Tips for the Strugglers (17)
Sup Team!
Back in the day when I was feeling shabby as a noob, putting in hard work and getting nothing back I was just severely unmotivated but I read a rad post from someone we all know too well, some may say his Angry (yet to see this myself) and slings lingo like this "мобильные братан, почему у не запустить?"
This post got me back in the game and helped me where I am today, so thought it would be sick for all you people here 
#2. Everytime you set up a test make sure theres a specific reason why you're running that test. Example, say I'm doing Christian dating. I find a bunch of christian sites and pop over direct linking to the offer. If my budget was ony $50 bucks and I had 1000 targets I really won't get much data out of that. Chances are you will lose money and you won't learn a thing. A smarter approach is to pick 5 - 10 targets that you extensively researched and think have the BEST chance of converting (that still have enough volume to make it worth your time). This way if you spend the $50 at least you'll have enough data to be statistically significant to know it will or won't work on those sites. What I'm getting at is with a limitted budget you can only test a few variables at a time and you want to be methodical about which ones you test.
#3. See what everyone else is doing. Install the adware yourself, visit the sites you want to target and see what people are running there. Creativity is the devil when it comes to AM, because 90% of the time your brilliant scheme will fail. A better strategy is to take what someone else has already done and do it better. The only way to do that is litterally rip their campaign exactly and that will teach you why it works. Then you can add your own touch (and always split test) to see if you can improve. I've ripped landers before and thought this headline sux let me change it and litterally would fail because maybe that shitty headline was exactly why that page worked for someone else. You're here to make money not be original or creative - if you're gonna steal do it with pride!
To sum it up. Pick a strong niche not offer. See how its been run and steal the campaign tactic. Test it yourself but make sure you learn something out of each test. Make a tweak (new targets, offer, headline) and test again. Did you get closer to break even? Great set up a new test and test again. Holly crap your profitable. Test again to see if you can get more profit out of it. And remember that you're campaign will die. If you have a few profitable URLs there are only so many people who will see your pop and sign up, so be prepared and always think how to scale.
Thanks for the motivational talk , maynzie (and anonymous upset former-USSR man) , I really need it right now, every thing I'm doing seems to be failing hehe...
Hope you are doing much better man and you can be up on your feet and kicking ass soon!
with new angles to market, we are essentially speaking to an audience so that we peak their interest (sports car urls paired with car insurance offer)
what's the balance between creating new angles and finding people who ALREADY what our offer?
Hope you are doing much better man and you can be up on your feet and kicking ass soon!
Originally Posted by harrypotter
See this is exactly what I was trying to explain. Find people who are looking for your product. Sports car URLs are NOT your target market. If i'm reading about the new NSX what makes you think that I'm looking for auto insurance?
A better strategy is targeting high profile car dealerships around the country. Someone actually buying a car (not jerking off to cars they'll never own) is a much more qualified visitor. They will want to check auto insurance on their new vehicle they just purchased or about to purchase.
Don't get me wrong you can probably make that sports car angle work... like you'll never believe how much this car costs to insure... but the quality will be shit for the advertiser and you'll soon get canned from the offer.
Originally Posted by The Angry Russian
makes a lot of sense after reading it over again. still learning and seeing all the angles that were taken to market different offers, i THOUGHT i was finally getting it! ... little did i know
finding people who are looking for our offers mean...
- we need to meet them where they are, which leads to
- think of how they think, which leads to
- what they search for, which leads to
- discovering what sites they browse to?
that sound about right?
Originally Posted by The Angry Russian
Like what size in the 1,000's of site visitors makes sense for a target? Im sure it varies...
His distinction between advertising and marketing is something every new marketer should pay very close attention to. Its why direct linking can work extremely well with the right targeting. The lead source and demand is most important.
Originally Posted by theguvna
The stronger the lead source and creative, the less important the offer is. I used to think the offer was everything, and it is extremely important, probably #2.... but I didn't know just how powerful a specific lead source can be until we started doing high priced premium e-mail drops. It has a higher barrier of entry and ideally a high ticket offer to make it work, but it's literally the easiest money I've ever seen (online and legally). Bizarre really. You'll have a sales page that converts at 1% with good display traffic do 3%-5% on the mail drops.
How does that translate to display, ppc, and what most guys tend to use? Well for a while I thought most buys for $40 CPA type offers would always work best on 50 cent to $1 CPM placements. And that's just not true. You can make a $3-$5 CPM work. Right now I have a buy that is at a $5 CPM, and it's starting to break even after 2 weeks on a product with a $40 payout (COGS is $3.95 on it so profit before spend around $36).
Mike Geary actually said it once too about his Truth About Abs offer, where he often has sites at $3-$5 CPM work once creatives are dialed in.
Creatives should be used to pre-qual, pre-frame, set expectations, and filter, not just sell a click... eCPM is more important that CTR, though CTR is also extremely important.
Alex made a good point once about being too cute in your ads just to get a click. That's one example.
The more and more I've done this, really direct linking is a very fast path to long term stability. I know that sounds counter intuitive, and I'm a big proponent of list building, but the best list is a buyers list anyway... and by direct linking you can rapidly find the converting lead/traffic source. Then adjusting an offer around that source is much easier based on looking at the successful offers you were direct linking to, emulating them, and adding your own version eventually into the rotation. Once you have the benefit of your backend, you can spend more.
Alex is right, it's hard to convince people instead of just selling what they want already.
We've gone so far as to now develop an offer specific to one of the strongest list buys we've seen... I've convinced the list broker (who knows his list better than anyone), to work on a rev share. We develop the product/offer, he drops, we tweak, he drops again. Easy play.
Hey Buddy!
I am sure by doing hard work and using our brain at right angle,we can get many ways to make our self efficient but don't get demotivated,keep trying hard and hope you will see result soon.
Best of luck,
Originally Posted by theguvna
Where do you do your list buying?
Lovely post Maynzie, and you too,
Mr Russian of the Angriness.
I fight my own short attention span
and bright idea syndrome every day,
and this post reminds me that I'm
definitely better off not chasing after
"better" or "easier" forms of traffic.
I'm doing this, and I'm doing it until
it's done and I'm a fucking expert.
Thanks for reminding me.
-David
Originally Posted by bangkokbaby
And I know we're supposed to share and all that, but in this case I won't out my list sources, sorry man.
No problem, wasn't asking for specifics, I thought maybe there was a hub/marketplace somewhere you could recommend. Thanks for the reply
It would be great if you could do a thread with pointers on mail drops and some insight on how they work (without disclosing sources). Not much about that on STM as far as I could see.
This is an awesome thread. I'm bookmarking it in my STM file for when I feel burnouty
Thank you!!
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