June, 2011 | Finch Sells

The Entrepreneur’s Survival Instinct: Got It?

Jun 15 2011

Running an online business works in stages. Those stages are typically bemusement, survival and once in a blue moon, the luxury of thriving.

The majority of enterpreneurs are stuck in survival mode. Not because surviving is any easier than winding up bemused, but because most people give up not long after bemusement sets in.

So that leaves the rest of us. Surviving or thriving. What is it for you?

Many people believe their online businesses are thriving, but in reality, they are prospering on the edge of a cliff. Just one stiff breeze from falling in to the oblivion. It’s difficult to determine what distinguishes thriving from surviving, but in my opinion, the ability to take several setbacks in your stride is a decisive factor.

I know many affiliate marketers who are producing profits of five figures on a monthly basis, but I stop short of calling them thrivers. Why? Because they’re surviving in a marginal market. Their methods are the business equivalent of whoring out a one trick pony. If the products they sell change, or the advertisement methods they use disintegrate, it’s very difficult to recover. Such is the pain in the arse that follows any middleman in a volatile industry.

This isn’t to knock affiliate marketers (I am one), but to get to the bottom of the most important quality in a successful online entrepreneur – the ability to survive, at all costs, in rapidly changing markets.

We have to adapt to new methods of generating income, or fall by the wayside as yesterday’s dotcom optimists.

If you are based solely online, you are running a fluid business. By doing away with the brick and mortar, your rent becomes the price of staying aware of how the online space is changing – and how you can affect it.

I remember hating web programming because I resented the endless evolving technologies attached to the craft. Learn one language and I’d find it out of date, or the poorer cousin of a brand new language. In reality, all online businesses are prisoners to the chains of technology. The quicker technology develops, the more proactive you have to be to stay on top of your competition.

For that reason, I always say that it’s wise to build a business on flexible foundations. You don’t want to be so rooted in what you offer that the evolution of technologies predates you before you’ve even started. There’s simply no good in forming a belief system that Money Making Method X will always work, when Money Making Method Y is already the next hot shit.

Adapting to new technology is one requirement for survival, and it could also be linked to the second requirement: Never get lazy.

For the same reason that a World Champion boxer one day finds it difficult to hang with a younger, hungrier opponent, you too have to deal with your own motivations if you want to stay on top. Can you hear that sound? That is the sound of a thousand keyboards being mashed by would-be entrepreneurs all around the world. Everybody wants a slice of the online riches pie, and just because you’ve had a taste, doesn’t mean you have a right to the next bite.

Dealing with laziness and those mornings where the brain just doesn’t want to cooperate are fundamental to enjoying lasting success.

I think the difference between a successful entrepreneur and a persistent failboat is not the output when they’re both hyped and happy to work. The difference shows in the output when direct motivation is hard to come by.

The people I see thriving with the most successful online businesses do not work in bursts. We all love the rush of a sudden motivational kick up the arse to get some work done, but these kicks cannot help you every day. If it takes reading a blog post, or tearing through a self-help book, to spur you in to action, then you are prone to working in bursts.

We can all achieve excellence when we’re motivated and at the height of our games. But retaining that burning motivation as success arrives can be a difficult trait to master. But you must succeed. There are plenty of other entrepreneurs waiting to fill your spot if you don’t match them for work ethic.

Personally, my favourite method for combating laziness is to engage in projects where money isn’t my sole motivation. It’s the only way I can ensure that when money arrives, I won’t relent and consider my job done. Surround yourself in enough reasons to go that extra mile and laziness should never be a problem.

Listen to Bill Gates:

“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”

This type of commitment – besides being practically unhealthy – simply isn’t possible if money is your only driving force.

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The Worst Converting Campaign Of All Time

Jun 12 2011

Did you know that it takes a mighty 12.5 million spam emails just to sell $100 of viagra?

This number was enough to send the cogs of my brain in to a wheelspin. The sheer inefficiency of it all is difficult to comprehend. Admittedly, the majority of viagra emails are handled by botnets that take much of the human labour out of the equation. But this is still a ridiculously inefficient line of business.

To put those numbers in perspective, on any given day, an American viagra pill slinger is more likely to die in a car crash than he is to convert with a single viagra spam email.

As affiliates, we bitch and moan about being scrubbed. But I don’t even want to contemplate how agrieved the poor bastard who just saw his 1/4000000 conversion rate fall to 1/8000000 must feel.

The numbers make you wonder how spamming in the name of viagra pills can ever be worth the effort. These emails show no sign of relenting anytime soon, proving that some businesses are still finding ways to profit from them. And as long as they do, I will still be ignoring hilariously titled emails such as “Make her orga$m by Inflate your pecker”

There can’t be too many products that rival viagra in the inefficiency stakes, but this also shows just how meaningless a conversion rate truly is. If a company can stay afloat with such shocking figures, maybe it’s time to spare a second thought for all those traffic sources you dismissed as junk in the past?

Many affiliates spend 100% of their time searching for the best quality traffic, when other much ridiculed traffic sources are actually effective in their own relative terms. I’m not saying you should dust down the botnets and load up your “erection” madlibs, but clearly a business doesn’t have to enjoy the best – or even respectable – conversion rates to succeed.

The best converting campaigns aren’t necessarily the best investments for your business, and are certainly by no means a guarantee of a healthy bottom line.

It hardly matters if you convert at 10% or 1% on an affiliate offer, only that you understand the mechanics of the equation better than your competition. You could be the best sales writer in the world but if you have no understanding of the arbitrage attached to your work, you can never be a successful affiliate marketer.

Our job is primarily to solve mathematical equations while occasionally stroking our own feathers by pretending to give a shit about actual marketing practices (when the tried and tested maths no longer work).

This is why so many affiliates end up in the legal gutter.

Trivial matters such as FTC guidelines are happily tossed to the wayside in an aggressive pursuit of numbers that work in our favour. The viagra spammer is simply an example of pushing the envelope too far. We can laugh at the poor conversion rates, but high traffic at a tiny cost is just another way of playing arbitrage. No better, no worse.

You don’t see too many affiliate blogs bragging “How I Made X/Day With This ABYSMALLY Converting Trick!“, but maybe that’s because most of us are guilty of over-simplifying the maths. There’s no pride in having the best conversion rate if some other sucker is doing thousands more in profit and posting EPCs that crash the system with too many zeros.

The numbers game can be played in many ways. That’s worth remembering if your marketing career has slowed to a halt at the prospect of monetizing $1 clicks on Facebook.

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Why “Easy, Profitable And Sustainable” Will Never Exist

Jun 07 2011

The Affiliate Marketing business thrives around the belief that three qualities – easy, profitable and sustainable – are just waiting to be uncovered. Look at the average bizopp sales letter and you’ll see it summed up in a nutshell.

“How I Earn $6904/Week On My Laptop With One Simple Secret Trick!”

Such a title ticks the three boxes that matter most to a sucker on the verge of quitting his day job to chase said dream.

Is it easy? Have you not seen how well I mine on Runescape? All Internet be easy to me.
Is it profitable? $6904/week…fuck, tell the kids we’re moving to Hawaii.
Is it sustainable? The guy’s Clickbank stats just keep rising. This time next year, we’ll be trillionaires Rodders!

Sarcasm may be dripping off this page, but make no mistake, this is the naive attitude that drives many an ebook launch.

In my opinion, only two of those qualities can ever exist in tandem. You can have an affiliate campaign that is easy and sustainable, but it won’t be very profitable. Or you can be driving huge profits for the long-term future, but it won’t be particularly easy.

Then you have the most dangerous combination in our industry.

Easy and profitable…but absolutely not sustainable.

This could be applied to a Plentyoffish campaign that peaks and perishes in the space of a weekend, but there’s nothing spectacularly dangerous about that. More importantly, it could be applied to a number of darker marketing practices that many of us are now familiar with.

The fake blog is a great example of easy and profitable, because it pinpoints the reason why sustainability can never follow.

Our challenge, as affiliates, is to come up with new and inventive ways to reach the skeptic mind. The flog was mighty successful in blurring the lines between advertising and believable testimonial. Many would argue, myself included, that it was far too successful. If an advertising practice becomes so commonplace that any half arsed marketer can spin a profit from it, you can be sure that it won’t be long until that practice becomes the most detested in the industry.

Did anybody expect such a profitable marketing trap to stay viable after affiliate marketers rushed to abandon conventional landing pages in favour of it? Every legitimate business with a weight loss product to sell was going to react unfavourably to a bunch of cowboy affiliates stealing their market share. That’s your first problem. The second problem is the customer.

When one customer feels ripped off, not many people are going to pay attention. When thousands of customers feel ripped off, reputations start to suffer. In the space of a few months, the snowball effect of broken trust amplified by relentless affiliate campaigns had driven a successful marketing ploy to the precipice where it had to fail.

The flog itself, controversial as it was, needn’t have crashed and burned as emphatically as it did. The marketing logic behind it was sound but ultimately too easy to execute, and too open to abuse from the affiliates who based their businesses around it.

Zero barrier to entry + very easy + very profitable = definitely NOT sustainable. Anybody with a grasp of basic economics should be able to work that much out.

I’m not trying to provide an obituary of the flog here, but rather a simple explanation of why “get rich quick” tactics will never be sustainable. They may exist, but they typically involve the bending of rules in such a way that the associated risk is never going to lead to the stress-free life in a hammock that you were promised in the stock photos.

If an easy moneymaking ploy becomes too profitable, it will draw attention from a) The customers and b) The competition. At this point, the ethics of the ploy will be called in to question. This is where they normally disintegrate. But even if your ethics are sound, the competition will soon catch on and copy. With increased competition comes less profitability – or simply a much tougher time making money.

Easy, profitable and sustainable affiliate marketing campaigns are never going to be published in an ebook or handed to strangers who haven’t busted their balls in pursuit of the same knowledge. It would be foolish to believe they even exist.

So you have to ask yourself: “What am I going to focus my business on?”

Easy and sustainable… without the lucrative rewards of more ambitious projects?
Sustainable and profitable… with a receding hairline from the stress of finding the magic formula?
Easy and profitable… and I’ll worry about the future when my luck runs out.

It’s pretty obvious which category most affiliates fall in to. But is that through choice or a complete disregard to the sustainability of the marketing they practice? Who knows, who cares.

For the rest of us, the challenge isn’t simply to be profitable. But to be so profitable that we can afford Wayne Rooney’s hair surgeon after finding that magic formula.

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New reader? Go on, 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
Check out Filthy Rich Mind, a general lifestyle improvement blog and the latest in my long line of projects. Love you long time. Thanks for reading.