I tried doing a 28-Day Challenge in February and ended up being banned from Facebook in the middle of the month and I said I would try it again, so here it is…

Let’s say I’ve been really slacking the last two months and I haven’t had any motivation to work.  I’m trying to hold myself accountable by stating I would throw up 30 campaigns in 30 days and see what I can make happen.

My main traffic sources this time around will be PlentyofFish, SiteScout and TrafficVance.  I will mainly be doing direct linking, but I’ll have a few campaigns with landers.  I’ll try to keep you all updated weekly and let you know what transpires.

I know I did this last time and I had seen great success with a few campaigns and I’m hoping that’ll happen again this time.

If you have any offer suggestions, let me know in the comments below  If you do suggest an offer, I’ll provide detailed feedback on how I setup the campaign in my weekly updates.

This is in addition to my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory, which I must say is an excellent guide if you’re looking to start doing direct site banner buys.

By far, the most frustrating part of buying direct placements on websites is contacting the owner of the site.  I’ve split tested many emails to site owners and the template that has given me the largest amount of responses is one I’m quoting below.  This is an email I found on the SuperAffiliateTwins.com Media Buying 101 Guide, so credit goes out to them.

So, if you’re having trouble contacting a site owner, try the email below and see if helps out your response rate!

Subject: interested in CPM advertising immediately

Hello,

I’m interested in buying advertising space on your site, with CPM budget of $30,000 to start this month. We have a few brands that we need to place immediately, including Lysol. I’m interested in speaking to the right person for this- and need to do so as soon as possible. I have interest in buying space directly from you, in the US and Internationally.

I’d like to know what your rates are for the 300×250 above the fold. Thanks!

Crystel
Executive Director, Publisher Development

Stats through the end of the weekend are below.

These stats are probably skewed somewhat because it was July 4th weekend in the US.

I was playing with my bids all weekend and they were all over the place. One day I’d get some traffic and I’d raise my bid and get less traffic, so I upped it more to get a ton of traffic so I went back down to my middle bid and got a lot more traffic. So it was all over the place, again, I’m attributing this to the holiday weekend.

I did decide to scale out my campaigns to the 18-24, 30-34 and 35-39 demographics and was able to realize profits in all demographics using data I compiled from the tests I did in the 25-29 demographic.

So take this data, make your own campaigns and go make some money!

This meetup will be held August 6th, 2011 in  Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands.  Adsimilis is an affiliate network based out of Amsterdam and they are an awesome company to work with.  I’ve also been to many conferences with these people and they know how to treat their publishers!

Meetup Agenda

On Friday night, the Adsimilis‘ team, Sean, Michael and Eleah plan on starting the weekend off right.  The plan is to do some bar hopping around Amsterdam and hit up some of the local favorites. I know what else I’m gonna be doing while we’re hitting up the local favorites.

Saturday, the official day of the meetup, they will be having sessions all day.  They’ll be starting out around 10am and going until 4pm.  The topics include, but aren’t limited to, learning new ways to run traffic and traffic sources, including Adsimilis‘ Display Network, get avice and tips on how to optimize and increase conversions from top affiliates from around the globe and an understanding of the financial implications of doing business on a worldwide scale with a Q&A session with a legal specialist.

Sunday you are free to explore the city and become a tourist.  London and Paris are both a quick 60-minute high-speed train trip away.  This is something I will be taking advantage of.

Affiliate Rewards

The two publishers with the most revenue generated,  the two publishers with the highest incremental revenue and the publisher whose referrals generate the most revenue during the period of May 1st – July 15th will be awarded an all expenses paid trip to this meetup. I wish I was one of these publishers

Please RSVP

If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP for the Amsterdam Meetup 2011.  I know I will be in attendance for this one.  I also plan on extending this trip and hitting up Paris, Rome and Athens before heading back home to Tulsa, Oklahoma.  If anybody’s game, hollar at me!

Disclosure: The Adsimilis links are my referral links.  I received nothing in return for this post, other than some attention from Eleah. <3

I barely did any optimization on the images, I only got rid of the ones that were having the worst CTR, like the worst 10% and that equated to like 2 or 3 images on each campaign. I also submitted 37 creatives for each campaign and all but one creative was approved in every campaign.

My conversion ratio on the original campaign has tanked. I’m contributing that to the other two campaigns. I also wasn’t getting much traffic on it at 40c and raised it to 45c on Friday and 50c on Saturday.

The campaign targeting Login Count ≤ 50 wasn’t getting any traffic so I jumped the bid to 50c on Friday and 60c on Saturday and I’m still not hitting my campaign budget of $20 per day. I have a feeling that there’s not a lot of traffic here because users who are new to POF might not know of the iPhone app just yet, but I’m only guessing.

The campaign targeting Session Depth ≤ 20 was getting plenty of traffic, but I jumped it to 45c on Friday since I bumped everything else and then knocked it back down to 40c on Saturday. I was able to spend most of that $20 budget every day. I’m pretty sure by playing with my bid on this campaign and optimizing the creatives, I could get this profitable.

Plans for this coming weekend are to create a campaign that combines Session Depth ≤ 20 and Login Count ≤ 50. I also want to scale the campaign on Login Count to 50 – 100 and 100 – 150 to see how they perform.

Just so you guys know I’m more about testing out things and seeing how different targeting combo’s work on WAP traffic and not necessarily going for a profit. I’m just trying to find out what works and what doesn’t.