Alright guys I'm back and have some time. Let's do this.
These are the elements of a campaign:
1. A tracking system. I use Voluum. This is used to track traffic and monitor stats. You also use it to set up your landing pages and offers.
2. An offer. This can come from an affiliate network or directly from an advertiser.
3. A traffic source. This can be Facebook, Google Ad Words, Native ad networks (e.g. the ads you see at the bottom of Veeky Forums) etc. I'm using Facebook for this "lesson".
4. Landing page. This is your pre-sale page. It is not always a necessity but usually is. It's basically where you sell the user before sending them to the offer page where they complete the action that constitutes a conversion.
5. Cloaker. This is only if you're running blackhat. The goal is to show the users one thing and the traffic source another. Because we are breaking the terms of use, we need to hide what we're really marketing from Facebook. So we show them a clean blog page or Shopify page to make them think we're running legit so they don't ban our account.
Basic flow is as follows:
1. Create campaign in Voluum by plugging in your offer link and landing page link. Voluum then generates a tracking link. This is your "dirty" link.
2. Set up cloaker. Specify the "clean" page URL that you want to show Facebook and the dirty one we just set up in Voluum. It will now provide you with an index.php.
3. Upload this index.php to a folder on your clean domain (where the clean page is hosted).
4. Set up your ads on Facebook. So many ways to do this and it's an art in itself once you get into using custom conversion pixels etc. but basically you want to catch the users attention and get them to click. You would plug in the URL of the index.php into Facebook ads.
5. Your ads are now running and people are clicking your ads. They will be sent to your dirty landing page as long as they aren't flagged by the cloaker.
Gonna continue in next post.