2009 | Finch Sells

To Flog Or Not To Flog

Jun 04 2009

It’s rare to read a blog that’s actually informative in this age of rehashed dribble and top ten lists. So props to Jay Weintraub for posting an excellent summary of the notorious flog. This guy knows his stuff.

Anyway, the flog. The fake blog. The “How I Lost 50 lbs Using XXX & Made a Website So You Could Read About It” method of promotion. It’s been around for a while and you’ve probably seen various adaptions of it.

I’ve often said that creating a convincing testimonial is one of the very best ways of persuading somebody to buy a product. Creating a fictional story of success is a brilliant catch to the reader and it’s a proven performer in the market – whether it clashes with your advertising principles or not.

Recently my attention’s been drawn to a number of sketchy lawsuits and legal complaints. First we had the threat of legal action against a bunch of fake acai blogs, and then we had the Texas GA taking non too kindly to a Google offer (which was pretty much a scam by the sounds of it). I’m so confident as to say that jack shit will happen to the affiliates who were involved in these altercations, but that’s not to say that we shouldn’t start thinking about the way that we’re presenting our offers.

I think a lot of the criticism directed at flogs is justified. From a purely moral perspective, it’s hard not to feel just a little bit scummy about endorsing a product that’s as likely to result in miracle weight loss as a Shoemoney breakfast.

I think the key to the continued success of the flog is to treat it as a product recommendation rather than a product testimonial. And of course, to flood that shit in disclaimers.

If you create a fictional story explaining how Mr. X lost XXX lbs using Product X, you’re positioning yourself as a lame duck for the day that the FTC decides to clamp down on false advertising. You’re misleading people. Plain and simple.

If, however, you write a blog by Mr. X, who lost XXX lbs, and wants to help others do the same, AND happens to have heard good things about Product X – it’s a recommendation rather than a testimonial. No worse than any of the thousands of fake review sites out there, and no worse than an infomercial on Channel 5 at 6am.

For a dieting flog, you can still have your personal success story of how Mr. X lost XXX lbs with a bunch of supplements he ordered online. Well, he doesn’t know if that offer is still around anymore but he’s heard that THIS one is even better…

Now, there’s still a degree of lying involved. But fundamentally, you haven’t directly implied that you have any experience of the product that the customer is going to be buying. There’s a fictional story attached, but it’s far too flimsy for serious legal action to be taken. What are they going to pin it on? The fact that you didn’t use to be a fatty?

Hey, if you’re absolutely determined to stay within the letter of the law. Go out and find a former fatty, get them to put their name to your blog, and go nuts.

As with most forms of marketing, there’ll always be some idiots who abuse the system. You’ll get people who don’t stop at false advertising. They’ll steal your berries from you, and your colon kit too.

Since I took up affiliate marketing full-time, I’ve become extremely cautious of the pages I’m sending traffic to. If I’m going to be making five figures from a fake blog, I want to be extra careful that I’m keeping it on the right side of the law. That means I’ve started crafting my sites in a way that they’re persuasive without ever falsely promoting a product. Still full of bullshit, yes. But the beach whale who stocked up on acai pills because of my site can’t come back to me and ask why her bacon drapes are still in tact. It was her choice to start popping them.

I think a lot of guys out there are simply misinformed. Can you really blame so many affiliates from publishing such misleading flogs, when the number one piece of advice for new affiliates is to “go look at existing sites”?

That’s exactly what I did when I started. I saw a bunch of flogs and started marketing aggressively in the same way.

Even when I talk to my affiliate managers, they regularly tell me that Offer XXXX would work great with a flog or a fake newspaper page. I’m actively encouraged to go out and build these things – and I invariably do. The flog is one of the best converting methods of promoting an offer. It doesn’t have to be a breach of advertising standards if you get your shit together and think about what you’re putting online.

Truth be told, whether it belongs here or not, the flog is going to be a prominent part of online marketing for a long time to come. As long as people are stupid enough to believe whatever they read.

Tapping In To The Right Buyer Mindset

Jun 02 2009

One of the big questions I see on affiliate marketing forums is how best to promote a product. I don’t believe that anybody making serious money is going to walk you through every last step necessary to trace down that answer. So you’re going to have to use your own testing. But it’s important, if nothing else, to appreciate the variety of marketing tactics out there.

Here are the main methods of promotion:

1. Classic sales letter

It’s been around as long as time, and it can still be as effective as it was on day one. Basically, you write a long ass letter throwing every last benefit of the product in the reader’s face – and explaining why it’s right for them. Popular practice includes bundling in freebies, capturing traffic with an opt-in and slowly lowering the price of the product – while increasing the value – as the page progresses.

2. Squeeze advertisement

Some landing pages are no more than large graphics with a bunch of bullet point benefits and a prominent call to action. These can be great for campaigns where you need to maximize the exposure to an offer – while still pre-selling with an intermediate page.

3. Review sites

Massively popular. Massively successful. It’s a wonder anybody takes review sites seriously with the sheer number of affiliates exploiting them in the market. You pick a couple of offers that you want to promote, you write positive reviews, you pack it all together as an expert authority review site. The success of these pages illustrates just how important the pre-sell really is.

4. The flog

Arguably the most effective promotion method in affiliate marketing. A flog is the name attributed to a “fake blog”. The best form of marketing in 2009 bar none is viral. Where the flog excels is in taking our consumer-to-consumer relations and exploiting them to develop trust in a product. Of course, the flog opens up a can of legal worms with false advertisement. So remember your disclaimers and don’t set out to scam.

5. Email opt-in

There are affiliate marketers who will dedicate their entire craft to harvesting emails and building lists. PPC, for them, is often focused on getting the email address rather than making a sale. It’s sensible when you think about it. How many people are going to snap up a product straight away? Even with a great offer and a greater pre-sell, you’re probably looking at 10% max. The email marketer prefers to have a POTENTIAL sale for life by opting-in the reader’s email. A lead for a lead if you will.

6. Direct linking

Conversions are typically much lower with direct linking. By sending the user through to the offer without pre-selling to them on an intermediate page, you’re hedging your bets that they’re in the mindset to buy. To have a hope of making this successful, you need killer ad copy and an offer that sells itself. You also need a strong grasp of tracking because most keywords WILL lose you money.

I’m of the opinion that ALL of these methods will work with ANY vertical – if you execute them correctly. Most people don’t, most people won’t.

Truth be told though, there’s nothing new or exciting about the tactics listed above. They’re all exploited to the limits of their potential. The best opportunities for success, in my opinion, come from combining the methods together. You’ve got to understand the attitude of a consumer before embracing that.

One of the most important skills in selling – not just online, but everywhere – is qualifying the customer. You have to understand that sales talk is everywhere. Even though you might THINK you’ve written the most convincing glowing review for a product under the sun, it’s likely that the customer has already earmarked another review to be read straight after yours. Why do you think we see conversions hitting 10% rather than 90%?

If you really want to get the biggest bang for your buck, you have to start branching out and aggressively pursuing every last customer that stumbles upon your landing page.

Whenever I’m promoting an offer, I like to consider the thought-cycle of the customer as he or she reads through the page. What’s going on in their minds? Don’t just think about the benefits that you’re throwing in their faces. That’s how a retard fails. More importantly, you have to ask yourself what’s STOPPING the customer from following through with that purchase.

So let’s take a review page as an example. You’ve just written a glowing article of how these acai berries really are the shit hottest acai berries going for 1.97 including shipping. Now what?

It’s a fact that most consumers don’t just like to read reviews. They like to compare reviews.

Don’t settle for leaving your sales pitch at a 10/10 rating and an affiliate link.

A neat trick that works for me is the integration of a flog with a review site. Most niches I work in, I’ve worked in long enough to develop all kinds of websites approaching the sale from different angles.

I’ve enjoyed good success with review sites, and good success with flogs. But where I’ve made the most money is in combining the two together and funneling my readers from an authority review to a convincing user related success story. The opportunities are endless when you get over the dumbass mindset that a conversion is won or lost on one page. It’s all about controlling the customer’s thought pattern.

Once they’ve read a positive review, they’re going to be thinking…”Hmm, I wonder if that would work for me?”. It’s a natural consumer response to go looking for case studies and similar success stories. I know damn well that a lot of readers will go straight back to Google and search for more information, no matter how hard you suck the merchant’s balls in your review.

One of the easiest ways of keeping a consumer is to offer that further information to them without the need to go back to Google. The more sites you feed them through, the better you can qualify them for the sale. Ask yourself what would force a customer to go back to Google and run another search, and then answer it for them with the next call to action.

How To Lose $250 Digital Point Style

May 28 2009

Digital Point Forums isn’t exactly known for it’s useful information. But every now and then, a numb nut comes along and proves to the world exactly why there will always be a demand for the supermarket cleaner vacancy. Here’s how to waste your money quickly and effectively.

So I was gazing over the usual threads of “how do i get my site 2 rank”, “help me get pr2 guys” and “hi, cpa networks don’t accept me i think im from somalia”. You might criticize me for even wasting my time on DP in the first place. The only reason I browse the forum is on the off-chance that I’ll see a good idea being executed poorly.

Unfortunately, the majority of users are so far buried up their Clickbank asses that it’s a needle in a haystack chore.

Anyway, I was reading over a thread from one particular guy who was looking to promote his colon cleansing offer on a popular health related forum. He’d checked with the forum admins and agreed on a media buy.

48 hours of 468 x 60 banner advertising on the top of EVERY page. He agreed to pay $250 for this exposure.

Bare in mind that $250 to the average Digital Point user is probably a bank loan and stealing from Grandma Jean.

So the forum admins wired him up and he sat back waiting for the targeted traffic to lap up the offer. Who wouldn’t pay $1.95 for a colon cleansing kit on a leukemia related forum, right?

In a tragic and somewhat amusing twist of fate, the affiliate network pulled the offer just HOURS in to his advertising stint. Obviously the retard was sitting there clicking through his stats like some kind of nympho in a porn chain. So it must’ve taken him – oh I don’t know – all of about 15 minutes to realize that his banner traffic was arriving at a dead link.

Yep, he’d direct linked to the offer without sending traffic through his own redirect page.

DIRECT LINKING OFFERS W/O REDIRECT + MEDIA BUYS = HI, YOU’RE STUPID

So while the forum admin cashed the $250 all the way to the bank, Idiot X found himself sat in a bedroom in his underpants (probably) sending desperate private messages asking for his destination link to be changed. Oh, and pleading for advice on Digital Point for how he could redirect a network link to a different offer. Brilliant.

Guys, it’s not difficult to setup a basic PHP redirect.

If you don’t redirect your traffic, you’re adding needless hours of edits on to every landing page or website you ever build. Not to mention the fact that it looks sloppy and unprofessional.

Here, I’ll even supply the PHP code. Place it inside your standard PHP tags.

header('Location: http://www.link-to-the-offer-goes-here.com');

Save the file as an index.php, place it in a folder, link to the folder. Pretty basic stuff – but pretty fundamental to not being a complete affiliate marketing failure.