From the moment you enter grade school, you are told and indoctrinated: study hard, get good grades, go to a good college or university. Plunge into debt of 50k-100k and spend the next 4 years (at least) in getting a degree. Then of course, comes the internship which you wont get paid for. But it’s all OK! After all that, the fun really begins, because, finally, it’s payback time for all your hard work! You get a job and start at a whopping annual salary of (drum roll please)… 50k, if you are lucky.

I hear people who tried affiliate marketing for 2 weeks invested $500 and decided there is NO WAY to make money from it. I use the term “invested” because even if you lost all your $500 and didn’t make a dime, it was an investment in your education of online marketing. An investment not much different than the tuition you paid for your college degree. The fact a bonafide professor didn’t force feed you rehashed material from the syllabus doesn’t mean your education process is worth less.

In reality, you actually applied yourself and your mind doing the fabulous act of auto-deduction. You learned by yourself! Isn’t that true learning, perhaps even more valuable then the more docile, passive act of being “taught”?

Let me go back to the prevailing status quo and paradigm of what a middle class person should go through. So you’ve got a job. Now it’s time to buy a house and own your first asset. How will you do that, with your past college debt, and a job that by now pays you around 70k per year? The answer? More debt of course. Debt which is of course owned and controlled by the ruling faction – as represented here by the banks.

You are actually bred and indoctrinated into slavery. Modern day slavery. In a modern person’s mind, slavery means black people picking cotton in the plantations. But in reality, modern slavery means “owning” debt (of course you don’t own the debt, the bank owns it, and thus the debt owns you). You actually enslave your future income and salary to the bank. Thus, although you are not whipped by the splintered whip of the taskmaster on a daily basis, you are whipped by the thorn of debt instead. Debt which you must accumulate in order to acquire assets.

Maybe one day you’ll think about quitting your job, wanting to finally realize your old dream of becoming an artist? Maybe you wont even have a choice and you’ll get sacked? Results – lose your house, lifestyle and maybe even your family (will your wife want to stay with a person who cannot provide for her and her children? I’m writing from a male perspective so for all you ladies reading it out there, do consider).

In the US alone there were almost 1.6 million bankruptcy filings in 2010, an increase of 7.4 percent from 2009. There were more people who filed for bankruptcy in 2011 than people diagnosed with cancer, suffering a heart attack or graduating from college. An interesting read regarding these findings is Elizabeth Warren’s book – “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke”.

The situation isn’t much brighter in the UK either. The Guardian has just published a report by a leading thinktank group stating that middle class families are “unlikely to see their earnings return to pre-recession levels until at least 2020″… but it predicts that the income of the wealthy will continue to rise over the same period.

The odds are absurdly weighted against working class families and in favor of the wealthy. Mitt Romney’s recently published tax returns shows that the Republican candidate income between 2010 and 2011 was 42.6 million dollars. The tax rate Romney paid was 13.9% or 6.2 million dollars (recent Time’s article even states Romney overpaid his taxes by about 44k). How could that be? Yahoo finance explains “The GOP frontrunner acknowledged his federal tax rate is 15%, thanks to a loophole called “carried interest” that helps the GOP frontrunner pay a rate similar to a family earning $50,000”.

With the current trend of affairs, the state will not be able to take care of you when you are old and grey, when you have lost your ability to provide for yourself. What you have in your bank savings (or hiding under your bed mattress) is what you’ll have to maintain you for the rest of your natural life. It’s doubtful even if you’ll have a proper pension. And even if you do, it will most likely not be enough.

Sounds pretty grim right? NO! Your financial future and freedom depends on you. This entire article (as absurd as it may sound) was written in order to inspire you to take action, in order to make you understand reality.

In the past, the choices were much clearer, much simpler. They were black and white. By choosing the life of an employee with all its benefits and comfort, you would receive a monthly salary, paid vacation, dental or health insurance, steady hours and more. In other words stability.

The downside – you’ll never be able to buy that Bugatti, the 10 bedroom beach front house, or staying at the Ty Warner penthouse at the Four Seasons NY. On the contrary, you could have chosen the path of an entrepreneur, risk all you’ve got in terms of time and money. No steady income or insurance. Work 20 hours a day and still end the year broke. Invest years of your life and end with nothing or a mansion. I deliberately choose to portray the two options as extremes.

Today, I believe that, having that option or choice between an employee or an entrepreneur is slowly drawing to an end. Choosing to be an employee might cost you dearly when you reach the end of your working cycle. Your 401k savings will not be enough to maintain your standard of living. The world is slowly reverting to the days of the filthy rich and the filthy poor. The erosion of the middle class and social security is something we cannot deny.

Yes, the world might end by 2012, but just in case it wont. I suggest getting ready for the fact you might live until you are 80+ and perhaps start thinking about your financial status.

Finch: Definitely some very important points to consider. Personally, I don’t think employment and entrepreneurism have to be mutually exclusive. I think it’s possible to balance a job that you love, which may involve working for ‘The Man’, with good investments that take care of your future. Not every kid dreams of running his own business, but every kid should grow up with a solid education in how money works. Thanks for the post, Oded.

Recommended This Week

• Check out the Moneymachinefactory.org blog to hear more from Oded. You can also find him on Twitter.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add FinchSells.com to your RSS. And hey, follow me on Twitter, too. Thanks for reading.

I’ve grown to see affiliate marketing not so much as a long term business, but as a source of easy capital for the company I want to build. It funds my bigger picture. Yet every so often I get to speak to individuals who see the industry from an outsider’s perspective. They don’t view affiliate marketing as the cold blooded arbitrage it usually is. They see it as an investment opportunity.

To them, affiliate marketing is the goose that lays the golden egg. It carries the legendary hook of ‘doubling your money‘, even if those words are rammed home by experts with as much integrity as a broken record. Many smart affiliates are harvesting small fortunes from our industry, that much is true. When you hear such a constant barrage of rags to riches tales, there has to be some truth to the idea that affiliate marketing is one of the quickest methods of doubling, trebling and quadrupling your money.

One glance at the typical UK savings account and you will find that annual returns greater than 4% are a rarity, especially if you require direct access to your money. By the time inflation is taken in to account, your newfound spending power raises some tough questions. “Should I continue buying Iceland-range cheesy wotsits by the multipack? Or can I afford to upgrade to Kettles?”

Decisions, decisions.

Affiliate marketing, to anybody sick of calculating the scant difference between 3% and 4% returns, is full of bold promises. It teases with countless fables of got rich quick stories, those that defy everything taught in Business Studies class.

I’ve never hidden my preference for running campaigns that achieve at least a 75% ROI. It’s a remnant of the shoestring budget I started with. To most business minds, immediate 75% returns are the sort of bullshit fantasies peddled by first-time entrepreneurs with their figures in a twist (forgetting to pay themselves, for example). But they do exist.

So does the golden carrot of potentially skyrocketing profits make affiliate marketing a suitable investment strategy? Or is it, to steal a particularly tasty lyric, a siren singing you to shipwreck?

If you found £100,000 to invest and had never touched an affiliate campaign, could you realistically expect to double your money? Does money buy you a better shot at success?

Well, ROI is deceptive, particularly in a field like affiliate marketing. The juiciest profit margins are a distant third in our importance stakes, trailing both scalability and sustainability.

Let’s say you have £100,000 to invest. You despise the typical savings accounts. You’re looking for a much greater return than the 4% which the proletarians live and die by.

Many people assume that as long as there are affiliates comfortably rocking 75% ROIs, it should be a walk in the park to beat the typical savings rates. If 75% is possible, 4% should be achievable while wearing a blindfold with your balls in the jacuzzi. Right? No, wrong. You’re assuming:

A. You will launch campaigns that actually make a profit.
B. You will invest the entire £100,000.

B cannot happen without A, unless your stupidity knows no bounds. And A cannot happen unless you’re naturally acclimatised to the industry.

On paper it looks pretty easy for an affiliate marketer to pummel that £100,000; to reap massive profits that are beyond the scope of banks, or even the stock market. But the percentages are skewed.

4% return on £100,000 leaves you with £104,000 at the end of the year. That’s a profit of £4,000. On par with a typical savings account

But what if you only get enough campaigns profitable to spend £10,000? In that case, you’d need to hit a 40% ROI to match the savings account rates.

Of course, there’s no reason why you can’t use a savings account and work on affiliate campaigns. Except that in most cases, you would erase your gains. As an investment source of infinite growth, the system is flawed. You’re throwing money at arbitrage, which is hardly a value investment.

The purpose of a savings account is to make all your money work for you. The mechanics of an affiliate business are completely different. Many would argue that having £10,000 to invest is just as good as having £100,000. Plenty of networks will pay you weekly so the cashflow is irrelevant. We aim to invest externally, not internally.

Every wise investor should make a habit out of reading the market before he shoves his dick in it. And what happens when you read between the lines of our industry? You hear, over and over again, that affiliate marketers are rushing to invest their money away from affiliate marketing. What does that tell you?

Even though we can sniff the delights of a 75% ROI, or taste the doubling of our money in an afternoon’s work, we know that like any market experiencing rapid growth – the bubble will inevitably burst.

Unlike the stock market, which specialises in exaggerated panic-stricken meltdowns, affiliate bubbles are burst every day.

It could be a Facebook account getting banned, the collapse of a top offer, or the bankruptcy of a once-great network. Our business plans collectively resemble a trip through the Chessington Bubbleworks; fragile and a little bit whimsical, to say the bloody least.

My advice to anybody looking to throw their money at affiliate marketing as a means of investment is simple: don’t do it. Use your capital to build assets that the rest of us are in this very business to fund.

Recommended This Week

• For information on how to rock those 75% ROIs, and much more, hit up my Premium Posts. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

A huge percentage of our working day is spent playing the waiting game. It’s one of the reasons the many Internet Marketing forums maintain such active communities, and why blogs such as mine retain a readership. Most of you are waiting for something to happen.

Black Hole Days, as I like to call them, are those where our productivity is stamped in to the ground. Where our goals are left at the mercy of somebody on the other side of the world deciding that an email or campaign is important enough to address. Such days are, thankfully, perfectly avoidable. But you’ll need to bagsy a lot of self-discipline along the way.

One of the many reasons that convinced me to move my efforts from SEO to paid traffic campaigns was the time that it took to see results. SEO is a messy business, full of relative variables, and a lot of donkey work. It’s easy to spend your 9-5 staying busy when there are more links to be had, and more articles to be written.

However, buying traffic and setting up arbitrage affiliate campaigns is something that can be achieved in the space of a morning. It can be done at a leisurely pace in your local coffee shop, so long as you find the seat where your fucked up dating imagery is shielded from the public eye.

It’s this lackadaisical approach to work that appealed to me while I was still in full-time employment. Yet, what they don’t tell you about making the jump from part-time to full-time affiliate is that nothing changes. Absolutely nothing.

The tasks simply expand to take up more of your time, and so you spunk more and more bandwidth on the chore of refreshing stats. Most of your work can be ticked off in two hours if you truly buckle down.

A lot of people ask me how I find time to blog regularly given the vast number of campaigns I seem to be running. Well, for one, the number of campaigns is probably much smaller than you think. And secondly, what else am I going to do? It takes 20 minutes to set up a campaign, and 2 minutes to check whether it’s a resounding success.

If we push ourselves, we can burn extra energy sending emails back and forth to various affiliate managers. For shits and giggles, you could always apply to one of these ’2012-era’ offers that requires all ad copy, images and landing pages to be approved. Those are my favourites. They should come with a health warning.

“Requires overnight planning. Likely to cause stroke and seismic mind-fuck in typical affiliate.”

The truth is that blogging is one of my preferred methods of filling the Black Hole Days. When my campaigns are ‘in transit’, or waiting to accumulate data, I prefer to be proactive rather than bouncing off the walls on AIM.

If you don’t want to blog (and let’s face it, most people shouldn’t), I recommend that you keep two or three books by your desk, ideally on completely unrelated subjects. I set myself the target of writing 10 pages a day, and reading 100 pages. To the uninitiated, that may seem a little extreme, but it feeds me a steady stream of new inspiration and ideas. The writing, additionally, is a profitable side income.

Slowly over the months, I’ve learnt to embrace the idea of using time spent waiting on campaigns to plunge in to research and papers that I’m completely unfamiliar with. If you’re not striving to learn out of your comfort zone, you’re never going to match the diversity of knowledge that comes from working in a formal job.

Reading and writing are both nice ways of spending time productively, but perhaps the most important step you can take is to commit to a project that involves more than traditional CPA arbitrage. Ever since I took up this job, I’ve been looking for ways to establish a legitimate business that places me as more than just a middleman.

It’s a controversial subject for affiliates, amplified by the Affiliate Marketing is Dead extremist views.

I don’t believe affiliate marketing is dead. As a regulated industry, I think it’s only just starting to flourish. Strip away the bullshit stereotypes of how we make our money and you are left with one word that is not going out of fashion anytime soon – commission. My balls will perish long before commission.

However, if you spend two or three years in full-time affiliate marketing, you will eventually find that the waiting game begins to grate. You turn resentful of those Black Hole Days and gain an increasingly fine appetite for the power of running your own ship. It’s lucrative to be a middleman, but with so much time on our hands, it’s only logical that we take measures to develop a permanent business that is ours.

Recommended This Week

• I hear Mr. Green has just released a brand new version of his Plentyoffish uploader kit. Sign up at the StackThatMoney Forum if you want it, along with a whole shebang of other free tools, plus a great community to receive professional treatment for your affiliate concerns.

• If you need a helping hand making this affiliate thing work, Premium Posts Volume 2 splurges over 70 pages of my tips, techniques and strategies for conquering Facebook. Reviews so far have generally been that the Posts are better than sex, so please do check them out.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

I’ll start by giving you the basics. What Runs Where is a competitive intelligence service for online media buyers. The hook is to discover new traffic sources, to become more efficient at monetizing your existing campaigns, and to open your eyes to a simply mind-boggling data dump of what your competitors are up to.

Spying on competition seems to be one of 2011′s hottest angles for marketing products. I’ve already reviewed several other products, all aiming to make our ‘creative process’ less troublesome. The difference with What Runs Where is scale.

It all looked so simple when I first logged in.

A nicely tiled interface allowing me to search through the most popular (and most relevant) adverts on 18 of the largest display networks – as well as 6 text ad networks.

And then I clicked through to view some data. And then I clicked through to view some more data. Before you know it, I’ve clicked through about seven times and the What Runs Where software is tracing everything from the entire banner portfolio of True.com, to the exact eye colour of the bastard who keeps outbidding me on TribalFusion.

This thing is a well oiled data whoring machine. And there lies it’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. To get the most out of What Runs Where, you have to be able to handle lots of data. You have to practically thrive on it like some kind of sick perverted numbers freak. There’s a lot to take in, and I can see how the fledgling baby affiliate could be swept under within minutes.

Let’s take a look at what you can analyse…

If you’re short on inspiration, you can use the What Runs Where system as a means of researching the most popular banner ads by strength, relevancy or recency on any of the following platforms:

Google Image Ads, 247 Real Media, ContextWeb, ValueClick, Tribal Fusion, Blue Lithium, BuySellAds, Rubicon Project, Adbrite, Technorati Media, Burst Media, Advertising.com, Interclick, Zedo, XTend Media, Undertone Ads, Specific Media and Harren Media.

And then you have your popular text ad platforms:

Adwords Content Network, MSN Content Network, Adside, Pulse360, AdBlade, Adsonar.

I know many affiliates feel naked and lost if they’re forced out of their comfort zone (Facebook and Plentyoffish), but these traffic sources are where the big money is made – particularly if you’re dabbling in rebills.

If you’re in research mode, you can use What Runs Where to assess the ads that are likely to work on each of those traffic sources. But that would be purely skimming the surface. The real value, in my opinion, is in the ability to perform searches for particular advertisers and to see the most popular placements on any given site.

If I run a search for True.com, I can uncover a huge number of banners that have been used to promote the site. Here’s a tiny sample:

Fair enough, it’s nice to see which banners are popular. But what I really want to see is the traffic sources and specific placements that have proven to be the most successful over time.

This information gives me some food for thought over suitable placements in a similar campaign. Christ, if I was running PPV, I’d have more than enough targets to keep myself busy. But it’s not quite giving me the complete picture. How do I know which ads are most suitable for each placement?

Now where the data really gets interesting is when you start cross-checking ads that have appeared in a particular placement. Let’s say I want to buy some banner space on TheFreeSite.com, I can use What Runs Where to perform a seperate placement analysis.

(I’ve purposefully chosen a very broad target…)

This gives me the breakdown of just about every advertiser that has been spotted on the site. If I want to see more recent placements, I can adjust the slider. I can also view the top banner ads on this single placement, as well as the strongest ad texts. Has one banner been hogging 50% of the impressions? What traffic source does it come from? All this data is at my fingertips, and it’s enough to make me slightly nauseous.

The data pool is truly gigantic. You can easily lose a couple of hours sifting through it.

So what can be improved?

The software currently tracks ads in four countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. This should keep most of you happy. But for advertisers like myself – those who have departed the popular English speaking regions in favour of dirty Eurotrash campaigns and the odd cheeky Brazilian – I would definitely like to see some Euro inventory added.

I also think the interface could be given a once-over and sprinkled with some explanations of how scores are calculated. Strength is annotated as a number, and while I’m sure the tech guys have perfectly valid logic in ranking the ads as they do, it could be made clearer.

Much of the data meaning has to be assessed relatively by looking at more data. If the team could find a way of leading lambs such as myself to the ‘opportunities’ rather than more numbers, it would open up the software to a whole new realm of buyers. They have a hell of a lot of features, it’s just rebranding a few of them as benefits that will convert this thing in to an unslayable savage donkey beast.

What Runs Where isn’t going to turn a bad affiliate marketer in to a rich affiliate marketer. You’re kidding yourself if you buy this thing expecting it to churn out profitable campaigns while you swing lackadaisically in the hammock.

And while it is by far the most sophisticated ad spying software I’ve yet to come across, it’s also tied to the same limitations as it’s many rivals – you, the user, have to turn that data in to a competitive advantage. It won’t appear by magic.

If I had to pull a metaphor out of my arse, I would compare the software to a very deep bucket full of jigsaw pieces. Inside, you will find just about every component of that one lucrative campaign you’ve always dreamed of. But to put the pieces together, you’re going to have to insert yourself balls-deep in to a matrix of data – some of which will take you a few days to properly understand.

If you’re a regular media buyer, or looking to venture that way, What Runs Where is a must-have. I’d recommend it to intermediate affiliates, and anybody with an interest in display advertising.

The Good News…

Now, you may have already heard, but What Runs Where has just opened up a special $1 trial package. If you have any doubts, or simply want to take the software for a test spin, quit reading my drivel and go see it for yourself. Best of British to you, have a good weekend!

Recommended This Week

• For those of you who advertise on Facebook, Premium Posts Volume 2 splurges over 70 pages of my tips, techniques and strategies for conquering Zuckerberg’s monster. I’m confident you’ll get a lot out of it, including some much better traffic sources for our gaming offer example above!

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

This is a question I get asked time and time again, particularly by those looking to cross in to affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget. I understand the concerns. Not wanting to waste a single dollar is an admirable show of frugality, if hopelessly unrealistic.

However, condensing my hindsight in to a reliable plan for somebody else’s future is not particularly practical.

There are many things I’ve learnt by starting an affiliate business. Most importantly, the need to play to my strengths.

When you step back from the industry and forget that affiliate marketing exists, you can find a great deal of clarity by simply asking yourself: “What do I have to offer? What can I do for other people that would make some kind of difference?”

These are very fundamental questions, and probably not as appealing as the one push button formula that many optimists are craving to hear about.

But it’s only by understanding your strengths, by grasping what you have to offer, that you can possibly think about creating a business that will be valuable five or ten years from now.

If you fail to recognise your strengths and passions, I can almost guarantee that your success will hinge on chance. You’ll adopt the scattergun approach to Internet Marketing where projects look impressive on paper, but leave you feeling empty on the first day of production.

I could advise new affiliates to go and build a website about losing weight with the latest jungle superberry, because obviously there’s plenty of money to be made in that particular niche. But I’d be doing them a massive injustice.

You could expect those excited affiliates to go away, bust out their credit cards, snap up domains and hosting, and maybe even come back two weeks later with a shiny WordPress ready to sell some berries.

The problem is that most new affiliates are pretty uneducated when it comes to understanding and selling berries. More to the point, the reason they find to justify such a splurge of berry related research is that it could potentially make them money. They will build websites about random crap because there’s a bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. But where is the passion?

You can’t be passionate about money forever. It’s a paradox. Eventually you end up with enough of it to be back to square one.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt is that even if there is a bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow, even if your berries website does make you a great deal of money, it’s not going to leave you feeling 100% satisfied. The only work that will leave you feeling 100% satisfied is work that you actually care about.

This is a ridiculous argument for many affiliates to understand. Who needs to feel satisfied when the money is in the bank and you’re still in your boxer shorts at 1pm?

It’s not a question of failing to appreciate the money, but rather feeling comfortable with your objectives. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and so I use affiliate marketing as a mechanism to monetize the passion I have for writing.

My whiteboards used to be littered with whichever projects were likely to put money in my pocket, even if the thought of getting the work done was enough to make me strangle a kitten in my sleep.

Sooner or later, the mindset grows thin. You find yourself naturally gravitating to the ideas that stir an emotion or excitement more sustainable than the appeal of making money. You ultimately realise that easy, profitable and sustainable can never exist.

I hope that one day the Internet Marketing bubble bursts, and we’re all forced to abandon the ridiculous exact match domain projects that came about simply because we saw a micro opportunity, or the thousands of Ezine processed articles, written by experts who are only actually expert in the art of getting to an opportunity first.

My number one piece of advice for any affiliate looking to break in to the industry is actually quite simple.

Imagine you’re designing a business plan for a brick and mortar store, not a website that can be quietly consigned to history at the first sniff of a challenge. Then ask, “What can I see myself happily working on every day for as long as it takes to succeed?”

Nail down your passion, research the market, and then do a better job of servicing it than the thousands of Internet Marketers wearing ‘expert’ masks in disguise.

It might take a while for the industry to correct itself, but when it does, the affiliates who are truly passionate about their objectives will have a much greater incentive to stay ahead than Mr. Exact Match Domain who couldn’t give a shit.

Recommended This Week

• Pick up a copy of Premium Posts Volume 1 if you like the content on this blog. For those of you waiting for the next Volume, well, keep waiting. I haven’t started it yet.

• For those who need more hands-on info, check out the Stack That Money Forum. It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

One of the things I remember distinctly was catching Jason from Ads4Dough at an extremely bare basics table, decorated with a bottle of water and surrounded by a hundred companies that had gone all-out to ‘dress for the occasion’.

It really emphasized in my mind how vast the gulf is between affiliate marketers who ‘get it’, and those who think they ‘get it’ by gelling the hair back and dousing their booths with:

1. At least four scantily clad female affiliate managers.
2. Enough jargon speak to give me a fucking headache
3. All style and zero substance.

As most conference junkies have probably worked out by now, I’m not one to travel halfway across the world to trade business cards with slick sales reps that I’ll probably never speak to again in my life. That’s not to say I don’t value the power of networking, I just prefer to stick to my small circle of confidants who generally keep me up to speed if there’s anything big I need to hear about.

I found London Adtech frustrating and confusing in equal measures. Not only did the companies seem to be wrestling for the title of best corporate Zoolander face, but they were also hugely out of touch with the solo working class affiliates like myself. I may not look like a Wall Street banker, but I’m actually a better representation of a real life affiliate marketer than some tosser with his glass of Champagne and never-ending presentation of “digital e-projects”.

Seriously, if you’re still prefixing business terms with “e” to show that you get the digital age, slap yourself in the ganglies and go back to the starting line. You suck.

I think most companies who attend these corporate events are under the illusion that affiliates are dumb, blind and blissfully unaware that suits and jargon speak actually add up to… not much.

Christ, the second you mention that you’re a CPA marketer who works from home, be prepared for that head to toe glance, the tutting of dismay and a polite ending of the conversation while the poorly educated twat turns his back on you to deal with other more respectable attendees.

The latest event on the horizon here in London is the A4U Expo. I don’t know about you, but I stopped taking this event seriously when I saw that it was sponsored by Argos.

What’s that all about?

Am I supposed to be seduced in to promoting Argos? With an entry pass starting at £395, I’d have to spend the rest of my life shelling Argos links to come anywhere close to making a return on that investment.

The only affiliate who will pay £395 for access to this kind of corporate circle jerk is the affiliate who is being sponsored by his company.

Now, I realise there may be corporate suits reading this now who gasp at the idea of their favourite event being compared to a Yuppie’s Day Out. But really, that’s all this shit is. Every single keynote spirals in to a final self-adoring sales pitch. You would be better placed collecting a list of the speakers, Googling their blogs, and reading up on the tips that everybody else will be paying £395 to hear a speech about.

The corporate affiliate marketing landscape couldn’t be further detached from the hard working affiliates who drive the industry’s popularity forward. Some of us are educating ourselves to build sustainable businesses, others are spending lavish amounts to dress with sophistication and learn how to make 4% on a fucking book sale with Amazon.

Good luck with that.

Recommended This Week

• Pick up a copy of Premium Posts Volume 1 if you like the content on this blog. For those of you waiting for the next Volume, well, keep waiting. I haven’t started it yet.

• For those who need more hands-on info, check out the Stack That Money Forum. It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

The video should be taken with a pinch of salt. Rastani has just as much to gain from ‘outing’ himself as every other banker has in operating quietly. But hidden in the scaremongering is a beautiful little snippet of advice for any hustler, any affiliate with the initiative to make some money when the economy cracks again.

“We don’t really care that much about how they’re going to fix the economy, our job is to make money from it.”

“The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

“If you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this.”

These are words of encouragement that should ring out to any readers who enjoyed the bizopp boom of 2008.

I enjoyed my first break in affiliate marketing by following a very simple economic theory that practically any dipship with a keyboard and some web hosting could have copied – and many did.

When people are fearing for their jobs, and when the mortgage walls are closing in, the opportunity to make ‘easy money’ and become self-sufficient is even harder to resist.

Who wouldn’t want to get rich posting links on Google?
Who wouldn’t want to earn $693/day by clicking a button and counting the profit?

Affiliates, blessed with the flexibility of changing business strategies overnight, swept to meet this demand and banked millions of dollars. In the news, and in the papers, all you would see was doom and gloom. More jobs lost, more disaster predicted and even greater incentives for affiliates to leverage in to their landing pages.

Now, admittedly, the products that were rushed on to the market to meet that rising demand were flimsy at best. Anybody promoting them was likely to wake up richer, but in a bed that smelt distinctly unlike roses.

There’s another reason why we should be optimistic about any market crash.

What do consumers do when they start to ‘feel the crunch’? They go online! Instead of spending money willy-fucking-nilly like a single mum of six on benefits (fuck you all, maggots of the state), they actually have to think about their purchases. That means our chances of courting such transactions are massively improved.

Any economic disaster is likely to be devastating to high street shops, or for intricately designed businesses operating on wafer thin margins. But in our industry, the margins are apple pie deep. We can sell products globally and move towards the money in a blinking of the eyelid. The flexible will survive. The smart and flexible will thrive.

Alessio Rastani has copped a lot of jealousy-driven YouTube comments from the proletarians of society. Those who feel eternally battered in to submission by bankers and giant corporations, despite their own mindless devotion to the very entities they claim to hate.

Image jacked From Sean Powl on Facebook. Cheers!

But what Rastani says is absolutely true, even if his motives are not (get proles get money seems to be his real agenda, very similar to the Warrior Forum pyramid).

A downward market is brilliant for entrepreneurs and innovative minds.

Fear is the incentive to end all, and as we know, every single commission you’ve ever received was registered for no other reason than because the incentive was great enough. Why shouldn’t we be pissing our pants in excitement at the idea of fear sweeping in to households around the world?

When society feels beaten down in to submission, the little hand offering escapism is worth more than ever. As affiliates, we often find ourselves charged with convincing users to behave as we want them. The task becomes much easier when indifference is replaced with fear, insecurity and a constant desire to change.

I certainly won’t be sobbing if the markets crash, or if fear sweeps the nation. If I were you, I’d be preparing for the worst and getting ready to deliver that escapism. If the worst comes to be, escapism will be in hot demand.

Recommended This Week

• To those who haven’t already checked out my $27.95 Premium Posts, the power of these balls compels you to do so immediately. If you’re a Plentyoffish affiliate, or a dating affiliate in general, there’s a lot of info to be grabbed inside. Sceptical about the quality? Google it and sniff out the feedback.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

The road to success is littered with dog shit. Affiliate marketing is no exception.

In my mind there are two kinds of affiliates. The ones that do a few things really well (develop a specialism) and earn themselves decent money in the process and then the other kind; that try too many things and end up earning mediocre amounts.

You’ve probably seen both kinds of affiliates at work.

There’s the super skinny sites that operate the manure model… this is an affiliate or website owner that has outsourced or just written piss poor content and sandwiched it between multiple horse shit offers in the hope that someone might actually feel sorry for them and click that ad and make a purchase. They are also the kind that merrily spend their AdWords balance sending people to a homepage or pay little attention to the commissions versus the CPC.

Then there’s the other kind that clearly understand how the business works and where they fit in the customer purchasing process. The fact that it is so easy to become an affiliate is part of the reason why so many affiliates have shoes caked in dog shit. People assume because it’s free and affiliate networks promise big payouts that all it takes is for you to whack up some vaguely relevant content and people will happily buy using your links.

In the immortal words of Daniel Craig in Layer Cake – “It doesn’t fucking work like that.”

What some affiliates forget are the underlying principles of running a successful business. You can ‘con’ a customer and turn a quid or you can look after them and enjoy lifetime customer value. I know which one I’d rather do.

Tip 1 – Encourage loyalty

We affiliates spend time, money and effort acquiring customers so we owe it to ourselves to try and retain them.

Think about it in money terms; if you spend £0.20 per click on a PPC campaign and you convert a £5 offer at say 5% you are going to hit profit if you buy 100 clicks. But what about if you took each of those 5 ‘customers’ and as well as the initial commission you managed to retain say 3 of them. You could then promote multiple other related offers to those 3 retained users and next time you need not spend that £0.20 buying them, they know you, trust you and you know what kinds of offers they like.

I can certainly do more of this and if I am honest, I haven’t cracked the loyalty thing quite yet on all of my sites but I’m getting there one pre-pop, email grabbing offer at a time.

Tip 2 – Don’t spread yourself too thin

This isn’t just a tip for affiliate marketing but more of an online business tip in general. ‘Real businesses’ make carefully considered investments in projects based on the likely risks and returns, weighing up the pros and cons in a rational fashion. Since you’re running an online business, you should do the same.

I’m not saying you need a committee or to embark on a complex journey of planning, research and feedback but having a solid grasp on the following is key to your success: who you are targeting, the problem you are solving, the business model you are going to use, how much is it going to take to get this thing off the ground, how much time will you need to commit in the first instance and on-going (and do you have that time), what is the likely return and how long will it take for you to see a return (and can you wait that long).

I’m pretty sure it’s the unwritten rule of internet business that you shouldn’t buy another domain or start another project until you’ve covered the setup costs of your last project or at least got a solid plan in place that is going to get you there.

The late, great creative director Paul Arden said that people are always looking for the next opportunity, forgetting that the project they have right in front of them IS the opportunity.

Tip 3 – Add value

Some people like to dress up the affiliate marketing business as a complex beast. The fact is that if you want to make big fat juicy commissions then you had better capture that customer right at the sweet spot – when they are at the info seeking or comparing alternatives stages in the buying process.

You can entice them by adding something of real value. There’s a reason why the likes of MoneySupermarket.com are so successful and that’s because they focus on providing real value to the end user. If your site makes the life of the user easier, solves a problem or is generally useful then they will be more than happy to oblige and click your affiliate link.

I try to build sites that are genuinely useful or solve a problem. I have a site that helps people out of redundancy and a site that helps people start a business as well as a few others. I’ve started websites in all sorts of niches like broadband, mobile phones and life insurance without truly thinking how I was going to make it work and what I actually brought to the party.

I’d be lying if I said that my sites were all about the user because I don’t run a charity and I try to ensure everything I do at least in some way contributes to my bank balance but I like to give my sites the appearance of being user focused.

Tip 4 – Don’t chase the money

I once blew a month’s money in two days chasing life insurance commission. Think you’ve got deep pockets? Not compared to these guys. They can afford to drop £30 a click because they either A) have more money than sense B) they are backed up by some mega rich brand that ‘needs’ to be present on that term or C) a combination of the 2.

There wasn’t anything wrong with my website, my keyword research or my ad writing skills. I simply didn’t have the budget to sustain that pesky pilot phase of every PPC campaign. Even if I had got there I probably wouldn’t have had the cash flow to support the demands of the campaign. Painful, but I’m glad I realised that fairly quickly otherwise I might have actually wiped myself out.

Look for gems. Niches or affiliate offers that are underserved or underrepresented or at the very least have good opportunities in i.e. some good keywords are low competition, low cost so at least give you a look in. They are still out there, the other day I found a whole niche with really decent search volume and on several of the bigger keywords, parked pages were actually ranking in the top 5!

If you are going to target a competitive market then you had better have a good USP.

Tip 5 – Relax

As any affiliate will tell you, there’s nothing worse than to sit there hitting refresh every 2 minutes wondering why your AdWords balance is going down but your affiliate network balance isn’t going up. Behaving like this will do little more than turn you into a nervous wreck.

Be thorough in your planning, spot-on in your execution and then to a certain degree you have to trust your instinct and let the thing run its course. You want to look at bigger patterns i.e. daily, weekly, monthly.

I’d like to think I have developed this mentality because I’ve got balls of steel but in actual fact I have just come to realise that worrying about a campaign is quite damaging to not only your health but also your bank balance. You may pause or delete a campaign before it has been given a chance to hit profitability or before at the very least it has been given the chance to show you where the profits might lie.

Giving up on a website too soon is also another crime that I have committed. When you kick off a project you have all the enthusiasm in the world, this tends to fade as it becomes increasingly clear that it’s not as easy as you imagined. Stick with it because if you truly believe in something then you will get there eventually. That annoying man that’s obsessed with “re-inventing the vacuum cleaner” spent nearly a decade on his idea before earning any real money from it.

A word of warning however, don’t let things go too far. Be clear in your own mind how much you are prepared to commit before you write the project/site/campaign off as a lost cause.

To sum up

You know just how easy it is to start life as an affiliate. If it cost you £1000 to join each program I guarantee you wouldn’t take it so fucking lightly and that’s the point. You need to focus on how you are going to turn this website/campaign/idea into the money tree your parents told you never existed – that’s the secret to avoiding the queue outside the job centre. As Finch would say, affiliate marketing really isn’t a piss in the park.

I’ve learned all this the hard way because I reeked of dog shit when I started life as an affiliate. I adopted the scatter gun approach. I started as many sites as I could, as quickly and cheaply as possible and then prayed my bollocks off that one might make me some money – yes I even had one dedicated to compost!

I escaped the dog shit by realising there was a problem and making steps to correct that (washing my shoes, selling domains, closing down websites and focusing on core projects), you can do the same, it’s never too late.

I learned the wrong way to be an affiliate and you’d be surprised how doing the wrong thing can actually be the better way of learning how to do it properly. A man that makes no mistakes makes nothing and all that. I like to tell people it was one big experiment when in actual fact it was good ol’ fashioned naivety.

Recommended This Week:

• Be sure to check out James’s blog, SkyRocket SEO. I stumbled across it several weeks ago and was impressed by the content. Plenty of takeaway tips to sink your teeth in to. You can also follow him on Twitter. Cheers for the guest post, James.

• I’d also like to say a major thanks to everybody who has purchased my Premium Posts so far. I’ve been genuinely flattered by the feedback and sheer number of sales. It’s nice to know that so many of you are willing to pay for my balls my grand wisdom. Plentyoffish advertisers, read this for more info.

I was not at all familiar with Google’s Global Market Finder tool, until about 7 minutes ago. Maybe that has something to do with my own rocky relationship with Google, but I’m sure there will be many readers in the same boat.

Global Market Finder takes your keywords, translates them in to different languages, and examines the popularity and cost of those matches in various countries around the world.

Leading on from my last post, I think this is something that should prove super relevant for detecting trends and opportunities in countries that haven’t yet been saturated by competition.

I would certainly hesitate before staking my balls on the accuracy of Google’s data, but as a guideline to be used in correlation with other trends, it serves up some interesting information.

Once you’ve picked a keyword to research, you can compare data using the nine filters: Africa, Americas, Asia, Emerging Markets, Europe, European Union, G20, Middle East and Oceania.

Compare for example, the data of the G20 nations for a keyword like “lose weight” (and it’s many foreign equivalents), against an emerging market nation. The difference in bid prices is obviously significant, but will presumably narrow over the coming months and years.

G20 nations

Good volume but high click prices (suggests tough competition)

Emerging market nations

Decent volume, low prices... although currently, much less valuable traffic

‘Lose weight’ as a keyword may, understandably, take some time to catch on in countries like Indonesia where there isn’t half the obesity problem that we have on our hands in the west.

The real shocker on that list is Russia. Is it really the slimmest nation on Earth, or do their beached whales simply not give a shit?

Forgetting about Adwords altogether, we can use this tool to establish the demand for products in cultures that we might not be familiar with. You could spend an entire afternoon translating your keywords and measuring the search volume. But Global Market Finder does the chore of translation and comparison for you.

The incentive of knowing 380,000 Brazilians are looking to lose weight (every month) may just be enough to convince an affiliate marketer to dust down his Portuguese and rebrand those trashy landing pages.

“Finally, the acai berry comes home to Brazil.”

What about those of you who own digital products like ebooks? The brilliant thing about ebooks is that the cost of delivery is always the same.

There are many rapidly growing economies with consumers looking to flex their newly discovered purchasing power. If you can sell the same content, in a different language, to a willing market – surely it’s worth exploring?

Recommended This Week

• Are you signed up to the Stack That Money Forum? It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

Do you find it easier to rank a website by building it in a foreign language?

This is something that has played on my mind for a long time now. One of the things that has always deterred me from SEO has been the sheer competition from millions of other English-speaking webmasters. I hate brushing shoulders with the urchins of Digital Point. The thought ruins my morning coffee.

It makes sense to me that somebody who has a perfect grasp of French, Spanish or German, would find life much easier to generate traffic when there isn’t such a global demand for the hottest keywords.

You don’t have to be speaking English to spend money. And most of us believe in the gigantic advantage of being first mover in a market.

My foreign experiments so far have extended to building landing pages in different languages and using the cheaper Facebook clicks to play arbitrage. This is something that I actively preach, and is rapidly becoming the best way for an affiliate to turn over a healthy margin – certainly on Facebook.

However, designing a website from the ground up and focusing an SEO campaign on ranking for foreign keywords is something that I haven’t nailed down. Surely it makes sense to do so?

It doesn’t even have to be the traditional affiliate website. Entire western web concepts can be ported abroad and matched to new markets where there is little or no competition. In some regions, that lack of competition is justified. There’s no money to be made. In other growing economies? Stepping out of your comfort zone seems like a lucrative step, dare I say it, logical even.

It’s no secret that the American economy is well and truly spitroasted, and Europe is hardly faring much better. The emerging economies of the world offer new opportunities, new growth and new demand.

Now while there are many reasons why China may not be ready for your lose weight fast campaigns, that’s not to say there aren’t areas that affiliates shouldn’t be seriously looking at and asking “How can I get a slice of that pie?”

I’m going to be running a personal experiment over the next 60 days to learn a brand new language and develop a website that caters to one of these emerging markets.

It’s going to take me to epic places that I’ve never been before (the library), but I hope that by the end of these 60 days, I can proudly showcase a sparkling new website that lines my account with pesos. Or rupees. Or magic beans.

Stay tuned to see the calamity unfold.

Recommended This Week

• Are you signed up to the Stack That Money Forum? It offers coaching from two of the best CPA bloggers in the biz, Mr Green and Mr Stackthatmoney. You’ll find a bunch of follow along case studies and some very generous knowledge dumps which you’d have to be an absolute muppet not to take value from. More info here.

• Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.