2010 | Finch Sells

Getting The Most Bang For Your Buck

Sep 01 2010

It’s a new month full of new projects and new targets. Kids are about to go back to school and Christmas is looming in the not too distant future. If mindless seasonal fever does the trick for you, I guess you could say it’s a great time to make some money online. Same as it always was.

I’ve been speaking to quite a few virgin CPA marketers recently. One of the recurring questions I get asked is “If I have X amount to spend per month, where do you think I should invest it?”

Working with a limited budget is something that most of us had to deal with when we started. You’ve probably noticed how a lot of the top affiliates out there are young entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s. These are guys and girls who probably didn’t have fortunes to invest.

Personally speaking, I’d only just turned 21 when I first hit success. Besides the odd scrunched up tenner in my back jeans pocket, most of my money was…err, the bank’s money. When you’re crashing in to your overdraft on CPA campaigns, you kinda have to get the most bang for your buck. Or you’re metaphorically shagged.

I consider myself lucky that much of my initial investment was made at a time when you could rip out a CPA campaign and treble or quadruple your money overnight.

ROI is especially important when you’re just getting started. If you’re barely managing to break even on your campaigns, and wondering how the top affiliates manage to build up these empires – well – cheer yourself up with the knowledge that it gets easier. Everything gets easier. You just need to scrap away. Increase the size of your investment pot, by any means necessary, and get your cashflow sorted.

My life as an affiliate is a lot easier now that I can get away with running 25% ROI campaigns. I don’t really care if I blow a few thousand dollars in a day, as long as I’m seeing profit and enough of it to cover the risk and outgoings.

Let’s say you have a monthly budget of $500 after deducting what your wife’s blown up the wall to fill her wardrobe. It’s tough to pinpoint where to start. Do you go in to promoting car insurance offers on Facebook? Rebills on PPV? Maybe even gaming offers on the content network?

The way I see it, if you don’t have much money to invest, there’s no point in entering a market where volume is a necessary ingredient to survive. Thinking of slinging a dating offer to 25 year old guys in mainstream America? Forget about it. Even if you find a profitable campaign, the ROI is likely to be so slim that it’ll take you twelve months of waiting on cheques in the mail before your business has taken a single step forward. That’s the reality if you’re working with Facebook, Adwords or even POF lately.

If you don’t have a big budget, your mind should naturally be focused on cornering small markets instead. Now you’ve probably read this endorsement of scaling and placed your finger on the reply button, ready to call me a lousy lying hypocrite. Yes, scaling is what puts the finishing touches on a super affiliate’s new LA mansion. But without having money to invest – and lots of it – scaling is like climbing in to bed after too much tequila. Really fucking difficult and really fucking slow.

I’ve posted time and time again about laser targeting your campaigns; both on PPV and Facebook. This is the tactic I used regularly before I had the muscle to compete with other big spending affiliates on broad demos.

If you’re looking to promote dating offers on a small budget, make yourself familiar with the niche markets where it’s possible to make a killing with highly targeted, albeit low volume, campaigns.

Markets like Single Parent Dating, Black Dating, Jewish Dating, Asian Dating…these are all great entry points for the newbie marketer wanting to increase his capital with a high ROI. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re wasting an entire budget only to claim ten bucks of profit with Mate 1.

If there’s no logical micro-market for you to target, it’s just as easy to create one for yourself. Your network might not have a suitable offer for Midget Albino Dating, but that’s not to say your CTRs aren’t going to be through the roof if you decide to target them anyway.

The key to initial success is to sweep underneath the heavyweight affiliates. If you can’t compete with their budget, compete with the time and care that you dedicate to your campaigns. Pay attention to the details, the small print of the demos. Produce creatives that strike close to the mark.

As an affiliate who now works mainly with broad demos covering millions of people at a time, I can say that there are a lot of micro-markets that I’d love to scale in to and dominate – if only I had the time. But I tend to dedicate my resources to those mainstream campaigns where most of my money is made. And it’s the same for many high volume affiliates out there. Your best opportunity is to cover the ground that we don’t bother getting dirty with. Like a local politician going door to door while we can only put a sweeping ad on TV.

There are some campaigns that I had to turn down as a newbie marketer simply because they weren’t cost-efficient. And yet they might have been producing 50% ROI. That’s madness, isn’t it? Like your mum buying you a unicorn for Christmas only to slap her in the face and moan that you wanted something more mythical. Beggars can’t be choosers, but profit isn’t always the footprint of money well spent.

It’s important to make every penny count while you’re still dealing in small business steps. Forget about the rulebook that super affiliates abide by. They’re competing on a different playing field under different rules altogether.

The CPA landscape is dramatically different in 2010. It’s no longer possible to fill your boots with overnight riches by going straight for the kill in huge mainstream markets. You need to operate on the fringes, reap profit where the markets aren’t so saturated, and dig deeper to grow your business.

Just started 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.

…oh, and follow me on Twitter

Offer A Quick Fix = Get A Quick Conversion

Aug 24 2010

Not too long ago, I wrote a post praising the brilliance of Ca$hvertising as a must-have book for all marketers. Hopefully a few of you have read it by now and can verify that I wasn’t bending you over in the name of an Amazon commission. That book really is the dog’s bollocks. And if you don’t have it, you should order it a-sap.

One of the many subjects that Ca$hvertising touches on is the importance of offering a quick fix in your advertising campaigns. I thought I’d make an effort to cover why this is so important, and warn you of how being a misleading little rascal can land you in a hot tub of shit.

By the very competitive nature of advertising, we’ve reached a tipping point. Consumers can find a mind-boggling number of reasons not to buy a product. One of those reasons is that a product simply doesn’t capture their imagination. It doesn’t promise a life changing impact overnight. The cold hard truth that losing weight can take months of blood, sweat and tears is often much less of a sales pitch than oh – I don’t know – lose half your body weight in 4 weeks.

To many affiliates, offering a quick fix is simple. Lie until you’re purple in the face and pretend you’re the fucking gingerbread man when the FTC comes calling. We only have to look as far as the acai berry craze to see how the promotion of a “quick fix” can get out of hand. Really bloody quickly.

It’s easy for me to sit here and rag on affiliates for lying with bold promises that are never going to come to fruition. But that’d make me a massive hypocrite. We all lie in our marketing efforts, and those of us who don’t simply forget to tell the truth.

If you’re going to learn anything from the acai berry gravy train, let it be that a quick fix will always prize that credit card out of the pocket. And there are techniques we can use that exploit this need for a quick fix, without getting our balls trapped in the crocodile jaws of [Insert General Attorney of Choice here]. You don’t have to sell your soul down the river.

It’s possible to build trust as an affiliate, and I’ve long stressed a personal desire to distance myself from slinging rebills that leave nothing but a sour taste in the mouth. Offering a quick fix doesn’t have to involve blatant lying though. It can simply be smart savvy marketing.

A technique I played with quite recently involved giving away a free ebook to my dating leads. We’ve all heard of Plenty of Fish, right? I haven’t spoken about *that* traffic source before, mainly because it served to benefit nobody who was already advertising there (rising click costs, invasion of newbies etc).

But if you’re advertising on Plenty of Fish, what do you know about your target audience? We can guess that we’re marketing to singletons who still haven’t found that special somebody. Despite putting in a clear effort by joining a dating site.

I think the reason so many affiliates fail with their advertising efforts on POF is because they forget to sell the appeal of the site they’re promoting. Think about what would constitute a “quick fix” to an existing dating site member. Maybe the women aren’t replying to your messages, maybe the guys are a bunch of narcissistic dicks with zero conversation skills. Either way, you need to establish something that you can fix.

I chose to give away a free ebook offering “ten explosive tricks for getting girls to message you on dating sites”. I will have you know that I outsourced it and didn’t write that shit myself. I then built out a landing page with an opt-in form.

“Sign up to my hot-shit newsletter and not only will I show you how to get women messaging you on dating sites, but I’ll send you an exclusive rare invitation to the best dating site to practice these tricks. I can only give away this link to [7] guys. If you’re sick of being Read & Deleted, you need to ACT NOW!”

Boom shake, shake, shake the room. Conversions, opt-ins, orgasms, profit. Everybody wins. By offering a quick fix to the biggest problem a guy can face on a dating site – being ignored like he’s carrying the plague (obviously I outsourced the research too) – you can slice through the competition and simply convert better than everybody else. Not to mention, if you use this method, you’re building yourself a long term business asset in the list.

But think about the concept. Don’t just jack my shit and run it for yourself. The second you place yourself in the collective shoes of your target market, you can find something to fix. Sometimes it’s necessary to develop your own freebie giveaways, like I did with my ebook, in order to present that quick fix without scamming the user or placing false promises in a service that might not be able to deliver.

There’s only one trick that works better than a quick fix. And that’s a quick fix that won’t be here tomorrow. So always remember to splash your landing pages with the urgency of countdown tickers, expiration dates and whatever else Ryan Eagle has recently added to his Network Application page.

It’s a sad state of affairs that consumers are so hesitant to place their faith in anything that doesn’t offer overnight results. But that’s the reality, so we have to adapt to it. Ask yourself what you can do for the user today. Then focus on developing a brand that’s simply too convenient for them to walk away from. If you find a quick fix, you’ll get a quick conversion.

Still haven’t bought Ca$hvertising?

Last time I recommended Ca$hvertising, the book was out of stock within a few days so I’ve got good faith that you guys went out and bought it. If you don’t already own it, buy it now.

Today is a rarity. I’ve actually published two posts in 24 hours. If you’re looking for some more reading, check out How An Affiliate Deals With 9am – A guest post I contributed to Kirsty’s blog over at Affiliate Stuff. Thanks for the guest spot, Kirsty.

Finally, follow me on Twitter.

I’ve Got Zero Experience And I Want To Be Rich

Aug 17 2010

I seem to have accumulated a lot of readers with little Internet Marketing experience. It’s flattering that people read my shit without actually caring a jot about affiliate marketing, or even knowing what it is, but those same people have started to ask me questions. Questions like “I’d kinda be interested in making money online, can you show me where to start?”

Ahh, yes, that one.

Zero experience, never made a website before, you thought FTP was some kind of late night porn channel, and now you want to make money online. You just need to know where to start.

This post goes out to anybody reading who isn’t an affiliate marketer, but simply an everyday guy or girl with a full-time job who wants to make some extra income online. And by that token, I’m suddenly speaking to half of the fucking Internet.

Your first challenge is to sign out of the forums. Stop visiting Warrior Forum, cancel your Digital Point account and don’t even try to digest what you’re reading on WickedFire. Forums will only complicate your objectives.

I swear, The Warrior Forum reminds me of the scene in The Wire where Bubbles tells a crowd of junkies the story of his drug addiction. I sit here listening to another buffoon reel off his Russian novel of “Warrior Advice!!!” and then when he’s finally stopped bashing his keyboard, the other Warriors stand up and cheer…THANKS FOR SHARING! As if his own pandering to the gutter is their new ambition in life.

Shitty ideas put forward by shitty marketers, sodomizing each other with tales of pity, and rubbing the only ego their four cents can afford. But the shit never stops smelling of roses when there’s a retarded “Thanks for sharing!” at the end of it all. Right?

Okay, I’m getting vicious. I don’t mean to hate on the Warrior Forum, but it’s too much of a swamp to help you. If you’re spending all day reading these forums and looking for a magic formula to start making money, you’re wasting your time.

Find something you’re passionate about, something you could sit there and write about every night.

To enjoy success online without delving in to paid advertising, you need to have an asset. To develop an asset, you need to have a website that other people would want to visit. While a select few of us can develop money generating websites based on topics we couldn’t give two shits about, you will nearly always have more success when your project is something you have a genuine passion for.

It’s a simple concept called appealing to your strengths. If you burden yourself with weaknesses by trying to build a website in a niche you’re hopeless with, and can offer no expert opinion on, you’re going to fail. Especially in these early days. Passion is everything.

Whenever I’m guiding people with the “online business bug”, I try to focus on their strengths. If you can find what they’re passionate about, you can guide the mentality away from “MONEY MONEY MONEY” and channel it towards a more positive energy. Such as “what kind of website can I build to appeal to people who share my passion?” My opinion is that if you don’t love what you do enough to do it every day without a single penny of profit, it won’t work. Not if you’re a bumbling technology tard who’s doing this for all the wrong reasons.

It’s so easy to setup a WordPress blog, grab some cheap hosting, and give yourself a web presence. In fact, it’s too easy. WordPress is quite possibly the greatest software ever developed for those who know nothing about coding. But people forget that building a website is like planting a seed. Just because you can see it, that doesn’t mean you’re ever going to make a cent from it. To make money, you need to water it every day with fresh content and spend a lot of fruitless hours wondering when anybody will visit but still chugging along regardless.

I can’t remember who posted this, so I’m sorry I can’t credit you, but one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever seen for making money online was posted on WickedFire last week.

“Pick a topic you love, setup a blog and write about it every night. Come back in six months and I’ll tell you how to make money.”

So, so true. It’s only when you suspend your fixation with the making money part that you’ll begin to prosper and develop quality assets. If I had ever let money dictate my decisions and willingness to work, this blog wouldn’t be here. It’s here because I love writing and I love my job.

Everybody has to start somewhere. So if you’re looking on, a keen bean to make money online, first ask yourself “What is my passion?”

What can you write about every night? What do you have a special talent for that other people would like to have? There’s a niche for fucking everything on the Internet.

The next step is to setup a WordPress blog. Grab yourself a free template that looks nice. It doesn’t have to be professional. Now spend every night contributing something, no matter how big or small, to your site. The snowball effect will slowly gather pace over the months, but ONLY if you keep supplying new fresh content. Most people fail because they give up if their empire of riches hasn’t materialized in the first week.

They’re snobs of their own creations.

Not enough comments? Not enough people reading? Still got zeros in your commission columns? The loser walks away with his tail between his legs and probably spends the rest of the week being angry at life flipping burgers in his day job. It takes time to hit success. And that success might not change your life. Christ, you might only make $100 on the side in a month. But the experience of your journey will become knowledge.

With knowledge, this whole world of making money on the Internet will no longer seem so alien. Some of what you read on this site may slowly begin to make sense.

We all had to start somewhere. But if you want to catch up, you better get your feet wet and start learning fast. There are enough passionate individuals out there to run those who only want to make a quick buck out of town. Focus on your strengths, forget the money objectives and let Father Time and hard work open those doors for you.

Networking and connecting

I decided against making the trip to New York for Affiliate Summit East. Mainly because Adtech is rolling in to London, my hometown city, next month. If you’re going to be at the event, feel free to hit me up and we’ll arrange a meet. And by meet, I mean a pint. And by pint, I mean several. Read more about London Adtech here.

Do you have a UK based blog covering similar themes to this site? I’m currently looking for guest posting opportunities. If you’d be interested in letting me post a piece for your site, please get in touch via email.

Looking for more affiliate advice? Want to read the 140 character drivel of somebody who actually makes money on the Internet? Follow me on Twitter.