January, 2012 | Finch Sells

Las Vegas: Designed To Confuse And Abuse

Jan 11 2012

Take a bunch of testosterone-driven young entrepreneurs, shove them off the jetway in Vegas, and there’s only one likely outcome. “I don’t care if we kill somebody…”

So, how many affiliates blew their entire January budgets in the casinos at ASW? For the sake of my own business, I’d be happy to hear of a busy weekend.

Did you learn a lot from the networking experience? Was the conference worth the trip?

I find it a little strange that affiliates will fork out hundreds of dollars for seminars, key-notes and Q&A sessions when perhaps the biggest inspiration is Vegas itself.

If ever you wanted to learn from a well oiled moneymaking machine, you would be advised to tear your head away from the Meet Market and consider the windowless, clockless micro-economy that is Sin City in the middle of the night.

Nickycakes wrote a piece several years ago that summed it up well. Vegas is one of the most fitting metaphors for a Landing Page. Everything about it is designed to creep in your pocket, carress the balls, and expose your wallet. All, of course, without shaking the drunken smile from your face.

In many ways, Vegas is untouchable as a sales funnel. Not only does it skillfully and rapidly relieve us of our finances, but it does so in a way that we doggedly admire. Somehow, the art of cataclysmically gambling the night away, has been turned in to pop culture that is part of the experience. You go to Vegas expecting to come home lighter than you left, in every sense but the hangover.

So how can we improve our own marketing efforts to create the same free spending escapism? How can we build landing pages as positively badass as The Strip in the dead of night?

Perhaps the best guidance is to determine your goal first. Vegas gives the impression of a city built around a slot machine. From the ground up, it weaves a gigantic web where every road leads back to the desired action – you spending money. It’s difficult to avoid spending money because the execution is so consistent. When you get off the plane, make no mistake: ‘Vegas has you now‘. Opt-outs are hard to come by. The message is loud and clear.

How loud and clear is your marketing? Is your message being scrambled by half-baked execution? The slightest slip of bad copy, or conflicting calls-to-action, and you’ll suffer the equivalent of daylight pouring through a gorged window in the Palace casino. The user slips away and doesn’t look back.

Our job when we’re creating sales funnels is to fully immerse users; to guide them to a state where we have their full and undivided attention. Once we’ve taken away their sense of daylight, their sense of time, their sense of financial good footing, we have to decorate that world with a brighter proposition. Be that an illustration of rapid weight loss, of finding love, or even the freedom of a new career at home; our job is to channel the force of desire and guide it to an action before the moment of escapism has passed.

I think, as Nick suggested, the pull of Vegas is the claustrophobia: a bombardment of the senses that monetizes your confusion whichever way you turn.

It’s difficult to recreate the same psychological experience on a web page. It’s even more challenging to recreate the justification that stalks you towards the departure gate, ably excusing the $3000 dent in your bank balance, as if it were money well spent.

Well, was it?

I hope, for the sake of the affiliates who flew out to ASW on shoestring budgets, that it was a great conference and not simply a Tour De Force in young, rich and infamous binge showboating.

Recommended This Week

Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.
I’ve recently re-branded FinchBlogs.com to cover a more personal flavour of the crap I’m currently working on. I’ll be blogging about issues even more obscure than sleazeball marketing, so check it out if you dare.
If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

My Plans For 2012: Survival, Flat Pack Disposal and America

Jan 09 2012

2011 was one of the most eventful years of my life. I started it by living the high life in downtown Bangkok (literally, on a 15th floor apartment), and ended it sloshed on the dance-floor of Shepherds Bush Walkabout, an experience that has become uncomfortably familiar over the years.

In between, I’ve travelled to Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore. I’ve moved house no less than FOUR times. And I’ve singlehandedly kept the coffee economy afloat – firstly via Gloria Jeans and now Cafe Nero. If there’s any life lesson I’m eager to take in to 2012, it’s that I’d be an utter dipshit to kiss goodbye to as much deposit money as I did last year; a grand total that ended up a few notes shy of £5500. FML.

Indeed, the moment where I’m asked to commit my signature to any dotted line is now met by a ferocious growl, followed swiftly by brooding silence. The kind where you could be forgiven for anticipating that I’m about to eat said contract.

My new home is the Greater London suburbs. Greater London by name, Greater London most certainly not by nature. My stress levels have tapered off significantly since finding a semi-permanent home. But that’s not to hide the fact that the closest I get to an adrenaline rush is when an elderly neighbour trundles in to a pile of dog shit outside my driveway. Such is the pace of living in ‘Greater London’…

I think the most excited we’ve ever been was when we thought we found Hitler on a bus.

Alas, moving house has proven, without doubt, that one of life’s greatest miseries is the struggle of relocation. If I have to accept one more flat pack from a courier, I’ll be greeting the merciless prick with my very best “Here’s Johnny…” impression. That and obviously, the point blank refusal to “sign fer it, mate“.

Christ, there’s already one room in my house dedicated to the shit I’ve yet to recycle.

That’s my dining room, believe it or not. Correction: That will be my dining room when I get hold of some recycling bags from the council.

Travel Targets in 2012

I already have some trips planned for 2012.

In May, I’ll be heading to America for a wedding, and to meet some of my partner’s friends.

New York, Chicago and Indianapolis will be our ports of call. Can you spot the odd one out? Yep, I’ve been told that Indiana’s biggest tourist attraction is the Indy 500 race, which doesn’t bode well for my souvenir hunt. I’m not a fan of motor racing at the best of times, but especially when it’s the retarded American version that takes place in a circular ring.

The only time I’ve found circular rings and cars to be compatible was in Destruction Derby on the Sega Saturn. And something tells me a Nascar event has gone badly wrong if it resembles as such.

Digs aside, I’m looking forward to visiting America again. It’s been a while since I last had my anal cavities probed at immigration. Remind me not to provoke Passport Control by smiling next time.

I’m also excited to travel back to Thailand at the end of 2012, although I’ve learnt another vital life lesson: don’t come home with a puppy. Unless you like handing over £3000 to government quarantine, as well as the puppy.

With trips to Spain, France and ‘somewhere beginning with B’ (hold hands, let’s pray it’s not Birmingham), it should be a good year.

Business Targets in 2012

Like most affiliates, my gameplan for 2012 is survival. Don’t get banned from Facebook, don’t get sued for false advertising, don’t get swallowed up by the competition.

Generally speaking, if I can succeed with just one of those targets, it’ll be a bloody good year.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many people that I’m slowly moving my business away from affiliate marketing. As much as I love the money, the job is about as satisfying for the soul as a bicycle kick to the bollocks. The sooner I become less reliant on mindless arbitrage, the sooner I’ll be able to force myself out of bed in the morning.

My most important target for the year is to get published. I’ve always wanted to be an author, and this is the year where I’m determined to make it happen.

I’m currently writing a book that sums up the sleaze of working in the Internet Marketing business. While it could be difficult to find an agent for my profanity woven prose, I’m hoping one will take pity on me. Or read this blog and get in touch. Nudge wink ball tickle.

Recommended This Week:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the FinchSells RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter. Have a banging 2012!

Grow A Monster Blog By Manipulating This 1 Human Flaw

Jan 04 2012

“Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, rather we just try out a different query and search again.”
– Justin Owings

This is one of my favourite quotes on the subject of confirmation bias – our tendency to pick and choose facts where they suit us, neglecting anything that goes against our argument. It’s something that should interest all Internet Marketers, and particularly those who run blogs.

I often say that to be successful as an ‘expert’ or a consultant, you don’t need to know everything – just a tiny bit more than your average reader. You can be a successful blogger by validating what your audience already knows. It’s one of our many rational defects that we rarely seek new information, and would much rather find confirmation that our existing views are truthful and valid.

Confirmation bias: The tendency of people to favour information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.

Successful bloggers are brilliant at exploiting this bias. They roll out content that is designed to look informative, but usually only confirms what the reader already knew. The best bloggers will go one step further. They’ll produce content that validates what a reader can only speculate to be true, thus sealing the role of ‘authority in a niche’, as my fellow Internet Marketers like to put it.

Unlike journalists, bloggers do not have to stick rigidly to the confines of fact over fiction. The secret to success lies in how we are perceived. By feeding readers the right blend of useless crap they already knew, and useless crap they always assumed, we can portray ourselves as figures of authority where it isn’t truly deserved. Some of the biggest and most popular blogs in the world rely on steady diets of ‘expert advice’ that serve merely to nail us to our beliefs.

Confirmation bias is a psychological weapon that allows bloggers to gain followers without having any kind of academic link to their chosen topic. By engineering a steady dripfeed of content that satisfies without challenging, any single one of us can become an expert. The old adage that content is king makes sense, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

If you really want to command a following, stick to telling people what they already know. If you want to become the fabled Mr Big Pants ‘authority in a niche’, extend that content to what they also speculate to be true.

One look at my Twitter feed tells me that the Republican primaries are now in full swing. Have you seen the bickering on political blogs?

You’ll find that the most commented sites are those that rally similar minded folk by enforcing their beliefs and serving a rose-tinted slew of facts to support them. If these sites felt a duty to promote a fairer race, they would paint each candidate in a fair and unbiased light. Of course, to do so would be to ask readers to challenge their beliefs. It never happens. People don’t want to be challenged. They want to feel vindicated, that they were right all along.

Once forming an opinion, we would rather live in ignorance than appear to be ‘flip-flopping’. Ordinary bloggers can grow monster followings by latching on to this weakness and appealing to the confirmation bias in us all.

Internet Marketing doesn’t require years of expertise, neither does blogging. It simply requires the articulation of beliefs and opinions in such a way that readers can pursue them as their own. If you do this, you will always have an audience.

Recommended This Week:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the FinchSells RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter. Have a banging 2012!