A common problem I see with affiliate sales funnels is a lack of understanding for what constitutes a conversion. Sounds pretty obvious, right? “Duh Finch, I get money when another sucker joins True.” Well, that’s almost correct. Unfortunately, the ‘almost’ cripples many campaigns.

Before promoting any offer, you must take the time to research exactly when the conversion pixel fires. There’s no room for vague assumptions. “Joining True” paints a picture in my mind of the conversion pixel being fired as soon as the user selects a username and hits Next. Most of the time, this is not the case.

We have zip submits, single opt-ins (SOI), double opt-ins (DOI), questionnaires to answer, profile pictures to upload, applications to download, first orders to place… every offer comes with its own criteria for when the conversion should be fired.

The definition of “joining a site” is black and white. But your conversion isn’t. Don’t make the mistake of assuming they are one and the same.

Here are some general guidelines for how your landing pages can be adapted to suit each conversion type.

Zip submits

Generally seen as the easiest affiliate offers to promote, zip submits do exactly what they say on the tin. As soon as the user submits his zip-code, you get your conversion. The payouts on these offers are predictably low to offset the unpredictability of the traffic quality.

The golden rule of promoting zip submits is to hold the advertiser’s hand and give them exactly what they want. There’s no point in delivering poor quality traffic. You’ll be scrubbed to Timbuktu in no time.

Single opt-ins

A single opt-in requires the user to submit his email address. However, the conversion is triggered after the submission rather than at the point of confirmation. You’ll find a lot of single opt-in offers paying around $2-$3.50. It’s not big bucks, but it’s better than a zip submit.

In my opinion, the large majority of affiliates use landing pages that are aimed at achieving a single opt-in. It’s the standard entry point. But think about it logically. If the advertiser is paying out on a single opt-in, you can probably increase your traffic quality substantially simply by treating the offer like a double opt-in. Encourage and incentivize the user to confirm his email address. This may have to come at the price of one of our favourite affiliate tactics: completely bullshitting the real nature of the offer. “Hey, where all the single soldiers at?”

Double opt-ins

A confirmed double opt-in is worth infinitely more than a single opt-in. Your payouts will traditionally reflect this by offering double for the confirmed email.

Something to keep in mind with double opt-in campaigns, particularly in the dating vertical, is that it makes no sense to calculate ROI on an ongoing ‘live’ basis. A small but significant percentage of users will not confirm their double opt-in straight away. They will get busy, distracted, or otherwise torn away from their Gmail. This can lead to a small trickle of conversions being fired the next morning. Ever had 0 clicks and 3 conversions? Well, there you go.

However, if you’re monitoring your stats like a hawk, what are you going to think when you finish the evening taking a loss? You’ve probably already deleted the campaign by then.

Always let your conversions filter through before making any snap judgments.

Survey/questionnaire completion

Some offers require the completion of an entire questionnaire before the conversion is recorded. Now imagine you’re the stereotypical battering-ram of a publisher who cares not for such details. You design a landing page with a teasing call-to-action like this:

“Register in 45 Seconds or Less!”

Sounds nice and coaxing, right? In some cases this works as a great hook. But it’s a terrible call-to-action when the conversion pixel is only fired after a 15 minute questionnaire.

I see it happening time and time again. Affiliates go for quick dealmakers. They sell every offer with the brevity of a single opt-in, when they should actually be shooting for a solid incentive to complete Steps A, B and C.

In instances where the user is required to navigate his way through a complex 15 minute interrogation, your landing page has a duty to sell this process and make it seem worthwhile. How could you get a user to answer a questionnaire?

To give you an example, on dating sites, I use it to filter out the ‘bad dates’ that the user will be avoiding when she joins the new service. It’s quality protection, because she only deserves the best.

Profile photo upload

This is another common requirement on high-payout dating offers.

Offers that convert only after a profile photo upload would have worried the crap out of me 5 years ago. But now thanks to Facebook, even technophobic 75 year old grandmas have photos at their disposal.

The secret to nailing these conversions is to make a direct reference to the benefits of uploading a photo. If you’re branding the site as an unusual paradise where men actually receive messages from hot girls, you should make it clear that communications increase X% when the user adds his photo. Or say that members without a photo are being culled and will not qualify for the free trial offer. Whatever puts the thought in his head and safeguards your conversion.

Converts on download

There are many toolbar and gaming offers out there where the user is expected not only to sign up, but to download and sometimes even play the game for the first time.

For single opt-in minded folk, I like to call this the ‘minefield offer’.

It’s littered with so many what-ifs that the challenge is as much about hitting the right carefree demographic as it is selling the product. A golden rule that I’ve adopted is to avoid targeting users who are likely to be on their work computers. This crowd does not want to download and leave a trace. So you will need to day-part and keep a tight hold over your demographics.

There’s no point in trying to con the user here. Your best step forward is to sell the offer as a legitimate must-have and hope that the user’s interest is perked enough to follow the necessary steps.

For gaming offers, “Can you beat this ridiculous score?” is a winning hook.

So, how are your conversions today?

Take a look at your own sales funnels. Be honest.

Has it all gone slightly tits-up?

Your landing page must not only sell the offer. It must sell the required steps necessary to secure the conversion.

As I said on StackThatMoney this week, your sales funnel has to be designed to shove the user to the conversion pixel, NOT purely to get them to choose a username and press Next. Be clear with your objectives!

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For example, which headline would you expect to perform the best on it’s respective target market?

Most sensible thinking affiliates would probably assume that the Irish headline would perform the best, simply because there aren’t many specialised Irish dating sites.

And to their credit, they’d be proven correct. But what I find really interesting is the comparison against landing pages which used a generic headline where no nationality was specified.

For the UK and USA, the landing page CTR stayed roughly the same (35-38%). But in Ireland, simply adding the two words ‘in Ireland’ hoisted the CTR from 44% to 51%.

By experimenting further, I found that including an Irish flag and changing the headline text to green forced the CTR up even further beyond 60%.

Would more Americans click through if I dangled the stars and stripes under their whiskers? Apparently not, the CTR stayed stable.

In the UK, there was a very slight 2% increase when I included the Union Jack flag alongside the headline. Not enough to wet the bed over.

What does this say about national pride? Are Irish singles really that much more compelled to join sites that have been clearly marked as Irish?

Perhaps, but surely Americans have the capacity to be just as patriotic?

The reality is that banner blindness has a huge say. I don’t believe national pride is a major factor that encourages Americans to sign up on dating sites. I think most Americans simply assume that the majority of dating sites are aimed at Americans, and/or are American by default. Not many Americans see the world through foreign eyes, and thus ‘American dating site‘ is pretty much interchangeable with ‘just another dating site‘.

In the UK, we have such a multicultural society that the British identity is – in my opinion – nowhere near as effective in the sweeping patriotism stakes as it would have been 25 years ago. For this reason, you would be well advised to word your ads carefully (‘Singles in Britain’ will regularly outperform ‘British singles’)

Ireland clearly responds well to Irish themed landing pages. But what other countries can be placed in the same group? From my experience, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavian countries, and pretty much every country I’ve ever marketed to in Asia has shown that time spent researching the culture and national pride is time spent lucratively.

It’s like steroids for landing pages. You will get better results.

Does this mean we should bow down at the feet of geo-targeting and allow the masses to be blindly lead towards their flags and national nuances?

I believe geo-targeting is effective in America primarily because it creates location based relevance as opposed to the ‘in America‘ line which most Americans take for granted. An offer will feel relevant when it’s calling out ‘singles in Illinois‘, in the same way that an Irish offer will feel specialised as long as there aren’t hundreds of other Irish dating sites.

Geo-targeting loses much of it’s accuracy when you take it away from North America, and I’m not sure people fully realise the implications of using it when the results are so unreliable.

For example, if you are going to geo-target users in the UK, you should definitely consider removing London from your target market.

The reason is simple. In the UK, we are squeezed in to such tightly packed cities and towns that for a geo-detection mechanism to be 5 miles out, it would be locating us in towns that are a complete misrepresentation of the places we call home.

In my case, geo-targeting would suggest that I live in Hounslow. While Hounslow is a mere 9.6 miles from my true location (Ruislip, if you were wondering), it’s actually a very foreign town to me. I don’t think I’ve ever been there in my life.

Certainly, if a porn site were to throw up an annoying pop-up saying “Get laid in Hounslow tonight“, I’d be inclined to wince, check the time and ultimately shake my head. Well it’s a bit of a trek, mate.

Of course, in America, the population is much more sparsely distributed and so geo-targeting has less margin for error. Tracking down a large city in Texas is less of a technological demand than pinpointing my musk-filled residence in the London suburbs.

There are times where nationality can be used to push a user towards an offer with great effect. It’s a technique I swear by in Ireland and Australia. But you should understand that in some cases, it’s better to ignore the exact location than to get it half-right.

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Aristotle believed that in it’s most simple form, persuasion is the shifting of attitude in your audience from Point A to Point B. Where Point B consists of behaviour that the audience wouldn’t normally engage in.

He spent many years searching for the phantom formula that best induced this persuasion. Predictably, the closest he got was still no guarantee that it would work every time. Aristotle filtered the many factors and narrowed them down to Ethos (ethical appeal), Pathos (emotional attachment) and Logos (logic behind the feeling).

Aristotle believed that the correct application of Ethos, Pathos and Logos would result in the highest probability of persuasion being effective.

Now while the philosopher may be confined to ancient history with his legacy predating Christ, there’s something everlasting about his theory that can be applied to our work as we sit behind screens and pull our hair out.

I think many affiliates neglect the majority of the equation when they design their landing pages, or upload their creatives. There’s no shame in doing so because in reality, it’s damn tough to come up with work that appeals to all three elements of persuasion.

Logos (logic) isn’t hard to conquer. If somebody is unhappily single, it shouldn’t take you a lifetime to turn their heads towards a dating site as a potential cure for their discontent. The logic in meeting new singles, chatting and dating, should be enough to appeal to the senses.

Some affiliates are also great at capturing Pathos (empathy). The flog stands as a hated testament to how effective it can be when you reach out to satisfy the emotional craving. “I made these fantastic changes and because I care about you, let me tell you my secret!” As customers, we love to see similar people turning their lives around and looking all the more happier for it. If the message has been intricately threaded through the right hoops of empathy, persuasion regularly follows.

What a shame for affiliate marketers that persuasion couldn’t rely solely on emotion and logic. Unfortunately, Ethos (the beast of ethics) is there to steal many a torn customer from the jaws of conversion.

It’s not enough to lay down a logical framework for why people should buy your product. It’s also no guarantee if you can produce an emotional attachment to what you’re saying. Ultimately, the element of credibility and “Can I trust this source?” stands between you and I, the affiliates, and an EPC that would make your eyes water.

Ethos is a difficult beast to satisfy. Unfortunately, we tend to gravitate towards some of the less squeaky clean products and services on the market. They are the items that pay out the highest commission, or produce the best results. Creating ethical appeal is difficult when you don’t have the stone cold truth sitting in your corner.

So we do what we can to bend it sideways, to shape it in such a way that our customers are able to establish that acceptance of credibility. Sometimes, it comes back to bite many of our peers in the arse. Stories of false advertising and misleading landing pages are rife. And when you look closely, it’s mostly down to the marketers who were willing to push the envelope dangerously too far in search of Ethos.

They replicate “As seen on…” logos to build a social proof that doesn’t exist. They’ll replicate entire news portals to make a product seem more mainstream than it really is. Bold claims fly around the room like they’re going out of fashion. This search for reputation is often the final frontier separating a good affiliate from the monster profits he’s been searching a lifetime for.

Should we be surprised that many affiliates go too far and pay the price when they break the Ethos for good?

I don’t think so, but we do have to look at alternate ways of establishing that element of trust. If you can establish credibility, affiliate marketing becomes a breeze to conquer. Though as I’m sure you’re already aware, establishing credibility in a sea of crappy products, scammy terms and growing cynicism is no mean feat.

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• 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 best way to remedy this confusion is to build every landing page with the attitude that simple is best.

It’s important to build landing pages for the lowest common denominator. And by that, I mean sacrificing your creative urges and making your sales pitch as sweepingly digestible as can be.

Here in the UK, The Guardian has a reading age of 14. The Sun is lower at 8. There are many tools where you can measure the reading age of your copy, with my favourite being the readability test at Juicy Studio. If your reading age is too high, you’ll be losing too many conversions on mindblown casual surfers.

Reading age is one variable, but where older demographics are concerned, the actual structure of your landing page is even more important.

Have you ever stood over the shoulder of a user in your target demographic and watched as they stumbled across your landing page? Try it, you’ll probably be surprised by the results.

This isn’t always convenient, and I’m not suggesting you load up on binoculars and go all fucking Rear Window on your suburban neighbour folk. Thankfully there are services out there that specialise in tracking live footage of users on your site.

Behold:

• Crazy Egg
• Mouse Flow
• ClickTale
• ClickHeat

We all know the importance of split testing, but witnessing the actual screen footage of users on your site is another leap in to the realm of truly getting your target market. These sites allow you to track the mouse, view hotspots of clicks and really drill down for usability data.

I managed to uncover a common flaw in my own landing pages, particularly with older demographics, where there were simply too many options on the page.

Are you building landing pages using the traditional bold Call-to-Action, with separate bullet points calling out various other incentives? I used to do this all the time. I’d have about five different anchor links, each trying to capture different sectors of the market. In the end, it was just too confusing.

Like your great grandmother staring blankly at The Facebooks, too many options is a bad thing. You will often enjoy much more success by having one simple Call-to-Action clearly defined, with a progressive sales funnel that leads the user on to the next step.

Or maybe you won’t.

If you’ve ever sat tearing your hair out at where all your ad clicks are disappearing to, the tools above should uncover some handy clues. If you’re still confused, here are those half price binoculars. Go hide in a hedge and collect some data.

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• Make sure you check out the newly redesigned Finch Blogs, which is now a mesmerizing portal of lifestyle design and 3am brainfarts for the online professional.

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

“Dear Mr. Postman, please pay special attention that this letter reaches Mr. Osborn quickly and safely. The contents inside are extremely important!”

Being the cynic that I am, I tossed the envelope aside and tipped my head at the stellar practices of one of my fellow kind. Maybe I know the plotting bastard that sent it. If I did, I’d buy him a drink.

It’s no secret that dumbed down adverts are incredibly popular in the affiliate space.

How many times have you seen the classic 300×250 Before and After banner for a weight loss product? It’s typically etched in less than flattering handwriting boasting one explosive secret that can turn your life on it’s head.

These aesthetically ugly weight loss ads are designed to look like they’ve been slapped together by some proud shedder of the fat, who simply couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the success.

Mainstream markets buy in to the ploy because it seems too amateur to be thrown around by a giant corporation. They’d come up with something much more professional looking, something much more similar to the glossy productions we see on television or in high class magazines.

It’s this contrast that allows an affiliate to break the pattern of banner blindness. By creating ads that are ugly and eye-catching in all the wrong ways, we may lose points in the grandiose stakes, but we don’t lose the most important acquisition of all – the attention of those eyeballs.

Customers instinctively let their guards down when they think they’re mingling with one of their own. They become much more susceptible to the final push towards a sale if they feel like they’re being let in on a secret, rather than pushed towards the crowd. It’s a fine ego act to balance.

Most dating affiliates know that amateur photos regularly outperform those of models in conventional catalogue poses. I could grab my own disheveled face, slap it on a dating ad, and probably enjoy much more success than a traditionally handsome model – simply because mainstream markets are so used to being shown the traditional. They’re blind to it.

I believe this act of ‘avoiding the traditional’ is translatable to all of your online projects.

Does anybody really believe in perfect anymore? Some of my best performing affiliate campaigns are those where I have instantly shot down expectations. Once you’ve burst the bubble, you can re-educate your target market, re-align their expectations and then hit them with a sales pitch that is all the more convincing for your honesty.

Ugly advertising compliments this strategy because it further disconnects the salesman from his traditional footprint.

If you work with an in-house designer, the temptation is always to run with the creatives that look suitably beyond your own Photoshop hackjob capabilities.

Something I always tell any designer who works for me is that I don’t care for visual perfection or art school theory, I only want creatives that reach out of the page and slap the customer in the face. The best way to achieve this is to either be professionally very very awesome… or to use MS Paint.

Anything that falls in to the middle ground is boring, and unlikely to attract the eyeballs that a direct response marketer needs.

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• Make sure you check out the newly redesigned Finch Blogs, which is now a mesmerizing portal of lifestyle design and 3am brainfarts for the online professional.

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

Estate agents are masters of the art and will spare no blushes in the execution, even if you’re smart enough to know exactly what’s going on around you.

Here’s the situation. It’s 9am in the morning and the estate agent has arrived at your hotel. She tells you she has a few properties to view, and you eagerly jump in the back of her car to get started.

The first property is an absolute dump. Situated in the middle of no man’s land, no aircon, no transport connections and for the estate agent, no hope of a conversion. Of course, I play along nicely and express that it’d make a great home…for the right Thai family. Did she really think she could get me to a sign a contract for the exact property I wasn’t looking for? No, she didn’t, but she knew it would butter me up for what was to follow.

I vividly remember cruising from property to property, the specifications marginally improving to match my needs with each visit. By the end of the day, my girlfriend and I were exhausted and ready to retreat to our hotel room to mull over the options.

“But wait! There’s one more place I’d like you to see… I think it might suit what you’re looking for.”

Lo and behold, she hits us with the single best matching property of the day so far, and we’re both convinced that it’s right for our needs. The perfect size, all the aircon we could guzzle, fantastic sweeping views of Bangkok and a snooker table. A motherfucking snooker table. How did she know I’d fall in love at first sight with my own snooker table?

Maybe it had something to do with the email I’d sent a week ago casually stating what I’d really love in a dream apartment.

This leaves you to ask the question: Was she intentionally wasting my time with a bunch of crappy or “good, but just not quite there” properties? Or was it a fantastically executed tour-de-force of how to setup and nail a conversion?

No prizes for the right answer. Estate agents deal with people like me every day, and get many more opportunities to study the human behaviour than I do to prepare for the exploitation of it. I would tip my hat to her if I had one. It’s simply one of the most effective sales techniques in the book.

Use the power of contrast to create indecision and uncertainty based on the information you already have, before unleashing the ultimate solution that goes above and beyond all that came before. As long as your subject is suitably torn up to that point, there really is little he can do to fight the tactic. Besides, he’s getting what he wanted. Why put up a fight?

Okay, so how can we apply this art of contrasting to boost our affiliate campaigns?

The one commodity an estate agent has that an affiliate marketer rarely gets to exploit is time. While I was being driven around a city I had lived in for just 3 days in the back of somebody else’s car, an affiliate marketer has little “holding rights” over the subject. We have so many options to not listen to a sales pitch (exit the page, browse another tab, get distracted by our balls) that retaining attention becomes the most important stage of the process.

If we go back in time 18 months, you will recall a sweeping craze that involved dual-selling affiliate offers on the same page. Hey, if the reader is happy to buy an acai supplement for $39.95/month, why not hit them with an additional colon cleanse kit for $19.95/month? The upsell seems artificially cheaper after the customer has already invested in a more expensive item. Another valuable asset of contrasting.

Take one look at the GoDaddy checkout process to see the bastard child of Upsell in all his gory detail. Fuck you, GoDaddy. I only wanted a domain and now I’m sitting on 4 dedicated servers, an SSL certificate and enough Adwords vouchers to run my own charity. What part of No Thanks did you not understand?!

Even if we don’t intend to sell two items, it’s possible to sacrifice one as a way of accentuating the most attractive qualities in the item we do want to sell.

How many Plentyoffish members have heard of Match.com? My guess would be pretty much all of them. You can very easily throw up a landing page on POF that attempts to “sell” some basic and uninspiring benefits of joining Match. It’s not going to create much of a stir, but it does one thing very well. It butters up the reader for a more attractive proposition.

So when you hit them further down the page with a largely unknown, new and exciting dating offer, that offers a niche angle relevant to their needs (targeting a Divorced demographic with a Divorce niche offer, for example), you leverage the power of contrast to create a much greater incentive in the reader’s eyes. It’s very subtle, but super effective when executed well.

Dating is just one vertical of many that can be exploited in this way. My favourite angle is to develop the classic long sales pitch – notorious for shilling Clickbank products – only to give away something 100% free at the end. Gaming registrations, downloads, even zip submits if you can get the traffic cheaply enough.

Conversion rates soar in to the sky, particularly if you nail a demographic that is already keyed in to how these long sales letters are typically used.

One of the most effective landing pages I ever built was a flog that promoted $3 job search leads. It was ridiculously profitable because it leveraged the expected extravagance of a flog’s claims, and then gave away something for free when the user wasn’t expecting it. I drew my own conclusions that most of the success was actually down to the contrast from what other affiliates were doing.

Whatever the reason, a little contrast can go a long way. Take a lesson from the estate agents of the world!

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• Feel free to follow me on Twitter if sporadic occasionally marketing-related outbursts of drivel are your thing.

Probably not. But that’s because you speak English… like most affiliates. This is what happens when an affiliate tries to scale his campaigns in to a different country without bothering to translate them properly.

They end up reading like they’ve been crafted by Robert Patrick on a bad day.

You may snigger, but these type of creatives are not unusual at all. Many affiliates who dare to venture in to foreign markets are hopelessly aided by Google Translations and a tendency to fuck up even the simplest of sentences.

Google Translations is about as trustworthy as my old shortcuts in French class. I hold the proud distinction of passing a French oral exam despite my speech being littered with random outburts of German. How could I screw something up so badly, you ask? Very bloody easily, with the unreliable assistance of poorly programmed word-for-word translation software.

If you want your ad creatives to look genuine, and not thrown together with the style of a madlib machine, it’s important to take your translations seriously. I would suggest you check in to One Hour Translation for small jobs, or hire yourself a cheap translator on CraigsList if you like your outsourcing to be more personal.

Pro Tip: Hire the best translator for the job. This isn’t a power trip. Try not to allow your judgment to be clouded by 17 year old Macedonian school girls who claim “Of course, I can speak fluent Japanese…you look so cute!“. You think I’m joking? Spend 10 minutes recruiting for jobs on CraigsList and you’ll feel distinctly more ordinary for the effort.

It’s important to translate your creatives correctly, not only to drive a greater CTR, but to keep your aura of professionalism in tact.

I’ve heard several horror stories of companies refusing to pay for leads and sales that were delivered legitmately, simply because the ad creatives were poorly constructed in a foreign language. It harms the brand, they claim. I’d be inclined to agree. Though refusing to pay the previous leads strikes me as a little draconian. A slap on the wrist and a “you naughty boy, you” should have been enough. But alas, these situations can be avoided by putting care in to your ad copy.

Let’s say you have the best creatives, translated in to pitch perfect lingo that the natives can understand. What is the next step for getting a campaign profitable in a foreign market?

I can’t stress highly enough the importance of cultural relevance.

Once upon a time, I submitted a Jewish dating ad with the headline “Girlfriend For Christmas?”. It wasn’t until about 4 days later that I felt, for the first time in my life, sufficiently more stupid than a Facebook intern that I would quit my bitching over disapprovals. For a few hours, at least.

Having run dating ads in almost every continent, I can safely say that the tone, language and imagery of a profitable campaign will vary drastically across the board. But, yes, if you were wondering, boobs are still king.

If you’re advertising to Hong Kong or Taiwan, it makes absolutely no sense to flood your ad imagery with scantily clad hobags of the American Pie realm. Different countries have different perceptions of beauty. And although dating throws up some of the biggest differences in culture, there are examples to be found in practically every vertical under the sun.

Let’s say you’re advertising an e-cigarette offer. The difference in tone between advertising to midwest America and the center of Amsterdam is going to be quite severe. As somebody who has sampled both of those parts of the world, I often wish for the two cultures to share a dinner party together where I could watch as a fly on the wall.

The media in each region portrays a vastly different image of smoking. If you approach your Netherlands campaign with the wording of a Midwest state dweller who knows only what he sees on Oprah, your ads are probably going to be met with a lot of confused Dutch stares. Perception, in advertising, is everything!

It’s important to approach your international ads with just as much patience as you would with a domestic campaign. If an offer doesn’t convert after 6000 impressions, that doesn’t mean an entire country has spoken. I only cracked the Singaporean gaming market after learning how to exclude Andrew “The Impression Whore” Wee from my targeting. Patience and perseverance are pretty much par for the course in any kind of Facebook marketing these days.

I also have to point out that dating offers designed specifically for the native country regularly outperform those that have simply been opened up to the new market and translated across with haste. I can’t pinpoint why, but it probably has something to do with a better understanding of the culture. Be sure to test all your options before confining another campaign to the scrapheap.

What can’t be argued is that there are still TONS of opportunities to launch profitable campaigns outside the popular trifecta of USA/UK/Can. There are times where I cry myself to sleep that I never took French class seriously. If you have the knowledge of a second language up your sleeve, what are you waiting for? Use it!

And if not? I have about 47 bilingual Macedonian schoolgirls that you’re welcome to borrow*

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• If you’re looking for a network to serve your international campaigns, EWA has an insane selection to choose from. Last time I checked, they had 580+ dating offers from practically every corner of the world. And that’s just dating. I run traffic through EWA daily. For all the outrageous Eagleisms popping up on Twitter – and in banner spaces on sites like this – you can’t knock what they do. The hype is justified by a mighty solid network that cares about it’s affiliates. Get registered here.

• If you’re not already a member 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 – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

* JOKE. Seriously, this is a respectable blog.

You might think boobs are just… boobs. Squashy mounds of goodness that sit at the heart of the WickedFire ecosystem. But actually, boobs are much more than that. They are lethal weapons of mass destruction, and when dropped in the right places, you can practically stun your readers in to handing over their credit cards.

I wish I was making this shit up.

No matter how many times I split test the effectiveness of boobs in ad images (and conveniently, I try that tactic a lot), I keep getting the same results. The ads showing boobs consistently outperform those where cleavage is tucked safely out of sight.

This is understandable if you’re promoting dating offers, a vertical where physical appearances are likely to play a significant hand. But the CTR also jumps, with the help of a little cleavage, whether you’re promoting sexy lingerie, home business kits or even your aunty’s antique decking furniture.

Boobs sell. To both men and women.

For some first hand examples of just how well they can sell, check out the Facebook Ads presentation by Shoemoney last year. I’m not a regular reader of Shoe’s blog, but the video has some great insight.

I wish turning on the money tap could be as simple as collecting a stockpile of cleavage photos, but you can probably see the flaw in that plan. Facebook is not particularly friendly when it comes to approving ad creatives that draw attention to skin.

If you’re ready and waiting to upload 63 saucy images of low-cut tops and enormous G cups, think twice about the repercussions of doing so. Have you received an email like this?

Hi useless tool who pays us money,

The Facebook Ads Team

When I received this message a few months ago, I did what any fast thinking affiliate would do. I removed every last one of my dating campaigns and replaced them with adverts to raise money for the Japanese earthquake victims.

I feel dirty for admitting it. But the easiest way to preserve an account is to give Facebook a damn good reason to think twice before pulling the trigger. So to this day, my account looks like the workstation of a good samaritan, promoting a hundred valuable causes on budgets of $1/day.

Does this make me a bastard? Probably so.

The point I’d like to make is that sexing up your campaigns on Facebook is a risky strategy. As effective as boobs can be, you should definitely be focusing on the figure and suggestion of cleavage, rather than flat out shoving some titties in a jpeg.

I always try to aim for photos where the skin is completely hidden but the outline of the cleavage is plain to see. I don’t know what kind of science this is bordering on, possibly whatever science applies to generating a good CTR without getting banned for having a great CTR.

If you can’t bring yourself to risk banishment from Facebook, there are plenty of traffic sources that are much more lenient when it comes to allowing boobs. Christ, if you dare to venture on to a network like Traffic Junky, you’d be a square to even consider publishing an ad without full frontal nudity.

Perhaps the best advice I can offer is to actually consider why it is that boobs are so effective as marketing tools. It’s not the cleavage itself, but a subconscious switch in the user’s mind that responds to a trigger. There are many other visual clues you can use to produce this reaction, and many of them have nothing to do with sex.

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!

• 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 – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

“The network is scrubbing!”
“The quality of the traffic sucks…”
“Somebody stole my cookies!”

It’s important to realise that while some factors of a healthy conversion rate are beyond our control, we can still have a vice like grip on the others.

Over the last year, I’ve managed to muster some of the highest conversion rates in the dating vertical. And I’ve done it by simply losing less clicks than my competition. That sounds like a stupid statement, so allow me to explain.

For every product you promote, there are many different angles you can take in selling it to your customer. But the only angle that matters is the one that is specifically relevant to the needs of that customer.

The problem with a vertical like dating is obvious. Individual taste can cover such wildly different ends of the spectrum, you’d be fucking nuts to design a landing page that satisfies everyone. We can opt for laser targeted campaigns instead, and this gives us a much healthier conversion rate – but at the price of volume.

It’s always satisfying to run a mainstream high-volume campaign where your market isn’t restricted to a demo that has scaling difficulties from birth. These are usually the campaigns that turn on the money tap. To achieve them, you need to be able to restrict the number of conversions you lose through poor sales funneling.

Troubleshooting Your Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel is the one element that distinguishes you from every other marketer. We share access to the same stock images, the same offers and the same traffic sources. It’s only when we combine them together and create a sales funnel that the conversions are won or lost.

Fluidity Between Clicks – I’ve written about this before, but it never loses relevance. Your ad creatives must transition smoothly in to your landing page, and then serenely on to the offer. Bait and switch marketing can get you so far, but you have to deliver fluidity in your sales funnel to minimize the loss of conversions.

Let’s say your headline reads “Instantly Get More Messages On Dating Sites”

This grabs a good CTR by the balls, but without fluid transition in to a landing page that elaborates and successfully funnels the user in to your next action (presumably registering on a dating site), it’s going to be a letdown. You can’t use a headline like this and then say “…by joining Match free!“, without harming your original message.

If you’re going to bait and switch, your landing page has to deliver an effective transition between your clickbait headline and your end goal. So in this case, giving five quick reasons why joining Match will make you Mr. Popular would make the transition much smoother.

Understand “YES!” Psychology – The more often you can get your reader to subconsciously answer “Yes!” to rhetorical questions, the more likely they are to develop a positive frame of mind. A positive frame of mind is important because it inspires action. You don’t win sales by casting thoughts of reflection or indecision.

The single greatest burden that stops John Doe from becoming your next customer is his ability to conjure limitless excuses and alibis for not buying your shit. We are all blessed with an internal reasoning system. In order to justify spending money or time, we need to be sure that the positives far outweigh the negatives.

For many marketers, this knowledge gets lost with the illusion that simply catering a page for what the user clicked on will be enough to deliver the sale. It rarely is. A click shows no more than a fleeting interest. In order to convert that fleeting interest in to a paying customer, we have to satisfy their doubts and create a great deal of positive imagery.

To create positive imagery, you first need to cut down on the escape routes that every reader will instinctively seek. Cynicism is a killer for any landing page that doesn’t address specific concerns. If you fail to understand the primary concerns that would stop somebody from accepting your product as a solution, the game is over before it started.

Of course, some markets take less cornering than others. It doesn’t take much to sell a weight loss pill to a hopeless beached whale who believes any excuse that aligns with her disgust for the treadmill.

“Wouldn’t it be great to emphatically blast those pounds away and look fantastic before the summer?”

“Wouldn’t you pay a bargain $30 for exclusive possession of the superpill that works quicker than any diet to reverse YEARS of harmful habit? Is this a price worth paying to capture the body you thought had disappeared forever? We think the perfectly toned, healthy you is worth MUCH more than $30…”

By subconsciously answering yes to the enforcement of positive imagery, your reader’s brain is kept stimulated and occupied. More importantly, the common excuses and alibis – those deadly conversion killers – are never allowed to dictate the thought impulses.

The fastest way to apply this to your landing page is to make a simple change in the way that you look at them. Become the Scrooge of your target market. Brainstorm every last reason why a user would REFUSE to commit to your product, and then work backwards. Take the biggest excuses and blunt them with positive imagery.

In the example above, price is countered with scarcity (exclusive possession?) and the classic trick of asking what would be the much greater price of NOT buying the product.

It’s possible to spin almost any negative in to a positive. And that is the chief purpose of a good sales funnel. Kill indecision before indecision kills your conversion rates.

Monetize The Scraps – If you can’t get a conversion, get an opt-in. Failing all else, co-brand your landing page to add value to an existing site in your portfolio.

It struck me a few months ago that I’d been driving thousands and thousands of clicks to dating landing pages, and yet I’d never thought to co-brand them under the umbrella of the dating blog I already ran.

Sometimes the offer you’re promoting simply isn’t right for a certain kind of visitor. You can forget about that demographic entirely and accept the lost clicks, or you can attempt to monetize the scraps. This is possible either through a second upsell – “Well if you don’t want to join my dating site, how about an ebook to help you on the one you’re already on?” – or by co-branding your assets.

I figured that if I had a ton of clicks not converting in to sales, why not address it frankly on the page? You can post a simple notice saying that you’re sorry they didn’t want to join Site X, but you’d love for them to subscribe to your dating blog instead. Or to check out a different offer. Or to hand over their Amazon cookie. Whatever. There is no limit to what you can achieve with a little hustle and lateral thinking.

In conclusion… The best way to stop losing conversions is to remember that not every click comes from a user who thinks as you do. And for every impossibly low conversion rate, create additional value to monetize the sales that never were.

Recommended This Week

• 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 – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.

• 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. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

I’m not a huge fan of these tools, personally. I use them, but I wish they didn’t exist. There are a thousand copycats for every creative marketer who manages to find a formula that hits the sweet spot. The harm far outweighs the good when you’re in the small minority who actually pave the way for others to follow (and rip, and steal).

Regardless, the tools are out there. If you’re not going to use them, somebody else will. So I choose to use them. One of the things that strikes me most about the ads I see being published is the sheer weight that affiliates are placing on user attributes to promote their offers.

Here’s the thing. User attributes are like the holy grail of direct response marketing. If we don’t have them, our best laid marketing plans are metaphorical turds being launched in to a whirlpool. On a good day, something solid will come out the other side. On most days, that’s not going to happen.

But give an affiliate some user attributes and what do you know? He suddenly becomes the world’s most in-your-face marketer.

A perfect example of an affiliate ad relying 100% on user attributes would be this:

“Single, UK Male, Aged 23?” Followed by some drivel about why you’re in high demand to join whichever dating site is paying him the most.

I’ve received a few emails asking me to elaborate on a post I made a couple months ago highlighting this issue. So let me explain the problem with ads like the example above.

Firstly, they have no relevance. If I’m answering “YES!” to all three of these attributes, it doesn’t mean I give a damn about your new dating service. For all you know, I could be clicking in the hope that being 23 and thrust out the womb in the UK somehow entitles me to a free monkey spanker. Imagine my disappointment when I land on a default Match.com lander and see some cake-faced bint in her panties asking for any poor sod with a credit card. Wait, I’m 23 year old English stallion though? Where’s my VIP membership?

That’s right. It’s nowhere. Because you sold me a false dream. So now I’m going back to my Plentyoffish account, crying boohoo, and falling victim to a better marketer who realised that my attributes were worth more than a dynamic headline.

I’ve explained many times the importance of having an effective sales funnel that acts on your original message. By knowing that a user is 23 years old, single and from the UK…you actually have a great foundation to build on.

But calling out those attributes is like reciting a horoscope and expecting me to stand like a fucking meerkat with my notepad ready. I know Mystic Meg is a fraud. I know I can’t be the only Aquarius in the world who should be “paying special attention at the water cooler today because new love starts with S and the moon is changing” or some shit.

Yes, it pains me to say it. But most victims of our marketing ploys have cottoned on. It’s going to take more than simply reading them a horoscope to get them to do what we want.

What you need to do is let your marketing create a picture that appeals to this demographic, without giving the game away that you KNOW their frigging attributes.

I think the attribute targeting that boggles my mind most is the “smoking” card. Do you really think that you can sell a service in one swoop by claiming that Match.com is looking for more single smokers? I mean, seriously? A smarter move would be to say NOTHING about what you know, use a nice stock image with a woman taking a puff from a cigarette and casually mention that you’ll find women who cater exactly to your lifestyle by joining Dating Site X.

Maybe even use a testimonial with a scorching hot female – miraculously the same age as the user, and from the same town (WTF?) – who happens to be enjoying a smoke while beckoning your loins forth. This kind of subtle marketing sends a message to the user without giving the game away that your marketing is actually a lot dumber than he has any reason to suspect.

Building fictional selling points in a service might grab you a few extra leads, but the long term damage is much more severe. You can’t sustain those leads when you’re kicked off the offer for poor quality.

I have several direct relationships with dating services who have been so happy with the quality of my leads that they’ve taken me on personally and offered me payouts beyond anything I can get with CPA networks. If I have one tip for developing relationships like these, it’s to keep your main sell simple.

I think it boils down to grasping the single biggest selling point of the service. Ultimately, the final shove down your sales funnel has to be an acknowledgment that the service IS exactly what it is. If you bait and switch, you better have humble intentions of scaling because you’re gonna get shot down sooner rather than later.

Exploiting what we know about the user is so important to a profitable campaign, and yet the art of subtlety seems to be lost on so many. It’s possible to grab a demographic by the balls without spitting out your bullet point list of desired attributes.

If you’re using landing pages, you have SO much opportunity to “divide and conquer” as I like to put it. I’ve seen many dating services publishing alternate landing pages aimed at niche markets – whether targeting by religion, race, age or location. And still, many affiliates choose to ignore them in favour of the manufactured selling points that bring them the highest CTR. These are the marketers who will drop first as competition increases and bid prices rise.

Once again, I’ve got to stress that so much of your success is going to depend on whether you treat this as a short or long term business. Our ability to target user attributes makes us an absolute Godsend for every single company that doesn’t know what we know. You can either use that advantage to game traffic, or you can use it to show the kind of stunning returns that will have companies paying higher and higher to retain your services.

Recommended This Week:

• 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. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.