Just noticed - 1 month anniversary of my mobile attempt.
Looking back and trying to convey a couple of things that might be helpful for others still to come and also to gain more clarity and better focus in y own endeavours.
First off the ' not so good parts '
Still haven't found a good source of consistent, cheap and good ( more on that later ) traffic.
I am nowhere near some income goals I have set for myself for the first month ( a kind of always knew that they might have been optmistic - but hey... who am I to say what's possible )
Off to the ' better parts '
Any kind of apprehension and hesitation I might have had talking to ad reps is completely gone. It's not somethig that happens overnight - just gradually it became less and less intimidating.
On a related note; everybody stresses the importance of building relationship with your reps. I think I am actually pretty good at that - I feel some limitations of what I can do. Obvioulsy it's a 2 way street and since I haven't had a traffic source / offer combo to really scale - theres not much; besides some niceties, I can bring to the table. Obviously there's more to talk about if one comes with a $5k daily spend ( and actually spends it )
Gotten much better from an organizational point of view. Got my templates for the inital contact ( email, LI, Web form ) plus some ' cheat cheats ' for the phone calls _ I update those quite frequently - there's always something to gain from the answers you get.
Developed a pretty good system for campaign launching - tracking links, creatives etc. - I think of it as an assembly line - don't have to think while doing it.
For the last 30 days I wanted to find out if I personally can deal with the challenges mobile comes with.There are a lot of ' moving parts' to make a mobie offer succesful. Some of them seem to be tangible while others are more of the intangible nature.
cpc and inventory - tangible ( maybe not the negotiating part ) - but it seems to be mostly a given factor and therefore easily dealt with. ( my fault I haven't found a good source yet - nobody to blame here but myself )
quality of traffic - tangible - BUT completely shrouded in mystery - at least I have't found a way to make an upfront judgement. It's also the point right now that throws a wrench into any kind of systematic approach I am trying to develop.
i.e. I found cheap traffic might not be the answer to all my prayers. I have campaigns at 0.01 cpc that didn't yield one conversion after $50 spend -while the same targeting has an 80% ROI on a different traffic source at 0.04 cpc.
I am at bit at a loss what the right approach should be - maybe it's really just different for everybody
and maybe someone can chime in here : At this point, after I tried a traffic source and it didn't yield any good results--do you go back with a similar offer if the carrier and headset requirements fit ? or do you just bury that traffic source for good for those kind of offers.
I've tried the ' going back ' method and had 50/50 success but my empirical data is obviously very limited.
Overall it feels actually pretty good how far I've come, when it comes to understanding mobile offers, 100% credit to this forum here; now it's time to make the second months better ...
as always thanks for reading