2011 | Finch Sells

Is A Blog Worth More Than A Degree?

Mar 28 2011

It’s easy to dismiss blogs as a colossal waste of time. They can be wild ego trips, or pointless attempts to feel more understood by your peers. Guilty as charged, that’s probably how it started for me. But when I say that blogging is the smartest career move I ever made, I’m not exaggerating.

I honestly believe that regardless of whether you’re trying to write for a living, make a few industry friends or simply spew your early morning drivel, blogging is one of the most powerful ways of adding value to your name. The value may not be immediately evident, but neither is a résumé until it’s delivered to the right mailbox.

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the blog is the new résumé. I don’t have a degree, or an academic background. I can’t rely on Masters honours to justify my ability to get a job done. To put it simply, there isn’t a single slip of paper in my filing cabinet that could pass as a certificate for my work. Christ, the only certificate I have at all is a swimming award from my primary school. And even that I somehow managed to fake.

One of the great appeals of working on the web has always been the level playing field. I love that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, or what your story is. You can be as relevant as you want to be in almost any field or industry, just by having the knowledge and putting it out there in the right way.

As we see on a daily basis in the “make money online” niche, it rarely even matters if you have the knowledge. Blogging is all about perception. It doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are, just that your readers are buying in to the right image. But forget about the readers and the meaningless subscriber stats. Have you heard the saying, If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room?

How true is that for bloggers?

If you’re the smartest marketer in affiliate marketing, why the hell would you be blogging about it? Exactly, you wouldn’t. But by blogging about a topic you’re involved with, you instantly make yourself relevant to the field. And when you become relevant, you get leverage with people that simply wouldn’t be approachable to Average Joe with no web presence. I’ve never seen blogging as talking down to a crowd. It’s a two way relationship, and a great way to establish a reputation.

Since launching an affiliate marketing blog over at FinchSells.com, I’ve pretty much guaranteed that if my business were to fold overnight, I’d only have to open my inbox to find work opportunities. That’s not to say I’ve done it well or achieved any more than the next blogger. It just comes with the territory of being relevant in my industry and establishing credibility through a web presence. In effect, my blog has become my résumé. Except I don’t have to read job listings or go combing for contacts on LinkedIn, because opportunity tends to present itself.

A couple of years ago, I saw friends leaving university with degrees and qualification to their names. But for many of them, it wasn’t enough to secure a job in the area they studied. How ridiculous is that? 16 years in education only to join the same rat race as the rest of us. Does that mean a successful blog has become more valuable than a degree?

Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to use a blog as a platform to a career in marketing than it is for, say, structural engineering. But if you have expertise, you should make every attempt to show it!

Blogs and portfolios are the way forward in 2011. The résumé deserves to die an ugly death for turning all of our individual qualities in to one uniformed template in Microsoft Word. If you have a special talent, or simply a career to fight for, you can often make it happen just by talking about it and becoming relevant.

A blog doesn’t have to be a profitable moneymaking machine. It can simply be a professional stamp of what you have to offer in your line of work. We all like to make fun of the stay-at-home-mum bloggers who write piles of sweet nothing to a circle of fans that eat it up anyway. But if you’re sitting on your degree and expecting qualifications to carry you up the ladder, I think it’s time for a reality check.

It’s not about the talent you have, but what you do with it that counts. Perception is everything to so many careers. And a successful blog can make you relevant in whatever industry you’re trying to crack.

Recommended This Week:

On the subject of putting value in yourself, I highly recommend Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. That man has a way with words that can light a candle up even the pluckiest of arseholes.
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Campaign Sabotage And Other Scumbag Tactics

Mar 25 2011

Do you ever get the impression that you’re fighting for survival in an industry full of complete and utter arsewipes?

No, I never got that impression either. Until seeing first hand the depths some “marketers” would plummet to stay ahead of the competition.

Campaign sabotage is something that happens a lot more often than you would care to think. It’s something you probably don’t even realise is happening. But it is. A lucrative industry with such low barrier-to-entry guarantees one commodity by it’s very nature; an abundance of dickheads.

There’s very little regulation in affiliate marketing. You don’t have to get the go-ahead from above, or the sign-off from a superior before blazing ahead with a new project. This creates a community of undomesticated outlaw entrepreneurs, willing to do any and everything to keep making money.

This is fine. Most affiliates have to utilise aggressive tactics to stay competitive with more and more hungry hands bidding for the same traffic. We can take action to game traffic sources, or to enhance our search engine rankings with black hat methods, but where I draw the line is purposefully – and directly – fucking with somebody else’s business.

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to prevent somebody driving a stake through your profitable campaigns if they really want to. There are always methods to fuck with your competition. And while preventative measures are available (redirecting affiliate IPs from your landing pages, for example), none of them are foolproof.

I’ve just recently received some raw data feedback on one of my dating campaigns. Most of it was to be expected, but I noticed several batches of fraudulent leads being posted by some bell-end out of Nigeria.

That’s weird, I thought. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered not to select Nigeria in my targeting options. There is such a thing as a niche too far, people.

Sometimes, users signing up to offers from countries outside your targeting can be explained by a perfectly genuine reason. The user could be an expat, somebody on holiday abroad or just the victim of IP scrambling.

But when a series of leads are posted from the same IP, in a country like Nigeria, you just know there’s a little arsefeeder rubbing his hands somewhere. Probably salivating at the thought of how much cheaper his traffic is about to become when you get booted from an offer for fraudulent leads that you had literally no control over.

I’d like to say a giant “fuck you very much” to whichever mopes happen to be guilty of spending their days cruising the web resorting to such bum tactics. I’m almost grateful. It’s prompted me to spend the afternoon combing through campaigns and planning out some preventative methods to handle these kind of tactics. But there’s no such thing as an airtight strategy.

You can’t stop a scumbag from making your business his own. But what you definitely can do is maintain a good relationship with the companies you work for. By ensuring that your campaigns remain transparent, you can limit the damage when shit turns hairy. In my case, inviting chargebacks on the fraudulent leads was the best option.

I think affiliates can be too quick to adopt a Me against the World attitude when it comes to receiving chargebacks. We assume that every lead posted is genuine, and that any chargeback is the result of a network or merchant giving us a stiff one up the jacksy. Personally, I would much rather accept the fraudulent leads than receive a blanket notification that I’ve been kicked off an offer.

Much of the time, the affiliate marketing community manages to regulate itself. We have some pretty loose rules against “outing” other people’s campaigns. The shadow of the FTC has cut short many of the renegade marketing ploys seen everywhere at the height of the flog phase.

But campaign sabotaging smegheads do exist, and you should be ready to deal with them. If you’ve ever played a game of Whack-a-Mole, you should be well prepared for the task of maintaining a profitable campaign.

The broader those campaigns become, the more likely they are to be seen by scheming little tricksters with less ethical latitude than yourself. Keep it in mind when you’re crying wolf at the next batch of chargebacks.

Recommended This Week

If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.
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Reverse Engineering Your Article Writing Career

Mar 22 2011

Like many Internet Marketers, the very first money I made online came as a hired writer. It seems painful to even contemplate the idea of sitting at my desk and writing ten 500 word articles in 2011, but that’s how I discovered the possibilities of making money in my bedroom.

As a sixteen year old who’d just dropped out from school, I saw every moneymaking opportunity – online or offline – as a chance to justify my decisions and say a big fuck you to further education. When you cremate your ticket to university, you kinda have to develop a killer instinct when it comes to making money.

But I guess writing articles was never the most glamorous way to earn a living. It would start off with enthusiasm. The words would flow from my keyboard and in my head I’d be counting the pesos with every saved text file. After a couple of hours, I’d find myself twisting phrases and sentences in to whatever upped my word count. But it was easy money.

You can often gauge how serious somebody is about making money online by how willing they are to get their hands dirty with cheap labour.

If you’re serious about producing some extra income, writing articles for other people is about as legitimate as it gets. The money won’t put you on a jet plane anytime soon, but what are you expecting? The miracles you were promised?

After several months of writing the same shit for different people, I began to ask myself just who was using this gibberish further up the food chain. Why would anybody need 100 different articles explaining the merits of marketing on MySpace?

If you’re one of those article writers, you’ve probably asked yourself the same questions. Just who is using this crap? Are they making any money from it?

Well if articles keep getting outsourced, somebody keeps profiting from them. It would make sense to learn how to profit from your own work, wouldn’t it? I know many article writers are just looking to make a quick buck to pay the next bill, but if you look at the economics of it all, you could be doing so much better.

I remember Googling one of the articles I’d written to see how it was being used. Sure enough, there it was, propping up a Rocket Spanish course with the entire website consisting of no more than my own hard work and a bunch of affiliate links. Being an eagle eyed little bastard, I decided to take it upon myself to start writing articles for my own personal use. That’s right. I became a Clickbank whore.

And, of course, I didn’t make much money.

Just as most people don’t when they’re getting started. It’s part of the learning curve. A successful entrepreneur fails, fails, and fails again. If you want to believe any differently, by all means be my guest. There’s plenty of experts who will take your money to fuel that short term belief.

So eventually I got the right idea. Instead of writing articles for other people, I saw the potential in building my own assets. And if you’re writing articles for a living – or just to make ends meet – I hope you can see the potential in having your own assets too.

The problem is, you need a vision… and patience. Endless reserves of patience.

Articles are no good on their own. Christ, I’ve already spilled my guts how I think they’re barely relevant at all moving in to the new decade.

But the economics of cheap article labour are a very good introduction to the world of Internet Marketing, SEO and whatever the current flavour of the month happens to be for successful entrepreneurs who already make money on the web. Who better to learn from, right? Better than Digital “I’ve got a method that would make you money in 2006” Point.

You don’t even have to be writing articles to get a good grasp of where money is being made. Just by browsing through regular Elance listings, you should notice familiar trends.

I often give this advice to writers looking to transition in to more lucrative work, and it never gets old. If you want to see where there’s money to be made, look at where there’s money being spent. You’ll find either successful entrepreneurs, or blind ass investors with not many repeat buys to their names.

Some people prefer to be team players. There’s nothing wrong with that. And for many online writers in third world countries, the money made through article creation alone is enough to live a life of relative luxury. I remember how exciting it was to take the leap from being a cheap labourer to somebody who defined his own project milestones.

But the way I see it, if you’re going to be a writer, you should be aiming for the top. There’s not much money in the middle grounds. And where there is, you’ll find fierce competition. If lazy 500 word articles are how you make your money, maybe you should consider moving up the food chain and adding some longevity to your work.

It’s not hard to reverse engineer your way to the top. To be in a position where you’re the boss rather than the bitch. If you need a little help along the way, drop me an email. For the first half of my Internet Marketing career, Bitch was my middle name. I know how it feels, and I sympathize with other writers in the same boat!

Recommended This Week:

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