Diary of The Worlds Lowest Earning Full Time Affiliate Marketer

[captain47]

That sucks dude but lessons learned! And congrats on your first profitable campaign. I'm still looking for mine

Quoting Dr NGO. Profitable campaigns are made, and not discovered.

When I test out a campaign and if it shows any more than -75%ROI, I try to make it work. Good luck!

That sucks mate. It really hurts. This is what i do in case of back:-
1. I always keep a copy on my HDD. I still save a copy on my dropbox, just the way its saved on my HDD.
2. While making small tweaks and variations, I copy the original folder and name it little differently(for example if my old folder is named as LP1 then my new folder will be like LP1.1).This helps me to check what variations i have made so far since the start of the campaign. Every small details help.

BTW congrats on your 1st profitable campaign. Keep up the good work. Looking forward for more stats.

Thanks for sharing man. I use WordPress for my LP's, so I cant exactly keep copies. I have setup database backups at the moment. I track the changes I made using labels for pages.

Thanks for the kind words guys. Stats coming up soon

 

[azgold]

Love this! Great follow along, Captain.

You seem to roll with the punches admirably and take a lesson from each obstacle. Can't see how you can avoid being successful the way you're going.

Re getting a VPS, that has been stressed to me here in the forums on more than one occasion. I haven't done it yet, still with HostGator...which makes me nervous after reading about your problems with them.

Congrats on your profitable campaign. I'm sure there'll be many more to follow.

 

[captain47]

Love this! Great follow along, Captain.

You seem to roll with the punches admirably and take a lesson from each obstacle. Can't see how you can avoid being successful the way you're going.

Re getting a VPS, that has been stressed to me here in the forums on more than one occasion. I haven't done it yet, still with HostGator...which makes me nervous after reading about your problems with them.

Congrats on your profitable campaign. I'm sure there'll be many more to follow.

Yeah, apparently HG was sold to EIG group: The Endurance Brands | Endurance International Group and ever since that happened things were down the drain.

I have created a final list of VPS / cloud providers to choose from. Beyond Host and Liquid Web is what everyone recommends, but they are pricy for me at the moment. If you are interested check out Digital Ocean and Cloud Ways. Cloud ways is based on Digital Ocean servers, and they have a free 30 day trial (no cc!) to test things out.

Thanks for the kind supportive words mate. I just have to make it this time.

 

[captain47]

A note on choosing offers: As posted on another thread, but copying it here as a note to self for future.

In my experience so far, its really hard to find profit with low paying and anti-virus offers. Decisive guys just plainly told me that many of their placements wont even accept antivirus ads.

Also, do not always trust your AM when it comes to picking an offer. If you ask him/her "Hey do you have a CPI offer recommendation for me" and if he replies instantly "Sure, go with this".. Then don't! He probably gives that out to every guy who asks him.

Ask him to give you a list of top 20 CPI offers from the network based on volume and then pick the ones that have a payout of at least 0.75$.

My logic is, the effort required to make a person install an App is more or less the same. So stick to the ones with the higher payout. Man, trust me when I say this, I have spent hours working with low payout offers with no success and then one day I was browsing around my aff network and searched for CPI offers, sorted the list and picked one that pays well, talked to my Aff man about it and went with it and now its profitable. I just need to figure out how to scale at this point.

*Captain is ready for his day*

 

[sleenirvana]

Not really payout has nothing to do with profits. There's a reason why they are paying you less, because its easier to convert. ( they are not stupid, when they are pricing the payouts ) The highest converting offer in my network is a b-saver global and has a very low payout. Its about how good it converts and how scalable an offer is.

 

[captain47]

Not really payout has nothing to do with profits. There's a reason why they are paying you less, because its easier to convert. ( they are not stupid, when they are pricing the payouts ) The highest converting offer in my network is a b-saver global and has a very low payout. Its about how good it converts and how scalable an offer is.

I get your point, but I disagree when you say payouts has nothing to do with profits. At least based on my little experience that's not true, and I could be wrong.

Payouts depends on how easy an offer can convert. Yes. But it also depends on how deep the pocket of the client is. Look at the payouts of the apps owned by Facebook for instance.

Payouts also depend on how new the offer is. As the offer gets old, the payouts go down. Maybe that's because the offer is converting so well and its proven. But as a newbie, its harder to work with that offer at that point because, the ones who are making money have already optimized their campaigns and have found the best converting combo of bids, LP's, banners and traffic sources.

Another reason to stay away from low payout offers is the newbie competition. Somehow everyone starts at the lower end and work their way up.

Just because an offer is high converting doesn't mean that you can figure it out. I worked on the Du Battery saver offer, maybe not long enough but I couldn't figure it out: Not Enough Data v/s Not Enough Spend. How To Proceed? | Affiliate Marketing Forum | AffiliateFix

Maybe someday I will see your point. But as of now, too low payout means you have to find conversions instantly or you are gonna lose money and probably never turn it into a profit.

 

[azgold]

Yeah, apparently HG was sold to EIG group: The Endurance Brands | Endurance International Group and ever since that happened things were down the drain.

I have created a final list of VPS / cloud providers to choose from. Beyond Host and Liquid Web is what everyone recommends, but they are pricy for me at the moment. If you are interested check out Digital Ocean and Cloud Ways. Cloud ways is based on Digital Ocean servers, and they have a free 30 day trial (no cc!) to test things out.

Thanks for the kind supportive words mate. I just have to make it this time.

Interesting...I didn't know that HG sold. Just great! I purchased a 3 year plan in 2013.

Thanks for the VPS info. I've seen so many recommendations but I have 2 probs: 1. Can't afford much 2. I haven't the faintest idea how to use one, I don't even understand what I read beneath package options. Hence, I haven't purchased one.

 

[azgold]

Question I just thought of: Captain, do you think HG throttled you? Or it was just one of those things - lack of resources/incompetence/whatever.

 

[captain47]

Interesting...I didn't know that HG sold. Just great! I purchased a 3 year plan in 2013.

Thanks for the VPS info. I've seen so many recommendations but I have 2 probs: 1. Can't afford much 2. I haven't the faintest idea how to use one, I don't even understand what I read beneath package options. Hence, I haven't purchased one.

Definitely check out Cloud ways then, they have plans that start at 5$ a month and you can install stuff in a few clicks and you do not need to learn or understand commands.

I was on a two year plan for HG too, actually bought it on the black Friday of 2012. Lucky for me, they only had two year on offer at that time, every other year they had three. So it expires this month.

Question I just thought of: Captain, do you think HG throttled you? Or it was just one of those things - lack of resources/incompetence/whatever.

To be honest, I do not know what your question exactly means, but from what I read online they were migrating to a cheaper server when everything went down. And in terms of load speed, now that I am on a trial of Cloud ways, I notice a massive difference. So in a way HG did throttle me.

 

[azgold]

You answered my question the way I meant it.

Thx for the info re Cloud Ways. I'm going to investigate it.

 

[sleenirvana]

Ohh u used decisive and you direct linked it. For that offer my average conversion was 6-8% at 50% roi for months ( i only did 1 geo). Im staying away from decisive, its crap.

Thats the thing with newbies, they give up really easily. Just because one traffic source is not working, doesn't mean thats a bad offer. I 90% of the time will use a lp.

Speed booster is by baidu- Baidu is the google of china; their pockets are deep

Once you say lose money, your already at a wrong mindset. Sorry to be so straightforward.

 

[captain47]

Ohh u used decisive and you direct linked it. For that offer my average conversion was 6-8% at 50% roi for months ( i only did 1 geo). Im staying away from decisive, its crap.

Thats the thing with newbies, they give up really easily. Just because one traffic source is not working, doesn't mean thats a bad offer. I 90% of the time will use a lp.

Speed booster is by baidu- Baidu is the google of china; their pockets are deep

Once you say lose money, your already at a wrong mindset. Sorry to be so straightforward.

Thanks for your straightforwardness. I am working my way up, I will come back to it at a later stage

 

[captain47]

So the offer that was profitable for me got withdrawn from my network. Paused for now at least.
Back to square one. But this time with more experience.

I can feel the competition, an offer I am running reaches its cap before mid-day. That's 400 leads before lunch!

Also, I just found out that my network withdrew another campaign that I was running just so that they could make it exclusive to an affiliate. Because he is doing volume. I should have been that guy.

 

[internalsoul]

Don't worry captain, soon you will be that guy.

 

[captain47]

Don't worry captain, soon you will be that guy.

Woot! I see the Dojo tag!

 

[internalsoul]

Woot! I see the Dojo tag!

Yeah.Got it yesterday

 

[azgold]

So the offer that was profitable for me got withdrawn from my network. Paused for now at least.
Back to square one. But this time with more experience.

I can feel the competition, an offer I am running reaches its cap before mid-day. That's 400 leads before lunch!

Also, I just found out that my network withdrew another campaign that I was running just so that they could make it exclusive to an affiliate. Because he is doing volume. I should have been that guy.

If you continue to reach your cap before lunch, you will be that guy.

 

[captain47]

I launched 3 more campaigns this week and results were pretty much the same as before. I realized I have been throwing a lot of crap onto the wall hoping something would stick. Even found something that might stick. But that's not the way to do it.

I have switched to an analysis / learning mode. Stopped all campaigns and am reading Ca$hvertising. Will probably come back with some new ideas soon.

 

[sleenirvana]

AM is throwing shyt against the wall and hoping ti sticks LOL. Thats why people have 10k budget a day on testing.

 

[captain47]

Nothing earth shattering happening at my end. I read up on a lot of material that Dr NGO recommended. Then got back to drawing board with a new campaign.

I am testing out what I learned. Testing out new Landing Page designs and layouts.