My first breakeven journey

[bikabon]

Backgroud
I'm a programmer for ~15 years. I've written 2 web apps alone. I have been learning knowledge in affiliate market from time to time during the past year.
Tracker
I'm going to write it today myselft (It will be a simple redirect tracker first, then develop into a full-fledged one with auto optimization function)
Traffic Type
mainstream push or pop (I haven't decided which one to use yet)
Affiliate Network
I need some recommendations (People from Zeydoo say newbies can't access all of their offers, and I have to make at least $300 from their specified 3 offers first, I'm hesitant whether to accept it or not, do I have better choice?)
Spy tool
Adplexity Push (It seems push traffic are for adult, CPI, sweepstakes verticle from search results)
(I'm going to try Adplexity Mobile to see some examples of pop traffic today)
Goal
Spend my first $100 bucks, and try my best to achieve a beakeven on a low payout offer.
Next Update
I'll update this post when I finish my first version of my tracker and post some captures of it. It won't take too long, no more than 2 days I guess.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[VirtualGlobalPhone]

@bikabon , Life is a journey and earning is derivative of life. Its not the small one time success its the consistency of success and digesting the failure.

Dont forget to add at Resources

Best wishes and look forward for your updates.

 

[Graybeard]

Did you see my ambush interviews with my AI app?

All Your Questions Answered

AI Ambush Interview! Hello AI ... AI: all your base are belong to us I ask: What ad network traffic will convert what affiliate network offer? AI answers: There is no one answer to this question as it depends on a number of factors, including the type of offer, the affiliate network, and the...

www.affiliatefix.com

Everyone is a liar until their assertions are proven true and they render some tangible (or empirical) results --sometimes you have to go with gut hunches. In the pro baseball leagues if you bat 300+ you're in the ballgame.

This is a numbers game, in most cases.

I was looking at Zeydoo's blog on their 'financial survey' and when I clicked the offer's link it went to the affiliate login -- the back button on my browser was History.pushState hijacked --that's rather sleazy when dealing on a B2B level. Very unprofessional ...

I did look at Zeydoo's pay-outs they seem as if they might be profitable using RTB type network ads. Try it and see I guess --never used Zeydoo myself.

 

[Strickland]

Hi bikabon,
I'm looking forward to your progress here. It should be interesting
Which offers did Zeydoo suggest? If it's the finance surveys they do convert, even direct linking works pretty well for testing geos.
I ran these myself not long ago with propellerads pop traffic using the cpagoal setting.

 

[business.manager99]

Go ahead guy. All the wishes!

 

[bikabon]

Hi @Strickland,
I'm glad you are interested in my follow along. I just came back from vacation. It will take another 7 days for my first update, because I have some new ideas during my holiday, and I will add it to my first version of tracker.

Which offers did Zeydoo suggest?

It is the financial survey 2025. Is it easy to reach $300 revenue on this offer and make a breakeven?

 

[PaidPoints]

Backgroud
I'm a programmer for ~15 years. I've written 2 web apps alone. I have been learning knowledge in affiliate market from time to time during the past year.
Tracker
I'm going to write it today myselft (It will be a simple redirect tracker first, then develop into a full-fledged one with auto optimization function)
Traffic Type
mainstream push or pop (I haven't decided which one to use yet)
Affiliate Network
I need some recommendations (People from Zeydoo say newbies can't access all of their offers, and I have to make at least $300 from their specified 3 offers first, I'm hesitant whether to accept it or not, do I have better choice?)
Spy tool
Adplexity Push (It seems push traffic are for adult, CPI, sweepstakes verticle from search results)
(I'm going to try Adplexity Mobile to see some examples of pop traffic today)
Goal
Spend my first $100 bucks, and try my best to achieve a beakeven on a low payout offer.
Next Update
I'll update this post when I finish my first version of my tracker and post some captures of it. It won't take too long, no more than 2 days I guess.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

I think you will succeed. I too been programming since 2009. One thing I understand that is the difference between us and total beginners is that the experience and familiarity we already have with the web helps us with confidence and ability to perform better for example, creating a landing page wouldn't be complex thing to you in any way at all. Hope you succeed.

 

[Strickland]

It is the financial survey 2025. Is it easy to reach $300 revenue on this offer and make a breakeven?

That depends on a lot of variables. I think it's important to remember these are very low-paying offers.
I tested this offer with $400, and when the budget was gone, I had $341. I was $59 down. But, I had a lot of data to work with and I learnt a lot. I managed to get my campaigns green, but the daily roi was very low, less than $1 on some campaigns. I probably could have scaled up with a different traffic source, but this was a testing exercise for me. The $59 spent was worth its weight in gold, and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
A couple of things I did to increase my roi
I had a back button redirect script that went to the cryptomania offer at Zeydoo. In order for the backbutton script to work with Chrome, you need the user to take an action on the lander. I used a popup modal.
I collected push subscriptions from my landers. I used two domains, one for the finance survey landers and another for the cryptomania landers. This way, you can collect push subs from both sets of landers (this still brings in small revenue each week).
Good luck bikabon, keep us posted

 

[T J Tutor]

I tested this offer with $400, and when the budget was gone, I had $341. I was $59 down. But, I had a lot of data to work with and I learnt a lot.

The $59 spent was worth its weight in gold, and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

This is exactly what a marketer thinks. Everytime! It's because of this thinking that you are an earner!

I collected push subscriptions from my landers. I used two domains, one for the finance survey landers and another for the cryptomania landers. This way, you can collect push subs from both sets of landers (this still brings in small revenue each week).

Now that deserves a case study! I love your creative outline for the funnels. Are you running the same traffic source(s) to both domains?

 

[Graybeard]

The $59 spent was worth its weight in gold

The $59 Loss was worth its weight in gold.

collected push subscriptions from my landers. I used two domains, one for the finance survey landers and another for the cryptomania landers. This way, you can collect push subs from both sets of landers (this still brings in small revenue each week).

That gain cost $59 acquisition --time will tell on the pay-off.

 

[T J Tutor]

Tracker
I'm going to write it today myselft

This may take some time. Admirable goal, but I can tell you it took Robert Gryn (CodewWise, Voluum, ZeroPark,Metahero) 2 years (2011-2013) to code the tracker Voluum and launch it inn 2013. He said in a recent interview the most recent version of Voluum would take a team of 10 and a year to create today's' full stack version.

I recommend getting an established tracker until yours is complete.

Affiliate Network
I need some recommendations (People from Zeydoo say newbies can't access all of their offers, and I have to make at least $300 from their specified 3 offers first, I'm hesitant whether to accept it or not, do I have better choice?)

More and more networks, especially established networks, are being far more demanding up front about requirements to work with them. I wouldn't be turned off by this. I would accept it and do my best to meet their needs so I could have a reputable and well established network like them in my business model.

In addition, join a couple of other networks that may be a bit more relaxed in their acceptance policies. You can create a new thread in the Business Centre Forum asking for networks with offers in your niche(s) and willing to work with a newbie. You will get loads of responses.

Spy tool
Adplexity

Excellent intelligence tool!

Goal
Spend my first $100 bucks, and try my best to achieve a beakeven on a low payout offer.

This may be considerably too low. I know that most traffic sources as well as networks recommend a minimum of $500 for testing on push traffic. I think both RollerAds and MobIdea have publish threads on this here in the forum.

My friend over at PlugRush tells me pop ads have a lot of low-quality traffic. They’re also regarded as a blind network and several times will pass only a website ID as opposed to showing the actual referrer. he tells me that your pop budget needs to be in the $250 to $300 range to start testing.

 

[bikabon]

I collected push subscriptions from my landers. I used two domains, one for the finance survey landers and another for the cryptomania landers. This way, you can collect push subs from both sets of landers (this still brings in small revenue each week).

I'm going to collect subscriptions as well. Instead of using out-of-box solution like propush.me, and monetizer, I'm going to write my own. (I always doubt service like monetizer would send ads to my subscripbers and cause them to unsubscribe.)

Do you still remember the subscription rate of your landers?

 

[bikabon]

He said in a recent interview the most recent version of Voluum would take a team of 10 and a year to create today's' full stack version.

That's because his product is user-orientend. And he has to create template for all traffic sources and affiliate networks. I will only add traffic sources and affiliate networks as I need. And I'll use elasticsearch and kibana for data storing and viewing, which save lots of time and provide much better view experience than all trackers in the market. The downside is my tracker need lots of background knowledge to use and not suitable for general users.

I'll try bemob if I can't finish my tracker by Sep 10th.

Thanks a lot for the comment.

 

[Strickland]

That gain cost $59 acquisition --time will tell on the pay-off.

In the past 6 weeks, the push subs have made nearly $27. I will collect subs every time I run a campaign. If I can 100X my list, it might be worth the effort.

This is exactly what a marketer thinks. Everytime! It's because of this thinking that you are an earner!

Thanks TJ, My journey started here at affiliatefix and it's been my learning hub ever since.

Now that deserves a case study!

I'm planning a similar funnel using a Push/mVas campaign with a follow-along for AffiliateFix
I only used 1 traffic source for the finance surveys and cryptomania offers. When I get better at optimizing, I plan to add more traffic sources to my campaigns.

Do you still remember the subscription rate of your landers?

Unfortunately, I don't and bemob won't go back to last month's data using the free version, so I can't work it out for you. I think it was around 10% subscription from the landers to the push list. And when the campaigns were fully optimised, my landers ctr was 13%-18%.

 

[bikabon]

I take quite some time to read details of offers on some affiliate networks, observe the structure of BeMob, use some spy tools to observe creatives of others, to make sure the structure of my versatile tracker is on the right road.

I'm going to simplify my tracker. I will merge build blocks (campaigns, flows, offers) of BeMob into tracker campaign.

I've written 10+ ppt to demostrate my idea, I'd like to hear your advice before implementing it.

Thank you all in advance.

 

[bikabon]

 

[bikabon]

The most important part is how to auto optimize my campaign. I might be good at coding, but I have very little experience in optimizing campaign, please give me some ideas on formulas. Following are mine:
(placeholder please wait)

 

[bikabon]

I've finished basic part of my tracker, it can be used to deal with:
1. traffic source -> offer page
2. traffic source -> landing page -> offer page
3. traffic source -> landing page step 1 -> landing page step 2 -> offer page
Just take a look at how potential it can be:

 

[bikabon]

I'm going to finish push notification part tomorrow.
I've asked my AM to recommend me some offers, I guess I might be able to run these offers with my own tracker on next Wednesday

 

[bikabon]

• Beware live look-ups are bad --time can be an issue.

Could you explain this a little bit?

• Are you using Maxmind GEO ASN database locally? .mdb is fast MySQL will lag when used as a 'test' restriction.
  Cronjob after the fact works well

I use Maxmind database locally that comes with ElasticSearch. I only have experience in MongoDB and ElasticSearch. I don't get the problem you encounter here.

• Nginx with a config.d/<file> works fine for me deny 111.11.111.0/24;

I use traefik, and have very little experience in nginx. But why do you block traffic from 111.11.111.0/24 (China Mobile Communications Corporation)?

• I have only found ASN location to be good for blanket network bans --server farms primarily.

My original plan is to just blacklist ASN when asn.organization_name contains word like "Data Center" or similar. How can you blacklist ASN by location? Can you give me some details?

 

[bikabon]

Thank you so much. Learned a lot today. Just want to share with you some of my ideas and experience.

My Plan:

I'm going to utilize "Amazon", "Data Center", FingerprintJS, and Google Recaptcha V3 in my tracker to flag some abnormal traffic, then find some patterns, and use them in my auto optimizer to send blacklist signal to Ad network through API.

I've finished my push notification feature, but my AM haven't replied to my email. He hasn't replied to my skype neither. Maybe I should just wait. (I'm going to run offers on MaxBounty, btw.)

> So, you think NGINX is funny?
Nginx is great, it's just not suitable in my situation. Traefik can detect new dockers and get https licence for them automatically. The configuration file is super easy. As one man developer, I often sacrifice performance and cost for my time. (I haven't compared the performance of the two though)

> I send 408 replies to the bogies I am detecting.
I'm not sure if I should block those spy tools from seeing my content, because I'm a newbie, I'm not afraid of copycat. LOL. But I'm afraid of blocking real users.

> Hope you don't plan to waste time tracking forged and out of date user agents
LOL, I will stop tracking them later.

 

[Graybeard]

Looks good!

• Beware live look-ups are bad --time can be an issue.
• Are you using Maxmind GEO ASN database locally? .mdb is fast MySQL will lag when used as a 'test' restriction.
  Cronjob after the fact works well
• Nginx with a config.d/<file> works fine for me deny 111.11.111.0/24;
• I have only found ASN location to be good for blanket network bans --server farms primarily.

I track using click logging in and out of my controlled domains.
I have found slippage to be a real issue between my counts out and what the 'offers' report as traffic.
Nothing you can do about it really, other than to be aware of the ratios of 'slippage' --and act accordingly.

 

[T J Tutor]

I have found slippage to be a real issue between my counts out and what the 'offers' report as traffic.

I've never seen these numbers match one another! I spoke to Voluum, AdsBridge, and CPVLab about this many years back and I concluded it is because they each develop their own metrics by which to gather the data. I was in these discussions with them on a group Skype call back then hoping to get a straight answer so I could publish a thread about it, but in the end i could not resolve the phenomena with these guys. They all claimed it was do to the means by which they collect the data.

In my world, and most with developer and database backgrounds, there should only be one way in and one way out of a database for data and that data should be universally identified in a fashion that allows us all to do cross platform work that produces the same result.

I remember my graduate work at S.U. included an assigned project based on this to prove the theory behind the book The Mythical Man Month.