EddieC123
Regular Member
- Jan 8, 2013
- 378
- 225
Firstly a little bit about myself, as I'm still relatively new here & have only spoken with a handful of people.
I'm Eddie, 30 years old & from the south of England. Prior to starting my IM career I worked in sales - starting out with hard-sell door to door stuff like double glazing & utilities, before moving on to (slightly!) more respectable roles like estate agency & recruitment.
Five years ago I had a car crash that resulted in a knee injury which left me virtually incapable of leaving the house for six months. To pass the time I started teaching myself HTML & CSS, then shortly afterwards I fell out with the owner of a forum I was moderating & started my own rival site. To promote the site I started learning about SEO & how to build a following on social media.
Two things happened in quick succession last year that prompted my decision to get into IM. First Google released the penguin update, and suddenly I had SEO companies willing to pay me good money for links on my site. Then a few weeks later I discovered Mylikes. The Twitter account for my site had 70k followers by that point, and I made a couple of hundred dollars in just over a week posting ads. The lightbulb went on in my head!
I spent the next couple of months setting up a number of Twitter accounts & growing them, as well as setting up another website & doing some SEO work on it. Pretty soon I'd racked up 100k followers & got the new site to PR3/DA25, I decided I was ready & quit my job.
Since starting out for myself I have been mainly making my income through PPC ads & a gambling affiliate that I've been promoting on Twitter, plus selling links on the two sites. I've also made a small income through a couple of micro-niche sites I started & some sponsored tweets I've sold privately. I'm up to about $300 per week & this is increasing steadily, but I'm hungry for more! I can make about $700 per week in employment, and I want to at least match this figure sooner rather than later.
Anyway, that's enough background - onto my journey!
The Plan
My Twitter following is up to 550k now & growing at a rate of 20-30k per week. Most of the followers are young men, so I decided to make a squeeze page targeted towards this audience. The aim is to create a squeeze page that converts well enough for me to be able to make a profit on PPC traffic. I've gone for two bodybuilding supplements that pay $30-35 each for a CC signup to a free trial.
Over three days I designed & wrote the page. To keep the page load time to an absolute minimum I decided to use a flat HTML file rather than a CMS. The page has an attractive design which is bodybuilding themed and consists of an article reviewing the two products (I'll get some screenshots made in due course). There are two call-to-actions - one at the top of the sidebar & one at the end of the article - encouraging the reader to get a free trial of both products. Finally I added an exit popup asking if the reader had got their free trials.
The article itself starts off with all the hype about these two products, mentioning that they've been on TV a lot & that celebs/athletes are using them. Then it moves onto a couple of customer reviews singing their praises. Next we hear from the 'team', who are initally skeptical having heard it all before, but then try out the two supplements & love them - unsurprisingly! There are a number of pictures of the products, and the team reviews all have face pics next to them. There are comments in the sidebar from satisfied customers & people signing up for the free trial as well.
So with the page made it was time to dip my toe in the water & get the link posted on my Twitter accounts!
Day One
I sent a tweet out to my top 6 accounts, which have a cumulative following of 400k. I kept checking the bitly stats and the clicks were rolling in fairly quickly. Checking my stats with the CPA network I could see one product was being clicked a lot more often than the other - this was to be expected as the product in question was listed first, but the ratio seemed a bit high to me. Checked my page & like an idiot I'd made a typo in the HTML that meant the link wasn't opening in a new tab. I'd already had 400 visits to the page, but got it corrected before anyone else clicked through.
My end result for day one was 582 clicks on Twitter links - which was a bit low but I have recently been running some similar ads from Mylikes so my followers may be a bit fed up with them - 60 clicks on my CPA links & one signup for just one of the products, making me $32. A bit disappointing to be honest - I was hoping for two or three signups to both products - but it's a start & I'm sure many people have made $0 on their first day! I obviously need to get the conversion up a bit but I also need to look at pushing the use of both supplements together a bit more so any signups I do get earn me maximum commission.
Day Two
You think your squeeze page is perfect, then you get a poor conversion & notice a load of things wrong with it! Noob error, I'm promoting a bodybuilding supplement & didn't include any before/after pics! Got these added to the page, alongside the customer reviews. I also added a little php to the page so the comments always show as having been made recently & the trials show as expiring at the end of the current day.
I posted tweets on some different accounts as I like to avoid promoting the same ad too frequently on the same account. These accounts were smaller so I didn't expect half as many clicks, but I was hoping for a better conversion with the changes I'd made.
Day two saw 92 clicks on the Twitter links, 21 clicks on the CPA links & one signup - again for just one product - earning me $35. I still didn't do anything to promote the combination for both supplements a bit more so I still need to work on that, very pleased with the CTR on my CPA links though.
I'm going to be waiting a few days now before posting some more tweets out, and I want to make some further changes to the page. I used an existing domain I had for the page, and based the site title round that. The domain was aimed at people looking for alternatives to illegal steroids, but I'm thinking that the mere mention of the word steroids in the title may put some people off. I'm going to buy a new domain - something a lot more generic to do with bodybuilding/fitness - and see if that makes a difference for the next run.
I've also noticed that about 15% of my traffic is from the US whilst the offer is geo-targeted for the UK. There are almost identical offers available for US traffic, so I need to use php to recognise the US visitors & serve them up a different version of the page. I'll also need to make some edits to the code displaying the date/time on comments, or they will be displaying future dates to US visitors.
Other ideas I've had for future runs are to try out the same content on a minimalistic theme & see how that converts, and to add some science stuff to the article using a load of long words to explain how everything works.
I'll update again after my next round of tweets, any feedback from anyone - especially those with experience in this field - is most welcome!
I'm Eddie, 30 years old & from the south of England. Prior to starting my IM career I worked in sales - starting out with hard-sell door to door stuff like double glazing & utilities, before moving on to (slightly!) more respectable roles like estate agency & recruitment.
Five years ago I had a car crash that resulted in a knee injury which left me virtually incapable of leaving the house for six months. To pass the time I started teaching myself HTML & CSS, then shortly afterwards I fell out with the owner of a forum I was moderating & started my own rival site. To promote the site I started learning about SEO & how to build a following on social media.
Two things happened in quick succession last year that prompted my decision to get into IM. First Google released the penguin update, and suddenly I had SEO companies willing to pay me good money for links on my site. Then a few weeks later I discovered Mylikes. The Twitter account for my site had 70k followers by that point, and I made a couple of hundred dollars in just over a week posting ads. The lightbulb went on in my head!
I spent the next couple of months setting up a number of Twitter accounts & growing them, as well as setting up another website & doing some SEO work on it. Pretty soon I'd racked up 100k followers & got the new site to PR3/DA25, I decided I was ready & quit my job.
Since starting out for myself I have been mainly making my income through PPC ads & a gambling affiliate that I've been promoting on Twitter, plus selling links on the two sites. I've also made a small income through a couple of micro-niche sites I started & some sponsored tweets I've sold privately. I'm up to about $300 per week & this is increasing steadily, but I'm hungry for more! I can make about $700 per week in employment, and I want to at least match this figure sooner rather than later.
Anyway, that's enough background - onto my journey!
The Plan
My Twitter following is up to 550k now & growing at a rate of 20-30k per week. Most of the followers are young men, so I decided to make a squeeze page targeted towards this audience. The aim is to create a squeeze page that converts well enough for me to be able to make a profit on PPC traffic. I've gone for two bodybuilding supplements that pay $30-35 each for a CC signup to a free trial.
Over three days I designed & wrote the page. To keep the page load time to an absolute minimum I decided to use a flat HTML file rather than a CMS. The page has an attractive design which is bodybuilding themed and consists of an article reviewing the two products (I'll get some screenshots made in due course). There are two call-to-actions - one at the top of the sidebar & one at the end of the article - encouraging the reader to get a free trial of both products. Finally I added an exit popup asking if the reader had got their free trials.
The article itself starts off with all the hype about these two products, mentioning that they've been on TV a lot & that celebs/athletes are using them. Then it moves onto a couple of customer reviews singing their praises. Next we hear from the 'team', who are initally skeptical having heard it all before, but then try out the two supplements & love them - unsurprisingly! There are a number of pictures of the products, and the team reviews all have face pics next to them. There are comments in the sidebar from satisfied customers & people signing up for the free trial as well.
So with the page made it was time to dip my toe in the water & get the link posted on my Twitter accounts!
Day One
I sent a tweet out to my top 6 accounts, which have a cumulative following of 400k. I kept checking the bitly stats and the clicks were rolling in fairly quickly. Checking my stats with the CPA network I could see one product was being clicked a lot more often than the other - this was to be expected as the product in question was listed first, but the ratio seemed a bit high to me. Checked my page & like an idiot I'd made a typo in the HTML that meant the link wasn't opening in a new tab. I'd already had 400 visits to the page, but got it corrected before anyone else clicked through.
My end result for day one was 582 clicks on Twitter links - which was a bit low but I have recently been running some similar ads from Mylikes so my followers may be a bit fed up with them - 60 clicks on my CPA links & one signup for just one of the products, making me $32. A bit disappointing to be honest - I was hoping for two or three signups to both products - but it's a start & I'm sure many people have made $0 on their first day! I obviously need to get the conversion up a bit but I also need to look at pushing the use of both supplements together a bit more so any signups I do get earn me maximum commission.
Day Two
You think your squeeze page is perfect, then you get a poor conversion & notice a load of things wrong with it! Noob error, I'm promoting a bodybuilding supplement & didn't include any before/after pics! Got these added to the page, alongside the customer reviews. I also added a little php to the page so the comments always show as having been made recently & the trials show as expiring at the end of the current day.
I posted tweets on some different accounts as I like to avoid promoting the same ad too frequently on the same account. These accounts were smaller so I didn't expect half as many clicks, but I was hoping for a better conversion with the changes I'd made.
Day two saw 92 clicks on the Twitter links, 21 clicks on the CPA links & one signup - again for just one product - earning me $35. I still didn't do anything to promote the combination for both supplements a bit more so I still need to work on that, very pleased with the CTR on my CPA links though.
I'm going to be waiting a few days now before posting some more tweets out, and I want to make some further changes to the page. I used an existing domain I had for the page, and based the site title round that. The domain was aimed at people looking for alternatives to illegal steroids, but I'm thinking that the mere mention of the word steroids in the title may put some people off. I'm going to buy a new domain - something a lot more generic to do with bodybuilding/fitness - and see if that makes a difference for the next run.
I've also noticed that about 15% of my traffic is from the US whilst the offer is geo-targeted for the UK. There are almost identical offers available for US traffic, so I need to use php to recognise the US visitors & serve them up a different version of the page. I'll also need to make some edits to the code displaying the date/time on comments, or they will be displaying future dates to US visitors.
Other ideas I've had for future runs are to try out the same content on a minimalistic theme & see how that converts, and to add some science stuff to the article using a load of long words to explain how everything works.
I'll update again after my next round of tweets, any feedback from anyone - especially those with experience in this field - is most welcome!
