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Really frustrated ! Need some guidance from the experienced people here ! (4)

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So little about my experience with Digital Marketing First

I first stepped into the world of digital marketing in 2018 when I came across the concept of dropshipping and instantly fell in love with it. Dropshipping was the first step for me to learn the digital marketing fundamentals. Since, it was my first venture, it was doomed to fail but it still taught me a lot and made me fall in love with online marketing. after 6 months of trying hard and tired of hearing that dropshipping is dead, I made a decision to move on and look for new opportunities. I had tried out many business models after that such as: drop servicing, traffic arbitrage (Shinez.io), agency work, blogs, Amazon FBA etc. None of them made me enough money to make it worth my time. Some traffics platforms I have experience with are Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat & Amazon Ads.

Journey with Affiliate marketing

It was in early 2020 when I first found out about STM. Before joining STM, I was under the impression that affiliate marketing is only limited to blogs and youtube and Didn't know affiliate networks existed. I though the only way to make money through affiliate marketing is through official brand sites like Amazon. This was because most of the content out there on internet related to affiliate marketing talked about amazon associates. After joining STM, I was amazed by the sheer amount of knowledge I was able to get here. STM seemed like an underground community to me. Much excited after coming across so much new knowledge, I quickly started with vortex's 1 dollar guide and successfully managed to complete it. However, after coming the 1 dollar campaign, I got so confused with all the concepts of affiliate marketing and failed to stick to it. Life went on I started spending some time in crypto currencies research and investing but earlier this month I got an urge again to start a venture in digital marketing. Affiliate marketing was the first thing that came to my mind as it is purely media buying and avoids all the hassle of dealing with people. Hence, decided to join back STM earlier this month and challenged myself to get my hands on with affiliate marketing this time anyhow.

Now the real Problem I've been facing

As promised myself, I spent hours on STM for the first 10-15 days to break down affiliate marketing in pieces and understand the concept properly. After doing enough reading initially, I started breaking down the concept to smaller bits to understand them properly and get a good grip on the fundamentals. It wasn't surprising that after a week things started falling in their places and everything seemed pretty straight forward. I will write down my understanding of affiliate marketing below, so, I can be corrected if something is wrong and also i hope it might help someone who might be as lost as me.

Some of the important tools: LanderLab, Spy Tool, Tracker, Theoptimizer & STM (Very Important)

Things to do before campaign set-up:

• Affiliate Network (with variables being GEO, Offer Flow & Vertical)
• Choosing a Traffic Source (Pop, Push, Native & SRNs (fb, instagram, google etc.)

Flow of Affiliate marketing:

• You buy traffic form the source (For eg. PropellorAds for Push/Pop Or Outbrain for native or FB etc etc)
• Traffic is first sent to the tracker where is it redirected to the landing page (according to rotation rules)
• The users lands on the lander and clicks on the CTA button
• Link on the CTA button sends the users to tracker and tracker redirects them to the offer page (Again as per rule)
• The users makes conversion on the offer page and this is posted back to tracker for optimisation purposes.

Going back to my story, just when I thought I have everything figured out and ready to go, I started hitting walls one after the other. Initially, I had only purchased Adplexity to spy on successful affiliates and planned to buy all other tools when I have finalized on the offer, traffic source & landing pages.

I hit my first wall while trying to find a perfectly suitable offer for me. As per my reading on STM, I made a few parameters to choose an offer. The parameters were: it should be a low pay out offer, should be performing good in tier 3 & 4 countries, it should be an easy flow offer like pin submit or SOI and I thought of starting out with sweep stakes due to their evergreen popularity. Firstly, I had a hard time getting accepted into affiliate network. I had applied to like 30 40 but just managed to get into only 3 or 4, which was alright because I just wanted to stick to 1 or 2 because of the pay out issues. Some networks I got accepted into are PrivateCPA, Sinum Vendo, Adultforce & Crakrevenue. Now I won't say that these are bad networks or they don't have good offers but due to lack of experience and strict parameters (because I didn't wanted to complicate things in the beginning) I failed to find nay offers that I thought do well for me. This is one of the biggest challenges I have been facing. I have not been able to select on one or two offers that I could test. There are so many factors to consider such as I am trying to avoid tier 1 country and high payout offers due to high testing budget requirements. Also I am trying to avoid adult offers due to user quality issues.

My second biggest challenge I am facing is with Adplexity. For some reason before joining Adplexity I thought I would join thier site and everything would be served to me on a plate. Obviously that was very naive of me to think that. Adplexity is full of adult offers, finding any other offers on Adplexity is like finding a needle in hay. Since, I had plan to stick to Sweeps initially, I did manage to find some long running sweep stake offers with good amount if hits. I had planned to rip 5 - 6 landers for testing purposes but I was surprised to find out that maximum of the offers were using the same landers. I literally went through 30 40 ads and all of them were using the exact same lander with maybe a different colour scheme or company logo. Now I am not sure if this is because people are clocking their links or everyone is using the same landers because they are working well. Either ways, this made me fail to find enough landers to test.

I was just trying to get through all these challenges when I came across a post on STM yesterday that linked an article by Charles Ngo. The article read that affiliate marketing is dead in 2021. Though non of the replies on STM indicated its dead but it surely hinted that it requires much more time and effort plus it is not even that profitable anymore.

Moreover, I am already spending money on STM and Adplexity when I haven't even started running campaigns yet. I need spend much more once I start my campaigns on tools like Funnel-flux, LanderLab & optimizer. Also, After reading so much on STM, i have realised it is impossible to get green camps at-least for my first 3 4 campaigns. Hence, I need some testing budget too before I really start earning from Affiliate Marketing. All this would require me to shed at least $ 6k - 7k. Now I don't even know if it's even worth spending so much on something that I don't know would even lost for long. Is it even possible to breakeven in the first 6 months of doing affiliate marketing?

Now I am extremely frustrated and desperately looking for some genuine advices from you legends. In a nutshell, I absolutely love the concept of digital marketing because it allows flexibility and it is fun. I really want to start some venture online that could earn me decent money to live a digital nomad life. I am not looking for some get rick quick scheme. I am ready to work hard and put my time and effort into it. My only concern is I want to know If I am even moving in the right direction. I would not want all these efforts to go waste after a few years. What I am trying to say is I am young right I am capable of hustling around for now but I would want a stable income source when I grow older. I am looking for something that would be stable and sustainable in the future. Something that i can rely on for the next 10 years at least. Some question that have not stopped popping in my head are :

1. Should I really go ahead with affiliate marketing through push ads, is it worth it in the long run?
2. I know @stickupkid is always in favour of Facebook for long term goals and I absolutely love Facebook too but I am not ready to deal with account bans. So, should I just drop affiliate marketing and stick to some other model like e-commerce?
3. Whats the hottest trend in the industry right now like how AM used to so profitable back in 2007?
4. What other profitable models are there in digital marketing other than e-commerce and affiliate marketing?

P.S. Sorry for this long boring post about my inadequacy to figure out things. I really need some guidance, I have come this far in digital marketing all by myself through youtube videos. I so look upto you guys (@vortex, @matuloo, @stickupkid, @twinaxe etc). Thanks for reading if you managed to come till here.

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1. push is a way to learn stats, optimizing and affiliate marketing easily yes, without having to handle possible bans etc, which you might face on FB or Google. so yeah, its a good source to start with.

2. even e-comm WH faces bans, only difference is you get the account back probably, whilst running BH offers you won't get the account back

3. hot: FB, push, native, sms - finance, e-comm, nutra, sweeps

4. social media content (pages), websites with content (google, seo, organic), create an own product/service are some possibilities.

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Thank you so much for your reply. Your insights were really helpful. I feel it has certainly made things more clear in my head.

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First of all @littleblackbird - a late welcome to STM!

I'm glad you spoke up before getting even more frustrated - below are my response to some of your concerns.

Applying to 30-40 networks and getting accepted by 4 - that's a 10% success rate! In this business, that really isn't bad at all - whether you're talking about getting accepted into affiliate networks, or the number of offers/campaigns you need to test before finding one that has potential.

It's a numbers game.

How many offers have you tested from the 4 networks?

Have you tried Haka or Zeydoo? These are pretty newbie-friendly. Did you try this tool? https://stmforum.com/central-vendor-app/

You can find a LOT more networks here:

https://stmforum.com/affiliate-directory/

And posts by different networks here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...-Opportunities

Here are some tips for getting into networks:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post413680


If most of the offers are using the same landers, it may be because they work.

Try to look at the bigger picture: For sweeps for example, no matter which geo you look at right now, you'll see 3-4 main lander styles: Survey, gift boxes, spinning wheel.

So - try to include at least one (or two variations) of each of these styles.

If you can't find one or more of the styles, download them in another language, and translate:

1)Using google translate - but first rewrite the content into short sentences because you'll have a better chance of getting accurate translations for shorter sentences; also avoid figures of speech.

OR

2)Use Fiverr - choose gigs with lots of reviews and high star-ratings.

You can also innovate instead of JUST ripping and running (it's recommended anyway) - some tips here: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post413679


https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post414409


Many affiliates have started making consistent profits after mere weeks of running campaigns. Others tried for years without breaking even.

YMMV.

I wished I could give you assurance that after investing that money, that you will make it. But I couldn't. Nobody could.

What I CAN tell you, with certainty, is that you can only succeed if you try.

Unfortunately, most people don't succeed on their first try at most things: https://propertyupdate.com.au/six-fa...re-succeeding/

The only people that truly fail, are the ones that never try, and the ones that give up before they succeed.

If you go into this with the mentality that: "I'll invest $xxxx and give this my best shot, and if I don't make it, it's OK, because I'll try something else."

Instead of: "If I invest $xxxx I BETTER make it back or I'll curl up and whimper and declare myself a failure and never try my hand at online marketing again."

THEN you'll stand a chance at this game.

Otherwise - I would suggest to not even start.

Something else worth pointing out: Yes you need a tracker, and a spy tool would be nice, but Landerlab or theOptimizer are not must-haves in the beginning - the 40-day tutorial teaches you how to set up your landers on S3+Cloudfront, and if you're not running a lot of campaigns yet you won't need theoptimizer.

And if you stick to low-payout offers - <$0.50 or even <$0.30 or <$0.10 - you can learn a SHIT TON about running campaigns, without spending a lot of money at all.


Many affiliates start off by running affiliate offers, which can be really exciting and require minimal preparation - just take an offer and run traffic to it.

Then after a few years, many affiliates would get tired of having to constantly test new offers etc., and proceed to build long-term assets.

It's a matter of knowing what you want.


Push is doing well at the moment still, and the barrier to entry is low which makes it one of the best choices for newbies. I wouldn't bet on it being hot in the long run though, as they can be intrusive to users and browsers have already started implementing measures to decrease its intrusiveness.


You could.

I agree that running affiliate offers on FB has become risky. Yes, ecommerce would definitely be safer.


I wouldn't compare ANYTHING to 2007. In the online world, things are changing every year or less.

For the hottest trends:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...marketing-2021


Google "make money online" and you'll find lots!

Here are some off the top of my head:

-Start a digital marketing agency and run campaigns for product/service owners.

-Figure out what services online-entrepreneurs need, and either hire developers to create a SaaS/software, or hire people with the right skills to provide that service (e.g. website creators, content writers, video editors...)

-Create video content and become an influencer.

-Create your own digital product and market that online.

-Learn a skill and market that online to get clients.


These questions need to be asked - so thanks for asking them!

Hope what I've said above will help. I tried to avoid sugar-coating because that's not what you're needing (or looking for).



Amy

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