Hey guys so this is my first post here in wickedfire, I've been doing AM for sometime now with some great successes (and failures) and I'll try to add some value here as I introduce myself.
I'm 24 y'o and I started working online full time when I was about 19. Im not from the US originally and the reason I moved to the US was because I was promoting a program as an affiliate and the "online guru" that ran it, ended up hiring me so I could come work and learn the ropes with him.
I learned a lot of stuff about business in general with him, and I eventually moved on, and bought this "online guru's" company. The company was seriously profitable but I got destroyed by the merchant accounts when they saw that large volumes of sales were coming in with new accounts, and not only one but several accounts got frozen and I was left without a way to collect payments.
This was also around the time I started working with Lerchmo, who I believe many of you guys already know. We worked this year together and all I can say is that the guy is pretty fucking talented. I was pretty new to the ways he does marketing and how he knew a lot of shit I've never heard before. There was a lot of testing, but after a couple months of hard work, once we started making money we started banking pretty hard.
I'm not saying I'm a beast at this like Lerchmo is (at least not yet) but after being a pickup instructor for a while I am really good at breaking down theories and making them really easy to follow along, which is what I've been doing with AM lately.
So I'll share with you guys some basics that were pretty groundbreaking when I realized them in order to have it all sorted better in my head, hopefully they'll a good basis for guys that are starting out or at least provide a good refresher.
One of the most important things for me was getting rid of the fog of what are the exact steps you need to do to create a succesful campaign. In fact, these are the only variables you can change in any campaign period.
The first variable is your offer. That's pretty obvious, but how do you know which offer to promote? Don't just randomly grab an offer that you see in a network and throw a campaign on it. In fantasy land every offer would make a killing but in the real work you can't just jump into it and expect to make money with everything.
So instead of doing that, first browse around and take a look at what's being promoted. Which ads do you see over and over? which offer are they promoting? how are they promoting? Spend a good part of your time doing your research and gather all the data before you setup your next campaign.
Make sure you sign up for all the networks, it's always good to have all the offers handy so you don't have to miss out because you don't know where an offer is, so even if you don't use it, have an account in every single network "just in case" you'll need it in the future.
Now, once you have selected an offer that you know works (because people keep advertising for it) then your next step is to build a landing page. The same principle applies here. Copy and modify. Don't try to come up with something groundbreaking, the goal is to start making money and then you can change things to see what works better than that.
So what you'll want to do is create your landing page close to the one you see most often. Because there are way too many variables in this game, you want to do this to stop making it a guessing game and start taking control of most amount of variables possible so there's less of a guessing game involved.
The next variable is your ad, and although you do need to get a basic idea from the ads you see other affiliates running, more importantly is the fact that you ad needs to make sense from the customer's point of view. First make sure you think about who is your target audience, what state of mind they are in, what your offer looks like to a fresh pair of eyes, just because you want your offer to work doesn't mean everybody will love it, and your ad is very important because it creates certain expectations of what's to come.
The two things you need to be aware of your ad are: CTR and Conversion Rate. I have had ads that have insane CTR that get 0 signups. CTR is crucial to keep your costs low but you need to find the perfect mix between the two.
Which leads us to the next variable which is your bidding strategy. This is completely behind the scenes and you'll never be able to tell what your competitors are doing, but this is one thing were if you are good at it you can smoke the competition even with everything else being the same.
This is one area I still need to work on but just know that whatever it is you're paying, top affiliates are probably paying less. Here's good tip overall: start high, get a good ctr, and slowly start lowering your bid.
What later will be the challenge is figuring out what's the right amount to start with as you don't want to start too high because when you go too low your ads will stop getting impressions. Like every other variable I mention here, it's an artform to master.
And last but certainly not least, is your targetting. When you're doing your study for what offers to promote, make sure you keep in mind of the target market that offer is being promoted on.
This variable includes the advertising network you promote, the age range, ethnicity, education and everything in between. If for example you want to advertise in facebook, then to do your research make sure you create an account for your target market. Chances are if you're a male in your 20's you won't be seeing many ads that read girls their horoscope, but it doesn't mean that you it's not being advertised in that network.
So that's it for my rant, I hope this offers some value. I'm glad to be here, I have already learned a ton just from reading in the past few weeks, and I'm always open to learning more. My offer is that if you teach me something I can always teach you how to be a better PUA
I hope to meet a lot of you guys in the Vegas Summit.
Cheers,
D
ps. if you want it in a nutshell here are the 5 AM variables anything you do will falls under:
- offer
- landing page
- ads
- bids
- targetting
I'm 24 y'o and I started working online full time when I was about 19. Im not from the US originally and the reason I moved to the US was because I was promoting a program as an affiliate and the "online guru" that ran it, ended up hiring me so I could come work and learn the ropes with him.
I learned a lot of stuff about business in general with him, and I eventually moved on, and bought this "online guru's" company. The company was seriously profitable but I got destroyed by the merchant accounts when they saw that large volumes of sales were coming in with new accounts, and not only one but several accounts got frozen and I was left without a way to collect payments.
This was also around the time I started working with Lerchmo, who I believe many of you guys already know. We worked this year together and all I can say is that the guy is pretty fucking talented. I was pretty new to the ways he does marketing and how he knew a lot of shit I've never heard before. There was a lot of testing, but after a couple months of hard work, once we started making money we started banking pretty hard.
I'm not saying I'm a beast at this like Lerchmo is (at least not yet) but after being a pickup instructor for a while I am really good at breaking down theories and making them really easy to follow along, which is what I've been doing with AM lately.
So I'll share with you guys some basics that were pretty groundbreaking when I realized them in order to have it all sorted better in my head, hopefully they'll a good basis for guys that are starting out or at least provide a good refresher.
One of the most important things for me was getting rid of the fog of what are the exact steps you need to do to create a succesful campaign. In fact, these are the only variables you can change in any campaign period.
The first variable is your offer. That's pretty obvious, but how do you know which offer to promote? Don't just randomly grab an offer that you see in a network and throw a campaign on it. In fantasy land every offer would make a killing but in the real work you can't just jump into it and expect to make money with everything.
So instead of doing that, first browse around and take a look at what's being promoted. Which ads do you see over and over? which offer are they promoting? how are they promoting? Spend a good part of your time doing your research and gather all the data before you setup your next campaign.
Make sure you sign up for all the networks, it's always good to have all the offers handy so you don't have to miss out because you don't know where an offer is, so even if you don't use it, have an account in every single network "just in case" you'll need it in the future.
Now, once you have selected an offer that you know works (because people keep advertising for it) then your next step is to build a landing page. The same principle applies here. Copy and modify. Don't try to come up with something groundbreaking, the goal is to start making money and then you can change things to see what works better than that.
So what you'll want to do is create your landing page close to the one you see most often. Because there are way too many variables in this game, you want to do this to stop making it a guessing game and start taking control of most amount of variables possible so there's less of a guessing game involved.
The next variable is your ad, and although you do need to get a basic idea from the ads you see other affiliates running, more importantly is the fact that you ad needs to make sense from the customer's point of view. First make sure you think about who is your target audience, what state of mind they are in, what your offer looks like to a fresh pair of eyes, just because you want your offer to work doesn't mean everybody will love it, and your ad is very important because it creates certain expectations of what's to come.
The two things you need to be aware of your ad are: CTR and Conversion Rate. I have had ads that have insane CTR that get 0 signups. CTR is crucial to keep your costs low but you need to find the perfect mix between the two.
Which leads us to the next variable which is your bidding strategy. This is completely behind the scenes and you'll never be able to tell what your competitors are doing, but this is one thing were if you are good at it you can smoke the competition even with everything else being the same.
This is one area I still need to work on but just know that whatever it is you're paying, top affiliates are probably paying less. Here's good tip overall: start high, get a good ctr, and slowly start lowering your bid.
What later will be the challenge is figuring out what's the right amount to start with as you don't want to start too high because when you go too low your ads will stop getting impressions. Like every other variable I mention here, it's an artform to master.
And last but certainly not least, is your targetting. When you're doing your study for what offers to promote, make sure you keep in mind of the target market that offer is being promoted on.
This variable includes the advertising network you promote, the age range, ethnicity, education and everything in between. If for example you want to advertise in facebook, then to do your research make sure you create an account for your target market. Chances are if you're a male in your 20's you won't be seeing many ads that read girls their horoscope, but it doesn't mean that you it's not being advertised in that network.
So that's it for my rant, I hope this offers some value. I'm glad to be here, I have already learned a ton just from reading in the past few weeks, and I'm always open to learning more. My offer is that if you teach me something I can always teach you how to be a better PUA
I hope to meet a lot of you guys in the Vegas Summit.
Cheers,
D
ps. if you want it in a nutshell here are the 5 AM variables anything you do will falls under:
- offer
- landing page
- ads
- bids
- targetting
