Doryphoros' Marketing Journal

doryphoros

doryphoros

New member
Oct 12, 2011
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Los Angeles
After reading Grieve and Louey's journals, I was inspired to write one of my own. This is probably the best way to get all my newbie questions out and hopefully answered instead of starting new threads all the time (as I've been doing) whenever I have a question. Hopefully this will entertain some of you.

Just in case anyone cares, my name is Tom, I'm 22, I live in LA, I work on the critical care transport team at a hospital, and I'm a college student.

I first heard about IM a few months ago through a thread on the bodybuilding.com forums (what up miscers). In reading that, I got the gist of affiliate marketing/blogging for adsense pennies etc. That thread led me to the nickycakes guide, which led me here. At the beginning of december I read up on html, watched a few videos on wp, bought some hosting and domains and put up a site. I learned a lot by doing that.

A week ago, I started my first venture into AM. I started advertising a game guide (leveling, pvp, gold farming etc.) from clickbank for a popular game that came out right before christmas. I decided to advertise with facebook, and I've been just about breaking even. Some days I've been making a little profit. I'm going to start up a few more camaigns tomorrow.

I started with about 3 ads, all with the same creative, and slightly different titles/text, and a $20/day ad spend. I lost money the first day or two, then started breaking even. I've added some more ads, started targeting by age, and I'm now split testing about 10 ads/creatives etc and spending $50/day (and making back 40-60/day) My best day was $70 gross. I'm learning a lot about advertising. There are a shitload of little tricks that apparently work. I changed the title of one of my ads from asdasd guide to BEST asdasd guide and it started getting a hell of a lot more clicks. Also, it seems that calling it the "best-selling asdasd guide" makes people a lot more likely to click. I've found that using a pic of one of a hot girl character from the game gets me a lot more clicks as well :D

I've obviously got a lot to learn, and I'll be sharing my plans, mistakes, smart moves etc. and hopefully receive some feedback from all you internet ballers.

Tomorrow:

I've got my eyes on this stock investment software, and I'm gonna start that campaign. I'm kind of taking nickycakes' advice and choosing random ass things to sell until I have a little more of a feel for marketing and have an idea of what sells and what doesn't. I'll update tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
 


That's pretty slick to jump into PPC and immediately have a workable campaign. I still haven't ventured into it for fear of just pissing my money away. Props for the balls and skills.
 
thehobbster said:
That's pretty slick to jump into PPC and immediately have a workable campaign. I still haven't ventured into it for fear of just pissing my money away. Props for the balls and skills.
Click to expand...

Thanks man. I don't know if I can attribute this to skills though :D. It is my first campaign and I'm pretty sure I just got lucky. I'm starting to split test and optimize now though, and I'm going to start up another campaign. Hopefully I wont piss too much of my money away. This is going to be a real test of balls too because I'll be spending like half my income if I start another campaign or two at $50/day.
 
Alright, what the shit facebook.

I have like 15 ads, all pointed to the same lp. All of a sudden these idiots decide that 4 of my ads get banned because the content promoted doesnt meet their guidelines.

Funny thing is that these ads are EXACT FUCKING CLONES of other ads which got approved (only minutes before) just a different age group targeted...

Do I just resubmit these ads exactly? Or should I go an change one word or something? Any ideas why this might have happened? God facebook is stupid.
 
So I seem to have found a winner...kind of. One of my newer ads has a .3 ctr in one age group with over 20k impressions. Only thing is, no sales.

My other ads have barely been shown all day though, so I have no way of knowing how they're performing yet.

Is this just how facebook works? Does it just start testing one ad a day? I mean I have this same ad (the one with .3 ctr) targeted at a few other age ranges, and theyve gotten like 1 or 2 impressions today. I'd like to hope that this ad is going to be a hit with all age groups, but thanks to fb I can't find out yet. My bids are all way above the suggested range. Is there any way to get the other ads showing, or do I just have to wait it out? (and lose money in the process)

I now see why a lot of noobs get frustrated and quit. Fuck that, though. I'll be adding a new campaign today for some stock investment software in a little while. That may serve as a nice little fire under my ass since with an additional $50/day I'll be spending a huge portion of my income, so I better make it work.

I have faith in the sink or swim approach.
 
I decided against doing the stock market software, it got some bad reviews by people on wf. Instead I'm going to do the product I'm already selling, but expand to the UK and Aus so I can make money at night (my campaign only makes sales during the day, so I pause it at night)
 
Wow I keep picking up on rookie mistakes.

I've been advertising in the US, but how the hell did I forget to include canada?

Aus ads got rejected, the content promoted got rejected actually. I don't really see how since it's been deemed acceptable in the US, UK and Canada. I'll try again with a different ad.

All this international advertising has got me wondering...is there a way to automate the scheduling of ads with FB? I don't want to have to keep track of a bunch of different timezones and manually pause and start the ads. I keep looking around for a way to do it, but I just can't seem to find it.
 
Ok, time to get some real stats out there. I'm breaking even with this (a little less than even but close enough). $50/day. Any suggestions to make this profitable? 5-10% conversion rates. I just started pausing and running ads at appropriate times (started noticing trends) hopefully that will make things more profitable.

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Hmm I've been doing a little reading and it seems like most people prefer CPA to CPS for PPC marketing. I've been doing CPS. I think I'll start a CPA campaign alongside it and see how that goes.
 
No money today. Lost about $25. I wonder why my ads barely showed today...I was getting a really good ctr, just wayyy less impressions than usual (and clicks obviously)
 
Wow. I just got fucking DICKED by facebook.

As of 7pm today, one of my ads (which i made two days ago) had approx 350 impressions, 0 clicks.

By 10pm, 102k impressions, 116 clicks...$.70/click.
All of that happened in minutes.

Well, that's my whole budget for the day and then some. Thanks fagbook.
 
Your thread is epic. I haven't done much fb advertising but I'm picking up on what your saying lol.
 
mikeshinobi said:
Same place I discovered IM. Sup brah?

Anyway, did you design a landing page for your offers or are you just direct linking the offer? I've tried several times to get FB ads approved with direct linking but they always get disapproved, and so I'm wondering if it's simply not possible or if I just need to be more persistent?
Click to expand...


Yee brah representing the misc.

Lettuce be reality,

I'm direct linking.
Every now and then I get a disapproval for "the content promoted", but most of them seem to get accepted (for the same content)
I think it just depends on which approval nazi your ad ends up in front of.


After last nights faggotry, I rearranged my ads a bit, threw up some new creatives, organized a bit more and...








nothing but high CTR. Lowest CPCs I've ever seen in my all my affiliate marketing days. (Literally days.)
 
As long as FB doesn't F me in the B by taking hours and hours approving ads, I might see some good CTR when I start running the US ads in a few hours.
 
Way better results today. Getting good CTR, CPC.

Close (kind of) to breaking even.

spent 50
made 32.

I've been making most of my sales on weekdays though, so hopefully tomorrow I'll reap the benefits of this good CTR and CPC! I'm also going to be trying other offers (very similar products) to see how they convert on the same traffic.

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