2011 | Finch Sells

Professional Blogger vs. Amateur Dipshit Blogger

Mar 10 2011

Entrepreneurs love new ways of making money. So it’s only natural that many choose to explore the dogfight otherwise known as blogging for a living. And as somebody who makes good money through owning various blogs, it’s a subject I’m going to spend a lot of time dissecting.

Before I get in to details, I want to explain why blogging probably doesn’t deserve the rep it has. There’s a theory that goes along the lines of “if you can’t do… teach”. I’ve never subscribed to that line of thought. But I certainly can’t deny there are many bloggers who would lead you to believe it’s actually quite a valid statement.

When I use the term “Professional Blogger”, two images spring to my mind.

The first is of the emo kid scribbling away on his LiveJournal. Desperately publishing another bullshit “day-in-the-life” that only a small circle of his friends would care to read. This guy could call himself a professional blogger, in every negative sense of the term.

Then you have the annoyingly successful web personalities who write about seemingly nothing, but never fail to have a large crowd of naysayers hanging from their balls. These guys seem to have developed worldwide brands from the mere drag of hammering a Publish button twice a week.

Many thousands of people would love to have the latter privilege. One of the things I’m going to be writing about in future posts is how you can aim to replicate this kind of brand. Nothing that hasn’t been done before, right? Well, I’m hoping I can show you a few unique and inventive ways of monetizing your blogs, developing that reputation of authority and hopefully enjoying the ride along the way.

Yes, it’s important to enjoy the ride. If you wouldn’t write without the bait of a monetary reward, you probably shouldn’t become a blogger. The world needs less miserable keyboard trolls, and more bloggers who are enthusiastic with something to offer to their readers.

Running a blog starts as an ego trip, a great struggle to be heard and to believe that what you think actually matters. It usually ends when you’re satisfied that nobody is reading. But sometimes, writers strike a sweet spot where people are actually interested in what they have to say. Before you know it, there’s money on the table and that idle rambling never seemed so lucrative.

These pages are going to be about making that step. I’m a writer myself, obviously. I have many successful blogs littering the web. These are sites that earn me residual income that increases with the passing of every month. And for some of them, I don’t even have to write anything.

Blogging is, in my opinion, the single easiest way to get started making money online. As a guy who works from home, people often ask me for the fastest way to get money in their wallets. Of course, I can never tell them. There’s no secret trick. Any guru who offers you an overnight success formula is simply spreading mish-mashed bullshit with a different coloured background.

But when you take away the hype, blogging is a little different. The financial investment and barrier to entry is so low that truly anybody can try it. When people ask me how they can earn money online, my answer is the same old template:

“Go away, start a blog, write about something you’re passionate about every day. Keep posting for six months and then I’ll tell you how you can make money from it.”

The difference between the bloggers who make fortunes from their writing, and those amateur dipshits who become the subject of jokes among their circle of friends, can be narrowed down to having a point and having a purpose. Don’t expect instant results.

When you start treating blogging like a business, and less of a vanity parade, you’ll notice that what was once a slow march towards obscurity can turn in to a great way of generating income. I’m not suggesting that every blogger is going to make money from his craft. But it’s possible.

Recommended This Week:

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

Dear Affiliates Suffering From The Truman Effect

Mar 10 2011

I wouldn’t be a true Londoner if I didn’t spend every hour of the day complaining, bitching, whining or just generally living as the Daily Mail tells me to live. And so a few months ago, I had a decision to make. Commit to another year in the Rat Race, endlessly overspending in a city where my high income would be seen as no more than par for the course. Or move to Thailand and engage in a little lifestyle arbitrage.

If you don’t know what lifestyle arbitrage is, I guess the best way to explain it would be “to get the maximum bang for your buck out of life”.

Or to quote Charlie Sheen; #Winning.

Most affiliates have “fixed income”. I say that with a hint of irony, obviously, but what I mean is that we can go anywhere in the world and still be present in our jobs. We can be making exactly the same money whether we’re chained to the suburbs of the neighbourhoods we grew up in, or traipsing across the globe on the back of an elephant.

It’s easy to get caught up in the obsession of making more money. There’s a common feeling among some marketers that more profit will somehow equal a better standard of living. While it’s true sometimes, the nature of our jobs throws so many more options to the mix. Lifestyle arbitrage has always been close to my mind. I guess that’s what you get for growing up and making ends meet in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Everybody knows a job in London pays significantly more than a job outside London (for those in the UK), and that’s because the cost of living is so much higher.

But what if you could earn a London executive salary while living somewhere cheaper?

When I was an affiliate working in London – albeit let’s face it, a guy sat at a desk twiddling his balls who just happened to be near the Metropolitan line – I was automatically raising the stakes of how much I’d have to earn by restraining myself to such an expensive city. I could handle it, and I did handle it, but why pay the premium when you have the one trump card that ejects you from the rat race altogether? A fixed income that doesn’t depreciate with the economy around you.

I remember reading a few comments saying it was an embarrasing step backwards when I announced I was moving to Thailand. A baller would never turn his back on the American Dream, would he? Why trade the western way for a bunch of ladyboys and “third world” living?

Well, I’ve spoken to various affiliates earning large figures, and many of them haven’t even visited a country outside their own. This is particularly the case in America. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But are you sure you’re aware of the sheer opportunities that full-time affiliate marketing has already opened up to you?

You can go anywhere and do anything. It’s a license to live! The sort of privilege you look back on when you have three kids and a bunch of responsibilities, thinking…damn, why did I blow the easiest chance I ever had to go and live the dream?

I remember when I made the decision. I was sitting in a Nero coffee shop with my girlfriend, nursing a property viewing hangover and weighing up my next move. It was only when I’d been forced in to making a decision (my rental contract was expiring) that I actually weighed up my options.

Inevitably, you can decide to pay the premium if a particular lifestyle is all you want to know. There’s nothing wrong with bedding down and saying “this is what I know, this is what I love”. But that attitude is ingrained in adults who’ve been chained to the careers they’re supposed to have. It’s an attitude born out of convenience more than anything. Thanks to the Internet, we are the kind of professionals that lifestyle arbitrage was made for.

My decision was pretty simple really. I could spend $3000/month renting a shoebox apartment in Central London, or I could spend that same money living in a huge apartment with my own pool, gym, games room and temperatures of 35C all year round.

So I decided to move to Thailand instead of Fulham Broadway, convinced in all of about 7 minutes that it was time to make use of the greatest luxury an affiliate can have; the flexibility to go anywhere.

This is lifestyle arbitrage. Changing your life in an instant by simply defining your own economy. It’s about getting more for less, just because you can. A choice that confronts you every day, but one that most choose to ignore. I’m willing to bet there are countless professionals who will read this post, who could choose to get more from their lives if they seized the true potential of the flexibility this industry provides.

I know we all have our puppet strings. For every reason to get up and go, there are several you can find to justify why you need to stay in the rat race and keep on grinding the grind. Loved ones, friends, kids, commitments, responsibilities…yeah, these are all perfectly valid reasons why you might not be able to get up and move to the other side of the world.

But it doesn’t have to be that extreme. Opportunities for lifestyle arbitrage are everywhere when you become your own boss. So many of the stresses and strains we place on ourselves are there because we expect them to be there, and because we feel too absorbed by the status quo to challenge them. Ultimately, I think most of us resign ourselves to the idea that we’re going to be corporate slaves for the rest of our working lives. A bunch of Truman Burbanks forever thinking about flying to Fiji but watching the years go by and getting no closer.

If your affiliate career ends tomorrow, when will you ever get a better chance to see the world without having to report to your boss at the end of the week?

You can stack money until the taps run dry, but it’s not all about money. Are you doing enough with your life to make it all worthwhile? Or are you just accumulating interest in the hope that someday it’ll add value to your life?

Recommended This Week:

In the last few hours, I’ve launched a brand new site – FinchBlogs.com – which is going to offer something a little different to the already rammo “blogging about blogging” niche. Every month, my readership on this site has grown to the point where I’m collecting readers who don’t even know what affiliate marketing is, but still come to see if they can make some sense of it.
The temptation has always been to branch in to more general entrepreneurial topics where I think I can help an audience larger than just affiliate marketers to make money. The more diversified my business becomes, the more I have to remind myself that most of you guys only give a damn about the tips and posts that make a difference to you.
Of course, I don’t want to to become one of those affiliate bloggers who starts publishing shit that has absolutely zero relevance to real life affiliates. So I’m keeping this blog for strictly affiliate related perspective. But if you want to read more of my thoughts and tips on general online business, subscribe to the new blog and you might find something you like.
If not, don’t worry. There’s plenty of my balls to go around.

Gaming User Attributes For Better Or Worse

Mar 03 2011

I have many tools at my disposal that allow me to spy on the ads of my competitors. Tools that automate the task across Facebook and Plentyoffish on a sweeping scale that simply wouldn’t be possible with my own eyes.

I’m not a huge fan of these tools, personally. I use them, but I wish they didn’t exist. There are a thousand copycats for every creative marketer who manages to find a formula that hits the sweet spot. The harm far outweighs the good when you’re in the small minority who actually pave the way for others to follow (and rip, and steal).

Regardless, the tools are out there. If you’re not going to use them, somebody else will. So I choose to use them. One of the things that strikes me most about the ads I see being published is the sheer weight that affiliates are placing on user attributes to promote their offers.

Here’s the thing. User attributes are like the holy grail of direct response marketing. If we don’t have them, our best laid marketing plans are metaphorical turds being launched in to a whirlpool. On a good day, something solid will come out the other side. On most days, that’s not going to happen.

But give an affiliate some user attributes and what do you know? He suddenly becomes the world’s most in-your-face marketer.

A perfect example of an affiliate ad relying 100% on user attributes would be this:

“Single, UK Male, Aged 23?” Followed by some drivel about why you’re in high demand to join whichever dating site is paying him the most.

I’ve received a few emails asking me to elaborate on a post I made a couple months ago highlighting this issue. So let me explain the problem with ads like the example above.

Firstly, they have no relevance. If I’m answering “YES!” to all three of these attributes, it doesn’t mean I give a damn about your new dating service. For all you know, I could be clicking in the hope that being 23 and thrust out the womb in the UK somehow entitles me to a free monkey spanker. Imagine my disappointment when I land on a default Match.com lander and see some cake-faced bint in her panties asking for any poor sod with a credit card. Wait, I’m 23 year old English stallion though? Where’s my VIP membership?

That’s right. It’s nowhere. Because you sold me a false dream. So now I’m going back to my Plentyoffish account, crying boohoo, and falling victim to a better marketer who realised that my attributes were worth more than a dynamic headline.

I’ve explained many times the importance of having an effective sales funnel that acts on your original message. By knowing that a user is 23 years old, single and from the UK…you actually have a great foundation to build on.

But calling out those attributes is like reciting a horoscope and expecting me to stand like a fucking meerkat with my notepad ready. I know Mystic Meg is a fraud. I know I can’t be the only Aquarius in the world who should be “paying special attention at the water cooler today because new love starts with S and the moon is changing” or some shit.

Yes, it pains me to say it. But most victims of our marketing ploys have cottoned on. It’s going to take more than simply reading them a horoscope to get them to do what we want.

What you need to do is let your marketing create a picture that appeals to this demographic, without giving the game away that you KNOW their frigging attributes.

I think the attribute targeting that boggles my mind most is the “smoking” card. Do you really think that you can sell a service in one swoop by claiming that Match.com is looking for more single smokers? I mean, seriously? A smarter move would be to say NOTHING about what you know, use a nice stock image with a woman taking a puff from a cigarette and casually mention that you’ll find women who cater exactly to your lifestyle by joining Dating Site X.

Maybe even use a testimonial with a scorching hot female – miraculously the same age as the user, and from the same town (WTF?) – who happens to be enjoying a smoke while beckoning your loins forth. This kind of subtle marketing sends a message to the user without giving the game away that your marketing is actually a lot dumber than he has any reason to suspect.

Building fictional selling points in a service might grab you a few extra leads, but the long term damage is much more severe. You can’t sustain those leads when you’re kicked off the offer for poor quality.

I have several direct relationships with dating services who have been so happy with the quality of my leads that they’ve taken me on personally and offered me payouts beyond anything I can get with CPA networks. If I have one tip for developing relationships like these, it’s to keep your main sell simple.

I think it boils down to grasping the single biggest selling point of the service. Ultimately, the final shove down your sales funnel has to be an acknowledgment that the service IS exactly what it is. If you bait and switch, you better have humble intentions of scaling because you’re gonna get shot down sooner rather than later.

Exploiting what we know about the user is so important to a profitable campaign, and yet the art of subtlety seems to be lost on so many. It’s possible to grab a demographic by the balls without spitting out your bullet point list of desired attributes.

If you’re using landing pages, you have SO much opportunity to “divide and conquer” as I like to put it. I’ve seen many dating services publishing alternate landing pages aimed at niche markets – whether targeting by religion, race, age or location. And still, many affiliates choose to ignore them in favour of the manufactured selling points that bring them the highest CTR. These are the marketers who will drop first as competition increases and bid prices rise.

Once again, I’ve got to stress that so much of your success is going to depend on whether you treat this as a short or long term business. Our ability to target user attributes makes us an absolute Godsend for every single company that doesn’t know what we know. You can either use that advantage to game traffic, or you can use it to show the kind of stunning returns that will have companies paying higher and higher to retain your services.

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 a new reader, please 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 Love you long time. Thanks for reading.