Long Time Affiliate, Finally Making Push to $100/day Consistently

[Fliiby]

This is why I personaly don't like CPA campaigns when it comes to paid advertising it sounds good and 2 good to be true but you always have to have few thousand $$$ to lose before you can make some money.
I never managed to make campaign that was profitable.. I was always in -

 

[artie7]

Fliiby,

Since you stopped doing CPA, have you found another way to earn $$ online?

 

[Maxin]

Fliiby,
Based on my research, CPA is one of the best avenues for making money online. Most of my campaigns have been weak efforts - just direct linking - and still I have gotten a few conversions. There are loads of members in this forum that have proven results where they are making four to six figures per month from CPA offers, even after they work it for a few months.

I have successfully promoted several different forms of affiliate offers including a lot of Clickbank products, major membership dating sites, hard goods, and financial offers. All of these offers required a substantial payment by the end user before I would get payed. It took a significant amount of work to get these full payment offers to convert. My sites that sold these items required loads of original, high value content plus a lot of effort to drive traffic.

CPA campaigns can be as simple as direct linking from a decent traffic source to start getting conversions. You probably won't do great or get profitable, but you may well get conversions. Once you learn the art and science of creating good landers, picking the right traffic for the offer, and tracking well, CPA offers can roll in the numbers. Someone who knows what they are doing - like several members here: CPAExpert, CashMoneyAffiliate, etc. - can set up a potentially very profitable campaign very quickly in hours to days depending on what templates they have. Try that with the full payment offers - extremely challenging.

One of my long term affiliate offers uses videos to drive traffic. The videos take a while to put together and there is next to nothing I can to scale the campaign quickly. Again, CPA offers allow scaling almost as fast as your campaigns get approved.

I am pushing through with CPA offers while continuing to run my other SEO and authority affiliate offers to keep in that game a little. CPA is my future though...

My $10 worth

 

[Fliiby]

Hey Maxin, I know that CPA works and I said you have to have big budget if you want to do it and stay in +
I run facebook/google/bing campaigns for our website and I made more then 20.000 conversions (user aquisition) and got to the point where conversion is about 0.40$ but I had to test a lot of things before I managed to put it down to that number from 1-2$..

artie7 - yes it seams that I'm one of founders of a company

I have been working online for 16 Years now and made money in every possible way that exists
CPA was not my strong side (CPA for other peoples products) tested multiple networks always ended being in - as I said in previous post.
Last time I tried CPA was 4-5 years a go, maybe things changed..

 

[Maxin]

Hey Fliiby,
Quite an interesting background you have. Your business/site looks amazing!

Yeah..if you have your own product or site like you do, that is the best way to go.
While I have made money with my own products (wrote some books for Amazon, one that reached #4 in Economics/Finance about Bitcoin...but not really much money out of it), I like the scalability of CPA offers, plus the challenge.

Even though I am not yet successful with this business, I am definitely getting better each day. Soon enough I will get campaigns to turn the corner into profitability. At least that is what I keep saying to myself with every new deposit for ads..

Back to my journey...busy day. I added another page to my main site using a nice template from Thrive Content Builder. Saved me hours of building out a site. Focused on adding content that can drive conversions for a very good offer.

I shifted focus off of one of my dating offers even while I am keeping my ads running because the niche is much smaller and I am challenged to get targeted traffic for the offer. With this new page and the good offer there is plenty of traffic. Or at least there was before...now when I turned my ads back on, the traffic slowed to a dribble.

Frustrating.

At least the small dribble of traffic, less than 1/10 the volume I was getting with the same ads, same kws, same budget, is showing that page appears to convert. 50% of the visitors are clicking through. Now I have to rework something to get the numbers up - way up. I need at least 100 targeted visitors per day to get something good to happen on this offer. And there is plenty of opportunity with it. Essentially unlimited.

My next step:
Get the traffic up by changing out ads, adding more keywords, possibly adding another network -going to wait a few days before I do that.
Continuing to add conversion factors to all my pages.
By tomorrow I expect to have the traffic issue on the way to being solved, plus have some solid conversion factors in place to get to profitability.

 

[Maxin]

Had to jump back and report on my improved results.

I tweaked my Bing campaign, created a new ad with a crazy angle...plus turned on a few options and suddenly I got flooded with traffic in Bing terms..not like PPV "traffic" but targeted, search driven traffic. My page is sending about 50% of the visitors to the offers, but only getting about 10% to convert at the offer. Better than before!

Looks like I might have resolved the traffic challenge allowing me to focus more on pre-selling with my landing page. I am thrilled to get by the traffic hurdle so far.

My landing page on my authority site is convincing enough to get a click but I must not be pre-selling well enough to get the form filled out. At least for 90% of the visitors. Still too early to tell without more data.
I am going to let the ads run over night, ponder pre-sell ideas for the site and then upgrade my landing page with something..
I have a few angles that might improve things.

Thus far my new ads have cost me about $6.00 and received $1.95 in commission.

NEWSFLASH NEWSFLASH NEWSFLASH!!!!

Just rechecked my affiliate network with the greatest affiliate manager on the planet - Rob at EnvyusMedia...
and SCORE! 3 conversions in the last few minutes..

HOLLLLYYYYMOLLLYYYYY!!!

This is what I have been dreaming of !!

While I am a nowhere near a major score, the upward trend is great!!!

Based on my kw bids and my conversion rates, here is the road to profitability for me:

33 clicks on ads (about 25 clicks in maybe 15 minutes..huge traffic for me on bing) at an average of about 0.18/click (Cost) = $5.94
14 visitors reach an offer
3 conversions at the offer at $1.95
Payout (P) = $5.85
Net = P-C = -$0.09
Getting close to pushing into positive territory!

Now, were I a super pro affiliate, here is what I would do as my next step...

I would quickly check all the conversions for the kws used to trigger the ads in my completely dialed in tracking system. Then up my bids on those kws and score more conversions in theory, while lowering my bids on the non-converting kws.

And I would be jumping on exactly that process, except for one minor detail (best said with a chinese accent!).
I did not use tracking links in the ads!!

For some reason I was getting flaky click data from Bevomedia, though it has a Bing template and showed previous data perfectly, and I never got AdsBridge to work right with Bing. So I went without tracking links...oh well.
Tomorrow I step up my game.

For anyone who is following along including Seeqer, Rob, Fliiby, TJtutor and others...thanks for sharing in the wild ride thus far. Tonight has been by far the most exciting.

I plan on making the next few days even more exciting as I crawl over the wall into profitability for the first time on my CPA journey!

 

[amamiya]

good program and journey!

 

[Maxin]

Thanks Amamiya! How is your affiliate journey going?

 

[Maxin]

What a blast the past 24 hours have been!

Yep..it is official! One of my campaigns has made it into the black or green

Using multiple offers on the same page miraculously worked! I have a total of $29.80 income and $21.00 spent on ads, including a day or two of outrageously high KW bids when Bing ignored my settings. No credit returned for it either...but all is forgiven now that the ads and kws are beginning to repay the mistake.

The current numbers look much better with about $9.75 in for $5.00 spent, but I am still shooting in the dark as far as tracking kws to conversions.

I worked on inserting the tracking tonight and have my plan worked out, ready for execution tomorrow. Using Bevo media I will get down to the kw level, along with location, and everything else relevant about who is converting and who is a wasted click.

Instead of inserting tracking tonight, I dialed in my campaign using geographic data on the conversions, plus tweaked my bidding.

Then..and this may or may not be a good thing...I pulled one of my offers and substituted another very strong offer, and added a call to action for it at the top of the page. It may work out great, or it may bite me. Will know tomorrow. All I do know is...tweaking for profit is super cool!

Not to forget about the first offer I was promoting, I reworked the page based on some things I learned from my now profitable campaign. I am expecting to get at least a few conversions from this campaign now. Considering the payout is roughly double and the kws cost about half, though traffic is much lower, it could be a strong ROI once I get it to convert.

My plan for tomorrow is:
1. Install tracking from ad through my lander to the conversion at the network. Will take me about 30 minutes to an hour to get that sorted.
2. Once I have the campaign tracking set-up, I am going to create a few new ads, including some dynamic text, then increase my bids to get more data. Right now my traffic has slowed down some because I dropped bids a bit. I will remedy that tomorrow. After I get about 50-100 clicks and roughly 15-30 conversions hopefully, I will then pounce on the performing kws with higher bids to get on the first page. The non-performing kws bids will get lowered.

and then..the moment I have been waiting for...

Once I get my ROI to around 200% ($30 out for every $10 in, or roughly double where I am at now), I will then scale my ad spend by about $10/day and see if the numbers hold.

The next step - a bit premature at this stage - is finding more traffic sources. I will have to add a lot of content to get into google's system, but I think I could get there with this site eventually. Just not too many search sites around with loads of volume other than Big G..might give 7search a try...then I will have to add mobile elements to the same campaign possibly.

Pushing to make tomorrow twice as good as today!

A reminder on getting over the rough patches, the challenges..

 

[Maxin]

Quick mid-day update before a late night post after changes..

One of my secondary offers on my newly profitable campaign got shut down suddenly.

My click through and conversion rates plummeted on my main offer after that happened. I think people just bounced out of the site or that it was out of date because of the bad link.

Spent a small load of money on traffic that did not convert...Bing must love me!

I have been rushing around looking for a replacement offer since my site needs a few offers to work. Finally found one and got the network to approve me.

AffiliateFix has been an amazing source of great contact and education..starting off of course with Rob from EnvyusMedia who is kind of like having the all knowing buddha of affiliate marketing kindly answering my questions and providing guidance on questions I had no idea to even ask!, plus Jake from MonsterAds, TJtutor, Fliiby, and many others that have popped in on this journey.

Also, Mobicow is the ad network I want to be successful with. I am going to work their platform night and day until I can get solid conversions going because they are a dream to work with..and I trust them. Did not even realize how involved they were with AffiliateFix until after I had been advertising with them!

Since I had to wait for approvals from replacement offers, I refocused on another offer and rewrote my main site. The writing seems to have helped as I got a quick conversion from just 4 visits.

Tonight, with the replacement offers, and tracking ready, I am going to reload my site up and turn on the traffic full blast to collect detailed data that I lacked before.

It might all be coming together!!

I have decided what I am going to do with my first check from Envyusmedia...join The Dojo on AffiliateFix!! Every single one of the high earners I have read about has that Dojo badge..and I already have seen such amazing value on the free side of AffiliateFix that if even half of what I have seen is available in The Dojo..then I need it!


More after my campaign update..

 

[JakeMA]

We look forward to working with you @Maxin give me a shout if you need any help

 

[Maxin]

@JakeMA - Thanks man for all the help already! Looking forward to working with you as well..

I worked late last night and early this morning on getting full tracking set up, then upping my bids somewhat on Bing.

Stopping the ads because of the canceled offer shut down my conversions, but I was able to get one conversion in just before midnight to keep my streak alive of at least a conversion per day!

Based on Roberts' advice, I upped my bids on Bing about 25% so I can collect some data. Detailed tracking tells me the kws, the clicks, the locations..almost everything I need to scale back on certain locations and kws, and scale up on the few conversions.

I only have one conversion this morning - not enough to know anything yet. By tomorrow - and somewhat poorer for the testing - I will hopefully have sufficient traffic and conversions to make the decisions.

Though I am tempted to ramp up fast once I have the converting kws, geos, etc. identified, I am going to follow Roberts advice and go slow! Already I have seen he was right about scaling up can often mean traffic quality drops significantly.

Reporting back after more data comes in..

Tonight I will add split testing landing pages to the campaign. I am seriously excited about this!! For some reason, I love testing for conversions whether I change graphics, or text, or anything..it is fascinating to me to see the changed behavior and potential profit from even small changes.

More to follow soon!

Looking forward to a double digit day! I know that is nothing for a lot of affiliates, but getting consistent conversions and beginning to scale them is a success marker for me...gotta celebrate the small hills climbed on the way up the mountain

 

[Maxin]

The day did not return the kind of results I wanted. My conversions dropped through the floor...and now i know why. Not only was there a bad offer, but somehow I had duplicated content on the site making it look untrustworthy. Found the error after I ran through most of my testing funds..oh well.

Also, I am not sure what is going on with Bevo media, but it missed one of my conversions today. Bizarre.

I added some conversion factors, modified ads, corrected the problems on the lander, and have the campaign running again. It looks like I will need at least another day of data before making decisions.

Am wiped out right now and calling it in early..

 

[Maxin]

Being completely OCD , I had to check my stats directly on Envyus before shutting down...after 3 visitors more visitors post repair and improvements, I got a conversion. So the old numbers I think will be improved. I expect that some of my conversion factors will help significantly but the data will tell me the truth.

My stats are:
44% of visitors from my ads click through my lander to the offer. Yes, I have high-fived myself!!
I was getting as high as 25% conversion of the visitors reaching the offer.
Today the pass through rate dropped, then the conversion rate plummeted to under 10%.

At 44%-25%, the math could work to be profitable again.

The trend is positive again..

 

[Maxin]

Made up for some lost ground last night and had my first double digit day from a CPA offer Enjoying the small victories...

My conversion factors paid off with over 50% click through from my landing page to the offer..I think it was closer to 65% but can't get the details out of Bevo Media so far on a daily basis. I am sure I can, but haven't yet. Also, Bevo's tracking is missing a lot of conversions - about 20%. Rob informed me that this is typical of a lot of trackers...another valuable lesson.

Tweaking ads on one of my offers because I have barely received any clicks for some reason...That trifecta of 1. being able to get targeted traffic at as low a ppc as possible 2) then getting a high click through rate on the lander 3) and getting a high conversion rate at the offer - is almost complete on one of the offers, but the most important step - #1 is my big hurdle on the other offer I am promoting.

My plan for tonight and the weekend:
1. Add my new logo to the sites.
2. Create more ads for all offers, plus find a new traffic source for the dead traffic offer.
3. Switch out some offers on my performing campaign..I think one of the offers is hurting all conversions.
4. Create a new campaign or two for some new offers from Envyus, MonsterAds, Clickdealer.

Going to be some late nights to get all of this done...but having this forum to share the journey with makes it much more interesting.

My goal next week is to get my formula down for my performing offer and scale it to $50/day profit. That will rock!

Here is me celebrating when I had my first double digit day:

 

[Maxin]

Worked until about 2:00 a.m. last night setting up a new campaign because I had made a commitment to @JakeMA that I would get the campaign rolling before I went to bed...and I got it going, but not all that well yet.

Getting up at 6:00 a.m. after working until 2:00 a.m., spending most of the day hiking because I had scheduled it with a group..left me in a toasted state when I got back. Lost time that I could have been improving my campaigns...
Only able to get a few hours in tonight, but I have noticed that even small changes that do not take long can lead to big improvements.

I have also been working hard on my other campaigns for @RobEnvyus including improving the sites significantly with a new logo and a few other things. The click through rate from lander to the offer continues to be strong...around 60%. Had the highest conversion day yet at 11 conversions...getting dialed in.

Chatted with Bing for over an hour on improving two of my campaigns because my traffic is too low for much activity.
A few good suggestions from Bing, including how to increase my quality score, but basically I need more ads, and better angles perhaps.

My focus now is to get all three campaigns from Envyus going with more traffic thanks to tweaks from Bing, improved quality scores, bigger KW lists, and possibly adding more traffic sources.
The next step, once I have driven sufficient traffic to those three campaigns with landers that pass through from 25%-60%, is to get my tracking working better. For some reason, Bevo media is dropping a huge percentage of conversions and clicks...has to be something I screwed up. A 30 minute cut and paste session will probably fix it.

Then I am going to dial in my new @JakeMA campaign much more...this one will require more content, better angles, and a slightly different landing page approach than I have been using, but I am excited about nailing it.

Probably able to get in about 4-5 hours of work tomorrow, enough time to get all of these tasks rolling. Looking for my most active campaign to hit about 18 conversions tomorrow, giving me a not too shabby 143% ROI.

If the numbers hold tomorrow for my most developed campaign for @RobEnvyus, then I have 3 more changes planned - already posted a new ad angle to test before I create the lander for that angle, then I will create 2 close landers to split test, and...this is a big one...begin capturing leads for email campaigns.

I really want to get to 200% ROI before I scale because I have seen that scaling seems to hurt ROI a bit. Not sure why that is, but I already experienced it.

Big days ahead, as I have made the lift off from $0/day to around $26/day...now going to $40/day, and probably over the $100/day soon once I enact all these changes..
That $100 day will be an exciting one for me...can't wait to share!

Thanks to all the readers, supporters like @seeqer and others...you are all helping me pursue and achieve my dream, and I appreciate it!

Focusing on my actions and the process, letting my goal take care of itself...just like this Pro Football Player (not the round ball kind ) talks about here:

 

[Maxin]

My traffic driving problems are greatly reduced now after my long consult with Bing. One of my lowest traffic campaigns now has about 6X the traffic previously. However, despite getting a lot more clicks to my ads and a reasonable 20% CTR from my lander to the offer, I did not get any conversions. This means I am not earning trust or providing a convincing reason for the visitor to follow through and enter the form.
I can solve conversion problems by changing angles, adding more value, and reducing all friction points. Getting the targeted traffic was my hard problem..and the challenge has shifted to a much easier problem. Solid progress. It will take me about an hour of tweaking on the lander, plus a rotator to split test, but I will get conversions going.

Odd happenings on my formerly profitable campaign. The click through rate from the ads, through my lander to the offer has plummeted to about 12% according to Envyus, but Bevo still has it at 60%...plus Bevo has credited me with a conversion that does not appear anywhere...things are getting strange.

My new offer for @JakeMA is getting much more traffic, but my lander needs work. It has to be much more loaded with convincers apparently because I have not gotten a great ctr and not one conversion.

Thankfully this week can be devoted to improving my landers because my traffic is flowing much better now...excellent news.

I also have a new angle/idea for one of the offers that @RobEnvyus provided me. I am going to have to code it in PHP/JavaScript and possibly using Ajax, but it could be a winner for driving much higher conversions...really only a fancy survey page, but it will be fun coding it.

This is the week for getting two campaigns to over 150% ROI...and getting another campaign to convert period!

More tomorrow night...when I may reveal my first coded page that I create from scratch!

 

[K]

Great follow along @Maxin and glad this forum and members on it are helping, a real example!

Make sure you post some stats and images of payment etc to keep things exciting!

 

[Maxin]

Thanks for the kind words @k !! I will start showing screen shots of earnings and some statistics...even though my numbers are much smaller than a lot of the affiliates here, at least for me it is exciting to see any $$ earned and seeing them grow daily!

One of my left for dead campaigns has surpassed my former #1 campaign in earnings today..and gone profitable. Go figure! It was all about getting more traffic. Finally I am getting traffic to burn through my budget.

I have several hours of client work today, then putting in a few more hours tweaking my landers, adding more kws and more ads for targeted traffic.

Also going to redo the lander for the campaign from @JakeMA and get it performing. Had to shut down my ads because I wasn't getting any conversions yet, and sparse traffic. Another minor hill to climb

A quick recap of my journey so far:

Journey Really Started July 24 - Once @RobEnvyus contacted me.
$0 income from CPA offers

Daily income is up from $0 when I started to consistent double figures from $10 to as high as $30/day
While $30/day does not sound like much, it can total to $900/month or a nice car payment

My ad expenses early on exceeded the conversion payments, but now two of the campaigns appear to be positive most of the time. Occasionally I will get really high conversion rates around 25-35% from visitors hitting the landing page to the offer, and then they will plunge to 10% or slightly below. Somewhat of a mystery right now.

I have viewed the money lost (about $120 in ads) as part of my educational expense for getting good at CPA offers.

Most of my other affiliate campaigns required more time to get traffic because I used organic methods mostly. They were slow to get rolling, but performed decently over time. The problem was, I could not scale my campaigns because I depended on organic SEO type traffic. In the payed world, I can scale in a day...a beautiful thing.

@RobEnvyus told me one of my offers is pausing..in a rush to find a replacement because he gave a high converting offer!
Will sort something out I am sure...as I mentioned in my previous post, I am building the most advanced landing page/ high value survey for visitors I have ever attempted. I think it will send conversions through the rough, but I need that great offer to make it work. Ahh...the fun wild changing world of affiliate marketing!!

 

[Maxin]

Have layed low on upgrading my current landers because I was swamped with client work - helping them increase conversions on their web offers

@RobEnvyus set me up with a great offer to help me replace the one that paused. Though this in a vertical I am completely clueless about, the offer seems to be fantastic - so I am direct linking, full tracking through Bevo (which I call Drunken Bevo because it both loses conversions and invents them routinely) with 3 ads to test potential conversions.

Will get busy with my landing page upgrade plans on @JakeMA's offer tomorrow, plus two other offers from Envyus.

Can't wait to run traffic through the upgraded landers. The great news is that now I can get about as much traffic as I want - all of it targeted at reasonable PPC's. Now to focus on creating a landing experience that results in conversions...