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jjlundy 40-Day Follow Along (17)

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Hi all,

I'm following Vortex's 40-Day Pop Tutorial and am creating this thread to document progress and to ask questions to the more experienced members here.

A little bit about me:
- I work full-time as a software engineer
- I own an ecom biz that will do $XX,XXX rev this year (I'd like to sell at the end of the year)
- Recent college grad

Why AM:
- I've been working to be successful w/ ecom for the past year or two, but to be honest I've struggled with growing anything substantial. I believe my biggest hurdle is becoming a more effective marketer, so why not go to the source of the most effective internet marketers.
- At times I feel lost and struggle w/ shiny object syndrome, so I'd like to surround myself w/ others in the same boat
- It seems the skills learned from AM apply to almost any kind of online marketing

My goals w/ AM:
- My biggest goal -- as I'm sure like many others -- is financial freedom --> replace my 9-5 income
- Learn the fundamentals of media buying & angle/offer creation
- For now, my goal is just to make $1

If you have recommendations for other AM groups to join, please comment or PM me. I'd like to learn as much as possible. (I don't intend to leave STM)

And if my coding knowledge can be of value to you, please let me know. I'd be happy to help.

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Update 6-20-22

Over the weekend, I applied to @vortex's rec'd affliate/ad networks:

• Zeydoo (applied)
• Haka (approved)
• Mobipium (approved)
• PropellerAds (registered)
• PopAds (registered)

This morning I setup Binom via AWS's Lightsail on me own domain.

Still waiting on Zeydoo, but no reason to get caught up on them alone -- will keep moving onward

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Will try to follow your FA and then let´s work on your campaigns together to get you running

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Hi @jjlundy! Welcome to the forum and thanks for starting this follow-along!

I'm NOT trying to discourage you from doing the 40-day tutorial, but feel obligated to point out something obvious:

Why not focus on marketing your existing ecom biz, which is already showing good potential, instead of starting something new?

Pop traffic is fun to run, and easy because it doesn't have many moving parts, AND doesn't require a lot of (if at all) marketing knowledge - which makes it perfect for newbies.

HOWEVER, if your aim is to become a better marketer, you'd pretty much be wasting your time by running pop.

Again - not trying to discourage you from pop! If you choose this route and enjoy it, after graduating from the 40-day tutorial, you can progress to @twinaxe's push tutorial. Pop+push together (or just push) have the potential of providing a decent income.

But if you'd like to get some inspiration on how to improve your ecom biz, please feel free to start a post on that as well, with some details.

Looking forward to our many discussions in the future!



Amy

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@twinaxe -- So generous. Let me get the ball rolling and I will gladly take you up on your offer once I've gotten my bearings so we can make the most of our time.

@vortex thank you for the thoughtful reply. You are absolutely right regarding current ecom biz. To be honest with you, I've been a little stuck in the biz revenue-wise & that's part of the reason I've joined the forum. Perhaps I will start a separate thread for that at some point.

And as for pop, I hear ya -- it's certainly not the end goal, but seems like a great stepping stone to learn how to create/optimize campaigns from the media-buying side since it's so cheap to experiment. Baby steps

Cheers

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Update 6/24/22:

Set 5 offers/campaigns live:
- propeller traffic --> mobipium offers for various mobile providers
- countries: tn, pe, dz, pk (each 1M+ impressions w/o narrowing the targeting)

I was shocked how quickly propeller turns your ads on & you start getting clicks... so much faster than the typical FB/TT wait several hours & hope for the best

Assuming PropAds' data is valid, I picked cpm caps roughly based on what would give best ratio of conversions to $ spent (see pic)


I'm thinking once I get a rough idea what these CPC & conversion rates will be for the various offers, you can kinda get a feel for whether or not you can make an offer work.

Seems like it just boils down to math.

I'll come back here once I've gotten some data back from these offers. In the mean time, I'm gonna work on setting up PopAds / getting some Haka offers in the mix

p.s. these API's are really interesting... offer platforms, ad platforms, Binom... I don't yet know what any of it would look like & don't have the time to mess around w/ them yet, but damn if you couldn't automate the setup of a ton of the basic 1 click campaigns & potentially automate the pruning of bad campaigns

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Just for clarification, are you running now pops or push?

If you understand a bit of coding and APIs it should be easy to do.

I didn´t know anything about Python or how to work with APIs and it took me about 2 weeks to code first automation scripts

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Pops for now

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Alright, thanks for clarification.

For click2sms you can also test iKangoo.

What also works good on pop traffic is click2call offers from Traffic Company

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Sounds like you're doing all the right things! You're a real action taker.

When it come to bids, don't be afraid to test low bids on PropellerAds - because their traffic quality is pretty decent.

On other traffic sources when you bid too low, you may end up 'scraping the bottom of the barrel' so to speak, getting garbage traffic that nobody wants to bid on (that people have excluded from their targeting). On PropellerAds this is less of a concern because they don't have a lot of garbage traffic at all.

And yeah if you can master automation it would REALLY help you to run pop campaigns. Pop is easy and fun to run, but to make any sizeable money you need to test a ton of offers and be juggling lots of campaigns at the same time. Pros and cons.


Amy

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Forgot to mention: Applying @twinaxe's whitelist here can save you some money as well.

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Pops-Whitelist

It's from a couple of years back, but will still help.



Amy

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Update 6/27/22:

I've done a couple things in the past couple days:

- Messed around with Binom's API -- found a cool repo that helped with getting up to speed.
I could see this being useful for a couple reasons. Primarily, I think it could help with automating the offer/campaign setup within Binom. And not to mention, I could see it helping prevent mistakes that happen when manually inputting data (talk about that in a sec). If others here have already written scripts for Binom please let me know, otherwise I'm sure I'll be writing my own.

- Got some data from 5 campaigns
I ran 5 campaigns for Mobipium offers -- simple direct-linked, click2sms? offers. For obvious reasons the results were not amazing, but it was nice to see our first few conversions . After a day of collecting data, I realized I directed 2 offers to 1 Binom campaign link (woops). Would be nice to have a little script to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future. BUT, I cleared the Binom data for those 2 campaigns, and re-set up those offers/campaigns. Data looking good, one offer is converting decently. Gonna optimize to see if we get it profitable, even if it's just a few cents a day.

- Binom "drilling down" -- wow
I've messed around with FB/Google Ads for a year or two... and I've never seen this kind of data on these platforms? Maybe I'm just a noob, but damn I was blown away by the reports you can get on these campaigns from Binom. "Zone" / Mobile provider / a big one, language. For example -- my Algeria campaigns were showing French and Arabic... and sure enough I looked it up and Algeria primarily speaks those two languages. Pretty cool!

- Registered for PopAds
Self-explanatory. I would imagine I'll be registering for many, many more offer/traffic sources.

- Had a look at @twinaxe's whitelist
Was going to toss this whitelist on my most promising campaign, but realized it was gonna severely limit impressions to ~25k/day -- no bueno. Taking into account win rate & conversation rate, it'd pretty much be a waste of time because we'd be getting so few daily impressions. I now realize how important traffic volume is for running sustainably profitable campaigns are -- seems it's a bare minimum requirement before even considering a geo/campaign. In the future, gonna use this whitelist to estimate potential traffic before even starting a PropellerAds campaign.


So, what's next?
Optimizing direct-linked offers seems pretty straightforward, and I'm not sure I stand to gain/learn too much by spending too more time on these types -- correct me if I'm wrong here. At this point, I think skipping ahead to messing around with creating campaigns that need landers makes a lot of sense.

And @twinaxe thank you for the recs, I'll get registered on iKangoo and Traffic Company

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Regarding whitelists: You're right about the need to make sure there's enough traffic volume before starting a campaign (as was described in the tutorial), but you can stand to save a lot of test budget by using the whitelist to test offers.

The reasoning: If an offer is far from profitable on a whitelist, then it would probably perform worse without the whitelist, and therefore probably won't be worth running further.

Regarding landers: By all means proceed to that next stage! Quite frankly, with your experience, you can probably just breeze through the tutorial in a few days, then proceed to push.


Amy




Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Makes a lot of sense, will keep in mind going forward.

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I want to give an update here --

Since my last post, here's what I've been up to:

I got static sites up and running on S3

I tested several more pop offers & was able to get one offer profitable w/ the help of @twinaxe's whitelist. (ty my friend for the insightful post)

I bought and read 'DotCom Secrets', and... holy shit that book is gold -- completely got the gears turning.

And... I had a realization.

Between:
- 9-5 job
- running & trying to grow my ecom biz
- AM

I realized I was doing a shit job at the 3. And it's completely my fault -- I stretched myself too thin.

Your original advice @vortex is indeed valuable -- at this time, you're right, I should and am now lasering in on my ecom biz so I can successfully exit in a few months time.

Less stress, more focus, and better quality work.

So, that's what I'll be focused on in the mean time.

I feel grateful to have found this place and met you wonderful people, and I plan on sticking around -- but for the time being AM is a distraction I need to quell.

Cheers

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No worries - we'll still be here when you're ready to continue with your AM adventures!

In the meantime: Although this is an AM forum, there are lots of ecom biz owners here as well. If you'd like some inspiration on how best to improve your ecom biz before the exit, please don't hesitate to make a post!

All the best!



Amy

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This is nice, didn´t even know that such a repo exists and I use Binom for more than 5 years already

That´s definitely true for low payouts.

With high payout offers it can work just as good to run on low but high quality volume.

Good choice

You´re welcome

Just as Amy said, although it´s an AM forum you shouldn´t feel limited to only this.

See STM also as a tool for networking and connecting with people, this alone can help alot.

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