I'm not very good a following through with these sort of blogging endevours but I thought a bit of personal accountability wouldn't be a bad thing to help combat some of my less useful personality traits.
Me and my partner have been around the affiliate marketing world for several years and I've planned to make a go of it for almost as long. My long term goal is to build assets through mailing with some twists. But before we get to that I want to master a more traditional form of aff marketing and learn the ropes thoroughly before trying to add our own innovations. I figure if I can't get it right doing what everyone else is doing I'm already handicapped if I try to invent new methods.
With that in mind our plan is to follow the blueprint layed out by @cashmoneyaffiliate very closely. It's fantastically detailed and although a couple of years old I'm hoping it's all still very relevant. By following a blueprint we limit the number of variables we can get wrong in those early days of floundering around when you almost have to guess at every single decision.
Our mid-term target is $300/day. We'll give ourselves 3 months to achieve it. If we get that far I don't see it being difficult to scale that to $1000+/day in a few months after that. We are very lucky in that we can start off reasonably well funded and with plenty of time on our hands.
Tools:
Voluum for tracking - I looked at running the latest free version of prosper202. I'm a software developer of 20 years so I liked the idea of being able to hack at the tracking software. But again to keep things simple and minimize variables we decided to run on a tried and test platform. I'll leave prosper until if/when I have a use case for modifying a tracker.
Adplexity for spying - It was hard to make a call about which tracker to use, in the end I just opened up CMA's ask me anything thread and scrolled backwards until I found a post where he said which one he's using.
Digital Ocean VPS for hosting - I'll probably run scripted LPs so a CDN is out.
Affiliate Fix Dojo - it sounded worthwhile and it is!
Traffic: AdCash and Zeropark (still waiting on ZP approval)
Networks: ClickDealer and G4Offers - I'll start with clickdealer and from what I've heard about them I'll probably end up wanting to stay.
Initially we are planning to to run leadgen/sweepstakes offers using mobile pops (again to limit variables by eliminating banners).
Down the track we will look at banners and media buying to add volume. As well as introducing other variables but we'll get good at one thing first.
Today's task is learning Adplexity and choosing offers. We are looking at 2nd/3rd tier countries. None in particular yet, I just asked my AM for a list of performing offers in various 2nd/3rd tier geos and now we are researching them with the help of our limited Adplexity skills. We may pick one 1st tier to run with just for the luxury of having landers in our own language. But my expectation is that we've got a better chance with non-english.
Aiming to have a campaign live by the weekend. So if we get through offer selection today then tomorrow will be working out how to setup voluum and traffic interfaces. The day after will be ripping a lander, cleaning the junk out of it and tweaking it with my own code.
A couple of things we've learned so far:
I'll report in with our progress when we've made some more.
p.s. Have to give a big shout out and a thankyou to @cashmoneyaffiliate for the awesome resources he's given away. We had other verticals in mind but we decided to attempt emulating his methods closely simply for clear and concise way he's layed it out. Even if it's not the vertical and traffic we eventually settle into his musings are an invaluable resource for newbies like us who are trying to find their feet in the sea of information that is affiliate marketing.
Me and my partner have been around the affiliate marketing world for several years and I've planned to make a go of it for almost as long. My long term goal is to build assets through mailing with some twists. But before we get to that I want to master a more traditional form of aff marketing and learn the ropes thoroughly before trying to add our own innovations. I figure if I can't get it right doing what everyone else is doing I'm already handicapped if I try to invent new methods.
With that in mind our plan is to follow the blueprint layed out by @cashmoneyaffiliate very closely. It's fantastically detailed and although a couple of years old I'm hoping it's all still very relevant. By following a blueprint we limit the number of variables we can get wrong in those early days of floundering around when you almost have to guess at every single decision.
Our mid-term target is $300/day. We'll give ourselves 3 months to achieve it. If we get that far I don't see it being difficult to scale that to $1000+/day in a few months after that. We are very lucky in that we can start off reasonably well funded and with plenty of time on our hands.
Tools:
Voluum for tracking - I looked at running the latest free version of prosper202. I'm a software developer of 20 years so I liked the idea of being able to hack at the tracking software. But again to keep things simple and minimize variables we decided to run on a tried and test platform. I'll leave prosper until if/when I have a use case for modifying a tracker.
Adplexity for spying - It was hard to make a call about which tracker to use, in the end I just opened up CMA's ask me anything thread and scrolled backwards until I found a post where he said which one he's using.
Digital Ocean VPS for hosting - I'll probably run scripted LPs so a CDN is out.
Affiliate Fix Dojo - it sounded worthwhile and it is!
Traffic: AdCash and Zeropark (still waiting on ZP approval)
Networks: ClickDealer and G4Offers - I'll start with clickdealer and from what I've heard about them I'll probably end up wanting to stay.
Initially we are planning to to run leadgen/sweepstakes offers using mobile pops (again to limit variables by eliminating banners).
Down the track we will look at banners and media buying to add volume. As well as introducing other variables but we'll get good at one thing first.
Today's task is learning Adplexity and choosing offers. We are looking at 2nd/3rd tier countries. None in particular yet, I just asked my AM for a list of performing offers in various 2nd/3rd tier geos and now we are researching them with the help of our limited Adplexity skills. We may pick one 1st tier to run with just for the luxury of having landers in our own language. But my expectation is that we've got a better chance with non-english.
Aiming to have a campaign live by the weekend. So if we get through offer selection today then tomorrow will be working out how to setup voluum and traffic interfaces. The day after will be ripping a lander, cleaning the junk out of it and tweaking it with my own code.
A couple of things we've learned so far:
- Backend interfaces of affiliate networks are horrible and clunky to browse offers in.
- Me and my partner have very different ways of learning things. We're on a steep learning curve so we've got to work out each other's processes and just let them flow without trying to kludge each other into our own way of doing things. I'm good with machines and she's good with people so if work out how to get the best out of each other we've got strengths across the full spectrum.
I'll report in with our progress when we've made some more.
p.s. Have to give a big shout out and a thankyou to @cashmoneyaffiliate for the awesome resources he's given away. We had other verticals in mind but we decided to attempt emulating his methods closely simply for clear and concise way he's layed it out. Even if it's not the vertical and traffic we eventually settle into his musings are an invaluable resource for newbies like us who are trying to find their feet in the sea of information that is affiliate marketing.
