Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing 2010’ Category

Getting The Most Bang For Your Buck

It’s a new month full of new projects and new targets. Kids are about to go back to school and Christmas is looming in the not too distant future. If mindless seasonal fever does the trick for you, I guess you could say it’s a great time to make some money online. Same as it always was.

I’ve been speaking to quite a few virgin CPA marketers recently. One of the recurring questions I get asked is “If I have X amount to spend per month, where do you think I should invest it?”

Working with a limited budget is something that most of us had to deal with when we started. You’ve probably noticed how a lot of the top affiliates out there are young entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s. These are guys and girls who probably didn’t have fortunes to invest.

Personally speaking, I’d only just turned 21 when I first hit success. Besides the odd scrunched up tenner in my back jeans pocket, most of my money was…err, the bank’s money. When you’re crashing in to your overdraft on CPA campaigns, you kinda have to get the most bang for your buck. Or you’re metaphorically shagged.

I consider myself lucky that much of my initial investment was made at a time when you could rip out a CPA campaign and treble or quadruple your money overnight.

ROI is especially important when you’re just getting started. If you’re barely managing to break even on your campaigns, and wondering how the top affiliates manage to build up these empires – well – cheer yourself up with the knowledge that it gets easier. Everything gets easier. You just need to scrap away. Increase the size of your investment pot, by any means necessary, and get your cashflow sorted.

My life as an affiliate is a lot easier now that I can get away with running 25% ROI campaigns. I don’t really care if I blow a few thousand dollars in a day, as long as I’m seeing profit and enough of it to cover the risk and outgoings.

Let’s say you have a monthly budget of $500 after deducting what your wife’s blown up the wall to fill her wardrobe. It’s tough to pinpoint where to start. Do you go in to promoting car insurance offers on Facebook? Rebills on PPV? Maybe even gaming offers on the content network?

The way I see it, if you don’t have much money to invest, there’s no point in entering a market where volume is a necessary ingredient to survive. Thinking of slinging a dating offer to 25 year old guys in mainstream America? Forget about it. Even if you find a profitable campaign, the ROI is likely to be so slim that it’ll take you twelve months of waiting on cheques in the mail before your business has taken a single step forward. That’s the reality if you’re working with Facebook, Adwords or even POF lately.

If you don’t have a big budget, your mind should naturally be focused on cornering small markets instead. Now you’ve probably read this endorsement of scaling and placed your finger on the reply button, ready to call me a lousy lying hypocrite. Yes, scaling is what puts the finishing touches on a super affiliate’s new LA mansion. But without having money to invest – and lots of it – scaling is like climbing in to bed after too much tequila. Really fucking difficult and really fucking slow.

I’ve posted time and time again about laser targeting your campaigns; both on PPV and Facebook. This is the tactic I used regularly before I had the muscle to compete with other big spending affiliates on broad demos.

If you’re looking to promote dating offers on a small budget, make yourself familiar with the niche markets where it’s possible to make a killing with highly targeted, albeit low volume, campaigns.

Markets like Single Parent Dating, Black Dating, Jewish Dating, Asian Dating…these are all great entry points for the newbie marketer wanting to increase his capital with a high ROI. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re wasting an entire budget only to claim ten bucks of profit with Mate 1.

If there’s no logical micro-market for you to target, it’s just as easy to create one for yourself. Your network might not have a suitable offer for Midget Albino Dating, but that’s not to say your CTRs aren’t going to be through the roof if you decide to target them anyway.

The key to initial success is to sweep underneath the heavyweight affiliates. If you can’t compete with their budget, compete with the time and care that you dedicate to your campaigns. Pay attention to the details, the small print of the demos. Produce creatives that strike close to the mark.

As an affiliate who now works mainly with broad demos covering millions of people at a time, I can say that there are a lot of micro-markets that I’d love to scale in to and dominate – if only I had the time. But I tend to dedicate my resources to those mainstream campaigns where most of my money is made. And it’s the same for many high volume affiliates out there. Your best opportunity is to cover the ground that we don’t bother getting dirty with. Like a local politician going door to door while we can only put a sweeping ad on TV.

There are some campaigns that I had to turn down as a newbie marketer simply because they weren’t cost-efficient. And yet they might have been producing 50% ROI. That’s madness, isn’t it? Like your mum buying you a unicorn for Christmas only to slap her in the face and moan that you wanted something more mythical. Beggars can’t be choosers, but profit isn’t always the footprint of money well spent.

It’s important to make every penny count while you’re still dealing in small business steps. Forget about the rulebook that super affiliates abide by. They’re competing on a different playing field under different rules altogether.

The CPA landscape is dramatically different in 2010. It’s no longer possible to fill your boots with overnight riches by going straight for the kill in huge mainstream markets. You need to operate on the fringes, reap profit where the markets aren’t so saturated, and dig deeper to grow your business.

Offer A Quick Fix = Get A Quick Conversion

Not too long ago, I wrote a post praising the brilliance of Ca$hvertising as a must-have book for all marketers. Hopefully a few of you have read it by now and can verify that I wasn’t bending you over in the name of an Amazon commission. That book really is the dog’s bollocks. And if you don’t have it, you should order it a-sap.

One of the many subjects that Ca$hvertising touches on is the importance of offering a quick fix in your advertising campaigns. I thought I’d make an effort to cover why this is so important, and warn you of how being a misleading little rascal can land you in a hot tub of shit.

By the very competitive nature of advertising, we’ve reached a tipping point. Consumers can find a mind-boggling number of reasons not to buy a product. One of those reasons is that a product simply doesn’t capture their imagination. It doesn’t promise a life changing impact overnight. The cold hard truth that losing weight can take months of blood, sweat and tears is often much less of a sales pitch than oh – I don’t know – lose half your body weight in 4 weeks.

To many affiliates, offering a quick fix is simple. Lie until you’re purple in the face and pretend you’re the fucking gingerbread man when the FTC comes calling. We only have to look as far as the acai berry craze to see how the promotion of a “quick fix” can get out of hand. Really bloody quickly.

It’s easy for me to sit here and rag on affiliates for lying with bold promises that are never going to come to fruition. But that’d make me a massive hypocrite. We all lie in our marketing efforts, and those of us who don’t simply forget to tell the truth.

If you’re going to learn anything from the acai berry gravy train, let it be that a quick fix will always prize that credit card out of the pocket. And there are techniques we can use that exploit this need for a quick fix, without getting our balls trapped in the crocodile jaws of [Insert General Attorney of Choice here]. You don’t have to sell your soul down the river.

It’s possible to build trust as an affiliate, and I’ve long stressed a personal desire to distance myself from slinging rebills that leave nothing but a sour taste in the mouth. Offering a quick fix doesn’t have to involve blatant lying though. It can simply be smart savvy marketing.

A technique I played with quite recently involved giving away a free ebook to my dating leads. We’ve all heard of Plenty of Fish, right? I haven’t spoken about *that* traffic source before, mainly because it served to benefit nobody who was already advertising there (rising click costs, invasion of newbies etc).

But if you’re advertising on Plenty of Fish, what do you know about your target audience? We can guess that we’re marketing to singletons who still haven’t found that special somebody. Despite putting in a clear effort by joining a dating site.

I think the reason so many affiliates fail with their advertising efforts on POF is because they forget to sell the appeal of the site they’re promoting. Think about what would constitute a “quick fix” to an existing dating site member. Maybe the women aren’t replying to your messages, maybe the guys are a bunch of narcissistic dicks with zero conversation skills. Either way, you need to establish something that you can fix.

I chose to give away a free ebook offering “ten explosive tricks for getting girls to message you on dating sites”. I will have you know that I outsourced it and didn’t write that shit myself. I then built out a landing page with an opt-in form.

“Sign up to my hot-shit newsletter and not only will I show you how to get women messaging you on dating sites, but I’ll send you an exclusive rare invitation to the best dating site to practice these tricks. I can only give away this link to [7] guys. If you’re sick of being Read & Deleted, you need to ACT NOW!”

Boom shake, shake, shake the room. Conversions, opt-ins, orgasms, profit. Everybody wins. By offering a quick fix to the biggest problem a guy can face on a dating site – being ignored like he’s carrying the plague (obviously I outsourced the research too) – you can slice through the competition and simply convert better than everybody else. Not to mention, if you use this method, you’re building yourself a long term business asset in the list.

But think about the concept. Don’t just jack my shit and run it for yourself. The second you place yourself in the collective shoes of your target market, you can find something to fix. Sometimes it’s necessary to develop your own freebie giveaways, like I did with my ebook, in order to present that quick fix without scamming the user or placing false promises in a service that might not be able to deliver.

There’s only one trick that works better than a quick fix. And that’s a quick fix that won’t be here tomorrow. So always remember to splash your landing pages with the urgency of countdown tickers, expiration dates and whatever else Ryan Eagle has recently added to his Network Application page.

It’s a sad state of affairs that consumers are so hesitant to place their faith in anything that doesn’t offer overnight results. But that’s the reality, so we have to adapt to it. Ask yourself what you can do for the user today. Then focus on developing a brand that’s simply too convenient for them to walk away from. If you find a quick fix, you’ll get a quick conversion.

I’ve Got Zero Experience And I Want To Be Rich

I seem to have accumulated a lot of readers with little Internet Marketing experience. It’s flattering that people read my shit without actually caring a jot about affiliate marketing, or even knowing what it is, but those same people have started to ask me questions. Questions like “I’d kinda be interested in making money online, can you show me where to start?”

Ahh, yes, that one.

Zero experience, never made a website before, you thought FTP was some kind of late night porn channel, and now you want to make money online. You just need to know where to start.

This post goes out to anybody reading who isn’t an affiliate marketer, but simply an everyday guy or girl with a full-time job who wants to make some extra income online. And by that token, I’m suddenly speaking to half of the fucking Internet.

Your first challenge is to sign out of the forums. Stop visiting Warrior Forum, cancel your Digital Point account and don’t even try to digest what you’re reading on WickedFire. Forums will only complicate your objectives.

I swear, The Warrior Forum reminds me of the scene in The Wire where Bubbles tells a crowd of junkies the story of his drug addiction. I sit here listening to another buffoon reel off his Russian novel of “Warrior Advice!!!” and then when he’s finally stopped bashing his keyboard, the other Warriors stand up and cheer…THANKS FOR SHARING! As if his own pandering to the gutter is their new ambition in life.

Shitty ideas put forward by shitty marketers, sodomizing each other with tales of pity, and rubbing the only ego their four cents can afford. But the shit never stops smelling of roses when there’s a retarded “Thanks for sharing!” at the end of it all. Right?

Okay, I’m getting vicious. I don’t mean to hate on the Warrior Forum, but it’s too much of a swamp to help you. If you’re spending all day reading these forums and looking for a magic formula to start making money, you’re wasting your time.

Find something you’re passionate about, something you could sit there and write about every night.

To enjoy success online without delving in to paid advertising, you need to have an asset. To develop an asset, you need to have a website that other people would want to visit. While a select few of us can develop money generating websites based on topics we couldn’t give two shits about, you will nearly always have more success when your project is something you have a genuine passion for.

It’s a simple concept called appealing to your strengths. If you burden yourself with weaknesses by trying to build a website in a niche you’re hopeless with, and can offer no expert opinion on, you’re going to fail. Especially in these early days. Passion is everything.

Whenever I’m guiding people with the “online business bug”, I try to focus on their strengths. If you can find what they’re passionate about, you can guide the mentality away from “MONEY MONEY MONEY” and channel it towards a more positive energy. Such as “what kind of website can I build to appeal to people who share my passion?” My opinion is that if you don’t love what you do enough to do it every day without a single penny of profit, it won’t work. Not if you’re a bumbling technology tard who’s doing this for all the wrong reasons.

It’s so easy to setup a WordPress blog, grab some cheap hosting, and give yourself a web presence. In fact, it’s too easy. WordPress is quite possibly the greatest software ever developed for those who know nothing about coding. But people forget that building a website is like planting a seed. Just because you can see it, that doesn’t mean you’re ever going to make a cent from it. To make money, you need to water it every day with fresh content and spend a lot of fruitless hours wondering when anybody will visit but still chugging along regardless.

I can’t remember who posted this, so I’m sorry I can’t credit you, but one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever seen for making money online was posted on WickedFire last week.

“Pick a topic you love, setup a blog and write about it every night. Come back in six months and I’ll tell you how to make money.”

So, so true. It’s only when you suspend your fixation with the making money part that you’ll begin to prosper and develop quality assets. If I had ever let money dictate my decisions and willingness to work, this blog wouldn’t be here. It’s here because I love writing and I love my job.

Everybody has to start somewhere. So if you’re looking on, a keen bean to make money online, first ask yourself “What is my passion?”

What can you write about every night? What do you have a special talent for that other people would like to have? There’s a niche for fucking everything on the Internet.

The next step is to setup a WordPress blog. Grab yourself a free template that looks nice. It doesn’t have to be professional. Now spend every night contributing something, no matter how big or small, to your site. The snowball effect will slowly gather pace over the months, but ONLY if you keep supplying new fresh content. Most people fail because they give up if their empire of riches hasn’t materialized in the first week.

They’re snobs of their own creations.

Not enough comments? Not enough people reading? Still got zeros in your commission columns? The loser walks away with his tail between his legs and probably spends the rest of the week being angry at life flipping burgers in his day job. It takes time to hit success. And that success might not change your life. Christ, you might only make $100 on the side in a month. But the experience of your journey will become knowledge.

With knowledge, this whole world of making money on the Internet will no longer seem so alien. Some of what you read on this site may slowly begin to make sense.

We all had to start somewhere. But if you want to catch up, you better get your feet wet and start learning fast. There are enough passionate individuals out there to run those who only want to make a quick buck out of town. Focus on your strengths, forget the money objectives and let Father Time and hard work open those doors for you.

Are Your Landing Pages Failing To Convert?

When I get asked questions about building landing pages, I’m always left with the impression that affiliates are searching for an exact science.

Unfortunately in affiliate marketing, there’s rarely such a thing as an exact science. If something works, it’ll make you money. If it doesn’t, it won’t. Everything between the margins is a matter of testing, being creative and sometimes copying what others are already doing.

Everybody has their own opinion for what makes a great landing page. But this is my blog so fuck everybody else, here’s how you do it. Finding the magic formula is a question of ticking three little boxes.

1. Am I writing in a way that my intended audience can understand?
2. Am I writing in a way that sells my service or product to that audience?
3. Am I writing in a way that gets them to act now?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, congratulations. Puff your tits, buy your copywriter some lunch and look forward to making some profit.

If the answer to any of those questions is no, it’s back to the drawing board. Your landing page probably sucks as many balls as you feared it did when the conversions failed to lift off.

There’s a fourth factor to any successful landing page. The artistic and graphical layout of the page can make a huge difference to ROI. I’ve seen landing pages with a yellow background convert irritatingly better than those with a white background. I could get deeply entrenched in the effects of changing tiny details for boosting conversions, but I don’t have the attention span today so we’re going to stick with the language.

The actual meat and potatoes of your page – the shit that’s going to dictate whether you can actually afford any meat and potatoes when the wife goes shopping – is the writing. The words you use and the language you choose. Nothing sells an offer like some badass sales copy driving daggers through the consumer’s “will I or won’t I?” doubts.

How do I write in a way that my intended audience can understand?

Just because you’ve got a full English degree, doesn’t mean you should be busting out fucking Shakespeare wordplay on a 13 year old kid.

I’ve lost track of the number of landing pages I’ve seen where the language is quite blatantly phoned in from the notepad of an affiliate marketer who expects his language to be universal. Always write to the lowest common denominator.

If there’s a good chance that 40% of your target audience is too retarded to pick up a book – and let’s face it, CPA and Retards are a match made in heaven – BE SIMPLE!

I know you want to sound impressive and knowledgeable, but most landing pages are simply a medium of showcasing what makes a product such a fantastic solution for your target. If the prospect doesn’t understand, or is struggling to digest the copy, you’re letting your artistic greed ram a fist up your own jacksy. It’s never going to make you money.

Use short sentences. They’re much easier to read. Most of America can understand this. Simple sentences increase your reading speed. They also encourage people to read more. So they’ll learn more about your product. And this can only be a good thing, right?

How do I write in a way that sells my service or product to that audience?

See the question at the end of the last paragraph? This is probably my favourite use of language for selling any service or product. It doesn’t matter what you’re promoting, if you can get consumers to answer “YES” over and over again, half your job is done.

So much of writing to sell is about building up momentum and creating a positive image in the consumer’s head. The greater the momentum and the stronger that image becomes, the more likely you are to push the final sale.

Asking questions where the consumer has no choice but to agree or nod their head can really ramp up the effectiveness of your landing pages.

We’ll take a landing page promoting a dating offer to women over 50 as an example. Of course, it helps to hit them with the features and benefits of your service. But you can also generate that helpful momentum by getting the target to agree with you.

“You’ve waited long enough for love. It’s your turn, wouldn’t you agree?”

“If you leave love to fate, it might never happen. But if you join us today, you’ll be taking one step closer to happiness. Do you care about your happiness?”

“Our women were much happier with their lives after we helped them find loving partners. Are you searching for that new spark of romance?”

After each of these sentences, the user is forced to agree. It’s just a natural flow that builds momentum and keeps them interested. It makes them aware of their weaknesses indirectly and thus much more likely to snap at your bait.

Get your targets to say yes repeatedly and they’re much more likely to say yes when it matters.

How do I write in a way that gets them to act now?

If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Would a charity worker ever get you to sign up to donate if she just left her phone number? Of course she wouldn’t. She’s harassing your arse outside the train station, backing you in to a corner and plying you with horrific imagery until you can see no light at the end of the tunnel when she asks for your financial help.

I remember the last charity worker I met in Shepherds Bush, we had an amusing conversation where I was pretty much filling in her next sentences. “You’re gonna ask me how I can afford to eat these McCoys but not donate £3.50/month to orphan monkeys in the jungle wilderness, aren’t you?”

I laughed because it works. It always works. The reason charities gets donations is because they have the balls to get in your face and ask for them.

So many landing pages out there fail miserably at the last hurdle. They do a fantastic job of selling a service but they forget the importance of a Call To Action. No CTA is effective without promoting the scarcity and urgency of what you’re offering. Yet you already know this because it’s all around you.

“Sale Must End Tonight”, “If you call in the next 20 minutes, ’cause we can’t do this all day…”, “Now accepting [7] new affiliates”

You know what they’re trying to do and still you can’t fight it. Scarcity manipulates the human desire not to miss out, while urgency rams the point home and seals the sale. Combine the two attributes with an unflinching Call To Action and what do you have? Profit.

Slice Your Way To PPV Profit… Ninja Style

I’m going to start by apologizing for false affbuzztizing. There are no ninjas in this post. The closest to a ninja you’re going to get is the knowledge that I’m wearing nothing but an all black towel as I write this. Yeah, I’m pretty much wet and soapy.

I’ve been meaning to post about some PPV techniques for a while now, because there’s only so much rhetorical bullshit I can rehash as “lifestyle advice” before people start to call me out on a mysterious lack of…actual content.

There are two problems with PPV.

1. Everybody is doing it.
2. You’re probably not very good at it.

PPV promotion – or any kind of advertising where you’re springing pop-ups on the user – is a method of interruption marketing that has to be approached differently to your normal social campaigns. And god forbid, get back to the drawing board if you’re trying to port your Search campaigns directly to PPV.

I’ve already posted about laser targeting PPV campaigns, and shocking users in to clicking your ads. I’ve had people emailing me quoting mixed results. Some have found a lot of success using the techniques, while others…not so much. *cough* NATURAL SELECTION *cough*

Instead of replying to a thousand different scenarios with a thousand possible reasons for why they didn’t work, I thought I’d explain the thought process that goes in to my own campaigns. And of course, many of these fail too.

The way I see it, profiting from PPV is all about brainstorming and developing enough ideas to attack a campaign from different angles. So many concepts out there are beaten and battered in to a state that you’d have to be Vince Offer on crack to make the product sound original. I don’t like joining the swarming masses, and I prefer to develop campaigns that leverage a very specific appeal to a relevant audience.

That’s great, right? Nobody cares, you just want practical examples.

Let’s say you’re going to promote a dating site, what are the obvious choices for targeting your ads? What are some keywords you might use?

Singles in [...]
Online dating in [...]
Get a girlfriend
Chat to girls online
Meet new people
Dating advice

You’re not going to win any gold medals for envelope-pushing creativity with this kind of targeting. That’s not to say it won’t work, but you’re battling with the masses.

Many marketers fail to understand why their campaigns are failing when they’re reaching such a targeted group of users.

“If Jo Bloggs is searching for a girlfriend, why won’t he use my link? Wah wah wahhh. It’s right there! Wah wah wahhh”

These users are clearly interested in online dating so why aren’t they snapping up your bait and whacking in their credit card details? A lot of the time it’s because they’re too well trained in the market you’re trying to promote. Just because you’re pumping a pop-up with “COME FLIRT NOW” in his face, doesn’t mean he hasn’t seen the message a thousand times before and already grown sick of it.

It’s not banner blindness, but you’re targeting a type of user who clearly knows what he’s looking for. And these users are sometimes the most likely to hammer the little x on your pop-ups. Why? Because they’re already reading similar ads in the Google search listings and don’t need your crap popping up!

It’s like old school porn surfing (oh god Finch). You reach a site with that really niche midget porn you’ve been looking for. Then some motherfucker springs a pop-up over your hard work which is less targeted and frankly a pain in the arse after the seven sites you clicked through to find what you were looking for. I don’t watch midget porn.

Pro tip: If you’re going to target obvious keywords, make damn sure that your pop-up is more relevant than the actual page that the user is loading!

With my own campaigns, I like to come up with targeting strategies where the user shits himself at how close to his current state of mind my advert is striking home. If dating is your niche, you should be looking to brainstorm a little deeper. Understand the reasons WHY these people might be suitable for an online dating site.

Don’t worry about the dude searching for “chat to girls online”. Worry about finding him before he reaches breaking point and realizes that this is what he wants to do. To manage this, you need to become receptive to human psychology and use your ears. Yes, use your ears.

Clues for targeting your campaigns are all around you. I find myself phasing out in the middle of conversations with friends when my brain is latching on to things that they’ve said. I will be damned if there’s a better way of brainstorming campaign ideas for a dating offer than by spending half an hour talking to single friends. You begin to understand their psychology and thinking.

My favourite line of questioning is to ask them why they THINK they’re single.

Invariably I get answers along the lines of…

• Target 1. “Because I don’t have the confidence to go and talk to girls”
• Target 2. “Because there aren’t many girls that like the same things as me”
• Target 3. “Because I’m still torn up over my ex”
• Target 4. “Because I’m too busy to be bothered with a relationship”
• Target 5. “Because I just haven’t found anyone at the moment”

This information is gold to me. My mind then turns to how I can translate these feelings in to PPV campaigns that don’t just target the right demographics, but hit them with stinging headlines that make them scream “YES” to the service I’m offering.

Let’s take target 3. For all we know, that guy who was searching for “chat to girls online” could have been the same guy who’s just suffered a horrible broken down marriage. We could target him with “chat to girls online”, yes, but it’s a LOT more powerful if we hit him before he’s reached Google. If we can reach out to him as an individual and be the solution to what bothers him most – we’ve got much more chance of nailing the conversion.

So where else could you target this guy?

How about on divorce websites? Marriage breakup Facebook groups? The thousands of articles on the web offering advice for dealing with a broken down relationship?

Not only can we catch the same target, but we can adapt a PPV campaign that is MUCH more effective than the standard dating LP you got from Justin Dupre’s Freebie Friday. Get creative with your headlines and imagery.

“You Think Your Ex Isn’t Searching Online? Get Back In The Dating Game Tonight”

This is what I would call slicing through the market and grabbing leads where you can resonate with them most. By segmenting markets and producing creatives that deal with genuine human emotions, you can be the answerer of those needs. It’s a lot easier than trying to grab your conversions from the huge pool of users searching generic dating terms.

I’ve got a couple more posts to come on PPV so check back soon if this is your thing.

Any questions, drop me a comment. I’m off to find some clothes.

I Have A Job, Swear!

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now. It’s something that I’ve held back from posting because I know it’s of little relevance to the majority of readers who have already found and established a successful living with affiliate marketing. But I’m hoping it’s something you can relate to in the attitudes of people outside our industry.

I’m frankly tired of explaining to people that my job equates to more than a hammock and a retirement plan.

If you’re reading this now and thinking “Well, this arrogant pom seems to be making a good living and he only ever tweets about his balls, I think I’ll do what he does” …well, you’re probably not alone. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions I’ve had to explain to family and friends that my success is the result of repeated failure. You can’t skip the failure part.

Friends often ask me if I could show them how I make money. Just give them a glimpse of what it is that I actually do that gives me the right to avoid a morning commute. Well, y’know, what would you like to see? The campaigns I can count on one hand that are actually making me money? Or the thousands that never worked out?

People don’t want to lose money and they only want to reap the benefits of a job that in reality, can be as simple as milking blood from a stone. It doesn’t help that every ebook under the sun is pointing to making money online being a rites of passage that you’d be a retard if you haven’t tapped in to yet. But some of my friends haven’t even seen the ebooks. They just assume I’m operating in a surreal home office straight out of cloud cuckoo land.

“So, what you do is pay for advertising, right? You buy leads and sell them on for more? If I give you £200 from my work wages, when do you think you can pay me back the £400?”

I shit you not. It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been propositioned with these kind of “business proposals” time and time again since I became a full-time affiliate marketer. It’s a glaring example of the two misconceptions that annoy me most.

1. Money is the only reason for my success.
2. My hard work to pinpoint an opportunity is somebody else’s “dead cert” to bring home the bacon while they’re sat on their fat arses basically saying “Go, monkey, PROFIT”.

It’s got to the point where if I’m asked what I do for a living, I stop to think twice before answering that I traffick humans. Christ, it’s easier to explain and most people just don’t want to probe any further. Tell people you make money on the Internet at home, AT HOME, and they’re on you like the prom queen after two roofies.

I will honestly give anybody a fair chance, even if I don’t believe they’re cut out for the business. If somebody emails me looking for advice on how to get started, I’ll reply to them. If a friend asks me to watch over them while they create their first campaign, I’ll do it. But this isn’t an industry where one person’s success gives you an advantage in terms of avoiding failure.

I think we can all agree that one of the best aims in life is to be able to work smarter, not harder.

For many affiliate marketers, this is the reality. We’ve given up day jobs, broken free from the chains of a Monday-Friday 9-5. But fuck you if you think it came without sacrifice along the way.

Long before I quit my day job, I was working double shifts. I’d spend an entire day working in a London agency where you’d often be sniffed at for leaving on time at 5:30, then I’d go home and spend the rest of the night slaving away on my own. My weekends? If I wasn’t out socializing, I was working. The only reason I ever managed it was because to me, it was never really work. It was my passion and a step towards where I wanted to be.

People don’t see those steps. They see the end product. They might call round and find me sitting here in my lounge on a Tuesday afternoon, and to them it’s like a seismic mindfuck. How can they join the party? If affiliate marketing is such a piss in the park, how can they get started?

There’s one trait that nearly all successful affiliate marketers share. It’s the ability to see opportunity where others see only a bunch of pixels. I can’t stress this enough. I could take a friend’s hand and walk them through the many steps of preparing a successful marketing campaign. I could show them how to setup hosting, how to design an excellent landing page. I could even introduce them to my successful ad creatives. But what we can’t do is inject the same sense of opportunism.

I’m beginning to think the best way to strike a chord of reality with people is to ask them one question.

“If you never made a single penny with affiliate marketing, would you still enjoy it?”

It sounds ridiculous to think that any of us could enjoy a moneyless profession where the urge is always there to pull your own hair out. But for most affiliates, this is how it started. I remember receiving my first cheque for something like a hundred bucks and being over the moon. It wasn’t the money I cared about, it was the entrepreneurism of generating something out of nothing on my lonesome.

Would you feel the same? Do you care about the entrepreneurism or are you just in it for the quick cash? I can tell you one thing. Being an entrepreneur will kill you if it doesn’t thrill you. Some people just aren’t cut out for the stresses and strains. And believe me, there are plenty.

In my inbox, I have a bunch of emails starred from affiliates just getting started and wanting advice. I give them exactly the same pointers and yet some will enjoy success, while others will have to learn the hard way. It’s pretty much rooted to your own expectations and passions.

But you know what they say about the grass always being greener, right? If you’re stargazing at the apparently novel lifestyle of an affiliate marketer, ask him where he came from instead of where he is today. You’ll get a much more accurate depiction of what it takes to be doing this shit for the rest of your life.

Don’t Buy Ebooks…Tell Me Your Name, Bitch!

Are you the kind of affiliate who shuns daylight, appears offline on AIM, never responds to emails and does everything he can to avoid conversing with the shadowy bastards known as his competitors?

We work in one of the most accessible industries imaginable. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re online. And if you’re a good one, your ego has probably exploded to the point where you’re not hard to find. I often wonder why newbies rush to buy ebooks from self appointed gurus when they could speak to those same gurus free of charge in the space of a basic AIM window.

Networking is free knowledge, ladies and gentleman. And yet it’s a subject that divides opinion for many marketers out there. Partly because it’s confused with the trait of time wasting, and those who do anything possible not to have to actually work.

For me, networking isn’t just a case of wanting to learn more about my industry. It’s an element of human interaction that I’ve missed since I jacked in my day job. While it’s pretty rare that you’ll find me piss-arsing my day away with idle chit chat on AIM, I do feel a regular need to speak to new people and to understand different paths that others have taken to find success in affiliate marketing.

But why is it important? Who would choose to spend an hour networking over the important split testing of their latest Facebook campaign?

If you’re the kind of tombraiding CPA urchin who makes his living through the constantly shifting dynamics of traffic arbitrage, then you definitely need to have an ear to the ground. Networking is your way of staying ahead. Much more so than the practical affiliate who develops long term projects with milestones stretching in to 2011 and a disregard for his daily ROI.

It’s tough for me to sit here and preach the importance of developing relationships. The popular word is that if you’ve stuck your weary eyes out of the rabbit hole long enough to engage in a 10 minute conversation on AIM, you’re simply not working hard enough. That’s bullshit. There can be no excuses for not taking a moment to integrate yourself with your peers, to seek out new business and to actually network with other like-minded individuals.

Oh and by the way. Some affiliates seem to preach to the crowd that they work 16 hour days, more or less Monday to Sunday. So they don’t have time to network. That’s real nice. But you do realize that just because you’re plugged in to the Internet and your modem is flashing, it doesn’t mean you’re actually working – right?

If your breakdown of a 16 hour day equates to 3 hours of keyword research followed by a WickedFire binge from lunch through to moonlight, then you’re probably not reaping the benefits that a dumbarse motherfucker “working” 112 hour weeks probably should. Your net working day can be established by subtracting “time spent chasing skirt on Facebook” from “hours spent building out campaigns”.

I am certainly not one to knock the hard working affiliates who strike through their to-do lists whether the wife has gone in to labour or not. It takes commitment and great discipline to stay focused on your goals. But without keeping an eye on your peers, you’ll never know how relevant those goals are to business success. Simply put, we work in an industry that evolves too quickly to be out of the loop.

Christ, I took a two week break not too long ago and the first thing I did upon rebooting my Mac was to Google search “is affiliate marketing still for real?”.

Networking and sharing knowledge means you’ll never have to buy another ebook in your life. Why? Because it puts you in touch with the REAL people of this industry. The people making money every day. The people making money before the lame ebooks have been outsourced for creation.

I like to think of it as a spider building his web. Broadening your horizons and spinning that web might not reveal any immediate benefits. You might even feel like you’re wasting your time while you could be out chasing after riches. I’ve certainly felt that sensation while aimlessly discussing Cheryl Cole’s sex appeal with Andrew Wee in the past. But when a knowledge bomb drops, when tomorrow’s big niche lands, you want to be there to catch it. And if you don’t make an effort to integrate yourself with real affiliate marketers, to reach in to every corner where opportunity might land – well…

You’ll be a hungry spider?

Yeah fuck that anecdote, it’s been a long day.

My point is that somewhere on the horizon, chugging towards your doorstep, is the same kind of gravy train that most of us were too slow to capitalize on in 2008 when it was loaded with acai berries. My excuse for missing out was simple. I didn’t really know about it. And by the time I did know about it, I was too late.

If you can establish working relationships with the right people in the right places, you WILL see that next gravy train coming. Whether you jump on for the ride is probably a matter of how intuitive you are.

The next time you find yourself stargazing at the promises of Mr Guru McBullshitsalot’s latest ebook, stop and think for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of buying a book that this smug bastard dreamed up six months ago when his methods actually worked…you could talk to him now and find out what he’s currently doing?

And there lies the power of networking with real affiliates. You will learn far more by simply being connected with the right people than you will by purchasing their products or reading their blogs. Make an effort to establish actual business relationships. Without them, you’re simply the pawn they’re trying to sell to or the sheep us bloggers like to write to.

Manipulating The Human Brain For Financial Gain

One of my favourite books on marketing – and one that you’d be a fool not to own – is called Ca$hvertising. You’ve probably heard the title in passing mention. The book has an entire thread dedicated to it on WickedFire and I couldn’t possibly overstate how brilliant it is as a resource for affiliates.

Forget all the guru secret spilling bullshit that crosses your path. If you’re going to make one investment this week, snap up a copy of Ca$hvertising and learn some REAL marketing tricks that will actually serve you well in this industry.

In the book, you’ll find a section called “What People Really Want”, and it’s here that you’ll learn about the Life-Force 8.

The idea is simple. As human beings, we are all prisoners to our own instinctive desires. Those desires, Ca$hvertising’s so-called Life-Force 8, can be summed up as:

• Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.
• Enjoyment of food and beverages.
• Freedom from fear, pain and danger.
• Sexual companionship.
• Comfortable living conditions.
• To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.
• Care and protection of loved ones.
• Social approval.

We cannot help ourselves from chasing these qualities in life. As marketers, our job becomes immeasurably easier when we realize that tapping in to those fundamental desires is the easiest and fastest way of selling a product.

So why do so many marketers get it wrong? For me, it traces back to the “Benefits vs. Features” argument. If you’ve educated yourself in the art of copywriting, you’ve already established that good writing sells the benefits of a product – not the features.

Nobody gives a shit that the acai berry diet is rich in antioxidants. People only care that the chemicals they’re chugging might possibly shave a couple of inches off their waistband, right? That’s your classic Benefits over Features argument. But I would argue that it doesn’t go far enough. And many affiliate marketers are guilty of this.

While we would all love to be ripped and chiseled like statues made from marble, you’re not selling hard enough if this is your only punchline. It’s a want rather than a need.

Being ripped must be great. But for stud muffins like yours truly – ahem – we are quite happy to look every bit of the nine pints we’ve drunk. Why? Because it doesn’t fuck with our deepest desires. Unless you’re spelling it out to me that I need to put the pint down right now or I’m not getting laid until 2018, getting ripped can wait til next week.

Forget the features of a product – and forget the benefits too. Focus on how you can ride the biological train of what human beings want most, and ride it all the way to the bank.

With the acai berry diet, it’s not a case that we want to be slim. These are secondary desires, symptoms of our greater needs. What might they be? It’s usually that we want to appear better looking to the opposite sex, or that we want to revel in the jealous glances when we bust out a washboard stomach on the beach. We want to be socially desirable and confident in our health.

How many times have you seen ads that preach “X can cause cancer”. I bet in that briefest moment, your brain judders and you think to yourself “Shit, I better think twice about X in the future…” It’s because we cannot help ourselves from reacting to ideas that compromise our integral desires. In this case, our biological desire to stay healthy and live a long life is enough to invoke a reaction. It might not last, but it still happens in our brains.

Which line is more effective to a red blooded male?

“Eating X is a proven method of losing weight, helping you stay in shape and get ripped in time for summer.”

“Only Eat X if you can handle the jealous stares at your ripped physique on the beach this summer. Girls just love guys who use our proven recipe. Shed the pounds and be the envy of your friends.”

90% of affiliates are happy with the first example. They assume that getting ripped is the real benefit of the product. It’s not. The second example tackles several biologically programmed desires in every male. We can’t escape them. The reader is living those words in his head. Did you see yourself on a beach surrounded by adoring female faces?

As marketers, there is no greater weapon than the ability to write copy that drives daggers through the reader’s innermost conscience. Ca$hvertising states the importance of using positive imagery with your writing. And I agree, it’s probably the single most effective copywriting technique you’re ever going to master.

Picture the most satisfied customer imaginable in your head. See how positively they’ve been affected by your product and then write copy that FORCES your reader to live those scenes for themselves.

I’m willing to bet that if you take the time to look over your recent landing pages, you will find numerous examples of weak selling. Instances where you’ve assumed that your job is already done when the prospect lands on your page. Great marketers understand that the human brain is fickle. And to sell a product, you sometimes have to stir the right emotions to ignite a response.

No matter whether you’re selling car insurance, dating websites or the latest “get ripped fast” recipe – you will always enjoy more success when you adapt the benefits of the product to appeal to our biological human desires.

Don’t just plant vague ideas and product benefits in the reader’s head. The reader will always analyze them negatively until he has a reason not to buy. Force vivid imagery that inspires them to answer their own questions positively. It sounds so simple and yet it works so well.

Affiliate Marketers Are Experts At Nothing

What’s up, affiliasphere?

Business Protip for the day: If you’re going to take a break and spend 6 days camping at a festival without email access – remember to tell your affiliate managers. It seems as if some networks are quick to pronounce me dead if I stop running traffic for more than 24 hours.

Unfortunately I’m not dead. But I am severely tanned with sun kissed balls, and ready to get back to the grind again. Glastonbury Festival, for those of you who haven’t been, is the sugardaddy of all musical events. You need to go. I still feel pretty partied out but I’m going to do my best to address something I’ve noticed that affiliates seem to get wrong. All the time.

If you’re a full time affiliate working from home, what’s the one thing you have that a part-timer doesn’t? It’s time. Complete control of your hours, and the ability to be as productive or as unproductive as the day is long. Nobody chomps your balls for strolling in to the office at 9:06 and if Brazil vs. Holland tickles your fancy, the to-do list can always wait a couple of hours, right?

How many marketers actually take the time to nurture a talent or to learn something new? It sounds pretty irrelevant. You’ve got all that split testing to do, those new offers to rig up to fresh campaigns. Christ, I’ve got a thousand tweets in my face telling me that snoozing is losing.

An affiliate marketer is more often than not a middleman. You can be a complete retard and still make good money if an advertiser has a good product and an audience has a strong need. But it doesn’t give you any kind of asset. You have no market value. That’s unless you develop websites that stand on their own two feet.

We basically seize the loopholes of traffic brokerage and exist in a state of limbo where our main talent is to capitalize on opportunity. That’s rosy and sweet, but it’s pretty fucking moronic to not have a Plan B. If you’re not designating an hour of your day to nurture a talent, you’re wasting the one freedom you always dreamed of when you jacked in your day job.

Real businesses exist to be the best at something. They provide real solutions. All the truly great businessmen of our time have a talent that puts them above their peers. The problem with affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to be the best at anything. You can be merely competent and still pay the bills.

But that shouldn’t be your attitude. In the worst case scenario that affiliate marketing gets nuked in the morning, we should all have been busy developing our assets to a point where we can say that we’re the best at something…anything. Being an expert at affiliate marketing isn’t enough. How many real life human beings give a shit if you’re the smartest handler of EPCs? It adds no value for anybody.

If, however, you decide today that you’re going to focus on improving your copywriting, for example, that’s an investment worth so much more than any late night split testing binge. If you can become an expert who writes the best damn copy in the business, you’re going to be in demand.

We have so many hours on our hands and if we’re not striving to improve, we might as well go back to the 9-5.

For me personally, my main passion is writing. You might accuse me of being just another marketing blogger with his dick up his own arse and willing to push any second tier referral he can throw your way. But actually, this site is like my CV. I could devote all my hours to painstaking research of new offers, but it doesn’t add any long-term value to my business. Whereas this blog will remain here long after my bizopp campaign of the week has faded.

More affiliates are soon going to appreciate the need to develop websites that provide genuine quality content. Because there are enough passionate people out there to drive you out of business. Soon we will need to put the quality of our content first and THEN worry about monetizing it.

How far do you have to look for proof? Just look at the search engines. Google is backhanding websites it deems to be “bridge pages” from the sponsored listings. I can only imagine that if this is their outlook, it will soon translate more heavily in to the organic listings too. If you don’t offer your own unique commodity, you’re dispensable.

This blog is an example of how I like to monetize. I’ve never offered sponsored content and I’ve never accepted payments to endorse networks or products in my posts. The main appeal is the writing style and the trust that I’ve managed to forge with readers. It’s a site that I’m happy to put next to my business name because I trust in what I’ve published here.

Too many affiliate websites are built on flimsy foundations. With $10/articles outsourced to so-called experts who know jack shit about the subject matter despite what they state in their Elance proposals.

The next time you focus on a micro-niche, don’t make your first question “How can I monetize this concept?”. Think first to satisfy the needs of the target audience. Be an expert in your field. How can you produce something outstanding that shows more than your ability to rank in Google?

Quality content will always stand the test of time. And so will your business if you drive it forward and become the best in a particular field.

It’s not easy, but you know what is easy? It’s easy to set aside one hour in your working day and learn something new. Ask yourself what you can be the best at, then go out and be it.

The Grind: Only Cool When You Know How To Stop

There seems to be a sub-culture in affiliate marketing these days. It’s the by-product of a super competitive crowd, all working hard to stay one step ahead of their rivals. You’ve probably seen it splashed across your Twitter feed.

“Hey Joe, I can’t come out tonight. I’m busy grindin”

“I just dumped my girlfriend. She didn’t like my grind.”

“Forced to choose between the grind and playing with my balls, I choose the grind.”

Check out Ryan Eagle’s Twitter for more classic examples.

Affiliates seem to fail or succeed by virtue of “the grind”. The ability to work like a slave – through the night, through the morning – deaf to distractions and entirely committed to the art of getting shit done.

Everybody needs to be working at least 22 hour days or they’re just not working hard enough, right? I’ve been sucked in to this competitive mindset in the past, and I’m doing my best to wriggle my way free. The grind is only cool when you know how to stop.

I was sitting downstairs in my lounge the other day, vegetating like some kind of unshaven grizzly bear. It’s very rarely that I allow mindless police chases on budget Bravo TV to distract me from work, but I truly miss the days where I knew how to lounge around and do absolutely nothing.

That sounds like a step backwards. If you’re successful, why would you want to waste your energy on television while the opportunity of time passes you by? For me, it’s become an issue of retaining my health and limiting my insanity.

It’s very easy, as an affiliate marketer working from home, to get sucked in to working these grueling 16 hour days. And if like me, you enjoy what you do, the lure can be even harder to resist. During the earliest days, I built some kind of elitist dream where putting in those hours somehow made me more likely to be satisfied with my progress. It made me better than everybody else because I was somehow more committed or more in control of my destiny.

But if you don’t know when to stop, you’re not really in control, are you? You’re more of a prisoner than you ever were in your 9-5 when there was a clear beginning and end to your day.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that no matter how much money you earn, there will always be somebody earning more. If you fall in to the trap of pursuing this relentless grind, unable to dictate when your work day ends, it’s only going to be you that suffers. And I know personally because I’ve already suffered. My health has suffered, my moods have suffered. My ability to appreciate rare moments, simply festering on the couch with absolutely nothing to worry about – those have also suffered.

I went for a laser eye surgery consultation last week and somehow ended up referred to the hospital instead with skyrocketing eye pressure, pounding headaches and an overwhelming feeling of fatigue.

Ironically, I’ve always figured that my problems could be solved by money. My bad vision being one of them. I thought if I could afford to throw £5500 at surgery to correct my eyes, it would easily justify all those hours on the grind. But there are some things money can’t fix, so grinding for 16 hours straight isn’t always the answer. Even if affiliates are being systematically brainwashed to believe that’s the case.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working to reverse the trend. I’ve been slowly lowering the number of hours I allow myself to spend in front of a computer screen and trying to work in productive surges. I took some advice from lenstrom on Twitter and have been trying to integrate these health measures in to my day.

The biggest challenge for me is to learn that whatever lands on my desk, whatever lands in my inbox…it doesn’t always have to be acted on now. I’ve already caught some fire and some contrasting opinions on the matter.

Just two days ago I posted on Twitter: “Tomorrow…tomorrow is the day where I get back on track.”

These words seemed to raise some strong opinions from various affiliates. Apparently it came across as a sign of weakness. Why wait til tomorrow? Why not act today?

Well, that’s the attitude I’m trying to overcome. It’s not always in my best interest to act today. Everybody has to have an off switch, and the ability to resist the temptation to grind or work hard at every waking hour. It’s just not healthy. That I’m only 22 years old, and feel like I have the mental wear and tear of a 42 year old…surely can’t be healthy.

Yet everywhere you look across the affiliate marketing landscape, grinding hard is the cool thing to do. I read a forum topic a few weeks ago with the title line “How much do you earn in a day?”

A guy, admittedly with his head somewhere up his own arse, had wandered in bragging about his $1000/days. He promptly received a bunch of criticism that he was small-time, a little fish in a big ocean. He had no right to be smug. It got me thinking though.

Would I rather be the “big time” affiliate who’s torturing himself to add the next zero on his pay cheque? Or simply the smug dude who’s perfectly content with his $365,000/year? As far as I’m concerned, that’s not small time. Look at the average annual earnings in the United States and it’s anything but small time.

This industry seems to judge affiliates by the flash cars, the fancy mansions and the number of Americans they’ve convinced to shed the pounds with acai. It all boils down to money, and yet money is only a gateway to opportunities. It’s not happiness in itself.

I’ve always preached the need to work hard and harder than most. But the importance of appreciating what I already have is only just dawning on me. The next time somebody tells me to get back to the grind at 2am, or to stop thinking about tomorrow rather than today, I’ll probably tell them with all due respect – to go fuck themselves.