2009 | Finch Sells

You Can Earn $XXXX/Day On Twitter! Only 56 Kits Remaining

Jul 23 2009

Tweet, tweet.

It’s been a while since I posted an update, and with good reason. I’ve been a little preoccupied with things going down outside the world of affiliate marketing – and I’ve also been away at a festival. Anybody go to Latitude? I reckon I’ve copped the Swine Flu, you know. Sniffling all over WordPress this morning.

Anyway, it was the first proper break I’d taken since I visited Amsterdam last year (now THAT was a break). One of the scariest things that dawned on me was simply how pivotal my own presence is to my business.

I know some guys have set up offices and started taking on employees to handle the day to day chores of affiliate marketing – not me. It’s a solo effort, with a helping hand from sub-continent article scrummagers.

But in a situation where I’m several fields and a thousand sheep away from the nearest Internet connection, it becomes a major concern to be running any significant PPC campaigns. Anybody got any tips for dealing with personal vacations? I’d be happy to hear them and it might just save my phone battery in future.

Before I left, I decided that I needed to keep some kind of income ticking over. And that brings me to the topic that I was going to talk about here: raping Twitter for cash.

Unless you’ve been living under a brick for the last few months, you’ve noticed that Twitter is going from strength to strength. The reality is that when an online trend emerges, affiliate marketers will jump the fuck over it until it’s milked so hard for cash that there’s no sense in running it anymore.

Twitter is a relatively untapped source for affiliate marketers. I say that in full knowledge that some guys are creaming enough profit to buy every reader of this blog a luxury yacht. But in terms of how saturated Google, Facebook and the usual suspects are – it’s new and fresh. That’s not going to last for long so if you want to get ahead of the pack, you’ve gotta be moving faster. Simple as that.

Twitter automation is rapidly becoming one of my favourite methods for promotion online. Not least because it’s free and relatively easy to slip through the net. I’m not going to write up a step by step guide of what you need to do because the quicker the entry level gets lowered, the quicker it becomes another Facebook.

Now while I have no doubt that peeps are making money with rebill offers on Twitter, the quickest way to see Twitter’s earning potential is to find a relevant email submit and start thinking demographics. An email submit is dirt easy to make tidy cash from if you’re targeting the right people, at the right time, with the right talk.

I thought I’d wait before posting this so that I didn’t blow anybody’s campaign out of the water – my own included. But take Michael Jackson for an example.

Following his death, you could find his name trending on the front page of Twitter for over 3 weeks. I was seeing hundreds of Tweets every MINUTE with his name or some variation in the text.

I put in requests on several affiliate networks for new offers with Michael Jackson’s name attached. Didn’t really matter what the offer was. As long as it had some kind of incentive for the average MJ fan (free collection, free t-shirt, whatever), I wanted to promote it.

This was one of my first experiments with Twitter. I opened a new account manually, threw up a few tweets, then dumped a link to my offer with something like this:

“lol i love Michael Jackson, #MJ rules! Just got his collection for free, check it out: [My dirty aff link]”

Guys, it helps when you’re creating these fake Twitter accounts to grow a pair of boobs and act like you’re 16 all over again. People respond to barbie doll whores getting freebies.

This was a tiny test to see whether anybody would click through. That single tweet generated 3 clicks to the offer and lo and behold: a conversion. Marketing on Twitter is free so we’re talking 100% profit here.

Now it’s all good to be able to sit at your desk and send out manual tweets for 8 hours while posing as a teenage girl. Personally, too much of that would detract from my larger goals. And it’d probably give me issues on a worrying level.

The second I saw the conversion, my intentions immediately switched to automating the living shit out of the process and scaling it up to leap on the Michael Jackson trend with tweets firing out left right and center.

To do this, you really need automation software.

You may have noticed the Tweet Adder banner at the top of the page. It’s not just a token gesture to fund my next pint of Stella. It’s a product that I genuinely recommend as a brilliant way of automating the entire process of marketing on Twitter.

If you can setup a whole bunch of accounts and start nailing your target markets with relevant email submits, you’re in the money.

I’m not going to discuss the potential of dating offers, work from home opportunities or anything else because you should be thinking that already.

As with any form of automation software, a measured approach works best. There are factors to consider when you get involved with marketing in this fashion, but it’s an option. An option that many guys are making a lot of money from at the moment. The learning curve is pretty much hinged on how quickly you can learn to scale – and how effectively you can avoid the ban.

Check out Tweet Adder to see if it gets the imagination frothing.

Anti-Aging For Pets: It’s On Like Donkey Kong

Jul 08 2009

Okay, what the fuck is this?

I decided to check in to Advaliant after a couple of months of not running any of their offers. I managed to stumble across this absolute gem of an offer. I can only assume that it’s geo-targeted to America.

The niche? Anti-aging…for pets.

I shit you not. Check the link.

Petipaaws: Your Pet’s Gonna Live 30% Longer, Or Ya Money Back

Click here if you ain’t American.

I’m sorry but this takes the rebill business model to new lows. I can half understand the principle behind an anti-aging product for, you know, humans. Because Average Joe might just notice that he feels ten years lighter after popping a few pills. But your pet dog? How’s woof woof for a testimonial?

My favourite part of the landing page is this:

Anti-aging for dogs

Try it risk free? YOU MEAN IF I POP THEM MYSELF MY PUPPY WILL LIVE FOREVER?

The thing that really boggles my mind is the idea that this product is actually being packaged in to a monthly rebill. I’m guessing the customer simply pays until his pet cops it, then cancels his credit card to get out of the monthly charges.

picture-10

Please, somebody.

Define the criteria of a successful 30 day free trial when it comes to pets and anti-aging. Do I assume that if Rocky is still wagging his tail after four weeks, and still eating as per the norm, it’s been a raging success and he’s going to live forever?

I don’t know.

I do know that I’m going to promote it.

It’s shit hot. 35 bucks per victim guaranteed.

Grow Some Balls…Close The Sale

Jul 06 2009

I was speaking to some dude pushing Resveratrol the other night. He seemed paralyzed with fear that somebody had performed a WHOIS lookup on his anti-aging domain. The woman decided to drop him an email about the product, asking whether it really worked, what else she could do to look like she’d fallen back in to 1998, and a bunch of other shit. Well the affiliate (who’s a decent guy), crapped bricks and saw the idea of replying as a marketing sin.

First of all, it’s always a good idea to purchase private registration on any domain that you intend to use for affiliate marketing. I learnt the hard way when my very first domain for a Google bizopp was uncovered. Inevitably, my email was leaked to a bunch of complaint filing dinosaurs who’d make the Warrior Forum look appealing in comparison. I still get requests for refunds emailed to me. It’s a pain in the ass. Go for private registration – there’s normally a coupon floating around for Name Cheap which gives you a couple of dollars off. Use it and save yourself the bother of forwarding 500 emails a day to a sketchy advertiser.

Anyway, it seems that some affiliates are quite happy to promote a product to the stratosphere on their blogs and flogs. But when it comes to dealing with customer inquiries face-to-face, they freeze up and their hard sell deserts them. I think it’s probably a guilt issue. This guy is a solid affiliate turning over a lot of revenue, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me that he hadn’t dealt with prospects directly.

Nobody promoting a rebill wants to personally persuade a customer in to signing up for an offer that’s going to flatter to deceive at the very best. The way I see it, if you’re going to promote a rebill, you might as well be good at doing it. Grow some balls and close the sale before another affiliate does it for you. When a customer innocently mistakes you for an expert in your field, do some Wikipedia research, give them the time of day, and complete the sale.

I’m not actively promoting rebills at the moment, but when I have in the past, I’ve always placed a contact form on my site. Some affiliates see this as asking for trouble. I see it as opening as many avenues possible for sealing a sale.

More recently, I’ve gone one step further and added a phone number to some sites. I realize a lot of affiliates would never agree in a million years to reveal their first names let alone a phone number that works. It’s just a recipe for 24/7 distractions and angry misled customers, right?

Well, not exactly. You can snap up a virtual phone number on Skype for something ridiculous like a few bucks per month. Setup an individual account for your site and get yourself on Elance.

Hire somebody who sounds remotely professional. Give them a simple script of dialogue. Get them to record a message and use it as your Skype voicemail (doesn’t have to be Skype). What’s important is that you design the voicemail message to act as a call to action.

When somebody stumbles across your site and decides to get in touch over the phone, your voicemail will specifically request that they leave their email address. It might even push them on to a second tier website (if you’re smart, this website will be the sort of thing that an Adwords intern would slap you for). You might not think that such a long-winded tactic is very likely to accumulate a profitable number of leads, but go try it.

Most people won’t bother because there’s too many stages attached.

Get a Skype number? “Can’t be bothered.”

Hire somebody on Elance? “Too much work.”

Chase up leads? “Who do you think I am?”

Truth be told, you probably don’t need to bother. But if you start thinking outside the box, you can be more than the one trick pony that most affiliates are when it comes to capturing leads.

Offline marketing opens up a whole new world of untapped potential. A phone number can go a long way when you wade in to those waters.

Ever found yourself staring at Gumtree or Craig’s List thinking “if only I could get my wang in to that”? Well maybe you could if you stopped thinking linkbait and started thinking individual leads and individual needs.