[Journey] Team Media Buying

Welcome to this thread!
I am very glad that it will finally be created!

A little background
The idea for this startup came to me during my other Journey. https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/im-mafia-journey.1321514/post-14384414 (You can also find there another small long read about my vision of the mechanics of team media buying) I am an owner of a crowd-tasking platform and I have always wanted to see it as more than just micro-jobs. I wanted to build an internet marketing team. At first, I could not find the idea that would allow me to see the real way how people who are not at all connected with each other but have some similar activity or just an interest in money can effectively interact to make even more money. I have had several relatively successful internet marketing journies in the past and cannot call myself a complete newbie. Some of my friends and former teammates with whom I met on the Internet are now working in large advertising agencies, offices. And I never wanted to work in an office. Therefore, I am writing this message from Cambodia sitting nearby the pool and hurrying to meet some pretty girls. But I understand what teamwork can give us. Companies can run more tests, consolidate larger budgets, and deal with a bunch of daily operational challenges. Keeping all this in my head, I tried to see a way that would allow putting this idea into practice. Then I decided to start at least from somewhere and created this topic https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/review-copies-team-media-buying-service.1341082/#post-14493767 and this topic appears as a result of that test.

Considering all previous experience, this is the path that I see

This Journey's MISSION
create a working team media buying service

What is team media buying?
As far as the universe explained to me, it is
1. collective thinking approach in determining a list of marketing hypotheses
2. crowdfunding a list of proposed hypotheses and sharing information from the results equally between the participants.
That is probably a short explanation.

Starting point
Taking into account all of the above, as well as my own experience in internet marketing. I decided to go in from the influencer marketing side. As far as I can see, this path offers lower monetary barriers to entry and a more transparent way to audit traffic.

First step
Earlier, I manually collected 300 Instagram influencers in the meme niche from Google and manually wrote a hundred of them. About five of them answered me in the first two hours and I managed to agree on something with one of them. Immediately after that, my Instagram account was, as expected, banned (I'm already used to it). So, I'm going to set my bots on Google and collect, like in the good old days, at least a few hundred thousand links to the Instagram influencer profiles. After that, I will contact each of them through my virtual assistants. In the message, I will ask those who are interested in providing advertising on their channels to write to me in private messages. Thus, I will just sit and wait for the robots to make the influencers come to me on their own. By the way, some services on the Internet ask for several hundred thousand dollars a month for such services.

In the process of establishing contacts with as many influencers as possible, I will be testing various affiliate products with their traffic. The results of the tests, I will publish here. The same I will do with links to the products and influencer's pages. Thus, I am already creating a situation in which all those who will follow this thread will already participate in the team media buying. I will listen with great interest to all your ideas and opinions. That is the reason to start all the hustle about the thread. Apart from that, I will also publish lists of influencers who have offered me their traffic but I have not tested them yet. Thus, everyone who reads this will be able to underline an influencer, a suitable product, and offer to test this hypothesis here. As if the budget that I will be spending on the tests was crowdfunded by the followers of this thread.

Based on the feedback from you and the information that will be received during this journey, I will build a website to automate the activity that team media buying involves.

I am doing this because I believe such a service should exist.

*** For those who still did not understand what is these all about.
Imagine you are reading a new method thread on BHW, you are interested but you don't have time and money to make tests and find out whether it is really working and making money. So what you do is you and others who want to have this information altogether crowdfund the test and, let's say, hire a virtual assistant from the BHW marketplace who honestly performs testing of the method and provides everyone who funded the experiment with a report of the campaign details. This way you can save time and make tests much more methods with the same budget.

In response to your "crowdfunded team" -> it's unlikely to work in such public way IMO, at least not in a meaningful way. People aren't likely to share what makes them a living - so even if you crowdfund a concept together and make it a team-effort - people will just leech off it and not provide really valuable info back.

If you want to work in a team, just build your own or partner up with pre-selected people and keep the circle close. This works well enough, no need to reinvent the wheel.

JessePinkmanBB said:

In response to your "crowdfunded team" -> it's unlikely to work in such public way IMO, at least not in a meaningful way. People aren't likely to share what makes them a living - so even if you crowdfund a concept together and make it a team-effort - people will just leech off it and not provide really valuable info back.

If you want to work in a team, just build your own or partner up with pre-selected people and keep the circle close. This works well enough, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Click to expand...

I understand your point. But I think I need to make the idea a little bit more clear for you. I do understand human nature and I do take into consideration that people are not going to share any valuable information for free. Thus, I am not talking about anything of the above.
What I am talking about is that if you are doing IM you know that sometimes you want to test hundreds of traffic sources, audiences, products, even more combinations of those. At this moment the business is not about squeezing the already profitable campaign. It is about finding a profitable campaign among the majority of those that will not turn out to be profitable. And at this point, we can collaborate in relatively small distributed groups. Instead of wasting 100% of the budget on a campaign that turned out to be a failure you can share the budget with others and fund only 10% of the whole budget. In this case, you can scale the number of hypotheses that you test 10 times...

This would actually turn out to be nice if it works out. You’ll need some wonderful individuals to pull this one off

I actually do a lot of media buying and once you understand how to do it properly then it is not actually that difficult to do, particularly if you understand how to blend it with ad arbitrage.

The key is a reliable traffic source, that you can scale and a profitable funnel.

From reading your thread you are buying posts from influencers.

Is there a reason you chose that approach, as in my experience that is actually the hardest way to do it?

GringoMonkey said:

I actually do a lot of media buying and once you understand how to do it properly then it is not actually that difficult to do, particularly if you understand how to blend it with ad arbitrage.

The key is a reliable traffic source, that you can scale and a profitable funnel.

From reading your thread you are buying posts from influencers.

Is there a reason you chose that approach, as in my experience that is actually the hardest way to do it?

Click to expand...

Because, from my perspective, influencer marketing has a lower entry budget barrier and more straightforward traffic audit techniques.

kelturon said:

Because, from my perspective, influencer marketing has a lower entry budget barrier and more straightforward traffic audit techniques.

Click to expand...

You can start traffic media buying with $200, so initial risk is about equal.

Have you done influencer marketing before, how did you scale it?

GringoMonkey said:

You can start traffic media buying with $200, so initial risk is about equal.

Have you done influencer marketing before, how did you scale it?

Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree with you. But this thread is not only about regular media buying... Read the first post. According to all the above, I chose In. Mar.
I was doing FB ads and push before.
For influencer marketing, I am going to post my journey here. I was doing experiments before but this time I want to do it seriously and on a consistent basis.
This week I did not do any updates because I got corona all of a sudden...

kelturon said:

I was doing FB ads and push before.

Click to expand...

I guess it begs the question why not just scale your push and fb campaigns or did they not work so well and you wanted to try ig?

GringoMonkey said:

I guess it begs the question why not just scale your push and fb campaigns or did they not work so well and you wanted to try ig?

Click to expand...

I already checked your BST bro) I see you are about FB ads. I do understand it is an interesting direction but I already told you my reasons why I am choosing inf., mar., for now. It may change after more tests are done. I will keep updated

kelturon said:

I already checked your BST bro) I see you are about FB ads. I do understand it is an interesting direction but I already told you my reasons why I am choosing inf., mar., for now. It may change after more tests are done. I will keep updated

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I am not just about fb. My questions are nothing to do with my bst.

I do like to talk about other things as well

I also do push, pop up etc as part of my media buying strategy.

Your original premise was to try lots of different ideas, where mine is to scale the shit out of something that works.

So, that is why i was asking you why did you pick ig, which is hard to scale, and why not just scale your existing fb and push campaigns.

But i understand if you do not want to answer.

There is a service like influence (.co) you can log in and view influencer profile handles or even communicate through that service before paying any money. Many users make agreements outside the service, but you can find list of influencers to talk to.

GringoMonkey said:

I am not just about fb. My questions are nothing to do with my bst.

I do like to talk about other things as well

I also do push, pop up etc as part of my media buying strategy.

Your original premise was to try lots of different ideas, where mine is to scale the shit out of something that works.

So, that is why i was asking you why did you pick ig, which is hard to scale, and why not just scale your existing fb and push campaigns.

But i understand if you do not want to answer.

Click to expand...

Yes, it is, exactly. But look this thread is not just about MB, it is about building a specific service around MB. I will be happy to answer all your questions and thank you for coming to this thread! I gave answers to most of your questions in the first post.

PushKing said:

There is a service like influence (.co) you can log in and view influencer profile handles or even communicate through that service before paying any money. Many users make agreements outside the service, but you can find list of influencers to talk to.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I also did mention already that there are such services, but I want to build the database myself because obviously there are some advantages of that (I prefer manual control and fine-tuning)

Sorry guys, once again, these 7 days I had corona. Kicked its ass and now going back to business.
As claimed in the first post I will scrape Instagram for influencers profile URLs (based on hashtags) and I will use virtual assistants to send them DM's and emails with business inquiries. So I influencers to start messaging me back and that's when I negotiate with them and upload lists of their prices here.

kelturon said:

Yeah, I also did mention already that there are such services, but I want to build the database myself because obviously there are some advantages of that (I prefer manual control and fine-tuning)

Click to expand...

I see no difference, you still building it manually, you just look at the source that has all the contacts and chose which ones you need for your database. Anyway, godspeed!

PushKing said:

I see no difference, you still building it manually, you just look at the source that has all the contacts and chose which ones you need for your database. Anyway, godspeed!

Click to expand...

As far as I see all the databases that are free to use are limited. I found some sources that claim more than150kk micro-influencers exist on Instagram. I want to have my own mechanisms of finding and reaching these people, this way I believe I will have a wider choice range

Looks like you have a solid plan. Best of luck