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Watch a noob struggle to master Tiktok (34)

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I wrote this entire thing out and accidently deleted it, ha ha ha ha. fuck.

I know what you're thinking, it's a bad idea. It really is.

But...

Everyone says you need to master one traffic source and one vertical.

Usually a noob should go for T3 or T4 geo's but I've always found I learn best by facing the best. My wallet will remember this as my famous last words I'm sure.

Also, it's really not that expensive. It's not Pop prices but at $0.10 to $0.20 cpc for tier 1 traffic, I don't think it's too shabby.

I managed to get an account up and running on Tiktok after 14 failed attempts.

Pretty bad right? Gets worse. I deposited $10 every single time just to get banned instantly. 12 times.

I was considering keeping a running tally of my profit/loss but considering we've yet to get a click and I'm down $120, I think I'll pass.

Anyways, let's get started baby.

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Day 1: Thursday, May 20th

Here's the plan. We're running a whitehat bug zapper offer in the uh glamour camping vertical. Don't ask, friend put me on to it.

I got 3 juicy landing pages right off the bat. Hosted on a global CDN, I got faith here.

I created 5 different videos, I used something called a "3-stack" format laid out in an Affiliate World conference I've been watching.



Basically you have a video of the product, you have a picture of the product and you have a call to action stacked on top of eachother.

It's supposed to be hot shit, we will see.

I figure for my journey here that I will need to learn a lot about making compelling videos and telling very quick stories that urge the viewer to click.

I'll work on that.

I created 5 headlines as well and am going to test it against 3 different call to actions.

All in all, I am testing: 5 (videos) x 5 (headlines) x 3 (call to actions) = 75 ads

Ad Sets:

I'm going to run 12 different ad sets in total targeting different interests.

My wonderful AM gave me the inside scoop into targeting. Basically, I aim for 35-55+ Males on Wifi, easy enough.

Here are my resulting ad sets and some early data from $50 ad spend:



The goal of this was to test creatives, headlines CTR's as well as determine which interests gather the most traffic.

I think I should of spent more, what do y'all think?

I found out that my top headlines are:

• You'll hate yourself this summer if you don't get this
• Take back your deck from mosquitoes
• Don't let mosquitoes ruin your summer

My best Call To Action by far is "Shop Now"

I didn't really get to narrow down the best performing video yet. Tiktok isn't sending details like which creative was clicked so it's tough to narrow a clear winner.

Anyways, based on this test, I ran my first targeting test with some new information I had.





but... we did snag a lottery conversion. Maybe. Or I'm really S+ tier right out the womb with this affiliate marketing business, only one way to find out.

p.s: it came from a tablet lol. This will be interesting.

Also my tracking isn't working and my pixel didn't get it's first conversion, this was a disappointment but we'll fix it up tomorrow.

Godspeed STM, see you tomorrow.

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Love it man! I've been hoping someone would do a TikTok follow-along! grabbing my popcorn bruh keep it coming!

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Day 2: Friday, May 21st

Got my 5g WiFi Enabled Vaccine sponsored by Verizon Wireless™ today and feeling good.

Apparently my campaign was feeling good as well.



Concerned that I should maybe take down my creative, ad and winning combo but we'll see if it doesn't fail on me.

I wasn't expecting this at all so not sure the next play to be honest, we're running green at 77% ROI.

I'm starting to identify the best landing page -> offer combination but going to give it a lot more data before cutting anything right now as shit seems to be working.

Except my pixel of course. My amazing AM managed to just throw my pixel code right onto their presale, checkout and post-sale so I should be finally able to build a LAL audience.

I'm pretty amazed this is converting this well on cold traffic, can't wait to see the results with warmed up traffic.

In regards to landers, I got drunk and wrote a quick snippet that automatically ads flying little mosquitoes on the top of the lander, going to see how it helps conversions.

To the pro's out there: What do I do in this scenario? Scale? Test more? Why isn't it failing? Should I play the lottery? Let me know

p.s: Is this enough data to cut out Apple devices?

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We run a decent amount of TikTok traffic and I wouldn't personally make decisions off of that little of clicks. As far as TikTok, we see it perform extremely well, but it does seem to fatigue. Once it fatigues we get a good uplift by duplicating the ad set and running the same exact thing. If you're positive, I would scale up a bit as well as introduce more tests in different campaigns or adsets. I know they call them ad groups, but I refuse to change from saying adset haha.

Should be noted, ads don't fatigue that often. That advice is when you're spending >1k/day.

How is targeting treating you? We always have found that not doing any targeting at all has lowered our cost per conversion significantly.

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You know I haven't even tried non targeting yet. I'll set that up.

Well that's great info to know, I'd love to start spending $1,000/day but a little far off right now.

I'm loving TikTok as a traffic source so far and haven't even started US traffic, hoping for more good things to come.

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Following up! All the best mate

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Looks promising so far. Good luck!


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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Day 3: Saturday May 22nd

Finally got tracking setup for Tiktok pixel, thanks to my AM just making it easy and throwing it on their checkout page.



Trying to test out the different campaign options and see how they all work and differ.



(Those conversions are just people hitting my landing page, set up the campaign incorrectly with wrong conversion event, need to change it. Maybe. Idk)

Goal of this test is to figure out if Awareness has any merit, also testing the waters for the start of remarketing. Right now I'm remarketing to people that watched 6 Seconds or more of one of my ads. The LAL audience is taking forever to generate unfortunately.

Further more I am trying out a tip from @carsfast and not doing any interest targeting for an adset and seeing the performance.




Once again, conversions are just product page view, e.g clicked thru my lander.

Do you see that CTR difference?! and cost difference? No conversions yet but fingers crossed. Thanks for the tip @carsfast.

Also no idea why open targeting is providing a higher CTR than interest targeting but I'll take it for now.

Also created a new video based on what was performing the best from my original test, not a 3-stack but a 2/3rd video, 1/3rd CTA/Product name.

Next up is going to test a couple different variations of my top performing lander and try and squeeze some more CTR out of it.



No conversions so far, if I grab one, I'll be sure to update the thread.

Oh right, also started running the offer in US. Let's see the costs.

re-read my post and thought, hmm why waste money on any of this interest adsets that cost more and provide less. Stopped all of them except open targeting and copy and pasted it twice to fill up the camp budget

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Day 4: Sunday, May 23rd

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I'm no longer hungover but my campaign isn't doing so hot.

Yesterday:


Today:


So either open targeting without interests just attracts idiots who click shit, or I'm just unlucky and haven't had conversions yet, or the two conversions I received were lottery conversions.

Currently my bet is on the ladder but we'll see.

I started another test, goal is to figure out if interest targeting is worth paying double per click than open targeting.

Anyways, here is my campaigns, you'll notice remarketing and conversion optimization isn't doing uh anything.



But that's fine, whatever.

Adsets:



Meh, once again, those conversions should be 0, it's optimizing for initiate checkout.

I had 34 people reach checkout page, that's painful with 0 orders.

On the bright side, I'm 200 page views short of having enough data for a LAL Clicked Ad Audience but I do have my first LAL Audience for people that watched at least 6 seconds of my video. Made a new camp to target this and see how it flies. Price is uh 7x or so of a non-targeted campaign but I've heard you make your face on remarketing, especially for a ecomm product.

Testing a couple more headlines, one new video creative, hoping for conversions to really narrow this down soon.

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So how do tiktok ads work exactly? Does it blend in with the for you page or is it a pop up? I have never really seen any myself while browsing tiktok. I have seen people advertising their own products before but I don't think they were ads, more like standard profile posts.

Now that I think of it, a pretty lucrative and simple way to make some commisions/sales would be to spam upload the same video but just change the song. I'm pretty sure theres a website which shows you whats trending song wise. This way would include 0 adspend but you may get banned a couple of times.

I have seen acc run this and get upwards of 1-10mil vies on one video.

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Blends in on the For You page, very small hard to see "Sponsored" tag and the ads have CTA buttons that only appear after 6 seconds I believe.

May even give that a try, it'd be good to own an asset like a popular Tiktok account for monetization later.

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Day 5: May 24th

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Alright, back to the drawing board.

First and foremost, blood alone moves the wheels of history.

So here ya go:




Yeah, it's seen better days. Don't worry, those costs are half what they should be. We're looking closer to $400.

But that's okay, no big deal. I'm good. I'm okay...

Here's the next stage of the plan.



My test showed me that while open targetting is roughly $0.02 cheaper, the traffic isn't really there and interest targeting seems to be better for me.

Imagine if you had to pay $150~ everytime you were taught something in school, sheesh.

On the bright side of life, these traffic tests have generated enough clicks to create my first Look-a-like Audience!



This means step one of my devilish plan has proceeded without a hitch.

The plan? Lemme explain:

Step 1: Run traffic campaigns in order to generate enough page visits/clicks to create a L.A.L audience.
Step 2: With this new audience, run our first conversion campaign optimized for Initiate Checkout using this brand new audience
Step 2.5: Run a campaign that attempts to lure back people that made it to checkout but never purchased with some '35% off!' offers
Step 3: When we have 1,000 initiated checkout events, create the next L.A.L audience containing people that made it to checkout
Step 4: Finally, we create the last campaign, a conversion campaign optimized for purchases targeted at people that made it to checkout.

No plan would be complete without a certified Backup Plan™

Which essentially boils down to restarting this entire process with a different offer.



Know what really hurts though? 58 people reaching checkout with not a single one converting.

Does anyone know if this is normal? Abnormal? An issue? I thought for sure I'd snag at least one conversion but c'est la vie.

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Thanks @ScottyG! Awesome to see a follow-along for Tiktok!

I have zero experience with Tiktok but intend to give it a test soon - after learning all I can from your follow-along!

That probably means there's something on the checkout page they weren't ready / expecting to see, e.g. a higher price tag than they were expecting.

Since there's probably not much you can do about pricing (I'm assuming this is an affiliate offer?), more preselling may help.


I agree - one conversion really isn't a good indication of average anything (ROI, CR, whatever).

Given you're testing a TON of ads, your daily budget is relatively low - basically every ad is only spending a few dollars per day. To do the testing faster, you'd likely need to 1)collect more data over more days before drawing conclusions, or 2)decreasing the number of ads you have, or 3)both.

Are the 5 videos very different? Quite similar? Different angles or similar angles?





Amy

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I'm going to go through my funnel and see if I have any oddities, thanks for the tip!

Thats a good point, it should optimize traffic towards winning ads but there still probably isn't enough test data.

The 5 videos are quite similar, I think I should try different angles and creatives.

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Day 6: May 25th

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Well, bug zapper just isn't doing so well anymore. Probably got lottery conversions cause it was on my initial test but after sending another 60 people to checkout page without any more conversions, I figured it's time to try some different offers. Maybe some without a $38 payout that will cause me to go broke in simply testing.

So, first idea on the drawing board? Sweeps.

I created three videos on different angles promoting how I've been earning $500 to $1000 a week doing giveaways.



The goal was to drive traffic to a Medium.com article I wrote (https://scottryangilmour.medium.com/...s-212db812c10c)

The goal was to maximize my profits on every click by providing an "easy" list of the "real" sweepstakes.

Tiktok wasn't a huge fan of it, hence why y'all can have the creative and lander for free.

Next up, instead of wasting time writing a landing page, copy and a video, I decided to use a new method for quickly checking if I can even promote an offer.

1. Write a quick 100 words or so on a Medium.com article, try to use all the words you'd want to use if accepted (free, giveaway, Mcdonalds, etc).
2. Create a simple link to the offer.
3. Submit it to Tiktok with a 5 second video of just a yellow box or anything really.
4. See if it's allowed to run or if they reject it for any reason.

It's quick and cost-free testing on their policy.

Now the weird thing is, I've gotten away with a much more aggressive offer on the next attempt.

The new offer is a SOI, one field, email offer to receive a free guide if you're eligible for a $1400 stimulus check.
The lander is quite aggresive though and I'm basically telling people to click my link to collect a stimulus check. Like I said, aggresive.

Pays about $2.00 per lead which is great since I can test heavily for cheap and see very quick conversions. I hope.

I thought for sure this would get me banned even trying to run it but low and behold, approved.

So I whipped up a new video, same style as my giveaway one above but with more 'meme' style I guess.

Approved!

This offer feels great so let's give it a run and see what we can do with it.

I'm still running the conversion and retargeting campaign for the bug zapper, mostly going to passively build a pixel and maybe come back to it when I've learned more about Tiktok.

Will report back with blood.

Got our first conversion!



Man I love seeing that first conversion pop.

Now I ran some math and encountered some issues with this plan.

On average the cheapest click I can get from Tiktok right now is $0.30~

The offer only pays out $2.00.

This means I need to convert every 6 clicks or 15% in order to just break even.

So we'll probably have to shelf this offer but it feels good to get a quick conversion and test something new out.

It's cheap right now so I'll let this run for 10x payout and check the results. I'm skeptical I'd be able to reach a 15% CR even if it is a 2-click email submit with the promise of $1400 for the user.
But I should probably refer to the council of elders on this, would you attempt to run this kind of offer with this traffic source?

It's early still but I'm learning a lot about Tiktok from simply running a different offer.



Tiktok gives you cheaper clicks and more traffic if you have a high CTR.

I'm sure the super affiliates are laughing at this stupid realization but sheesh, the difference is insane.

$0.15 CPC & $0.17 CPC when your CTR is over 5-7%, interesting. Of course, super open targeting right now but still, I can maybe work with this.

At least I now know that my creative video for the bug zapper was probably shit considering it was barely pushing 2% CTR on the best performing ads.

So if I test a ton of offers and verticals, I'll be able to create a list of benchmarks to strive for in terms of CTR, CV, CPC etc.

This way when running offers for profit, I can quickly determine if the creative/headline/offer is 'hot' enough to compete with my benchmarks for the vertical/offer type.

Sounds good, I'm going to gather 5 more (cheap) offers from different verticals, see if Tiktok approves and then setup more campaigns.

Also, if this current SOI offer starts to convert more, I may try and split test a couple landers but I'm still doubtful I'll ever be able to make money off this thing.

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Great to see that you´re creative.

Curious to see the further progress.

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Day 7: Wednesday, May 26th

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I really don't know what to do with this information.

First of all, there is no way to have Tiktok pixel determine real conversions because HTML pixel postbacks aren't being accounted for.
Those conversions you see are people clicking my button on the lander to go submit their email, best I can get right now.

These are the stats from my affiliate network:



Unfortunately the conversions drop heavily otherwise I think I could of made this profitable.

The CPC is insanely cheap. Never dreamed I could hit $0.10 or even lower than that for good T1 traffic.

This means that instead of having to convert 1 in 6 clicks, we only need to convert 1 in 20.
Taking our required conversion rate from 15% to 5%.

That means this is potentially profitable!

And our current averages state that we're at 384 clicks -> 9 conversions = 2% CR

Which means we need to gather another 3% CR from somewhere... my landing page CTR is pretty solid already:



However there is still a ton of falloff when reaching the offer's landing page, potentially a disconnect in messaging?

I think I need to try another offer, I need to determine more benchmarks for different offers/verticals.

That or perhaps try two more landers with different angles to see if we can jump that CR past 5%. I don't really want to target more heavily as it will cost a lot more.

Any suggestions super affiliates?

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Not sure what the funnel looks like, but my guess is the offer has one or two too many questions causing our TikTokers, with 6 second attention spans already, to lose interest and not want to click two more buttons.

Since your LP CTR is already really good, I would split test with another one which could possibly increase CR.

Something that convinces the user to 'make it all the way through to the end! Totally worth it!'

Not sure what lander you're using, but a random comments section with testimonials saying shit like that might help.

'[shocked emoji] I was bored and and almost didn't finish, but holy shit am I glad that I did! I just received the check from govt this afternoon! [boner emoji]'

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Shiiiiit that's good.

Already got the testimonial/comment section but that is a nice one to add.

I'll give that a try and hope to increase conversions on second page.

Wish it was a prepop but oh well

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That's an important observation! And many traffic platforms work similarly. High CTR reflects good user experience - it means users like your ad so the algo rewards you accordingly.


I think things are looking REALLY promising! Chances should be good you'll hit profits with more testing!

I agree with jaybot - your lander CTR is really good already. Of course you can always split-test more landers, but I would focus on split-testing more ADS and more OFFERS.

(BTW - how many ads and offers have you tested so far?)

If you haven't tested more than a few offers, testing more offers could be the easiest and quickest way to increase your ROI.

As for ads: Test different angles. Test ads that only focus on getting people to click through. Test separate ads that focus more on preselling. For these two types of ads you'll get different CTRs, CPCs, and CRs - there's no telling which will win in terms of ROI until you test.

As for targeting: Most sweeps offers have very broad appeal, so I wouldn't worry about refining the targeting (especially with your information that narrower targeting may result in more expensive traffic - I've never run on Tiktok but this is true on a lot of other traffic platforms including FB).

Again - I don't have experience with Tiktok. Merely drawing on my FB experience here. But I really think you're getting close!!




Amy

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Well, quite a few ads but really all the same angle and only 2 offers. Rookie numbers. I created a list of 10 offers I'm going to try and work on.
I just get a bad feeling when I look at some offers. "I just can't even see an angle anyone would remotely take" you know?

I learned a ton from simply testing the second offer and it only cost me $50 instead of $500. Baby steps.

Also I'm trying to identify a sweet spot offer that isn't a huge payout but also isn't $2.00.

You think I'm close? Sheesh, let's hope so.

It's hit or miss with offers on Tiktok but either way I learn a ton. Going to run an offer in every vertical and see which sticks out to me.

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Day 8: Friday, May 28th

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You might notice that I skipped a day or two, thats because I told myself I wasn't going to spend anymore money this month and study more instead.
I repeated this phrase as I cashed out investments and transferred to my blood for the blood god checking account.

Also, you may of noticed I was in the newsletter!

This was a surprise to me and my affiliate manager Brigitte Gil (VerveDirect!) actually was the one to show me it.

Seriously, they uh don't tell you or anything. I regret writing this like my intimiate internet diary.

Anyways,
Here's the plan folks.

Brigitte put me on to a new hot offer that might generate better conversions with a younger cool audience.

She also gave me all the useful stats as well for what I need to target.

The product is called StarScope, it's a telescope lens for your mobile phone that allows you to take better photos from a distance.

I chose this offer because theres a lot of nature lovers on Tiktok and it appeals a bit more to a broader audience.

I created two different videos and put a lot more effort into them this time hoping to reach similar CTR's as my previous video.

I had a lot better engagement from my 'meme' style video so I doubled down and went deep with it.

Please note, I was uh drinking a bit when making these, please place your judgement aside.





I've noticed that now that I've spent over $500, my ads are approved a lot faster. Just an interesting side note.

Time to test and see how we do, I went with a simple test so I can gather more data and not spread everything so thin.

2x ad sets, one for males, one for females, 18 to 55+, no interest targeting. If the ad is good, I pray to see close to 5% to 10% CTR.

The goal is to get cheap clicks right now and hopefully a few lottery conversions. Instead of optimizing too quickly, I'm going to try and let it gather more data so I can be sure.

If it doesn't work out, it's on to the next product. Either way, we get to learn more about what makes Tiktok tick. (fuck thats a good line, New York Times reach out for copy anytime)

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Day 9: May 29th, Saturday

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It's going to be a big update today. Mostly wall of text.

First of all, results of my dumb videos for StarScope.

Jaybot said something about a newsletter curse, I wonder...





By the way, if you want to run the same offers I am with the same creatives, shoot me a message anytime.

My amazing affiliate manager is Brigitte Gil with VerveDirect and her Skype is: live:.cid.8dc1df4a11c1e707

Tell her I sent ya and you should be good to go. They have insane products and funnels. Highly recommended.

Back to business.

I should spent $450 to go 10x payout but I reread my notes and I had written in all caps: "TEST CHEAPER SHIT IDIOT"

and without any real interest (28 people hit checkout without anything, once again, probably bad messaging/presale) and poor CTR's, I figured I could call this one early and save myself some blood.

After this little tangle, I decided to do some competitor research.

If you didn't know like myself, there are currently no spy tools available on the market for Tiktok. I found this to be an open challenge and went at it. 4 hours later with my poor phone connected to a messy MITM SSL proxy server on my laptop trying to reroute Tiktok API calls to figure out their backend I started to quickly realize why. Tiktok doesn't display ads on their web interface and require anyone attempting to call their API server to have the Tiktok SSL certificate installed and a unique device key sent.

Of course I got a backup plan but we're putting that on hold for right now. If anyone wants to help me or needs the code for a Tiktok spy bot, I got a method that will work, hit me up.

Anyways, competitor research. I found out on Tiktok that they show an ad every nine videos.
This means you can quickly swipe 9 times and see the next ad shown to you.

Being in Canada and having my own interests, I figured I could at least gain insight to a working offer and a rough target demographic, people like myself.

Protip for new affiliate marketers: Search for ads on your social network of preference and see what has the best engagement. Copy it and target yourself.
*I don't know if this works p.s

Here's the ads I found:

• EComm Product x8
• Wealthsimple x2
• Auto loan x3
• Koho Finance
• Debt Forgiveness
• Match Dating x2
• Mist Play
• Posture Fix
• Manscaped
• $750 giftcard
• Life insurance
• Wholee
• Nail shit
• Walkfit?
• Harry Potter Mobile Game
• Got2B Hair Color
• Girls Leggings

I also found that 90% of these ads are from the companies themselves, not affiliate marketers. This was a little concerning, this is uncharted territory with not many finding success.

But fuck that weak shit, I'm out here for glory and treasure.

I realized that E-Commerce is HUGE on Tiktok.

And I want my piece of it. Badly.
I also keep repeating to myself that I need to test tons of offers and products.

I really want to stick to whitehat e-commerce ironically (if you know my background, you'd find that hilarious). I also want to have the money that I spend on ads to have more value, even when testing failing products.

Like @jaybot right? He collected a ton of push subs and that often saved him during some rough weeks (don't worry he's famous and rich now).

I want to build up an asset. I want every click to potentially earn me money in the future.
Emails, phone numbers, customers. A brand.

Also most of the e-commerce products available to affiliates are just rebranded products from AliExpress with a heavy markup price.

So I went ahead and built a Shopify store.

It was uh shockingly simple. I mean, I got the background for it but still, sheesh.

3 hours start to finish and I created a website, product page, upsell, email subscription, the works. It has all the cool shit you see on the big affiliate marketing e-comm sites such as "Someone recently purchased...", Exit popups to get an email, people viewing this page and more.

Obviously I will add a lot more effort to it over the next few weeks but this allows me to not waste time creating one-time landing pages and creatives for offers that may work, may not or may disappear randomly.

This way every time I try a new product, I have it forever. I can cross-sell, upsell, giveaway, etc. I can even revisit in a heartbeat. I can use people interested in a similar product to create unique coupon codes for my less popular or new products.

I love it.

More benefits, I'm rolling em out.

• To run a 10x payout test a product, it will cost me $10 to $50 instead of $100 to $500
• I can quickly build landing pages by reusing components from other landers
• I can sell the store if I get bored or sick of it on the marketplace
• I can easily control all the tracking and modify anything I want, including price, in order to figure out my optimal optimization
• If I find a successful product, I can bulk buy it and ship from my house to save even more and add custom packaging
• My Tiktok pixel will become useful for promoting new products in similar niches

Love it.

I won't release my website right now, I'm not proud enough of it yet.

I do realize this will be another uphill battle but I figured I can easily use Shopify plus my coding skills to basically clone other stores providing the same or similar products.

Regardless, I'm using the same strategy that I always use in life, reach the end-game as fast as possible to learn from the best at the fastest pace. In this case, from what I've seen, the real killers own their own products/services and build brands they can sell for even more dolla.

Also in a past business venture I had a fantastic brand and packaging so I'm confident in this plan.
*I was selling weed but it really was beautiful packaging.

So let's get this shit rolling. I already got my first product (it's a secret right now, the newsletter scared me). I got my ad on Tiktok approved I think, honestly I haven't checked yet but it should be fine.

As usual, will report back with the results.

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Considering you've only tested 2 offers and only one angle - and already getting a -60% ROI - yup I'd say you're close!

Cause there's still a lot of room for optimization.

Regarding offer selection: Try not to judge an offer by how you feel when looking at the offer page. Start with offers that your affiliate manager tells you convert well.

If sweeps is what you're planning on focusing on, apply to some networks that specialize in them. Some networks could even create exclusive/custom offers for you. Please see this post for networks that specialize in sweeps:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...mp-Advertisers


Just a heads up: You'll probably be in the STM newsletter for next week as well. (The one you were featured in last week was the MRKTRS newsletter.)

You have every reason to be proud of this follow-along! I for one am learning something new, and I'm sure many other members are following along as well. Not that many people have experience with this new'ish traffic source!

I'd just like to thank you again for being so generous in sharing your experiences. Really. Updating a follow-along takes time and effort. It's very much appreciated.


Interesting! Eager to see how you do with it!

It's really good that you're testing different things! However - if I were you, I would focus on testing sweeps offers for a while. Sweeps have very broad appeal so there's no/minimal audience targeting needed, which is great for scaling. Plus there will be an endless stream of great offers available so you'll never run out. AND - if an angle works, you can use it for a LONG time - and apply it to different sweeps offers. Because you're targeting really broad, the angle will not reach fatigue any time soon.

Whereas for most ecom products, you'd need somewhat of a narrower audience compared to sweeps. Saturation would come sooner as well. Plus, it won't be as easy to transfer the same angle to another ecom product - after your current offer ends or reaches saturation or becomes too competitive.

Just a personal thought though. Follow your intuition and keep testing and you shall find success.



Amy

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I'm a simple man, I get @'d and spoken about, I show up and respond.

Newsletter curse is real. (the first 20 times at least)

And for the record: I'm not famous nor rich. Closer to the opposite (infamous and poor).

Your FA is awesome tho.

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I just realized we posted at around the same time - I hadn't seen your last post before making MY last post lol!

It's really impressive how you figured out how to spy on Tiktok ads! And I love how you're doing your research by analyzing the ads to see what types of stuff is being promoted the most.

As for building your own Shopify store, your own brand and your own lists: That sounds like a very smart move! Promoting affiliate offers on social platforms can only become more difficult as time passes. I have no doubt there are affiliates that are cleaning up on TikTok right now because they're not as strict as FB, but I see TikTok going down the same road sooner or later.

So - if you're in business for the long haul, building a real asset would be a smart move.

Niche selection will be key. Once you've built that audience you'll own your own traffic. Make sure to pick a niche where customers have a high LTV and lots of products you could sell to them.

Another tip: Having a shopify store is great for testing products, but once you have a product and ads that are making profits (or close), building a website exclusively for the product will almost always get you better profits.

You have some solid plans - I look forward to seeing how they'll unfold!

(BTW which part of Canada are you at? I'm in the Greater Toronto Area.)



Amy

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Yeah I figured I'd have to eventually as I want to squeeze the most out of the front and backend for customer value. Also can do so many more things now for testing offers, can even drop the price to $1 to confirm everything works.

I'll write that down in my journal (yes I keep multiple diaries, some are for the internet only).

I'm in the GTA as well! Burlington. How have you been enjoying house arrest for the past 2 years?


The man, the myth, the legend.

Your FA made me make an FA so you get a referral bonus or something I'm sure.

Only 20 times? Oh wonderful, I'm looking forward to the next 19 bout's of misery.

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Day 10: Monday, May 31st

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I'm a big fan of Shopify, makes sense why they wanted to hire me a year ago, they've built a hell of a platform.
I find I can test products a lot faster after setting up an easy way to create landing page advertorials.

My new hobby is browsing AliExpress for hours looking for new products, going to branch out and seek out other sources, preferably with faster shipping options.

Anyways, let's see how shit is going.

Once again, tracking on Tiktok is hard, no conversion tracking right now.



This is for the Posture Correction Brace product I'm offering, it has a basic presale page that I ripped from someone also dropshipping this.

...and we got our first ever sale!



Absolutely stoked. The beginning of great things to come I hope.

The plan right now is to run simple open targeting traffic tests on new products for roughly $0.20 CRC.

I find a new product on AliExpress, ensure I can ship to the states in a reasonable timeframe and rip the product images and description.

Then I usually will write a landing page if I feel like I have to explain the benefits of the product if it's not obvious.

After a quick $100 traffic test, I start to analyze data.

I'm ideally looking for...

• Cheap CPC, anywhere from $0.10 to $0.20
• Good engagement, ideally 3% CTR for e-commerce products
• Sales, obviously.
• People hitting Add to cart or initiate checkout events on my pixel

If I reach this criteria, I'm going to double down on testing and start to build up an audience for it with my pixel.

I added a bunch of shit to the website, mostly aimed at the product page. Things like trust badges, people viewing this product, more descriptions etc etc.

I'm also testing more products now. I learn something from every product I test and can gain more and more valuable metrics to compare my other offers to.

I'm currently running three campaigns on Tiktok:

• Posture Correction Brace
• Electric Nerf UZI Gun
• Pokemon Game Collection for GBA/GBC

I want to add these products next:

• GPS tracking chips for pets/iphones/car keys
• Lockpicking set
• Automatic cat toy
• Height lifting inserts

I need to either write or implement a plugin to automatically ship orders to customers, this could be painful doing it manually if I want to scale.

Let's see uh what else is going on..

I need to start writing backend for getting the most LTV out of my customers, especially since I got a sale already.
Also need to implement upsells.
Also need social media profiles.
and add Full Story or Hotjar.

Quite a few other small things as well but thats on my todo list right now next to starting 3 more camp's.

I still need to study up on scaling campaigns, on the odd chance I get to do that one day.

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Love the enthusiasm and endless fountain of 19 year old dropshipper on adderall energy... But. You know. Cart. Horse.



Oh. And nice humble-flex on the Shopify almost-hire, lol.

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Nice! I'm in Mississauga.

Kind of enjoying house arrest to be honest. There's plenty to do online, and also offline - reading and meditating for example.

And the lockdown is ending - gonna resume hiking soon! There are so many nice trails within a 2-hour radius. We're truly blessed to be living amidst so much green!


It sounds like you have a plan!

Just one reminder: If you're planning on building a brand and a customer base to monetize repeatedly, you're going to need to identify/find your AUDIENCE first and foremost.

There's nothing wrong with testing random products - as long as they appeal to the AUDIENCES you're wanting to test.

i.e.:

-GPS tracking chips - probably doesn't have a well-defined, specific audience that they'd appeal to - may not be a great choice for testing

VS.

-Automatic cat toy - WAY better - as it would only appeal to cat owners - and there are many other products you can sell to the audience


Looking forward to where this massive testing will get you!



Amy

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Complete shitshow. I've had more issues with their accounts than anyone else, including my personal and business TT accounts.

Suspended for no reasons, losing balance, losing pixels.

And no, it's not free.

They switched to cashback accounts (they were on credit line accounts) so they get an extra cut of their spend.

They still take your fee.

I get that you want to make referrals, but let's not oversell it.

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Didn't take the time to properly investigate, you're right, removed the post.

I was told it was free however, I'll confirm, if they still take a cut, that's my bad and nothing new then.

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thanks for sharing your your case, it's a very good experience!

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This is one of the great threads I've seen in all my years on the internet.

How's life treating you these days, Scotty?

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