2012 | Finch Sells

The Rise of the Content Marketing Moron

Sep 03 2012

In case you didn’t hear, there’s a new craze in town. It’s called Content Marketing. There’s a serial site-killing Google Penguin on the loose, and he seems to be eating bad SEOs for breakfast.

Many of those bad SEOs have been reincarnated as bad Content Marketers.

It goes like this:

Stage 1: “Hmm, I sure would love to rank highly on Google. It’s a shame the Penguin had to munch my old bag of tricks. What can I do now?”

Stage 2: “Gee, every blogger and his dog seems to be guest posting. Maybe I should write a few dross articles and ~~ask~~ command the owners of better sites to publish my links.”

Stage 3:

Content Marketing Morons

Stage 4: One week later. “why u no reply?”

You know, these ‘content marketers’ have a lot in common with my pet Maltese. They both circle other people’s property curiously, they both piss on them, and they both run away without a care in the world.

But not if you fail to reply! Christ on a bike, that’s just an invitation for the ‘follow up’ email:

Content Marketing Morons

Look, seriously, this is not going to happen. You can make a meal out of my balls or sod off. I have no other purpose for you.

SEO, as we know it, may be heading towards its twilight years. But the new breed of Content Marketer leaves me in no doubt that the era of the complete and utter moron is still in full swing.

My girlfriend just received an invitation to place a link in her sidebar, for free. The incentive? “If you link to us, we’ll seriously consider buying a sponsored post on your site in the future.”

Who trains these people? Which WSO did this email template descend from?

My biggest problem with the guest posting outreach process is that it has become so popularised, so tutorialised, that every self-righteous urchin with a WordPress has begun to consider his brainfarts welcome on other bloggers’ property.

Don’t even get me started on the SEO keyword stuffing brigade.

Its just so painfully obvious what your intentions are!

Readers are not stupid and good bloggers are rightly protective of their assets.

If you think you can march in with a blatantly SEO’d article and then wait to cash the cheques, you are wrong, my friend. It doesn’t work like that. It shouldn’t work like that. How can you possibly be so arrogant to think it would ever work like that?

Okay, rant over.

Let this be a message for content marketers: the web is not your playground. Other people’s hard work is not your cheapskate shortcut to the top of Google.

Take the time to contribute something valuable or fuck off completely.

Love,
Finch

Recommended This Week

Have you read Premium Posts Volume 6? Grab your instant access to the PDF, print it, turn off your computer, and read my shit. Thank you please.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5 & 6. 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.

Lots of Ads Review – Fiend on Facebook Ads

Aug 28 2012

Lots of Ads is one of the more popular ad-spying tools on the market.

If you are the kind of inquisitive scumbag who likes to know exactly what his competitors are up to, you better buckle up for Christmas. You’re in for a treat.

This tool gives you access to exactly what it says on the tin. Lots, and lots, and lots of ads swiped directly from the world’s largest traffic source.

Facebook advertisers: Yes, there’s a good chance you’ll prosper from the ‘competitive analysis’ in Lots of Ads.

Facebook advertisers: Yes, there’s also a good chance you’ll turn red with rage upon finding your beautifully crafted ads sitting like lambs to the slaughter, just waiting to be jacked.

I have a love/hate relationship with spy tools.

The hate in me says:

1. I only really care about affiliate ads. I could not not give a rat’s left bollock what Betfair, William Hill or Sky are promoting. Ads promoted by companies that don’t follow my direct response principles are redundant. They are never going to match my ROI requirements.

2. They encourage lazy affiliate marketing. It’s so easy to take a peek at what other affiliate marketers are doing and attempt to steal the profit from under their door mats. But as most of us who have ever tried it can testify, it rarely ever works. Copying campaigns word-for-word, image-for-image, targeting-for-targeting is just not good cricket.

That said, if you were ever looking for a tool that would make campaign replication an absolute breeze, Lots of Ads would be your man.

It has a couple of newly released features that give it a huge advantage for sifting through the crap, removing the brand ads, and sneakily delving in to the day-to-day operations of other affiliates.

The first feature is the Redirect URL search.

If you want to search Facebook for every single ad that includes a redirect to your favourite network’s tracking link, you can. If you want to search Facebook for every single ad that references your favourite dating offer, you can. If you want to access translations to similar ads in 25 different countries, you can.

Lots of Ads allows you to search by demographic (gender, marital status, age) for ads in any of the following countries:

Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

When you find an ad that looks tasty, you can click for a detailed breakdown of the URLs that it redirects through.

This information has three benefits:

Find the networks that are running the best offers.
See the landing pages that have been most effective.
Use the scraped data to dig even further by searching for other ads that are associated with the tracked URLs.

You can sort ads by Last Active (eh, irrelevant), Days Running (useful for determining the burn-out factor), Avg Position or Frequency (a high frequency means you’ve landed yourself a hot potato).

For all the countries where the ads are written in languages that are total gobbledegook to your native tongue, fear not. There is a built-in translation feature that may or may not massacre the intended message. It depends on how ambitious the ad creator has been with his vocabulary.

Tip for creating foreign ads: Keep it simple, for god’s sake. Local slang is incredibly powerful, but plucking pretentious wordy adverbs out of your arse and hoping they translate well in to Chinese is not. It will be a bloodbath.

Modelling and Reverse Engineering Campaigns

As much as I admire the affiliate-friendly features that have been caressed and noodled (Hello, my confused Chinese friends) in to Lots of Ads, it goes without saying that you can only go so far by browsing the work of others.

The advertisers who will benefit most from Lots of Ads are those take the examples – and particularly the most successful images – to model similar but innovative campaigns of their own. Study intensively what is working for others, and isolate the determining factors.

A lot of the time, from my experience, you will find that the intangible ‘success‘ variable is a willingness to cloak. I found many examples of ads that have clearly been manipulated post-approval to make money from the platform. Lots of it, I’d imagine.

That’s fair enough, but I don’t like to cloak.

By looking deeper and burrowing further through the rabbit hole of data at my disposal, I’ve managed to find several awesome images as well as headlines that I would never have thought of in a million years. Probably because they’re written in Spanish.

What price does a great marketer pay for a few great images and a winning headline? They are priceless if you use them correctly. But the paradox of this software is that you will need to have your marketing brain tuned in to get maximum value out of the data.

That’s a good thing. If striking it lucky was as simple as signing up and automating the process, I would never dare to post this review. It wouldn’t be worth it.

Look at what other marketers are doing well and compare it to what you know you can do better. Somewhere in the middle, profitability collides.

My Thoughts

The software is relatively expensive, priced at $399/month for the All Countries package. I can only recommend the investment if you have a budget to play with and a decent track record of getting profitable on the platform. That may sound counter productive. Surely it’s the newbies without a prior taste of success that would benefit most?

Well, probably not.

I always recommend that spending money on data is better than spending money on tools when you’re just getting started.

If you have $399 burning a hole in your pocket and want to explore affiliate marketing, I recommend plugging in your imagination over any tool that is currently on the market. Invest in data. You will learn from the experience of testing – even if you fail to break even.

However, for Facebook advertisers who work on the platform daily and seek a comprehensive ‘competitor analysis’ solution – Lots of Ads ticks all the right boxes. You can use this bad boy to model the success (and many mistakes) of your peers.

The multitude of countries and demographics, as well as the option to sniff out tracking links by Redirect URLs, make this a very powerful and timely tool for the affiliate marketer who wants to know everything about his competition.

Landing pages, ad copies, images, networks, warts and all. Every last gory detail of the Facebook Advertiser’s conversion funnel is here for you to use, peruse and abuse.

The only thing missing is the bottom line.

Happy duplicating!

Edit: I’ve just remembered – I have a discount code! Use coupon FINCH12 for 10% off any package (lifetime deal).

Recommended This Week

Want to give Lots of Ads a test drive? Sign up here for a free trial. You can also use the coupon FINCH12 for 10% off any package.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5 & 6. 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 Grow The Balls For Bold New Campaigns

Aug 23 2012

Here’s an important lesson for affiliate marketers:

The best time to launch a new campaign is when the last one is still making you money.

If you haven’t read it, Charles Ngo (Dr_Ngo) recently posted an excellent guide on how to make it in Affiliate Marketing. He raises a lot of good points, but none more so than this:

Affiliate marketing is very psychological. One important principle is what I call “money momentum.” Lets say you’re making $1k profit a day. If you test out a bunch of traffic sources and lose money, it doesn’t hurt too much because you’re still profiting overall. When money’s coming in, you can afford more risks. And some of those risks are going to pay off.
What if the same guy didn’t start launching new campaigns until his old ones die and he has no $ coming in? He’s going to get more emotional with the money loss.

There’s a lot of truth in this.

The easiest time to be laying down hundreds of dollars on new campaigns is when you have a buffer against the loss. It doesn’t have to be another profitable campaign. It could be the money that comes from your day job.

There are two reasons why I advise those making only ‘decent’ money from affiliate marketing to avoid chucking in their day jobs.

‘Decent’ money is not enough to guarantee your future success. Affiliate marketing is so volatile that you really need to have at least six months of living expenses in the bank before taking the plunge – more if you have a mortgage (or kids! …or a partner for that matter!).
The psychological advantage of having a guaranteed pay cheque will reduce the friction that is associated with churning out bold new campaigns. You will stomach greater losses than the affiliate marketer who has to conjure bread from his returns.

This brings us to an industry paradox.

The affiliate marketer who has other business assets, other sources of income, is likely to have much greater risk tolerance, and is therefore more likely to invest in bold new campaigns that open the door to rapid wealth growth.

Affiliate marketers who hang their entire careers in the balance by living pay cheque to pay cheque on skinny arbitrage margins… well, it’s easy to understand how they end up in a wheel spin, isn’t it?

They know that they need to gamble on bold new campaigns (and alien traffic sources), but their risk aversion prevents them from throwing balls to the wind and doing so. They can’t stomach the loss.

If you recognise these symptoms and can’t bring yourself to launch the campaigns that will springboard your career to the next level, here are the logical steps you can take:

Slash your living expenses and save more pennies for your campaigns.
Seek guaranteed stable income as your fallback – both emotionally and financially. This could be in the form of a part-time job, or in local clients that pay you a fixed monthly retainer to be their digital marketing whipping boy.
Use your skillset (e.g. writing, design, coding…) to earn ‘disposable income’ on freelance sites like Elance.
Focus on building web assets that generate traffic you don’t have to pay for.

Each option makes sense. Personally, I am a big fan of building my own web assets.

How much money do you spend on advertising? How much of the risk in affiliate marketing is associated with arbitrage? Building your own traffic source removes the stress of calculating and tracking margins. You can then reinvest your profits in to more scalable traffic sources without the emotional resistance to losing money.

What do you think? How do you deal with the risk of creating new campaigns on new traffic sources?

Recommended This Week

Have you read Premium Posts Volume 6? Grab your instant access to the PDF, print it, turn off your computer, and read my shit. Thank you please.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5 & 6. 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.