


I'm currently going all in on learning coding and taking the Front End Development track on Tree House (HTML, CSS, Java). I chose this area because tech is my weakness and hiring a coder was nightmare for me last time. Being strong in tech is a big edge.


Also I am considering posting my help for free (any VA type task) on the Job Board. I can wire frame, write basic copy, am proficient at excel etc. Would this be useful to you?


Give me your suggestions!

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As a matter of fact costly mistakes are part of the learning process.

For quite some time in the beginning (when I first started) I was mostly spending on tools rather than on traffic. Plus on top of that, I'm guilty for letting things get out of control excessively trying to reach statistical significance, or sometimes forgetting about the campaigns due to my focus on learning the basics of HTML, CSS and some JS.
I also literally sucked at tracking in the beginning. At a certain point I was afraid of approaching a new affiliate network unless it was using cake (which I was already familiar with). But, luckily with the right amount of trial and errors and focus, I was able to get over all the basics pretty quickly.

I'd suggest the following:

1. Make sure you learn the basics

Focus on understanding the basics of this game. For instance, tracking is one of the most important ones as without it, it will be impossible to make decisions.

2. Avoid outsourcing most of the tasks, but only when it's not affecting your overall operation.

So, if you want to learn coding to deal with landing pages, just grab a few dirty ones from spy tools and focus on cleaning and tweaking them as if someone else would pay you for that job. Or if you have some friends that would need some help on their HTML pages, offer them to do it for free.

Just be careful tho, it can easily become a bottleneck that will keep you from moving forward. If you don't feel comfortable on the coding side, just ditch it, there are tens of super affiliates that haven't written a single line of code their entire life, yet still moving 7-8 figures a month confidently.

3. Don't focus on just one campaign.

The offer will most of the time be the main drive of a successful campaign. Having a great funnel with a shitty offer won't get you anywhere but wasting money. As such you will need to test tens or hundreds of offers to find a winner that will generate profits.

4. Try to build trustworthy relations with your account managers at both the affiliate and traffic networks

This is something that many new affiliates skip on, but on the long run it will pay off great.

5. Squeeze your affiliate network AMs in terms of offer insights.

Almost every affiliate network manager ill tell you, they have exclusives, highest offer payouts, top-converting ones, and bla bla bla... But most of the time it isn't the case. Always ask your AM to give you up-to-date insights about the offers they are suggesting (weekly traffic volumes / traffic sources / drect-linked vs. with landing page / offer conversion rate on the network level / EPC). With this information you can easily do some reverse calculations and create a rough idea what will it take for X offer to generate a profitable campaign.

6. Avoid jumping from one traffic type to another

Sometimes not getting good results with a specific traffic type can easily make you jump around from one ad format to another. There's no secret recipe for making things work on a specific ad format, you'll just have to understand how different ad formats work and whats the best optimization approach. And this one comes only with experience and some significant ad spent.

7. Ask for payout bumps

Back to point 4. Having a strong relation with your account manager will help you to move faster from street payouts and get better payouts for your campaigns. You don't need to send 100s of conversions to ask for that. As soon as you see that the offer has potential for a profitable campaign with a 10%-20% payout bump, just ask for it - you already have the default payout granted.

8. Read some copy-writing books

This will help you a ton on the long run, and not only on affiliate related stuff (at least on my experience). In the following thread you'll find a solid list of books you can get busy and learn a lot from.
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...on-Copywriting

9. Don't be fooled from high payout offers

No matter how sweet and juicy a high payout offer might look, don't get fooled by them if you are on a tight budget. Keep present that you'll end up spending your budget on learning, testing and scaling (when finding a profitable camp). Higher payouts require higher testing budgets, so try to chose wisely.

Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where you're getting overwhelmed by all the stuff you need to take care of, remember that luckily now there are plenty of solutions that can handle most of those boring and time consuming tasks. Take advantage of them, it'll cost less by the end of the day

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[QUOTE=platinum;409125]As a matter of fact costly mistakes are part of the learning process.

Absolutely! I did not realize how limited I was on my Voluum discover plan! I tried to drill down into the campaign data and they wanted me to upgrade to go even 2 levels deep! I learned allot about this on my first few go arounds. Installing pixels, creating rule based paths (language based flow for example), and A/B testing landers.

I'll be using Binom on my next time around


Wow! did not know this. Can you Elaborate a bit on the bolded part?
This was something I didn't understand before I got on STM. I only tested like 2 offers. Then I read through some guides and realized I did not test nearly as many offers as I should have.



My Clickdealer AM is awesome, He's gone as far as ripping landing pages for me and telling me to fix my lander translation when I didn't know any better. Will work on this.


Awesome tip, My Clickdealer AM is super helpful and will probably be willing to provide this intel


Definitely want to avoid that mistake! Pops till I profit!

Nice I'll keep this in mind

Thanks for this list I've read/skimmed the following - The Adweek book is great

1. The Copy Writers Handbook
2. The Boron Letters
3. The Adweek Copywriting Handbook
4. Cashvertising

Great detailed response! Thank you!

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Wow @platinum that's a really comprehensive list of suggestions!! Definitely worthy of being included in the weekly newsletter! Thank you!
@lilgator: For pop alone, because right now you're not actively running campaigns, the two biggest skills you can spend time on are basically coding and copywriting.



Coding:

I wouldn't be put off by one negative outsourcing experience! What @platinum probably means by "there are tens of super affiliates that haven't written a single line of code their entire life, yet still moving 7-8 figures a month confidently" (and he'll verify this I'm sure) is that they have other people doing the coding. Again, you can either outsource it, or partner up with someone who's strong in tech.

Whether to outsource or not: It really comes down to whether you have more time than money or the other way around.

If you have more time than money (e.g. newbie with a not-very-big budget) then learning to clean up your own landers can make a lot of sense.

If you have more money than time then by all means start outsourcing from the start.

Either way - knowing a bit of coding REALLY can't hurt. Even when you outsource, it makes things easier to be able to give accurate instructions on what you need to be done.

Not to mention: If you want your VA to quote you for customized landers (not just fixing up errors), if you know a bit of coding you'd know if they're trying to rip you off or not.



Copywriting:

You've already listed enough good ones. This post has further information:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post408396

For pop it's really simple: Keep text really short and to the point. Pop is interruption marketing so people won't bother to read long copy or run-on sentences.

Pop isn't as much about marketing as it is about having an efficient testing and optimization system.

But knowledge of copywriting and audience research will help you become a better marketer - if you ever want to venture into higher-quality traffic types such as Native, FB, Google.



Amy

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I don't know how to code either... I can do some minor changes but I wouldnt be able to put a LP together, or even clean one properly But that hasn't stopped me from running 1000s of campaigns. I have a coder that works for me when I need that, usually I just ask him to do things in batches, so it's not even my full-time employee. Works like a charm, but you need to find someone RELIABLE if you want to go this route, which can be a bit complicated for sure.

I guess this was what platinum had in mind... there are many large affiliates who don't know how to code, they just have the people to take care of such tasks.

I would dedicate my time to what Amy mentioned above: Copywriting... do some reading, study what others are running, do some spying...

You can also work on the infrastructure, so you are ready to launch quickly when the time comes. Prepare creatives and translate them if you plan to target multiple GEOs... these things can be cheaper when you're not in a hurry and can test a few translators. Sort the tracker, research some new verticals and look around at networks to find some that have a solid selection of offers for the verticals of your choice.

In the end, it will still be about testing a lot of offers, LPs and creatives, but you can use the time to build up a solid base of material to test, so it doesn't slow you down once you have the funds to restart.

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@matuloo is/gave a concrete example of what I had in mind. And here in the forums we have lots of other members that never took the trouble at managing the coding part by themselves

When I'm saying "avoid outsourcing most of the tasks, but only when it's not affecting your overall operation", what I mean is that currently you need to get a thorough understanding of how this business works.
It could be a bit slow in the beginning, but in the long run you will be more confident at delegating tasks or asking for something to be done by someone else. For me at least this approach has always worked well, especially when someone tries to tell me that X, Y, Z from the total tasks list cannot be done.

Then as you grow, you'll have to deal even more with communications, accounting, private deals, etc... So, I hope you soon reach to that point (of profitability) where you won't have an option but to build a team and run your affiliate business like any other business.

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Learning coding is definitely helpful.

As others already said, it´s not needed to learn how to create landers from scratch yourself.

It´s enough when you know how to read, change, clean and edit landers for your use.

I also can´t create landing pages myself and I am doing affiliate marketing for almost 16 years and I do all the stuff myself.

Apart from that you could use time to go through your tracking funnel and make sure that everything is working 100% correct when you finally start running campaigns.

You could also run some small campaigns to get used to the process of setting up campaigns and stuff.

When you´re then ready to start it will probably be much faster and easier for you to setup campaigns because you already know how to do it.

And being successful is not always that connected to being perfect in what you do, it´s more about working effective and fast.

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Infrastructure is a great idea. I'll take some time fix up LPS and create new angles where possible. That way I can just launch.


I have heard this SO many times from successful AFF marketers here and elsewhere. Success is about SPEED and QUALITY of testing. Good stuff

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Yup, for example a very common beginner mistake is when you try to get everything perfect before you run your campaigns.

But that way you waste so much time for stuff where you don´t even know if it´s worth it or not.

It´s much better to do a rough research if the stuff you want to run has potential at all or not and then run some quick and dirty tests.

The test stage is not about finding the perfect campaign right from the start, it´s just to see if something is good enough to invest more time in it or not.

So better test more campaigns/offers faster and increase your chances to find a winner that is worth it to spend more time and money instead of trying to run perfect tests where you spend (and often waste) much time for campaigns that won´t succeed anyway.

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Hi Losid,

First off, I recently purchased the Nothing But Natives Course and greatly appreciate the content you provided to us. So, in that course there's a emphasize of planning out your campaigns before actually running it. This provides a greater chance of success once you know what metrics to set as a benchmark. With that being said, I came across your offer performance calculator on TheOptimizer website and would like some clarification on what this all means.



1) The metrics I've inserted are all known except for the CPC. The conversion rate & EPC I just gathered from the affiliate networks dashboard. I have to confirm this with my affiliate manager though. The CPC is the bid I'd to start campaigns to get the highest performance placements which in this case is Taboola. So I'm not entirely sure if I should put a different CPC number.

2) Based on this calculator, it tells me at which ad spend($50, $100, $150, $200) which LP CTR%, Ad Clicks I should expect. When would you run this calculator at different stages of your campaign?

1. Prior before you run your campaign
2. Once you have finished testing headlines and ad images
3. Once you finished enough testing for headlines/ad images/LPs

3) With this all said, the question at the end of day that kinda stumps me is how do you know when to stop testing an offer?

For example, if I test an offer(Payout is $30) and let it spend $180 and no conversions, assuming I did all the "proper research" and setup blacklisting rules do you automatically consider that offer is no good?

My research technique to see whether or not I want to test an offer:

1) Ask AM to see what's working well with Native.
***Using SimilarWeb all depends whether or not the website you're researching has enough data***
2) Take that offer page and see if it's running well with the traffic source on SimilarWeb.com
3) Check Adplexity to see if anyone is running it as well. If they are, I also take the LP domain and plug it into similarweb to see which traffic source they're using the most.
4) I also take the competitor's url redirect link and plug it into similarweb to see if the offer it's redirecting to has the most referring website hits.

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Hey @stungads, I looked at that course, what are your thoughts on it so far?

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I liked it. I think it's very informative and in my opinion better than his iStack Course. That's probably because a lot of the material on NBN is more current. He/Losid/Rita/Joe all give some great perspectives and different ways to approach media buying. Which prompted me to ask Losid the question above for further clarification.

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Hey Simon, really glad you liked the content!

Let me answer your questions below.

Normally I would go with the average starting CPC, it might be a bit higher than the average one you can get on the long run, however, that will be the one you will use when testing the offer. So inserting the avg. starting CPC would be the way to get an average estimation to what metrics you need to get close to break even.

I usually like making these calculations first before launching the campaign. This way I can get a rough idea of what to expect from it. After the first week of testing or so, then I can recalculate estimates based of my current campaign stats.

Usually there will be a noticeable difference between the network stats and the actual stats we get from our campaigns. At this stage, adopting the calculations to the actual campaign stats will make more sense into giving us a better idea on what approach to take when optimizing campaigns.

Also, it's wroth noting that any changes made to the landing pages will influence the overall campaign performance. This is usually visible on both the landing page click-through rate and landing page conversion rate (lander to offer). So in case you see a noticeable change in the conversion rate (for better) running calcs again will suggest less aggressive thresholds.

It's practically like fine-tuning multiple variables simultanuesly as a result of the changes you make to your campaign.


$180 might be a bit too low for killing a $30 offer. Considering you're running a tested offer, or which the network is getting significant volumes, you'll have to take into account the performance of the ads and landing page too. So on average, you can go for at least 10x testing budget.

Your research method seems pretty good.

As we know, unfortunately many AMs tend to inflate their offers stats to make them more appealing and Similarweb (even in the free version) is of great help to check the volume stats reported by the affiliate manager. Just be careful not to get mislead by low volume landing pages when checking SW stats. It can happen that you won't get any meaningful data on such landers.

I'd suggest asking for top performing offers broken down by traffic source. Also, when AMs share their stats, it's helpful to ask whats the conversion rate between traffic sources (e.g FB vs. Native).


Hope the above helps

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Thank you for the help Losid, I'm really starting to understand how to structure my campaigns more efficiently and be more well prepared in testing

When I was testing offers on the Taboola, I was getting around .85+ actual CPC on my ads when I had set my CPC to .75. Based on that information alone, that told me that my CTR was too low therefore I'm getting more expensive clicks. My Ad CTR was less than 0.10%. I'm reading things here and there about metrics so I can better understand how to analyze data that I bought.

Without giving too much away from the course, I didn't understand one part of testing the campaign.

The idea was to test one variable at a time and then move onto the next.

My future tests would be

1. Test 20 Ad Images One Headline for One Week.
2. Take the best ad image and then create 20 headlines to test for One Week.
3. Once I have a winning ad image/headline combo, start testing Presells.

This part is where I was confused and I don't think it was discussed. I know we're supposed to test Presells in the beginning, but if we're trying to focus on one variable at a time doesn't testing ad images and presells (or) headlines and presells conflict with one another.

Once your ad image/headline test is complete, you would've also completed the LP test at the same time because you found the winning lander. Is that correct? And you would start to optimize the lander by doing one variable at a time changes. 1st Major Change would be LP headlines, then LP main image, then LP body copy, etc....

Am I thinking about this correctly? James mentioned how this phase could last 4-6 weeks to see if the offer is worth it. Now I can see how that can be the case as the first 2 weeks are towards ad images/headlines test and the 3-6 week is optimizing LPs.

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