January, 2012 | Finch Sells

Stop Reading Blogs, Start Reading Books

Jan 19 2012

Since caving in to the lure of a Kindle, my personal goal has been to read 100 pages of literature every day. It’s something I recommend every blogger should consider.

If you run a blog, or produce any kind of web content, you should be reading regularly to enhance your own output. In fact, if you have any entrepreneurial instinct whatsoever, you will greatly improve your chances of success by reading regularly.

Most people accept that good writing comes from practice and lots of reading. What they often ignore is that bad writing is just as easy to inherit. Unfortunately, bad writing is a central trait of the blogosphere. It’s just as epidemic as the lack of actionable information, or the self-obsessed drivel regularly tossed out by writers with no journalistic qualities and not the slightest regard for being held accountable.

Blogs have become a staple part of our literary diets. While I’m a huge advocate of sharing information in this way, I think it’s a shame that so few bloggers actually take their writing seriously. It’s not just bloggers. Every day, I find websites scourged in bumbling copy that fails to communicate the author’s message.

So what’s the solution?

Not every blogger has the literary prowess to mug off Shakespeare in the style stakes. But I think we can all benefit from investing in a decent grammar handbook, and particularly by immersing ourselves in books that have been stamped for approval. You know that a book has been stamped for approval when you find it on a bookshelf, not on a Clickbank sales page.

Many of us have RSS readers loaded to the hilt with meaningless crap – often, horrifically written meaningless crap. Feasting on so much mediocre writing makes us susceptible to inheriting the flaws as our own.

In the business world, we say that the fastest way to achieve wealth is to spend your time in wealthy company. Well, let me tell you that the same applies for good writing.

We live in an age where tablets and smartphones make books as accessible as the nearest USB cable. How many hours do you spend commuting to work each day? How much television do you inflict on your weeping eyeballs? Cut down the crap. Get some literature in your life!

And not just any literature. Read books that challenge your imagination.

I’m currently indulging in a wide variety of genres from the brilliance of Orwell, to the science of Dawkins, with thousand-page-thick Psychology textbooks thrown in for good measure. Reading is a workout for the brain. If you’re not pushing yourself, you’re standing still. If you don’t sweat after a workout, it probably hasn’t been a great workout.

Blogs exist by rehashing the same nuggets of information in bite-size form. Most of that information comes from books, or worse, plucked from the blogger’s fat lying arse. Sites in the Internet Marketing space – hey, like this! – are notorious for providing reminders of the shit we should have done yesterday. They rarely deliver plans for tomorrow.

There’s little harm in that, but for two problems: the information can be extremely biased, and the writing often sets a bad example.

I’m not suggesting you sacrifice all blogs for a dingy afternoon in the library, although maybe you should. But we need to make an effort to escape our comfort zones and feed the brain some literature of a little more substance. Our brain will thank us duly with new inspiration, new ideas and a much tighter hold over the English language.

If you have a blog, or any kind of web presence, you can steal a beat on your rivals by learning to communicate more effectively. The best way to do this is to read, and a read a lot. Writing is a tool that will aid any business. But to master it, you must expose yourself to a variety of literature. Not just the crap – like this – that piles in to your reader.

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How To Tackle Unstable Conversion Rates on Plentyoffish

Jan 18 2012

Advertising on Plentyoffish is some of the easiest money you’ll make in affiliate marketing. I’ve used the platform for over 2 years with varying degrees of success. Some days it seems so easy, other days I couldn’t grasp profitability if it slapped me in the face with a briefcase full of Benjamins.

As with any traffic source, or any advertising campaign, good things come to those who show patience – and especially those who aren’t afraid of losing money in the pursuit of much more.

I’ve traded tips and techniques with many Plentyoffish advertisers, and one of the recurring questions that pops up is how to combat unpredictable conversion rates.

Have you been there before? One day your ROI is impressive enough to book a spontaneous vacation, and the next you’re struggling to break even. You spend your morning coffee praying the marketing deities have woken up on your side; afternoon is spent with fingers crossed, legs crossed, and eventually eyes crossed having obtained a miserable headache.

Okay, if you haven’t been there already, you will do someday. It happens to all of us.

So how can we get some consistency in our conversion rates? How can we find the sweet spot where our ROI trajectory doesn’t resemble the Big Dipper?

NOTE: Before continuing, I have to ram this piece of advice down your throat: split test your offer across multiple affiliate networks. And even split test the offer. I couldn’t possibly overstate the importance of doing this – it can reverse a negative ROI overnight. The lack of loyalty will not endear you to your affiliate managers, but you’re in this to make money, right? Don’t become a network martyr.

An easy way to stabilize conversion rates is to tighten up your campaign’s message. Many Plentyoffish advertisers have an obsession with abstract marketing. They try gaming user attributes to attract a high clickthrough rate, often at the expense of a solid advertising message.

For example, let’s say an advertiser is promoting a typical CPA dating offer. In order to create relevance and catch the eye, his ad may read something like “More Single Smokers Needed, Join Site X!“, with the ad being targeted to single smokers.

These ads are rolled out as frequently as rat meat at a McDonalds drive-thru, but they lack a real message. Does Site X really appeal to single smokers? Is there actually a resemblance of a connection between the ad and the service being promoted? When there isn’t, conversion rates are likely to be erratic.

But why is that so? If the ad was competent enough to convert yesterday, it should work today, right?

The reality is you could advertise a dating service using just about any headline under the sun and it WILL score some conversions. Why? Because it’s appearing on a dating website! There’s no science to poor marketing. It is naturally erratic. The handful of conversions are a by-product, not an endorsement of your advertising work.

To achieve stable conversion rates over a sustained period of time, you need a stable message. Something that adds value to the sales funnel, rather than simply monopolizing user attributes. You need to pinpoint what the unique value of your offer is, create a meaningful message, and then rely on the powers of persuasion to convince your audience that the offer is right for them. This is only possible if you engage in real-world marketing, using hooks of genuine value. Attempting to lure smokers to a dating site under the illusion that they are ‘needed to meet the demand for more smokers’ is a shoddy hook – fitting of the erratic conversion rates it will likely produce.

Creating consistency and value in your message is one way to troubleshoot a wobbly conversion rate. What other steps can we take?

How about taking a structured approach to our testing?

A structured approach is definitely NOT this:

Day 1: bidding 0.55 CPM, 300 login count, frequency cap of 4
Day 2: bidding 0.65 CPM, 400 login count, frequency cap of 3
Day 3: bidding 0.85 CPM, 100 login count, frequency cap of 6, oh and a different landing page.

What happens when your conversion rate drops dramatically on Day 3?

Pick your reason from any of the following:

– The high CPM doesn’t convert.
– Low login counts suck.
– Your new landing page is hideous.
– Ads that have been showing for 3 days in a row stop converting.
– If the user doesn’t click in the first 3 views, he won’t convert.
– Day 3 was Christmas.

The actual reason? Who the hell knows?!

It’s impossible to diagnose a faltering conversion rate when you don’t have a structured approach to your campaign. So instead of fiddling with targeting parameters every 5 minutes, duplicate any campaign you wish to modify and then compare the results to your original campaign (which should still be running). Without controlling your variables, any data you collect is meaningless – and thus very expensive.

A final tip for stabilizing conversions is to limit the range of users you’re advertising to.

Ben has previously revealed on the POF company blog that 28% of the site’s inventory has a login count of less than 100. These users are the ‘fresh’ eyeballs. Another 30% of the traffic has a login count of over 550. These are the users who have seen pretty much every trick in the book. It’s going to take an innovative campaign to light a firework up their asses, but fear not, it can be done.

Between 100-550 logins you have the middle ground. It’s difficult to predict the behaviour of these users as the effects of banner blindness could swing either way.

My advice is to pick one or the other. Either target the first 100 login counts, or exclude them. Some advertisers take the middle ground and attempt to advertise to all users with a login count of less than, say, 300.

The problem with doing so is that it muddles your message by targeting two slightly different demographics – those who are new to Plentyoffish, and those who aren’t. Sometimes you can get away with it, other times you can’t. A better tactic, if you’re intent on targeting logins <300 would be to break the users in to two groups. A smart strategy would include two campaigns:

Campaign A: Targets login count of 0-100 (Strictly new users)
Campaign B: Targets login count of 101-300 (Users who have been around a while)

A more unstable approach is to lump those users together, so let’s have a Campaign C.

Campaign C: Targets login count of 0-300 (A melting pot of new and old users)

The difference in performance may not be obvious until a natural variation in the bidding on the platform.

Perhaps a swarm of new advertisers drives up the prices for the best quality traffic, so the volume in Campaign A drops dramatically – but the conversions are still stable. You’re left with an excellent conversion rate but not much traffic. Not a particularly alarming problem on its own, right?

Now consider what happens to Campaign B during this surge. The new advertisers may be rushing to grab the best quality traffic (perhaps yet another blogger recommended low logins FTW), but they don’t seem to care for inventory with a login count over 100. What then? Campaign B remains exactly the same. The conversion rate is stable like it always was. It’s a decent conversion rate, but not as good as Campaign A. The volume hasn’t changed though.

But let’s say you were to advertise using the Campaign C approach. You now find that you’re barely breaking even and the conversion rate has dropped alarmingly in the last 24 hours. How are you going to tell where the discrepancy came from? Why is the conversion rate on a seemingly terminal decline?

Of course you don’t notice that behind the scenes, you’re receiving less of the alleged best quality clicks because of the increase in competition on 0-100 logins. Instead, your high CPM is now paying for the next tier of traffic, which doesn’t convert as well but is costing you the same money. All you see is an unstable conversion rate, keeping you blind to the source of the problem – a problem that is very simple to fix.

This is just one of many problems that are notorious on self-serve advertising platforms. Different advertisers may swarm a demographic at any given time, which raises the prices, meaning that without knowing it, you’re suddenly bidding on completely different traffic. The only way to avoid the problem is to make sure that you’re bidding on just one demographic at a time, and that you’re setting the bid accordingly.

By doing so, your volume may vary dramatically, but the conversion rate should remain stable.

Of course, this is not science. Self-serve platforms by their very nature have hundreds of scenarios that may affect your ROI. But the bottom line remains the same. There’s big money on Plentyoffish, and it’s perfectly within your reach – but you must use your data as an advantage, rather than a deep pool to drown in.

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A much more detailed assault on monetizing Plentyoffish is covered in Volumes 1 and 3 of Premium Posts, which have both received widespread praise. Grab your copies now. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.
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Buying a Yacht vs. Defaulting On Your Argos Card

Jan 13 2012

There seems to be a lot of discussion in the Internet Marketing world over how best to create a lasting business, and particularly where to reinvest your profits if you create one that works. Knowing as many affiliates as I do, this is great to hear. It’s nice that people are waking up to the reality that reinvestment is critical for long term business growth.

Unfortunately, life is rarely as simple as spend spend spend. Many of us, through starting businesses and throwing balls to the wind, have taken on large amounts of personal debt. So, when is a good time to reinvest, and when is a good time to pay back what you owe?

There’s a reason why I voted Tory in the last UK Election: spending money you don’t have is the first sign of financial insanity. There’s only so far you can kick the can down the road. I’m all for reinvesting money to build a business. But to do so at the expense of ignoring debt is delusional; as is persisting with the faith that it will go away, or that paying it back will be easier at a later date.

Everybody who ever went bankrupt once thought their debt would be easier to pay at a later date.

So let’s be honest. When you look at your earnings vs your outgoings and find an extra £100 of disposable income, do you immediately piss your pants with unbridled epileptic joy? Is the opportunity of binge consuming too good to resist? Maybe you see it as a golden opportunity to invest in a new business idea. Shit, maybe you throw your extra earnings on the stock market.

I think this is stupidity of the highest order.

Pay back what you owe. The easiest way to relieve stress while running a one man business is to minimize your outgoings, whereas carrying unnecessary debt is the stupidest way of shooting yourself in the balls if it all goes tits up.

Let’s say you’ve racked up £5000 on your Mr. Plastic Fantastic. It’s tempting to think that time will be a great healer to those debts. So when your monthly statement arrives, you wince for a moment and then toss it aside. Mmm, the sweet smell of escapism. Instead of doing the sensible thing and paying back as much money as you can afford, you stick to the minimum repayments. Yeah, that £9.57 will go a long way. You feel like the fucking gingerbread man screaming “Argos, you’ll never catch me now!” But, of course, Argos will catch you. Painfully so. And you’re not even a gingerbread man. You’re just a tosser in the red.

Next month, your new statement arrives and lo and behold, you’ve barely scraped the surface of your original debt. You are a slave to interest. Even the dude printing statements at Argos calls you his little bitch behind your back. Yes, you’ve become the picture-perfect sucker that credit companies swear by.

Why is it so tempting to turn a blind eye to debts? Worse yet, when you have money to spare, why is reinvestment – or worse, blind indulgence – more appealing than repayment? Unfortunately, we are hardwired to resist giving up what we think we already have, even when that possession is deluded. We’d rather receive £50 today than wait for £100 next year. And this attitude contrives to keep us in the pockets of the industries that exist to monetize our greed.

Well, if the large majority of us weren’t such pigeons of consumerism, we’d learn to spend what we could afford and ‘the crunch’ would be a term reserved for those living their luxury lifestyles in castles built on sand.

Whether you appreciate the implications or not, all of your debts are working against you – day by day – for as long as you allow them to accumulate interest. If you spend your disposable income on reinvestments rather than repayments, your investments better be pretty badass. Your ROI needs to be discriminately high to not only produce profit, but to pay for the money you are leaking every month through those deceptively flexible minimum repayments.

Another issue I struggle to understand is our fixation with reward schemes. Reward schemes are the sales devices used to satisfy our weakness for instant gratification, the same trait that encourages us to accept £50 today instead of £100 in a year. Generally, they are used as distractions; woven in to contracts that aim to milk every last pound of that ‘reward’ back, and so much more.

It seems that many people have yet to catch on that you can have the best points scheme under the sun, but if you fail to make the full repayments on your debts, the accumulated interest will annihilate any hope you had of a freebie. The same for airmiles. Fucking hell, don’t even get me started on airmiles. I will happily take whichever card attempts to blinds me with the least bullshit. And if I hear airmiles, I instantly know that I’m swimming in it.

The people who run up gigantic debts on credit cards, then fail to repay them under the pretense that it’s okay “cause I’m earning airmiles, innit bruv” should be taken back to school and either educated, or simply shot behind the bike shed. I haven’t decided yet. It’s the same irrational logic that inspires a mildly psychotic Bible-Belt housewife to spend her days extreme couponing in the name of good value.

To put it simply – before I spiral further in to the extreme couponing rabbit hole – clearing debts as soon as possible is nearly always the best way to spend your money. It may not feel good. But it’s the best value deal. Once you’re out of debt, go ahead, reinvest like there’s no tomorrow. Splurge your extra cash on drugs and prostitutes if it makes you happy. Whatever rocks your boat.

Just don’t choose to be in somebody else’s pocket. That’s pretty dumb, and very inefficient.

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