October, 2011 | Finch Sells

My Arse Is More United Than The States of America

Oct 13 2011

When you’re building affiliate campaigns, do you consider what affect your message will have on the various demographics of your chosen country? Or are you a One Size Fits All marketer?

Let’s say you have a “Make Money From Home” bizopp campaign targeting America. You’ve spent a lot of time split testing imagery, landing pages and offers, but you can only seem to scrape by on a profitable margin of 20% ROI.

Your next thought is to duplicate the campaign and port it over to Canada where the traffic is cheaper.

While there’s nothing wrong with this logic, it seems to be avoiding the elephant in the room. Countries, by nature, are incredibly diverse.

A single marketing campaign generating 20% ROI from the whole of America could quite possibly disguise one smaller campaign of 100% ROI in New York, and another of -100% in Tennessee. This is the price you pay for assuming that every state in America behaves the same.

When advertising broadly, we tend to accept these discrepancies without a second thought. You can’t be picky if you want to have the volume, right? I think that’s bullshit.

Sometimes a large campaign can be hiked from 20% ROI to 40% simply by pinpointing the lowest converting states and removing them, or rebranding your message. In all my sleepless nights of testing, I have yet to find a single campaign that converts at the same % across every single state in America.

For verticals like bizopps, a lot of the thinking is just pure common sense.

Take a look at this demographic data for the USA.

It’s widely known that the home bizopp offers perform much better when you design them specifically per ethnic group. Looking at the data, would we run the same campaign in Maine with it’s 95% white population, as we would in Mississippi which is 37% black?

We could, but then we’d have no right to complain if we found ourselves forever tied to that 20% ROI. How can you expect to improve it whilst you’re still targeting the whole of America? It’s difficult to get results if you can’t tell the difference between a user profile that converts, and a user profile that digs out your WHOIS, sprays it over the Scam Forums and leaves seven voicemails asking for a refund.

The effects are even more noticeable on dating campaigns, which I touched on in this month’s Premium Posts. You don’t really think those jpegs of California Girls are going to perform the same across every state in the country, do you?

Quick experiment for you: Find a pic of a girl in a Yankees shirt. Set up two dating campaigns on Facebook. One for New York and one for Boston. The data should speak for itself. States do not behave equally!

My girlfriend, who is half-American and has spent half her life in London and half in Indianapolis, is often telling me of the differences between what she considers the desirable states to live in (New York City, California) and the places she hates (anywhere in the Bible belt).

Whether you love your state, hate it, want to move, or want to celebrate it – the fact remains, America is an incredibly diverse country.

The complications of regional trends should be obvious without having to road-trip coast to coast to test the theory.

Likewise, England is perceived as a tiny place. A little melancholy teacup full of smart spoken chaps who all know the Queen on a personal level. You know, as if we share a Sunday Hogwarts roast while debating how to tackle our crooked yellow teeth.

What many foreign advertisers don’t seem to realise is that England is one of the most culturally diversified countries in the world and what performs well in London could – and probably will – totally bomb in Leeds. Don’t advertise new ideas to Leeds, guys. Creating change in Yorkshire is like pissing in to a hurricane.

You have to appreciate there are more than two options for targeting your campaigns. It’s not a flip of a coin between “broad” or “laser targeted”. Sometimes, spreading the net wide can do just fine. As long as you remember to empty it when you realise some of what you catch is dog shit.

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Hold Hands, Let’s Pray For A Financial Meltdown

Oct 10 2011

How many people saw the clip of Alessio Rastani brashly predicting the markets would crash? The video turned Rastani in to an overnight Internet sensation, a banker with the balls to confess to his inglorious disregard for everybody else’s money.

The video should be taken with a pinch of salt. Rastani has just as much to gain from ‘outing’ himself as every other banker has in operating quietly. But hidden in the scaremongering is a beautiful little snippet of advice for any hustler, any affiliate with the initiative to make some money when the economy cracks again.

“We don’t really care that much about how they’re going to fix the economy, our job is to make money from it.”

“The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

“If you have the right plan set up, you can make a lot of money from this.”

These are words of encouragement that should ring out to any readers who enjoyed the bizopp boom of 2008.

I enjoyed my first break in affiliate marketing by following a very simple economic theory that practically any dipship with a keyboard and some web hosting could have copied – and many did.

When people are fearing for their jobs, and when the mortgage walls are closing in, the opportunity to make ‘easy money’ and become self-sufficient is even harder to resist.

Who wouldn’t want to get rich posting links on Google?
Who wouldn’t want to earn $693/day by clicking a button and counting the profit?

Affiliates, blessed with the flexibility of changing business strategies overnight, swept to meet this demand and banked millions of dollars. In the news, and in the papers, all you would see was doom and gloom. More jobs lost, more disaster predicted and even greater incentives for affiliates to leverage in to their landing pages.

Now, admittedly, the products that were rushed on to the market to meet that rising demand were flimsy at best. Anybody promoting them was likely to wake up richer, but in a bed that smelt distinctly unlike roses.

There’s another reason why we should be optimistic about any market crash.

What do consumers do when they start to ‘feel the crunch’? They go online! Instead of spending money willy-fucking-nilly like a single mum of six on benefits (fuck you all, maggots of the state), they actually have to think about their purchases. That means our chances of courting such transactions are massively improved.

Any economic disaster is likely to be devastating to high street shops, or for intricately designed businesses operating on wafer thin margins. But in our industry, the margins are apple pie deep. We can sell products globally and move towards the money in a blinking of the eyelid. The flexible will survive. The smart and flexible will thrive.

Alessio Rastani has copped a lot of jealousy-driven YouTube comments from the proletarians of society. Those who feel eternally battered in to submission by bankers and giant corporations, despite their own mindless devotion to the very entities they claim to hate.

Proles of Society
Image jacked From Sean Powl on Facebook. Cheers!

But what Rastani says is absolutely true, even if his motives are not (get proles get money seems to be his real agenda, very similar to the Warrior Forum pyramid).

A downward market is brilliant for entrepreneurs and innovative minds.

Fear is the incentive to end all, and as we know, every single commission you’ve ever received was registered for no other reason than because the incentive was great enough. Why shouldn’t we be pissing our pants in excitement at the idea of fear sweeping in to households around the world?

When society feels beaten down in to submission, the little hand offering escapism is worth more than ever. As affiliates, we often find ourselves charged with convincing users to behave as we want them. The task becomes much easier when indifference is replaced with fear, insecurity and a constant desire to change.

I certainly won’t be sobbing if the markets crash, or if fear sweeps the nation. If I were you, I’d be preparing for the worst and getting ready to deliver that escapism. If the worst comes to be, escapism will be in hot demand.

Recommended This Week

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One Website That Launched My Career

Oct 07 2011

A common trait you will find in many online professionals is the background of being self-taught. It’s something we seem to be very proud of, a sort of retrospective fuck you to academia.

Perhaps the single greatest appeal, and challenge, of making a living online, is the ease of which you can get started. There’s no degree necessary, no interview process, and each individual takes on full responsibility for his or her self.

We should consider ourselves lucky that money can be made with just a modem and a little common sense.

Unfortunately, modems are in heavy supply. And so is the number of would-be entrepreneurs who think they have what it takes to make a living online. It appears that some people are better at self-teaching than others.

I made the decision when I was just 16 years old that I wanted to run my own business. It didn’t happen overnight, and thank god it didn’t. I was a trainwreck through the mid 2000s. After dropping out from school, I spent the next 18 months lurching from one disasterous idea to the next – both in my personal life, and professionally.

When Facebook Timeline is released, don’t be surprised if 2004-2007 is obliterated from my records. It already has been in my head.

My only other job to that point was a 3 month stint at Wickes in Hayes. If God decided to stick the vacuum in the arse end of society, he would probably start with Hayes. It’s a genuinely ugly place.

I wanted my own business, and I wanted to work online. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days surfing double decker buses straight out of a stabbing scene on the Uxbridge Road.

There aren’t many IT companies that would take on an 18 year old who dropped out of school, and the IT industry was where I saw my future. So I had to develop experience and knowledge on my lonesome.

Private classes were expensive (Baker Street, London…ouch) and they still left me short on opportunities. I went to a couple of job interviews but was finding myself squeezed out of the reckoning. Too young, not enough drive, bad haircut, whatever. I think the most I had going for myself was a strange immunity to taking it personally.

That’s when I stumbled across VTC, a plain looking site that may have just saved my career when it was threatening to flatline.

If you’re going to get a headstart on the kids attending university, you really need information and training materials for your chosen profession. And lots of them.

Back then, when I discovered VTC, it was like hitting the jackpot.

VTC has over 98000 tutorials covering almost every programming language, application or software you’re ever likely to use. For anybody with web development tingling their taste buds, it’s an excellent one stop resource where you can learn as many basics as you can put your mind to.

Eventually my crazy self-teaching binge paid off and I was able to capture a junior web developer job on the back of my portfolio (and probably my desire to learn).

Two years later and I was hired by an agency in Central London, again as the youngest employee in the company. I stayed there for 15 months before quitting to go full-time with my affiliate business. It wasn’t a particularly researched decision. I woke up one morning, checked my affiliate stats, saw my first day of £1000 profit and that was that. Au revoir, mon petit 9 to 5.

I was 21 when I made that jump, right in the middle of the recession. While many of my friends were still labouring through University, I felt an enormous weight of gratitude towards that one site – VTC – which gave me the tools to burst in to an industry that I was a complete virgin to.

If you have the right attitude, the Internet typically has the right resources to launch your career. Remember though, self-teaching is only an option if you have the discipline to execute a kick to your own balls when you deserve one.

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