Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

How To Make Money On Somebody Else’s Forum (Part 1/2)

Sep 02 2009

One of the toughest tasks in affiliate marketing is finding targeted traffic that doesn’t break the bank. No doubt about it. It’s tougher than installing a flog, tougher than researching ‘o chosen keywords of the fat, and a whole lot tougher than scouring Affbuzz.

I see a lot of people exploring PPC platforms as if they’re the center of the CPA universe. You’ve got another bunch of guys who will spend Monday to Friday resubmitting disapproved ads on Facebook. But what’s the end goal? Surely it’s to find targeted traffic, right? To find traffic that backs out. Well, if you step away from those popular marketing hubs, you can find a lot of untapped traffic sources where the costs are still low.

Forum marketing, for me, is one of the most cost effective methods of reaching a targeted audience. The clue is in the name itself. It’s a forum of people who have already registered on a site because they’re passionate or interested in the subject matter.

Qualifying traffic is so important. If you find the right niche forum, you’ve already qualified that traffic. You’ve simply gotta find an offer that catches the imagination of the crowd at hand.

I hate to mention his name again. I really need to branch out, I know. But for this post, I’m gonna need to go back to my favourite CPA niche of the last 3 months.

So I was on this Michael Jackson forum…

And this was about a month after his death. It was a booming community with I can’t even remember how many active members. Something like 20,000.

It got me thinking. Every single email in that forum database has a relation. Nobody’s going to sign up at a Michael Jackson forum, when he’s still alive, without having some genuine affection for the plastic fantastic himself.

That’s 20,000 targeted emails. You know what else I like about Michael Jackson’s fans? The fact that they’ll bend over backwards and take one for the team if you tell them that filling in your unrelated zip submit will bring his black ass back to life.

I didn’t go that far, obviously. A man’s gotta have morals.

This is where monetizing a niche forum really excels though. If I asked you to write down three character traits that you’d associate with a Michael Jackson forum owner – what would you put?

Obsessed?
Devoted and black?
Middle aged cuckold fanboy?

…how about CPA marketer?

Yeah, didn’t think so. Most niche forum owners are there for the community factor, it’s as simple as that. Their payment comes in the form of posts, threads, new members and the self-satisfaction that comes from having a bold fucking username.

But what most forum owners don’t realize is that there’s a lot of money to be had in their forum database. And where they don’t realize it themselves, we as affiliate marketers, have an open window to hop in and monetize their database for them.

I know for a fact that if you email a mid-sized forum owner with a simple “Hey, nice board. I was wondering if you could drop your members a sponsored email? Willing to send $300 to your Paypal today.” Most will bite your damn hand off. A typical forum owner won’t stop to consider why it is that you can afford to spend $300 on a long-forgotten function in his vBulletin admin panel. A typical forum owner won’t care. You know why? Server costs! Bandwidth costs! In this case, probably Jacko memorabilia costs!

Straight up money will sway the large majority of forum owners. It beats the slow trickle of Adsense clicks, and it gets them thinking: “What if he wants to send ANOTHER email tomorrow?” “I could make money posting his links on vBulletin!” You know the drill. People like quick cash. Most of you probably making a living on the fantasy.

Forum owners value their sites less than CPA marketers. A forum owner, more often than not, will judge value by active members. How thriving is his community? If he’s got 100,000 registered members, but only 100 of them actually post – he’s likely to think that anybody with business acumen is going to also judge his community on those same factors.

But if I’m looking at a Michael Jackson forum of 20,000 registered members, my eyes are firmly on the emailing possibilities. I could care less how many middle aged Californian housewives are posting their top ten tracks in the Off Topic Room.

If you have a CPA offer paying out at $1.60…and you’re converting a mere 1% of that original memberlist – that’s still $320 revenue. All from jumping on the sack of somebody else’s hard work. Start looking at more realistic conversion percentages and it’s easy to see how an affiliate marketer can afford to pay a nice fee to the forum admin for the privilege.

This should get a few ideas flowing for monetizing niche forums out there. I’m gonna split the post in half and reveal how to actually do it without screwing up like a complete retard next time. Happy hunting.

Pro tip: Don’t try this on Wickedfire.

The Shit I’ve Learnt Not To Do On Facebook

Aug 29 2009

One of the first blogs I read before moving in to affiliate marketing was a Facebook piece over on Nicky Cakes. It explained how and why I was such a retard for failing to make money with Facebook.

I realize now, about two years too late, that Facebook Advertising was the genuine shit back in the day. Right before the guidelines started warping in to something resembling an affiliate hate list. You could put in a half day’s work and see an enormous mountain of cheap clicks. Clicks that produced conversions. One thing Facebook hasn’t lost over time is the quality of it’s traffic.

It’s a shame we can’t go back to 2007 and jump on the gravy train as if we’d seen it coming. I’d have jumped on some acai berries while I was there. But the reality? It’s 2009 and advertising on Facebook requires some actual marketing knowledge. You can go and read over Nicky Cakes’ Facebook tutorials, but as relevant as they may have been at the time, this industry swallows up profitable tactics fast.

Anyway, if you want expert advice on how to get rich using Facebook – don’t be looking at me. It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve managed to troubleshoot my way out of the red and get some profitable campaigns on the burn. I’m currently in the process of scaling my campaigns and I’m quite happy to see them doubling my money.

But having thrown a festival sized tank of shit at the wall in the hope that a marketing strategy would stick, I can hopefully offer some advice for what NOT to do. This could be a long one.

Don’t advertise on Facebook with the Google mindset.

I don’t think enough people talk about the difference between marketing on various search engines, let alone the change in dynamics that comes with marketing on a social media site.

I was traditionally a search guy for a long time. All of my income came from search based PPC. When I decided to shift a campaign across to Facebook for the first time, it tanked embarrassingly.

This is how it goes for most people, whether they’ve got the modesty to admit it or not. Makes sense when you think about it, though. It’s much easier to reach the right demographic of people on Google. Christ, you’re bidding on keywords that consumers are actually hammering in to their browsers. If you can’t find the right audience there, well, maybe you need to go back to the drawing board.

Facebook is entirely different. You’re not bidding on keywords that people are actively searching for – rather you’re serving your ad to a certain demographic and hoping that they bite the bullet. Vague targeting is punished with a high CPC and impressions that have dried up by dawn.

My first mistake was in spreading the net too wide and advertising to as many users as I could filter in to my campaign. This, obviously, ended in tears and a very low clickthrough rate.

Sample size: 800,000
CTR: 0.05
Impressions: Not many without breaking the bank.

If you’re using Google, you get in to the mindset of trying to reach as many people as possible with your relevant keywords. Perfectly fine on Adwords. But if you try to target everybody who *might* match your demographic on Facebook, you’re going to collect a lot of wasted impressions.

I only started achieving success on Facebook when I reduced my ad target sizes to under 50,000. I’ve managed to scale upwards, but even now, I don’t like advertising to groups larger than 100,000. You need close control over the keywords that your profiles are matched to.

Do your research before you start bombarding the damn interns. Head on over to Microsoft Adlabs and put the tools to use. The Demographic Prediction tool is excellent for laying down the first building blocks of any well targeted Facebook campaign.

Enter the URL of the offer landing page (at the advertiser end, not your own), and you’ll be presented some nice starting points for targeting your campaign.

This gives you a rough idea of the demographics that are already visiting the advertiser’s site. Never a good idea to judge success on patterns as flimsy as this but we’ll take it as a starting point.

One of the areas where I see a lot of marketers failing is in taking the bigger percentage. Acai berries as a prime example. How long did it take for some of you to catch on that it wasn’t just women who were searching for acai? I’d be seeing landing pages everywhere with twenty something chicks showing off their new flat stomachs. How many of those banners featured guys? This despite the acai market having a 30/70 guys to girls split according to some networks. You might run with the 70 percent, but the 30 percent is pretty fucking significant when you’re talking about a billion dollar booming industry.

With Facebook, in particular, it’s possible to find a niche within a niche just by targeting the smaller crowd of users that everybody else ignores. A bit like Canada. Why oh why did I spend 4 months scratching around with doomed USA-based Facebook campaigns when I don’t need 13 million fucking conversions to get rich?

Anyway, moral of the story. Get to know your target market. I mean, really well. Take whatever keywords you can relate to your product and plug them in to the filtering system. This leads on to probably my most expensive mistake.

Your message has to be consistent on Facebook.

All pieces of the jigsaw have to come together. You can quite easily drive traffic to your site with a headline like “These Acai Berries Are Free”. But if your landing page headline says “Well, actually they’re not. But now that you’re here…”

This is expensive because it’ll get you a lot of clicks but a distinct lack of conversions in the column that matters. Whatever advert you place on Facebook, you have to realize that people clicking it are CHANCE clickers. They didn’t search for your shit. You threw it in their face with a headline that caught their attention. You’ve gotta make your landing page instantly sell whatever x factor it was that brought your average Facebook junkie to the party in the first place.

Facebook traffic does convert. We all know that it converts because people have built a living and a future on this one single damn platform. But you have to keep your message consistent.

Specific keywords used to filter users.
Ad title.
Ad image.
Landing page content.
Final offer page content.

They all need to have something in common, or you better know your demographic like it’s your best friend.

Facebook is all about trial and error. You’ve probably heard this so many times that it’s lost it’s meaning. And no, it might not be as easy to make instaprofit as it was a couple of years back. But the industry moves on and we all roll with it.

I’ve established some successful campaigns on Facebook over the last few months that have kinda made me reconsider the most profitable ways of marketing online. I might add a few posts of useful tips I’ve picked up along the way. I might not. Just remember that it only takes one successful Facebook campaign to pay for the dollars you’ve lost on the shit that never worked out.

Are you serious about advertising on Facebook?

Whether you’re using CPM or CPC – the benefits of the latest Facebook Ads Manager are pretty damn obvious. Automate the process of submitting ads and create thousands of variations within a single hammer of the Go button. The Facebook Ads Manager is a brilliant solution for those who care about time and want to maximize their profitability on the ‘Book. Get it now.

Acai Berry Flavoured Shit Hits The Fan In Illinois

Aug 20 2009

Another day, another dose of acai berry backlash in the press.

I was taking a read over Wickedfire when I caught sight of this thread. It seems that the Attorney General in Illinois has decided to take firm action against acai berry floggers. This news is particularly significant as it involves both the advertisers and a couple of well known affiliates.

Read the article here: Attorney General Madigan Files Suit Against Acai Berry Companies

Now there’s a bunch of issues that come to light from this news. Firstly, you’ve got the whole drama of fake celebrity endorsements.

Not to criticize fellow affiliate marketers too heavily, but if you buy a domain with Oprah’s name attached – and promote a rebill as if it fell out of her fat ass – you deserve all the trouble you get. I’ve invented my fair share of sales stories, but I’ve stopped short of imaginary Hello magazine endorsements. It’s just a legal minefield. I’m a pretty strong advocate of aggressive marketing. But that’s not aggressive marketing. It’s barely even marketing.

If Viagra Plus posted my smiling face and promised the world “As Seen On Finch’s Bedside Table”, I’d be pretty fucking heartbroken. Somebody else’s business is somebody else’s business. Sure, half of America is dumb and willing to buy anything Oprah shills on her talk show. But you can’t go sticking your wang in other people’s pies. Fake celebrity endorsements are the sort of harmful and misleading advertising that are ultimately gonna come back to haunt this industry. For some, clearly, it already has.

The second issue raised in the lawsuit – and arguably the bigger problem for most affiliates – is the action threatened against flogs. Most media publications have been pretty slow to “get” what a flog is all about. But in the latest round of lawsuits, the AG Lisa Madigan has gone out of her way to directly implicate these kinds of websites.

No doubt, widespread legal action against floggers would dump the cat amongst the pigeons. Not just because the acai berry market is so dominated by this kind of marketing, but because it’s spreading so rapidly to other niches and verticals.

Flogging for bizopps, flogging for anti-ageing…Christ, even flogging for dating (Try it, you’d be surprised!). If this form of marketing becomes a process of walking the legal tightrope, we’re going to see a lot of movement and a lot of top earners rethinking their marketing ways. Personally, I see that as a good thing. A flog, when you break it down, is pretty basic and doesn’t require much “level of entry”.

So what are we going to see next? If advertisers get hit for using fake celebrity endorsements – where does their next logical step take them?

How about…ACTUAL celebrity endorsements?

It’s happening already. I got a tip-off from one of my affiliate managers today about a muscle-building rebill that is apparently enjoying quite a lot of success on Advaliant. The catch? It’s genuinely endorsed by Stephan Bonnar. If you don’t know, Bonnar is a hulked up dude from UFC who looks like the sort of wet dream the target market for the offer would have.

Most of the top advertisers can afford to pay for a genuine celebrity endorsement. And I think this is what we’re going to start to see in the future. The celebrities don’t have to be A-List. As long as the name rings a bell in the consumer’s head, that’s all that matters. Credibility only has to be subtle to be effective.

Affiliate marketers have been running wild with fake celebrity testimonials for as long as I can remember now. The best way to sustain the tactic in the long term is to take the method and make it legit. Pluck a C-List celebrity out of obscurity and create some consumer trust.

If you’re sitting there now, scouring Google Image search for Oprah pics to throw in to your flog, stop for a second and think about the long term repercussions of what you’re doing. You’re not really marketing. You’re making up bullshit lies to sell a bullshit product. I can live with the bullshit product. But trademark infringements and slinging on somebody else’s rep – that’s no way to skin the cat.

Good luck to those affected by the latest round of lawsuits. I’m kinda anticipating a scapegoat to be made at some point in the near future. Best to comb your facts from your fiction to make sure that scapegoat doesn’t become you.

For clarity, I do not use Viagra Plus.