Building an Online Business | Finch Sells

How Much Could I Pay You to Quit Affiliate Marketing?

Oct 31 2014

There was an interesting poll up on the STM Forum this week:

What guaranteed monthly salary would you accept to quit affiliate marketing for a job in the corporate world?

Just under 50% of the affiliates who replied said you’d have to pay them at least $500K per year to quit affiliate marketing.

That’s pretty remarkable.

Anybody who works in affiliate marketing knows that there’s no such thing as a fixed income.

To turn down a guaranteed bounty of $500K per year — plus a lifetime free of the aeons of stress-fuelled hair shredding — says a lot about the passion of those who turn to our industry.

Admittedly, yes, the figures are likely inflated by a sense of bravado and outward ‘who-can-grind-the-hardest’.

There’s a funny line that if you ask a man how many women he’s slept with, and then divide his response by three, you’ll be somewhat closer to the real answer.

Perhaps we can say the same for the price on an affiliate marketer’s head.

Regardless…

This poll, if even remotely close to the truth, reveals two stark realities:

1. Your competition is ruthlessly committed.
2. Affiliate marketing is more than just a business. It’s a lifestyle choice.

The Ruthless Competition

If somebody is willing to turn down a guaranteed income of $500K per year, what does that tell you about their affiliate business?

It says, either, “Hi, I’m insanely rich and 500K means nothing to me.”

Or, “I’m completely committed to making this work, to the point where not even half a million dollars is going to sway me.”

Whatever the case, this is your competition.

And that should be a call to arms.

These are the people, the pooled ruthless mindset, that you have to compete with.

Is it any wonder that the industry is so tough for a newcomer to crack?

A Lifestyle Choice

One of the things that struck me while reading the responses to the STM poll was just how many users had already given up six-figure corporate jobs in favour of affiliate marketing.

When you see a poll like this, your first thought is cynical:

“Somebody who already earns his millions in a glass-laden corner office probably isn’t going to be exchanging the view for affiliate marketing anytime soon.”

Except, that wasn’t the case.

I regularly speak to successful pros from all walks; from the finance arena, to the weary battle-hardened in law (the irony), and to unsatisfied executives.

It’s widely accepted that beyond a certain point, your salary ceases to add enjoyment to your life.

Once the basics are covered, and luxuries enjoyed, an extra 100K or 500K is pretty much irrelevant.

Time and burnout become the chief nemesis of happiness. Along with the political games that are so entwined with the corporate world.

And that’s why, for many people, affiliate marketing is not just a career. It’s a symbolic lifestyle choice.

Once you have enough money, you start looking inward at the value of your time.

Want to know the reason why so many affiliates put such high prices on their head?

Because they have something that people stuck in high-paying corporate jobs so desperately want:

The freedom of time
Self-determination

Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up.

This stubborn defiance to conform, even under the carrot of a fixed 500K salary, is what drives affiliates to be the best damn marketers in the business.

It’s the reason why corporations have to pay extreme money to attract us.

And if you want to carve your own career in affiliate marketing, this needs to be considered.

There simply isn’t room for the half-arsed.

The Price on My Head

Would I accept a fixed salary to quit affiliate marketing?

Are you shitting me?

Yes, of course I bloody would.

In a strange paradox, it’s exactly what I strive to achieve every single day.

But there’s a very big difference between working for any corporation, and working for one built in your own image through your own blood, sweat and beers.

For all the successful affiliates I’ve met, I can count on one hand those who wanted to stay middlemen in this same industry forever.

(And even then, I’m pretty sure half of them were rat-arse plastered at the time.)

We all have escape plans.

Affiliate marketing, the career choice, is 100% expendable in my eyes.

And yet the lifestyle and opportunity it represents comes at a huge price.

Is a 500K salary enough to fund that exchange?

To say there’s a yes or no answer would be to undersell the very Machiavellian nature of our industry.

To illustrate, I put this question to a friend of mine (who happens to be a newbie affiliate) and here’s what he said:

Guess I’d take the job. Hustle for a year. Demand a pay raise. I’d keep tabs on any useful data they had, any interesting connections. Try take on a few juniors to get some solo work done on the side. After 3 years, I’d leave with two Mil in the bank and blow up my own dick boost pills, or whatever’s flying at the time. Maybe Ebola. Fuck, when can I start?

And that, my dear scumbags, is why affiliates are not grown.

We are born rancid.

Dude, Where’s My Margin?

Jun 23 2014

Feeling the squeeze?

Ever get the impression that your affiliate campaigns are having to work twice as hard for half the profits?

If you work in any of the major verticals — dating, gaming, adult, apps, etc etc — on any of the major traffic sources — Google, Facebook, POF, BuzzCity, Decisive, Exoclick — you have surely seen the effects of an explosion in competition, and the rising costs that it entails.

There is a swelling crowd of hungry affiliate marketers, and most of them are armed with the same weapons:

The same banners
same landing pages
same offers
same payouts
same budgets
same bidding strategies
same traffic sources
and all of the same advice.

Is it any wonder that you can’t get profitable when your entire business can be reverse engineered and replicated in 20 minutes?

Because it can be replicated so easily, it is replicated.

Which leads us to a situation where most of the major traffic platforms are now battlegrounds in a race to the bottom.

Affiliates bid against each other, rapidly driving up click costs, until they can stomach the loss of margin no longer.

He who cries first is forced to take his ball and look for a new traffic source where the battle has yet to reach the savage dying stages.

So what can you do about it?

First, understand the insanity:

There are websites where the exact same banner is shown when you refresh the page. You’d think this is the same advertiser, but it isn’t.

Further investigation shows that the duplicate banners are linked to an identical landing page promoting the same offer. In some cases, the offer is provided by the same affiliate network.

The only way to distinguish between these two campaigns?

They have two unique domains — because they are run by two competing affiliates.

In an industry obsessed with healthy margins, we forget what damage this level playing field does to the cost of traffic.

It rises continually.

Cloning a business model isn’t necessarily a bad strategy, and neither is cloning a campaign. But most business models take months or years to replicate successfully.

An affiliate campaign takes 20 minutes.

Now imagine that you conjure some serious creative juices.

You produce the most stunning banner ever to leave Photoshop. It gets clicked harder and faster than any other creative in Digital History. Imagine you pair it to the freshest and bestselling landing page in your niche.

Now what?

You make money, we hope.

As you start to make money, you can afford to bid more than your competition.

Slowly your winning campaign rises to the top of the stack.

You’re scaling! The world is your oyster!

Until…

One sleep later: every other affiliate in your vertical has noticed that he’s getting less impressions than he received 24 hours ago. He goes to see who’s taking them. He sees your work.

“This looks effective.”

So he copies you, and an entire industry follows suit.

The greatest work of your career is rehashed, ripped, and reuploaded faster than you can say “Hands Off, Wank Biscuit”.

This is a big problem, particularly for those affiliates who misunderstand what constitutes a competitive advantage.

A banner is not an advantage. Banners are copied every minute.

Neither is a landing page.

A business built around the percentage points you are capable of extracting from Photoshop or JQuery is doomed to fail — because there are simply too many marketers ready and waiting to View Source on your innovation.

You can’t hide the creative element of a well scaled campaign.

We’ve got proxies in every corner of the world.

There are a number of spy tools that exist to ‘out’ your work before you’ve had time to celebrate it over breakfast.

Whatever you can get to work, somebody else can too.

(Arbitrage marketers are the most agile in the world.)

And therefore, if you want to regain your margins, the creative process is the wrong place to look.

The solution is to unlock an advantage that is difficult to replicate.

And here are the main areas you should choose to focus on:

1. Wholesale traffic

Imagine trying to run a grocery store if you had to buy your stock from Tesco at retail prices.

It sounds like an uphill struggle, but that is exactly what affiliates try to do.

We buy nicely geo-targeted traffic at the premium rate. We then rely on our creative approach to squeeze profit where a brand advertiser revels in waste.

(If he grew any smarter, we’d be doomed.)

The industry is dominated by self-serve platforms. These charge a premium for their convenience.

They are great if you get there first. But it’s amazing how quickly costs will rise on an auction platform if just a single competitor enters your market.

The good news?

It is possible to buy traffic in bulk.

You can cut out Tesco and go straight to the supplier.

When you find a campaign that is profitable on Placement X, you should be thinking about getting that placement all to yourself. The way to do this is by approaching the site owner and making an offer he can’t refuse.

You need to offer a better deal than he’ll get with a traditional network.

A useful carrot is to offer upfront payment for months in advance.

Better yet, target websites that fit your market perfectly whilst being monetized poorly.

Research which of the major ad networks are known to be stingy with their payments — and target their publisher-base relentlessly with better offers.

If you see Google AdSense on a target’s website, pounce accordingly.

No webmaster who relies on AdSense should be able to refuse the type of deal that a smart affiliate can offer.

2. Exclusive offers

AKA networking, schmoozing and getting a jump on the gravy train before it leaves the station.

The best time to promote an affiliate offer is when nobody else has access to it.

While it’s optimistic to expect a one-to-one relationship with the merchant (unless you’re packing some serious volume), it’s certainly possible to promote offers before they land on your favourite CPA networks.

Often this comes with sacrifice: slower payments, greater risk of getting burnt, the chore of dealing with a real-life, living, breathing, ~~usually fucking sleeping~~ accounting department.

By the time a CPA offer has risen to the top of your network’s ‘hottest offers’ chart, rest assured: some other affiliate has taken the pie.

You may still be able to feed off scraps if you run fast enough, but the train has left the station.

Make it your responsibility to stay connected in your niche. Attend the networking events, store the business cards if you truly absolutely have to.

Use LinkedIn to target companies that might not necessarily have an affiliate program but do have a product that you know how to sell well.

Your competition can’t promote an offer that they don’t have access to.

3. Investing in Technology and Infrastructure

If there’s one thing you shouldn’t skimp on, it’s technology.

Every day I see mobile marketers trying to make a living using double meta refreshes on servers that are barely wired to load a LiveJournal without creaking.

It’s like turning up at St Andrews with a bag full of hockey sticks.

By technology, I mean investments like:

Servers
Tracking solutions
Spying tools
Automation tools
Redirect configurations
Local Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Productivity software (keep it simple, avoid productivity porn.)
High quality scripts for geotargeting, countdowns, etc
List building capabilities
Your own choice of hardware

By infrastructure:

Tax-efficient corporation setup (for the love of Satan’s Balls, stop running traffic under your personal name!)
VAT registration (you think your rivals pay 20% on their traffic?)
Access to high quality information
Native translators
Outsourcing teams
Payment terms and credit
Privacy settings to cover your trail
A setup that lets you work on the move

Most affiliates skimp on both technology and infrastructure.

You shouldn’t if you care about your margins.

4. Attritional Bidding

There are several ways to win the war on self-serve traffic sources.

If you have money in the bank, you can grind out the smaller fish by accepting a skinnier margin. This advantage snowballs if you can drive enough volume to demand a higher payout.

Some of the biggest businesses in the world operate on wafer thin margins (1-10%), but they make up for it in volume. They leverage economies of scale against the competition to literally choke them out of the market.

Similarly, you can focus on high quality traffic at the expense of short term profits.

If you deliver good leads, you can outmanoeuvre the competition through pay bumps and familiarity with the vertical’s underlying economy.

Knowledge of what ultimately sells is priceless in a way that knowledge of how to turn a quick 200% ROI usually isn’t.

The third option is to be more efficient.

Affiliates waste ad dollars every day by failing to set rules and redirects for their campaigns.

Just because you’re bidding on prime American traffic doesn’t mean that you’ll actually get it.

Analyse where your traffic is coming from.

Use a filter to deal with mobile traffic, and another to redirect traffic from outside your geo.

You can choose to monetise it with an alternate campaign, or simply sell the impressions back to an ad exchange.

5. Unfashionable Traffic

When a newbie logs in to TrafficJunky and buys a 300×250 banner for the whole of America, I can tell him with sad-eye certainty that he will not be making money in my lifetime.

Because his campaign is simply too fashionable.

It’s too fucking obvious.

You do not get profitable trying to conquer rush hour traffic with a bicycle and a $20 budget.

What is unfashionable traffic?

It’s traffic that you don’t hear publicised on blogs, forums or in network roundup emails. You’ll never hear me talking about it, or anybody who actually relies on it.

It’s traffic that still has healthy margins because the competition either doesn’t know how to monetise it, doesn’t know where to find it, or doesn’t have the technology to deal with it.

All of these burdens create a wall that protects the traffic from inflated costs.

Facebook is a good example of unfashionable traffic.

Yep, Facebook. Unfashionable.

There is still huge money to be made on Facebook, but in order to do so you need advanced technology to cloak your creatives, and you need a healthy bank balance to spend thousands on accounts that might disappear overnight.

To the newbie gazing in from the cold, that’s unfashionable traffic.

It comes with strings attached, headaches to nurse, problems to solve.

The newbie would rather move along to the next platform where the barrier to entry is less severe. The only problem is that he’s not alone.

The platforms with less friction are invariably meeting grounds for an industry full of disillusioned souls all trying to find their margins without having to put in the groundwork.

But shouldn’t that excite you?

You don’t have to follow them.

The upside to monetizing unfashionable traffic is that it gives you a massive advantage in times of industry crippling saturation.

If you run the hottest campaigns on the biggest self-serve platforms with the same creatives as the next guy, you can’t possibly expect to be making money forever.

You’d do well to make money, period.

Newbie affiliates, I’ll be honest with you:

You will not survive unless you build some walls around your business.

Building those walls means embracing the challenges that fill lazy marketers with dread.

It means pushing out of your comfort zone; creating a structural edge in your business that allows you to outbid the competition regardless of whether they copy your banners and landing pages.

That’s not to say that affiliate marketing is dead.

Only that arbitrage for fools might as well be.

2 Small Powerful Concepts to Explode Your Conversions

Mar 25 2014

Why is split testing so important?

Because small changes add up to big dollars.

My favourite example comes from Colleen Szot, the world renowned infomercial writer who shattered a twenty-year sales record by changing just three words in one of her scripts.

You would miss them if you didn’t know where to look.

She didn’t insert superlatives, or extra promises, or yet another celebrity endorsement.

Here’s what she changed:

Version 1: “Operators are waiting, please call now,”
Record breaking Version 2: “If operators are busy, please call again.”

And sales took off in to the stratosphere.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that small wordplay can turn a losing product in to a multimillion dollar success. But it can certainly shape a winner.

Conventional sales logic says: make the sale as pain-free as possible.

Why would you piss off the customer by threatening to waste her precious time on hold?

Szot would argue that believable social proof is worth it.

After all, who is more likely to rip out your eyeballs?

The salesman peddling a product that is flying off the shelves, or a call centre full of eager, idle lions who haven’t been fed for days?

Whatever you are selling, you will sell more by adding social proof.

If you are in the service business, this means appearing busier than you actually are.

You are publicly seen to value your time; your writing is concise, your communication succinct. The world knows you refuse to take a shit without checking your calendar first. It’s a staple of your vocabulary that you only ever have room for one extra client.

If you are selling products, this means threatening to run out of them, or stop selling them, or start raising the price on them. Whatever you are selling, the cost of not acting now is always going to rise exponentially (even if the price doesn’t).

In both cases, the best possible reason for denying a customer your service or product is because somebody else got there first.

It’s annoying to walk in to a shop and find that shiny new gadget is out of stock. But it stings to see the last box snatched up by the guy ten paces in front of you.

Social proof creates intrigue, desire, validation.

Scarcity creates a monster.

Every piece of sales copy you produce should have both.

Extra: Read more about how I use social proofing and scarcity in my neuromarketing post series, originally published in 2012.