April, 2012 | Finch Sells

How to Avoid A Mental Breakdown From Working At Home

Apr 13 2012

Do you remember what happened to Jack Torrance when he tried to ‘work from home’ in The Shining?

Jack thought a little peace and quiet would be nice. What better way to finish his writing than to migrate to a remote hotel with nothing but time and his rocking shadow to fill the void? Unfortunately, that particular ‘home’ turned out to be harbouring some sinister spirits.

Believe it or not, Internet Marketers and Jack Torrance have something in common. No, not haunted mansions. But rather, we have to deal with the psychological effect of isolation. We have to win the battle that goes on inside our heads.

Disconnecting from the world and working from home is some people’s idea of paradise. Well, if you’re not careful, it could turn in to your idea of Hell. And before you know it…

Well shit, Sherlock. I guess that 9-5 doesn’t look so bad, after all.

We Are All Creatures of Habit

From the age of about 5, we are indoctrinated with a system of routines. A system that – for many people – lasts all the way through to retirement.

There are 8760 hours in a year, and not many people have the power and responsibility to decide how they spend every last one of them.

I’ve spoken to many Internet Marketers like myself, and a recurring theme is the difficulty in striking a work-life-play balance.

Even though I had less freedom, I look back on my stint working for a London agency as one of the easiest times of my life. The days and weeks were laid out for me. You turn up at 9am, leave the office at 6pm, and whatever hours left in the day are yours to spunk however you see fit. There was a beautiful simplicity to life, albeit a restricting schedule that often left me chewing a large Mocha to get through the mornings.

I won’t lie. Working from home will always be my preferred arrangement. But it comes at the price of isolation. Do you ever feel that the rest of the world is racing on by without you?

The effect was magnified during my 8 months living in Thailand. There were periods of mild depression where I felt so isolated from other 24 year olds that I lost complete direction and control over my life. I came back to London thinking it would reignite me somehow. I was excited just to be able to communicate in English with whoever was serving me coffee. It was a luxury. But now having settled back in to the suburbs, the same restlessness has returned with a vengeance.

I come from the small town of Ruislip in North West London. It’s a nice town, but it rarely sets my pulse racing. The last time I got excited was when Boris Johnson rolled up outside Budgens seeking London Mayoral votes. You know you’ve got problems when the presence of Boris makes your day.

Despite being just 40 minutes from the hub of Central London, life here is slow. It’s really slow. There are times where I forget that human life exists outside my window, until I hear the trundle of a granny mowing down the street on her scooter. Then I realise, Jesus Christ, if she doesn’t slow down, some poor sod is about to get his arse extinguished by her four wheeled killing machine. That’s when I feel alive.

From my home office window, on a particularly exciting day, I may glimpse next-door’s cat getting in to a fight with a pigeon. But that’s about it. There are times where for all of the freedom and comfort that comes from working at home, I do question my future sanity. I’m 24 years old and most of my conversation throughout the day comes from two extremely lively dogs barking at me for food. Is this really all there is to Internet Marketing?

I think a lot of want-to-be-work-at-homers underestimate how quickly total freedom can spiral in to a blur of inactivity. There are times where ‘rudderless ship’ has summed me up perfectly.

Working from home creates a huge vacancy of time. Pretending that such a void can be filled with work, television and coffee is quite possibly one of the biggest lifestyle fuck-ups you can make.

Everybody needs to feel alive socially, and much of the natural gravitation behind that pursuit is stripped away when you decide to work from home. You have to make the effort, on a personal level, to ensure that your sense of camaraderie and belonging doesn’t dissipate from the moment you leave the office for the final time. Working at home is not the answer to anybody’s true sense of paradise. It’s just a contributing factor.

When you have more hours at your disposal than everybody else, you need to find more ways to pass the idle time. You need hobbies and social routines. Activities that snap you away from your screen and inject purpose beyond making money from so-and-so.

A day built around wealth generation is completely wasted when you think about it. Why aren’t you enjoying what you already have? I’ve had to answer that question many times for myself and it represents my biggest struggle of the last 3 years.

We are all creatures of habit. For most of us, those habits are defined through systems that are implemented from childhood. But when you step outside the system, isolation and poor planning can unleash a truly ugly creature.

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Cloaking On Facebook – Is It Really Worth It?

Apr 10 2012

To cloak or not to cloak? That seems to be the question for many disillusioned Facebook marketers these days.

Facebook has grown increasingly picky over the ads that it accepts. I doubt you needed me to tell you this. The endless stream of disapproval notices and the fist-shaped hole in your wall should be evidence enough.

While Facebook seeks to tighten its noose around the necks of certain rogue affiliates, many of these marketers simply can’t stand to give up the ghost. They are head over heels with Facebook’s enormous earning potential, and perhaps the knowledge that it made them good money in the past. So instead of playing by the rule book, they eat the rules and crap them out the window. Cloaking enters the equation.

Cloaking is the mischievous art of showing one page to the Facebook approvals team, and another to the unlucky guy who clicks on your ad. When cloaking Facebook, you can launch a series of pant-wettingly lucrative ads simply by ignoring the strict editorial guidelines that the rest of us are obliged to follow.

Naturally, Facebook doesn’t take kindly to having the wool pulled over its eyes. If you are caught cloaking ads, you can consider yourself banned, along with any other accounts that you may already be linked to.

It’s clear that cloaking on Facebook is a high stakes game. The need to avoid detection has led to the launch of several professional ‘cloakers’, which can cost from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. Most of these cloakers rely on huge databases of IPs, and the hope that Facebook doesn’t get any smarter than it already is (a flimsy leg to stand on, if you ask me).

I don’t want to delve in to solutions that are currently on the market. What good would it do for anybody? You need only sign up at a private forum, or pay attention to your email newsletters. They are not hard to find, although their degree of effectiveness can vary dramatically.

If you’re going to skimp on budget for your technology, investing in a half-arsed Facebook cloaker is probably the dumbest decision you could ever make. Well, almost…

My mind boggles at how many affiliates are still fond of the classic ‘bait and switch’ cloaking that was popular 3 years ago.

If you’re not familiar with the technique, well, there’s very little science to it.

Cowboy Affiliate #1039 submits an ad promising dramatic weight loss, while redirecting to an innocuous article on a reputable site. Let’s say “7 foods that will help you lose weight in 30 days” on Men’s Health Magazine.

Facebook follows the link, sees no harm, and approves it for public display.

Roughly 20 seconds later, Cowboy Affiliate is changing his redirect so that instead of the article on Men’s Health, the ad now routes through to a monster flog that’s painted in pictures of the 300 workout. Instead of 7 healthy ‘foodages’ (Thanks, Karl Pilkington), the user is confronted with 2 bottled health supplements, and a recurring billing cycle buried somewhere in the footer.

This classic form of bait and switch cloaking can be achieved without technology. You need only guts, balls and a heavy dose of naivety to get your first ‘cloaked’ campaign live and profitable. Facebook traffic converts so well that having the right ad live for a week can net five figures of profit quite comfortably.

Unfortunately, it’s also about as suicidal as affiliate marketing gets. If your business can only make money with such crash and burn methodology, it’s already infected with a terminal cancer. I give you about 3 weeks.

My recommendation is to avoid cloaking altogether. If you are in this business to make money over the long term, without burning every last bridge along the way, there is little sense in committing to a business strategy where the only person who wins is yourself.

In most cases, it would be more accurate to say that the only winner is your affiliate network. They enjoy the fruits of your traffic, without the risk of getting their Facebook accounts banned.

But there’s the catch. Not everybody is in affiliate marketing to make money over the long term. Some of you guys reading this now have no interest in being full time affiliates. Maybe you have day jobs or other business ventures, and you see cloaking Facebook as a funny little moneymaker on the side. “Hey, Mark Zuckerberg! Suck my berries…”

No words of mine will deter those individuals from investing in the technology necessary to cloak Facebook profitably. So to answer the question, “Is cloaking Facebook worth it?“, only you know the answer.

Are you trying to build a business, or are you trying to pillage quick cash like a bull in a china shop? Your answer should reveal the way forward.

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Volusion Review – My First Impressions

Apr 05 2012

I recently registered with Volusion to setup my own commerce store at FinchPremiums.com. I’ve been experimenting with the software for 2 weeks now, and I’m impressed at how many bases they’ve managed to cover. If you sell products – online or offline – Volusion is a powerful beast that deserves a closer look.

If nothing else, it’s certainly a step up from E-Junkie.

Volusion review pic

Volusion: The Basics

Volusion simplifies the process of running an online store. It’s branded as the definitive all-in-one ecommerce solution, boasting 24/7 support, and over 35,000 active websites currently using the software.

Volusion looks mighty fine in the presentation stakes. It’s sleek and professional. The product listings, checkout process and homepage are distinctly un-Clickbank, which is always a good thing in my book.

You can choose to install one of the many existing design templates, or hack it together yourself. I got lucky with one of the ready-made templates being a perfect match for what I was looking to achieve.

There are a number of payment gateways available; including PayPal, Google Checkout, wire transfers, electronic cheques, money orders and straight up cash (seriously, how many online stores accept a fistful of dollars these days?).

You can also apply for a merchant account to handle credit and debit card transactions in-house. While I do like the idea of a one-page checkout, I don’t hate Paypal enough to want to go through the ball ache of setting up a merchant account. Horses for courses, right?

Why I’m a Fan

Before using Volusion, I had been selling my products via a rather primitive ‘Add to Cart‘ button on your typical WordPress page. There are three features I wanted that required ugly hacks to mesh with the E-Junkie shopping cart: coupon codes, Facebook integration and an efficient affiliate program.

Coupon codes are easy to setup with Volusion. You can set as many codes as you want, and they look far less jarring than they did with E-Junkie. Previously I would be forced to ask the customer for their coupon code in a dirty text field before clicking any checkout button. This led to many customers bailing on a purchase because they couldn’t find a coupon code and didn’t want to miss out on a deal. Not a problem with Volusion.

The Volusion affiliate program is a must-have for anybody like myself who relies on word-of-mouth buzz to promote his products. Affiliates can sign up and receive a fixed % commission, or a specific payout set at the product level. If you have ‘super affiliates’, you can reward them Amazon-stylio by ramping up their commission for extra sales delivered. Very nice, very sleek and very easy to manage.

Volusion is also nicely prepared to jump on future trends. There is complete integration with Facebook, the ability to set ‘Daily Deals’, and even the option to run your own rewards scheme. Some of the more visual features, like bestselling lists and featured products, can be added in the space of about 5 seconds using the many fully customisable widgets.

I haven’t immersed myself in these features yet as I’m only selling 4 products, but they look like excellent tools for increasing sales. Arguably Volusion’s greatest selling point is how effectively it presents your products, and how easily it lets you promote them.

If you have a great idea, there’s every chance you can execute it within the hour thanks to the huge array of features Volusion packs in; many of which are likely to sit dormant for months until a sudden brainfart alerts you to their potential.

The Packages

Behold:

Click to enlarge.

Problems I’ve Encountered

I expect I will get to grip with the following grievances as the software becomes more familiar. But that leaves a question mark hanging over the learning curve. How long does it take to get to grip with Volusion? I think you’ll need at least a week to learn this thing inside out. Even then, you’ll still be finding new functionality hidden four menus deep.

Some problems I’ve noted:

Shipping has been behaving randomly.

Perhaps the biggest problem – one that I’m still in conversation with support over – is the tendency for some shipping emails to get lost in the shuffle. I’ve had to send several customers their purchases manually. It would be mighty foolish to expect all orders to come in through 9-5 BST, especially with customers scattered all around the world, so I’d like this to be automated and foolproof ASAP.

I’m told that the issue is now fixed. Fingers and bollocks crossed.

Too many options?

I understand the need for flexibility on an ecommerce platform, and I’m admittedly biased from the viewpoint of a guy who only wants to sling his digital products. However, the number of options to get your head around in the configuration process may prove slightly overwhelming if you’re not a numbers man.

Just to add a product to the store, there are no less than 121 fields begging for your attention. Do they all merit the inclusion? It depends what you’re selling, but I’ve left a good 80% of my options empty.

If you’re buying Volusion with the sole intention of selling digital products, there’s a lot of information to digest that will never be relevant to your business, and yet you will still need to comb over it in case you miss something important.

Volusion could perhaps benefit from a modular approach. “Will I be shipping physical products?” If the answer is no, disable these four million extra options and Finch will stop drowning his neighbour’s kittens in dismay.

So, Volusion: Worth The Investment?

I shudder to imagine how many sales I lost with E-Junkie’s clunky interface and lack of marketing features. Volusion is exactly the opposite, and I’m optimistic that it’ll make a positive impact on my bottom line.

All things considered, the price is outstanding. I’ve started on the Bronze Package which is paid for with a single sale of my Premium Posts.

You can take a 14 day trial to setup your entire store on a demo server. Throughout the process, I’ve found the support team to be highly responsive and well worth their salt with the “We’re here 24/7” claims. I’ve had answers to my questions usually within 30 minutes of submitting a ticket. And I’ve been submitting a lot of tickets.

If you like what you see, upgrading to a paid package and putting the site live is relatively pain-free. It took me 5 days to go from a completed demo site to the public launch. A little longer than I expected, but worth it in the end.

I recommend taking Volusion for a trial spin if you’re in the market for a good shopping cart. It’s surpassed my expectations so far.

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