How was your first campaign?
- Thread starter dzpirate
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Some people may have gotten lucky but I lost money on my first 2-3 campaigns. The very first one I started loosing money through direct linking. I created a lander. Kept loosing money. I changed the lander. Lost even more money. I did end up figuring out a way on how to make it profitable eventually, but before I did I had lost $400. I was too stubborn. I should have dumped and moved to the next one
I did my first campaign in 1995 or 1996 and I didn't realize it was affiliate marketing at the time. It was for some awful "make money from home" thing and I was just a dumb teenager with no driver's license and nothing better to do. I ended up using a mass mailing program to send a ridiculous quantity of unsolicited e-mails to AOL addresses (I may have been spamming, but at least I was spamming AOL users). I didn't know any better.
I paid $20 for the program and the e-mail addresses and I ended up making a few hundred dollars on it, which was awesome for a kid. Of course, when half the e-mails turned out to be no good and they all came back to the ISP at once, it ended up crashing everything there (the ISP was run out of a trailer in the middle of a cornfield). No one in town had internet access for several hours thanks to my spam fest.
I quit after that and didn't get back into making money online until I played EverQuest years later and got into the virtual currency trading business.
I paid $20 for the program and the e-mail addresses and I ended up making a few hundred dollars on it, which was awesome for a kid. Of course, when half the e-mails turned out to be no good and they all came back to the ISP at once, it ended up crashing everything there (the ISP was run out of a trailer in the middle of a cornfield). No one in town had internet access for several hours thanks to my spam fest.
I quit after that and didn't get back into making money online until I played EverQuest years later and got into the virtual currency trading business.
Don't be nervous, but do expect to lose a shit load of money before you make a single conversion.
Affiliate marketing via PPC is heavy on the pocket, and shouldn't be experimented with if you are low on money, or barely getting your bills paid. You could lose hundreds and thousands of dollars in a single day without any return or hope for improvement. When I first started affiliate marketing via ppc; I blew several thousand dollars, close to 4k to be exact. Luckily, with the monetary loss came real life experience and knowledge, and I had a positive ROI campaign running afterwards. Fast forward a couple years, I'm now profiting close to 4k a day. Affiliate Marketing really is great, and like another member mentioned somewhere, it's a game of math. Do your math, and you'll see your pockets get deeper.
I lost money the first few. Okay, more than a few. But not a lot of money.
Take it slow, be systematic, use the "daily limit" features so you don't bleed out while you learn. Get a course on PPC basics. Watch the stupid Google AdWords video tutorials, they actually do give you good framework for using PPC services like Google. Once you have something that is profitable (more $ in than $ out), then pump a little more money into that, bump up the keywords, test better ads. Then port it out to Yahoo, MSN. Once you make it work there, repeat to the thrid-tier PPC networks.
Then do it again.
Take it slow, be systematic, use the "daily limit" features so you don't bleed out while you learn. Get a course on PPC basics. Watch the stupid Google AdWords video tutorials, they actually do give you good framework for using PPC services like Google. Once you have something that is profitable (more $ in than $ out), then pump a little more money into that, bump up the keywords, test better ads. Then port it out to Yahoo, MSN. Once you make it work there, repeat to the thrid-tier PPC networks.
Then do it again.
Would you guys say its a good or a bad idea to have a few different types of landing pages for a single offer? For this offer I'm planning on campaigning for in a few days, I created 4 landing pages - first is a straight offer, like details about the product, why you should get it, free trial, etc...another is which place to buy it from and which not to, another is whether or not its safe to use, etc...and the last is a review + results (fake) from the offer, etc...
I figured I would be able to capture a wider amount of keywords and direct them to exactly what they are looking for..
I figured I would be able to capture a wider amount of keywords and direct them to exactly what they are looking for..
I failed miserably on my first 20 or so campaigns. Once I found a profitable one I just changed my daily limit and have made all that money back.
Biggest mistake that I had done as a newbie would have been tackling competitive niches - loan, credit score, diet.
The idea is to target the longtail keywords in which the consumer is looking to buy. For example if a searcher typed in garmin gps then they arent necessary looking to buy. But if they typed in garmin c350 gps review then you know they are looking to buy and thus have more chance to make a sale. If people targeted more specific keywords where the searcher is actually looking to buy then they might have more success with affiiate sales.
my first ppc campaign was an adult related term review page.
i never saw before any review pages, specially not in adult. who knows, maybe i invented modern ppc...
i've spent 100$ a day on adwords and banked 300$ profit/day for 6 months.
i must say that before that i promoted the same offers with seo.
i never saw before any review pages, specially not in adult. who knows, maybe i invented modern ppc...
i've spent 100$ a day on adwords and banked 300$ profit/day for 6 months.
i must say that before that i promoted the same offers with seo.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'this new business' and what a campaign is. I got started by building solid quality content sites that pull organic traffic -- and then looking to monetize that traffic.
Recently I've been working towards more traditional ppc affiliate marketing.
If the content site is a campaign, then it was profitable in the first year. It could do better, but it was always a learning exercise, so I wasn't focused so much on it making money as in building traffic and ranking. Lately, as traffic keeps building, I've been more motivated to monetize -- I expect that to continue to earn more and more as I get better and better at figuring out how to pitch.
As for my first ppc campaign - I lost money. But I monitored it closely, and expected to lose money. With ppc you have to figure your first campaigns are your tuition in the school of hard knocks. Either you figure this stuff out, and start to make money, or you quit. Either way, set a budget that you're comfortable with spending to learn this stuff, and just do it.
I know someone who has been very successful at ppc affiliate marketing. He's said that for every 40 campaigns he tries, 1 will be a keeper - but that one campaign will more than make up for the other 39. The trick is to watch them closely, kill them when you decide it's not working. And keep building new ones. He works 12 hours a day, building landing pages, selecting offers, creating ad copy, launching campaigns, monitoring conversions and driving that ppc traffic.
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