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Attention: Plentyoffish Dating Affiliates
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2011’s Craziest Week for Technology and Science?
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More Lucrative Niches Exposed With Global Market Finder

Attention: Plentyoffish Dating Affiliates

Can’t get profitable on Plentyoffish? Fantastic! I mean, shit, that’s tragic, let me help you feel better.

I’d like to invite you to check out the very first edition of my brand new Premium Posts.

Now just what in the hell are so premium about these Premium Posts?

Good question.

It’s extremely difficult for me to give away my best advice for free on this blog, knowing that it will be rehashed and beaten to death within a few days, along with a chorus of “Hey arsewipe, stop outing my shit.

Premium Posts are going to be a monthly (or bi-monthly) collection of the very best tips I have to offer in a specific area of our industry. This month it happens to be geared towards Plentyoffish dating affiliates.

Each pack will serve up something different, informative, funny and – I hope – damn lucrative to your business. Will it affect my usual posting schedule here? Not at all. I’ll still humour your peasant monkey brains for free.

Premium Posts are simply my method of monetizing what I write, giving away a little extra and hopefully making this shit a little more fun than it has been for a while. Check out the first pack here, or don’t. The choice is yours.

But seriously, kiss my balls if you don’t.

UPDATE: Wow, maybe you guys don’t deserve to kiss my balls after all. I’m flattered and slightly blown away by the feedback and sheer number of people who have contacted me to say they enjoyed the posts – even affiliates who don’t touch POF! A major thanks to everybody who has bought so far. Enjoy your weekend!

2011’s Craziest Week for Technology and Science?

So who still hates the new Facebook layout?

It’s amazing how the attitude of social network users shifts from hour to hour, let alone day to day. On Wednesday, my feed was a swarm of complaints, awash with keyboard warriors vowing “Enough is enough, I’ll never use this disgraceful clustermess ever again. Consider yourself disowned, Zuckerberg. It’s OVER!

A few hours later and the same unsettled crowd could be spotted on Facebook Chat, presumably sniffing around for replies and likes to their outbursts.

Facebook seem to be back in everybody’s good books after news of the innovative Timeline, which seems to be a scrapbook of sorts allowing every facet of your life to be captured and spotlighted. It has definitely been interesting to watch the reaction, and you can activate your Timeline today by following these steps.

While the social web is busy working out how to set Spotify to avoid posting their One Direction fetishes to Facebook, the rest of us have been evaluating what this means for businesses going forward.

How will marketing on Facebook change?

I think the most significant development, addressed here by Christopher Penn, will be the isolation of how we actually reach customers. ‘Liking‘ has proven to be a profitable viral beast over the last year, but it’s tough to see how the new interface will allow that to continue with all the signs pointing towards apps as the new prerequisite for trends to go viral.

It seems to me that Facebook is serving up two options for small businesses. Build an app, or buy some ads. For those of you have dabbled in Facebook Ads over the last six months, I think I can safely say that there’s never been a worse time to use the self-serve Ads platform. Escalating click prices, rising competition… almost enough to make me build the damn app myself, whatever it takes to avoid auctioning my left kidney for $2/click.

Will Google+ seize the day and roll out a suitable alternative for businesses to advertise on their network? I have to ask, seriously, what would be the fucking point? The only people who would bother to advertise are those who have something to sell to Robert Scoble or Chris Brogan. Last time I checked, they were the only people showing up in my feed.

Social sniping aside, the last few days have been eventful. Facebook certainly isn’t the only big news of the week.

Some scientists managed to break the speed of light. Pretty impressive. The most I ever broke in science was a Bunsen burner and a few pencils on my head out of boredom. How times change when you’re no longer a 15 year old prat with bridges to burn.

I hate to blow stories out of proportion, especially on the subject of science (which I massacred at school), but this really could be huge if the results are verified. The sort of revelation that leaves Einstein blushing in his grave.

If time travelling atoms aren’t enough of a seismic mindfuck for you, how about the ability to record your dreams and play back the footage on a screen? That’s what this UC Berkeley experiment seems to be paving the way for.

Clearly it’s been a pretty incredible week for technology and science enthusiasts alike.

So go ahead and make the most of your weekend, I’m sure we’ll be back to stock market scaremongering by Monday.

Recommended This Week:

  • Subscribe to my new FinchSells RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add Finch to your Twitter. Merci beaucoup!

More Lucrative Niches Exposed With Global Market Finder

Thanks to James Agate for this tip from the comments in the last post (Shouldn’t We Just Build Websites in Chinese?).

I was not at all familiar with Google’s Global Market Finder tool, until about 7 minutes ago. Maybe that has something to do with my own rocky relationship with Google, but I’m sure there will be many readers in the same boat.

Global Market Finder takes your keywords, translates them in to different languages, and examines the popularity and cost of those matches in various countries around the world.

Leading on from my last post, I think this is something that should prove super relevant for detecting trends and opportunities in countries that haven’t yet been saturated by competition.

I would certainly hesitate before staking my balls on the accuracy of Google’s data, but as a guideline to be used in correlation with other trends, it serves up some interesting information.

Once you’ve picked a keyword to research, you can compare data using the nine filters: Africa, Americas, Asia, Emerging Markets, Europe, European Union, G20, Middle East and Oceania.

Compare for example, the data of the G20 nations for a keyword like “lose weight” (and it’s many foreign equivalents), against an emerging market nation. The difference in bid prices is obviously significant, but will presumably narrow over the coming months and years.

G20 nations

G20 market competition

Good volume but high click prices (suggests tough competition)

Emerging market nations

emerging markets competition

Decent volume, low prices... although currently, much less valuable traffic

‘Lose weight’ as a keyword may, understandably, take some time to catch on in countries like Indonesia where there isn’t half the obesity problem that we have on our hands in the west.

The real shocker on that list is Russia. Is it really the slimmest nation on Earth, or do their beached whales simply not give a shit?

Forgetting about Adwords altogether, we can use this tool to establish the demand for products in cultures that we might not be familiar with. You could spend an entire afternoon translating your keywords and measuring the search volume. But Global Market Finder does the chore of translation and comparison for you.

The incentive of knowing 380,000 Brazilians are looking to lose weight (every month) may just be enough to convince an affiliate marketer to dust down his Portuguese and rebrand those trashy landing pages.

Finally, the acai berry comes home to Brazil.

What about those of you who own digital products like ebooks? The brilliant thing about ebooks is that the cost of delivery is always the same.

There are many rapidly growing economies with consumers looking to flex their newly discovered purchasing power. If you can sell the same content, in a different language, to a willing market – surely it’s worth exploring?

Recommended This Week

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