Home > Adult Traffic (NSFW) > Follow-along Campaigns

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"Accelerated Learning" - Getting to Super Affiliate in 4 Months (47)

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This Follow Along is a little different from the normal campaign follow alongs, because my goal is 'learning' before profit. And learning quickly.

There is a lot of information in STM that is super useful - but what I see that is potentially lacking is advice on how to learn. How you learn IMHO is what makes the difference. You do find it here and there in threads. But there is no clear cut guide. AM is just like anything else - it's a bunch of skills that can be pulled apart, learned and mastered.

What is super affiliate? I'm talking about being able to think up a campaign and bank on it within a week of investment. In figures that will definitely mean multiple $100/ day. I'd like to hit my first $1000/ day within these months (ambitious goal, maybe… nonetheless what I'll aim for).

Over the next days I'll post up my learning plan (the skills I think I need to learn) and how I'm going to approach it. Then I'll update with 'how I'm learning' as much as possible every day with what helped or didn't.

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Change your mindset. No matter your a super / mega / average / highfly etc. affiliate, you won't set up a campaign and bank of it right away. It's rather like throwing the shit on a wall and watching what sticks. In my experience, managing to get more than 2 out of around 10 campaigns you test profitable is really hard. You gotta accept that you'll find much rather losers than winners, especially starting out. Sure experience comes into play here as well, but it's not like you set a campaign and bank from it. Finding potential, optimizing and scaling is the key here.

Lacking advice on how to learn? Browse the forum, use the search function, read the shitload of guides and follow alongs and do your calcs based on what you see. Next step, bring up some cash and TEST. That's the whole process. If you think there's not enough material showing how to 'learn' AM on here, I'm affraid you either haven't bothered to read much on the forum or simply don't understand how AM works. It's not like an education with a degree in whatever. You're not done even launching your first 4 digits campaign per day. It's like an ever growing experience that's bringing you closer to reach your goals step by step...

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Thanks fjk87, some interesting feedback I think you probably haven't got where I'm coming from (I'm not a newbie to business or making money) and not completely new to IM either. In my experience everything is about learning a skill of some kind. Making good $$ and having more campaigns go well than bad is about developing those skills.

I'm just saying that there is less luck involved than most people think. More like hard work/ hard thinking.

I imagine that saying I was going to learn in 4 months was what tipped you a bit. If we don't set ambitious goals we have no hope of reaching them. It's also more motivating to set something ambitious (for me any how). So don't take this as a negative post - I aim to bring something positive here. And believe me I've been doing a lot of reading and note taking already and I meant it when I said "there is a lot of information in STM that is super useful".

Peace

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get your research together to come up with "stickier shit" before you throw it at the wall. It works :P

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I do agree with what fjk87 is saying here, but I think with time and experience you can absolutely get better at creating profitable campaigns. The last 3 campaigns I created were pretty much profitable from day one and that all came down to doing a lot of competitive research, being super picky with what I started and then knowing the vertical pretty well. And I don't mean just ripping someone's else lander, but REALLY understand what your competitors are doing and then doing it better. You can also only study so much...you really have to DO to learn. That will slowly build up that intuitive feel of knowing what works. Although you never truly know until you go live. I've had the stupidest ideas blow up and the smartest ideas just bomb.

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Isn't it that 'smart' isn't always what fits with reality. In my old career of management consulting, many times, especially in my first years, my ideas would be too smart. By that I mean impractical, because they weren't simple or straightforward enough - even though they looked good on paper. Mostly because the ideas always required buy-in or others working with them to get them to work - and simplicity always helped that. I had to dumb down my ideas to get them to work.

With marketing I look at it the same way. It's easy to get too smart - and lose the consumer. The whole trick to AM I'm thinking is to get your perception as close to the REAL reality as possible. Then you start hitting the mark more often. When we get a different result than expected there is something to be learned there.

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My first update. We'll call it Day 1 of 120 - although I've been dabbling the last month getting my feet wet.

I'm working on an offer right now that has a bad mywot score, despite this I've had no problem running it on Facebook. In fact my approvals come pretty much as soon as I submit the Ads, I figure it has to do with the other advertising I used my account for in the past. This was more of a test - as I didn't want to run a bad mywot score on the account long. I ran into a different barrier with raised click prices for the holiday season (my CTR was 0.13/0.14% with CPC of 0.50 or 0.60 to get decent volume). Ouch.

The reason I started with Facebook is that I know it well being a user, so it was the easiest place to start and get some early wins. Overall that was the case with a tidy profit of about $200 for the tests. That includes profit of around $280 was made on 1 campaign that worked, with $80 spent on others that didn't.

Because of the MyWot issue and the raised CPC I'm now looking at other traffic sources. I can see that each option PPV, mobile and 2nd tier engines like 7search will require a learning curve and a few technical hurdles to jump over. I want to focus on mastering one traffic source at a time as much as possible to keep variables in my learning/ data limited.

I'm studying STM and weighing the pros and cons to decide which Traffic Source I'll go with next.

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This is a breakdown of the skills I've separated out from my first review of STM material and what I know already. This may change as I go. I've put down the skillsets that are necessary to master to make good money.

I'll start from the top, spending most of my time on the top skills development until I feel that they are contributing to results, then steadily work my way down.

I'm focusing on implementing 1, 2 and 4 in my campaigns to gain experience right now.

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Print that out and put it on your wall. You'll save yourself mistakes by also writing out a solid flow chart for some of those steps (e.g. testing tracking, camp protection) and putting those up as well.

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Totally. Thanks for the prompt Zeno. I was putting the procedures in Evernote, but sticking them on the wall is better.

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Day 2 of 120

I've been knee deep in Traffic Source research on STM pretty much all day - in particular PPV and Adult (e.g. Exoclick). This is going to take some time.

The offers I'm going to be promoting are in adult dating so I'm looking for something where the Offer and the Ads can be Edgy (without cloaking), and if possible without too steep a learning curve.

So far I'm leaning towards adult traffic being more straightforward. PPV seems to have more variables that can go wrong. Trying to keep as tight as possible on limiting variables.

Any suggestions on traffic sources to get started on for Adult Dating welcome.

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Looking good man, remember theory doesn't always hold out in reality. But its awesome to see you've got your flow down pact.

Stick to 1 source to begin with, adult you can jump into pretty easily as there isn't much learning to get it going, but it requires a fairly large cashflow, low to mid $xxxx/week to get anything decent going, as most campaigns with have lowish ROI's but your profit is off the volume

PPV takes a lot more time, ad approvals, lots of testing different variables before it becomes perfected, but its still a lot of money to be made there.

Can find plenty of sources here regarding adult traffic

Just don't yourself read too much and dip into analysis paralysis get into the work, keep it simple. Don't work more then 6-8 hours a day, keep your mind clear and I'm sure in 120 days you'll be on the track to crushing it

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Thanks for the encouragement dude. I'm sure you're aware of how helpful that is at this stage.

And that link to your post - great stuff. I also appreciate "Don't work more than 6-8 hours a day, keep your mind clear" --> the highest productivity lever will always be a clear/ untired mind.

I'll wind up my traffic source research today and get going to avoid paralysis. Looks like adult is going to win as I feel I'm creative enough to get something working, and the scalability you emphasize is *very appealing*.

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Hey wanted to chip in cos I'm seeing more and more this distinct different between 2 "schools of thought" in business.

1) Corporate, management-consulting sort of thinking where flowcharts and infographics and theory is the rule of the day.
2) The screw-it-just-do-it-even-though-I-don't-know-what's-going-on-at-all mentality.

Me I love the concept of 1) but realized that because of the huge fluctuations and random-ness of the AM world, what got me to 4 figures is really the 2) sort of thinking.

Every man thinks there needs to be a fine balance between 1) and 2) and that he's got it down pat, that's certainly what I thought in the past.

Took me alot of time to really achieve that though, so YMMV for sure.

Good luck man, looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

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Im subscribing man . Love the attitude and am looking forward to updates!

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I totally understand. I used to be in strategy consulting and as you may know that world has changed a lot. The McKinsey's of this world have moved away from long strategic planning projects, to using analytics with heavy stores of data and focusing on implementing.

If you look at the tech startup world they are heavily into 'just do it' now too.

I think the reason is that nothing works without momentum, and the world is changing so fast (even in the corporate world) that plans have to change every quarter. In the AM world of course, you can hike that up further! Things can change in a day if someone rips your campaign.

I find having a lot of structure helps me to build momentum, and stay focused, it's just the way I work. For me also 'thinking' before acting has always paid off. I've tried just throwing stuff at the wall before and I tend to get mediocre results. As you say, it's probably somewhere in the middle.

Maybe (2) gets you more just because you put more out there... anyway, we're kinda theorizing here lol!
Thanks dude!

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A lot of great comments here. I spent a few months understanding the industry, the different traffic sources, the types of offers, yada yada BUT!

It was not until I decided to commit to the DOING it that I really started to learn and learn fast!

I also started a Follow On as I like the commitment it gives me to take action and then report on it!

So, I guess I started with 1) and then moved to 2) but as I was working away I was doing more of modified 1) as in I was putting my repeatable systems in place. Tracking, Geo Redirection, Logging, ROI Projections, Various Software Packages, Landing Page templates, etc!

We all know this is a numbers game so the more you throw at it the more chance you have of having successful campaigns! I have also realised that if a campaign does not work on one traffic source it does not mean it won't work on another. The other thing is that once you have developed your landers and keyword lists for a campaign it becomes so much quicker to launch it somewhere else.

I am concentrating on building campaigns but also building a strong backend to support incoming traffic. Sales funnels etc! I am taking a long term view to building relationships with customers, even if that means losing at first!

You will always have good days and bad, so be it!

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Totally with you here. This is how i'm approaching it. Acquire a skill, put a system in place each day... and the end result can't fail. However, while my end game is to build 'assets' like lists, remarketing lists etc. I'm not focused on that right now. I'm taking the baby steps and focusing just on getting direct offers and ads to work. Less variables... then I'll work my way up.
All business has its ups and downs. It's part of the entrepreneur high, I got used to it a while back.. but it takes some getting used to! I think it makes us better people all round and wouldn't have missed it for the world - and I'm sure I'll look back and say the same for this current project

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Excellent advice from this guy. Don't analyze, just do. You'll learn things along the way. It seems to not make any sense when you're first starting, but this is really the way to succeed in this industry.

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Well, anybody who has actually done it can tell you that in real-life it quite never works like you charted it out at first. I've been working on POF for the past month and even with all the posts here, I tend not the get campaigns profitable there. I've no idea why but what I know is that I'm following all "the best practices", checklists and all that but still "it doesn't work" - this doesn't mean that the best practices are wrong, it just means that there are other pieces in the puzzle than what you can read here.

This is why I also subscribe to "school of thought" number 2. All the charts, flows and other bs doesn't really matter until you actually make money.

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@qhead: I agree that it is only be doing it that you truly learn the Good, Bad and the Ugly! I am about to start on POF so I will keep you posted :-)

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@andyscraven : how many traffic source are you focusing right now ?

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That is not what I meant, but still absolutely true. Some of the largest companies have some of the simplest business models. We often tend to overcomplicate things. I probably didn't word it very well. What I meant by "smart" was copy/angles that I thought were just going to kick ass...and then they bombed. And the "dumb" ideas were more "let me try this out...it probably won't work, but let's see what happens".

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@mbhansen: You are absolutely right! Some of the best inventions were mistakes. The Humble Match (as in the type you strike!) for instance and it can be the same with Angles etc.

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I agree with this too...

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Day 3 of 120

I spent the day reviewing adult and PPV. Some of it was spent with technical set up so that I can see what's going on in those platforms.

After having looked at them I have some ideas on angles - however, I don't want that to be my first play.

First, I'm going to take baby step and find existing examples of people that have campaigns working for the offers (or similar) that I'm running. I haven't found that yet - not in any volume, very disparate. Inspire directly off those to get my first campaigns running and some data of 'where things are at' for the existing playing field.

After that I can throw out some of my original angles I think may work and I'll have a benchmark to stack them against.

So today (day 4) I'm going to focus on spying/ looking at those platforms to find examples of the offers. Competitive intelligence day to find a first campaign and establish a good benchmark to measure future progress.

One thing I haven't been able to figure out today are the "popunders" for adult ad networks like Exoclick. It seems they give very varied results depending on the browser and maybe platform. What I found (could be my mac):
- Chrome a new tab opens up (so you are basically pushed into that new window - the popunder - which isn't an under)
- Firefox - it worked for me here: the ads had sound though, so it was playing/ distracting in the background. Isn't there a way to 'stall' this till the popunder becomes visible at the end of your session.

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A frustrating day of technical issues trying to set up looking at PPV popups yesterday. It felt like a lot of wasted time - I had to keep reminding myself that its a 'system' that will pay off and is essential to understand PPV.

The best info I found was from polarbacon and a few others. It ends up looking like this:

1. Install virtualbox from http://www.virtualbox.org/
2. Download and install Win XP on virtualbox
3. Install IE 7 (lowest common denominator browser)
4. Download and install ifreetv (http://ifreetv.net/) for Lead Impact PPV
5. Download and install GameVance.com or Playsushi.com for TrafficVance PPV
6. Set your time and date 3 days forward and restart windows (the popups don't show up for the first few days, so this allows you to see them immediately).
7. Go to amazon.com and check to see if popups appear (there are always Lead Impact PPV here so it's a good test)

Here's a shot of one of the popups:


Honestly I have a few kinks to iron out in this. I wasn't able to downgrade to IE7 from 8 (windows stops you and I haven't found a hack to get round it). I've seen 2 pops so far and my Lead Impact crashes (BrightBreeze.exe) after I close the pop.

I also tried hotbar (hotbar.com) which wouldn't install for me.

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whatever VM you have used, there is something called snapshot, make use of it, before you install bill gate's software, make a snapshot of the clean state, install it, screw it, fxck yourself ? restore from snapshot again.... thanks to virtualization

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Missed this post! Ooops!

I have been trying 7Search (just can't get the traffic) and Looksmart (more traffic stiff assessing quality)

I get the feeling that some of these smaller traffic sources are good if you want to make a $xxx a day but if you really want to build a campaign and be able to scale it I think I need to look else where. Media Buys, PPV etc.

What do you think?

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high volume targets = $xxxx day
it's great when you can earn 100%+ ROI with high volume, but even if you've got a steady 30-40%... you're still banking

find a reliable network that you KNOW pays and put those credit cards to use... when you find something profitable with broad targets, MILK that shit for everything you can

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Thanks dude! Time saver!

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If you want to do PPC then do Bing IMO. If/When you then find a campaign that works then and only then try 7Search. They are a third tier PPC provider and the traffic quality is just not as good as Bing or Adwords (Wait with these guys though as you'll get a perma ban before you know it). You should always test new offers on the highest quality traffic you can. This way you get the best possible data to make your decisions on. I know its a bit counter intuitive that you start with the most expensive sources first, but it comes down to having proper data.

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@mbhansen: No! It makes perfect sense to me!

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Back to work after ThanksGiving.

Research
Setting up PPV Spying has been a pain despite trying a variety of setups - still not getting popups. Considering just using boxofads.com to save a lot of time and pain, but it's not the same thing as being able to see the popups yourself as they appear.

Campaign #2
As I felt it was getting to be unproductive, I wanted to launch a campaign on Facebook (which i know pretty well) to be gaining some data and testing things out. I had an idea for a Facebook campaign to get round the current Holiday brand rush rates and went with that.

As of now the campaign is at 446 clicks, $63.24 Profit with 236.32% ROI (running for about 14 hours). If it continues to perform well I'll look at optimizing a lander and then scaling it further. The creatives for this campaign are inspired from some of the spying I've done on WRW and looking around adult and PPV.

Approach + Learning Musings
Since it was facebook, a source I know, I spent time trying to take the ideas behind campaigns and use those, not just ripping them.

For my first tries on new traffic sources I will basically rip first - get a benchmark understanding of how they perform, and then go to this next stage of 'reverse engineering' what makes them good - and creating something new (hopefully better based on it).

New Task for Tomorrow
I'm making use of geo-targeting with the maxmind JS version more and see the value of it for better creatives (landers) and campaign protection. I don't trust the JS version. So will invest some time in setting the local DB/ PHP version today as a system - so that I don't waste any more time with it.

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Research
I've been talking with offers/ AMs to get more info on the offers I'm promoting. Have got some great pointers on traffic sources and creatives. Given me a lot more ideas.

Campaign #2
I wound this Facebook campaign up and tried scaling it the 2nd day (unfortunately Cyber Monday) which didn't go well at all. Conversions literally disappeared so I put the campaign on hold until I figure out the issue - which I believe was a backlash from the sales period.

At its peak at the end of day #1 the campaign was 399% ROI.

Right now its at:
Clicks: 2,051
P/L: $170 (I lost ~$100 the second day)
ROI: 95% ---> Ouch what a drop!

I split test a few landers and didn't get to the point where the lander was more effective than direct linking. Although there are compliance benefits to having a lander on facebook and protection of campaign.

Approach + Learning Musings
I noticed that after I turned off the campaign I was still getting click throughs - seems someone was spying on the campaign. So I took it as an opportunity to get my landers set up with protection for the future since I plan on going deep with campaigns - makes sense to protect them.

I've got a script taken from Mr. Green's post about protecting campaigns and Andy Craven's formulation of it that I modified for my server. Just got to test it, but should work fine.

My GEO targeting got set up locally with no hassle. I pay for hosting management so I just hit them up with the best reference of step by step implementation (CTRTARD - thx again Andy Craven) and they did it all for me. Geo targetting on speed - done!

New Task for Tomorrow
I'm going to fire up my campaign #2 again tomorrow after having let it simmer for a few days. I've got a few more ideas on improving CR with the lander and how to target it better to eliminate some of the fat - so we'll see how that goes.

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What did you use to create that graph?

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Powerpoint

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Research
More talk with AMs is proving very useful. Will start a test with a new traffic source and offer next week as a result.

Campaign #2
Have fired this up again - will update with the results tomorrow - am splitting testing more segments to see which are better converters.

Assets Setup
Done: Today finished the implementation of the campaign protection script, added in some of my own specific upgrades to make it more convenient and reliable.

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Research
Proxy Services - Value for money?
Have been setting up a permanent proxy service to make viewing ads and doing research on Adult and POF possible. It works well although a bit slow at times.

The best services I've found so far are:
- GeoEdge and GeoSurf (because of their convenience, although cost is more than I'd like). - GeoEdge is ideal but too expensive for my needs/ level of use.
- GeoSurf has a cheaper option: http://www.geosurf.com/pricing/basic/ ($19/ month - but just one location to choose).
- Overplay (www.overplay.net) $9.99 (is probably the one I will go with temporarily for now, for multiple locations)

Anyone found a better value for money solution?

Facebook Spying
I've also been looking into the Facebook spying tools. I'm on the borderline whether to invest in these or not as I have found few examples using the Demo of ads targeting the same as me.
The main options are: lotsofads.com and socialadsninja.com. You have to be an intensive user to justify the lotsofads.com cost.

Campaign #2
Ups and downs with this campaign.
A). Varying daily between -100% ROI to +300% ROI some days. I have tested different landers and increased CTR, however CR wasn't impacted. Also tested day parting and am starting to narrow it down.
B). I implemented the campaign protection with an upgrade that allows me to monitor IPs who are visiting the page multiple times - there are a lot, and sometimes they are consecutive visits (e.g. like they bounced first time and the link was reclicked - or a double click of the AD). A little bit strange. End of the day I realized that adding campaign protection before you have stabilized a campaign is counterproductive - it introduces another variable. So going forward I will use it just for stabilized campaigns.

Conclusion: I'm restarting this campaign from scratch with new Ads, new landers and new targeting based on things I've learned. We'll call is Campaign #3 - Facebook Optimized.

Campaign #4
I've secured de facto exclusivity for a traffic source with one of the offers I've dabbled in for a while. The traffic source is POF, so I'm going to work on this this week as a campaign as well as the Campaign #3 on Facebook.

Accountability
I've organized a weekly accountability call with one of my IM buddies. We keep it simple and focused on just one goal per week.

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Research
- POF: STM + POF Blog + some other random tidbits google found.
- Spent a fair amount of time cruising POF also to understand what's going on.
- Checked the POF Spy - but it looks like the information is buggy so I quit it (couldn't tell if it was a waste of time or not)

Campaign #4
- Set up 12 Creatives in 3 different Campaigns (2 angles from existing market, 1 new angle) to start off with.
- Going Broad.
- As it's my first crack at POF I'm waiting for them to get approved and see the first results before working on next creatives.

Learnings
- POF takes a lot of dogwork to set campaigns up - I wanted to set it up by hand first time to get my head round it. But I'll have to quickly find ways to automate better (Mr Green's uploader etc.) to make it more efficient.
- Eliminating DOGWORK is key - I want to spend 90% of my time Researching + Thinking - that's what contributes Value.

9 Days away from 30 days already - I lost a few days to other issues this week - makes a big dent in progress. To keep on track need to get more testing done - after the 1st 30 days where most of the setup and base research has been done I'm sure that'll happen automatically anyway.

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Research
- Have continued to read everything I can get my hands on for POF.

Campaign #4
- Barriers: Approvals and campaign freezing (and unfreezing). Over the last 48 hours POF disapproved all my ads (around 30 submissions now) for a variety of reasons (Ad, offer) - which are possibly mistakes by whoever hit disapprove.
- What I've Done to Get Over the Hurdle:
A) I've done my homework with existing creatives on POF for the offer that I'm promoting, verified that the offer is good (I've seen Ben recommend that people run it many times, and there are at least 3 affiliates running it now) and reread all the guidelines Ben has given on the blog about Ads etc..
B) I've resubmitted ads with some 'tests' of identical ads to ones running right now on the platform - disapproved also.
C) Contacted Ben and I'm waiting to hear back from him.

Learnings
- Not that I do this, but this has reinforced in my mind that you should never be tied to / reliant on 1 traffic source. When blips like the POF blip above happen you can quickly kill productivity if you don't have other campaigns/ traffic sources to run with.

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Campaign #4 POF
- Approvals: Got over this by calling my account manager and talking over the creatives. Very helpful. POF approvals as with any traffic source depends on who and when is reviewing them. Sometimes I've had to resubmit the same creative to get it accepted.
- Testing: I've put up a benchmark campaign (based on generic campaigns) to understand CTR and conversion and put up a new angle campaign that I thought up. I have one creative that is doing particularly well, testing more to find better.

Learnings
- I've been studying ROI in two parts: When to kill an ad because of CTR, and when to kill and AD/ LP because of CR. Some great posts by 'inversion' in the forum on this covering the statistics.
- I created some tables for myself to know when to kill an AD for CTR - still working on the CR part.

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Campaign #4 POF
- Testing: Have spent the last few days testing a variety of images and it has been a very useful learning experience. I've literally been buying 'learning' as a lot of the time the images or ads I thought would work, didn't and the ones I threw up as 'maybes' or a bit out there - did. I have one ad doing around 0.2% and some others between 0.15% and 0.2%.

Learnings
- I've set my minimum target as 0.25% for this exercise - I'm focusing on learning to increase the CTR. I've seen examples here where ads are able to hit 0.6% - so that's the potential to be unleashed (obviously NICHE campaigns).
- POF approvals are away for the weekend - I have the dayparting POF script from a thread here, so I'll implement that while things are slower.

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Yes I completely agree with what you said about 1 traffic source. So many gurus say to focus on one source, however especially when you are new it is inevitable there will be problems. So focusing on one traffic source can force you to sit on your hands for days allowing time to fix the problems, whether that be a traffic source problem or an issue with an affiliate network, or whatever. This has been a huge source of frustration for me. Example, A4Ds tracking URLs were burned on Facebook so I couldn't run any traffic because I was relying on A4D for my offers and all my offers were tied to this specific tracking domain.

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I subscribed to this thread, it seems interesting.

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Good stuff man...keep it up!

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Just went through this thread, any updates....just curious

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