Ready set go! A Beginners Journey

[davesev]

After about a month of research into affiliate marketing, my impatience has finally gotten the better of me, and I am about to jump head first into my first affiliate offer.

Whether the offer I have chosen is going to make money I can only hope and pray.

First registering on clickbank, there seemed to be the most tutorials and guides available. Many of the other affiliate sites suggested here were difficult to get into and my impatience got the better of me.

I picked an offer and registered some domains on namecheap and hosting with bluehost, I was comfortable at the prices.

After playing around with photoshop and Dreamweaver, I realized I knew too little about this to create sites from scratch, so I signed up for unbounce 30 day trial.

The price tag made me gasp. Even though I have 30 days, am I going to be able to make a profit by then?

Then I signed up for AWeber, another "must have tool".

I am planning on signing up for Google analytics tomorrow and another tracker (one with a 30 day trial).

At this point I am wondering if I will be able to generate enough money through affiliate marketing to pay all these expenses and traffic before my 30 day trials expire.

There are many others who appear to be doing it, I just hope and pray I can work it all out in 30 days.

I have received invaluable advice on this forum and I thank those who have helped for their participation.

I will hopefully have 3 landing pages for the same offer ready in a few days and begin buying traffic.

If there is any interest in this journey I will continue to update!

 

[Dr. Forum]

It is a good thing that you have decided to post here. The habit or the post will always keep you in a check from time to time. I will say that for you to succeed, most of the things you have done, research work. You, however, need to be committed always and persist in everything that you are doing. As much as we have money, you need to work harder.

 

[davesev]

It is a good thing that you have decided to post here. The habit or the post will always keep you in a check from time to time. I will say that for you to succeed, most of the things you have done, research work. You, however, need to be committed always and persist in everything that you are doing. As much as we have money, you need to work harder.

Thanks for the support I will double my efforts!

 

[game333]

What's your goal, you didn't mention at all on your original post?

 

[TonyB]

Glad to see another person taking their first steps but.... aweber, trackers, etc.... do you need all this?
I might be wrong, but I would be looking to keep it lean as possible?

 

[davesev]

What's your goal, you didn't mention at all on your original post?

Originally my goal was to begin an email list, but I didn't have a niche, only a product. So I have now backed off from that and am investigating traffic sources to match with an affiliate product.

I have been a bit confused about the direction of this process.

So my new goal is to be able to get CPA clicks direct through the product.

I am working on setting up an adsbridge tracker which is a bit confusing as to what tokens I need and how to set it up before I start spending money on traffic.

 

[davesev]

Glad to see another person taking their first steps but.... aweber, trackers, etc.... do you need all this?
I might be wrong, but I would be looking to keep it lean as possible?

Yes I have realized as much. So many articles videos etc seem to imply the first place to start is an email list. Maybe once you able to actually place an ad and get some commission, but until then it's too much.

So yes Im going to try only getting some clicks through to the sales page and hopefully receive some commission.

After that I will look at enhancing the process with landing pages, email optin...

It was a bit of a mental setback but I think I have got a better plan now.

 

[TonyB]

I dont want to rain on your parade, you're motivated and doing something, so hats off to you - but it all seems a little chaotic to me.
If you read some of the follow alongs here, (Servando, @comegetbravo, and CMA for example) there is a clear plan.
I don't know your situation, but I hate to see people wasting money when they don't need to.

Tell me to mind my own business, but I would suggest applying the brakes for second and just really firm up what your plan is....
Where is the traffic coming from (instead of just hoping for clicks?)
Is this traffic right for the offer and vice versa? Speak to an account manager.
How is the offer performing? What can you expect?

I have been in your mindset myself, and you grab anything and everything and just hope something sticks. But one thing that stuck with me is @cashmoneyaffiliate follow along where he decided on one vertical, one traffic and source and made it work. You're learning a craft, a trade. When you train to be a chef, you don't learn to make the whole menu from day one. You move from technique to technique, dish to dish, station to station.

 

[Zach AdsBridge]

Originally my goal was to begin an email list, but I didn't have a niche, only a product. So I have now backed off from that and am investigating traffic sources to match with an affiliate product.

I have been a bit confused about the direction of this process.

So my new goal is to be able to get CPA clicks direct through the product.

I am working on setting up an adsbridge tracker which is a bit confusing as to what tokens I need and how to set it up before I start spending money on traffic.

Hello!

I'm glad to see that you'rse using Adsbridge! If you have any general questions on tracking, feel free to contact me here. If your questions are technical, you may reach out to our support team at support@adsbridge.com !

Good luck!

-Zach

 

[davesev]

So I have got an offer and a tracker, however when I test my link, (its a clickbank product) it includes my clickbank nickname in the URL. e.g. www.zzzzz.com/?hop=davesev

How do I remove the davesev from showing when people click on the offer link?

Also Zack, what are domains in adsbridge? The tutorial video seems to say they should be different for each offer? (I am doing direct linking at the moment so there was a default one there which seemed to be standard?)

 

[Dr. Forum]

I dont want to rain on your parade, you're motivated and doing something, so hats off to you - but it all seems a little chaotic to me.
If you read some of the follow alongs here, (Servando, @comegetbravo, and CMA for example) there is a clear plan.
I don't know your situation, but I hate to see people wasting money when they don't need to.

Tell me to mind my own business, but I would suggest applying the brakes for second and just really firm up what your plan is....
Where is the traffic coming from (instead of just hoping for clicks?)
Is this traffic right for the offer and vice versa? Speak to an account manager.
How is the offer performing? What can you expect?

I have been in your mindset myself, and you grab anything and everything and just hope something sticks. But one thing that stuck with me is @cashmoneyaffiliate follow along where he decided on one vertical, one traffic and source and made it work. You're learning a craft, a trade. When you train to be a chef, you don't learn to make the whole menu from day one. You move from technique to technique, dish to dish, station to station.

TonyB you have for sure spoken a lot of sense in your post. It is very important that we have a plan which directs us on what we need to do. When we do not have plans in the activities we want to do, there are very minimal chances that they will sail through. Planning will give us an opportunity to cross-check and measure the place we are at after begging a journey.

 

[davesev]

TonyB you have for sure spoken a lot of sense in your post. It is very important that we have a plan which directs us on what we need to do. When we do not have plans in the activities we want to do, there are very minimal chances that they will sail through. Planning will give us an opportunity to cross-check and measure the place we are at after begging a journey.

Yes but I have to start somewhere and the only way to learn is trying and making mistakes (or if I am lucky enough to read about the mistakes and learn). I have to start somewhere...

I worked out the clickbank link is associated with my nickname - so a new nickname should fix this mistake learned.

 

[game333]

Originally my goal was to begin an email list, but I didn't have a niche, only a product. So I have now backed off from that and am investigating traffic sources to match with an affiliate product.

I have been a bit confused about the direction of this process.

So my new goal is to be able to get CPA clicks direct through the product.

I am working on setting up an adsbridge tracker which is a bit confusing as to what tokens I need and how to set it up before I start spending money on traffic.

Pretend yourself a salesman and introduce your customer the product like the selling points etc.
Or simply tweak the selling point from the clickbank sales page.

Like 3 ways to grow tall with my recipe(I don't know any creative title for this.)

Okay, now assume you're using this angle to promote but think, what kinda of traffic source would work with this?

Pick one traffic that you believe your angle will sell.

 

[Delyte]

This is a great idea and I'm very interested in the journey.

However, I think with the mass of 30-day trials you're setting yourself up for failure. As I mentioned in the adplexity thread, which seems to be overall an absolutely fantastic tool, the $149 monthly pricetag is just far too much to justify for someone (aka myself) who is just getting started in affiliate marketing. Learning to break even takes time on its own, making money consistently is a whole other step. I'd venture a guess and say most people aren't consistently profitable in their first 30 days. So to be successful AND keep the use of all these tools, you've not only got to break even, but you've got to earn the monthly cost of all these trials summed up AT LEAST just to break even. Even if you manage to pull off that miracle, you probably wont consistently.

On the other hand, if you just break even, or even worse, lose money, you're going to automatically view your entire month as a failed experiment, especially given that you used hundreds of dollars worth of tools. I also think you're wasting these free trials if you can't use these tools to their full potential. There are probably ways to get a 2nd trial if you really need it for most things, but it probably requires a different card, and possibly changes to your computer's ID, but just like split testing your ad campaigns, you should be testing just as thoroughly new software. To thoroughly test the effectiveness of software you need some past performance (or possibly future) to compare to that didn't use the software, calculate the effectiveness, and decide if it's worth it. This is just made even harder by running 10 different trials at once. Additionally, if you haven't used these tools before, just learning the tools themselves takes time, sometimes weeks or even a full 30 days to use it effectively, and trying to do that with 10 new tools is not going to be easy. At best by the end of 30 days you've learned to use a handful of tools effectively, but your performance up to that point wont be representative of its potential.

I think you should take a step back and really consider what tools you need. For getting started, I'd try to not use any free trials at all, but if you do, limit it to one or two things, ideally cheap things. However, if you have the money to spend in experimenting with marketing software very early on, then perhaps it's not such a bad idea, but if you're like me, who has a budget of exactly $0 to work with, starting out with large expenses is not going to be a good idea. There's plenty of free tools out there for pretty much everything you might need. You might not get all the features you want, but usually with time and research you can at least partially make up that difference. So unless you have lots of disposable income to spend on this little 30-day experiment, I suggest you rethink your approach, or at the very least, make sure you set your expectations accordingly.

Just be cognisant of your situation. Your approach just screams to me that of somebody who is coming at affiliate marketing hard and fast and expects it to just work or not. I just hope this doesn't mean that your interest in it dies as quickly as you dove in. It takes patience to learn how to be a consistently effective Affiliate, so I just hope you realize that regardless of the outcome of your 30 days, you'll still have room to improve.

I'm also new to affiliate marketing and am starting now, but my approach is very different. Because my budget is exactly $0 (well not exactly, I bought a domain and hosting, that's all, cost me about $30 for 1yr), I'm focused on traffic I can get for free. Using my programming (and piracy) skills I've managed to automate Pinterest/Tumblr/Instagram (working on Facebook/Twitter) and after about 2 weeks have a combined ~2700 followers I can reach through automated posts. I've become an Amazon affiliate and started developing a basic site. I'm currently working on building an Amazon-based shop attached to the site, and once I get that up and a few pieces of core content, I'll start directing followers to my site, as well as hoping to get some organic traffic from Google and other search engines from doing some keyword research. I did some keyword research to find some good, low competition keywords to target in my niche once I get to that point.

Eventually I hope to make a couple hundred dollars per month on my site with a combination of social media traffic and search traffic that I can use to expand my budget to work on paid traffic stuff. Once I get to that point, I'll consider adding tools to my arsenal as well.

 

[davesev]

This is a great idea and I'm very interested in the journey.

However, I think with the mass of 30-day trials you're setting yourself up for failure. As I mentioned in the adplexity thread, which seems to be overall an absolutely fantastic tool, the $149 monthly pricetag is just far too much to justify for someone (aka myself) who is just getting started in affiliate marketing. Learning to break even takes time on its own, making money consistently is a whole other step. I'd venture a guess and say most people aren't consistently profitable in their first 30 days. So to be successful AND keep the use of all these tools, you've not only got to break even, but you've got to earn the monthly cost of all these trials summed up AT LEAST just to break even. Even if you manage to pull off that miracle, you probably wont consistently.

On the other hand, if you just break even, or even worse, lose money, you're going to automatically view your entire month as a failed experiment, especially given that you used hundreds of dollars worth of tools. I also think you're wasting these free trials if you can't use these tools to their full potential. There are probably ways to get a 2nd trial if you really need it for most things, but it probably requires a different card, and possibly changes to your computer's ID, but just like split testing your ad campaigns, you should be testing just as thoroughly new software. To thoroughly test the effectiveness of software you need some past performance (or possibly future) to compare to that didn't use the software, calculate the effectiveness, and decide if it's worth it. This is just made even harder by running 10 different trials at once. Additionally, if you haven't used these tools before, just learning the tools themselves takes time, sometimes weeks or even a full 30 days to use it effectively, and trying to do that with 10 new tools is not going to be easy. At best by the end of 30 days you've learned to use a handful of tools effectively, but your performance up to that point wont be representative of its potential.

I think you should take a step back and really consider what tools you need. For getting started, I'd try to not use any free trials at all, but if you do, limit it to one or two things, ideally cheap things. However, if you have the money to spend in experimenting with marketing software very early on, then perhaps it's not such a bad idea, but if you're like me, who has a budget of exactly $0 to work with, starting out with large expenses is not going to be a good idea. There's plenty of free tools out there for pretty much everything you might need. You might not get all the features you want, but usually with time and research you can at least partially make up that difference. So unless you have lots of disposable income to spend on this little 30-day experiment, I suggest you rethink your approach, or at the very least, make sure you set your expectations accordingly.

Just be cognisant of your situation. Your approach just screams to me that of somebody who is coming at affiliate marketing hard and fast and expects it to just work or not. I just hope this doesn't mean that your interest in it dies as quickly as you dove in. It takes patience to learn how to be a consistently effective Affiliate, so I just hope you realize that regardless of the outcome of your 30 days, you'll still have room to improve.

I'm also new to affiliate marketing and am starting now, but my approach is very different. Because my budget is exactly $0 (well not exactly, I bought a domain and hosting, that's all, cost me about $30 for 1yr), I'm focused on traffic I can get for free. Using my programming (and piracy) skills I've managed to automate Pinterest/Tumblr/Instagram (working on Facebook/Twitter) and after about 2 weeks have a combined ~2700 followers I can reach through automated posts. I've become an Amazon affiliate and started developing a basic site. I'm currently working on building an Amazon-based shop attached to the site, and once I get that up and a few pieces of core content, I'll start directing followers to my site, as well as hoping to get some organic traffic from Google and other search engines from doing some keyword research. I did some keyword research to find some good, low competition keywords to target in my niche once I get to that point.

Eventually I hope to make a couple hundred dollars per month on my site with a combination of social media traffic and search traffic that I can use to expand my budget to work on paid traffic stuff. Once I get to that point, I'll consider adding tools to my arsenal as well.

Thanks for the detailed response and you 100% correct. I really am groping around in the dark looking for what I can get to work and what doesn't.

I have abandoned trying to build an email list and put AWeber and my bluehost on hold.

I have decided to take 1 clickbank add with a decent gravity and landing page (I found 1 that the direct link goes to a capture name and email instead of direct to "buy here").

My traffic

I signed up for clixsense to try and drive traffic from there. It's simple and cheap, and even though the traffic is not great traffic, I learned really cheaply about how to target. I signed up for 28 dollars worth (a few thousand clicks), submitted my ad and it's running at the moment.

You need to indicate upfront how much and for how long the ad will run, Eg I tried worldwide for 15 sec views for 1000 clicks.

Immediately I saw that most of my traffic was coming trough from Russia and the Ukraine (about 20% each). The ad is in English so this is clearly a mistake I can optimize.

I have now set up a new smaller set for English speaking countries, for a 30sec for 500 clicks to see if there is any difference.

At this point I am looking to see if I can get 1 conversion in the whole campaign in order to try optimize the ad copy or optimize countries. If not I may abandon this offer completely and perhaps try a completely different traffic source and abandon clixsense altogether and move over to more traditional traffic such as 7search.

I will let you know if i manage to get a conversion.

 

[davesev]

So reporting back... no conversions

But it was a good experience learning. First ad headline and copy, first targeting, first tracking (although the tracking didnt tell me much since no conversions).

for this product... Take Surveys For Cash!

Here was my ad:

So I guess it was not as good as I thought it was

I figured clixsense is people looking to make money online, the product tells them how to make more money online but i guess they really are not interested in the ads there.. or maybe i did not spend enough money on their traffic. either way it seems it would serve me better to start with a more traditional CPP.

The top members of this forum recommend 7search but I have not seen anyone reporting a profit on them so I am hesitant. Can anyone suggest another beginners traffic source?

Should I start with a landing page? I would prefer a direct offer since it will allow me to focus on the actual ad, instead of buying hosting, domains, trying to set up and create a landing page, but if that is recommended I will focus on that.

I have been accepted to peerfly, and if anyone can help me with some tips on selecting an offer and how to proceed I would be most grateful.

I'm trying not to let this experience be too much of a dampener so the best thing I think is to move onwards and upwards!

 

[Delyte]

Every time you run a campaign you should be running at least 2 campaigns, probably 3-4 split tests. Each run should be testing something different. Perhaps in the beginning, just try a few completely different ad versions, and pick one that works decent. After you pick one, try changing the color scheme of the ad and choose between the best of ~2-4. After that, try different fonts, same thing. Ultimately it's this process which gets you to a profitable campaign.

You should absolutely have a landing page in my opinion. Primarily for list building purposes, but even if you aren't building a list yet (you should figure this step out though, I haven't gotten to this point yet because I'm not doing paid traffic yet, but I imagine you can probably do it fairly easily for free as long as you dont have thousands of names), you want to be able to promote the product before you send them to the offer page. Most importantly, this also gives you more feedback about your campaign. You can try variations of your landers, and you can see how many people are making micro commitments (aka putting in their email address) so this tells you more about when your campaign is working/failing. For example, if a bunch of people enter their email address and read your lander page to go to the offer page, you can tell that it's probably the offer that's failing you. However if they just aren't entering their email address at all, your ad or the email entry screen probably need work.

split testing is probably the most important aspect of running campaigns with paid traffic. If you don't do split testing, you're not going to be consistently profitable unless you get really, really lucky. You should expect that you wont get any conversions, or at least very limited, until you at least distill a few things from split testing.

Just a piece of advice on your ad, it seems too wordy, most people won't read that. Perhaps make it something like "Make $50 in 10 minutes with just 1 survey!"

 

[davesev]

Every time you run a campaign you should be running at least 2 campaigns, probably 3-4 split tests. Each run should be testing something different. Perhaps in the beginning, just try a few completely different ad versions, and pick one that works decent. After you pick one, try changing the color scheme of the ad and choose between the best of ~2-4. After that, try different fonts, same thing. Ultimately it's this process which gets you to a profitable campaign.

You should absolutely have a landing page in my opinion. Primarily for list building purposes, but even if you aren't building a list yet (you should figure this step out though, I haven't gotten to this point yet because I'm not doing paid traffic yet, but I imagine you can probably do it fairly easily for free as long as you dont have thousands of names), you want to be able to promote the product before you send them to the offer page. Most importantly, this also gives you more feedback about your campaign. You can try variations of your landers, and you can see how many people are making micro commitments (aka putting in their email address) so this tells you more about when your campaign is working/failing. For example, if a bunch of people enter their email address and read your lander page to go to the offer page, you can tell that it's probably the offer that's failing you. However if they just aren't entering their email address at all, your ad or the email entry screen probably need work.

split testing is probably the most important aspect of running campaigns with paid traffic. If you don't do split testing, you're not going to be consistently profitable unless you get really, really lucky. You should expect that you wont get any conversions, or at least very limited, until you at least distill a few things from split testing.

Just a piece of advice on your ad, it seems too wordy, most people won't read that. Perhaps make it something like "Make $50 in 10 minutes with just 1 survey!"

Thanks for the response.

Many of the offers seem to already have a landing page capturing email addresses e.g. As per the offer above.

Even browsing through Peerfly many of these already have landing pages. Should I be looking at offers without a landing page? Will users fill out multiple emails on multiple Landing pages before getting to the offer?

Thanks for the response,
Dave

 

[davesev]

So after reworking my angle, I have now got a landing page almost ready to go.

I have also been accepted into MaxBounty and they have many more offers in the vertical I am hoping to promote. Hopefully I will start seeing some results soon!

I still need to do keyword research and try and run some ads so lets see what happens!

 

[davesev]

My first real campaign has started.

A landing page (Thank you @K and the Dojo), with tracking, using Bing Ads. I have set my budget at $5 per day to try and see if the ads/landing page/offers work and am testing multiple offers (5 offers all in the same vertical) with 5 ads with mostly the same keywords but different ad titles.

Hopefully I'll get some clicks and maybe even a conversion.