-Joe-'s newbie journal.

-joe-

Britfag
May 6, 2010
4,318
72
0
Just outside London, UK
Hi there, I thought for my 200th post I'd start up a journal, documenting my progress and hopefully getting some friendly advice from everyone :)

Basically, I'm just about 17. I've been doing a lot of reading for a long time, and I've run a few websites in the past, but I'm now finally getting down to actually doing affiliate marketing and taking action. Last week I started with a £50 facebook ads voucher I got, and have been promoting an email submit. Today I hit 0.1% CTR on that, and am nearly in the black. (although since the voucher was free, you could say I've already gone way into the black!)

Up until this point, my main method of making money has been writing articles. I'm sick of that, getting paid lousy rates, spending too much time, all for people who are unappreciative because you've spent too much time on their articles, rather than just rewriting an existing one in broken English. (see iTrader)

So here we go, I'll update this as I go along!

Comments & CC welcome :)
 


Hi there, I thought for my 200th post I'd start up a journal, documenting my progress and hopefully getting some friendly advice from everyone :)

Basically, I'm just about 17. I've been doing a lot of reading for a long time, and I've run a few websites in the past, but I'm now finally getting down to actually doing affiliate marketing and taking action. Last week I started with a £50 facebook ads voucher I got, and have been promoting an email submit. Today I hit 0.1% CTR on that, and am nearly in the black. (although since the voucher was free, you could say I've already gone way into the black!)

Up until this point, my main method of making money has been writing articles. I'm sick of that, getting paid lousy rates, spending too much time, all for people who are unappreciative because you've spent too much time on their articles, rather than just rewriting an existing one in broken English. (see iTrader)

So here we go, I'll update this as I go along!

Comments & CC welcome :)

Joe,
What g'won mate?

First of all, I commend you for being 17 and seizing your own future! Also, don't worry about the broken results....

People pay big money for solutions NOT the queen's english (and I studied at Oxford so I know what the bloody hell I'm talking about ;] ...)

IMHO, you need to find something you are passionate about....

find something of value....

cloth it in a sexy package....

then generate repeat sales from buyers who know, like and trust you....

are you building YOUR OWN LIST?

If not, everything else you are doing is NOISE....

Get yourself an aweber or getresponse response and start opting people in.....

That's the first step. Have you thought about how you can monetize what you are a) good at or b) what you love doing, i.e. your hobbies?

Really THINK about that....

good luck
 
Nice. Update this regularly so you can get some feedback.
Thanks, but try and lay off the spam posts, eh? No one wants to hear about your shitty ebook. :)

Joe,
What g'won mate?

First of all, I commend you for being 17 and seizing your own future! Also, don't worry about the broken results....

People pay big money for solutions NOT the queen's english (and I studied at Oxford so I know what the bloody hell I'm talking about ;] ...)

IMHO, you need to find something you are passionate about....

find something of value....

cloth it in a sexy package....

then generate repeat sales from buyers who know, like and trust you....

are you building YOUR OWN LIST?

If not, everything else you are doing is NOISE....

Get yourself an aweber or getresponse response and start opting people in.....

That's the first step. Have you thought about how you can monetize what you are a) good at or b) what you love doing, i.e. your hobbies?

Really THINK about that....

good luck
Hi, thanks! :D Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I've been brainstorming some ideas on a piece of paper today of things I could do like that. And no, currently I'm just promoting someone else's offers, bog standard "win a free" ones. And yeah, I will. I'll try and think of something I'm good at or interested in, I can't think of any hobbies though! I'll get back to you on that one!

Thanks again! :D
 
Ok, update, currently my facebook campaigns are paused due to insufficient funds. So I'm chucking my money into my new debit card b/a tomorrow, all £350 of it. Off we go again. Also, since I wasn't making enough with my offer, I messaged my AM, who gave me a raise on the offer of $0.25 :) Easy, and I'm wondering why I didn't do it before!

Currently got $60 in my A4D account, which I obviously can't withdraw until the end of the month.

Off we go again. :)
 
Are you running out of money because you spend more than you make..or because you make money but do not get the payouts fast enough?

A lot of networks give weekly payouts, others you can ask for them.
 
Are you running out of money because you spend more than you make..or because you make money but do not get the payouts fast enough?

A lot of networks give weekly payouts, others you can ask for them.
Recently I haven't been in profit because I simply hadn't got the CPC down low enough. But it's not that I've run out of money - I've only just got a debit card which I loaded today, so I've just got the campaign up and running again.
 
Another update for all who're watching this (anyone?)

Facebook have currently set my account to auto-disapprove new ads, so currently can't widen my fairly tight demo. Once that's working, it'll be all go though! Also, I'm currently bouncing a few ideas around in my head of websites to make etc... - snapped up a few domains in the Namecheap sale on Tuesday as well.

Also, in other news, I'll now be working Thursdays and Saturdays.... Selling double glazing! At least it pays £50 per lead though (all they have to do is agree to get a quote from the sales team, and that's my £50 :) ) (or more, depending on sales volume)

Also, it should help my Sales skills, as well as generating some extra cash for AM. :)
 
I am surprised facebook approved your ad for an email submit. They hate those types of offers.
 
What do you mean auto-dissaprove?
I submit, 5 minutes later it's disapproved.

I am surprised facebook approved your ad for an email submit. They hate those types of offers.
Yeah I know, I had 10 as well, all approved. It's only now that my thing's set to auto disapprove that they did a manual review, and disapproved my most successful ad, the one that was running.

They accidentally left all the paused ones alone though, so I've unpaused the 2nd best (only 0.08% CTR, as opposed to 0.1- ah well :p )

In other news, first day at double glazing door to door sales job today. Was good, I'll be continuing it, definitely. I did, though, on the downside, get my iPhone nicked:

Someone working with me (their first day too) asked if I wanted to split on a bag of green. I said kk, and we walked up a bit to the dealers place. He borrowed my phone, and we eventually got it. He sorted me in a bush, so at least I got that. He made out there was a police officer there though, so we ran. (him still having my phone) We went ages,and when I was a bit behind him, I think he hid round the corner.

However, there's a good ending! :D

Because we both worked at the same place, and I was due to be picked up by my dad, I needed to phone my dad. So I went back to the office, got in, and explained why I needed to borrow the phone. The one guy left called back the other people, who made a bunch of phonecalls (including to the cunt, since they had his phone number and address from his application form!) Let's just say, this cunt is getting fucked over, AND is out of a job! :D

In other news, found a new, totally unexploited traffic source, where I'm gonna push some offers. I'll let you guys know how it goes on that!
 
Hey again guys. My conversions have suddenly upped, I dunno why, apart from possibly the fact I activated several old FB ads, although they're not sending many clicks :S. Conversions have gone from 10% to between 25-40%.

So far, only got $70 in my aff account.

In other news, I'm currently looking at some mobile offers, which I'll be promoting on Admob. Anyone got any discount codes?

If not, I'll let you guys know how that goes. :)
 
Joe, I am glad you have kept updating your blog.

Since I have a blog as well here I know there is one thing I wish people did more off...and that is to critic my mistakes instead of being cheerleaders.

So with that in mind.

If you cannot tell what is upping your conversion % you are doing something wrong.

You have to keep a very close eye on your offers which ad is working and which one is not.

For example, lets say you have two ads, one of them gets 100 clicks and 2 conversions. The other gets 100 clicks and 75 conversions. Then you look at your stats and say, "sweet I made 77 out of 200".

In reality you could kill ad 1, and double the money spent on ad 2 making you 150 out of 200 conversions.

I hope you see what I am pointing out.

So how can you figure this out?

Tracking, lots of it. Either use native tracking from facebook or your affiliate network or prosper/bevo...even one of you made yourself.

The point is you need to have a way to see how each ad is performing in an individual level. For example today I launched 50 datings ads, each one of them has separate tracking, I use Subids 1-50. That way not only can I see how each ad did CTR wise, but I can also see which ones converted.
 
try twitter
Go on...
Joe, I am glad you have kept updating your blog.

Since I have a blog as well here I know there is one thing I wish people did more off...and that is to critic my mistakes instead of being cheerleaders.

So with that in mind.

If you cannot tell what is upping your conversion % you are doing something wrong.

You have to keep a very close eye on your offers which ad is working and which one is not.

For example, lets say you have two ads, one of them gets 100 clicks and 2 conversions. The other gets 100 clicks and 75 conversions. Then you look at your stats and say, "sweet I made 77 out of 200".

In reality you could kill ad 1, and double the money spent on ad 2 making you 150 out of 200 conversions.

I hope you see what I am pointing out.

So how can you figure this out?

Tracking, lots of it. Either use native tracking from facebook or your affiliate network or prosper/bevo...even one of you made yourself.

The point is you need to have a way to see how each ad is performing in an individual level. For example today I launched 50 datings ads, each one of them has separate tracking, I use Subids 1-50. That way not only can I see how each ad did CTR wise, but I can also see which ones converted.
Thanks :) and yeah, thanks for the critique :)

While I normally do use subids, that wasn't something I did at first, so my first ads are a bit jumbled. I paused them all, because I didn't believe I could make them profitable.

However, facebook have now made the restrictions on me creating ads really tight, so I re-activated all the old ones. Unfortunately, if I change the subids, they'll have to be re-approved, which is gonna just be a disapproval.

You do have a point though, I'll try upping the CPCs slightly, so they're not profitable, but get more clicks, and disable them all and activate them one by one, seeing which one converts the best, so I can bid more per click for that ad (cause it'll get higher conversions)

I've learnt one thing from this, so far: Make sure the ads within guidelines before submitting, or you'll have millions of problems tweaking them!

Thanks again, and I'll be sure to check out your journal again! :)

Btw, in other news, tried out an offer on Maxbounty, on Adbrite.

Let's just say, I won't be using adbrite again.

The offer has a high network epc, but it doesn't with Adbrite... (although with all the click fraud, it's so hard to tell... 2300 clicks registered in Maxbounty, 100 in Adbrite) and a lot of the "legitimate" clicks are faked as well, one has 1 impression, 1 click... "/

Spent $50 on there, got $10 in return. Ah well, you live and learn, time to try some other traffic sources!

EDIT: PS, in other news, I booked my ticket to ASW for $99 the other day, nice goal to aim for :D (it's during a maths exam, but screw maths)
 
Grr, bit pissed off atm, tbh.

Just had a big row with my dad about me spending my day doing IM instead of reading A level textbooks... "/ He had the same old usual rant, about how much more work he does than me, (although he's spent 90% of today lying in bed, and all of yesterday) Called IM just a "paid hobby, in fact not even paid" and how I have half term, and it's a holiday for me, but he has to work tomorrow (isn't that the point of a holiday? Doesn't he get them?) although I WILL be doing AM all week, and door-to-door double glazing job on the days I can.. He complains all the time about me not making supper, but when he makes it, it's only taking something out of a packet, putting it in the oven, putting it on a plate...

Grrr.

Anyways, sorry for that rant, AM wise, haven't managed to get too far this weekend, cause my AM doesn't work weekends, and all the offers I was looking at promoting require approval. :(

I've been compiling a list of 5 mobile offers, and how I'd promote them, and Chase, my AM, said he'll give me the network stats for them. Been looking at alternate traffic sources, possibly looking at running some dating ads. I'll ask Chase what he thinks first though, what do you guys think? I'd probably be promoting partly on POF, partly on facebook.

Also, I was looking at web designs for a niche I've been looking at targeting for a couple of months now, gets 150k searches a month, and literally no competition. Today I was researching some affiliate offers to run on that, and the lack of affiliate offers suggests to me it might actually be a better idea to start my own business in that area, although I'll need IM to get me some starting funds first! So I think I may lay off the affiliate offers on that, don't wanna bring people to my competion. Might setup a basic MFA page for the moment though, the adsense CPC is pretty high, and the keyword is such that it won't get people to the competition, so that could be a win-win method of generating some extra funds! Anyone know of a good MFA template?

Also, final IM thing, tried phoning up privatelabelnutra today, I messaged them the other day about private labelling one of their products that looks pretty good, haven't seen them advertised online before. It's not the stereotypical acai or viagra. I didn't manage to get through to the guy I talked to over emails, but I'll try again tomorrow. The product looks pretty solid overall, but at 50-100 units, the price is almost prohibitively high, I could sell at a profit, it's just the cost of promotion would easily scrape off any profit. I'll try and get a reduction.

In other news, I've decided to semi-quit smoking. (tobacco, anyway) I've been a week without one, until today (I wasn't officially quitting, I'd just not felt like it). I realised that, actually, they're not so great, and threw it away halfway through. I'm gonna start cutting down, although I'll still smoke occassionally, at social occasions etc.