Some random pleb's media buying journey

[SomeRandomPleb]

Hey guys, I decided to get into media buying after reading @oni3350 's thread here a few weeks ago https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/c...2-days-from-adult-media-buying.1401834/page-4 - my posts there were literally the beginning of this journey.

Bit of a backstory perhaps... I tried some affiliate marketing back in 2015 or so but I sucked so hard I never got a conversion. I tried doing it with free traffic and I was a lazy piece of shit on top of that. Bad combo.

I ran a crypto brokerage with some of my m8s from 2015 till 2021, did really well during the golden bull run of 2017. Also did manual crypto arbitrage on the side while it still worked up until 2019. I made loads of money and blew most of it.

Kinda been looking for a new thing to get out of the wagecucking cycle again (which I got forced into again when covid completely wrecked my finances).

The thing I always hated the most about IM is getting traffic, yet I was either too much a pussy or too dumb to realize that I could simply buy it.

The stakes are high, I'm playing with my last few grand. I'm about to get sacked from my job and I really don't want to continue the wagie grind.

I already started the journey 2 weeks ago, failed miserably so far, blew through almost $1k. BUT today is the first day where I'm running profitable campaigns. I almost couldn't believe it! So here's the thread, I wanna keep going, I hope you follow along with me.


Current "setup":
- Cloudhosting for the landers
- 3 domains for 3 different verticals to host landers on them
- got ONE shitty LP, tomorrow is saturday so I got time to bang out a variety to split test landers
- BeMob Tracker (took me almost a week to track something properly with it)
- adplexity adult

CPA networks:
- Crakrevenue (main one)
- CPAbuild (shit for what I've run)
- Zeydoo (haven't used it yet)
- CPAhouse (haven't used it yet)

Buying Traffic from:
push.house
richads




Goals:
$20/day (hit today after 2 weeks)
$100/day consistently (covers cost of living in my country)
$1k/day (close to the levels of money I'd made in 2017 when life was good)
Sky is the limit!

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

Here's a picture from my crakrev dashboard. Going to bed now, will flesh out the journey of the past weeks tomorrow for your entertainment. I've either learnt an expensive lesson or just got insanely lucky today. Time will tell.



Also here an excerpt of today's campaigns on push.house:

 

[SRProfitKing]

Obvious question but why not stick with the crypto arbitrage which made you money in the first place.

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

Obvious question but why not stick with the crypto arbitrage which made you money in the first place.

Good question.

Crypto arbitrage is kinda dead these days or has become too much work for too little profit and too much risk.

5 years back you could get 1-2% profit arbs daily, doing the whole thing by hand. Now the whole space is dominated by bots or you'll have to deal with extremely shady people to squeeze out some basis points. It's simply not worth it anymore (at least for me).

Also with media buying you can set up campaigns and once they run with postive ROI you can go to bed and even earn while you sleep.

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

About the first two weeks.

The start was rough, I had no clue what I was doing or what I was supposed to be doing (I still really ain't now).

I decided to focus on push ads and cams.

I created some half-assed creatives, launched campaigns for different geos and direct linked to crakrevenues cam smartlink. Needless to say my initial $50 topup for ad spending was gone within 15 minutes with 0 conversions. The fool I was I thought this was part of the game and topped up my balance again to continue running those campaigns. By the end of the first day I blew at least $150 without a single lead.
Woke up the next morning and decided I should in fact use a tracker - if everyone in this forum says having a tracker is a must, it has to be true. So save yourself the initial blunder and just set up a tracker from the beginning.

A few days in I found out that even with a tracker direct linking is a waste of important data. I've ripped a lander with adplexity adult, got myself a domain and made some changes.

It's worth noting that by this point I've switched from cam to dating. I couldn't figure out what kind of landing page would work for cams, dating seemed easier to build landers for.
Got the LP live, hooked it up with my tracker, embedded backoffers and slapped a dating smartlink on the CTA button.

I ran campaigns with 5 different creatives pointing to this lander. By that point I already stopped targetting anything T1 + India as those were the geos that really drained my bank quickly with shitty results.

After one day I cut off all the geos without a single lead. After the 2nd day I cut off all the geos that gave me only 1-3 leads as it wasn't any meaningful data to drill down. Then I stopped all my campaigns on the remaining geos, looked at the data and started cutting off feeds, cities, and IP-ranges that didn't convert at all.

I let the optimized campaigns run again and had a few profitable ones. Problem being that I narrowed down my traffic so much, that I got to like 10 cents profit on 40 cents total spending for the day. So it wasn't scalable at all - increasing bids resulted in a loss again.

I optimized my creatives, tried to come up with a catchier anchor but still nothing. At that point I figured I should probably bang out more LPs, having just one simply isn't gonna cut it. Given that I didn't have enough time yet to work on some banger landers, I decided to switch to direct linking again and see if the results will be any better (I'm gonna work on those landers today, weekends I got time to grind).


Spent a good few hours making a list of possible offers that could potential convert with direct linking, targeted T1 countries with really low bids and small budget (I moved away from blowing $50-100 just for testing an offer) and let it sit for 2 days. First day no traffic because my bids were too low, upped them a bid to get at least a tiny share of the pool. 2nd day (that was yesterday) I came home from work, checked my tracker for the first time and I couldn't believe it, there was money to be made!

I immediately halted the campaigns on all the shitty offers and let the one that converted run with increased bids. And the results showed up almost instantly.

I closed yesterday with $119 in revenue and spending $40 on ads for this.

Key takeaway - You can optimize as much as you want, if your offer is shit, there's nothing to optimize. Now I feel like I got the first piece of the puzzle (or I just got lucky). I found out the traffic I was buying CAN convert. I know that the offer I try to promote is the most important thing, even before the way the campaigns are set up.

It will be a long journey, I expect to get dragged down to the floor of reality again countless of times but I'm happy I stuck through those 2 weeks and didn't pull the plug after losing so much initially.

Here's an updated screeny from my Crakrev Dashboard:


And the updated stats of my campaigns on push house:

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

Two big questions on my mind. Maybe one of the experienced guys wants to give his opinion on it.

1) Do LPs work for cam offers or is direct linking the way to go? I've set up some pop campaigns for cam revshare offers to gather data - pop traffic will be a tough cookie to crack I guess. I'm direct linking as of now, will stop the campaigns after a day for analyzing.

2) I was thinking about collecting e-mail addresses on my dating landers. You know the usual stupid questionnaire about body type and shit and at the end an email address field for the CTA button. Is there a market to sell those e-mails? I'm not planning to go into e-mail marketing myself, but it kinda feels like a waste not collecting something for extra ROI.

 

[mirrorer]

Two big questions on my mind. Maybe one of the experienced guys wants to give his opinion on it.

1) Do LPs work for cam offers or is direct linking the way to go? I've set up some pop campaigns for cam revshare offers to gather data - pop traffic will be a tough cookie to crack I guess. I'm direct linking as of now, will stop the campaigns after a day for analyzing.

2) I was thinking about collecting e-mail addresses on my dating landers. You know the usual stupid questionnaire about body type and shit and at the end an email address field for the CTA button. Is there a market to sell those e-mails? I'm not planning to go into e-mail marketing myself, but it kinda feels like a waste not collecting something for extra ROI.

1. I can't talk about cam offers because I have not promoted them but a pre-lander always works best. You get to warmup the traffic, cut out non action takers and improve your stats with your network.
2. I do this for a living, so the answer is definitely yes if you can do it. However, make sure your ISP is ok with adult offer/leads.

Following.

 

[sscaz]

following gl

 

[Boriss]

Following!

Good luck with the journey.

 

[rodmarb2b]

Im following your journey Good luck!

 

[Darkmind007]

Subscribed, Goodluck.

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

Thanks for the kind words everyone. Just a quick update without any big posting.

I've just beaten $100 in profit today!
Only thing I've done is increasing budget for the running campaigns
Already e-mailed my manager at crakrevenue to check on my traffic on monday. I'm really tempted to just go apeshit and scale it even more while it's working, but considering I'm promoting SOI offers I don't want to get in trouble if some of the traffic doesn't convert well for the other party. Time will tell I guess.




Current BeMob stats for the day:

1. I can't talk about cam offers because I have not promoted them but a pre-lander always works best. You get to warmup the traffic, cut out non action takers and improve your stats with your network.
2. I do this for a living, so the answer is definitely yes if you can do it. However, make sure your ISP is ok with adult offer/leads.

Following.

Thanks
As for 2.) I'm not planning on sending the Emails out myself, I'd rather sell off the list of the collected addresses (neat excel sheet with emails, date, the lander signed up + the offer which was promoted to them)

 

[mirrorer]

I'm not planning on sending the Emails out myself

You'd be missing out.

Think what your audience needs and you can promote a lot of products making a lot of revenue!

Good luck.

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

You'd be missing out.

Think what your audience needs and you can promote a lot of products making a lot of revenue!

Good luck.

Thank you for the advice.

I might consider getting into it at some point, but right now I'm still learning the ropes with push ads and everything else that comes with it. I'm pretty sure for successful E-Mail campaigns one has to be a solid salesman in terms of copywriting.

I wanna master one thing (or at least get decent at) before focusing on the next one.

All the best for your email business, and thanks for the advice!

 

[thedorf]

The thing I always hated the most about IM is getting traffic, yet I was either too much a pussy or too dumb to realize that I could simply buy it.

Traffic always was my downfall; buying traffic seems to be the way to go.

I tried some affiliate marketing back in 2015 or so but I sucked so hard I never got a conversion.

I laughed when I read this - my first attempts at affiliate marketing were simply pathetic

 

[Turul]

Hey guys, I decided to get into media buying after reading @oni3350 's thread here a few weeks ago https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/case-study-how-i-made-8-686-15-profit-in-22-days-from-adult-media-buying.1401834/page-4 - my posts there were literally the beginning of this journey.

Bit of a backstory perhaps... I tried some affiliate marketing back in 2015 or so but I sucked so hard I never got a conversion. I tried doing it with free traffic and I was a lazy piece of shit on top of that. Bad combo.

I ran a crypto brokerage with some of my m8s from 2015 till 2021, did really well during the golden bull run of 2017. Also did manual crypto arbitrage on the side while it still worked up until 2019. I made loads of money and blew most of it.

Kinda been looking for a new thing to get out of the wagecucking cycle again (which I got forced into again when covid completely wrecked my finances).

The thing I always hated the most about IM is getting traffic, yet I was either too much a pussy or too dumb to realize that I could simply buy it.

The stakes are high, I'm playing with my last few grand. I'm about to get sacked from my job and I really don't want to continue the wagie grind.

I already started the journey 2 weeks ago, failed miserably so far, blew through almost $1k. BUT today is the first day where I'm running profitable campaigns. I almost couldn't believe it! So here's the thread, I wanna keep going, I hope you follow along with me.


Current "setup":
- Cloudhosting for the landers
- 3 domains for 3 different verticals to host landers on them
- got ONE shitty LP, tomorrow is saturday so I got time to bang out a variety to split test landers
- BeMob Tracker (took me almost a week to track something properly with it)
- adplexity adult

CPA networks:
- Crakrevenue (main one)
- CPAbuild (shit for what I've run)
- Zeydoo (haven't used it yet)
- CPAhouse (haven't used it yet)

Buying Traffic from:
push.house
richads




Goals:
$20/day (hit today after 2 weeks)
$100/day consistently (covers cost of living in my country)
$1k/day (close to the levels of money I'd made in 2017 when life was good)
Sky is the limit!

Following, good luck buddy

 

[karupoiss]

1. I can't talk about cam offers because I have not promoted them but a pre-lander always works best. You get to warmup the traffic, cut out non action takers and improve your stats with your network.
2. I do this for a living, so the answer is definitely yes if you can do it. However, make sure your ISP is ok with adult offer/leads.

Following.

I am doing email marketing myself - would you rather try to sell in each email and get the best CTR or do you offer value emails and then sell inbetween those?

I have done selling in every email and the CTR was pretty big but now when I send value emails and then occasionally send sales email the CTR is a lot smaller.. (I use the same selling emails as before).

 

[hdigitalagency]

Clear inquiry yet why not stay with the crypto exchange which made you cash in any case.

 

[mirrorer]

I am doing email marketing myself - would you rather try to sell in each email and get the best CTR or do you offer value emails and then sell inbetween those?

I have done selling in every email and the CTR was pretty big but now when I send value emails and then occasionally send sales email the CTR is a lot smaller.. (I use the same selling emails as before).

Hard to give an answer without more info.

How did you build the list?

Do they know and trust you, if yes, then 90% value, 10% sell but high ticket courses/webinars.

I do both but with different lists.

List 1. Organic seo leads, 90% vale, 10% sell,epc ~$8
List 2. Built with paid traffic, selling traffic, only promots, epc ~$0.4

 

[SomeRandomPleb]

Clear inquiry yet why not stay with the crypto exchange which made you cash in any case.

Hi, good question.

By end of 2020 we received a letter that the following year we'd have to be licensed to continue operating. Nobody likes dealing with regulators and the big boys were already eating up a huge marketshare at that time already. So we decided to sell the brand and move on to something else.

The good days were pre 2020 start of bullmarket. After that too many big players came into the space. Considering the current scrutiny the whole sector is getting now, it was the right decision.