TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Affiliate Marketing Update: November 4th, 2012

Jeez… it’s already been a week since my last post? That’s crazy. Well here’s an update on what has happened over the past week.

I’ve been continuing to work hard on my campaigns, even though I said that I’d be taking a bit of a break in order to catch up on other work and personal things. However, I did spend a day and a half updating MMAForums.net, cleaning up all the spam, and putting it up for auction in my continued efforts to slowly sell off my network of sites to free up time.

The rest of the time, I’ve been pretty much working on my campaigns.

Landing Pages

In my past post, I was pretty gung ho about chasing a 1.3% landing page conversion rate on one of my campaigns. However, since that post, I actually only created 1 more landing page to split test.

It took me quite a while to make though… a solid 5-6 hours, even though it wasn’t all that much different from my other landing pages. The main difference was that I did some additional research of the offer and spent a while compiling that into both new images (which I didn’t end up using yet), and informational data/facts about. I then added this text onto the landing page.

I also spent a while playing with Photoshop and HTML/CSS to recode the page so that I had more control over the landing page elements, and repositioned them around the page. For example, I moved the CTA button from the bottom left to the top right.

I really liked how this latest landing page looked, and was excited to test it out. However, the results were rather shocking – it ended up being one of the worst performers! Weird. I think it’s because of the text I added… it made it a bit too "informational" and I think visual and simpler elements work better (like simple bullet points stylized nicely, for example).

Anyhow, here are the results from some of my landing pages thus far:

The bad news is that I haven’t surpassed the CR of direct linking yet. The good news is that the the CR of direct link tracking vs. no tracking is nearly identical now.

I will split-test some more landing pages on this campaign soon, but right now I am just sending all traffic to the direct link as I want to maximize profit on the campaign for a while before I invest more by split testing.

Over the past week, I also spent a long time (perhaps 7 hours?) setting up a base landing page for an offer I ran in the past. The "base" or initial page of a landing page always takes the longest for me to make as it’s the core layout and coding. Any variations of it are much easier to pump out in the future.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out, but I ran some traffic to it, split-testing the 1 landing page against the direct link, and was quickly reminded at how poorly the offer converted. The landing page tied the direct link for conversion rate, but the offer itself is not the best so I only ran $32 worth of traffic before pausing it. I’ll work on it more sometime in the future, but it’s not a priority right now – there are much better offers to work on.

New Facebook Campaign

I spent a good full day launching a campaign I tried in the past on Facebook again. This time I changed the way I broke my ads up, and launched 30 images to split-test.

Unfortunately, it performed quite poorly, despite having some really good ads in there. Well, ads I thought would do well, anyway.

Again, I think this is a symptom of the offer itself being poor. I never had any success with this offer (on multiple traffic sources), and my Facebook campaigns were extremely targeted.

I’m pretty much giving up on this offer unless I get a payout bump on it or something.

I blew a good $500 in 1 day on Facebook testing this. What a waste.

Giving AdWords Another Try

I’m going to give AdWords content network another try soon. It’s just a matter of finding the time.

While I have a good amount of search experience on AdWords, my content-network knowledge is very limited (basically I know nothing).

I did a very small test on it a few months ago. I ended with a negative ROI, but I do see potential there. The nice thing is that it’s like Facebook in that there’s basically unlimited traffic there. Tracking and optimization is a huge pain though…

Anyhow, we’ll see if I manage to find the time to test this traffic source again.

New Campaign Rocking

Two days ago, I set up a new campaign for an offer I had never run before.

I was very sceptical as to if it would work though, as the payout wasn’t the best and it didn’t look as easy to convert as the other main offers I was running.

But testing every offer pays off, and I now have a new profitable campaign going.

The first day I ran it, I pushed around $400 with close to $100 of that being net profit.

I’ve optimized it slightly since then, and my ROI is even higher now.

I’ve only been running it for a day and a half and have already pushed $1,000 to it.

It’s great news. However, the campaign is kind of flimsy… not one of those that looks like it will be a long-time runner… it’s standing on weak legs. We’ll see how long it lasts. So far, so good.

Daily Income Update

And now for arguably the best part of these affiliate marketing update posts – the income numbers.

As usual, I spent a long time crunching all my numbers from all my campaigns across all my traffic sources.

Campaign #2 actually consists of 10 different campaigns, for those of you interested.

Here’s the data from Friday, November 2nd, 2012. I couldn’t give you yesterday’s numbers as I don’t have all the reports from the past 24 hours yet:

Pretty good! Saturday was even better, I think.

Well, there’s my update. Hope you enjoyed!