Affiliate BizDev | Finch Sells

Stop Wasting Money! Start Hoarding Data

May 29 2013

Affiliate marketing arbitrage is one of the simplest careers in the world. There are no politics, no glass ceilings, and no barriers to entry. The focal point of 99% of what we do is numbers. Can you make them work for you?

From CPCs to EPCs, from CPMs to CTRs… what may appear to the uninitiated as random digits on a screen, can be optimised and manoeuvred in to a recipe for serious, serious moo-lah. But only if you know how to work them. And thankfully most people don’t.

The EPC Spreadsheet

Many affiliate networks distribute spreadsheets of their top performing offers, complete with EPCs, conversion rates and ranking by revenue.

Affiliates seem to love these documents, despite the warped data they can represent. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if 50 new publishers are direct linking one offer, while 5 veterans are pre-selling another, the EPCs are going to look favourable for the pre-sold offer. We take a lot of this bias for granted in the pursuit of easily consumable golden nuggets.

EPC spreadsheets are good for ruling out dud offers, and a welcome helping hand for deciding where to start, but they are not an accurate representation of how your marketing will perform.

If you run a lot of campaigns, and particularly if you are an adopter of the ‘throwing shit at the wall’ technique, I suggest creating your own performance spreadsheets.

In short: Learn to make use of your data.

You pay for it. You bust your balls for it. Why waste it?

If affiliate marketing is all about numbers – and it is – then failing to stockpile your data should be seen as a karate cock slappable offence.

With every campaign, you can store data on multiple levels.

Country Specific Data

I have a file for every single country that I advertise in, as well as an Excel spreadsheet with an overview of the key points I need to remember.

In the spreadsheet I aim to correlate some baseline metrics for each country based on the hundreds of thousands of dollars I have spent arbitraging my damn hairline away.

Metrics such as:

The best offer in that country, by EPC
The second best offer, by EPC
Average CPM/CPC to draw traffic from each of my favourite traffic sources
Average landing page CTR (some countries can be bashed for 70%, whilst others are tough to optimise beyond 35%). No idea why. That’s why it’s important to take notes.

Note: Media buyers should have doubts about running a campaign if the gulf in performance between best and second best offer is enough to eat up most of their profit. Have a Plan B, or stick to low-risk marketing on self-serve platforms.

There’s no shame in being a one trick pony, and there’s no sense in being an over-confident donkey who just blew $15,000 on a campaign that has no viable Plan B.

My countries overview spreadsheet is a permanent fixture on my desktop.

How many times do you find yourself surfing through new traffic sources, checking out the minimum bids and running calculations in your head to see if you might get profitable? Get that data out of your head and on to paper.

I will say it again: affiliate marketing is all about the numbers.

If you get in to the habit of recycling your data and archiving it for future reference, you will soon find that there is no such thing as a failed campaign. Only more numbers. Numbers that will lower the risk, and the uncertainty, of your next investment.

There are two forms of filing that can also help you.

Digital archiving

What do you do with those landing pages and creatives once you’ve pushed them through the FTP?

I used to let them fester on my desktop before eventually click-and-dragging in to a spiralling abyss marked ‘To Sort‘, one day to be found a dozen archives deep.

I’ve since got in to the habit of storing every single landing page in a country coded folder. If you start this today, you are unlikely to see immediate benefits. But six months down the road you will have enough assets to move quickly in to just about any market in the world.

Naturally, a good labelling system is vital. 1001 folders titled ‘LP1‘ are more trouble than they are worth. Name your landing page variations accordingly. For example: Rules, Qualifier, Short Sell, Sales Letter, Squeeze, and so on…

If you are particularly adventurous, you will have multiple sub-variants inside each folder. Again, name them based on their distinguishing qualities. Future You will be grateful, unlike 2011 Me, who spent many hours fishing through his Trash Can looking constipated.

Paper archiving

Besides the overview spreadsheet and the digital files, I keep a paper record of every single country that I advertise in. As you might imagine, some are thicker than others. Australia is starting to resemble a J.K. Rowling brainfart, whilst a stiff breeze sends China in to my laundry basket.

What do I store in the paper files?

A whole raft of miscellaneous information, such as:

Print outs of successful creatives
Printed mind maps of available offers matched to networks (Get MindNode)
Email correspondence with affiliate managers
Skype conversation transcripts from networking sessions
Related forum posts, case studies and follow alongs (Join STM)
Cheat sheets of common language translations so I can understand my own ads (surprisingly helpful!)
Popular local slang terms

You could probably do this shit in Evernote, but I like the smell of paper.

Every single campaign you run is a haven for data and insights that can be tucked away and referred to in the future. Some of those insights will be relative to a traffic source, others to a country, and lots will be to a particular offer or creative approach. If you are the kind of affiliate who regularly gorges on network EPC spreadsheets, there’s very little excuse for placing less value in the data that you bought.

Data is no guarantee of success

Affiliates are pretty lousy at predicting how their campaigns will perform. This is a damn near universal trait.

I thought it was just me; a bumbling fool in an ocean of wizard mathematicians. But no, having sat through my share of mastermind sessions recently, I can say with confidence that many of you are just as bad. Collectively we project numbers about as accurately as ~~ReBumberclart~~ Republican Karl Rove on Election Night.

Nate Silvers, we ain’t.

Let’s see…

You’ve spotted that you can snap up 200,000 impressions per day at a CPM of $0.70 and you hope that with a combined ad CTR of 0.25%, a landing page CTR of 30% and a conversion rate of 1/10, you’ll be enjoying a 100% ROI.

You’ve gone so far as to multiply your $140/day profit by 30, and have tentatively pencilled ‘$4200‘ next to a sketch of ‘JUNE‘ with doodles of the cocaine and hookers that you’ll buy with the harvest.

Initial estimates are fine. But don’t kid yourself. You are not going to have an accurate idea of the true numbers until you bite the bullet and go live. And it’s usually at this point that most of us scrunch up those hopeful projections, launching them in to the office bin while snarking viciously:

“How was I to know my CTR wouldn’t nudge past 0.06%?”
“A 3% conversion rate? Are you shitting me? No? Are you SCRUBBING me?”

If you place too much trust in your estimated numbers, you will find yourself so disenfranchised at the end of Day 1 that there’s a good chance you’ll have abandoned ship before the weekend. That’s how money gets wasted and confidence wanes.

Data spreadsheets and detailed files can help to rein in your focus. But they will not perform miracles, and they will not turn your brainfarts in to fairy dust.

There’s a famous quote from Thomas Edison:

“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Naturally, like any wise bastard from years gone by, his words have been passed through memos and mutilated on blogs to the point where you’re just as likely to recognise them as:

“Genius is 20 percent my balls and 80 percent my balls.”

Well, I’m more of a Pareto Principle kinda guy.

It’s tough to say how much of an affiliate’s success stems from genius. But I do know that moments of creative brilliance are rare, and data is not.

Many affiliates carry around their stats as a burden; a constant reminder of how wrong they can be. The best affiliates bounce off their data not as crushing evidence of an initial bad judgment, but as vital signposts for where they need to improve. Sometimes the signal gets lost in the emotional sting of losing money. C’est tragique, now get over it.

You can make a lot of money by applying basic data-driven principles to very ordinary advertising. It’s not rocket science. And the next time somebody asks me what I do for a living, that’s exactly what I won’t tell them.

How to Learn by Osmosis: The Traits of a Successful Affiliate

Nov 20 2012

There are many blogs, forums and ebooks where you can learn the intricacies of online marketing. Some are great, some are poor, but nearly all are inferior to the process of learning by osmosis.

Osmosis is the art of unconscious learning. It is where we stop studying materials, and start absorbing them.

1) Park balls on knowledge 2) … 3) Profit $$$

Learning the Facts vs. Learning the Meaning

Imagine two kids go in to a lecture. One has a stack of notepads and pens. The other has his hands in his pockets. We’ll call them Kid Prepared and Kid Unprepared.

As the lecture begins, Kid Prepared starts scribbling notes. His hand whirrs furiously across the page, siphoning sound bytes and trying to record every last tidbit for future consumption.

In the next seat, Kid Unprepared stares blankly, soaking up the information and searching for its meaning.

Who do you think is more likely to be successful?

The plague of academia suggests that it will be Kid Prepared; the perennial note-taker, he who responds so intently that no fact is left behind. He is the kid that breezes through college, aces his degree, and should be changing the world.

Except in the real world, success goes to he who shuts the hell up and listens.

Learning by osmosis is all about listening. It is absorbing the world as a human sponge. It is how you apply meaning to what you see around you.

This innate talent for plucking the meaning out of a lecture, rather than the facts and figures, is how we develop intuition, which is the pulling force that separates successful entrepreneurs from bankrupt sob stories.

If you are an affiliate marketer, or if you do any kind of work online, learning by osmosis is especially important.

I believe many affiliates are trapped in the superficial mindset of Kid Prepared. They’ve read all the books, blogs and forums, but their ability to translate those principles in to a tangible business plan is still highly flawed.

They know what to do, they just don’t know how to do it. Their intuition is lacking.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde

That was 122 years ago.

God only knows what Oscar Wilde would make of the Internet. There has never been such an overflow of information at our fingertips – and most of it is useless.

Here are three strategies that are great for unconscious learning. They share a common trait, and that is to tear you away from your comfort zone.

Joint Venture with the smart and passionate

When you are running more online businesses than you can keep a tally on, promoting dozens of products, in a handful of different verticals, there is no way in hell that you can retain as much information as somebody who has specialised expertise in a single market.

The best you can hope for is an exceedingly good business partner who is willing to share the bacon.

My view is that every affiliate should be joint venturing, but only with the right people.

We are primarily monetization experts who know how to drive traffic. Our weakness is usually the product. We just don’t understand what we are promoting properly, and the Internet plus its millions of consumers suffers for it.

When I joint venture, I do so with individuals who are passionate in the market we are targeting – much more passionate than myself. Not only is their spirit contagious, but it pays to have somebody who is in touch with the grassroots of that market.

The secret to creating awesome affiliate websites is not rocket science. It’s having your ears pinned to the ground.

When you work with somebody who knows the market conditions, or is the market, you can learn a hell of a lot by shutting up and taking stock.

“If you always hire people who are smaller than you, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you, we shall become a company of giants.”
– David Ogilvy

I believe this same principle applies to personal growth, career advancement and just about any item in a respectable Bucket List.

Work with people who know more than you, befriend people who are happier than you.

If nothing else, I’m sure your Facebook feed could do with the detox.

Bounce off a small mastermind group

Small mastermind groups are brilliant for those who work on their own. I’ve noticed a booming trend of Skype groups in the affiliate space.

If you can gather 4 or 5 ambitious minds, meld them to a routine, and share everything that is learned – the task of conquering affiliate marketing is suddenly a team effort.

Not only can you bounce creative ideas off your partners, but they will hold you accountable when you’ve spunked the entire day playing Civilization V with no new ads to show for your efforts.

Ahem.

Nobody wants to be the weak link in a mastermind group.

Get your mind out of the basement

What are you learning from your work environment?

If you work at home, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to unconscious learning is the home comfort that you are surrounded by. A stale non-challenging work environment is a catalyst for stale, unambitious ideas.

If you really want to take your business to the next level, you should first try taking it out of your mother’s basement. In your head – and probably in the literal sense, too.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many benefits to working from home:

No commuting in the winter cold
No boss peering over your shoulder
No colleagues to steal your milk from the fridge
No shirt and tie, more slippers and slacks

But there is one major disadvantage:

Who – and what – are you going to learn from?

The whole principle of learning by osmosis, of unconscious learning in general, is that we absorb the world around us. If your work revolves around a dank, stench-filled office that hasn’t been scrubbed since 2007, then that is not a particularly healthy world to absorb.

I believe business growth is stunted by the lifestyle that most Internet Marketers choose to adopt. It’s not that we don’t have the opportunities to learn from behind a screen, it’s that we fail to grasp them.

We wrap ourselves in home comforts while the truly great achievers are contorting their minds with new and uncomfortable challenges.

I can’t stress this advice firmly enough: network, network and network some more.

There is a sad belief that if we rock up to a marketing conference and fail to uncover a golden nugget, a brilliant traffic source or a hot new offer, the experience has been a giant failure. While I can understand the need for inspiration in these challenging times, the strongest incentive to network is the effect of being around equally ambitious minds – as well as the social interaction.

Your networking does not have to hinge on strictly marketing conferences.

Talented entrepreneurs are aware that some of the best ideas you will ever have are the result of ‘cross-pollination’ from meeting diverse and unusual characters a world apart from your usual comfort zone.

I often say that you can tell a lot about a man by his five closest friends, and you can tell a lot about his career by his five closest advisors. If we are the product of those combined forces, it makes sense to choose them wisely.

There’s a simple solution.

Don’t allow yourself to be influenced by your comfort zone. Snap out of it.

We, more than anybody, are prone to falling back on home comforts when we should be gasping to learn more. If you want to unleash the full effect of learning by osmosis, the good news is that you already are.

You just need to change the source.

Recommended This Week:

After much writing, re-writing, editing, head banging and more writing, the final volume of Premium Posts is complete and ready to set sail. It’s called The Empire Strategy and it will be released later this week. Drop your email in the list below for a chance to get it before everybody else (plus the free 50 page Survival Kit!)

How to Work With a Designer

Aug 15 2012

The following is a guest post by Jesse Freund of LandingPower.com. Jesse has been active in the affiliate marketing world since 2008 and has had plenty of experience catering to the needs of affiliate marketers. LandingPower.com is a great option for high quality design needs.

For the past few years, I’ve worked as a designer catering specifically to the needs of affiliates. You’d think the process would be very straight forward, but in reality, there are practices one should use to ensure the end result is a success and that money isn’t wasted. Today, I’ll give you some pointers when you work with a designer.

Don’t Be Vague

First thing’s first: you’re the affiliate, not the designer. If I had a nickel for every time I was told, “I need a high converting landing page” or “I need a banner that has a high CTR“, I’d be rich enough to sit around all day on a yacht surrounded by Brazilian models.

OBVIOUSLY, one would want a high converting landing page, or a banner that gets a high CTR. Before you said that, I wasn’t going into the project thinking, “I’m going to design a landing page with a moderate conversion rate so this guy will never come back“. Now granted, there are certainly practices that help increase conversions and CTR. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to be specific. You’re still the affiliate, so it’s important to use your expertise based on the traffic you’re targeting and other factors to offer the designer a clear idea of how to maximize conversions and CTR.

So, here’s an example of being vague:

“I’d like to promote this dating offer, here’s the offer URL. Please create a high converting landing page that matches the offer.”

Finch: Have you hacked in to my sent messages? This is uncanny.

While this wouldn’t result in a complete travesty, it would result in a very generalized result since you failed to offer any specific taglines, or any specific qualities (example: I’d like an area for geo-targeting, I’d like to target ages 40 and older, etc.)

Now, let’s look at an example of how to properly convey an idea. We’ll stick with a dating niche:

“I’d like to promote this dating offer to black males, and I’m targeting ages 30+. After researching, I’ve noticed images with older women seem to convert better, so I’ve attached the images I’d like to use. I also have included the code for a geo-tracking script I’d like to use, which should be easy for me to adjust. The color scheme should be light and should match the offer page with blue as the base color. All text should be editable in HTML so I can test different terms.”

See the difference? This was only a generalized example of how specifics can really change the outcome of a page. Depending on the designer, had age range or specifics not been mentioned, you may have received a layout with stock photos that end up looking unrealistic and lowering CTR. Without mentioning you wanted a geotracking script up front, you may have received a layout where adding it as an afterthought would offset the whole design.

There are ways to even go further beyond, such as offering a wireframe, specific examples, etc. Designers should be thought partially as an extension of yourself, to be used to bring your idea to fruition.

Come Prepared

Now that we’ve been through how important it is to be specific about what you want, we’ll go through the steps you should’ve taken before ordering.

1. First, do some research. Try to figure out which pages are converting. If you see ads for a long time for a specific offer or page, you can assume it’s doing ok, otherwise money wouldn’t be wasted on testing it any longer. Make a list of pages you think are doing well, and/or build your own wireframe from certain elements of each page for the designer.

2. Decide on the specifics, from color scheme, to taglines and copy. Again, YOU’RE the affiliate. It’s up to you to think up those winning taglines that ensure the offer or product is going to sell.

Now, depending on the designer, there will be a varying level of affiliate marketing knowledge, so it doesn’t hurt to ask for advice, but it would be foolish to rely completely on a designer because you have then forfeited control over your potential success or failure. Even when starting out, you need to trust yourself with thinking up ways of selling your offer or else you’ll never learn what works and what doesn’t.

3. Provide as much as you can. Design is based partially on personal taste. What you think is a good image to use, may vary from what the hired designer thinks is good. With that said, you should certainly include as much as you can in terms of logos, stock photos, etc. This will ensure that your design uses as many elements to your liking as possible.

4. Be positive about your offer. If you’re promoting an offer, be certain it’s actually a high converting offer. When it comes time to order a landing page, for example, you’ll want to ensure you get the most bang for your buck. That means if you hire a designer to make a design that is tailored specifically for an offer that doesn’t end up converting, you’ve just lost not only the funding spent on testing but also the cost of the design. Sometimes you’ll have a landing page with a great CTR but if the actual offer doesn’t convert, it means nothing, so be sure.

Finally, it’s time to order!

Once you’ve gotten all your info together, it’s time to get the ball rolling. I’d say it’s pretty much down hill from here (we hope), but let’s go over a few things to keep in mind during the actual process of having a design put together.

Have a good attitude. If the roles were reversed, how would you feel having to deal with someone that easily gets frustrated and offers rude responses instead of constructive criticism? I’m sure you’d be trying to get the job done as fast as possible with little to no consideration for detail or going that extra mile to please someone that was respectful and well mannered.

Sometimes coming up with a winning design can be a frustrating process, but there are worse things in life, so take a deep breath and keep your composure so you can focus on success, rather than risking arguing that will ultimately only result in a waste of time.

Offer constructive criticism. Sometimes I’ll get a response that’s simply, “No, sorry, I don’t like this.” That does nothing to help either one of us. An example of what DOES help, would be something like, “I’d like the blue header to be red, the text to be a little smaller, and I’d like you to use this image instead.” Basically, be specific about what you don’t like, rather than lazily responding under the assumption that the next revision will miraculously be the design of your dreams.

You’ll be able to tell right off the bat if the designer is even capable of doing something close to what you have in mind. In the case of them possessing the skills but not having a solid understanding of your specific idea, take a time out and draw up a wire frame or find an example that’s 80-90% of what you have in mind. We designers are visual people, so a picture is worth a thousand words whereas an attempt at articulating your idea in an email may end up being worth only a misunderstanding.

Work towards functionality, not eye candy. I’m not saying you want a design that was sloppily thrown together, but it’s important to always keep your eye on the prize, which is conversions.

As a designer I’ll come across an affiliate that’s more interested in having something that “looks nice” rather than something that “performs nice”. New affiliates would be surprised to see some of the pages that actually convert amazingly. If those pages were judged by their design, they would be among the worst, most repulsive creations to ever be uploaded via FTP.

The reason behind this is the fact that the average consumer has absolutely no concept of what good design looks like and only looks at a landing page in the most simplistic of ways. Keep yourself inside of your targeted consumer’s mind while working with a designer. A 50 year old consumer is going to interpret a design in a much different way than an 18 year old.

So there you have it. Before you risk wasting money on hiring a designer, work on making sure you’ll get the most out of your money while avoiding a nightmarish experience. I hope this will help you avoid wasting your money and time. Good luck!

Recommended This Week

Now that you know how to get the most bang for your buck out of a designer, hit up Jesse’s LandingPower.com for a wide selection of rather swanky lookin’ design services.
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