2012 | Finch Sells

The Millionaire Fastlane Review

Jan 20 2012

A few days ago, I asked Twitter for some feedback on Rich Dad Poor Dad. I received a ton of replies with the consensus swinging from awesome, to a vanity project, to a complete waste of time. A number of people suggested I read MJ DeMarco’s The Millionaire Fastlane instead, and having heard good things from sources I trust, I thought I’d take them up on the suggestion.

The Millionaire Fastlane aims to dispel the myth of Get Rich Slow, aka ‘every financial dream you’ve ever been sold’. DeMarco is a contemporary self-made millionaire; the type that we traditionally look up to in the Internet Marketing world. But then, this is no ordinary world. DeMarco made his fortune by selling Limos.com for several million dollars in the early 2000s. Now, he wants to hand us his blueprint for early retirement, using a clusterfuck of petrolhead metaphors and really, really tough love.

It sounds like a very familiar story arc, doesn’t it? Tell the already downtrodden reader that he’s been doing it wrong all these years. Then fill his shattered dreams with hope that a quick fix solution is there after all.

DeMarco distances himself from the popular ‘be your own boss gurus’ that he claims to despise. And yet his formula for setting the tone of the message is as textbook as a Clickbank sales page. While the first half of The Millionaire Fastlane is a merciless assassination of anybody and everybody who detours from his grand plan, the latter chapters are a brilliant portrayal of what it really takes to attract wealth.

Fastlane is a mixed bag. It’s 100 pages too long, and starts terribly by ticking off every last painful cliche of the Internet Millionaire. DeMarco is an abrasive, obnoxious and sometimes annoying writer. That happens to be one of my preferred methods of relating to young cash-hungry audiences, but MJ really pushes the boat out. The tough love tone could be forgiven, if it wasn’t for the breathtaking nonchalance by which he dispels the merit in any lifestyle but his own.

God forbid you read this book as the proud owner of a shitty car, or as somebody in his 50s or 60s. DeMarco ridicules anybody who hasn’t achieved early wealth as a urine-stained, wheelchair-riding lost cause of society.

The first 100 pages act as a relentless attack on what MJ refers to as sidewalkers and slowlaners, or anybody who hasn’t discovered his fastlane mindset. He unleashes a grandstand assault on just about anybody with a day job, and anybody with the audacity to follow a profession that requires working for The Man, or getting a college education.

It takes 17 chapters of preaching to the choir for DeMarco to simmer down and accept that we ‘get it’. We know why most people are destined to never be millionaires. We know that working 5 days in an office to enjoy 2 days of peace is not the greatest of trades. But Christ, does he ever ram it down our throats? Barely a page drifts by where we’re not forced to listen to his Lamborghini fetish, or an increasingly ridiculous diatribe of automobile metaphors.

So, I hated the first half of this book. The empty rhetoric left me wondering how such a broken beat could ever have hoarded the 5 star reviews that Amazon suggests, which made it all the more surprising that the chapters to follow are perhaps some of the best ever written on the field of personal finance.

As brash as DeMarco writes, his assessment of entrepreneurism is the sort that really gets you lining up the parallels with your own business. He provides a much needed demolition of the myth that being your own boss is synonymous with wealth and freedom. He even accuses us affiliate marketers of hitchhiking the road to riches and not being genuine entrepreneurs. He’s right, of course. And his message that creating systems is the true secret behind wealth will be reverberating in the head of anybody who persists with the first half of the book and gets so far as to read it.

There are moments in the closing chapters where The Millionaire Fastlane resonates with our kind in a way that I’ve yet to see any other book manage. It’s a perfectly executed kick in the GoDaddys. A much needed reminder that as long as we stay promoting other people’s products, we get no closer to dictating our own future. Indeed, DeMarco even confesses his love for affiliate marketing. He just wants to be in charge of the system, rather than a disposable part of it.

Without doubt, the first half of this book is a damning crucifixion of the modesty lacking in our industry, but by the time you reach the final page, you’ll be feeling too punchdrunk on inspiration to care.

You’ll feel the need to step out from the shadow of promoting products you have no control over. You’ll want to build real wealth that leads to real freedom. This illumination, if it comes, is the single greatest gift an affiliate marketer could ask for. For that reason alone, Millionaire Fastlane is a must-read.

Recommended This Week

A 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.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

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.

Recommended This Week:

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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.

Recommended This Week

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.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.