Thanks to MyBid, marketers can access some of the most experienced marketing teams. It was hard to imagine that a platform could give affiliate marketers all-inclusive service. This blog reviews the MyBid platform, how to get started, and its many benefits.
As one of the newest players in the digital marketing world, MyBid has been quietly working by drumming up interest from partners and advertisers for the last couple of years.
Recently, MyBid has moved into the public eye, moving away from being just a fully managed affiliate marketing agency and now into a popular platform with some of the most stellar customer support.
In my opinion, what stands out for me is the fact that MyBid is specifically for advertisers. Some of their best features are a fully managed advertising platform, various ad formats, wicked push notification ads, and much more.
Here’s a quick overview of getting started with MyBid.io. With just six steps, you can be raking in cash in no time.
By harnessing the power of the MyBid manager, I found it a breeze to find the perfect ad formats, landing pages, and creatives to make my campaign stellar.
In this second step, I chose which payment method I wanted to use; I found it interesting to start with such a low deposit.
The MyBid manager helped me take my marketing campaign to a whole new level; I was able to optimize everything resulting in some wicked stats and leads.
After that, the MyBid manager quickly set my campaign and started it; I didn’t have to lift a finger.
Here I was able to change bids, tweak creatives, and even add more advertising formats to scale my campaign.
Finally, the most attractive allure of affiliate marketing advertising is to count your profits; with MyBid, I was shocked at my ROI.
Honestly, I was blown away by how many advertising formats MyBid has available; there is something for everyone here. Below is a list of all advertising formats and my thoughts on each option:
Out of all the ad formats, push notifications are probably the most effective when it comes to advertising; I can easily reach my target audience without going broke. I love push notifications because they work well on web browsers and mobile devices, with cheap traffic and high returns.
I’ll keep this one short and sweet; with popunder ads, I find that they’re a great way to keep your budget low while still getting high-quality leads.
As a relative newcomer to the affiliate marketing world, widget notifications have a reputation for generating traffic using a strict filtering system, resulting in quality leads that’ll convert.
For native ads, it’s common to see them on news websites or blogs, appearing like they’re part of the content. As one of the most potent ad formats, native ads can generate quality traffic from their natural, inviting appearance.
As one of the oldest formats, banner ads are a tried-and-true option for affiliate marketing. Typically found at the top of websites, displayed like a “banner,” these ads are a great starting point for any beginner affiliate marketers.
As in-stream videos continue to grow in popularity for ads, it’s great to know MyBid is keeping up with the times. The biggest advantage videos have is that they can easily evoke emotions and let viewers visualize the product without holding or using it physically.
Here’s my list of some of the best advantages when using MyBid to take your affiliate marketing campaign to the next level.
The best thing about MyBid.io is the personal manager; they provide the tools I need to scale my campaign and business successfully. With access to these incredible tools, I can confidently reach my target audience, watch what ads are converting, and see where I need to make any changes.
Super easy to interact with my managers, I mean they gave me 2. Since I just supply them with a link, they start making sure it becomes profitable.
As one of the best options, regardless of what product or service you’re trying to sell, MyBid can accommodate all verticals and niches. This point is what sold me on using this platform; with a wide range of options for possible offerings, I can have peace of mind knowing my campaign will be a hit.
With loads of flexible settings, I found it easy to customize my traffic, focusing on specific needs and interests. By targeting by country, IP address, browser type, or operating system, MyBid is the perfect tool to convert high-quality traffic.
Lastly, I found MyBid’s extensive library of ad formats to be a factor that sealed the deal for me. With many options that can work for any vertical, campaign type, or target audience, MyBid was the missing piece to my affiliate marketing puzzle.
My verdict for MyBid would be two thumbs up if you didn’t guess it. With MyBid’s personal manager, I have another set of eyes looking at incoming traffic and much more. In the end, MyBid took care of the stats, and I could focus on increasing my conversions and profits. For more information, go to MyBid now and learn more today!
Today I will review Conversion Rate Academy; my buddy Oliver Kenyon owns this platform and wants me to share some of my insight. Right from the word go, I was amazed by this platform. With a perfect blend of community and experts, Conversion Rate Academy is a great resource, especially if you're still very new to marketing. Keep reading for more on my insights and thoughts on this incredible platform.
As the name suggests, the Conversion Rate Academy is an incredible community focused on conversion rate optimization. Developed as the ultimate instruction booklet that provides marketers with the tools to craft and completely optimize landing pages, website sections, or affiliate marketing campaigns.
If you're new to affiliate marketing, the process of conversion rate optimization is where a marketer looks to "optimize" or improve their website, landing page, or campaign to increase their conversion rates. Essentially, increasing the amount of paying customers associated with your marketing efforts while trying to squeeze the most out of your budget.
It isn't easy to understate CRO's importance for a website or online business; becoming a CRO expert can be the difference between your business spending or raking in thousands of dollars. Whether you're an affiliate marketer, e-commerce business owner, lead generator, or website developer, this platform is perfect.
I tried to do this part in one section, but there were too many points to include. Instead, I broke down my review section into smaller sections based on components found within Conversion Rate Academy; read on for more on my thoughts.
After you've signed into your Conversion Rate Academy, you might notice something that's known as the dashboard and community section. In this part, you can view a list of all available items from a community forum, user introductions, status updates for ongoing user projects, an area for feedback, and guides to help you get started.
Here, you'll have the chance to chat with community members about CRO topics, such as copywriting, website design, and general digital marketing questions. I loved this section's resources for ads, software services, and different themes or apps; finding so much inspiration in one place was awesome.
In the training section, which is quite comprehensive, in my opinion, Conversion Rate Academy goes over each of these eight parts in great detail. Below is a further breakdown of each section with some of my thoughts along with that too.
1. Introduction
Here you get to introduce yourself to the community and get a great warm welcome from everyone including the owners and even Oliver Kenyon himself.
2. Basics of Conversion Design
After that, the basics of conversion designs go over the main aspects of conversion rates while also breaking down the importance of using landing pages.
3. Foundation of High Conversions
Then there's the foundation of high conversions, which explains how to set a CRO goal, develop a solid offer for your customers, and why it's so critical to know your target market.
4. Design Blueprint
You'll learn about creating a landing page that converts for the design blueprint. This section looks at the importance of colors, high-value propositions, and how to ensure you keep your design sleek.
5. Development Blueprint
From there, you'll hear why aspects like speed optimization, responsiveness, cross-browser compatibility, CTAs, and more are vital to making a high-converting landing page.
6. Copywriting Blueprint
In section six, you'll touch on the importance of good copywriting, how to create the perfect copy, and how to develop the best value proposition that'll make your customers convert.
7. Level up your Conversion Game
After that, in section seven, Conversion Rate Academy dives into tactics you can use to increase your conversions, such as up-selling, cross-selling, and suggestion walls.
8. Testing and Optimization
Finally, in testing and optimization, you'll learn how to test and analyze your data correctly, and from that, you'll learn how to plan strategically based on that information.
In my opinion, the guides section is one of the most helpful and best places to start when using Conversion Rate Academy. In this section, you'll find digital marketing gold as others share their knowledge and experiences with the greater community.
On my YouTube, I talk about the audits section a fair bit. Here I discuss that Oliver's team will "audit" someone's website or landing page designs, detailing what they did well and where they can further improve things. The audits section is one of my favorite features of Conversion Rate Academy; it's an invaluable tool, especially if you're starting.
Now to some of my last thoughts on Conversion Rate Academy. What stuck out to me is this blend of experts and, at the same time, a great marketing community, all folded up into one; I love it. With experts ready to give you a breakdown and feedback from website or landing page audits, training courses, and much more, Conversion Rate Academy has it all.
This forum is very different because this forum is a direct mentoring approach vs a community approach. What do I mean by this? Simple, a typical forum is dependent on the community. The forum community gives you the feedback and you decide if that information is good.
Conversion Rate Academy, Oliver, and his team are answering you directly, giving their direct experience to you to help increase your CRO. This is the difference between this forum and others out there. In every post, you will see Oliver and a member of his team on each post, helping you make more money.
This is why this approach is very different and I commend the Conversion Academy team for directly being involved in everyone's success.
As I was looking to scale up my TikTok campaign, I realized that I could quickly start converting my videos for Meta Ads, which I could repurpose later on stories and reels.
I bet you didn’t think of that. A lot of people ignore this because FB doesn't even give a lot of value to these placements. I tested and well let's talk about it…
At the start, my TikTok campaign used all direct linking, which is why initially, I found no need to create a landing page. Mainly because even before presenting the offer, the audience on the platform is already interested and warm; they know what they want.
Honestly, this is what makes TikTok so incredibly powerful. In my opinion, this platform has perfected its ability to utilize an interest graph rather than a Meta social graph.
This thought left me wondering what would happen if I moved my campaign to Facebook; I thought it should likely do well there too. First, I started by creating a brand-new campaign in RedTrack and connected it to my Facebook business manager using a direct link.
Initially, I kicked this campaign off with a budget of $200 per day. With almost no conversions at first, which was odd, I let it run for a day to see what would happen. Typically, I've found that Facebook goes through a learning period, so I was under the impression that after a day, some conversions would start trickling in; unfortunately, I was wrong.
After that, I decided to add a landing page in front of the offer, thinking maybe my audience on TikTok was different from Facebook; maybe my initial approach was too much in their face.
From there, I added a landing page to the front of the offer. Here are the results…
From the first day of this campaign, you'll notice it didn't start too well. After that, the next day, some profits started to roll in, followed by the next day showing some further promise.
For some reason, a landing page helped me filter out unnecessary clicks and unwanted users. With this change, I began seeing higher quality leads from the network and ads.
But how did I find the right type of landing page?
Simple, I just did some essential spying on Anstrex, which you can read more about it here. From there, I could niche down, which let me promote using the most popular landing page template, in which I repurposed the existing text from the original.
Since I had already used different sets of landing pages before that I think have done well in the past, I just needed to find the right context.
With the help of spying tools, such as Anstrex, I quickly got ahead of the game. Following the help of these fantastic tools allowed me to work on my copywriting, the bane of my existence.
Above, you can see that you can easily edit and then export the landing page right from Anstrex, then quickly load it onto your domain; it's just that easy.
The reason a landing page helps to create conversions is, first off, it pre-qualifies all leads. This point is critical for a social graph traffic source; you must filter all incoming users.
With the help of a landing page, you can do this quite easily, mainly because the user needs to click on the next page to see the offer, which helps to drive further interest, curiosity, and even action.
The goal of any affiliate campaign is to convert the click. Here, ensuring that users click are qualified persons of interest for the offer is critical. A good landing page should entice users; by creating a sense of wanting from the user, it's more likely they'll continue through your click funnel.
For those who follow, Oli Gardner, founder of Unbounce, states you should never start a marketing campaign without a landing page. In my opinion, it depends on the algorithm, such as on TikTok.
But I do believe, for the most part, a landing page is a powerful tool for any marketing campaign, which I always use when it comes to Google and Facebook.
Hands down, I will always recommend using a landing page; it's one of the most powerful marketing tools. As you can see from this case study, a landing page can be the difference in helping translate a successful TikTok campaign into one that's converting well on Meta Ads.
What this tells me is that not all traffic sources are made equal. Sometimes, it's a good idea to let the data tell you where to go next; that's been the case for me.
Sometimes, it could be as simple as the offering costing too much or the users on Facebook wanting to know more information before they agree to anything. By answering questions for the user like "What is the benefit?" and "What are they getting out of it?", which most offers don't tend to state, a landing page can help turn things around.
Keep in mind that the flow of a typical landing page is pretty straightforward, from the ad to the landing page to the final offer; it's that easy.
Some people will argue it's better to add a lead capture right before the offer, but I've found that this depends on the type of offer. I believe lead capture is necessary, but again this heavily depends on the offer and goal of the ad, but that's a conversation for another time.
Finally, to cap everything off, this ad converted better mainly because I could filter the users who were most interested in the offer, resulting in higher quality leads and more conversions.
Anstrex Spy Tool is handy for keeping a close eye on your competitors' native and push ads. Today, we are going to do an in-depth review just to see if this tool actually lives up to its name.
But before that, let us first give Anstrex a basic definition to help newbies understand what this tool is really for.
Anstrex Ad Spy Tool is an ad intelligence tool that lets you snoop into the ad strategies of your business competitors. You can use this as leverage to take your ad marketing to the next level and dominate the market.
As far as functions go, there are three terms that describe what Anstrex can do for you: Analyze, Strategize, and Execute. On top of that, this platform also creates a unified native and push and ad affiliates to manage their campaigns.
For those of you who have already seen the ins and outs of this industry, you might have already heard of other names like AdPlexity that offer the same services as Anstrex.
The difference between AdPlexity and Anstrex is that the latter specialized mainly on push notifications and native ads.
It certainly has a lot of impressive stats especially since it has data on 50+ ad networks not to mention having beyond 17 million ads in GEOs.
Still, those stats aren’t enough to make Anstrex stand out from all other spy tools that you use. So, here’s why we think Anstrex is the best.
This tool actually covers more markets, countries, and networks than any other spy tool you can find. Beyond that, it is also the most comprehensive spy tool at this time.
The benefits don't stop there. Anstrex also comes with a lot of features that you won’t find in most spy tools. This means using a different spy tool, you would have to register for countless monthly subscriptions to equal the benefits Anstrex brings.
For all the solutions Anstrex offers, it actually has a pretty modest entry-level plan for only $59.99/month.
The Anstrex Ad Spy Tool can literally make you one of the best advertisers online all thanks to the intelligence data that it can obtain for you.
You won’t find any other tool in the market that can help you rip high-converting landing pages while allowing you to optimize them with your own affiliate link. You will also be able to deploy these landing pages to your own server in just a few clicks.
There’s no need to keep close attention to your competitors. As you keep yourself busy with other aspects of your marketing or business, Anstrex takes care of everything else about competitors spying for you.
Each time your competitor launches a new ad, you will be automatically notified through email. You will never have to miss any of your competitors’ moves ever again.
To activate the Competitor alert feature, simply click on your name profile at the upper left corner of your dashboard.
Select Alerts.
Click Add New Alert.
Tap your pointer on the saved search that you want to apply the alerts for. Take note that you can only activate competitor alerts if you save your searches.
Here is a quick demonstration of how you can save your searches.
In your Anstrex dashboard, click Search.
Go to the And/Or section, and then click the box as indicated in the image below. Select the subset you want to use for your advanced search.
You can decide to sort your search per the categories listed below.
Enter a name or title for this particular search preference. Click Save. Once you've done that, you can return to your competitor ads activation page and refresh it. You now have a saved search that you can use for your alerts.
Going back to your competitor alerts, after you've chosen a saved search that you want to use for your alerts configuration, you need to select a subset of categories.
Choose your preferred way of receiving the alerts. You can receive competitor alerts per email or push notification in the Anstrex dashboard itself.
Since the interface is user-friendly, you will be able to find successful campaigns in any category in a much swifter manner. It also helps deal with huge chunks of data when searching for a campaign through its filtering options.
You’ll have the option to search by country or by keyword. You will get a preview of the landing page in almost an instant. Anstrex also enables you to filter ads per metrics such as Gravity, days running, Alexa rank, as well as ad strength
One of my favorite things about Anstrex is that you no longer have to spend hours just to analyze a campaign. In just a few clicks, this platform gives you all the intelligence data you need.
It allows you to spy on most ad networks. You can do so up to 27 ad networks at one time.
Apart from spying on all kinds of native ads, you can also explore new niches. By collecting intelligence data from Anstrex natives ad spy tool, you are able to integrate more items in your own native ads and thus surpass your competitors.
Using Anstrex, you will be able to gather the following information:
Meanwhile, here is a bulleted form of all the advantages you from using Anstrex push ad spy tool:
Whether you plan to use a desktop or mobile platform, Anstrex has got you covered. You can spy on various countries including the USA, UK, Canada, South Africa, Japan, Italy, India, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain, and Turkey.
Here is where I give you a quick demonstration of how this tool is used.
To get started, click at the upper left corner, you will click on the logo. When clicked on it will give you two options, Anstrex Push or Anstrex Native.
Click Anstrex Native.
Anstrex can be a bit confusing at first due to the numerous clickables that you see as soon as you open the dashboard.
With that, it is important to only pay close attention to the top portion of the dashboard. These are the filters that you'll need as you search for your competitors' campaign content.
Select which ad network you want to look into. If you already know where you are going to advertise of are curious where others are advertising.
You can also select a country to make your search results more specified and precise. This allows you to see the creative in that language as well.
Choosing a language is completely optional depending on which country you are trying to run a campaign for.
Choose a category. This category attempt to organize verticals and sub niches to refine your search. This helps with finding offers as well. Even some very creative angles.
You don't have to filter your searches using all of these categories. Simply use the ones that apply to your needs.
Your filters will show up in this portion of the dashboard.
Further manipulate your search results by adjusting the days running, Alexa Rank, ad strength, and gravity of the campaigns. Simply drag the bar sticks forward and backward to adjust.
As you click on a creative image, you will have the option to do a reverse image search on either Google, Bing, or Tineye.
You can also click on the landing pages of your competitors. Allowing to have a sneak peek of what their pages look like.
As you do, you will have the option to download the template of your competitor's landing page. We will be discussing the Anstrex deployment tool in greater detail but first, let's have a quick overview of the synopsis tab.
The synopsis tab gives you an overview of your chosen ad campaign. It gives you the following information:
This is perhaps Anstrex's most fascinating feature. By using the Landing Page Deployment tool, coders and non-coders alike will be able to save a whole lot of time in producing landing pages that can rival your competitors in just a few minutes.
But we recommend that you don’t just rely on Anstrex to provide you with the bread and butter when it comes to looking for your competitors’ best performing landing pages. We suggest that you also do a bit of split testing to see which one would work best for you.
As soon as you find a landing page that you fancy, you can proceed to Download & Deploy.
You don’t have to keep an eye on it while it is downloading since it will still continue to download in the background while you proceed with your searches.
You can access the downloader any time if you want to see how far the download has progressed. All you have to do is click on your profile icon and then choose the Webpage Downloader as the dropdown menu appears.
Aside from the landing page template that you are currently downloading, you will also see a whole bunch of other downloads that you have done in the past 24 hours.
Any other downloads that were performed later than that will be automatically deleted. Anstrex holds the download for only 24 hours.
After the pages have been downloaded, you just have to click the Edit button from the page that you want to use.
Anstrex has a built-in WYSIWYG editor so you can easily make changes to your page templates. There are tools available that enable you to edit all links, JS, and replace the copy so you can match with what you intend to offer.
If you’d like to do a bit of editing, you can also access the source file to look at the code in greater detail. Before you do that, make sure to remove all the tracking from the page.
Otherwise, it is still going to lead right back to the original advertiser.
Once you are perfectly happy with your pages, it is time to select Optimization so you can proceed with minifying your images, CSS, JS, and HTML.
The completion of the process will depend on how big your files are.
Your landing pages will be prepared in a ZIP file. Now, you can download the ZIP file and deploy it on your server.
You have two options in how you will be deploying the files to your server.
You can simply upload these files to your server upon the completed download.
The second option is to go to your profile icon in the dropdown menu and then select manage server accounts. This is where you can manage your servers and Anstrex will upload it to your preferred servers.
See the status of your download by tapping on the 'Click Here' link as indicated in the image above.
If there is any landing page or creative that you think is not applicable to the campaign that you plan to run soon but you think will come in handy one day, you can just save it to Favorite so you can go back to it at any time.
All you have to do to add a landing page or creative to your Favorites is to click the heart button. You can also categorize the items that are in your Favorites page. You can file them by:
The procedure for using Anstrex Push is the same as how it is with Anstrex Native. You simply have to connect from the Anstrex Native dashboard to the Anstrex Push dashboard.
To do that, take your pointer to your profile and picture at the top of the window. Click it and wait for the drop-down menu to appear.
Click Anstrex Push. A new tab will be opened that will take you directly to the new dashboard.
That's it. You can now begin spying on your push ads competitors just like what we did a while ago with our native ads competitors.
A lot of native publishers and advertisers will agree that Anstrex Spy Tool is more than just a native and push ad spy tool. It is an apparatus for a lot of marketers that are not only innovative but it is also ambitious in the sense that it boasts gradual development in its API.
For the most part, it also succeeds in living up to its vision and promises to its clients. If you are serious about upgrading your campaigns, this is certainly a must-have.
Ian Fernando: Affiliate marketers and media buyers like me we think on the creative side. We think about how do we do this if Facebook restricted us with this? So a lot of people just come to me, buy mostly referral technically, and they want to see the, a problem that they're going through with a creative solution. Well, if you're buying media more, so a lot of people think like, Hey, I spent a hundred dollars. I should make a hundred dollars back. That's really a bad mentality. It's some people you really have to, after all the cleaning and, you know, moving and adjusting creatives and basic optimization, you're probably spending a wasting a couple grand. Right?
Andrew Tran: Look like focusing on the anatomy of landing page. I think you might have alluded before but one of the core elements, of information architecture that you need in order to your landing layout to convert as highly as possible.
Intro: Hi, I'm Andrew Chang I help organizations find their strategic purpose and enable them to create amazing customer experiences. I've been in the game of marketing and sales for over 15 years across various roles from cutting my teeth on the salesroom floor to strategizing and executing truly transformational projects that have made an impact on customers. On this show. I speak to business professionals from around the world in areas of leadership, branding, marketing, and sales.
Andrew Tran: Welcome to the point of view show my name's Andrew Tran I'm your host. Today we're talking to Ian Fernando all the way over from Brazil at the moment, Ian, how are you?
Ian Fernando: I'm doing good. How's everything on your end?
Andrew Tran: Good, good man. Good, good, good. Hey today I wanna talk about the anatomy of a landing page. And so before we kind of dive into that, it would be nice to kind of, you know, let the people who are watching and listening know a little bit about you. So Ian, if you could do a little bit of intro of yourself.
Ian Fernando: Yeah, sure. The fast version of it is I'm pretty much a performance marketer. I do consulting create my own products but most of my past history is performance marketing. direct response marketing, affiliate marketing in essence, pretty much I tend to buy ads as cheap as possible and trying to make 'em convert onto other end, whether it be maybe a client, an affiliate offer a CPA, CPL offer, or even just my own product that I create. So most of my time, [Inaudible02:43] for conversions.
Andrew Tran: And with that in mind, like I think it's gonna be pretty interesting when we start trying to get your tips in terms of understanding, like, what is the best way to do up a landing page, how to build a landing page that kind of converts as well as possible, obviously like traffic is really, really important, but then there are certain elements within the landing page. That's gonna be really important as well. But firstly as an icebreaker mate, if international travel opens up properly in Asia, what is the one place you want to head to? And why?
Ian Fernando: For me, I think it's from all my traveling, I think for me is going back to Vietnam. You know, I think Vietnam is such a fruitful country in itself where it is just growing busy, but calm at the same time. It's so Seren the vibe and environment there is amazing. Like I don't even have to cook pretty much for the rest of my life just because I have street vendors that are pretty much cheap and healthy at the same time. So I just love Vietnam in itself. It's super-fast growing. I remember the first time, I went there, nobody was into tech, and then the second time I kind of went probably after two years, everybody was into tech and they're growing it's just a fast pacing, slow-moving country. If, if that makes sense.
Andrew Tran: Yeah, no, it does. I feel like Vietnam's in this weird precipice where they're about to jump like about to do leap somewhere in technology. Yeah. But they're, it's like one or two things needs to happen before that kind of occurs, but they're pretty close. In terms of city in Vietnam where's your favorite
Ian Fernando: For sure. Ho Chi Minh, just because I've been there the most I'd rather, I definitely want to check out more [Inaudible04:30] the city beach area. Right now I'm currently in Brazil and I live in a city beach town and it's like New York two blocks away it feels like Miami. And I think I kind of wanna experience that in Asia. And Asia just has a lot of beach places, which is fun, but I feel like [Inaudible04:45] might be the city beach vibe might look for, but currently right now Ho Chi Minh City.
Andrew Tran: I mean, you've lived everywhere around the world. I mean, at one point you lived in Thailand for a minute, is that right?
Ian Fernando: Yeah. Correct. Thailand. I mean, I've lived in most of Southeast Asia from Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Japan. I mean, you name it. I've been there, so. I've probably been over, I don't even know how many countries I've been to actually definitely over like 40 plus I just, and now I'm exploring south America right now. Most of South America and Latin America is pretty much vaccinated. So most of the countries are pretty much open with pretty much no restrictions, which is pretty good. The only thing is you just certain places won't let you in like gyms, right. Unless you get a vaccination and all that nature. But yeah.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. Nice man. Nice. And look like moving on, like, you know, you touched on your background a little bit, right. And you also touched on your globetrotting, digital marketing consultants. Some might say a digital nomad, but you've been really been able to build some really success or businesses like earning six, seven figures. What is the main lesson you've learned through this journey so Far?
Ian Fernando: Oh man. I think this question or answer for me always changes. It's because it depends what part of my life I'm in. And for me, I think right now it's understanding who I am as a person. Right. So when I made my first eight figures it was awesome. And it was challenging for sure, but also like I realized like, Hey, I'm not a good CEO. I'm not a good C-level person. I'd rather be the media buyer. Just because when you start growing a business, you tend to do pretty much everything in between, and then you just wanna make sure [Inaudible06:32 ] run. So you tend to do the banking, accounting human resources. Right. And it took me away from what I was good at, which was buying media, data analytics data mining, and all that nature.
It took me outta the creative process and just put me in a doing process, which I think I realized was not my persona. Right. And at that time I think for me, it was good to understand me as a person that I never want to have, or be a C level person anymore. Right. A lot of people wanna be the CEO and all that, that's cool. Right. You might have a personality for it, but I know people, the reason why they hire CEOs is because they don't want to be CEOs. And I think for me, I've learned that as a person over time and the more companies I've built, I'd rather be put in a process or start a new process, but never be the visionary of the plan. You know what I mean? Or the supporter of the plan. I mean, you need to have vision just the CEO's job, main responsibility to have support for the company in essence.
Andrew Tran: That's actually really interesting how you said that because you know, it, you went through that journey, right. To really kinda understand like who you are as a person, but also who you are as a business person. And then coming down to that point where it's like, Hey, you know what I love, I like being in the thick of weeds. I like looking at data. I like analyzing, I like being creative in that sense. And I like optimizing. I like moving quickly. And I think, you know, knowing you outside of this, like you have that type A personality where you know, you just wanna get s**t done.
Ian Fernando: Yeah. I mean, that's basically what I wanna do. Right. I mean, I'm consulting for a company right now and it's crazy that they're so successful, but so, also disorganized. Right. And it's very interesting how that works. Organized chaos may work, but I mean I feel like most of the time you're losing time, you know?
Andrew Tran: Yeah. What, what do you, what do you think like when small businesses or when businesses anyway, reach out to you, whether or not they are agency side or client-side,, what do you think is like the big issue or big challenge that they face? And the reason why they come to you.
Ian Fernando: I guess more of creativity and optimization, well, optimization comes from creativity, but most of the time I feel like a lot of people come to me because they hire somebody that is a media buyer or a data analytics person and they're a studious. They have a studious background, right. They graduated, they have this they got a Google certification, Facebook certification, right. But they follow these protocols that Google and Facebook tell them to do. Because they went through this training, whereas affiliate marketers and media buyers like me, we think on the creative side, we think about how do we do this if Facebook restricted us with this. Right. So a lot of people just come to me by mostly referral technically, and they want to see a problem that they're going through with a creative solution. Right. And I think a lot of people come to me for that.
Just because, hey, my immediate team currently is stuck. What can we do to do this right? Then I'll give them, I'll look over their campaign, see what their bidding strategy is currently. And I'll think of another way to get cheaper clicks for them maybe its landing pages or maybe increasing the CTRs maybe adjusting their flows with their funnels, things of that nature. Right. I bring more the creative side, which I think a lot of people are looking for because, in marketing, you need to have both left and right brains. I'm definitely more of a left-brain just because I am analytical, but I am also right. Just because I have to be creative with that data. Right. But most people tend to be either left or right. And I'm able to mend those together in a way where it works for both, both parties.
Andrew Tran: I like what you also said, it kind of comes back down to actionable recommendations or actionable solutions. And so you're able to kind of use your left and right brains in a sense, because you're able to kind of use data to deduce your argument and your point, and then able to enable your team to kind of come up with creative concepts that will then kind of answer whatever challenge that the clients are kind of facing as well.
Hey, so that actually kind of brings me to a point you just kind of talked about before in terms of affiliate marketing. So you cut your teeth in affiliate marketing. You've been in the game for over 15 years. You post a ton of content resources around this. You've traveled around the world like you've said, and to speak around the world as well. And you know, one of the things about, you know, affiliate marketing is driving that right traffic. And you said that before driving the right traffic to the right side, in order to convert as quickly and as easily as possible, you can do it either like organically, but that takes a bit of time. Or you can do it through paid media, which you kind of use to accelerate, get your learnings, adjust, optimize, and kind of move forward in your experience. What are the common mistakes marketers make on their lead gen page?
Ian Fernando: Well, if you're buying media more, so a lot of people think like, Hey, I spent a hundred dollars. I should make a hundred dollars back. That's really a bad mentality. Its some people you really have to, after all the cleaning and, you know, moving and adjusting creatives and basic optimization, you're probably wasting a couple grand. And when I say wasting, you're not really wasting money. I do that to basically filter out people when I talk to them. If I say, wasting people get so emotional and be like, oh my God, I don't wanna lose money. Whereas maybe some people understand what wasting money is to like, oh, I am gaining data and I can actually decipher the data. Right. That's just one example. The other example is just probably having, not a perfectly optimized page and not optimized copy. Those two play hand in hand, right.
The organization of copy versus organization landing page also makes a huge difference in how people actually read top to bottom or bottom to top, depending on who the audience is. , right. Are they gonna be more image-heavy? Are they gonna be more context-heavy? Will it be more visual, you know, things of that nature. The thing is just because there are so much variables, just the reason why you lose and waste so much money in the beginning, because you have to find these variables and pinpoint which one is actually perfect for your audience.
Andrew Tran: Yep. And, and you also kind of talk about like having to test and, and whether or not it's the copy or whatnot. Tthere's tools out there, like crazy egg for instance, or hot jar. Is there any other kind of tools that you use to kind of analyze a page?
Ian Fernando: Not really. Most of the time I like right now I'm using hot jar. A lot of people tend to use lucky orange, which is another popular one. Hot jar is the only thing that I think is pretty much needed. You only just need to figure out basic heat map of the end-user. But again, that's assuming you have the right format. And if you don't have the right format on the page, then sometimes you might be dealing with hot jar and figuring out why are people doing this? Why are people doing that? Why are people just leaving right away?
Another one I tend to use, which is more of a crowdsourcing app or application or website, I guess, is a Pick Fu it's pretty cool where you just create a landing page and you tell people to do one thing, and then they just try to describe their experience on that page. This is more of a crowdsourcing feedback where you can just throw a page out there between two pages or whatnot, and they'll say, oh, I like a more because of this. Or it was difficult to get [Inaudible14:08] option cause of that. Right. And they actually give you feedback to the visual feedback. So that's one tool also I tend to use as well.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. Nice. And, and for anyone who's watching, listen, I'll put the links to, you know, all the resources that, you know, that Ian kind of been talking about as well. Look like focusing on the anatomy of a landing page. I think you might have alluded to it before, but what are the core elements of information architecture that you need in order to, for your landing page layout to convert as highly as possible?
Ian Fernando: Yeah. So it's a really basic strategy. There are two, I guess there are really no two versions of it. There is like who, what, why, and what analogy, which is basically saying who am I? What do I have? Why do you need me? And what to do next? Who, what and why. Another version of that is pretty much the either rule, which is attention into desire. And action, which pretty much the same if you kind of look about it, like, who am I, here's the attention, this is who I am. And then you have what do I have? Here's the intent. Why do you need this? Here's the desire for your issues, what to do now and there's action. Right? So those two are pretty much the same.
Who, what, why, and what is pretty much like the old Tony Robbins? [Inaudible15:32] strategy ADA is more, maybe the common term nowadays, right. Since I have been in this game for so long, I've tend to grow up on the who, what, why, what version? ADA is fairly new. I don't think fairly new, but maybe like seven years old, the terminology, I guess. Right. You know, like attention can be reverted to awareness. But it's pretty much the same. Grab the attention. What is the intent or purpose that you have on this page? What do I have to deliver and why you should function with me, which is the desire and actionable item or call to action on the bottom page and what to do next. That's basically the format basic, basic format.
Andrew Tran: And like for, for, I guess for like, you know, obviously it depends on the industry or depends on the business, but say for instance, we'll take like a small to medium business. Right. And they might be selling something that might be considered a high end. Like it's, it's in a couple of thousands of dollars in terms of its [Inaudible16:30 ] service. When you try to build a landing page for that particular client, how would you, besides like the variable factors that you kind of spoke about before and the methodologies, is there anything else that you would try and get information off to kind of determine roughly like how much time you're gonna need in order to a quote-unquote waste bit of budget. So leverage a portion of that budget in order to test and learn and then kind of look towards like you know, some sort of gain and returns.
Ian Fernando: Well, I think for lead gen, it kind of varies. The consumer or client or whoever I'm talking to, need to understand what is the value of that end user. If that end-user stays with the company for three months, let's say an agency model, a contract of 90 days, and that person generated X amount of revenue. Then they should take that as the cost per lead gen over time. And then over the amount of time they spent on ads or maybe six months. So it really, really depends. You have to understand that number value first. Right. And then after that, I tend to like, look at, okay, what does the agency product, what it would have to offer? What is the main benefit that it has given me?
For example, let's take weight loss, right? A lot of people tend to like, hey, just lose weight, but why lose weight? You know what I mean, lose weight because your husband is about divorce you, right? There's an angle more specific, more emotional, more cold hearted, and then use that emotion to help trigger with the ads. The idea of the landing pages to constantly get them to flow toward action. And when they get to the action, they actually do take action. A lot of people, when they do copy, they just put the most generic stuff on there. And it's cool having the generic stuff is good, but you're not getting actionable results. An actionable result is people actually scrolling through the page, reading through the page, clicking the button, right. There's engagement on that page. When there's no engagement on that page, then there's something wrong with a copy. I mean, something wrong with the organization and the layout, right?
So those are the things that are pretty much important. And then once those are basic set up when you do an ad, it's pretty much easy. Now you have to use copy on the ad to be relevant enough to the page that you created. I have a client now that we're doing lead gen for they are I don't wanna say their specific agency, but they're basically B2B business. And I've created a lead gen page, which is very, very short, which basically tells them like, hey we know who X amount is. We know how to do this. Focus on your business. Here are the case studies. Here's what to do now. Very, very simple. And it's pretty much straight to the point when I have people go through the page, which is probably just another one scroll on a mouse. I know that they're interested. And then that allows me to actually fire pixel to create an audience, or hopefully, they schedule a call with the client I have.
Andrew Tran: And do you find like with B2B, there's a longer lead time, s therefore, like you might have to generate several basis email like if you've caught their emails, you've had to kind of create a bit of funnel, like a longer funnel than you would.
Ian Fernando: Yeah, exactly. So right now we have, we have a funnel that goes to the lead gen. In between the lead gen, there's a pixel firing for actionables and then goes to the calendar, right. Obviously there's a drop-off. People tend to not want to go to or schedule a call right away. So we have a full funnel of yes and no email series of what to do next. Like if a person did not schedule an email gets sent out welcome and this is a whole nother copy on what to do, right. Just because this is a full marketing funnel, again, just because you have a landing page, you buy media, you get a lead that's cool too, but you also have to work on the series of the email.
So we have the intro who we are, right. Attention. It’s first one, if they did not click or schedule a call within that email, they got put through a no process. Then they go through the next email series. Right. The next email series is the intent, oh, you know, why you should use us is because of this and this and that. If there's no schedule on that, it goes through another one. And we use the same process to ADA process or desire, but within desire, we tend to put now testimonials in this phase, just because we're introducing ourselves more so to help the user’s potential to escalate their business more. Right. So we have to back that up and we add testimonials in the email and then if it is a no the last one is a more of an overall actionable item. We will say, hey, we recognize, we saw that you didn't wanna schedule with us, but here are several blog post to keep in touch. If you have any more questions, blah, blah, blah. Right. The email's more like a four or five-day email series just to keep the user looking at our name, looking at our name, looking at our name, and trying to get the engagement. Right. And hopefully in that four or five-day series, they click yes. The email series stop, and then a call a scheduled and go through a call time agent. So,
Andrew Tran: And, and to tie it all in, do you also fire off sorry. Do you also do remarketing? So when they land on certain social media platforms they are able to kind of see, like you're able to kind of determine, okay. Which part of the journey, like if you're using the, ADA model, like which part of the journey that they're in, are they in that decision making zone or, or maybe they're in the, you know, the further up, so they're more likely in that awareness moving into, you know, attention or desire or something like that.
Ian Fernando: Yeah, of course. I mean, we are targeting or remarketing is pretty much very important. It's also, there's also another strategy to do it properly, in my opinion. A lot of people, tend to just look at people that actually did the actionable stuff, landing pages, or the conversions whereas I tend to just use each segment in a different way. And I try to put them through a specific journey. So when I do retargeting, if not just maybe through LinkedIn or Google, it's more like, oh, let me put all these pixels in Google tag manager. So I can create an ecosystem of retargeting where I can target these users on Twitter, maybe on some news sites, maybe on Facebook, maybe on other native platforms, or whatever. So this way I have a whole scope of where to target these users.
And then once I get those targeting users down from lead to page view to lead to conversion. Then each one gets its own series, almost like a different email series, right. One gets a potential intro. Then it goes like, Hey, you haven't check this out. Why didn't you feel schedule second? One's like, oh, we know that you entered you email at us, but you didn't schedule. And then we'll go through this weird email stage, whereas it's not stalkerish, but more like hey, did you forget? I'm here? Like, I'm waiving my hand at type style where it's like, but I'm not saying like, Hey it's been three days since you haven't scheduled a call, you know, that's a little bit more creepy, so we don't wanna go there route, but each section of retargeting and gets its own mini funnel in a sense.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. It's like a, it's a nice little nudge in a sense.
Ian Fernando: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Tran: Hey, so like I wanna talk more about like the lead gen part of it as well, but you know, before we, I know you're a bit really busy and stuff, prediction wise I notice you've also kind of mentioned a few predictions, like for 2022, when it comes to ad spend for those who are watching or listening new to you. And they're also thinking about ad spend whether or not it's for their own business as a consultant or, you know, or for a large kinda FMCG or whatnot those in Asia. So what, what do you think are gonna happen over the next, like, you know, 2022, when we start looking at ad spend
Ian Fernando: Well, ad spends always increasing year over year, right? The best thing about ad spend as a media buyer, I think you have to-- a lot of people think that they just buy conversions, but I believe you have to buy clicks. If you ever watch a movie Money ball, and there's a famous scene where Jonah hill and say, Hey, your goal isn't to buy home runs Your goal is to buy bases. And the more bases you buy, the potential home runs you can get. It’s just mathematical so that's how I think about it. Your goal is to buy clicks, cheap clicks as possible. Right. And then hopefully that turns into conversions. A lot of people already just want to buy conversions and sometimes it just doesn't work out because all they understand is the conversion part, but they don't understand the click value or click journey.
Next year and the years after a lot of new platforms gonna come out, TikTok is getting popular YouTube is just starting. Snapchat is just starting. There are other platforms that are getting huge organic reach, like for example, anything that you search health-related, healthline.com, you can just buy ad, directly on that site. Right. Instead of going through an inventory box or a DSP box or, or anything of that nature. So there's gonna be platforms like that. Medium.Com core.com. You Reddit, you're gonna buy ads directly on, on those platforms because of the high, high volume. Right. So the idea is what platforms do you want to use? Pinterest is very popular. Those are different ads, styles, right? Linkedin it's super expensive, but you know, depends on, what your lead base is gonna be.
Andrew Tran: It's highly targeted.
26:19 Ian Fernando: Yeah. Yeah. But LinkedIn TikTok, Snapchat video image related platform will probably be the next thing in traffic.
But I feel like traffic's always evolving. It's just, how fast can it get on top of it? Will it be cheap enough that you bounce on it because it was the first Facebook or maybe the first Google before everybody jumps onto it. That's kind of the idea and it's the reason why I always watch different sources of traffic. When I see an ad, I always be like, oh, where does this ad come from? Where is it being distributed from? So always to be on lookout for new traffic sources, I think.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. I mean, speaking about traffic source, like, do you find that more businesses now because they wanting to own the data a little bit more instead of using an intermediary, like for their inventory like certain websites, whether or not it's entertainment or views or whatnot that have high volume traffic from a broad sense will begin to own their own kind of distribution ad platform.
Ian Fernando: Yeah, of course. I mean, healthline.com is a perfect example. It’s like a, a 25 K minimum to advertise on their platform. When you reach a certain amount of impressions per day, you can say like, hey I have this amount of distribution. It's the reason why newsletters are getting so popular nowadays because they have direct access to consumer. Like for example, the hustle, the morning brew is a very popular one. They can ask brands to be like, hey, we have a potential reach of 10 million people and we will email you twice a day. That's 20 million impressions they can potentially get. So that's, I think the big discretion where owning your own data source is important. I mean, push traffic, like I started growing my own push traffic network as well. And with that sense, you have that data, you can be like hey, I have a potential reach of a million users.
I will send your ad three, four or five times a day. So that's 5 million potential impressions. But it really depends. And how much time you wanna spend on growing your own distribution channel? Morning brew pays like $2,15 cents per lead. But when they first started, they were doing a viral campaign. And a lot of popular newsletters are doing the same thing, but push networks. I mean if you have your own distribution, of course, its better. You become your own traffic source. It's the reason why a lot of businesses, a lot of Philly marketers, a lot of media buyers own their own email list because they have that potential to just email us after the click.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. I mean, I see that with Tim Ferris, for instance, like [inaudible29:02 ] and it became like just a small email newsletter and now he just promotes that like hell now, like he, and he's got ads flowing through like on Facebook and all the social platforms just to capture those email addresses. Just exactly what you just kinda said before, like using that as leverage when it comes to sponsors and stuff coming in.
Ian Fernando: Yeah I mean even with only distribution that haven't changed in as long as I've been on internet. So,
Andrew Tran: But do you find though as emails, like, as people have jumped on the email bandwagon, the newsletter bandwagon, will you find though that the open rates and performance of newsletters will become more important, yes but the actual performance will be worse because, everyone will be just beyond some sort of newsletter and then they're gonna get spanned by all these like distributors.
Ian Fernando: Yeah. There's a potential for that. But I feel like the reason why people sign up on newsletter because they're, they're interested. There's not like a push notification I’m kind of forcing you to join, even though you don't have to, whereas it's super accident ways you could type in each letter of your email address. So there is a wanting fact factor for it, sure there can be a lot of spam, but Google is so good at detecting it that people just reported span Google, like, okay, let's just block x.com from 20% of inboxes. Let's see if anybody notices, then let's start blocking 23. And that's how Google's inbox system work to just prejudge. Especially when they're getting a bunch of reportings. But I mean, it's easy just for people to unsubscribe. So I think it won't be much of a difference in my opinion.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. I mean, it's pretty interesting what you kind of said in terms of 2022 where like ads will be kind of basis. Well, based more on the clicks, like the importance of clicks will be much higher. But also email capture, like data is gonna be so important. I think that's one of the things like when I speak to clients here in Asia and elsewhere around the world, like having a nice clean data is really important. One client I had, like, they had like hundreds of thousands of emails like in their database, but the database was so dirty in a sense that it became really difficult to even try and do some simple custom audiences like campaigns because it was missing so much data and it always became useless. And then there was so much balance. So like soft balance, hard balance coming in. So, yeah I-
Ian Fernando: It's important to really clean the data first before emailing a lot of people make this huge mistake without cleaning and they just email and they basically destroy their esp relationship or their servers or whatnot.
Andrew Tran: Yeah. And I think another thing that's really important for emails and it kind of touches back on that landing page as well. Like you've built this landing page, part of the traffic is this direct traffic that you're probably gonna get through your email database, hopefully, and then also your paid media as well, but with your email database, like, there's an argument to say, hey, if you've got a big base of like a hundred thousand, for instance, like, it makes sense to leverage 10% to do that testing, very similar to your methodology in terms of like how much data can I leverage or use as test or waste, as you might say, like you would always apply that same theory with emails as well. Like what is the percentage of emails I can test? Yeah.
Ian Fernando: Yeah, of course. I mean, it's important to test the data that you have, especially if you're not consistent, if it could, the idea is to take cold and warm and turn to hot. So if you have a really cold list, I means you have to change your strategy on how to look warm your list to a hot list. So, yeah. It's always important to test small versus huge.
Andrew Tran: Yeah a hundred percent like having that email nurture campaign to kind of reactivate cold leads in a sense of cold email addresses to make them warm again. Yeah it's really important. But Hey, look like finishing up, I've got one question. I ask all my guests on it. If you had to give an advice to a C-suite or a small business owner to improve their Legion in order to sell that product or service, what is the key things you would advise them to review or look at?
Ian Fernando: Copy. I think copy is super important. Because a lot of small business owners, product owners they wanna write from their current point of view when they should write it from the consumer's point of view. So there's a actually good video by Simon C-mak that he basically took a test with a homeless person and he adjusted their sign, not from the homeless person's point of view, but the giver's point of view. And the homeless person actually made their day's revenue in one or two hours, I believe and then that homeless person actually just left and decided hey, I made enough money for a day. I don't need to do anything else. But, by changing the perspective of copy from your business, you have to change it for the copy on the consumer side, because it's the consumer you're attracting, it's not you you're attracting, you already know your business. That's awesome that you know your business, but the consumer doesn't. So how do you give it to the consumer's point of view and give it to them on copy? So they feel the emotional, they feel the need, they feel the need to sign up, they feel the need to do whatever you want. That's the idea copy, I think, is super important.
Andrew Tran: You made a really good point that mode of action that copy really makes. And that's in all honesty I think that's what justifies, why it's really important to find a really good copywriter and actually to pay that particular copywriter. That's why they're worth quite a bit with it. But Ian, thank you so much for coming onto the show. I think anyone who's watching or listening got a ton of value, especially a little bit of a peak in the world of affiliate marketing and what you do, but for anyone who's watching or listening and they wanna reach out to you, where are the best places to contact you?
IAN FERNANDO: Obviously the best is finding me on my blog, my website, Ianfernando.com, and then you'll find all my social media links, content links et cetera on there. So Iandernando.com and if you have any questions, just reach out
Andrew Tran: All right and I'll put that in the notes. So guys, thank you so much for watching and listening. Thank Ian and for everyone else, I will see you in the next episode.
Attila: Hey, Ian, how's it going, buddy?
Ian: How are you doing?
Attila: I'm good. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much for doing this quick bite-sized interview. We really appreciate your time. I know you're a super busy guy and everything, so it's an honor to have such an OG in the space on the show.
Ian: Thank you, bro. Thank you for having me for sure.
Attila: So what we want to do is we have a couple of questions and after we finish the questions, we have a fun game in the end, the rules with the game are simple. You're going to have to name 20 different cryptos because the person that can name the most cryptos in 20 seconds will be entered to win some kind of special prize that we're going to announce later. So anyways, so ready to start.
Ian: Okay. Hopefully it's Bitcoin.
Attila: Yeah, that'd be the best, right?
Ian: Yeah. That's good.
Attila: Alright. So the first question is why do you think lead gen is the future of performance marketing?
Ian: Well I think everybody needs leads. Even when I first started online my first success was from lead gen. Agencies need leads, car dealership needs leads. We're going from now local businesses, physical business to online. Roof gutter, people need leads. Everybody just needs more data, more information. And as you know, Facebook has all the data and businesses need data. So they need leads for customers and to run their businesses, especially offline business specifically.
Attila: Absolutely true. I mean, I certainly agree. And we agree that lead gen is the future just because it's something that is always going to be around. I mean, I believe that it's the most evergreen vertical there is because businesses, they all want to make money. So that's true. You're right. Absolutely. Now there's something crazy going on. And this brings my second question. CPA rates are going through the roof, so it's more important than ever to have a high payout offer, which Geos, which countries do you feel have the highest potential for profit?
Ian: I think like Southeast Asia since I've been living there and I block traffic there, I think they have the highest CPAs and payouts there just because it's just upcoming. And now, since I've also lived in Columbia and in Latin America, I feel like there are offers here that are also surpassing in CPAs as well. Plus the fact that the traffic is cheap in these countries makes it even much more possible for your cost. So I think for me, it was always Southeast Asia. And now since I've been traveling Latin America, I feel like they do also have the high CP offers, just because you can compete with low CPCs here.
Attila: I personally agree and I think that tier one Geos are not the best opportunity for affiliates. What do you think about that?
Ian: Yeah, I agree. But at the end of the day, if you can find a cheapest traffic and your EPCs are decent, it's okay. But tier one, like Google and Facebook for sure. But you have traffic sources like native that are just upcoming out and just get much, much more popular.
Attila: Absolutely. Now there's something really crazy going on and it's about Facebook ads. There has been a lot of Exodus of people, advertisers, marketers, leaving Facebook and Facebook noticed because when you log into business manager, they have a notice that says something like, sorry, we know we screwed up, we're working hard to fix this because of the iOS 14 update. Like, I don't know if that's an excuse or what, but what do you think is going to be the best traffic source for affiliate marketers in the future in 2022?
Ian: What I'm seeing right now is I think we're going back to when I first started in affiliate marketing where you buy media at a CPC level. And I think like I just mentioned in the last question is native ad is getting much, much more popular because it is super simple. All you're doing is filtering things out, just like how you did with Google back in the day and how you did with Facebook back in the day with CPCs and categorized and all that stuff.
So native, I feel like it's been popular, but I think it's getting much, much more popular as well and upcoming months and probably even years, because it's just super simple, all you're doing is paying for CPCs and only numbers you care about are CPC, EPCs at the end of the day. Even me, I started getting programmatic just because I just got to buy banner from a bunch of DSPs, all that stuff. It's just at a CPC level. But I think native or any type of CPC platform is beneficial nowadays.
Attila: I agree, native is so good. And if we use a spy tool, like adplexity spy tool, we see a whole lot of affiliate offers, especially crypto. I'm seeing a lot of crypto and native. And I was wondering which ones are your favorite native traffic sources for crypto and affiliate offers?
Ian: For me, it's probably mostly like [05:34 inaudibe], tabula. Mercon definitely has more volume, but a lot of more crappier widget. Tabula definitely has direct access to MSN as well too. So I think those are pretty good, but obviously there are other smaller third party native platform like run native, astero. You can always run on those, but if you want volume and quality, I feel like tabula for me is the best then maybe [06:00 inaudible] then rev content and then everybody else.
Attila: Right. I mean, I actually think the same and I believe that you have the order right, like it seems like [06:11 inaudible] and tabula are the top and then followed by rev content and then MGID and all the other.
Ian: MGID is really good for international, like international MGID is really good. I think.
Attila: Yeah. Like these four is all the affiliate needs. Like there are some other ones like adnow I believe that's also a native platform.
Ian: Yeah, there's adnow, there's rawnative. There's content ads.
Attila: Oh yeah content.ad, that used to be really good in the past, but it seems like it changed. What do you think?
Ian: Yeah, so they had good contextual ads back in the day. Now the native ads. I don't know. They're okay. I mean, they need to update their interface first of all. I don't like their backend interface. And the quality widgets, I think it is where they're being displayed is an issue on their network. I think they're competing with the boom [07:05 inaudible]. Well, I think Content ads are just the arbitrage websites, but we'll see in quality over time.
Attila: Right. So another thing is, affiliates are probably dying to get a really killer tip from such a legendary, super affiliate like yourself. What's one tip that you have for affiliate marketers that would really help them make more money with their campaigns.
Ian: I think synchronizing websites and content on affiliate sites. I've been recently getting to more like affiliate minded websites. And this way I can create related posts on those pages. And the best part is you can add aggressive pages on these related posts and put like, oh, Trump XX did this with this new [07:58 inaudible] card or whatever, and then tag it in your WordPress and then have it pop up on a second or third engagement.
And then that would be your aggressive seller, which then avoids most of your issues with your ad approvals. So this way, when people are engaging and see it, and you just have a tag on it to show the second or third engagement pages, then you have your aggressive page, for selling of any [08:27 inaudible] offer.
Attila: Holy cow, dude. That's like cloaking version 2.0. You're cloaking based on engagement. Nice. I'm very sure that affiliates are going to love that one, because that's a really golden tip. So thank you so much for sharing that one. Now for the final question or the final discussion. We're running a really fun competition here at Byte size. And what we're doing is we're asking all of our guests to say as many cryptos in 20 seconds as they can. So if you're ready, I'm going to open the timer. You have 20 seconds to say as many as you can. Let me just open the stopwatch real quick.
Ian: You got Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cast, Dogecoin, Shiba, Monera, Stellar, ADA, Cardano, hubcoin. What else? EOS, Stellar, Zcash, Monera, litecoin.
Attila: Thank you. Thank you. Good job. Time's up?
Ian: I think I said double time. I think.
Attila: We're going to count it. And then we're going to put you up on the scoreboard.
Ian: There's a scoreboard?
Attila: Of course. I mean, this is serious. You're going to need something nice or whoever manages to say the most cryptos. Ian, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. We know that you're busy. You have a lot of campaigns to attend to and all the ladies in Columbia.
Ian: I'm actually in Brazil right now.
Attila: What? I thought you were in Colombia. That's why the internet quality is so bad.
Ian: I was there just last month and then now my visa ran so now I'm in Brazil.
Attila: So, oh, I see. So you moved on from the Columbian ladies to the Brazilian lady?
Ian: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Attila: Yeah. That's the affiliate life. That's the affiliate life, living it since, when did you start?
Ian: Oh man like 2000 something, like almost 16 years ago.
Attila: Yeah. You're a real OG. So thanks so much again for taking this time and we really appreciate it and hope you win.
Ian: Yeah, thank you for having me. Hopefully the information that I gave was useful for you guys and yeah, anytime.
Attila: Have a nice day.
There's an ongoing argument for a narrow approach in marketing, but this couldn't be farther from reality. A broader approach gives many benefits and will have been the greenest for marketers making conversions. I look at chad marketing, the benefits of a broader approach, and the steps to make it happen.
Chad marketing is a term I like to use. It's all about open targeting, letting the data tell you where to go next. As a marketer, it's easy to do guesswork on who your target market is, but this guesswork, time and time again, typically proves wrong.
When I first entered the marketing game many years ago, there wasn't anything known as targeting. We had to go in blind when capturing our audience. Enter chad marketing, which you can think of as "throw whatever you have against the wall and see what sticks," and whatever does stick is where you want to focus.
This lazy, open, broad marketing strategy saves time and takes your rightful customers. With a broad marketing strategy, you can easily take a single message and share it with a large audience. The result is a higher return than a targeted approach. The reason for this higher return is simple, those who connect with your message are your target market.
Ultimately, I found I could make better business decisions using a broad approach, leading to higher conversions and more money in my pocket. By harnessing the incredible powers of open marketing and today's algorithmic ad buying, you won't be making assumptions about who your audience is. The ad copy will let you know.
By taking a much broader approach, chad marketing allows me to look across a much broader customer segment. I can easily cross-check customers based on specific traits, preferences, and interests, then take all the information, and when the dust settles, I can see those who want what I'm selling.
I have to say, the most significant benefit to chad marketing is that it saves me time. Rather than spending one to two days doing some agonizing target market research, this approach gives me all the answers I need, and pretty quickly too.
If you're going to take anything away from this, remember data gathering is an absolute game-changer. I would rather waste my money than my time if given a choice. When it comes to data gathering, I've lost money, but the difference is I always make it up later, but the same isn't for time.
There's a reason why we all hear about these massive companies constantly trying to collect customer data. In the end, it saves them time and makes them more money. The more data I collect, the better I know my target market, the more conversions I get, and the more money I can make in the end. Data makes things more manageable, and if you're looking to know your customers like me, it's an essential tool, without a doubt.
By taking a sample of such a large number from different groups of potential customers, I have a very accurate picture of who I should focus my ads on and who is likely to convert. This approach leads to higher conversion and more sales; for me, that's money in the bank.
If you are considering taking on a much broader marketing approach, there are some aspects to consider. Below are my five essential tips that will help lead to higher ROIs using an open strategy; here they are:
One of the biggest mistakes most marketers make is drawing assumptions before having accurate data. It's not uncommon for marketers to make assumptions about who would want to buy from them, their interests, and what they're willing to pay. It's a good idea to go into a chad marketing approach with an open mind and wait for some actual data to arrive before making any decisions.
It's not uncommon for some marketers to turn up their spending on ads, thinking that the higher the frequency, the more likely customers will want to buy their product or service. But the truth is that this doesn't work. I've found that increasing the frequency levels usually leads to diminishing returns the more spent on ads, be careful and pay close attention.
Spending more money on ads doesn't guarantee higher ROIs or more conversions. What it might mean is you're just throwing good money away. Believe me; I've done this in my early days when I thought that if I spent more money on running just a few more ads, I would surely see some big bucks in no time.
Don't be afraid to refine your ad copy and designs continuously. Sometimes, the difference between a hit and miss is just a few minor tweaks. With such a broad approach, it's not unheard of that the first ad you start with will be the ad that converts your audience into paying customers, so don't be afraid of making some changes along the way. — allow the message, headline, and creativity to do the work, not the other way around.
You've got some actual data in hand; start niching down and crafting your ads for your target market. With this accurate information, I saw higher revenues almost immediately, so don't forget to niche down to customers willing to buy what you're selling.
I found that using chad marketing has saved me a massive amount of time and many headaches from doing all the guesswork of trying to find those customers that'll convert. In my opinion, taking a broader approach will save you time and start making you money sooner.
My final verdict is chard marketing works; it's that simple. By taking a broader approach, you'll better find your target market and get conversions sooner, eventually leading to higher revenues. Make sure to start your affiliate marketing journey here.
Anna: All right. And we are live with our next speaker, the wonderful Ian Fernando. Hi, Ian.
Ian: How you doing? How's everything?
Anna: Really good. We'll wait, just one more minute for our friends to come back in. Thank you for joining the speech with Harran earlier.
Ian: Yeah, no problem. I actually want to try to get back on out brain because you know, band issues in the past.
Anna: Well, it happened to a lot of us, you know? You and I have been doing this for a really long time. We know each other for years now and I think it happened to everyone at one point, but Harran made a really good point that their policies really do change all the time.
Ian: You know, just like any traffic stories, for sure.
Anna: Exactly. Hi Mike, hi Vasi, awesome seeing you here. What we've noticed, I mean, you know, with MaxWeb, we have a lot of VSLs and historically for example, like a couple of years ago, it was so hard to get some of those on outbreak, right? And now as long as we have a good communication and we make the changes that they want from us, it's actually quite reasonable. It's quite reasonable. And what I personally like about native too, is the consistency. So, from the side of the product owner, I love consistency.
Ian: Yeah. I agree. I mean, traffic sources changes algos all the time, so it's just adapting to it. I mean, Google and Facebook change algos way too often than most.
Anna: Yeah, exactly. Well, one more minute. I know a lot of people already know who you are, but for the ones that don't, you're like, oh, you're so humble. It's like, what? But tell us a bit about you, who you are, you know, your journey and how you got to be where you are today.
Ian: Yeah, sure. I guess I've been in online space for close to 15 years. No, a little over 15 years ready. Full time as an affiliate market, 12 years. So I basically started basically just running ads, not ads, but trying to hack MySpace and selling eBooks in MySpace, then selling stuff on eBay. At that time, usually working three jobs just because I think I pissed off my parents so much that they kicked me out of their house.
So I was like, oh man, I need to make some cash now. But now I was like, oh man, I got to work three jobs. I was actually a call center rep, a waiter on the weekends. And during the morning I was a human resource manager. And I thought to myself, like, man, this can't be like the American dream.
So I was like, is there a way that I can get rid of one job or get rid of at least two jobs and keep one. Like my goal is actually just to keep one job and the highest paying job. Right. And the highest paying job at that time was had given me the biggest chance, it would be a call center agent, which I rose up at top of that company to be a telecom analyst. It took two years to be telecom analyst. And telecom analyst actually helped me with my affiliate marketing, because being an analyst is very important with [inaudible03:32].
But after a couple times of like getting rid of my waitering job, and then I was like, man, I just need to get rid of this human resource job. And I was sitting with my friend and my friend was saying, he's like, man, if only I could make 40K a year, I would be perfect.
And I looked at him, I'm like, dude, like you're worth 40K here. And that's where it just starts flipping off. And like, man, I guys just going to push hard. I'm going to push hard on my eBay. I'm going to push hard on MySpace. I'm going to push hard on Google. And at that time, I was making some decent money on eBay and I couldn't deal with customer relationships because I was still working three jobs and then I selling stuff on eBay, and the customer relationship was hard. So,, I actually had to Google how to make money online without customers, and I actually found affiliate marketing.
When I found affiliate marketing, I worked with the Google ads back in the day, I worked with Never Blue and they were the ones that helped me learn Google straightforward, helped me from going from a hundred dollars a week to a hundred dollars a day, to a thousand dollars a week to a thousand dollars a day. And I've always shop them out, even though they're not here anymore. Their company's not here anymore; they're the one that actually helped me a lot with affiliate marketing, just especially with Google and keyword targeting and all that.
Anna: That's awesome. And thank you so much for sharing because you know, this is a big testimony and we always talk about this on how it's really not that hard. And now is the time more than ever if people are really serious about changing careers, you know, sometimes when people hear us talk about stuff like this, they see it as like a crazy unachievable dream to like quit your job and just do this full time. I mean, Ian, he was so... we obviously have not rehearsed any of this. I say this all the time. I say this all the time. It's just putting in the work in the hustle, and you don't have to have - at least your goals at first.
You should have, you know, you start with realistic goals, make enough to just quit your job. Just make, you know, that should be your goal. And I just personally, you know, when we're asked what we give back as a business. Well, for me, when I hear stories of affiliates starting and doing really good and being able to quit their jobs and then, you know, they get to the 1K a day, the 10 K a day is just, oh, that's so amazing. I'm excited. So, thank you for sharing that everyone is loving your story. That's awesome.
Ian: I mean, that's how it really like. I mean, I didn't actually want an entrepreneur. I didn't want an affiliate. I didn't traveler. I didn't want any, I just wanted to keep one job. So my motivation was to get rid of at least two slowly over time, and then I just thought to myself, Hey, if I was able to get two, I have about three months, four months of savings. Can I do this in at least 60 days where I can replace my yearly salary? And then within about, I think it was 45 days where I hit my year salary, within that 45 days just work cranking out like 18 hour days. And that's where I'm like, okay, I can actually do this. This is real. Let me go full time on it. But it definitely has ups and downs. I mean, I've also been through depression, you know, just because this is a rollercoaster driven event, you know?
Anna: Well, I'm glad you said that because you know, we had this conversation and it's a deep level to go into at 9:00 AM in the morning, but a lot of entrepreneurs don't always talk about this - the depression side of working on your own and having that, you know, is the continuous hustle and working hard. And when you work for yourself, many times, I don't know, it's pretty challenging. And then you get to certain numbers and everyone around you has the expectations of you always beating that and being more badass than you were, you know, last year. So, thank you for sharing that. Do you still feel like a lot of people don't really talk about stuff like this in the industry?
Ian: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, you know what, there's this stigma of online where this is the reason why gurus are like so successful because they're like, Hey, here's my Lambo, you know? I mean, the only reason why I can very relevant is because I actually know. And I don't care about talking about these ups and downs, because this is real. This is like actually real life stuff where, you know, you will like lose a million dollars in a year, one time. Right. You will go through depression more than once. And the fact is, as long as you have a circle like I till all the time about like, you know, some issues where campaigns are down or like I'm having a bad day and he's there to support me and push me on the wall and be like, Hey, you know, get back up. As long as I have my circle, then that's good because that's really, really important.
Anna: That's awesome. And you know, a lot of affiliates are chiming in and thanking you for sharing all respect for your motivation towards achieving your goals. So, depression is a huge part of it. I completely agree with you. I always have to go back to my trip is to stay sane. You know, it's part of it, it's hard, right? Even if people don't want to talk about this, and it's okay. At the end of the day, we're saying it's part of it. Don't get freaked out. Reach out to your community. That's why you should have a tribe. You should have people around you that you can chat with. You know, Madalina says hard workers are always to be appreciated. Thanks for sharing this.
Ian: Welcome everybody. Welcome. No problem. I can't even wait to share what I got for you guys.
Anna: I'm excited. What do you have for us?
Ian: So, just watching the last series with Harran, it's basically like an extension of that, right? How to optimize your pages, how to basically get the best lower your CPA by, you know, just easily collecting one small thing and tagging people, right? There's a lot of affiliates that just wanted send the traffic to the offer. And that's awesome. I've done that in the past. Like, I'm a really direct response marketer. I want to just be like, hey, this is something for you, this is beneficial, and this is why you need it right now and you need to take action right now, right? Those days are gone, right? Arbitrage CPCs are definitely gone, so now you have to have a better way to manage that traffic and managing that traffic is by collecting data. And by collecting data is the only way to leverage and lower your CPAs over time.
And it is a little harder to mathematically analyzed because you do not understand from a day one opt in when that person will convert, right. You need a really good tracking platform, and there's really no platform that does it very, very well right now. And the only way I do it is by adding the unique user IDs or at least affiliates in the tracking link so then I can track them later on. But that's the thing, you know, just collecting data from push data to hard email data, to SMS, to a lot of stuff, so it's the best way to actually leverage that traffic. And leveraging the traffic nowadays, especially with tier one and tier twos, especially like Out Brain and Tubulo, where they will become a tier one type traffic source now, they will be like a really good source to actually compete with Facebook and Google later on.
Anna: That's awesome. Well, I'll let you get into your stuff, but people are already asking you questions, you know, this is what you get for being so awesome. So Kamakshi is asking - do you have a routine each day that keeps you so successful?
Ian: I do have a routine, right. I do have a routine, so I wake up usually by seven o'clock. I wake up super early day because I was actually super excited to do this, you know, and I was like, oh man. So my routine usually is I try to go to the gym, but now COVID and the pandemic is providing us like lockdown in Puerto Rico, I do like push up stretches for about 15 to 20 minutes. I have my breakfast, I work ,and I work in three to four hour increments where I work for three to four hours, take a break, do errands, do something for an hour and a half and then do another two to three hours from there. And then the last part is the one to two hours at the end of the day. So that's kind of my workflow routine, you know what I mean? So most of my stuff is up pack in the front where I need to get a lot of stuff done, and then I aggregate things slowly hour by hour.
Anna: I love it. I love it. Emily is saying no way, you're in Puerto Rico too. You see, so many friends here. I love it. Well, their question is going in with the one we got from one of our affiliates on Skype. He's saying, do you spend a lot of time in front of the computer, affiliates usually work less than the regular nine to five?
Ian: So, I mean, I try. It's kind of hard for me. So there are days where I have to be in front the computer and there are days where I just take phone calls and build my relationships. So, I'm not a nine to five guy. Like most of my workload is really up in my first four hours. So you can say I work four hours a day, but I also have increments of work where I have to write my notes, I got to, you know, do a little bit of reading, I have to you know spot check my campaign. You know what I mean? So there are these things that I have to do throughout the day, but the bulk of my other workload is usually in the morning, the first part of the day.
Anna: That's awesome. And you know, Harran and I touch based on this. And every time I chat with people, they have this conception that in our industry, we have this super easy jobs where we don't ever have to work. But many times you have to, you know, even if you split the workload, then you don't work from nine until five; through the day, chances are, everyone works way more hours than that. The cool part is just, you can shift the hours around and you can, you know, how you said you work three hours and you could do something else.
Ian: Yeah. I mean, I've traveled Asia and I took a year off in just marketing. And I just enjoy like a full year, year and a half, just not looking at computers so often. But then there's a time now where I'm like, oh man, now I'm kind of bored, I need to find a full direction what I want do. So, there's a lot of stuff that's going to works right now.
Anna: That's fantastic. Well, I heard that you have some slides for us.
Ian: Yeah, I am going to hit the share screen on here I'm assuming, right?
Anna: I love it. Yes.
Ian: Okay.
Anna: Worst case we'll just see your room, which is beautiful by the way.
Ian: You see my screen?
Anna: Yeah, I'm adding it to the stream right now. Beautiful.
Ian: Okay. Everybody see the slide? Since I'm going to hit present, I guess I won't be able to see the comments. So I'll just go through this and I know you just, you know, stop, pause me or whatever you need to do.
Anna: You got it. I'll keep an eye on the chat too, for questions as you go through everything.
Ian: So guys, I don't know if you guys are just coming in or I know it definitely introduced me earlier. So my name is Ian Fernando, and you can find me all over the internet under the handle Ianternet. Basically when I first started online, Ianternet came to mind because the internet was just so brand new and I was like, you know what, the internet was just spelled wrong. So I called myself Ianternet because I wanted take over internet if you guys get that handled. Now, today, we're going to talk about okay... so today Leadgen to offer traffic strategy, and the goal for this is basically revamping your landing pages. And everybody wants to do a jump page, like a single jump page to the offer, which is great. You're basically filtering traffic. And from the last presentation, Harran basically says, you want to filter that traffic, right?
And the reason why you want to do that is because creating asset is super important nowadays. For the past, I wouldn't say seven years, I've been collecting data and it's been su per important to properly utilize that data in a good way, because like Harran says, you can test all these traffic sources of the competition, but then let's say the algorithm changes with Facebook or let's say Tabula is buying Out Brain, right?
There's that merger, what's going to have what the potential what's going to happen with OutBrain, right? There's these issues that might change and having this email list or data of like their phone numbers, emails, their addresses, you know, it's very, very important to collect. And when I first started online, all these marketers back in the day, like your Mike Phillip Sames, and you have Russell Brunson, like they were my mentors, like Joe Com, like they were my mentors back online and they always said, Hey, collecting data is part of being a powerful asset because when you have nothing, you can always send at least one email and make, you know, a couple thousand dollars off that depending how big the list is. And they do say the powers on the list.
And being an affiliate marketer, we do get greedy, I've been greedy, right? I've bought all these fancy stuff that you see these crew doing. And I realized later on that, okay, what am I going to show for? I have nothing because yes, I have skillset to run traffic to any type of offer - run traffic or run offers to any type of traffic source either and still trying to be profitable or be profitable if I put enough time. But what happened when the traffic stopped? So this is the reason why having an email list or an assets is important. Basically talking about that.
I want to talk to you about one thing here, right? So there is an issue back where I had my list and this couldn't result in the potential of close to three ends on my list, I collected seven years of data. I had roughly about close to 2.2 0.7 million records. And at that time we were making so much money with our own internal - offer, right. This is how I thought this is how as an affiliate marketer, direct stock marketer thought if I made $10,000 a day by buying ads revenue and being profitable at $10,000 a day, right. Is it worth it for me to make $10,000 a month and manage my email? To a normal affiliate direct fund marketer story go, the question would probably be no, because you're making, you know, 30 times that by the end of the month, so there's no point to spend time on email. And that was my mistake. So over time, these records, they basically just diluted and they lost their value.
And when I tried to revamp this list, it just basically became garbage. And Anna, you know, like once data is not used, it does not have value, you know what I mean? People change their emails all the time. You have to clean the list, you lost the relationship, they don't know who you are. So, this is the reason why since that company, that company that I had in the past is now gone and now I have all these records, if I sent an email, I've only probably made couple thousand dollars, but I could have made a potential $10,000 consistently over 120 a year over X amount of years while I had that company. And so, now where I'm at now, that could have made at least three million today. So that was the loss of potential. And over time, this is why like a lot of email [unclear19:59], they value their leads at $2 - $3. And then DOIs Optims, they value their leads almost close to $30 because they know there's money that lit in those leads.
And that's the reason why when we, as affiliate run sweeps and we send them email data, this is what they're doing. They're collecting as much data as they can and see where they can put these people on a specific path to make money. So now my question to everybody is what would you do with 3 million records? This is question that people don't know what to do, even advertisers, even me as an advertiser, I didn't know what to do. I didn't. I gave that question of like, is it better to not make a constant $10,000 a month? When I was already making 10K a day, right? Eventually that 10K day turned into almost a 100K a day in Nutri spend where I had to double pay American express twice a day. And then my record just became trashed.
We started selling the data after about seven days because since we're not doing anything, we decide, Hey, what else can we do with this? Can we give it to an email service provider where they can clean and monetize it or do we just sell it? And at that point, since I was a big media buyer and my business partner was big media buyer, we just wanted concentrate on ads and crank ads and just do that just because I know I'm good at. Because email marketing is definitely a skill, so go ahead and leave it in the comments. And I watching the comments like, yo, what are you going to do with the emails afterwards?
Anna: Yeah, one of the questions is actually how are you best managing segmenting the data. So lets say you do have a lot of records, you know, how do you manage it?
Ian: Yeah. So segmenting the data is definitely difficult, right. I segment data based on opens and clicks, right. And then later on I do it by surveys, depending on how everybody interacts. So this way, if people open, but they don't click. I mean, there's a problem with interaction and engagement. If people do not even click open the email then and put them in a different sub bucket where maybe I have to trigger their interest some other way. So that's how I basically segment it. That's the only technically way to really segment email. You can definitely segment it by conversions. I know Market Hero is only one that can probably segment data on conversions, but you can also do it with any click tracking platform. You just have to run analytics properly, like, especially like in any tracking, you just make sure you add in the email data in your link and you'll have, and you can filter people by email and then you can see, Hey, this person converted X amount of time over X amount of emails.
Anna: Love it.
Ian: So why do we feel least not collect the... oh, sorry, go ahead.
Anna: No, the questions are coming in. You wanted this now, you know, get ready. Goran is asking, do you do some warmup with email sequences or just send them offers?
Ian: Yeah, so I'll definitely talk about that later. So that would be definitely part two of the strategy, but the first part's obviously getting into the landing page part, which is kind of important. And then there's a specific data point that I want to mention out. So let's go slowly. If I'm going too slow, Anna again, just let me know, and then just go to meat and bones and stuff.
Anna: I love it. And I'll just kindly interrupt you if I say any questions and then you like with Goran, we will come back to this later. Christopher is asking, is running Sweeps on Facebook still a profitable one. Is there another traffic source also that has high conversion rate, I guess this is for Sweeps and Facebook.
Ian: Yeah. Sweeps and Facebook. I don't know. I don't run sweeps on Facebook just because CPCs and engagements and then managing Facebook balances is a big issue. I'm trying to leave that space because it managing Facebook ads is just a pain and I hate it. Doing that for so many years, I don't want to do that more. I want to have like two, three or four and be comfortable. This is why I'm trying to do more white hat, more strategic things. So, why do affiliates do not collect data? Like I mentioned to you guys before, it's basically an extra skill set. You have to understand heavy copy, right? Like, yes, we know about ad copy, but we need to start learning how to actually do sales copy with emails, conversion copy and emails, engagement copy and emails. Then we have to start learning about inboxing how Yahoo changes with Gmail and all that other stuff.
And then the relationships with affiliate managers, how some of affiliate manager, they don't want email traffic or they might want email traffic. There's a lot of stuff that happens like, and this is the reason why I didn't want to do email in the past is because even though we hired somebody to just write emails, we didn't really concentrate on the inboxing. We didn't really concentrate, oh, let's segment Gmail only, let's segment only Yahoo, let's only segment Microsoft, right? So, it's just a huge other business. And at that time in my career, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to concentrate on media buying analytics, how can I better lower my CPCs and lower CPAs right.
There's a lot of data we can collect. There is email, which is the most important I think. And then we use ESPs which are email service providers, like an awebber get response and phone numbers where you can send SMS to them. SMS is kind of a sketchy error right now, I believe; it's just because you cannot send more than three texts a day within a four hour gap, I believe. And then there's addresses with direct mail and then the second most popular one, which I also do like to do is push notifications. Obviously, email is the best, but push notification would be second best, then for me would be phone numbers, then the last one would be direct mail. Direct mail does get expensive over time and even more strategic. Then you have to look at mile radius from people you don't know the true demographic of the specific mile radius, so you have think about that, right?
Anna: Yep. I'm going to interrupt you for a question here because I have a feeling we're going to get a lot, so as much as we can to answer to some of our friends. So Jerry's asking as a newbie, what kind of CRM or email autoresponder do you recommend?
Ian: Okay. So as a beginner, best one to probably use is probably MailChimp, because it's free and super easy to use. The next one to use, I think is a little bit more advanced is Sending Blue, Sending Blue is far better, I believe. Just because they have actually segmenting segregations in their platform where I don't think you can do that with MailChimp currently. And then there is Market Hero where you can actually track convert based on emails. I think they're the most advanced one in the game. I do know one of the inboxers there, he used to be one of my mentors back in the day. So, I think those are the ones, but currently I use - since I now segment properties because I do want to keep my assets tight as possible to sell them later. I use a plugin called called Mailster and then I use a SMTP service called [unclear27:44], so this way all the contacts stay in one website. And this way, if I do sell that website later on, they can just take everything off the server or I can just give server to them, all the data and information. I try to make it as easy as possible to sell off the asset later on.
Anna: That's awesome. Perfect. Sam on our team got a question from someone on Skype. Lead Gen works on BSL offers as well?
Ian: Oh yes. This is the point of the slide you are going and learn today.
Anna: I love it. And I don't know if you know much, but Mazharoddin is asking if you know of Pinterest being profitable. I can personally say I've seen people be very profitable with Pinterest. I don't know if you, Ian ever tried that. But sure.
Ian: Yeah. So, I actually just recently started Pinterest ads. It's a pretty interesting platform. So, we started this huge conversation in my advents community and so for me it's super easy to use, but very engaging with very little conversions. But I think if the offer that I have, right, so I want to try something that's more DIY and all that stuff. So it's still in testing mode for me. I haven't been profitable on it or highly profitable on it, so it's still a good test for you to do later on.
Anna: Awesome. Beautiful. I'll let you go back to the slides. I'll just interrupt you when I have more question.
Ian: So here's the typical to offer strategy. Again, like I stayed in the past most affiliates, we're lazy affiliates. I know I was a lazy affiliate. This is what we do, we just want to spend the traffic directly to the offer, if possible. I know affiliates that basically send traffic to an offer and it works. Sometimes even some send it straight to a smart link. I do to this day I send smart link offers to traffic and they convert because it's easy. There's no work to be done. But again, if you want to lower CPAs for higher end offers like let's say high ticket offers, you know, offer that are paying a $100 CPA, $50 CPA, you know, or if your average order value for an advertising or average order value 150, you should be collecting leg gen or emails.
And the funnel is obviously simple - goes from a landing page to an email optin, the confirmation page is obviously in the middle. This is an important part of the strategy; you want to tag these users, right? And then it goes to the affiliate offer after the fact. Then four, five, and six is obviously your email series. And that's basically the most simplest way to do it. In the past, a lot of people are selling this strategy and for like a thousand dollars and I'm like, dude, that's so BS. This is the most easiest thing to really implement today. But it's stuff that - a strategy that nobody thinks of because it is another skill to kind of learn. So, here is a sample opt in. This was a clickfunnel optin page that I I've used in the past. So there is just the landing page, obviously here, there's a video - actually, I have it up here.
Anna: I love it. That looks nice. Thank you for sharing that. Nice.
Ian: Yeah. So what I do is I take a screenshot of the VSL, so this is specifically for a VSL. I've done this multiple times and seen stuff or earnings on my backend for the offers. So, we do VSL with screenshot here, or I do a juff here of something like... like some VSL are like 30 minutes long, so I do like something from like 15 minutes or somewhere in the middle of the VSL where I take a quick 32nd screenshot and I put it in here. So they're like, oh, there's something happen, for sure. I actually put the author because on the VSL, an author on there. And then I'll just say something like exclusive video for serious people that want to lose weight. And then they enter in the name, email and phone number. Those are kind of two information I collect...
And then I'll put in here - the things I put here are kind of important because you want to explain what's going on the next page, especially for VSL, the VSL you want to say this video is 45 minutes long, in order to consume the information properly, make sure you have 45 minutes. Or you want to talk about what the issues there because there's always a story behind it. Or you want to put in the social proofs on lower because some VSL to have on the page, their own reviews. So, you want to put that there too, right? And you want to mimic this page specifically strictly... that's a page I'm working on guys. Not for you.
Anna: This is awesome. I love that you're sharing like specific stuff with us. This is fantastic.
Ian: Yeah, no problem. So this is fat, which is on Maxweb. So this is basically the simple VSL, right? And you can take anything on these pages and use them. Like you can even copy part of this or here is a very simple strategy to do, some of these VSL they put it on YouTube, and they do so much volume that they don't care when people actually click on this and go to YouTube. And this is how you kind of skip the VSL, but the targeting for these type of VSL are for people that probably don't understand how to do this. So this is where I can skip in between, take this off and turn into like a slide or PDF and put it on, on here, so that's kind of the way to really do it.
Anna: That's awesome. And this question actually goes in beautifully here. What tool did you use to create the opt-in page? Looks really great.
Ian: Yeah, so this is click funnels. I used Clickfunnels. I used Optimized Press, and I also use Subscribe Funnels, which is another drag and drop editor. I use Clickfunnels specifically just to test the traffic and then I take it off click funnels when I do high volume. And the reason I do that is because Clickfunnels just very slow. They double and encrypt their pages so nobody can actually copy their landing pages. It actually loads within like five seconds, which is not good for high volume. I basically take this, I give it to my designer or developer, they rip it on their own, and then we put it on a vulture, which loads the landing pages within less than a second within like 300 milliseconds, and that's kind of the goal. What you want to do is use these builders to test, and then when you scale out, put them on a real server.
Anna: That's a good point. That's a really good point. And Goran is asking regarding the email funnel and what works, what worked better for you, desktop or mobile?
Ian: It doesn't matter. So for VSLs, it's more so desktop. Let me get in this slide because that's a number I want to get into. Let me go back to it.
Anna: Love it. This is awesome. [Inaudible35:29] sure did.
Ian: What goes on a Lander? We just talked about it. Mimic offer, social proof and you just want to mimic the page as much as possible to the offer. So, next one is tagging, which is the important part. Now, what I wanted to answer as somebody asked, like the conversion rates, you know, what to - is a desktop, mobile, right? This is where it becomes important. It doesn't matter technically. What I've noticed from a Lander to offer, from optin to offer, there is a click through rate, click through rate or optin rate. I'll consider optin rate in this sequence in comparison to CTR, landing page CTR the same because they are technically relevant.
There is a drop in landing page CTR, so for me, it was roughly a three - the lowest of 3% to high of 7% drop of optin CTR to offer. And that's because one, I believe people do not want to give up their information that easily. And two, sometimes you are just curious and want to see the price and you don't want this type of users, so this is where tagging is very important. Tagging the users with Google tag managers, pixelating them with Facebook text pixels. And this will tell you, Hey, these guys are coming from desktop, mobile. My optin are array through mobile is X amount of optin rate through desktop is X amount. And this is where you want to tag them because especially with Facebook, now you can create a look alike audience based on actionable users. And this is the part.
There is also another strategy which can tag users on your landing page without optin, but this is much, much better because you want to make sure that they are taken action and they are engaging, because sometimes random clicks happen and you don't want to create a lookalike audience facing that. At least you have a serious user that is actually putting in their information and now you can actually create a big audience through your lookalikes.
And we just talked about this by retargeting campaigns later on, especially if they did optin; you can send, show them the VSL straight to the offer at this time because you are retargeting them and be like, Hey, we've noticed you, haven't blocked this video through your retargeting campaign. Or if you're collecting the push data, you can send them push information later on like, hey, you were stuck at 15 minutes, please continue watching the video. And obviously the most important part is pixelating through Facebook and creating a lookalike audience on there.
And obviously you go to the offer page and that's it, right? The offer conversions happening on Max website or on affiliate network site, you can see that happening; the only problem is you cannot tag users. You can definitely talk to the advertisers. Some advertisers will allow you to put their pixels, but it becomes so overcrowded with pixels that there will be pixel issues, and that's the reason why advertiser do not do it. So, there is a way to fire, post to a Facebook pixel page, but it does also conflict with tag manager. There's no perfect way, in my opinion. Anna, correct me if I'm wrong, there's no way to actually properly throw a pixel tag manager analytics on the conversion side of the offer.
Anna: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ian: It's just very, very difficult. And this is why tagging in the middle of it is very, very important. So, now you have all email data. Now, what kind of email do you send? Obviously there is the welcome email, like thank you for opting in; here's the link to the video. Boom, that's it.
Now, the next step is to get started on a journey, which is more of like an information reminder because you want to warm up the user, you don't want to force the user. You don't want to shove emails and conversion down to your throat. You want to be like, hey, this is a strategy, blah, blah, blah. And this is what was mentioned in the VSL. Here is a link to it, let me break it down and have bullet points or something of that nature.
What I tend to do in this step, especially if there's a text in VSL is I get somebody on Fiverr. I get everybody, I get the person on Fiverr to take the text VSL and turn into PDF and they get a downloaded product. Right now this is actually a very smart strategy because you, at the end of the day, especially on match web and click bank, you can actually send them directly to the checkout page right, from the PDF. So when you convert the on PDF format, especially if it's text you can actually tell them, Hey, here's the information that we talked about and its PDF in our prior email, or we talked about it in the video, you are interested here is the checkout process, and you can have him check out that way with your affiliate link attached to as well right.
So that's the next step, just more of an information style, right? But not really mentioning the product and obviously the third is for them to take action; hey, did you hopefully you enjoy the video? Here are the bullet points or recap of what we just talked about. Hopefully you learned something new if you're interested in it, we're here to help, here's the last minute video and then here's to check out process, right? And then obviously after that, there is more of the information cost per pays, you know, and you want to give them more information than anything especially through email, this does become cumbersome and I agree, I've hated this in the beginning, right. But there's so many resources out there such as like Fiverr and Upwork where you can get ten emails done for less than probably a hundred dollars, right. And decent emails, right, and I just said...
Anna: [Inaudible41:49]
Ian: And I just said after ten days after ten days of auto respond, you got to send them information. And I found for me personally, after ten days, it's like where they are; they're kind of tired of hearing the product, so what's next right. So now from here, you kind of want to start segmenting it by clicks and or filtering by clicks and opened and this way you can see who people are in interaction who are interested and who are not. And if they're not, which one do you promote other offers and other offers obviously in the same vertical which can be a horizontal vertical, or it can go in the same niche in a vertical way. So something in like, for example, horizontal niche is more of like, let's say health is a horizontal, you can have weight loss, weight, loss, weight loss, skincare care, hair care, eating right, your right diet that's a horizontal, right? You want to go vertical, vertical going from like health is like skin care.
Anna: Financial, yeah.
Ian: Right, right. Well, it wouldn't be that it would be like so let's say for example, it's skincare right. If you go vertical right. So now it's like the daily moisturizers or more of like okay, now I need to whiten my teeth to be more prone to my new skin or like acnes, you know, something like that, which is not very, very similar right so, but then once you start segmenting users, which you want to survey them later on is the fact that is to start segmenting properly based on survey and you just send them a random server, like hey, we notice that you were not interested in the files we pushing in the past seven days from our sponsors.
We are trying to make sure that you are being beneficial. So what kind of information you're looking for? And just say, but like I put like the evergreen, just dating financial, you know, healthcare insurance, [inaudible43:51] gaming, whatever right. And then you just take that information, you just filter them out into send their actual segmented list right. And then we actually talked about this earlier, which is basically types of email to push out for affiliate offers and they can be the advertisers templates, a lot of advertisers actually in click bank, they have their own template to send out which you can definitely use. But the problem with that is that you don't know if these users are also being promoted by the advertiser because the advertiser might have [inaudible44:23] from them way before you did, but they might have seen this email before, right.
So you should probably edit it, right, the easiest way to do it is just use like word AI to like send email and do it that way, right. I mean, it's not that too complicated right but you also want to have decent copy of it. The other one is actual factual emails, which is probably just more of the information side; information learning, I call it where you're just like, you just want to tap them like, hey this is what you need to do, you know, real quick and then they'll do their own research.
And then hopefully they will click on a link, come back to it and be like, okay, this is what I will do. And obviously educating the user over a three day email span with third email is more of like hey, take action, where the first one in two emails of like, okay this is what you need to do for your skincare. Wash your face for two to three minutes. Next day is to moisturize in the morning and night. And then here are my full routine how to do within for the next seven days and that would be your call to action email, right.
Anna: That's awesome and I'm so glad you mentioned the skin offers because we have a lot of them and you are so right on the sequence that is so important. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? I don't want to miss any here. Carlos is asking, do you collect leads for any niche? For example, you create a landing page for neutral product collect leads, and then send the swipes to do the sale.
Ian: Yeah so you should collect emails for any CPA that's hired in like $20 I think; anything below that, like dating, there's really no point I mean there is a point to collect dating leads, yes. but do you have a future funnel later on is what you really need to think about, right. So we're dating, even though they're like only three, $3 to, you know, $14, right; are you going to be like, Hey, you know what, I'm going to collect the email. I will send them to these offer, but then I'm going to make my own pickup ebook later on and then sell them that, right. So you really have to think about a future later, that kind of future later on. If you really want to do that, but you should always collect leads that are hired and a CPA of 20, $25 I think.
Anna: That's a really good point I agree on the CPA that's I completely agree. Coran is asking, what do you do when you finish with one product auto responder and users buy or not? Or you try to do some upsells or Optum users onto another flow?
Ian: Yeah correct, so when you have, so this is the difficult part of email is like, you don't know that Ian Fernando clicked on six emails, didn't take action right. You really don't know that, you really need to have really good tracking. And there, there is a way to do it properly with like any of the tracking platforms, right? It is just very difficult to take that data and segment it into email. What I tend to do is some email platforms, it'll be like move users that did not open emails over seven days to list two, right? You can do that in most email platforms or you can be like, you can set rules, be like, okay, if user did not click link in the last email, move them to this platform, right. And this way you actually know that they're not paying action on your offer and you want to send other offers, right?
Like if you just sign up for any click bank email list, you will notice that you are getting bombarded every day. They're emailing them every day, every new offer, but the first five days is about their offer, and then after that, if you don't take action, you notice your emails change to just offer, offer, offer, offer, offer, right? So you should always move around with different affiliate offers, but it there's a strategy to do. You definitely want to survey them first, so you can give them relevant information where they do take action, that's the most important part. Remember everything in the field marketing is all about filtering. You filter the data, you filter your leads, you filter your task sources, filter the widgets, right? So the more finite you can get the data, the better off and higher your conversions are, will be so.
Anna: Awesome, love it.
Ian: Cool so what I do with data later on, because you know, it can be a pain. So in the past I used to sell my data, right. Again, it comes to the question of, is the better team for me to make $10,000 a day or the better to make 10K a month? At that point in my career, I was like, you know what? I don't want to make 10 K a month, I'd rather contain my ads, but we started selling in data and you can sell the data in real time, you'll use a system like a ping tree or a lead wrench or something like that, where people actually bid like I was doing insurance leads or car rental leads. People were, were bidding from $7 to $40, right in real time.
But after an hour, after a day after one week, the lead will become shipped and they'll only spend probably 25 cents because that data is not relevant anymore and after the thing with leads, you want to make sure your emails and information data is relevant enough. After that, when your leads are not relevant, you move to the second part of your email, autoresponder just crank out more or crank out more emails to them, right? So the other part of the data, now that you have the data, what can you do with the data if you don't want to sell it, but you want to still monetize off it, sure. There's something called an industry that I call list jerking. It's the wonder thing that I really, really hate which happens in the MOLM space and make money online space is basically everybody jerks each other off for a good list.
They don't want to buy traffic, they'd rather swap list and make off each other, but it's such a horrible way to do it. But if you're an affiliate you're brand new, you can actually go to these pools and be like, Hey, I get fresh leads every day, you know what I mean? It will to just send out you know, 500 emails or guarantee X amount of clicks, it'll be a thousand dollars. And there's a lot of mini networks out there in the click bank space popular in the click bank space, popular in the war warrior forum space. It's popular in the JV zoo space, you know, those are the kind of marketers that I don't consider real marketers. Right. They're just swaps. Right. So that's one thing that you can definitely do, right? There's a huge, you know, email industry that will buy you data as well, or share and rush, share your data as well and that's something you want also look into.
Anna: That's awesome, Adam is asking can you chat about running leg gen for e-com offers? Do you hit your list with list goals or run directly to specific products?
Ian: Ecommerce affiliate offers or eCommerce and advertisers? E-Commerce, I'll do both like eCommerce affiliate, right. So since I've done both, right, since I was an advertiser, I had my own e-com I had my own Nutra and I am doing also as an affiliate. As an advertiser, there's a huge series to do it and whatever, but as an affiliate you do want to do your listical in your email, right? Nowadays people are, especially in this pandemic, I've noticed that listical are, very more popular in email, down on website, right. Because they everybody's on their phone, so they'll actually take more action through email than actually going to the website, right. But you also want, this is how I target; so this is a really, I don't know if I should share this actually.
Anna: You have to, [inaudible52:21].
Ian: So the way to do proper email listicals is to target. So some networks, they allow you to target wifi and 3g. So you just turn off wifi, right? So this way you guarantee them that they're always, they pick action on the listical you don't guarantee I don't, there's nothing, always a guarantee, but there's more action on a non wifi right. If you do wifi, then there's more action that they might take it and go to the computer, that's what I found right. So just by turning off wifi and just targeting mobile and 3g, like you know, that they'll take action just, or not take action, but they're more inclined to do things on their phone than looking on their phone. I'm like, oh that's cool. I clicked list to go, oh, I went to such and such domain. Let me go to that domain on, on my desktop and just article more; so there's that, there's that gap. There's that information that a lot of people do not think about. Right. So that's something that is very, very unique. That very rarely anybody that you think thinks about, man I'm giving too much, I'm giving too many secrets out today.
Anna: I know Andrew's saying it best sharing is caring, I agree Andrew and well, this is why we do it right. And that's why people that woke up early and turn in their life are getting all the juice and the good secrets, so thank you.
Ian: No problem, I guess and then the last part is like, the other way to collect data is obviously SMS push notifications. Like there's one signal, one, signal's an awesome platform to collect data, especially just starting off and then you want to merge off one signal later on, right. And push is such a popular topic source nowadays. There's so many topics that will actually buy your push notifications, right? So if you have random sites, landing pages that you just want to click, collect, push notifications, and you don't want to monetize it yourself, then let another affiliate network do it. Like I'll buy those pushes and advertise on them, right. And they actually categorize your pushes. So when you talk to your ad manager where you want to start collecting, push, they'll say, oh, you're a neutral space we'll make sure you're under neutral.
Oh, you're in financial, we'll make sure you're in financial. So there's no kind of disruptive portion with your leads to information they are receiving, right. But it does become spamming on their end, so there is an argument you can argue with yourself where like it better for someone else to monetize it, where you just want to sell the traffic to whatever, what do I want to do and control it later on. But again, that becomes another skill, right? Where you have to learn push notification advertising a bit on your side, right but emails is the majority part, but, and there's obviously desktop SMS or direct mail. I haven't done direct mail myself, I actually sold information to an agency to direct mail and we basically just broke even after agency fees and all that stuff so, yeah.
Anna: Awesome.
Ian: Yeah and then I guess the last part is you doing push the first three reminders in the first three days, did you watch the video text version of the VSL and then cart reminder, hey you forgot to finish your checkout process, right. Same thing with your emails, right or you do anything a longer version of your email copy and putting into a 40 character version on push notifications. And that's kind of basically it all right and then that's, that's it guys so, and you can start bombarding me with questions, you guys can find me on.
Anna: I'm going to, I'm so glad I was asking you as if we were going, because I don't want to be late for Joe, but I do want to leave this here for a second. That's the Ian's information you guys on the screen Avengers online. I'm not saying this because I like Ian, and he's my friend, but it's such a cool community, what he's doing with Avengers. So please check that out, I'm genuinely saying this because it's really cool and to me, any tools that are usually going to help our affiliates, I'm so excited to share. So yeah, it's a really cool website, I'll do one question just because you know, this is a good one. Andrew is asking if you have $500, what would you do to create your funnel?
Ian: Oh man so the strategy I would use, which would be the cheapest strategy would be to arbitrage clicks to Facebook and in that way I would probably buy pops or push, right. Create an optin lead and then generate a lookalike audience through optins and move the advertising to Facebook. This way you actually utilize $500 as much as possible by spending maybe a hundred dollars on push growing a mini list because the most important part after that is growing the lookalike audience on tagging and you're retargeting for Google ads and then either put a hundred dollars on Google or put the rest of the budget on Facebook via your local life audiences, right. But you need to at least get a hundred interactions or a hundred tags through your opt-in. So that is the only thing you kind of have to actually modify sport, but that is the best way to take a small budget and expand to a bigger revenue later in my opinion,
Anna: I love it so we have like dozens of comments thanking you, the presentation was great, you're awesome, valuable info. You're a rockstar what can I say? I know it's like, thank you. And you know what? This is telling me, we have to do this again, like we're not going to wait. We're not going to wait for the next conference, we're going to do this again soon because you know, it's so much good information and you know, affiliates love it so yeah.
Ian: I mean, I love giving information and it's fine; to me it's information is awesome. It's just all these groups, they teach you stuff, but they just don't give you nuggets, that's a problem, you know?
Anna: So yeah I'm with you, thank you so much. I'm going to jump in with Joe, you should definitely stick around for that, that's going to be a really good one also. Yeah, you guys just stay live on Facebook we we're going to make things easier for you, but Ian you're awesome, we love you and stay on for the next one.
Ian: No problem.
When it comes to building your eCommerce store, deciding which plugins to go with was the most daunting process. With so many options, I was worried I might regret my decision to even try my hand at running my very own online store.
But have no fear; in this blog, I go over the two plugins perfect for anyone who's a beginner.
Created in 2003, WordPress has become a dominating force for website development on the internet. Today estimates state that WordPress powers about 34% of websites is a definite must if you're looking to build your website. Below are some key statistics that I've found on the true strength of WordPress:
To me, it's undeniable when I look at the numbers that WordPress powers 43.3% of all websites on the web. I can tell anyone starting that WordPress is the answer to building an online store; I'm team WordPress.
WordPress has a staggering 55,000+ plugins in its library. With such an overwhelming number of options, finding the perfect few plugins, you need to get your eCommerce store running can seem impossible. No worries, though; I've got you covered! Below I look at two incredible plugins that have taken my online store to that next level.
WooFunnels funnel builder gives you the power to either add, remove, or duplicate specific sales funnels. When it comes to the funnel builder, I've noticed how powerful the WooFunnels analytics has been, giving me valuable insight into what funnels were working and what wasn't.
By having access to that data, I made small changes that led to significant increases in revenues.
When it comes to sales and eCommerce, this is the dream to sell more to customers who are willing to buy. WooFunnels has this ridiculously awesome feature that has allowed me to make it super easy to add one-click upsells.
The flexibility of this feature within the plugin has given me way more sales and higher revenues than I could have imagined, and all just from a few clicks.
One-click upsells are the kind of stuff I live for when running an eCommerce store. Whenever I hear "one-click" and "upsells," I'm like green on grass. I would have to say this is probably my favorite feature when it comes to WooFunnels, simply because it allows me to increase my revenues quickly.
If that isn't obvious yet, I'm a massive fan of WooFunnels. But don't take my word for it; here are some stats if you're still on the fence about WooFunnels:
The amount of flexibility that it offers me when managing my online store. For me, control is always priority number one. My main goal is to give my customers the best shopping experience with WooFunnels that's possible.
For me, WooFunnels, I would have to say, has been the secret sauce for running my eCommerce shop. Ultimately, WooFunnels gets 4.5/5 stars from me because it gave me the freedom to build some absolute killer sales funnels resulting in more profits down the line.
If you're curious, check out my full review post here.
The Thrive Optimize feature is perfect for anyone who might not be super technical. Thrive Optimize makes it incredibly easy to do A/B testing when working on crafting high-conversion landing pages.
When it came to my eCommerce store, I was able to perfect landing pages resulting in higher revenues month over month; I'm always looking for that next thing to optimize.
When it comes to lead generation and conversions, nothing seems to do the trick like creating a sense of urgency. With Thrive Ultimatum, you can tap into your audience's fear of mission out by using countdown campaigns on your online WordPress store.
What I love about Thrive Ultimatum is that it beautifully taps into the emotional aspect of the customer journey, which in my experience, has allowed me to scale my business as my profits rose.
Check out my Thrive Theme review post if you're still unsure; for me, I found Thrive to be an absolute game-changer.
With the help of Thrive Leads, you can create the perfect forms to boost lead generation. You can make your lead generation process your own, from opt-in form templates to customizable forms. This feature has let me optimize my sales funnel, focusing on the areas where most of my sales were coming from and doing away with processes that weren't bringing in any income.
So, you might be wondering, "Is Thrive Theme worth it for building my eCommerce store?" The short answer: Yes, it most definitely is; without a doubt, Thrive Themes gets 4.6/5 stars.
Thrive Themes was directly responsible for taking my ecommerce game to a whole new level, I was able to customize my online store resulting in higher conversions. The most significant advantage is that Thrive Theme is perfect to use alongside WooFunnels. Check out my Thrive review blog post. If you're looking for my information, click here.
Here are my two cents on WooFunnels and Thrive plugins for WordPress; these two plugins are my bread and butter when it comes to my online store.
My ability to increase conversions, generate better leads, and overall have higher revenues are all thanks to both WooFunnels and Thrive, without a doubt. Click here for more on WooFunnels or Thrive; they're absolute game-changers in my experience.
TikTok has been a fun traffic source to get to know and understand. Now TikTok can be very tricky because keeping your creative ads alive is tiresome, especially for TikTok. When I first started on TikTok, I would go through the creative burn, meaning my ads start to lose impressions over time and then doe out at 3-4 day range.
This was getting annoying until I started testing every aspect of TikTok features from images, to interest, to hashtags, to the audience, to segmenting groups etc. I went through a full study of how each section of the ad platform to determine what is important and what is very important.
I have found one part of the platform that is beneficial for an affiliate especially for growing a list. First, I always usually start with a conversion-optimized campaign. It is pretty straight to the point the problem I found is there is just 1 point of data, the conversion. TikTok needs more information and I found out the TikTok algorithm is pretty damn powerful.
I always talk about growing a list when it comes to affiliate marketing, it is an asset to have as an affiliate especially with traffic being so expensive nowadays. Having a list allows a balance to your ad spending.
Well, the easiest is to set up a Lead Generation campaign within TikTok. This creates an instant page within their platform and you get to collect a set of prefilled information from the user. This is super easy since the user just needs to just click submit once. Once the user hits submit, TikTok holds that information for you to collect later. Then there is a thank you page.
This thank you page I think is critical for you to get users to get to the offer. The thank-you page shows after the submission of the instant form. So this copy should flow after their form submission. This is where copy plays a role, after an action, you want them to continue to another action. So it is important to write copy that continues to pursue more action after.
Now that you have the lead, this is where it becomes important to start nurturing the lead. You can utilize an ESP such as SendinBlue which I currently use. The reason why I use SendinBlue is that they have an integrated SMS, which is another way to send and remind users to fill out your offer.
>> Check out other ESPs that I have used in the past.
... but you need to get those TikTok leads to your ESP. The easiest way is to utilize Zapier. Zapier is an amazing platform that integrates with pretty much every app on the internet with an API.
It makes it very easy to move leads from TikTok to your ESP, specifically for me, SendinBlue.
As you can see from the snapshot, I am able to just use Zapier to sync with TikTok, grab the leads, and push it to SendinBlue. You will need to customize your ESP to pull the information you want to collect, the default right now is just emails. You will have to create attributes in SendinBlue to make sure you are pulling the information you want.
So there is an extra step with SendinBlue, but again they have an integrated SMS system which is what I am looking for. The reason is that it is just another way to push information to the leads captured.
This is a snapshot of my automation from when a lead enters my TikTok Instant form. There are 5 emails and 2 SMS integration that is happening here. The idea is to get users to convert within the day and if not over the next several days. I try to re-emphasize the original offer, the only problem here is that users that already converted still get the same email.
There is no way around that as I can not tag users on conversions since I would need to pass the ID from the click, I think that just becomes a bit more complicated.
It is important to emphasize the offer, so the flow continues for the user. This is the start, SendinBlue does have a limited text for your SMS but it is enough to send a quick message to the user. So you need to specify your choice of words for the offer.
At this point that is it, you just need to write an email every day to let the automation continue and email them similar offers. Now that you have your own leads, you can email them any offer and generate revenue. Most of the time it is profit minus the cost of the ESP.
You can utilize an affiliate network such as A4D and pick a lot of their popular lead generation offers.
Email is a new skill to learn, it isn't just sending out an email. You will need to understand your stats, is it inboxing, why is it reaching in spam, what type of offers, tagging users, pixeling users, etc. eMailing is just a new way to generate revenue but also a skill that is critical to your marketing arsenal.
I think it is critical, I always say to collect leads. This is the first time I am using forms from the traffic platform, usually, I send users to a landing page to collect their information, as this helps filter users. Also, user emails on the platform might be temporary emails and not even real, so there might be an issue with the type of emails you are collecting from the instant form vs an actual landing age.
Just because you have data doesn't mean it is all good, instant submission might not be very good vs a landing page, where users type in their information than a prefilled form.
This is why it is important to understand the data you are receiving and how they interact with your SMS and emailed offers.
I wrote a quick TikTok scale strategy in the STM Forum, read more if you want to conquer TikTok!
The hardest thing about digital marketing today is timing; there’s nothing worse than selling to those not looking to buy. PropellerAd’s Direct Click has been the missing piece I’ve been searching for, giving me the ability to find high-converting customers and sell to them when they’re ready to buy. In this blog, I look at what is Direct Click, what are the benefits of Direct Click, and why it’s a game-changer.
If you’re like me and are constantly looking for new marketing tools to help drive traffic, look no further. PropellerAds recently announced a cutting-edge feature that I found has completely revolutionized how I get traffic onto my websites; it’s called Direct Click.
What makes PropellerAd’s Direct Click so unique is that it can zero in on which users are most active and help increase their likelihood of converting. Direct Click, which uses PropellerAd’s Onclick format, uses that information to pay for direct visits right to your website or online store, increasing conversion rates by an average of 3-10 times. Moreover, some tests show increasing CR a staggering 120 times!
Direct Click does so well because it’s given me access to which segments of my audience were the most engaged. I was then able to better target customer traffic types that were the most likely to convert and lead to higher revenues. An absolute god-send if you ask me.
Direct Click is slightly more expensive, but I found that you pay for what you get. This feature has helped convert traffic that much faster compared to anything else I’ve seen on the market. Direct Click has given me the freedom to expand my operations, leading to even more conversions.
Testing in marketing is so crucial. Knowing what is working and converting can be the difference between high revenues or going bust. Direct Click lets me test super efficiently on which offer types and creative are converting and which approaches need more focus.
Direct Click uses PropellerAd’s specially designed artificial intelligence algorithm (AI), which looks for the best performing traffic that’s most likely to convert through direct visits. Although Direct Click doesn’t target specific zones, it gives you the ability to access areas that are super hard to reach.
Direct Click can drive quality traffic so successfully to your site because of the amount of testing this feature uses. This testing leads to those customers who are likely to convert right away, giving you the best quality and volume.
I’ve found many other clients of PropellerAds online have said that their conversion rates have been between 20% to 40%. PropellerAds states that conversion rates go up as high as 3-10 times higher with Direct Click; the numbers don’t lie.
Before (On Click Campaign):
After (Direct Click):
In the e-Commerce vertical myself and have found that Direct Click has done wonders for my campaigns, making things so much easier. Some other verticals that top the list are iGaming, Pinsubmit, Sweepstakes, Extensions, Utilities, Finance, and eCommerce.
What Direct Click does way better, in my opinion than the competition is there’s no guessing; with access to up-to-date information on active audience members, you’ll increase your conversion rate by 10 to 120 times higher.
The next thing is Direct Click does tons of testing at exceptionally high speeds so you can know who to target and where to focus ad placement that much sooner. Lastly, high-quality traffic sources will help ensure your campaigns are a success-leading to higher revenues.
Direct Click by PropellerAds has been a true gamechanger regarding which customers I target and where I place my ads. It’s been just the thing I needed to make sure my campaigns are in front of those looking to buy my offering. I would give Direct Click two thumbs up and if you’re looking for that last missing piece, look no further.
Recently the past couple of weeks I have been playing around with TikTok Ads. As a media buyer, you should be testing all traffic sources. The reason you do not want to be a Plenty of Fish advertiser and then do not know how to run other verticals or platforms, you become obsolete.
It is always important to take a loss on new traffic platforms, you learn and gain experience. So lose.
I never did like advertising on Snapchat, TikTok has a much easier interface to play around with and it is easier to get started right away. The big drawback I have been reading was creative death. Meaning your ad creatives tends to die pretty fast, within 3 days. TikTok will deem to decide that your creative isn't good enough.
I believe that is based on the CTR and I think there is a bare bottom creative CTR TikTok is looking for. If it doesn't accomplish that then it just decides to slowly lower the impression and even just kill it... example below.
You can see this specific creative took 3 days to get a bucket of impressions, then TikTok decided that it wasn't good enough and stopped showing impressions. TikTok is choosy of the type of ad creatives you are uploading and how users are interacting with it. (my opinion)
I found creatives are super important. I found a person to create video creatives on Fiverr. Later I found out they didn't perform well. This is why I never got much into Youtube ads, SnapChat, or any video-related ads. There are just too many variables to test within a video vs stand-alone graphic.
Now I have an easy process to create a ton of video creatives pretty much in the same day. In the end, your ad creative needs a decent engagement CTR. If not your ad just dies. You need constant creatives.
TikTok is time consuming.
The basic setup is pretty easy, I am using RedTrack as my tracker for TikTok because they have an integration. I think it will make it easy to pass variables over and more importantly conversions.
So what offer am I testing? from where?
My assumption with this campaign is zip submit, it is easy. I have done a lot of first page offers on Push and thought it is that easy as well. As you will read later on it was not and it is because of some issues I found with the offer. Luckily I switched it out for a better offer on A4D.
I got one video designed via Fiverr like a traditional advertorial, non-UGC. I got 4 videos that I am just going to RIP from TikTok and add my own video effects to it and context, they are short enough that I can edit and add my CTA to them.
This will usually take me a day (depending on how lazy I am, but it can be done in just a couple of hours) as I need to do some research on spy platforms and see what is out there already.
I am going to reuse videos off TikTok and just extend them with more context. I already have one done advertorial style. Creating unique videos will be expensive, so why not just recycle - save the world.
It is just still images and context below it. I got this done on Fiverr for like 30$
I read UGC (user generated content) does better, but again I don't trust too much media until I do it myself. Plus being TikTok is still brand new, I want to see how it affects CTR and impressions. Testing is always better than trying to believe what is out there.
Here are some stats on the campaign after a couple of days. This is where I started to find out about creative performance and started to understand their ad algo a bit more.
It isn't about the creatives but also the campaign setup, the audience setup. When I start, I set up a campaign based on compound experiences running similar offers on multiple networks.
Usually, that is a first approach and a smart approach. In this case, it didn't work in my favor so I had to re-adjust and do the 'chad' style marketing. Open everything. I also found an issue with my offer, as an ad group got rejected.
After a couple of days of running the campaign got rejected, due to context on the page. I was actually direct linking to the offer, the payout was low and there was no need for a landing page. I usually tend to always do a landing page prior to the offer, but a low payout didn't pique my interest to do one.
Since the ad was rejected for context on the offer, I had to make a landing page. I created the most simple landing page possible...
Since this is on mobile, a super easy simple page is all that is needed. Straight to the point to encourage click to the offer.
This landing page avoided any context that caused my campaign to be rejected in the first place. I resubmitted my ads and they got approved. I let this campaign run but again it started to die out after 3 days. The LP CTR wasn't impressive and still no conversions after several hundred spent.
I then thought it had to be the offer, I rotated it in with another and I saw a conversion from the offer I rotated in. (insert TikTok dance here)
The next step was creating a whole new campaign with the new data I got. Since I only have 1 conversion, I used the click data to rebuild a new campaign.
Currently, it is a test zone and I am curious how this new auto insurance offer will perform. I will be journaling my results in the Afflift Forum if you want to stay updated with my conversations and conversions.
I will keep that forum thread updated and post any new idea/discovery that I come across in my TikTok auto insurance campaign.
