July, 2012 | Finch Sells

Premium Posts Volume 6 Available Now

Jul 31 2012

I’m relieved, happy and excited to announce that Premium Posts Volume 6, ‘Confessions From Your Competition‘, is now ready for your devouring.

You can read the synopsis below, and order here for instant access.

Special thanks go to Adsimilis for once again sponsoring the release. Adsimilis is, in my opinion, THE network to be with for dating offers. They’ve delivered over 400,000 dating leads for the month of July so far, and it’s still July. If you have anything to do with dating, get with Adsimilis today.

What’s in the Volume?

Controversial, opinion-dividing and absolutely rammo-jammo with affiliate marketing tips and tricks you can actually use. Premium Posts Volume 6 provides fresh moneymaking insight, lucrative confessions from your competition, and brand new methods of assaulting your campaigns.

Whether you are an affiliate marketing newbie, or a veteran of several years, this volume will deliver both actionable campaign ideas and deeper marketing theory that has the potential to make a real difference on your ROI.

What’s in this Volume?

Volume 6 is the most sprawling, mind-frazzling collection of affiliate marketing tips yet. Here is what you will find inside:

Bidding Strategies: The Oldest and Newest Tricks in the Book

An extensive trip through the best strategies for nailing long-term profitable campaigns on Facebook and Plentyoffish. Learn how to tweak your best creatives for optimal CTR, how to scale rapidly, and how to prevent rapid campaign burnout.

Practical Changes That Will Improve Your Landing Pages Today

A simple formula for troubleshooting your landing pages that will completely change the way you build them. Learn how to squeak more from your landing page CTR, why the presence of a brand’s logo may affect your CVR, and much more.

Profitable Angle Creation Made Easy with The 7 Deadly Sins

Do you struggle to create profitable campaign angles? Here we dissect a dating and skincare example to reveal how the 7 Deadly Sins can give you all the ammunition you need to find lucrative gaps in the market.

How to Use the Dark Art of Subliminal Advertising Like The Pros

Dive in to the rabbit hole of subliminal advertising. See it being used, see it being misused, and see how it could be adapted for your affiliate campaigns. Guaranteed to divide opinions.

1 Awesome ‘Hack’ to Boost Your Worst Converting Days

Why do you settle for some days converting worse than others? With this method, we introduce a ‘hack’ that will optimize your profits throughout the week. Get the maximum bang for your buck out of every dollar spent.

The Critical Campaign Variables that 80% of Affiliates Ignore

What if you were losing 50% of your traffic and you didn’t even know about it? This lengthy post looks at several important but unheralded campaign variables that can literally make or break your affiliate career.

Exposed: 1 PPV Dating Angle that Magnetizes Eyeballs

If you like campaigns delivered to you on a plate, this strikes pretty close to the mark. We’ll be revealing a hot current trend, along with some emphatic ‘visual cues’ that will send your banner CTRs through the roof.

August 2012 in the Affiliasphere

What’s happening in affiliate marketing? Probably not much. Read this and see for yourself.

The ‘Getting Things Done’ System… For Affiliate Marketers

Here is the system that enables me to balance affiliate marketing, with blogging, with product creation with a damn good scratch of my balls when I so feel like it. Adopting this system might not be for everyone, but it has made a genuine difference for me. We’ll tackle the many ‘bottlenecks’ of affiliate marketing, and how to launch a campaign the right way. AKA The Profitable Way.

Full Contents

Introduction: Confessions From Your Competition
Bidding Strategies: The Oldest and Newest Tricks in the Book
Practical Changes That Will Improve Your Landing Pages Today
Profitable Angle Creation Made Easy with The 7 Deadly Sins
How to Use the Dark Art of Subliminal Advertising Like The Pros
1 Awesome ‘Hack’ to Boost Your Worst Converting Days
The Critical Campaign Variables that 80% of Affiliates Ignore
Exposed: 1 PPV Dating Angle that Magnetizes Eyeballs
August 2012 in the Affiliasphere
The ‘Getting Things Done’ System… For Affiliate Marketers
In Closing: Thanks for Reading

Contains 9 posts, 21707 words, 127 pages in PDF form.
Originally released in July 2012.

Order here: “YES, MAKE ME SWOON, SEND ME THE POSTS”

Enjoy!

Note: After ordering, your purchase will be available for download immediately by accessing My Account > Orders. Don’t wait for the email.

“Do Affiliate Marketers Ever Feel Guilty?”

Jul 24 2012

One of the dumbest questions I get asked is “Do you ever feel guilty?”

It’s the inquisition that follows my brief and ambiguous description of what I do for a living.

“You’re making money from other people’s misery and false expectations…” goes the moral line of questioning.

Yep, that’s about the size of it.

I sit at my desk wearing horns as a dual-screen flickers with fire and brimstone. Somewhere in a distant land, my digital lambs are being lined up for the slaughter. And for what? Another $5 in my pocket? Don’t I ever feel guilty about that?

Guilty, no.

I feel about as guilty as a fish for shitting in the sea.

Dirty… always.

Why I don’t contribute to ‘share your office’ posts.

As long as advertising guidelines are being followed, there’s no reason to feel guilty that consumers are doing what consumers have always done.

People love investing in their dreams as much as they hate waking up and realising their own naivety for believing in another ‘magic button’.

While I would never advocate products that scam and steal money, there’s a huge misconception of what constitutes a scam in this business. In the majority of cases, users scam themselves.

They buy in to bullshit because they want to. It’s easier than facing reality. Nobody wants to be sold reality. And that’s okay.

It’s the way it’s always been.

Advertising provides an endless stream of placebos to cure emptiness and unease.

Affiliate marketers – driven by arbitrage and the waft of desperation – chase the same ends with less finesse.

It’s this unfortunate lack of judgment that cops a media firestorm; the bad press and FTC booty lashings soon follow. The actions of a few cast the entire industry in a negative light.

“Oh, you little affiliate marketing urchin, I’ve heard about your kind.”

What irks me most is the idea that some affiliate marketers are ‘above’ the business of advertising.

There are a lot of hypocritical voices in this industry who will speak down on anything remotely attached to CPA, while running reviews on their own sites about products and services they haven’t touched in their lifetimes. I would feel guilty if I was that full of shit.

All affiliate marketers are created equal, but some are clearly more equal than others.

I said that I don’t feel guilty, but I do feel dirty.

So, how is it possible to have a clear yet dirty conscience?

Well, there are two forms of guilt. There is the kind that arises from scamming and ripping people off, which affiliate marketers are often mistakenly diagnosed with.

And then there is the self-inflicted guilt that our time could be spent more productively on helping individuals rather than guiding them further in to delusion.

I don’t feel guilty that I make a lot of money from affiliate marketing, because it’s a legitimate industry and I need to put dinner on the table. That much is fact.

But I do feel dirty that my own talents aren’t going to a greater use. It’s psychologically unsustainable, for me personally, to spend the rest of my career in an industry that breeds such contempt.

Just one hour lost to lucrative campaigns is one hour that could have been spent on objectives I personally believe in – those that excite me. They are projects I can discuss around a dinner table without faceplanting my gravy in shame.

Thankfully I’m in a position where I’m doing well enough to be able to work on both campaigns and my long-term objectives. Yet affiliate marketing is still my job.

I don’t feel guilty about that, and no ‘regulation-abiding’ affiliate should.

Recommended This Week

If you haven’t downloaded it already, make sure you grab a copy of my freshly brewed Affiliate Marketer’s Survival Kit (add your email below for access). It’s 50 pages of up-to-the-second info on what currently works in affiliate marketing.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate, you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.

How to Use ‘Free’ to Your Advantage

Jul 17 2012

There’s a huge difference between marketing a service as ‘free’ and marketing it as ‘premium’ with a free incentive. Never underestimate the negative connotations that ‘free’ has on the anticipated quality of service.

As marketers, we tend to assume that free is always a good thing. And so our landing pages are plastered in free registrations, free bonuses and free instant access.

The worst offending affiliates will explain that something is free before explaining what it actually does. They sell the $0 before the product!

Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.

A lot of items are free in this world.

I could run outside and steal my neighbour’s garbage. That’s free.

I could spend £20 at Pizza Hut and get some free BBQ wings. But will I? Probably not. I don’t like wings.

Unless you establish a real desire to attain what is being offered for free, free does not sell.

So, why do affiliates continue to worship the supposed ‘benefit’ that X costs $0, when the user could barely give a shite about ‘free’. He doesn’t want free. He wants a good deal.

Note: Hey, at least they’re selling it as a benefit rather than a feature. Otherwise we really would be shooting basic psychology in the balls.

Free only becomes a powerful asset in your sales copy after the user has established “what I think X is worth to me“. And not a moment before.

This is where so many get it wrong. They never allow that worth to be established.

You have to establish value to create desire.

Here’s an example for a dating offer I posted on the Stack That Money Forum last week (sign up!)…

Meet the finest men in New York City for just $37/month*
Sign up in the next 15 minutes for an exclusive FREE peek at our men

*Most of our women only pay $37 once. Don’t be surprised if you find the man of your dreams before your trial membership expires. Yep, it sucks for us, but it’s unmissable value for you. This is your last chance to sign up free, so hurry!

Instead of taking the angle that the offer is free and therefore unmissable, it’s much more powerful to ask probing questions of the user’s own valuation system.

To put it more bluntly, here’s the thought sequence that we’re dictating…

The service is not free.
It must be a quality service.
Women are paying $37 to find love in their first 30 days.
Would I pay $37 if it meant finding love?

Most women are going to answer yes to this dream scenario.

Now that we’ve created an anchor where the possibility of finding love is worth at least $37 (in the user’s own head, where all effective anchors reside), we can drop our bombshell.

“Hold on, If I sign up in the ‘next 15 minutes’… I don’t have to pay a penny? But what about all those women paying $37/month?”

We’ve already established $37 as a bargain price. Now we’re hitting our target with a simply unmissable deal (free instant access!) compounded by the scarcity of time.

Act in the next 15 minutes or an exclusive peek at a premium service is gone forever.

There are many affiliate offers that use free incentives to attract sign-ups, and we are more than happy to oblige when it comes to making those incentives our number one selling points.

It’s amateur. We should be embarrassed.

The word ‘free’ should never appear in a landing page headline.

Our role is to establish a desire that is worth much more than any free service can provide.

Once we’ve created that desire, ‘free’ is the sucker punch that seals a knife-edge deal. It should never be the primary selling point.

Remember: Marketing always leads back to selling something – it wouldn’t exist if we only dealt in freebies.

Recommended This Week

If you haven’t downloaded it already, make sure you grab a copy of my freshly brewed Affiliate Marketer’s Survival Kit (add your email below for access). It’s 50 pages of up-to-the-second info on what currently works in affiliate marketing.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate, you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.