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For a long time I've envisioned being able to make a post like this one somewhere. I was however a little hesitant to make this thread at first once things did start picking up, as I'm a pretty reserved guy, but I figured if I've already shared my hardships and tough times (in my intro thread, here) I should also share my successes. Thankfully my prayers have been answered much sooner than I had anticipated. So here goes; hopefully I can also help a few others that have been venturing down the same path as me.
Quick Recap
I've been doing affiliate marketing for a little over 2 years now. It's been almost exactly 1 year since I kicked the training wheels off and dived head-first into paid ads. At that time, I think my budgets were like $25-50 a day MAX, and my credit card limit was about $800. So not much breathing room, especially for PPC.
Given my monetary situation at that time, I had to bootstrap as much as possible. Scavenging google, forums, youtube, any information I could find to teach myself paid ads. I couldn't afford a decent expensive VPS, so I had to learn to set up, manage and optimize a self-managed VPS for my tracker and to host landers.
I reinvested my profits into more learning resources like paid marketing forums, which really turned out to be invaluable in terms of the information and coaching I received. everything I made went back into the business. And not having big budgets forced me to be extra conservative with my campaigns. Thankfully, I don't think I ever lost more than $300 in a full month while testing and learning. So, I guess that's an advantage of starting out broke.
The Details
It took me 6 long months of non-stop grinding to finally hit a breakthrough. During these months, I don't think I made any significant profit. In fact, I may have been at a slight loss considering all the hosting/tracker/forum membership costs.
But finally one day, it was like the POWER switch flipped on. Literally, my breakthrough was from a few days to another.
I found a hot offer and matched it up with a great traffic source. It was also right around this time that I had just finished setting up my corporation, business bank accounts, and fortunately had gotten approved for some higher limit credit cards, JUST as all my other ones were nearly maxed out from all the daily adspend.
Within a couple of weeks, I had taken my previous $30-50 profit days (good days) to $250 - $300 profit days. And within a few more weeks of optimizing and adding some additional offers to the mix, I was doing anywhere from $500 to $1700 profit a day. In 4 months, I was able to generate over 6 figures in revenue, and almost hit 6 figures in profit as well. Overall ROI was a little over 100%. THIS is what I had been waiting for.
Flashback to 1 year ago when even spending $30 on ads every day was a stretch.
Needless to say, this has been like a huge burden lifted off my back. This money doesn't guarantee my financial security or puts me and my family into the fastlane -- but it's a start. And some breathing room certainly a great thing after struggling for so long.
Lessons Learned
I started reading TMF during these last 4 months, and MJ's principles have really changed my perspective on my current business. I lack a very important thing -- control.
The first week of August I got my ad accounts banned. Recovered them a week later, but then the main offer I was running got paused. Not only that, but regulations in that particular country also affected every other similar offer in that particular geo. So conversions are nowhere where they used to be. I made some good cash in that 4 month run, but now it has mostly dried up. I'm back to working on some other campaigns to get my daily profit back to where it used to be, again.
But after reading MJ's book, I can't help but feel as though I'm building a sandcastle right next to the shore. Yeah, I might do 45k again next month, but these offers have a shelf like. There's no building upon this to do 100k in 3 months, then 300k, and so on. Well, technically you can. But realistically offers will go down and you'll have to rebuild that lost profit.
Looking back at the previous offer I ran the most volume to, while my conversions stopped coming in after it got paused, the offer owner is still making money from the subscriptions I generated him. Lots of money. So moving forward, I will be looking to to transition from affiliate to offer owner.
Not quite sure how to go on about that, but I'll figure it out. All I know is that to get where I want to go, that's the road I'll have to take. I need to have more control over my business, and not be at the expense of offer owners pausing their offers, lowering their payouts, or other regulations that I can't control being imposed on the offers I'm running.
So, my journey onto the fastlane isn't complete. But I'm definitely a lot closer than I was a year ago.
If you have any questions, ask away. Please try to keep them on this thread, and not on PMs. I want to keep everything on here for others to read.
Quick Recap
I've been doing affiliate marketing for a little over 2 years now. It's been almost exactly 1 year since I kicked the training wheels off and dived head-first into paid ads. At that time, I think my budgets were like $25-50 a day MAX, and my credit card limit was about $800. So not much breathing room, especially for PPC.
Given my monetary situation at that time, I had to bootstrap as much as possible. Scavenging google, forums, youtube, any information I could find to teach myself paid ads. I couldn't afford a decent expensive VPS, so I had to learn to set up, manage and optimize a self-managed VPS for my tracker and to host landers.
I reinvested my profits into more learning resources like paid marketing forums, which really turned out to be invaluable in terms of the information and coaching I received. everything I made went back into the business. And not having big budgets forced me to be extra conservative with my campaigns. Thankfully, I don't think I ever lost more than $300 in a full month while testing and learning. So, I guess that's an advantage of starting out broke.
The Details
It took me 6 long months of non-stop grinding to finally hit a breakthrough. During these months, I don't think I made any significant profit. In fact, I may have been at a slight loss considering all the hosting/tracker/forum membership costs.
But finally one day, it was like the POWER switch flipped on. Literally, my breakthrough was from a few days to another.
I found a hot offer and matched it up with a great traffic source. It was also right around this time that I had just finished setting up my corporation, business bank accounts, and fortunately had gotten approved for some higher limit credit cards, JUST as all my other ones were nearly maxed out from all the daily adspend.
Within a couple of weeks, I had taken my previous $30-50 profit days (good days) to $250 - $300 profit days. And within a few more weeks of optimizing and adding some additional offers to the mix, I was doing anywhere from $500 to $1700 profit a day. In 4 months, I was able to generate over 6 figures in revenue, and almost hit 6 figures in profit as well. Overall ROI was a little over 100%. THIS is what I had been waiting for.
Flashback to 1 year ago when even spending $30 on ads every day was a stretch.
Needless to say, this has been like a huge burden lifted off my back. This money doesn't guarantee my financial security or puts me and my family into the fastlane -- but it's a start. And some breathing room certainly a great thing after struggling for so long.
Lessons Learned
I started reading TMF during these last 4 months, and MJ's principles have really changed my perspective on my current business. I lack a very important thing -- control.
The first week of August I got my ad accounts banned. Recovered them a week later, but then the main offer I was running got paused. Not only that, but regulations in that particular country also affected every other similar offer in that particular geo. So conversions are nowhere where they used to be. I made some good cash in that 4 month run, but now it has mostly dried up. I'm back to working on some other campaigns to get my daily profit back to where it used to be, again.
But after reading MJ's book, I can't help but feel as though I'm building a sandcastle right next to the shore. Yeah, I might do 45k again next month, but these offers have a shelf like. There's no building upon this to do 100k in 3 months, then 300k, and so on. Well, technically you can. But realistically offers will go down and you'll have to rebuild that lost profit.
Looking back at the previous offer I ran the most volume to, while my conversions stopped coming in after it got paused, the offer owner is still making money from the subscriptions I generated him. Lots of money. So moving forward, I will be looking to to transition from affiliate to offer owner.
Not quite sure how to go on about that, but I'll figure it out. All I know is that to get where I want to go, that's the road I'll have to take. I need to have more control over my business, and not be at the expense of offer owners pausing their offers, lowering their payouts, or other regulations that I can't control being imposed on the offers I'm running.
So, my journey onto the fastlane isn't complete. But I'm definitely a lot closer than I was a year ago.
If you have any questions, ask away. Please try to keep them on this thread, and not on PMs. I want to keep everything on here for others to read.
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