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.

So, how many affiliates blew their entire January budgets in the casinos at ASW? For the sake of my own business, I’d be happy to hear of a busy weekend.

Did you learn a lot from the networking experience? Was the conference worth the trip?

I find it a little strange that affiliates will fork out hundreds of dollars for seminars, key-notes and Q&A sessions when perhaps the biggest inspiration is Vegas itself.

If ever you wanted to learn from a well oiled moneymaking machine, you would be advised to tear your head away from the Meet Market and consider the windowless, clockless micro-economy that is Sin City in the middle of the night.

Nickycakes wrote a piece several years ago that summed it up well. Vegas is one of the most fitting metaphors for a Landing Page. Everything about it is designed to creep in your pocket, carress the balls, and expose your wallet. All, of course, without shaking the drunken smile from your face.

In many ways, Vegas is untouchable as a sales funnel. Not only does it skillfully and rapidly relieve us of our finances, but it does so in a way that we doggedly admire. Somehow, the art of cataclysmically gambling the night away, has been turned in to pop culture that is part of the experience. You go to Vegas expecting to come home lighter than you left, in every sense but the hangover.

So how can we improve our own marketing efforts to create the same free spending escapism? How can we build landing pages as positively badass as The Strip in the dead of night?

Perhaps the best guidance is to determine your goal first. Vegas gives the impression of a city built around a slot machine. From the ground up, it weaves a gigantic web where every road leads back to the desired action – you spending money. It’s difficult to avoid spending money because the execution is so consistent. When you get off the plane, make no mistake: ‘Vegas has you now‘. Opt-outs are hard to come by. The message is loud and clear.

How loud and clear is your marketing? Is your message being scrambled by half-baked execution? The slightest slip of bad copy, or conflicting calls-to-action, and you’ll suffer the equivalent of daylight pouring through a gorged window in the Palace casino. The user slips away and doesn’t look back.

Our job when we’re creating sales funnels is to fully immerse users; to guide them to a state where we have their full and undivided attention. Once we’ve taken away their sense of daylight, their sense of time, their sense of financial good footing, we have to decorate that world with a brighter proposition. Be that an illustration of rapid weight loss, of finding love, or even the freedom of a new career at home; our job is to channel the force of desire and guide it to an action before the moment of escapism has passed.

I think, as Nick suggested, the pull of Vegas is the claustrophobia: a bombardment of the senses that monetizes your confusion whichever way you turn.

It’s difficult to recreate the same psychological experience on a web page. It’s even more challenging to recreate the justification that stalks you towards the departure gate, ably excusing the $3000 dent in your bank balance, as if it were money well spent.

Well, was it?

I hope, for the sake of the affiliates who flew out to ASW on shoestring budgets, that it was a great conference and not simply a Tour De Force in young, rich and infamous binge showboating.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• I’ve recently re-branded FinchBlogs.com to cover a more personal flavour of the crap I’m currently working on. I’ll be blogging about issues even more obscure than sleazeball marketing, so check it out if you dare.

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

“I will learn how to control my time. I will defeat procrastination. 2012 better watch out ’cause I’m coming to kick its arse…”

The statement of intent is admirable, but far too many of us fail to learn from mistakes of the previous twelve months. Do we expect them to just disappear? Irrationally, yes we do. We wait for a new dawn, pretend that we’re all the wiser, and then plunge head-first in to the same mistakes yet again.

I would guess that at least half of the people reading this blog woke up on January 1st with the desire to procrastinate less. We see it as the great barrier to achievement. “Well, if I could only bring my mind to focus on all the plans I’ve set for myself, I’d be as rich as my whiteboard says.”

Procrastination is a buzz term that bloggers love to blog about, writers love to write about and speakers love to speak about. It’s a universal phenomenon. To beat procrastination is to pin jelly to a wall. Just when you think you’ve cleared your head of all the distractions and white noise, along comes another unforeseen circumstance to obliterate your carefully laid plans. We end up feeling sorry for ourselves. No matter how hard we search for solutions, we still fall in to the same black hole lapses of productivity.

If you don’t challenge yourself to tackle the problem at its source, you might as well pencil in ‘beating procrastination’ as your annual challenge for 2013, 2014, and every subsequent year for the rest of your life.

So what is the source of procrastination? Ultimately, it’s the failure to foresee your own weaknesses. It’s not a lack of application, or desire, or ambition. Procrastination is simply what happens when you plan a future without addressing the fragility of the decision-making by your future self.

We can all assess procrastination logically in moments like these where we’re reading the obvious in black and white. Yes, we know it’s bad. Yes, we know it’s a hindrance. And yes, we’re all going to make an extra effort to conquer the problem. It’s natural to feel vaccinated against procrastination while you’re reading about it. Unfortunately, there is no vaccination. Just sensible planning.

To reduce the procrastination struggle, you need to make contingency plans for your future self; a much weaker feebler-minded self that has long forgotten your ambitions, and wishes only to cave in to short term satisfaction. Pretending that this alter-ego doesn’t exist is the fastest way to guarantee failure.

A naive New Year’s Resolution is to vow not to spend hours checking Facebook every day, using the thought of all the extra work you’d get done as an incentive.

A realistic New Year’s Resolution is to vow not to spend hours checking Facebook every day, and then LeechBlock the motherfucker so that its physically inaccessible between 9am and 8pm.

The difference between these resolutions is that one is driven by an idealistic hope that temptation will diminish given the right incentive. Much wiser than such hope, is a contingency plan for your weaker future self. Procrastination is just a term we give to the many temptations that control our short term decisions. Temptation is here to stay, and so is our habit of caving in to it like victims of a venus flytrap – unless we learn to tackle the temptation in advance.

Procrastination is not like smoking. It’s not a dirty habit that we can overcome with the right incentive. One day, even the most ardent nicotine fiend may find that cigarettes just don’t hold the same appeal. Such success stories prove that beating an addiction is painful but possible. Beating procrastination is not. It would require evolutionary re-programming that probably won’t be possible in our lifetimes. We are hardwired to cave in to short term temptation much more willingly than we will hold out for long term satisfaction. And that’s why you find yourself balls deep on Facebook when you should be hard at work.

If we can’t eliminate procrastination, what can we do? We can prepare for the temptations that have fucked us in the past. We can’t remove temptation, but we can control behaviour by putting our future selves on a metaphorical leash.

Here are some examples of steps an affiliate marketer can take to become more productive:

1. Pick a new traffic source, any new traffic source, and deposit $1000 immediately. The simple act of committing money to a project will do more for your ‘scaling’ than any amount of scribbling in a notepad.

2. Use LeechBlock to physically remove access to time wasting sites. Don’t just hope that you won’t waste your time. Physically stop your future self! There will be moments in the day where your attention is slipping and that future self sees no harm in a quick 5 minute session on Facebook. Make it impossible.

3. Find a business partner with a superior motive. Once upon a time, I built websites thinking the carrot of money in the future would inspire me to see them through to completion. I soon realised that this carrot would disintegrate when a better idea came along. Naturally, your future self has a bias towards ideas born in the present. If you want to really nail a big project, take on a business partner who is even more motivated than yourself. (Hint: Somebody who gives a damn about the niche.) Use their energy and passion to maintain your spark for projects when the honeymoon period (aka. the domain registration and WordPress installation) wears off. Let them know that part of their job is to kick your arse in to action.

4. Form your own mastermind group and set a daily recap. Sharing knowledge with other affiliates is one of the fastest ways to progress. I recommend kickstarting 2012 by forming a small mastermind group with 2 or 3 other marketers in the same position. Make sure there’s a group discussion at the end of each day. Use it to share your progress. Nobody wants to be the worst performer in the group, so use that competitive pride as inspiration to get a bloody move on.

5. Announce products before they’re ready to be launched. If you run a blog, or any kind of community, and still haven’t ticked off that 2012 must-do of releasing your own product, why not create a sense of urgency? Announce it in advance, tell everybody the launch date, and let your followers hold you accountable. Even better, promise 50% off if you fail to deliver it on time.

I hope everybody is optimistic and determined to make 2012 their best year yet, no matter how depressing my contrarian approach may seem. Never be afraid of making a fresh start and setting tough targets. Just don’t be so foolish as to make the same mistakes again.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading. Happy Motherfuckin’ 2012.

The theme was simple.

I was to design a New Year’s Resolution flog. An epic landing page linking the most cited resolutions to some simple crazy tips, and a juicy affiliate offer that would cash in on each desire.

“Find out how I achieved these seven CRAZY New Years Resolutions in 2009…”

Written, of course, from the perspective of a frighteningly ordinary (and now incredibly successful) Every Joe Average. The flog took the seven most obvious New Year’s Resolutions and wove them in to a story of remarkable achievement. My character had been down on his luck at the end of 2008. He decided to turn his life around.

To do so, he set not one but seven New Year’s Resolutions.

1. To lose weight
2. To improve his income
3. To find love
4. To improve fitness
5. To quit smoking
6. To quit drinking
7. To learn something new

The flog explained how with the help of a few unusual tips (the more unusual the better, trust me) – and some relatively unknown products – he succeeded in making the last year the best of his life… the launch pad to enormous success. His resolution this year is to share the success story; to reveal to a select few the secret products that helped him, and of course, to spread a little festive cheer.

The beauty of New Year’s Resolutions is self-explanatory. They read like a list of bestselling affiliate offers. I didn’t find it difficult to match any of the resolutions to a suitable affiliate offer. If you’re wondering, ‘learn something new’ was crowbarred in to a pitch for the various Rocket Language packs on ClickWank.

I rarely speak too highly of ClickWank, but if there’s ever a time to push one of their links, it’s on the sixth upsell. Just don’t make a habit of it.

With a little tinkering, what I had on my hands was the grandaddy of all flogs – albeit one that would be profitable for only a short period of time. Pretty much all New Year’s Resolution traffic was fair game, since 90% of the users were going to associate themselves with at least one of the resolutions. It was the making of my wettest dreams, and the ROI was insane.

As the months have passed, I’ve become much more conservative; in all walks of life, but particularly where risque moneymaking schemes like this are concerned. I don’t wish to take the moral high ground – affiliates can choose to focus their businesses where they see fit. It’s none of my business. But I don’t plan to roll out a 2011 take on the New Year’s Resolution flog, which is why I’m happy to post about it.

I’m sure somebody reading this now will run wild with such a campaign on the Adsonars and Pulse360s of the world. But it doesn’t have to be scandalous. You don’t have to sling 7 different fragrances of the same bullshit in scumbag flogging style. You can use the New Year’s Resolution angle to improve just about any sales funnel.

Now is the perfect time to give your landing pages a face-lift with some hard selling copy; the type that appeals to the resolution setting nature of your users. It’s not hard to see how dating can be assaulted from a ‘make this a better year’ angle. The same for weight loss, bizopps and especially those offers related to going back to school.

I’ve always seen January 1st goal-setting as an exercise for the fickle minded. But from a marketing perspective, it’s a priceless window of opportunity. When else do you have large swaths of the population convincing themselves that it’s time to change? They’re doing half of our job for us!

Christ, it’s the only time in the year where the masses are searching for the shit we spend half our working hours trying to convince them they need!

Don’t miss out on the New Year’s Resolution madness. There’ll be plenty more opportunities to make your money, but rarely will they arrive gift-wrapped with a bow tie. This is the time to bank your Christmas bonus, seal the summer holiday and start 2012 with a bang.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• I hope you all had an awesome Christmas. If I don’t post before the New Year (very likely given my unread emails), have an awesome blowout to 2011. And a profitable non-Apocalyptic 2012.

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

It’s that time of the year when Tesco wheels out the chocolate selection boxes, and Boots starts charging £3 extra to cram the most disappointing products in to the most appealing shaped packaging. You know, the kind that looks ‘appropriate’ under a Christmas tree?

We both realise you could have saved money buying your victim’s Lynx and shower gel from the Pound Shop. But no, in the spirit of Christmas, you chose to fuck yourself in the wallet by spending more for the same shit in a ‘gift box’.

Maybe it’s because there isn’t a productive human being on the planet who enjoys wrapping awkwardly shaped presents.

It’s obvious that squares and rectangles are the way forward, guys. Anything too circular, or too pointy, and I end up celotaping myself to the mantlepiece, or punching holes in the wrapping like some kind of angry bull.

Selection boxes are an even bigger piss-take.

But they are, without any shadow of a doubt, the perfect present for that distant fourth cousin you only see once a year. The selection box says “Hey, I didn’t have to buy you this shit. I could have picked up four Curly Wurlies for the price of two on Tesco Special Offer and given them to you in a tramp’s paper bag. But no, I bought you a present. Do you know how you can tell that it’s a present? Because it’s in a fucking box. Take it.”

When I cool down to assess the situation logically, I can’t help but tip my hat to the effectiveness of it all. Selection boxes and gift sets are the perfect way to boost sales during a time where consumers are extremely conscious of their purchases.

In that moment of shopfloor gift hunting madness, I would never dream of picking out a can of deodorant and then some shower gel from a different aisle, with the intention of wrapping them together and passing it off as a gift. The idea of unwrapping a single can of Lynx is actually bordering on the offensive.

But package them together in a festive boxset and it’s as if by magic, Boots has made the can and bottle infinitely more appealing. How does that work? When you strip away the cardboard, what you have left is a tour de force in product re-positioning.

Desperation breeds opportunity… for scumbags like us

I know lots of people start their festive shopping early (I believe they’re called females), but I am personally the kind of guy who can be found sweating his tits off at 8.59am on Christmas Eve, desperately mapping his way around the town center and preparing to pillage whatever’s left for goods that can be passed off as gifts.

It’s a habit of mine that plays in to the hands of retailers and their tendency to box the living crap out of everything. The high pressure environment – there’s no escaping the hoards of other husbands, fathers and boyfriends suffering last minute meltdown – makes us highly suggestible to marketing that appears to solve our problems.

The examples above are perfect illustrations of how and why consumers will pay more – and will hand over their money faster – when you solve a legitimate problem for them.

Desperation is an interesting force for marketers to exploit. But what really should be taken from the gift packaging craze is that, sometimes, it’s not the product you’re selling, but the solution you’re offering that counts.

If you’re wondering how to boost sales and leads in the run up to December 25th, here’s a simple tip. Take whatever you’re selling, charge a little extra, and offer a re-packaged version that is suitable to be given away as a gift. Whack it on your homepage, ‘drop shadow’ it with tinsel and scream to anybody who will listen… “The Perfect Festive Gift, now comes in a square box…”

You’ll often find that your price is totally irrelevant at this point. You could charge a thousand bullions of gold and some red-faced panting husband will still take you up on the offer. Such is the power that Christmas exerts on us mortal souls.

So… will I listen to my own concerns and start shopping earlier in 2011? Of course I fucking won’t.

I make the same mistake every year.

In the same way that I’ll regret paying £69.95 plus £10 delivery for a sheet of plastic that works as a Halloween outfit, you will find me scouring Westfields on December 24th wishing I’d listened to these words.

Recommended This Week

• For those of you who advertise on Facebook, Premium Posts Volume 2 is the perfect Christmas gift to give yourself. I’ve been wearing a fake white beard while merrily packing all my favourite tips and techniques in to one handy resource. It’s 71 pages of full of insight I would never give away for free. So you should buy it, yeah?

• 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. Thanks for reading.

Let’s say you have a “Make Money From Home” bizopp campaign targeting America. You’ve spent a lot of time split testing imagery, landing pages and offers, but you can only seem to scrape by on a profitable margin of 20% ROI.

Your next thought is to duplicate the campaign and port it over to Canada where the traffic is cheaper.

While there’s nothing wrong with this logic, it seems to be avoiding the elephant in the room. Countries, by nature, are incredibly diverse.

A single marketing campaign generating 20% ROI from the whole of America could quite possibly disguise one smaller campaign of 100% ROI in New York, and another of -100% in Tennessee. This is the price you pay for assuming that every state in America behaves the same.

When advertising broadly, we tend to accept these discrepancies without a second thought. You can’t be picky if you want to have the volume, right? I think that’s bullshit.

Sometimes a large campaign can be hiked from 20% ROI to 40% simply by pinpointing the lowest converting states and removing them, or rebranding your message. In all my sleepless nights of testing, I have yet to find a single campaign that converts at the same % across every single state in America.

For verticals like bizopps, a lot of the thinking is just pure common sense.

Take a look at this demographic data for the USA.

It’s widely known that the home bizopp offers perform much better when you design them specifically per ethnic group. Looking at the data, would we run the same campaign in Maine with it’s 95% white population, as we would in Mississippi which is 37% black?

We could, but then we’d have no right to complain if we found ourselves forever tied to that 20% ROI. How can you expect to improve it whilst you’re still targeting the whole of America? It’s difficult to get results if you can’t tell the difference between a user profile that converts, and a user profile that digs out your WHOIS, sprays it over the Scam Forums and leaves seven voicemails asking for a refund.

The effects are even more noticeable on dating campaigns, which I touched on in this month’s Premium Posts. You don’t really think those jpegs of California Girls are going to perform the same across every state in the country, do you?

Quick experiment for you: Find a pic of a girl in a Yankees shirt. Set up two dating campaigns on Facebook. One for New York and one for Boston. The data should speak for itself. States do not behave equally!

My girlfriend, who is half-American and has spent half her life in London and half in Indianapolis, is often telling me of the differences between what she considers the desirable states to live in (New York City, California) and the places she hates (anywhere in the Bible belt).

Whether you love your state, hate it, want to move, or want to celebrate it – the fact remains, America is an incredibly diverse country.

The complications of regional trends should be obvious without having to road-trip coast to coast to test the theory.

Likewise, England is perceived as a tiny place. A little melancholy teacup full of smart spoken chaps who all know the Queen on a personal level. You know, as if we share a Sunday Hogwarts roast while debating how to tackle our crooked yellow teeth.

What many foreign advertisers don’t seem to realise is that England is one of the most culturally diversified countries in the world and what performs well in London could – and probably will – totally bomb in Leeds. Don’t advertise new ideas to Leeds, guys. Creating change in Yorkshire is like pissing in to a hurricane.

You have to appreciate there are more than two options for targeting your campaigns. It’s not a flip of a coin between “broad” or “laser targeted”. Sometimes, spreading the net wide can do just fine. As long as you remember to empty it when you realise some of what you catch is dog 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.

The Free Micro Niche Finder

Inspiration is the magic ingredient of a successful Monday morning, closely followed by an injection of caffeine if it’s been a rough weekend.

There’s nothing an affiliate marketer likes more than a mash-up of potentially profitable niche markets with low competition and high rewards.

So if you’re looking for ideas and/or direction, head on over to 43Things.

43Things is a community portal driven by users who share their goals and ambitions on the site. As a starting point for new projects, it’s a goldmine of inspiration. Where better to brainstorm than where thousands of users are spewing their innermost desires?

Instead of creating a 60 page website only to find that nobody wants to visit it, 43Things uncovers more than a small handful of micro-niches that are backed by solid social proof.

Now, if somebody could just strap on a self-serve advertising platform for Finch to target those “want to lose weight” users directly, that would be fan-bloody-tastic…

Recommended This Week

• 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!

• Self-improvements junkies, head on over to Filthy Rich Mind, a project I’m collaborating on with several talented writers that I’m excited to work with.

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

There’s nothing the affiliate world loves more than a good fad to ride all the way to the bank. Justin Bieber encapsulates the affiliate marketer’s wettest dream, and that’s a dangerous sentence if ever I wrote one.

There are tons of affiliate offers that can be spun and peddled using Bieber’s bandwagon of fans – some that directly use his name, and others that need only be implied. It’s not the most reputable marketing tactic in the book, to monetize a brand that’s not your own, but we’re not the most reputable marketers in the first place. It’s going to happen.

Besides, the landing page H1s just roll off the tongue.

“How much do you know about the Biebs?”
“Pick the right answer for a chance to meet the Biebs”
“Lose half your body weight in 28 days to look attractive… to the Biebs”
“Sign up if you’re a BBW whale and like meeting rich men… like the Biebs”

Some niches may be more suitable than others, obviously, and that sentiment becomes even more relevant when you’re talking about traffic sources. Facebook and Google aren’t the best places to parade Justin Bieber as your CPA’s fake celebrity ambassador. Indeed, it’s not sensible to portray a relationship to any degree.

But for PPV, this kind of marketing bait and switch has become the norm for drawing eyeballs to offers that are hyper targeted to a certain demographic. One of the things that makes Bieber such a marketing hero is the immense loyalty he receives from a never ending pool of fangirls and floppy haired pretenders.

It’s the loyalty that should hold your attention. This is what we should be pursuing.

Click prices are rising across most demographics on most traffic sources, but there will always be opportunities for the marketers who are skilled at monetizing the Under 16 demographic. I’m using Justin Bieber as an example, but to tell you the truth, he’s probably not the best case study. While his army of fans continues to grow, so does the number of advertisers who are keen to jump on the monkey – and not just affiliates, but commercial brands too.

Looking further afield, it doesn’t take too much market research to pinpoint the names and shows that are exploding in popularity with the Under 16 market. How can it be? These are some of the most loyal followers of any demographic, and can be found posting their shit on Twitter 24/7.

There are huge opportunities for affiliates to jump on these trends. It just takes a little creativity, where affiliate offers don’t already exist, to match them to suitable campaigns.

I hate to use the phrase, but “like taking candy from a baby” springs to mind.

A regular pet project of mine is to snatch up domains for fansites of these young stars, turn them in to very basic blogs, then to simply splash the shit out of them with gaming ads and quiz offers. You may think the competition level from crazy eyed fans is too high to make a decent return, but in reality, you only need a tiny slice of the market when the market is so huge. And if you’re smart, you can convince the hardcore fans to work for you by seeding these projects with their own devoted content.

Sinister, right? I’m going to Hell? As long as the Devil crosses Baby off his playlist, that’s perfectly fine by me.

I remember when Michael Jackson died, there was a similar explosion of MJ themed offers. For the dirty scumbag affiliates of the world, it was easy pickings. Lock and load, and help yourself to some commission. I did just that, and I’m sure many other affiliates did too.

Where will the next craze emerge from? He or she is out there now, slowly accumulating an army of fans that will one day reach a tipping point when Ca-Ching – the money rush begins. Better get your ears to the ground!

These opportunities to reach huge demographics of highly concentrated users don’t appear every day, but when they do, you’ve gotta cash in.

Recommended This Week

• If you’re looking for a good place to seek out Justin Bieber offers, look no further than EWA Network. EWA is clearly no stranger to the Biebs. “Bieber” Web Assets has been a running joke of regular hilarity on WickedFire. Remarkable physical similarities aside, Ryan Eagle is running one of the best houses in the industry for an affiliate to get his tracking links from. Sign up now for a peek.

• 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.

I think a lot of affiliates gravitate towards self-serve platforms as a matter of security. Once there, they compare CPMs to what they’ve paid in the past. This helps to formulate an idea of value for money. It’s no more than a hunch, but can often be enough to deem a traffic source suitable or unsuitable without spending a penny.

The problem with measuring CPMs in this way is obvious. The equation lacks the mechanical wheel of a clickthrough rate to actually mean something. Without the CTR, there’s truly no way of knowing whether a $10 CPM or a $0.10 CPM is going to do more for your bottom line.

Sounds like common sense, but plays out like anything but.

From my experience, many affiliates have shown themselves to despise high CPMs. They’ll make it clear not only by refusing to work with certain traffic sources, but by refusing to experiment with their bidding strategies on platforms like Facebook and Plentyoffish. Why? Why are affiliates so apprehensive about paying more to potentially get more?

I think many of us share a strain of inferiority complex. We don’t consider ourselves worthy of bidding the absolute top dollar on ad placements, because we somehow believe that our survival nature depends on scraping the barrel and monetizing dregs of traffic that the other real advertisers didn’t want.

Does this sound like your own attitude towards buying ads?

Think about it. When advertising on Facebook, do you have a glass ceiling where you’ve convinced yourself bidding any higher would turn a guaranteed loss? Is that belief backed on solid evidence, or simply a hunch that grew when one campaign slipped in to the red?

I think there’s a fear factor attached to high CPMs. A misplaced belief that in bidding more, we’re losing margin for the sake of a few more eyeballs. You will often find that campaigns can be turned profitable at two ends of the spectrum.

1. By monetizing the scraps, living off low volume and turning the stragglers in to potential customers.
2. By bidding the premium, reaching your actual target market and making up for greater costs with an improved conversion rate.

I tend to encourage newbie affiliates to aim for the first target. Without money and/or experience, you should get your tail wet by learning how the system works and trying to turn a profit on the lower quality traffic.

But for established affiliates who have reached the plateau where they make good money but can’t take the next step, stop bidding for the scraps! Grow some balls, place a little faith in your skills and bid where the volume is. There are guaranteed to be a few hiccups along the way, but the future is much brighter when you succeed.

This much is true on Facebook and Plentyoffish, but it’s a damn near prerequisite if you want to enjoy success buying banners through display networks. You’re going to be met with high CPMs. There’s no getting around it.

Some affiliates spend so much time frothing on Facebook Ads that they assume clickthrough rates of 0.08% are an unspoken industry average when moving on to other banner exchanges.

They see a CPM of $5 and think “Shit, I have one click to get the conversion or I’m at a loss. This isn’t going to work.” I remember taking that attitude to a popular gaming ads platform and being pleasantly surprised when my ads jumped from 0.12 to 1.5 CTR, just through the merits of the different platform.

If you’re making the jump from one traffic source to another, leave your expectations of the CPM at the door. You’re going to have to spend money before you have any true perspective. That may strike fear in to some, but it’s a welcome barrier of entry for those who are already reaping the rewards.

Recommended This Week

• If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.

• If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine! Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

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

Whichever way you look in the press, percentages of individuals are doomed. 9 percent of the population is unemployed, 95 percent is too stretched to buy a first home, 47 percent is busy looting Asda for a packet of rice. Forgive me for my number crunching cynicism, but why are we so obsessed with percentages?

Since when did the individual view his professional crisis as a colour on a pie chart?

CNN and the BBC can spend hours dissecting every last tribulation of the economy to a fine detail, but ultimately, they can only deal in averages and sweeping states of the nation. We, as individuals, have to take responsibility for rising above the insufferable fate that awaits those who aren’t personally driven to swim against the tide of national averages.

When reading the newspaper fills you with a sweeping sense of dread, maybe it’s time to put down the shit rag, turn a blind eye to the latest headlines and continue with life and business.

There’s only so much scaremongering I can handle on the subjects of unemployment and business growth before it starts to turn really fucking old really fucking fast.

It’s tempting to blame our personal failings on the condition of the state. Tempting, but ultimately beating around the bush in spectacular fashion.

If you are one of the millions who cannot find a job, how about creating one? Or locating where the demand is, and adjusting your skills to match?

If you are one of the millions who cannot pay a debt, how about living within your means? Or finding the willpower to say “No” when faced with materialistic desires that you simply can’t afford but choose to have anyway because you’re a feckless tool.

Recently I’ve seen affiliate marketing as the perfect source of income during times of economic turmoil. It’s flexible, fluid and allows me to speak from a high horse of pro-entrepreneurism that simply isn’t possible for most honest businesses.

I don’t believe it’s mere coincidence that the last recession in 2008 triggered an almighty boom in the notorious “work from home” kits. Your average family was worried about the fragility of employment, and how it would service debt if his and her jobs disappeared overnight.

Fast moving affiliates jumped on that vulnerability and made an absolute killing with home biz kit rebills. They didn’t last forever, thank god, but highlighted how recession, depression or market euphoria doesn’t matter a damn jot to the entrepreneur who can change what he sells at the flick of a switch.

We have the power to move where the money is.

Online entrepreneurs don’t have to spend months in the trenches doing research, lobbying banks for loans or calculating intricate margins to ensure their stock levels are correct. Instead we can react to market trends, create digital products in a matter of weeks and have them available to download with none of the risk of tight margins.

No matter how grave the economy becomes, people will always be buying. Where there is spending, there is the desire to spend knowledgeably. And where there is people asking these questions, there is a shit ton of affiliates queuing up with ebooks that monetize the answers.

Thanks to the rise of the Internet, we know better than most how lucrative it can be to move quickly in to those buying markets.

Our price for this flexibility is the impending sense of business instability, the castle built on sand syndrome. These are shackles that most successful affiliates learn to cast aside, either through diversifying or by removing the word ‘complacency’ from their newspeak.

Even if our domestic economies were to face total annihilation, it’s never been easier to spread the wings and set up shop elsewhere. Is it so hard to advertise to foreign countries? To translate your products in to the native tongue of a more extravagantly spending nation?

Not really, it’s just another challenge we can overcome in days while the brick and mortar business is still occupied in the prison of distribution logistics.

Affiliate marketing clearly has a lot going for it, but with such rapid movement in to new markets, we are also guilty of filling the web with more useless crap than the average surfer could sift through in a lifetime.

This is where I see affiliates biting the dust in future. Our industry has grown so fast and so profitably that we’re going to have to become much more accountable for the information we publish and any claims we make. Dare I say it, we may actually have to start slapping our names to some of this shit.

Our landing pages are typically hidden in subfolders, draped in anonymity with WHOIS protection. We anticipate customers will buy through our links because we treat them like hopeless lemmings, selling them the moon and then shoving them off the cliff face. How long can it last?

Aggressive marketing has always existed. Yet with the freedom affiliates have, there’s never been such a whirlwind of false, bad and misinterpreted information.

We specialise in creating sales, but the actual companies we sell for are becoming more and more disconnected from the selling process. This results in more and more bullshit. More and more customers being shoved off the cliff.

Affiliate marketing, despite the rising costs and legal shitstorms, is still a very lucrative industry. It always will be, by virtue of the fact that it’s an industry composed of all other industries. How can it go out of fashion?

What needs to change is the culture of anonymity and the kamikaze any bold claim will do approach to selling. The sooner affiliates focus on providing genuine quality to the industries they choose to work in, the faster the bad press will disappear and the quicker we can get on with calling ourselves actual businessmen.

Recommended This Week

• If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.

• 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!

• New reader? Add Finch to your RSS.