2011 | Finch Sells

My Niches Bring All The Clicks To The Yard

Mar 18 2011

Internet Marketing was plain sailing in the early 2000s. There was a time where simply buying the right domain would put you in the money. In these harder times, we have a buzz word called “niche marketing”. The art of finding topics most people don’t give a crap about and setting up shop for the small handful who do.

It can be very profitable. Building a website to satisfy a small demand is much easier than battling in a network full of bigger, better and richer competition.

Here’s the thing. Just because a niche is nowhere close to being saturated, that doesn’t mean you should be rushing to stick your dick in it with a sparkling new WordPress installation. Some niches are untapped for a reason. That reason being they suck donkey chode when it comes to making money.

The argument, one I’ve heard many times before, is that traffic is traffic. Who cares if my website reviews antique deck chairs from the 1950s? Stats are stats and if Google is sending me traffic, my site must be worth something. If it’s already drawing some Adsense clicks, all the more power to my “thinking outside the box”.

Building niche websites is the sort of game that anybody can play. Hands up if you can pinpoint an interest obscure enough to have no other presence on the web? Christ, it’s not hard. Here, let me string several niche markets together.

How about a site for divorced Jewish transvestites?

By the laws of human insanity, there’s probably at least 14 people searching for this every month. Six of them being me about 30 seconds ago. And yet I’m guessing there isn’t a niche site for it yet?

So are you going to sit down and build one…just because you can?

Unless you have some seriously hot product catering directly for the market we’re talking about, I’d take a step back and think about what you’re doing. If you see zero potential beyond Adsense and a rare Amazon book referral, you’re probably wasting your time. You niched out too far.

My point is that we can dig so deep for opportunity that we sometimes forget the actual principal of what we’re trying to do; make lots of money.

When you’re running the rule over which new niches to branch in to, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Is this a buying market?

Forget Adsense. Websites built around Adsense are clusterfuck monstrosities that have no place on the Internet. Do you have something legitimate that you can sell to the people interested in this niche? Are there web-savvy local businesses – with actual budgets – that would value your content?

2. If I don’t have a buying market, do I have a LOT of traffic?

It’s okay to not have anything obvious to sell, if you have the necessary weight of traffic to rely on numbers instead. Celebrity fan sites, current trends and big upcoming local events can often merit a website. Why? Because if you do them correctly, you can produce enormous surges of traffic that attract direct buy advertisers.

If attracting highly targeted users to a niche website is one method of making money, the reverse is to take the “niche” out of niche marketing and simply drive a ton of traffic.

Think of all those sports streaming websites out there. Many people don’t want to pay for the PPV package to watch UFC live. So if you stick a live stream up with some pretty basic gateway advertising, you can fill such a huge demand that the numbers make you money – not the concept itself.

3. What is the absolute best case scenario?

Because if your answer is “I sell 3 deck chairs in March and make enough money to pay for my dedicated server“, this is probably just a mid-life crisis you’re going through. Carefully select the Back button and filter back in to whatever pipe dream you came from.

I know it’s easy to aim too high. I mean, shit, my career is built around making people believe in that high. But if your niche website has no obvious gold tap that can be switched on, forget about it and go back to the drawing board. It’s hard enough to make money online WITH a vision of where the money’s going to come from, let alone without one.

4. What is the work vs rewards ratio for my competitors?

If you’re looking at moving in to a niche full of psychopath groupies who whittle away their every hour posting content for the reward of jack diddily, you might want to have a rethink. How serious are your competitors ? If they’re working hard for no money, you’re probably going to have to work even harder just to get the show off the ground.

Do not try to beat Justin Bieber fans at building Justin Bieber niche websites, unless you plan on outsourcing to within a community.

Actually, let me rephrase myself. If your tentative keyword research throws up anything related to Justin Bieber, empty your browser history, wash your hands with soap and think about what you just thought.

What’s wrong with you? There’s a line Internet Marketers should know not to cross.

5. Can I commit to this niche?

Most important of all! If you don’t feel capable of getting your hands dirty with a niche, it’s not going to be a winner. That doesn’t mean you have to be the poor guy sat at his desk and churning out article after article on the topic. But if you know you can’t get the quality content published, you’re only ever going to be a bum search engine traffic gamer.

People forget that simply rolling out a niche website isn’t going to be enough to dominate a market. You have to become an authority in that niche. Doing this requires actual knowledge and expertise. You’re going to have to outsource your content to an expert in the field, or a damn good researcher.

There’s a lot more to consider when launching a niche website than the sheer weight of traffic numbers on Google keyword sandbox. Focus on the potential of making money. Because without that, you’re just another pillock with a fansite.

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Pros And Cons Of Running Offers Directly

Mar 17 2011

Your ability to assess risks could make or break your future in this industry.

We all love to play down the risk attached to what we do. We naively expect to be paid for our leads and sales, whatever the circumstances, no matter what goes wrong further up the food chain.

Most affiliates only give a damn about risk assessment when it progresses to the stage of damage limitation. And that’s when you’ll start reading blog posts and threads about it.

Nobody wants to read about the steps you can take to keep your Facebook Ads account in tact. But everybody wants to read posts like “My Facebook Account Just Got Banned” or “This little bell-end won’t pay me“. Some affiliates are quite happy to pump thousands of leads in to small-time networks, without waiting for the first payment to turn black. It’s not cool to consider pausing a profitable campaign, right?

Well let me tell you, it’s even less cool when you invest everything you have only to get burnt by a bunch of scumbags who’ll find any reason not to pay you. Thankfully this hasn’t happened to me yet. But if you’re not careful, it could easily happen to you.

For those who worry about not getting paid, joining an affiliate network is often touted as the smart thing to do. Affiliate networks earn their slice of your revenue by taking on that extra risk. There’s the fear that by running an offer directly through the merchant, you open yourself up to the increased likelihood of getting stiffed.

As somebody who runs traffic both directly and via networks, I thought I’d throw in my two cents for the hell of it.

Running an offer directly is always going to be more lucrative at face value. The margin is all yours, and you should find yourself losing more leads in the shuffle. Less brokering means less tracking and in a picturesque world with little unicorns running free…less scrubbing. That’s more money to line your wallet with.

But only at face value.

You’re going to find it challenging to convince many of the big merchants out there to start paying you weekly off the bat. As most tuned-in affiliates know, cashflow is king. It’s better to be running solidly for 30 days a month than to find something that works then have to put the breaks on because you rinsed your wife’s entire savings one fine afternoon.

It can actually be more lucrative to run consistent traffic at a lower ROI, if you know that you’re getting paid every 7 days.

And even if a merchant DOES promise you weekly payments, from my experience, this is only as good as being told you have an invitation to send more invoices to their accounting department. Whether they get paid on time or not is a different ball game altogether.

Make sure you don’t make my schoolboy error of issuing an invoice with the standard payment terms of 28 days. Weeklies, my arse! No self respecting accountant is going to file your payment any sooner than they have to.

The most important advice I can give to anybody who plans to run traffic directly is to stay as transparent as you can possibly be. Once you have an account manager, you need to build a relationship with them and make sure your campaigns are squeaky clean from top to toe.

This isn’t purely for the sake of being a good little boy, but also because you can actually learn a lot about the shit you’re promoting. I run directly with a few dating companies and speaking to their internal people is like reading an entire private catalogue of OKCupid posts.

As helpful as affiliate managers can be, they have to spread their knowledge over hundreds of different offers. Much of the time, they’re basing their “what’s hot” recommendations on EPCs and revenue. By speaking directly to merchants, you can cut the crap and find out what’s actually in demand.

So…

Are the payouts significantly higher by running directly? You better believe they are. I know of one dating offer that fetches $5/lead through CPA networks. But by running it directly, I’ve seen payouts as high as $11/lead with an additional bonus for every registration that converts to a sale. When you’re delivering quality traffic, that adds up to the kind of EPCs that you simply don’t get on affiliate networks.

Ultimately, it’s only worth going direct if you have the two attributes that matter most; cashflow and quality traffic. The kind of traffic that backs out for the merchant and has them begging for more. It’s definitely worth exploring your options if you have sales under your belt.

Whether you’re working directly with a company or through an affiliate network, apply some common sense in your efforts to scale. No merchant likes being sent thousands of leads without first having the chance to weigh up how the traffic is converting.

Staying transparent and regularly asking for performance updates is probably the best way to stay on top of your campaigns and avoid getting burnt.

It all comes down to assessing your risks. There’s nothing to fear about running an offer directly, and there’s a lot more money to be made. But do you prefer the convenience of letting a network handle the drama? Or do you have the balls to place some faith in your work? There’s not really a wrong answer.

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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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Why Won’t You Die, Article Marketing?

Mar 14 2011

Article marketing is for my reckoning, the most boring chore on the planet. Every time my to-do list springs up an item that requires me to visit Ezine, I shed tears of sorrow, snap a kitten in half, and beg for it all to go away.

Just who was the smart arse to decide that such monotonous crap should ever be rewarded by Google?

The benefits, or pointlessness, of article marketing can be argued over all day long. I don’t like to ruffle feathers when it comes to SEO. Everybody has a different opinion over what works, what doesn’t, and what classifies as a gigantic waste of time. If I had my way, I would confine the entire art of SEO to the latter.

It’s pointless shit, isn’t it?

It’s like trying to beat your competitor by jumping on the fastest escalator to the top of the pile of riches. Only, you don’t control the escalator. Google can choose to switch you in to reverse at any moment. If Google has a bad day, he can choose to remove the escalator from under your feet.

Nobody can deny that great money is there for the taking by ranking first for [your key phrase here]. But in my opinion, getting search traffic is the just tip of the iceberg. The real challenge isn’t to produce optimized content, but to produce memorable content.

And for that reason, I’ve always believed sites like Ezine to be about as valuable to the end user as a third nipple on my face. So imagine the explosion in my pants then when I read just recently that the so-called Google Farmer update could bring an end to this madness.

The death of article marketing, you reckon? I’d say it’s no more than a shifting of the goalposts at this point. If there’s one thing SEO professionals can be praised for, it’s their ability to try a lot of pointless crap with no true relevance to the people that actually matter. A string of wild experiments just to find something – Christ, anything – that creates an artificial ripple and crowbars their website a place or three up the rankings.

But no matter how influential you gauge these latest Google updates to be, the warning signs are there.

It’s time to stop being such a lobotomized prat in how you market your websites. Blasting hundreds of shitty 400 word articles may be effective now, and even tomorrow, but as long as Google is *trying* to castrate you at the source, you’re always going to be struggling to keep up with the pace.

I think it’s about time people woke up from their Digital Point induced comas and realised the importance of providing genuine content that offers real value to the world. No matter how many search engine changes lay ahead, you can always rest assured that there WILL be a way of marketing genuine content. But only if you actually have it.

So how can you take a step towards that? A little method I’ve been playing around with involves simply re-distributing my budget.

Instead of outsourcing 10 mediocre articles, I’ve been surveying opportunities for how I can outsource just one high quality article and get it used as a guest post on other high profile sites in my niches.

While it’s early days and requires a lot more creative thinking, not to mention a guest post friendly niche – you’re not going to find a blog about the cheapest office chairs – the first signs are definitely promising.

I find this a much more rewarding method of generating traffic to my sites. But also importantly, it gets subscribers and the highly sought after “return visits”. Search traffic is great for generating leads and sales, but you’ll rarely see those users again – unless it’s to complain about the bullshit you just sold them in your fake review.

Guest posting is often seen as an even greater chore than article marketing. At least with article marketing you’re guaranteed a backlink if you put your commas in the right places.

Most SEOs prefer to spend their time completing utterly brainless tasks with the surgical precision that warrants their job titles. Whereas high quality content requires time and thought – qualities you often have trouble outsourcing to Nigeria – and most importantly, the development of a rapport with the end user.

But in the long run, isn’t that exactly the content Google is striving to reward?

It doesn’t really matter. Screw Google. It’s possible to run high traffic websites without a shred or sniff of a first page on the Big G. You just need to be able to market your message in the right places to the right audience. The idea of abandoning search traffic altogether is, I would imagine, too much of a leap for most. So try looking at things in a different way.

Someday, Google will succeed in getting it’s algorithm up to speed with it’s vision. I know a lot of SEOs will argue how they’re smart enough to keep finding loopholes and keep gaming the system. But when that day comes, the smartest and most cost efficient way of gaming the system will be to actually oblige the god damn system.

Produce the great content, regardless of any search traffic, and have those forces like Google striving to be on your side. Not against it.

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