Escaping The Oilfield

I have referred to Mr. Green’s levels numerous times and it gives me great pleasure to say that I have moved up. If today keeps up I am poised to make 50$ profit. I have found my first profitable mobile campaign and like graduating university, or becoming competent in a skill, or having sex for the first time, or learning how to meditate for the first time; I am born again and finished a right of passage. (I make sex jokes all the time when it doesn’t really fit).

I’d like to share with my non-existent readers my work environment.

This shows you how anybody anywhere can do this. It took me 4 months to start making money, but I think it’s worth it. Soon I’ll be able to work anywhere in the world.

Also you’ll see in my work area, the office. I use my work computers to do all internet marketing activities. I have a laptop but it’s too old to do things fast. I use Sumopaint.com to edit my ads, Lunapic.com to make gif images, and this imageoptimizer to change the gif images to the right file size. I save all my files on a USB. This is true portability. When I visit family and friends on my days off I plug my usb into their computers and do 2-3 hours of work to update, test, and adjust things. AMAZING.

So It’s been close to a month since my last post. Basically at this point I have launched 10 campaigns and no luck yet. I have just posted a follow along on STM forums and AngryRussian posted a great reply which has given me direction for my next campaign. I have spent 500$ testing campaigns and hopefully with the help of Angry and the STM forums I will minimize my future losses and find that first campaign that yields internet moneys. That’s pretty much it for my AM activities. I have made so much improvement as far as ability, but it would be too long and pretty much useless to feature here.

For the holidays I enjoyed lots of time with aunts, uncles, cousins, and immediate family. I did have a lot of oilfield work to get done. I am on an 80 day project right now so hopefully during this time I will get lucky. To Success!

I think my posts will be short until I find a success, because my time is better spent on the actual tasks.

In one week I went from 2 day campaign development time to 3 hours (Mobile!) campaign development time. Not only that, the campaigns are better quality. After I had joined STM, read many a golden-gems, I took to the pavement and started pounding. As you read in my previous post I joined something called the STM Forums. A bunch of nice gurus who know their shit started a forum to teach able minded individuals. I imagine if a person was clogging up the forums with terrible comments they would probably kick him off. It’s a place for serious work, serious fun, and serious dollar billz.

Once I had joined I read through their introduction wiki. It’s a nice compilation of how to use the forums, how it’s organized, and threads related to introductory subjects. Things are so well organized that I don’t even need to ask questions cause it’s all easily accessed. Much easier then when I was trying to figure this out for free. The 99$ a month? Ya, I got a bargain and so does everybody in that forum. When I make my first 500$ a day I will thank the forum operators with maple syrup(for the record I don’t even like maple syrup).

So in one week what was I able to accomplish? I read the majority of the wiki. I posted an introductory post to explain where I am and absorbed the instant knowledge that was flung onto my thread. It was very nice to be in contact with nice gurus who are trying to give back to the community. I chose to specialize in mobile. I read The Angry Russians exclusive 14 day guide to mobile(he’s apparently the master). It is so god damn good that I went from oblivious to the tasks and challenges to easily launching a mobile campaign in 3 hours. Were talking pick the offer, create creatives, setup tracking, and launch campaign. I can’t possibly give the guide justice. He also touches on so many important subjects. He provided a gem of knowledge by linking to “Scientific Advertising by Claude C Hopkins”. It has helped my understand advertising, it’s purpose, and ad copy writing. I suggest people read it once they get their campaign skills to this level. It gives you a compass for making the advertisement, headline, body, and image. This is crucial if you want to get fast at making campaigns.

I started to treat my efforts more like a business(as recommended by the angry russian). I created a company website(sylvainmedia.com) so when I apply to networks they take me a bit more seriously. “Don’t be just another affiliate” was the lesson learned. As a result of this attitude you stop playing around, you get serious, and you get effective. At least that’s what happened to me.

I have launched 5 campaigns and let them run and tested them. No winners yet but as the guide says, there will only be a few winners. – You need to make a 1000 campaigns before you get one that makes a 1000$ a day.

As for work, I have been at the same rig site for 40 days. They are finally finished the well so I have 4 days off. During the past week we had a bit of gas flare and it was pretty gnarly to watch the rig crew run around and contain the situation. Meanwhile my MWD tool was downhole and I was campaigning away . This stuff really does get addictive once your good at it. Anyway, that’s all for now. I can not wait to report a winning campaign.

If given the chance to join your network I will do what every self respecting canadian newbie affiliate would do: go streaking in the snow. Well maybe I won’t do that, it’s friggen cold out right now and 11:55pm. I will however be very happy. Due to all the STM forum member recommendations, I now think your two networks hold the key to my success.

I will work hard and learn fast. Sometimes I may not be reachable cause I do have a job for now. I actually like my job as I have said many times. But that is only because it gives me an insane(and I mean insane) amount of free time to campaign away. Even though I won’t be reachable 24/7, I’ll be focused on affiliate marketing every second. I think for the most part I have already explained in emails or applications where I am at in affiliate marketing, so instead I’ll just bribe you with maple syrup. That’s right, if I get accepted I’ll send you maple syrup. Cheers for now.

To my currently non-existent readers and hopefully future readers:

The past 5 days have been interesting. I got those first few conversions and like I said it felt great. I got tracking working properly and wow that is key. I got a few more conversions but nothing major. I spent a few days on the phone with adcenter getting help optimizing my campaigns. I like spending some time on the phone with somebody from somewhere, it always seems to help. I deleted keywords and ads. Added Keywords and ads. Like magic I was campaigning away. It wasn’t profitable but still encouraging. But then a few days passed by and I got to thinking, maybe I’ll just ask Mr. Green if the STM forum membership is worth it?

See I haven’t really had anybody I could collaborate with or learn from. I have done it all on my own for the most part. My one friend who introduced me to affiliate marketing has only sent me short messages via facebook like “Hey man sounds like your learning fast, keep up the good work”. This was the reply to a message of mine containing two questions. Lol What a guy. I think he knows though, if one will be successful in affiliate marketing he’ll make his own luck.

Mr. Green got back to me and said that STM forum is still a thriving oasis of support and ideas. First, it was very cool for him to get back to me. Second, it was instant, maybe 5 minutes after my message. It’s that kind of class that sets him apart. He gave his personal guarantee that it will be a huge help at this stage of my career and beyond. I already knew it was good, but it’s nice to hear from the man himself.

So I joined. I pimped my avatar. I started an introduction thread. And bam, instant guidance from people who know what their doing. They recommended many things and these two networks were the main recommendations. Even if I don’t get on right away, I’ll be persistent and make them accept me. I got nothing but time out here in the oilfield.

That’s right folks, the day every affiliate realizes it’s possible has arrived. I have 3.70$ in my ClickBooth account and it feels good.

Lets back track to the beginning of these past two weeks. One day I got up and paused all 3 campaigns. I didn’t have my heart in 1 of them, another was a copy cat, and the main one wouldn’t measure profitability cause conversions were months away from when traffic is driven to the site. This was not good for a newbie and would require 800$ for testing. I emailed the program affiliate manager and asked for pay per lead instead. That didn’t work out, but he did understand my challange. They are working towards having leads displayed on CJ.com. As of now only clicks to their webiste are tracked, not people who start playing the game AND you only get paid when the people pay for subscription for the game. As you can tell, hard to measure profitability.

I decided to read some blogs for some guidance. I stumbled on some adcenter suggestions and watched all of the adcenter training videos. I decided to specialize in adcenter for now cause of many practical recommendations from various super affiliate bloggers.

One of the main pieces of advice I haven’t tackled yet was tracking. After a long battle of technical learning I got Prosper 202 installed. At first I was with Bluehost.com , but could not get it to work. Now I host with beyondhosting.com and they actually set it up for me. They are refered by Prosper 202 so they are pretty much required to make it work.

In the midst of all my blog reading I found what I believe is the best newbie guide out there – NickyCakes newbie guide. This helped me sort things out. I had already done most of the steps but it just helped to read the process in such a coherent fashion. I also found a really cool resource in splittester.com that helps you decide if the testing you have done is statistically significant.

Once I had reached this point I was ready to rock. I had tracking installed, I had fooled around enough to know how to run traffic sources. Now I just needed to test stuff. I followed MrGreen’s and NickyCakes advice and asked my affiliate manager for a low payout offer(2-6$). It was a postal code submit. I made an adcenter campaign with 5 adcopies and plenty of keywords.

This is where I did the wrong thing. I got impatiant cause it takes a day for the campaign to be approved. I also kept getting turned down by various traffic sources for policy reasons. I created another campaign from an old offer my affiliate manager had sent me. Then I just started trying anything and everything, just like the guru’s say not too. Right now I have campaigns set up on DirectCPV, adcenter, adwords, POF and admob(mobile). This gave me lots of practice setting up tracking, but makes your work scatter brained.

I woke up this morning with 3.70$ in my account and I have no idea which traffic source, keyword, or adcopy it came from. Why? Cause it turns out all the tracking I setup for each campaign doesn’t work. Or just one of them doesn’t work. Either way, I have to find out which source gave me the conversion.

The past few days before these conversions were getting discouraging too. When you try so many different things and nothing works, it’s tough on your spirit. Luckily, something worked and I have to find out what.

As of today I have 2 campaigns running on adCenter, and 1 campaign awaiting approval on POF. Two of those are from CJ.com and 1 is from Clickbooth.com. I have stats to check, and there looks to be some good keywords working with some good creatives going to some good offers. BUT, I haven’t seen a dollar in my accounts yet. I think that will come soon. I cancelled one campaign I was running on DirectCPV cause it didn’t track properly on my Instapage landing site.

I started a single notebook to jot things down like: A list of which traffic sources I have dollars deposited, Networks that I am part of or read about, traffic sources that I could look at in the future, to-do lists, and anything else I want to write about.

I read my 30 minutes of affbuzz.com, and stuck to the 30 minutes. I added another daily to do and that’s investigate the new info I read on affbuzz.com; for 30 minutes and stuck to that. Then what follows on my daily to-do is check stats, then for the rest of the day, enhance, adjust, and create campaigns.

A lot of what I read today suggested that I do more enhancing and adjusting campaigns then creating. Well, I found that one campaign running just didn’t do it for me. Waiting for campaigns to run their course feels like a waste of time. So now I can check 3 at the beginning of my work day and then adjust all three. That should take me about 6 hours. I’ll add keywords, creatives, and landing pages till that 6 hours is up. Then take the rest of the day off.

I may be getting soaked in newbie sweat but I am not on a treadmill. (Mr Green level 2)

The only reason for this post is I feel really productive today.

So after getting turned down again from adwords for another campaign, I decided to go back to reading stuff on blogs. These were the following conlusions:

1. Facebook, Google, POF, some networks all hate affiliates. Here (Although elsewhere bloggers specify “lazy affiliates”.)
2. Times are a changing and you must learn how to adapt to these changes and overcome them. Here
3. Mobile is exploding. (same blog post as above)

I also read an awesome post that I can’t find again that says this shit ain’t easy. That no lazy ass will ever make it. That you must try and try again for you to ever have a chance.

So after those few wake up calls I plan on retooling my efforts. I will probably try looking into mobile and see where it leads. However, for now I am still trying to work on my first offer and try different traffic sources. I have registered with adcenter and directcpv to see if they wont turn me down like google. Fingers crossed, would love to actually run a campaign, profitable or not.

Oh and the new habit, take 30 minutes a day to read affbuzz. Don’t go over this amount, there is work to be done.

Its been about 10 days since my last post, and some interesting things have happened. My buddy from Florida hasn’t got back to me with a reputable VA. I contacted him again so maybe he’ll get back to me soon, he’s probably too busy rubbing shoulders with big wigs at Clickbooth.com. Fair enough, he’s breaking into the field in a big way. So since I was unable to get a VA. I made my own landing page. I used sumopaint.com to make my own graphics. I sent it into my affiliate manager and he actually really liked it. I thought he would since this time I was like “damn that actually looks good”. Looks like I am still able to work some computer magic. After that we(affiliate manager and I) decided it was time for me to start campaigning on AdWords.

I was extremely excited! This offer could be the bomb! But then another bomb went off. After I chose my keywords, made my creative, and submitted the campaign for approval, google shut it down due to the “Bridge Page Policy”. You can look it up, but in summary, you cant link to a page where the sole purpose is to link to another page aka a sales/landing page. After days communicating with my affiliate manager and google’s AdWords team there was no chance of it getting approved. I’d have to change the page completely. Also, I learned that this policy was in place since 2008, wow did I feel late to the internet marketing party.

So I was a little distraught. My dreams of making money off my first legit campaign was popped. I couldn’t brag about batting 100%. Fine. I am now looking at other PPC or PPM networks out there so I can give my landing page a try.

The other big news of late is that I signed up with Clickbooth.com and they look awesome. My friend from Florida is working so closely with that company that when my “affiliate strategist” contacted me, she saw that I knew said person, and mentioned that she has hung out with him personally. This was good, she then proceeded to list some offers with high EPC’s for paid search campaigns. So the game plan is to still focus on the original offer from CJ.com, but from now on will be looking for new offers only from Clickbooth.com. They do seem to have a better system in place, but I am sure I will learn more as I go.

As for work in the Oilfield, I might be moving up to a higher paid position that takes up more time. Even with that I will still have time to do internet marketing, so no worries!! Either way, moving up in the world on all fronts.

Ps…People actually commented on my blog. Not to geek out or anything, but thats pretty awesome. Keeps me motivated.

Well the week and 2 days were challenging to say the least but filled with promise. I had applied for loads of programs and got onto one that I definitely thought I wouldnt. Its a new advertiser with a fantastic brand name and a great service to sell. I was a bit shocked when I got the email from CJ.com that I was accepted. Turns out their really new. I went onto CJ.com to check details and there is even commissions for ongoing subscription to the service. After looking at all the details I was left with a question. Where to go from here.

Since I was planning on working with just adwords for the time being(because if a campaign works you can scale the shit out of it), and the guidelines said no direct linking from search engines. I knew I had to make a landing page. Also I knew I was going to ignore the goal of creating 5 campaigns this week and just focus on this offer(its that good, I think), so I emailed the affiliate manager of the offer. I told him I was just starting, that I was going to do adwords, and that I was only going to focus on this offer. Well the coolest thing happened, as Mr. Green said it would. The affiliate manager gave a helping hand. I got an email back telling me no one else in the program has being advertising on google, that he’s going to bump me up to 14% commission from 10% and up to 20% once 1000$ in commission is hit, they wanted long term affiliates as well, and he gave me some solid advice on how to get started. Wicked stuff indeed, its all about communication.

So I spent the next few days trying to figure out how to build a landing page. I have some programming background from the teen years of just fooling around, but no functional ability to get things done asap. So I fooled around with wordpress, tried downloading some templates and adjusting those, and scoured the internet for easier ways. I needed to act fast. So I finally found this awesome service called instapage.com . I built a simple lander within 2 days, and sent it back to the affiliate manager for review as he wanted to see it first. I knew it wasn’t complete but I was starting to spin my tires and needed some feedback. Sure enough he gave me even more direction. Unfortunately this is where the challenge happens.

My actual work got busy, sent me to a new rig site, which has crappy internet. Now I cant do things fast, and one thing I have learned is the faster you click the better off you are in affiliate marketing(within reason). I am just saying if your being spoon fed the right info and all you need to do is get the clickin done, then speed matters. Well, now I am stuck. BUT, it might turn into a good opportunity, my friend who got me started in this affiliate wonder world has a few VA’s(virtual assistants). Well I just sent a message to him. Asked him if he can get me a reputable VA from the Philippines. I am going to use them to create the landers for this offer and all the ones after it. With this offer I have to update the landing page with new monthly aspects of the service. Also in this specific case I need to act fast and have a feeling thats a multi-case problem. The help will be good.

So, thats the first week. Like I said, filled with promise but has some challenges. Still at Mr. Green Level 2

I got an amazing oilfield job and I love it!! WTF is with the domain name then? I only like my job cause of the opportunity. My job gives me crazy amounts of time in front of a computer, lots of money to save, and time away in the middle of nowhere with nothing but internet access!! Sure its not the funnest industry in the world, sometimes long hours, most people succumb to boredom, around chemicals, and run into assholes on the jobsite. Luckily there are very nice people out here as well people who actually care about the environment and think of alterntive technology. Sometimes they also save lots of money and retire early. Onward…

Thats not what this site’s about. Its actually about my affiliate marketing journey (other wise known as internet marketing you pretentious douchbags). When I got my amazing job opportunity I knew as soon as I learned all aspects of the job, I would have some free time on my hands. I phoned, facebooked, and frantically searched for ways to make money online. I got intouch with a pilot from a skydiving center I worked at and she forwarded my question to a mysterious friend of hers who “makes money online”. 3 days later I was on skype with him and asked him whats up.

After the conversation he opened the door to affiliate marketing for me. I didnt understand it at all then, but armed with a list of websites that he gave me to look at (mrgreen.am, affexpert.com, foreclosuresearch.ca), I started on the unclear path. By unclear I mean down right blinding fog.

So you mean a pyramid scheme?? ponzi-r-us?? when will I lose my money???

While after about 3 weeks of reading mrgreen.am and passing as one of his non-adhd readers, I understand now. All those advertisements you see on the internet…..like all of them….is internet marketing. Affiliate marketers help make those sometimes (not all the time), and affiliates get paid when those advertisements get clicked on and a sale or lead or whatever is made. The title does make sense after a while, but at first your all in “wtf” state. Then affiliate marketing dives into any creative way to drive traffic to an “offer” and those ways I dont understand yet.

So where I’m at. I made a half ass dating campaign on pof and ran it for a whole 2 dollars length. I got a CTR of .125 for the first 500 impressions then nothing for 6000 more. I played around with a few other campaigns and put a pause to all – achieved getting my feet wet. I have registered with Commision Junction and Click Bank. I’ve watched the worst reality tv show Top Affiliate Challenge, but extremely helpful. I am now back to reading tons online(jonathanvolk.com, rileypool.com, etc).

So why start a blog?? Well most of the gurus seem to start when they’r successful so I thought I’d start the day before I make millions….also I hope it helps me network. Since I work 30 days on and maybe 2 off I am stuck in the middle of nowhere and have little hope of meeting people face to face who do the same thing. I am hopeing this helps me meet a few people via skype, helps me keep some goals, writing practice, and helps get me to my ultimate goal!!!

That goal is that when I reach a certain daily income amount and savings in the bank (both decided already) I will Escape The Oilfield and start living life. I will move down to the states and probably live in California, hopefully with a girl I met skydiving in Arizona who I keep in touch with still. Now I do actually like my job, but thats only cause its an amazing opportunity to do something like this. Help me escape!! (As you can tell I suck at writing, feel free to correct everything)

So the Next goal: pass level 3 : Explanation No I did not buy any guru crap cause thats stupid for now and mrgreen said not too(yes I am a Mr. green convert).

A more specific goal: run 5 more campaigns in the next week. Probably will copy cat off of a google campaign. Ultimately depends on which of the 10 affiliate programs I applied to on commission junction accepts me.

Oh and I’ll try to update this blog weekly, but with an actual job it may change from time to time.

Thanks for reading.

- Happy Canadian