I Went from 0 to $21,000 in 40 Days - Thanks WarriorForum

A bit of history about me. I have a good established blog in tech niche that was earning me nice $1200-$1500 a month. It was doing good in all the Panda and Penguin updates until the May 25 Penguin update where I lost 80% of the traffic and earnings. It was a big eye-opener for me. I am (was) not a big fan of having multiple small blogs and thought I would make it big with just 1 blog.

So, starting May 26, I looked into different ways of making money. 1 way was to make multiple niche blogs and the other one, Affiliate Marketing with paid traffic. I choose the later for 2 reasons:

1) Instant Results
2) Unlimited money making potential

So ahead I went and started reading everything I could about AM. I quickly found WarriorForum and am glad that I did. I went ahead and read almost every thread in this sub-forum for about a week. There's so much knowledge on this forum that if you stick with just 1 method, you will make bank pretty easily. I joined a few other forums too and read everything I could lay my hands on. I know that taking action is the best learning experience but I needed to make sure how everything works and how to track and optimize stuff before-hand.

I started with facebook ads on 11 June 2012 but was really disappointed at the start. I chose dating vertical and all my ads got disapproved every single day for 7 days straight. I would submit ads in the morning, wait for them to approve till noon and submit more ads and wait for approval till the evening. I never saw 1 ad approved in that entire week and boy was I frustrated. Which brings us to June the 18th. My entire batch of about 30 ads got approved. I submitted more ads based on them and got the total of about 300 ads in 10 different campaigns. I resumed all ads right away and set daily budget to $20 on each campaign which is $200 for the entire day. The first day went without a conversion. I spent only $105 mostly because I was bidding a bit lower than what FB recommended. On the second day, I decided to up my bids and paused all campaigns but one. I put it at $200 daily budget and put the bids at $0.68 CPC. I saw 2 conversions 20 minutes in and was so happy to realize the '+' sign in Prosper202 actually changes to a '$' sign when you get a conversion. Happy moment. I have no idea why changing the bids had an affect on conversions but I never changed them on that campaign afterwards. (or maybe a different day was converting different, no idea though.)

I saw 2 more conversions in the rest of the day but nothing fancy. Spent total $100 and made $22 back. This was before any optimization and I knew I could make it profitable (reading all those case studies really helps). Second day ended with almost break-even. Spent $100 to make $98. It has been an exciting ride ever since. I made more campaigns, added more offers and in the coming month started doing PoF ads. I was just checking my various accounts and have made $21090.50 since I started running ads on 18 June 2012. Not bad for first 40 days huh?

Now, I know most people here don't like revenue figures so I am going to post ad spend and profit too. And for ADHD readers, here is a nice little TL; DR for you.

Date Started: 18/June/2012
Traffic Sources: Facebook and PlentyOfFish
First Profit day: 21 June 2012 ($3 profit)
First $100 day (revenue): 1 July 2012
First $1000 day (revenue): July 25 2012
Total Spent in ads: $5,186.30 (Around $5300 after adding the Forex fees)
Total Profit: ~14800 after deducting hosting and other expenses.
Vertical: Dating
Best offers: FindMeLove, Richmen, True.com

I am so glad my blog was hit by penguin. I wouldn't have tried AM otherwise and would have never gotten 10 month's worth of profit in just 1 month. WarriorForums and some of the members here really helped to make a big difference in my success. Salute to everyone especially my Affiliate managers, without whom this would never have been possible.

I didn't make this thread to brag. I simply made it because maybe some of you need a bit of push and to know what really is possible. I am not a smart guy and am actually pretty far from it (otherwise I would have started doing AM a lot earlier ) and if I can do it, anyone can. Just keep believing and keep taking risks. When I spent my first $100 on FB ads, I had no intention of seeing anything in return (which actually happened) and this helped me in spending more the next day. If I had gotten scared after losing the $100, I would have never made profit in the next few days and would have easily given up. This would have really wasted the $100 ad spend.

Really looking forward to the coming months and see how everything pans out.

I would be happy to answer your questions as long as you don't ask me for LPs, ad copies and targeting .