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ACTION & EXPLANATION
Once you've identified a good offer+lander combination, and have identified traffic segments that convert well and ones that don't convert well, you're ready to scale the campaign to other traffic sources!
In general, as soon as you feel that a campaign has good potential of becoming profitable with further optimization, that would be a good time to scale to other sources. There's no need to wait until a campaign is actually profitable before scaling - that way you can milk the offer as much as you can while it's still converting well.
And as you gain experience, you'll be better at deciding what will be the right time to scale
Confirming Lead Quality & Asking for Pay Bumps
Before doing any type of scaling, make sure you do the following:
1)Confirm lead quality with your AM. You've generated some conversions by this point. Ask your AM if the quality is satisfactory, and only scale further if the answer is yes. Also remember to notify your AM of your plans to scale the campaign and get the green light before taking action to scale.
Don't waste a ton of money on scaling, only to be told by your AM that your lead quality is unacceptable and that you won't get paid.
Be sure to retain some type of proof that your AM has confirmed that your lead quality from your current traffic is good enough (e.g. skype or email message). And as you scale to other networks, be sure to repeat this check with your AM periodically. Traffic quality differs from network to network. If you're passing the traffic source tracking token to the affiliate network as I've suggested in the tracking lessons, then your AM should be able to tell you if a specific traffic source is sending bad traffic, so that you can stop buying traffic from there - and hopefully you'll be allowed to continue running the offer on the other traffic sources.
2)Ask for a pay bump. Most of you as new affiliates would get the "street payout", which is basically the lowest payout networks start most affiliates on. If, when you ask your AM to confirm lead quality, they tell you they're happy, that would be the perfect time to say to them,
"I'm now going to scale this to more networks - if you'd give me a pay bump, that would motivate me to scale bigger!"
Keep in mind that you're not limited to asking for a single pay bump. You can ask however many times you wish - although you probably wouldn't want to annoy your AM by asking too often.
Another thing to watch out for: Some AMs on some networks will consent to giving you a pay bump, but would tweak some settings in the backend to shave your leads harder (so that fewer conversions would show up in your stats). That has happened to me in the past - each time I got a pay bump my profits would stay the same because the conversion rate would go down to offset the effects of the payout increase. It took several pay bumps before I figured out what was going on.
If you're seeing the same phenomenon, stop asking for pay bumps from that AM/network. And of course, consider leaving that network altogether.
In addition, here are some threads relevant to pay bumps that may help you:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...what-to-expect
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ting-Pay-Bumps
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...a-payout-boost
Scaling to Other Traffic Networks
I've already suggested for you to apply to more pop traffic networks in the previous lesson.
So ideally, you should have accounts on at least a few of them at this point.
Just because the campaign is profitable on your current source, doesn't guarantee it will also be profitable on the other sources. When scaling a campaign to other sources, I would suggest to target the most profitable traffic segment(s) first - if not even that is profitable, chances are that the other traffic segments will not be either.
So, for example, if in your current/original campaign, your lander+offer is converting the best for IOS + mobile phone traffic, then I would try to target that when scaling to other sources. You can always target more segments on sources where the campaign is profitable.
I would also suggest to just scale your most-profitable lander+offer to other sources, or at most your best 2-3 landers and offers. Although if you were to re-test all offers and landers at each traffic source, you may end up with different winners than for your original source, the extra accuracy will not be worth the extra money you'd need to spend to retest everything.
So to summarize: when scaling to other traffic sources, use the same offer, same lander, and best targeting.
At each traffic source, you will need to mainly test 2 things: Bids, and Placements. We've covered how to do each of those in previous lessons.
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So this is it - the end of the tutorial.
I tend to be long-winded when explaining concepts to new affiliates - this can be a pro and a con depending on the reader. Either way, I want to take this opportunity to apologize for the big walls of text!
I'd also like to apologize for the months it has taken me to rewrite this tutorial. It's a huge undertaking that has taken up a ton of time. Looking at a follow-along to give specific feedback is one thing, but trying to explain the whole campaign testing and optimization process in general, without it coming across all convoluted and confusing, is infinitely harder.
Kudos if you've followed the tutorial to the very end - this in itself demonstrates perseverance, which in my opinion is the single-most important quality that will help you succeed in affiliate marketing - or most other endeavors for that matter.
If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask, either in the lesson threads themselves or in new threads. (Please refrain from PM'ing me - I struggled for a long time to keep up with PMs, but eventually had to give up as it turned into an impossible endeavor. Asking questions on the forum would be the quickest way to get a reply.)
Better yet, start a follow-along thread to document your journey, and to get feedback and advice on your campaigns. This would be the section to post in:
https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...-Follow-Alongs
Before I let you go, here's a very important message:
Pop traffic has become competitive as more and more people enter the space. Google is banning lander domains with higher frequency. Well-converting offers are harder to come by due to there being more regulations. Although there are still people making very good money from pop, there are definitely easier ways to make money nowadays.
Why then did I write this tutorial still? It's because pop is still a great learning tool. It's the traffic type I know best, and the only one I know enough about to write a (close-to-being) step-by-step tutorial on.
It's probably one of the easiest traffic types to learn the basics of. Basically you grab a few offers from aff networks, grab a few landers from Adplexity, and away you go.
It's also the cheapest type of traffic you can buy. So for the purpose of collecting data and learning split-testing, statistics, and optimization, pop serves its purpose in an inexpensive way to save you tuition money.
However, pop is becoming increasing harder to make high consistent profits from. It's still relatively easy to make xx/day to low/mid xxx/day in profits, but to get to high xxx/day to xxxx/day or xxxxx/day, would require some/all of: A lot of time and effort spent on testing + optimization + scaling, automation tools and/or a team, special relationships with aff/traffic networks, etc.
For these reasons, I would strongly encourage that you NOT stay in pop exclusively. You can if you wish to of course - like I said, it's still possible to make an income. But don't be complacent and stay in pop exclusively and indefinitely is what I'm saying.
Launch a few pop campaigns, get some experience on how to test, optimize and scale. Then with your knowledge and experience which you will have acquired for cheap, expand to another traffic type and continue your learning there.
If you need some good recommendations on what other traffic types to play with after pop - please read this post, where I've jotted down some thoughts:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post362595
Most of that post is still true today, except Facebook which has gotten pretty much impossible to run affiliate offers on long-term without having to burn a few accounts.
If you're not sure which traffic type to play with after pop, I would highly recommend checking out Twinaxe's Push Tutorial:
https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...-Push-Tutorial
Push is the next logical progression from pop - it's the "next step up" - basically it's pop with the addition of push ads (on top of offers + landers + traffic).
And if you want a bird's eye view on what's working or not working in the affiliate marketing industry - verticals, offers, traffic types, whatever else - check out the current year's "What's Working in Affiliate Marketing" report. Just do a search in the forum. At the time of writing, the most recent report is here:
https://stmforum.com/whats-working-2021/
That's all from me for now! I wish you much prosperity in the near future and beyond! Thanks again for dedicating your time towards this tutorial - I'm filled with appreciation for STM, and for each and every one of you.
Amy - signing off (for now)
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