Affiliate BizDev | Finch Sells

You Master Nothing By Committing 25%

Apr 03 2012

“You master nothing by committing 25%”

This is a law of affiliate marketing that will remain true as long as the industry exists. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, or how ambitious, or even how lucky; if you fail to appreciate the importance of concentrated effort, you will forever be surrounded by mediocre results.

The law applies to monetizing traffic sources, succeeding in new verticals, building websites, running ad campaigns, as well as to learning just about any part of our craft.

If you don’t focus your efforts, you’re destined for mediocrity.

Ping Pong Marketing

Ping pong marketer is my friendly term for the many, many affiliates who are reactive rather than proactive. They get bounced around the online marketing table by two highly skilled players: the traffic source, and the merchant.

In the space of just 24 hours, the ping pong marketer may find himself smashed in to a corner by Facebook, only to be crashed back by a merchant that didn’t like his traffic. Then Google has a hissy fit, whooping him over the net (and banning his account), before Mate1 gets pissed with his leads, unloads a mountain of chargebacks and sends him scuttling once again.

The ping pong marketer is forever getting his business scattered across the table by other real players who know exactly how to use and abuse him. Eventually, the ping pong marketer is left battered, broken, and disregarded.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The ping pong marketer is often responsible for his own demise. He commits an act of affiliate marketing suicide, tightening his own noose while remaining blissfully unaware. Do the scenarios below sound familiar?

First degree suicide – Where you bounce from niche to niche, offer to offer, and traffic source to traffic source. Your guideline for launching a campaign is hearsay, or what a rogue affiliate manager from a network you don’t even recognise told you. Your attention span is so fleeting, your commitment so flimsy, that you rarely get out of the red before deciding to call it quits with your (many) campaigns.

Second degree suicide – If you swing too far to the opposite end of the OCD scale, you can ruin your chances of success by becoming a micro-management extremist. These individuals can’t go 10 minutes without checking their ad spend, or their clickthrough rates. They don’t focus on the end game. They focus on the emotional highs and lows of losing or making money, and they react accordingly. If you are not focused enough to reject short term decision-making that is not backed up by data, you will once again become the ping pong marketer.

The cure to ping pong marketing is to react less and plan more intensively. To bring value to a sales funnel – the primary job of every affiliate marketer, let us not forget – you must increase your level of knowledge and expertise. It’s all about mastering the craft of relating back to what people want.

How to ‘Master’ Any Part of Affiliate Marketing

Unless you are blessed with incredible fortune, the fastest road to success in our industry is to commit to a concept 100% and execute it better than your peers. The web is littered with half finished affiliate websites, and badly executed CPA campaigns. You can always tell the guys who attempt to master their craft from those who attempt to go live on every project within 15 minutes. The latter are rarely seen again.

So, how do we commit to a project 100%?

Besides the golden rule of taking immediate action, here are some important considerations.

Immerse yourself in the trenches.

If you advertise to 50 year old women on Plentyoffish, sign up on Plentyoffish as a 50 year old woman and take notes on the experience. What ads do you see? What messages do you receive? What is the typical user experience of a sweet middle-aged lady searching for love on the Internet? Until you know what it looks like on the other side of the fence, you can’t possibly hope to create masterful ad campaigns.

One of my favourite resources is Scam.com.

I know many affiliate marketers will shit bricks at the thought of visiting their own personal Ground Zero, but the information to be gleaned from what customers like and what customers hate is absolutely priceless. It helps that so many consumers are bordering on the retarded, happy to report companies as scams when it’s their own sense of judgement that should be brought in to question. Lemmings will be lemmings, right?

Use forums like Scam to search for similar sites in your niche, and particularly any undercurrent concerns that might be present when you bombard those same users with your ads. Dig under the fingernails of your target market.

Do you research your competition? Really?

We overestimate what we can achieve in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a year. This saying rings loud and true when it comes to weighing up our competition.

I sense that many affiliates commit the mistake of over-simplifying how easy they can replicate the success of their peers (see the number of ripped ads and landing pages?), while underestimating their own ability to create powerful engaging campaigns when they snap out of the short-term mindset.

When was the last time you spent more than 24 hours researching a campaign? Or more than 24 hours analysing the exact blueprints of the competitors you hope to brush aside in one swish of your mouse? Respect your competition but avoid an ugly case of ‘small man’ syndrome.

Elabourate sales funnels and sophisticated affiliate campaigns might not be executable by 5pm, but they won’t take the rest of 2012. Take your time to do the job properly, especially the pre-execution phase. Many affiliates end up with failed campaigns not because their execution was wrong, or because affiliate marketing is dead, but because their maths didn’t add up.

Leverage people wisely

When I say leverage people wisely, I don’t mean sign up to the first thousand dollar consulting gig that comes your way. You’d be broke before the summer. But rather you should be using your affiliate managers and traffic source reps as your eyes and ears.

If you want to master a traffic source, you should put the people who work for that traffic source on your weekly email hit list.

If you want to run bizopp offers, you should be making it clear to all your affiliate managers that this is your line of expertise. Make sure they know that you are their man (or girl) when a hot bizopp comes through the gates. It sounds like a mute point, but simply establishing yourself as a specialist at X gives you a much greater chance of monetizing the hottest offers before they become saturated.

Don’t brand yourself as a ‘bits and pieces’ marketer. You’ll find your inbox full of more bits and pieces than you could ever shake a stick at. Make your speciality clear. Tell everybody you work with that you are focused on X, and you don’t want to be tapped up with a thousand distractions per minute unless they are directly applicable.

Even if you are running zero traffic through a network, it will instantly elevate your credibility to have these clear expectations in place. Good business minds know exactly what they want, and they leverage their people wisely.

Are you committing your resources and efforts wisely? If not, how can you fix it today? The heartening flip-side to this post is that you can – and will – master a hell of a lot by committing 100%.

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5 Ways to Monetize Any Website in Your Portfolio

Mar 27 2012

“What’s the best way to make money from my website?”

This is a question that lands in my inbox every so often, and rarely does it have a straightforward answer.

Monetizing a website is simple… if you don’t care for how much money it makes.

How long does it take to slap some Google AdSense in to your sidebar? About 17 seconds? Great, then that’s how long it takes to monetize a website. You can now retire rich in the knowledge that you made money from the Internet.

But how much will you make? Will your website ever fulfill its potential? Or will you spend the rest of your online career waiting by the mailbox for a $50 cheque from Google?

What I’ve noticed from speaking to so many webmasters – not necessarily affiliates – is that monetizing a website is too often treated as a one dimensional affair. The process is rarely attacked from every angle. There’s a tendency to ‘lock in’ the monetization aspect of a website, and then focus purely on content and backlinks thereafter.

Traffic is precious. Monetizing it fully should be one of your top priorities.

Here are 5 strategies to help you make money from any website in your portfolio, along with some best practice on how to do it well.

1. Promote products on a per-lead basis

Some websites are naturally great matches for CPA offers (those that payout for a simple lead, no credit card necessary).

I have several dating related websites in my portfolio. Their primary use is to generate free traffic that can be routed through to CPA offers. One of these websites generates only 100-200 hits per day, but it still makes around $1000/month on auto-pilot. That’s a huge return on investment relative to what would be considered a rather small trickle of traffic.

Pros of monetizing by per-lead offers:

Your income is likely to be much more predictable promoting pay-per-lead offers rather than pay-per-sale offers. With a low traffic site, you may go through months where you don’t score a single sale. But if you’re getting paid for something as simple as a form submission, you’re likely to make some kind of income. It’s psychologically crippling to work hard on a site that doesn’t seem to convert. Opting for pay-per-lead offers may prove better for your mental health in terms of seeing some immediate results.
The ROI is excellent if you find a suitable offer, usually surpassing what is achievable by promoting per-sale offers, or using banner exchange networks. Very few banner exchanges are going to pay you $1000/month for 100 hits per day.

Cons of monetizing by per-lead offers:

It requires rigorous management. CPA offers go down regularly. To maximise your revenue from promoting them, you have to schedule a weekly check-in to make sure that the offer is still converting. And if it isn’t converting well, you need to switch to a new offer. Depending on whether your ads are displaying as banners, or as contextual recommendations similar to my suggestion in Premium Posts Volume 2, this can sometimes prove difficult.
It gets old quick. Many of us build our own websites to break free from the vice like grip of CPA marketing. We want to feel that our assets are built on solid foundations, primed to make money passively from now until the end of time. So does it make sense to then monetize those websites with CPA offers – the most notorious whorers of time and energy in the industry? It’s a commitment to not-so-passive income.
Most CPA offers will only pay for leads from certain countries, whilst most websites draw traffic from all around the world. You will have to show different ads for different countries to get maximum value out of your traffic. This means you will need to have a geo-detection script. OIOPublisher is the best I’ve come across so far.

2. Promote products on a per-sale basis

We’ve all seen websites littered in ads for the latest Clickbank hype-job. Do they make money? If there’s enough traffic for keywords with the right buying intentions, then yes they do. They can make a lot of money.

So, perhaps you decide to monetize your entire website with banners for a $200 information product that nets you a $100 payout. A critical question at this stage would be “Does my website attract users that are going to like this product and be willing to spend money on it?” If not, this can turn in to one of the least efficient means of monetizing a site. In some cases, you’ll make a rosy $0/month.

Of course, pay-per-sale programs extend far beyond the shady realms of Clickbank. You’ll typically find that digital products aside, the most reputable products come attached to the lowest payouts. Amazon is a popular pay-per-sale program. But have you tried paying the mortgage while making 4% on CDs and DVDs? If this is the only means of monetizing your site, alarm bells should be searing your ears.

Pros of monetizing by per-sale offers:

If you nail down your targeting, leverage a demographic in ‘buying mode’, and have the luck to find a program offering good payout terms and a stable conversion rate – it can be both lucrative and long-term, which is the sacred cocktail of success for any Internet Marketer who values his healthy blood pressure.
There’s no such thing as a quality score. A sale is a sale, right?
It requires very little management. Products that pay commission by the sale tend to survive much longer than offers from the CPA world. They also present a good bargaining position for the affiliate, who is clearly adding some real-world value to the sales funnel by supplying real-world customers. The question of “Who’s Your Daddy?” is turned on its head.

Cons of monetizing by per-sale offers:

By the very laws of economics, non-converting users are going to be much more common than those who are happy to bust out Mr. Plastic Fantastic. Are you happy monetizing a tiny segment of your website’s core audience? Do the payment terms make this sacrifice worthwhile?
If your website is built around an obscure niche and there is only one product that you can sell, your situation is just as precarious as the rogue CPA cowboy cloaking Facebook. What happens if the merchant drops its affiliate program? Tough break for a small fish. My suggestion if you find yourself hoarding lots of traffic in an unsaturated market is quite simple: build your own product…

3. Launch your own product

In my opinion, if a website doesn’t have a feasible product that it could sell, it’s probably a waste of time, or a non-profit venture that isn’t suitable for increasing your income.

Whether you build a website to promote affiliate offers, reap banner sales or simply monetize via Google AdSense, the reality stays the same. If the website doesn’t produce a customer for somebody somewhere, it’s not going to be worth the hair on my arse.

Before building any website, ask yourself – “What could I sell on this site?” If you find yourself struggling for an answer, drop the project! It’s the same question any advertiser will be asking when he stumbles across your page.

If he sees no market, you are no more than a webmaster with a hobby – a servant to the information age. Either way, the road to riches veers off a cliff, and you would be a complete sucker for hopping over the edge on a whimsical hope and prayer.

A suitable product can be anything from an instant download ebook, to a rolling monthly subscription for private forum access, to branded merchandise. Pretty much whatever you can muster the balls to charge for.

Pros of monetizing by launching a product:

Gain complete control over the direction and future of your product. It can be adjusted to meet the very specific demands of your target demographic, which you define, while psychotically whispering “Who’s The Daddy, now?” and trawling the web for affiliates…
You control the affiliate equation. Affiliate marketing is an incredibly effective sales model, especially when you are at the head of the chain. How many dating website CEOs do you suppose would spend their time in the trenches learning how to advertise on Plentyoffish cost-effectively? Not many. But thanks to the art of delegating to small fish like us, they don’t have to. Plenty of fish, indeed. CPA marketers are highly skilled traffic resellers who will fight hard for a few scraps. When you control that equation, you’ll regain much of the sleep you lost as an affiliate (aka ‘Guy with the Sore Arse’).
The issue of trust becomes a benefit rather than a constraint. If your website’s readers are faithful followers of your regular content, selling a premium product to them is natural progression. Premium Posts have been very successful for me, but that platform was built in the 2 years prior where I was dedicated to churning out decent posts for free. Trust goes a long way if you can resist the urge to exploit it.

Cons of monetizing by launching a product:

Taking the plunge is hard. Deciding to offer a paid product to your readers requires a certain deal of courage in the relationship you’ve built. You don’t want to be seen as cheap, or trying to make a fast buck from those who gave you a platform to be heard. The pressure to deliver is unmistakeable. A bad product will sour the taste of a loyal following.
You’ll need time, vision and patience to launch successfully. It’s not hard to fill a whiteboard with ideas for great products. And it’s not hard to upload the completed PDF to your server. But the road in-between is a confusing, testing and challenging fist up the jacksy. Your vision must prevail.

4. Join an Ad Network

Many webmasters opt to hand over the monetizing aspect of their site to banner exchanges and ad networks. Google AdSense is perhaps the most popular of the bunch. But there are many others, far too many for a guy of my attention capacity to list. See here for a comprehensive list.

Platforms like AdSense will pay you by the click (or by impressions), which is naturally a smaller slice of the cake than per lead or sale. It may not be the most lucrative method of monetizing a website, but it’s by far the most hassle-free. The question is simply, “How much money are you missing out on?” If a third party advertiser is making good hay from your website, why aren’t you?

Pros of monetizing by joining an ad network:

There’s very little management involved. Turning your ads over to an ad network pushes the matter about as far out of your hands as any other suggestion in this post. Out of sight and out of mind? Perhaps, but out of sight and likely out of pocket too.
If you have a brilliant brand and a lot of traffic, the likelihood of generating good revenue from ad networks increases tenfold. When your website appeals to a broad and large audience, the volume and consistency of display revenue outmuscles the benefit of using your inventory to promote products – whether they are somebody else’s or your own. Promoting products is still smart, but as a secondary source of income.
If your traffic is low quality and there’s no obvious outlet, it’s better to have some money than no money. Whether you’re getting paid by CPM or CPC, you will receive more than you would by promoting a questionable product with a 0% conversion rate. When your conversion rate is 0%, the banner networks are a guaranteed improvement.
Using an ad network allows you to blame somebody else when an undesirable ad flashes up on your site.

Cons of monetizing by joining an ad network:

Unless you have a lot of traffic, your income is likely to remain minimal. It’s like following a stock index fund, knowing that the index represents the lowest quartile of growth in the market. It’s stable and predictable. But for low to mid traffic sites? The alternatives are usually more profitable.
This could happen:
If ads stating ‘1 Weird Trick…’ swarm your site, you could potentially damage the relationship of trust with your readers – which is dangerous if you are also selling your own products. Mmm, death by association.
Payment terms are not always the best for low traffic sites. If it doesn’t take you forever to reach the minimum payout threshold, it will take forever for a bumbling intern accountant to process the bloody cheque. More waiting by the mailbox.
Many ad networks want 100% control over your entire inventory and will not deal with other networks on the same page. It makes sense from a business perspective, but it still sucks to be on the losing end of the stick when it’s your own website.

5. Sell your own banner space

Finally, we have a strategy that is particularly rife across blogs in the affiliate marketing space, this glorious creation included.

If you hate the idea of an ad network pocketing a slice of your hard work, or of ‘1 Weird Trick…’ being slapped across every inch of your hallowed HTML, there is always the option to sell your own ads (as well as tweets, sponsored posts, paid reviews, daughters, wives and dignity as a whole).

Pros of monetizing by selling your own banner space:

If you run a site in a crowded marketplace where there are a lot of brands fighting for attention and manpoints, auctioning off your ad spots to the highest bidder will nearly always trump the rates achieved through ad networks. You can multiply your CPMs overnight by taking on advertisers of your own finding.
It’s very easy to do, especially with software like OIOPublisher. Automate the entire process from start to finish and you won’t spend half your working hours flapping around the inbox sending emails about renewals.
By controlling placements manually, you can keep a close rein on any ads that might be harmful to your brand, or designed to ‘game’ your very own readers.

Cons of monetizing by selling your own banner space:

Finding advertisers is not easy if you operate in markets where the majority of product owners would rather use affiliates than buy ad space out of their own pocket – unless those affiliates are hot on your heels. Affiliate activity is a good marker of how likely you are to be able to sell your ad spots. Got a dating, bizopp or weight loss themed website? There’s likely to be strong demand for good quality inventory that ticks these boxes. But if your website is an information portal of the best mahogany rocking chairs from 1954… good luck, happy fishing.
This could happen:
Yes, Ryan Eagle will swallow your inventory for breakfast with his motley crew gradients and epileptic fit inducing flash photography. Kidding, I love them Ryan. They’re like mini-Picassos.
Income is variable. Many advertisers love to buy traffic for a month, see how it converts, and then cull where necessary. This means you have to be offering a good deal for the ad spot to be worthwhile (and if that’s the case, why not just use the spot yourself?). The result of having lots of advertisers ‘passing through’ is a lurching income that could be great one month and barren the next. The best way to solve this is to focus on selling your ad spots to brands that are less performance-driven and more perception-orientated.

Conclusion: “What’s right for me?”

These five monetization strategies share the quality of being potentially good choices, or very bad choices, depending on the situation and the mechanics of the website you’re trying to monetize.

There’s no reason to suggest you should only use one method. This very blog implements four of the five approaches. In my case, the ‘creating a product’ route blows the others out of the water, as I suspect it might for many other webmasters in a similar position.

My takeaway advice is to be flexible. Look beyond designing entire websites with the intention of promoting a single product, or littering the damn thing in Adsense and letting it collect dust.

And I also have to go back to the question you should be asking yourself before starting any web project.

“What could I sell on this site?”

If your answer is muted, how can you expect to generate income from other webmasters and advertisers asking the exact same question?

You can survive with average content (anybody who tells you otherwise is an idealist dreamer), but with no market, you have no value. It doesn’t matter which strategy of monetization you choose. But there better be at least one option available to you.

Good luck! Any questions? Feedback? Fire away.

Recommended This Week

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What’s Hot Today… And Why You Shouldn’t Care

Mar 19 2012

CPA marketers like to divide the affiliate world in to six continents: dating, health, careers, gaming, mobile and zip submits.

These are the verticals that get talked about almost constantly. If you log in to an affiliate network’s control panel, it’s likely that the hottest offers – those pushed above the fold – will fall in to these categories.

If you’re launching CPA campaigns, it makes sense to stick to the tried and tested, because you’re likely to get better support from your networks – most of whom are very familiar with the six continents of markets above.

Networks are better at providing support for offers they know, the offers they see a million other publishers promoting. Naturally, there’s a downside. Saturated offers are also seen as ‘past their peak’. By the time Average Joe is throwing his money at Offer X, the initial conversion rates are likely to have tapered to compensate for the demand. The best time to promote an offer is nearly always before everybody else.

There are many reasons why you might look at the state of the CPA world and draw the conclusion that it’s a shrinking pond with an overflow of hungry fish. That’s my view, and it’s why I’m spending most of my time diversifying away from CPA. Product creation is my number one focus right now, shortly followed by the development of websites that cash in on trends ahead of time.

Stop asking “What’s Hot?”

In the last round of Premium Posts, I included a section on tax season offers. Tax offers are the perfect example of a money machine that materialises as surely as the sun rises. It solves a real-world demand… every single year.

Everybody hates taxes, nobody likes filing them, and many will shit bricks at the thought of making a mistake and somehow ending up in the slammer on fraud charges. A resource that takes the pain out of filing taxes is a nailed down success, year in year out, for as long as taxes remain a pain in the arse.

But for many affiliates – the short term thinkers – this is a real-world demand that passes them by. They’re far too slow to react. And what they’re doing wrong is precisely that: reacting.

The affiliates who pocket the most are those who are planning ahead. While the rest of the world is busy scrummaging for festive tinsel borders to drape on its dating creatives, the long-term planner is already working on tax season creatives. And not just creatives, but entire websites.

I’m not normally the greatest advocate of search engine traffic, but what would you give to have a site at the top of Google for a tax-related keyword right now? Unfortunately, ranking on Google takes time, patience and a painful self-awareness of your small man syndrome.

Most high volume tax keywords have been swept up already by publishers on far greater budgets than your own. It’s one thing to spot and prepare for a future trend, it’s another to launch a website that gets the traction necessary to capitalise on it.

Target the trends within seasonal booms.

When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, my first reaction was to register a domain that welded his name with Halloween. I knew right away that Jacko themed Halloween costumes were going to be all the rage in 4 months time, so I acted as fast as I could to lay the groundwork before most other affiliates even turned their attention to the season.

It sounds like a slightly disturbed mindset to adopt. The greatest pop icon of all time dies, and I’m already pillaging his legacy for commission. But if you don’t look forward, you will constantly find yourself reacting to ‘What’s Hot’. And when you react to what’s hot, it’s too late.

Sure enough, I was able to pocket a lot of money from my Jacko costume groundwork. By the time Halloween rolled around, I was in ‘sucking up traffic‘ mode, while anybody reacting to the trend would have been dawdling in the planning and execution phase.

Even when planning in advance, you have to be realistic. Had I focused my efforts on targeting Halloween 2009 as a whole, I’d have been swept aside by many other companies with bigger budgets and the same foresight. So I focused all my efforts on one angle instead – a dead Michael Jackson.

Competition decreases as your focus increases.

The same concept applies to tax season, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas and virtually any seasonal trend. If you don’t have a planning cycle that runs several months ahead of the average consumer, good luck reacting fast enough to make money from him.

You will make life a lot easier by specialising on a trend within the trend. It’s unrealistic to think that even 4 months of preparation is going to be enough to dominate tax-related search engine traffic, which is why you need to segregate keywords and target the low hanging fruit.

Get a whiteboard and list every conceivable concern related to tax season, from every possible angle. You need only target one angle effectively to make a lot of money, and you will reduce the competition by doing so.

Use the AdWords Keyword Tool to find the highest trafficked keywords with the least competition. These are your low hanging fruit.

Once you have your trend within a trend, it’s time to make a commitment to work that isn’t going to produce an immediate return, but hopefully will produce a steady passive income in the future.

Register a domain closely tied to your chosen angle (exact match if possible), and get your sales funnel in place – either by building your own product, or promoting a stable offer that isn’t going to cap out when the season arrives. Then inundate the site with fresh quality content and a constant barrage of quality backlinks.

If this sounds like donkey work, it’s because that’s precisely what it is.

I hire small armies of Filipinos to do the SEO labour for me.

Your goal should be to have a legitimate presence on the web, somewhere close to the top of Google, for a high volume keyword that brings in money on autopilot. With this animal of free traffic at your disposal, you can be much more flexible than the average CPA affiliate when it comes to payouts and margins.

Clearly, it’s too late to build a money-machine for 2012’s tax season. But you can certainly build one for 2013. In fact, there’s no harm in reacting to seasonal trends in 2012, so long as you’re expecting to make a profit next year – rather than next week.

Seasonal trends are sometimes a turn-off for affiliates. Not everybody likes the idea of making their money in one small boom period. So… cover more than one trend. Build a website for a trend in each quarter. With good execution, you’ll never be more than 2 months away from your next money tap, and the cruel satisfaction that comes from watching everybody else rush to build what you have in a fraction of the time.

Most importantly of all, learn to stop reacting to ‘What’s Hot’. Focus on getting to market before the crowd reacts.

Recommended This Week

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If you’re running ads on Facebook or Plentyoffish, FBAdsToolbox is an excellent little time-saver. Simply upload photos, crop to size, and choose from over 80 variations to split-test. Very nice tool.
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