Affiliate BizDev | Finch Sells

18 Months On From Quitting My Job…

Oct 16 2010

It’s now 18 months since I quit my day job. I guess the cliche thing to say would be that it feels like only yesterday. Well it doesn’t. All those vivid memories of clearing my office desk, elbowing a small mountain of coffee cups in to the trash, and setting off to live the dream. They’re pretty distant to say the least.

It’s hard to explain the things that go through your mind when you say goodbye and take your final commute home from the day job you hope you’ll never have to live again. It’s a combination of optimism, luxury and – in my case, at the time – a slightly paralyzing fear of “Oh shit, did I just quit my job in a recession?”

For those of you striving to make that dream a reality, I won’t shit on your parade. The first few weeks of rolling out of bed and being your own boss are like a paradise. But if you’ve been following this blog and reading my own journey, you’ll know that I’ve never been one to hold back from posting about the downsides.

But then, I’ve been facing several battles with myself that probably neutered any sense of reality. Most people would drop their day jobs in a second to have this luxury. And it’s something that I’m slowly starting to appreciate after the post-novelty trauma of adapting to working from home.

The most important lesson I’ve learnt so far is the importance of establishing relationships in an industry where trust and respectability are hard to come by. There’s always the temptation to become a profit scalping recluse. The kind of bastard who moves from pseudonym to pseudonym just to survive on the traffic sources that want him banned for life, only to pop up on WickedFire every now and then asking “How can I get a new Adwords account?”

This is the kind of bridge burning that can cost an affiliate dearly. And it’s the type of relationship that I showed no respect for whatsoever in my early days. When I entered the industry, I didn’t give a flying fuck how many search engine TOS guidelines I broke, or how many people I mislead with morally dubious advertisements. And it’s through a minor miracle, and some extremely exhaustive processes, that I can sit here and say that I still have access to every ad platform I might need in the future.

Other affiliates aren’t so lucky. Many are banned from Google, while a who’s who list of ballers are indefinitely exiled from Facebook. And even though last year’s profits might suggest it was worth it while it lasted, I would beg to differ. If you continuously exploit your relationships with these traffic sources, you’re inadvertently placing a clenched fist up your own arsehole. I promise you, one morning it will begin to hurt.

There is so much more value to coexisting with the Facebooks and Googles of this world, rather than forever ducking from their crosshairs. Are you happy to spend the rest of your days wincing whenever your Gmail shows a (1) because you know you’ve been a naughty boy?

I know many affiliates live and swear by the argument “Hey! It’s easy to get back on traffic sources – even if I’m banned for life! They’ll never catch me with my mum’s credit card, right? Wanna see how Gerard got ripped in 300?”

Well, yeah, I guess it’s easy to tell a girl you love her and then screw her over again. Sooner or later she’s gonna tear off your balls for going to the well too many times. You shouldn’t keep fucking with Facebook or Google’s little heartstrings. As impetuous as they may seem, your efforts are probably better spent holding hands and taking the next guideline changes with a sour lemon face but a long term vision. It’s better to be with than without where traffic sources are concerned.

At some point in the last 18 months, I started looking at my work as a business rather than a money making scheme. A different attitude is required to each. And I’m not saying you should agree with my own decisions, because some people ARE in this for the quick cash. In fact, ten minutes with the average Internet Marketer and it dawns on me how those of us who are actually here to build a business are the grand fucking minority. It’s an industry dominated by retards chasing a dream.

I’ve picked up certain tricks and exploits that could have netted me an absolute fortune in this last year. But they compromise my relationships with networks, traffic sources, advertisers, and the people who’d be reading my ads. If I was running a money making scheme, I probably wouldn’t give a shit. But I’m trying to build a business, so I’ve learnt to think differently. It’s just not worth getting greedy and burning your bridges.

I’m actually really excited about the next 18 months, thanks to the pursuit of some new projects that I genuinely believe in. In drawing up my business plans, it’s dawned on me the true value in having traffic sources like Google and Facebook at my disposal. I’m lucky to still have that luxury, and I’d be getting my little titties in a twist if I didn’t.

If you’re going to burn your bridges, make sure you bank a hell of a lot of money to justify the sacrifice. It’s a reckless streak you might end up regretting somewhere down the line.

Connect to me, baby

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My Rocky Relationship With SEO Is Over

Oct 11 2010

It was a hot sweaty night in the land of Finch. The clock was ticking past 2am. My eyes were starting to strain from the glare of WickedFire’s traffic generation section. I had logged in with the intention of learning from the best to improve my SEO game. If you want to build long term assets, you need to rank well on Google, right?

Somewhere between reading about link wheels and staring dumbly at pyramid diagrams, the realization dawned on me. I fucking hate SEO.

If we’ve reached a tipping point where your success is determined by the number of Squidoo hub pages you’ve got passing link juice through to your money site, I would rather just forget about it completely. I’m sure if I sat here long enough, I could automate a script to dramatically increase the number of backlinks pumping through to my site. But beyond satisfying a phantom algorithm somewhere in Google’s underbelly, what exactly am I doing? I’m a fucking pawn in somebody else’s system.

In my opinion, the SEO brigade are deluded when they say that developing these naturally high-ranking sites is a long term business plan. I’m not going to deny that it’s incredibly lucrative. But long term? If your methodology is based on the science of link profiles, you don’t have squat diddly to bank your house on. SEO is just as volatile as any PPC campaign.

And as I sat there in the recess of the night, scratching my chin and scrolling through page after page on WickedFire, it really dawned on me that so much of what marketers do is complete and utter bullshit. It’s clever bullshit, don’t get me wrong. But I can’t help feeling that there’s more money in being the system, rather than trying to game one.

Over the last couple of months, my focus has shifted away from SEO. The safest way forward for affiliate marketers isn’t to learn advanced SEO or to become a wizard with a traffic source. Branding is everything. If you can develop assets that stand on their own two feet and command readership through the quality of the content alone, THAT is the only thing that can be deemed “long term” in this industry.

The problem with building a brand is that it’s an art best left to those who know shit about the subject matter. I’ve found it very easy to build a brand for this affiliate marketing blog, because that’s what I do. I can relate to affiliates and I can write in a way that strikes a chord with them. But if you asked me to write a blog about shoes or the process of learning a second language, I’d have my work cut out.

Many affiliates suffer from this. We want to monetize every niche, but we don’t know where to start when it comes to writing about topics that have no relevance to us. We end up with half arsed sites, branded as sloppily as a squashed lemon, and articles that’ve blatantly been slapped together by some copywriter who’s only interest is stretching his 437 word count past the 500 mark.

Outsourcing is one of those buzz words that sounds smart. Fuck yeah, I can hire some housewife to write me 20 articles for a hundred bucks. Invariably, you end up with a website that strikes a tick next to the proverbial mutton dressed as lamb box.

The reality is that if you want to become an authority in your niche, without the indefinite nature of SEO or PPC, you have to pay the premium.

Hire passionate people to write about topics they can spark to life with their own knowledge. I’ve gone from selecting the best value bidder on Elance, to selecting the candidate who has slightly sketchier grammar but loves the niche I’m trying to break in to. Inevitably, you’ll be able to publish content that looks less like minimum wage slave labour.

Affiliate marketers are untouchable when it comes to monetizing traffic. No agency or worldwide company can lay a finger on the creativity and innovation that some of us possess. But we’re also responsible for publishing some of the biggest piles of steaming bullshit ever to be labeled “articles”.

I think the way forward in 2010 is to develop websites that other affiliates would pay a premium to advertise on. Be the system, don’t be part of it.

Connect to me, baby

Getting The Most Bang For Your Buck

Sep 01 2010

It’s a new month full of new projects and new targets. Kids are about to go back to school and Christmas is looming in the not too distant future. If mindless seasonal fever does the trick for you, I guess you could say it’s a great time to make some money online. Same as it always was.

I’ve been speaking to quite a few virgin CPA marketers recently. One of the recurring questions I get asked is “If I have X amount to spend per month, where do you think I should invest it?”

Working with a limited budget is something that most of us had to deal with when we started. You’ve probably noticed how a lot of the top affiliates out there are young entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s. These are guys and girls who probably didn’t have fortunes to invest.

Personally speaking, I’d only just turned 21 when I first hit success. Besides the odd scrunched up tenner in my back jeans pocket, most of my money was…err, the bank’s money. When you’re crashing in to your overdraft on CPA campaigns, you kinda have to get the most bang for your buck. Or you’re metaphorically shagged.

I consider myself lucky that much of my initial investment was made at a time when you could rip out a CPA campaign and treble or quadruple your money overnight.

ROI is especially important when you’re just getting started. If you’re barely managing to break even on your campaigns, and wondering how the top affiliates manage to build up these empires – well – cheer yourself up with the knowledge that it gets easier. Everything gets easier. You just need to scrap away. Increase the size of your investment pot, by any means necessary, and get your cashflow sorted.

My life as an affiliate is a lot easier now that I can get away with running 25% ROI campaigns. I don’t really care if I blow a few thousand dollars in a day, as long as I’m seeing profit and enough of it to cover the risk and outgoings.

Let’s say you have a monthly budget of $500 after deducting what your wife’s blown up the wall to fill her wardrobe. It’s tough to pinpoint where to start. Do you go in to promoting car insurance offers on Facebook? Rebills on PPV? Maybe even gaming offers on the content network?

The way I see it, if you don’t have much money to invest, there’s no point in entering a market where volume is a necessary ingredient to survive. Thinking of slinging a dating offer to 25 year old guys in mainstream America? Forget about it. Even if you find a profitable campaign, the ROI is likely to be so slim that it’ll take you twelve months of waiting on cheques in the mail before your business has taken a single step forward. That’s the reality if you’re working with Facebook, Adwords or even POF lately.

If you don’t have a big budget, your mind should naturally be focused on cornering small markets instead. Now you’ve probably read this endorsement of scaling and placed your finger on the reply button, ready to call me a lousy lying hypocrite. Yes, scaling is what puts the finishing touches on a super affiliate’s new LA mansion. But without having money to invest – and lots of it – scaling is like climbing in to bed after too much tequila. Really fucking difficult and really fucking slow.

I’ve posted time and time again about laser targeting your campaigns; both on PPV and Facebook. This is the tactic I used regularly before I had the muscle to compete with other big spending affiliates on broad demos.

If you’re looking to promote dating offers on a small budget, make yourself familiar with the niche markets where it’s possible to make a killing with highly targeted, albeit low volume, campaigns.

Markets like Single Parent Dating, Black Dating, Jewish Dating, Asian Dating…these are all great entry points for the newbie marketer wanting to increase his capital with a high ROI. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re wasting an entire budget only to claim ten bucks of profit with Mate 1.

If there’s no logical micro-market for you to target, it’s just as easy to create one for yourself. Your network might not have a suitable offer for Midget Albino Dating, but that’s not to say your CTRs aren’t going to be through the roof if you decide to target them anyway.

The key to initial success is to sweep underneath the heavyweight affiliates. If you can’t compete with their budget, compete with the time and care that you dedicate to your campaigns. Pay attention to the details, the small print of the demos. Produce creatives that strike close to the mark.

As an affiliate who now works mainly with broad demos covering millions of people at a time, I can say that there are a lot of micro-markets that I’d love to scale in to and dominate – if only I had the time. But I tend to dedicate my resources to those mainstream campaigns where most of my money is made. And it’s the same for many high volume affiliates out there. Your best opportunity is to cover the ground that we don’t bother getting dirty with. Like a local politician going door to door while we can only put a sweeping ad on TV.

There are some campaigns that I had to turn down as a newbie marketer simply because they weren’t cost-efficient. And yet they might have been producing 50% ROI. That’s madness, isn’t it? Like your mum buying you a unicorn for Christmas only to slap her in the face and moan that you wanted something more mythical. Beggars can’t be choosers, but profit isn’t always the footprint of money well spent.

It’s important to make every penny count while you’re still dealing in small business steps. Forget about the rulebook that super affiliates abide by. They’re competing on a different playing field under different rules altogether.

The CPA landscape is dramatically different in 2010. It’s no longer possible to fill your boots with overnight riches by going straight for the kill in huge mainstream markets. You need to operate on the fringes, reap profit where the markets aren’t so saturated, and dig deeper to grow your business.

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