Building an Online Business | Finch Sells

Dear Internet, Print Me Some Money

Feb 16 2012

Internet Marketing is littered with enough false promises to make your eyes water. Ever since the turn of the millennium when Internet stocks created fortunes and lost them twice as fast, our industry has been riddled with high expectations, a circumspect grounding in reality, and far too much bullshit to keep a tab on.

My work has revolved around the Internet for my entire professional career. I advanced from designing websites, to assembling the code behind them, to selling ad space on them. Along the way, I’ve developed a keen eye for spotting opportunities on other websites. From primitive arbitrage, to site flipping opportunities, to abusing loopholes in ways that the webmaster never intended.

I’ve seen many moneymaking strategies crash and burn, whilst others have evolved with time. SEO, for example, requires a conservative and professional approach in 2012, with an ever-increasing number of bullets to dodge. It used to be easy. Why? Because nobody else was doing it.

Fast forward to 2008. Affiliate marketing had become perhaps the greatest wealth generator for idiots the digital landscape has ever known. Life was so simple. Find an offer to promote, upload an ad to Facebook, wait for approval, and bank the rich returns. Inevitably, the rest of the world caught on. And here we are now. Prices have never been higher, and so the degree of creativity necessary to succeed has risen. Thousands of novices want to become affiliate marketers, and yet the task gets harder with every passing day. They’re 4 years late to the party.

Affiliate marketers who made their millions in the big boom have been fast-tracked as experts on a subject that has detoured dramatically from its original path. Novices may look up to those experts, but the painted picture from the top is rarely anything but smoke and mirrors.

Nature has a time-honoured method of punishing good moneymaking strategies once they reach the public domain. If the strategy becomes common knowledge, or too exposed to unskilled buffoons, any benefit to be gained from the opportunity is lost. Of course, the strategy lives on in the imagination of the baying crowd. Many will happily pay to hear about the next magic button, the next get rich quick scheme, blissfully ignorant to the reality. As soon as lucrative information becomes public knowledge, it loses its value.

As an Internet Marketer, I see this happening time and time again. Legitimate moneymaking opportunities are born, profited from, and then swiftly rendered useless as a ‘guru’ leaks the techniques to the masses.

These gurus are rarely true exponents of the techniques they talk about. They are poorly skilled at making money with genuine enterprise, so they choose to sell the concept instead. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Their decision to teach ruins the opportunity for the true exponents, and it creates a glorious pipe dream for everybody else. Market law dictates that when a lucrative strategy becomes too easy and too popular, it fails.

In the stock market, wise investors know that a bull market is riddled with danger when Average Joe can be seen throwing his money at it – especially if he’s offering the same ‘hot tips’ to his neighbours and friends.

The same applies to just about every ‘easy’ strategy in Internet Marketing. Unless you’re the innovator, the strategy is guaranteed to be anything but easy by the time you’ve read about it in a PDF.

99% of information products are bullshit on this basis. The grander the promises, the further detached from reality they become.

One of the golden rules you have to ask before considering any information product is simply, “Why is the author giving this information away?”

The bizopp market is constructed around some of the most illogical consumer decisions of all time.

If you honestly believe that a multi-millionaire is going to give you access to the blueprints of his success for $19.95, you’ve lost your bloody marbles. Why do people not ask “Why?”

1. Why would a millionaire need to sell his blueprints?
2. How effective can those blueprints be if they’re on sale for $19.95?
3. If he really wanted to give back to help others, why charge at all?

Honestly, there are no exceptions. You will not find a single moneymaking strategy in the world that ticks all three boxes of easy, sustainable and profitable.

There are easy and profitable strategies… but they don’t last, and often require leaving your integrity at the door. If you’re an affiliate marketer, slinging acai berries to half of America was easy and profitable. But sustainable? Not with an FTC lawsuit wedged firmly up your arse.

Likewise, you’ll find plenty of easy and sustainable strategies… although I haven’t yet seen one that made anybody rich. Extreme couponing is an easy and sustainable strategy, but only if you value your time at close to nothing. Maybe a nuclear blast will bring profitability to your giant stash of Frosted Flakes, but failing that; good luck.

And then there’s the smart choice: profitable and sustainable strategies… the blueprint of all great businesses. Average Joe might not like to hear it, sitting at home in his underpants with $19.95 to invest, but these strategies are several galaxies detached from being easy. They require the creation of real-world value. And there you’ll find the only blueprint of wealth generation with a proven track record: adding value to the world.

If you can’t create value for somebody, somewhere; you don’t deserve your early retirement. That’s a contrasting view with the many ‘magic button’ infomercials; those that prosper when your sense of entitlement grows. They insist that success is your God given right; that the world is doing you wrong if it fails to deliver a Pina Colada on a crystal sandy beach.

Whatever your personal beliefs, or your own sense of entitlement, the market will not change. Anything that you can buy for $19.95 is readily available for the rest of the world to buy too. If you intend to become richer than the market average, you have to do more with the information than most of your neighbours and friends. Or better yet, blaze a completely new trail for others to copy.

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Building Backlinks: The Fastlane To Insanity

Jan 23 2012

This weekend, I decided to engage in some research that never fails to get my blood boiling. What better way to spend your Sunday afternoon than by crawling the web making notes on how to boss Google’s search rankings?

SEO is to Finch, what the slaughterhouse is to cows.

It’s where I go when I feel like throwing my business plans before the judge and pleading for a stay of execution. “Dear Google, please take pity upon thee.”

So I loaded up on Victoria Sandwich, pointed my browser at Yahoo Site Explorer, and prepared mentally for the skullbreakingly arduous task of analysing my competitors’ backlink structures.

As it so happens, Yahoo Site Explorer is now defunct. My childhood sweetheart, the only SEO tool I ever truly loved, has been married by Bing and shepherded away – presumably to be shagged and ruined in some Microsoft developer’s basement. This has driven yet another wedge in my already unstable relationship with SEO.

Backlink research is touted as a ‘must’ before venturing in to new niches. Nobody wants to build a potentially lucrative website only to find that Joe Marketer has already pummeled Xrumer and assembled his gajillions of links to maintain search engine dominance through 2017. But there’s the paradox. Even though I make the effort to do backlink research, it rarely ever affects my decision to go ahead with a project.

“Wow, the competition has 3,990,374 backlinks. That’s pretty impressive. But I don’t like his choice of stock photos. I’ll build my site anyway.”

Ego often impedes the voice of SEO reasoning in my head. I hate the idea that success hinges on some bullshit measurement of who has the best/most backlinks. That’s why you’ll find me feeding buckets of fish laced with steroids to Google’s Panda in the middle of the night, then running away like a little girl as the ‘SEO Professionals’ come charging in disgust.

The whore charade makes me wonder if offline business ever used to be this way. If you took the regional equivalent of today’s Google, let’s say a local business directory, would it have been ranked and prioritised in the same manner? Are you telling me that to get my business spotlighted on a good page, I would have to cruise every last dark corner of the neighbourhood posting my business card through abandoned letterboxes?

Because that’s essentially what backlink building is. It’s handing your business card to anybody who will accept it, in the faint hope that a chief regulator, aka Mr. Google, notices the card in abundance and is mathematically satisfied that you’re worth half a shit.

No doubt this analogy would provoke an uproar from the local directory ranking experts. They would tell me quite bluntly that I’m wasting my time whoring business cards in the ghettos. They’d insist, “No, no. You need to get your business card adorning the windows of the palaces and castles!”

So, I’d work hard and mingle in those upper class circles. I’d send letters and scratch backs. My culture vulture would be well and truly on. But invariably, I’d discover that the owners of the palaces and castles aren’t interested in my business cards. Their interest extends only as far as their own financial gain.

Believe it or not, these Princes and Kings don’t classify what you promise to be “relevant content for their kingdoms” as fitting for their cause. Cruelly, they would rather engage in a furious 24/7 circle jerk behind closed doors than deal with the ignominy of your fresh arse on the block. So, what are you to do? You get on your bike, retreat to the neighbourhood, and blast your business card through 3,990,374 derelict letterboxes instead. Fan-tastic.

My conclusion? The backlink building game is fundamentally shagged. Don’t waste your time building backlinks. Just build a reputation for awesomeness instead.

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Buying a Yacht vs. Defaulting On Your Argos Card

Jan 13 2012

There seems to be a lot of discussion in the Internet Marketing world over how best to create a lasting business, and particularly where to reinvest your profits if you create one that works. Knowing as many affiliates as I do, this is great to hear. It’s nice that people are waking up to the reality that reinvestment is critical for long term business growth.

Unfortunately, life is rarely as simple as spend spend spend. Many of us, through starting businesses and throwing balls to the wind, have taken on large amounts of personal debt. So, when is a good time to reinvest, and when is a good time to pay back what you owe?

There’s a reason why I voted Tory in the last UK Election: spending money you don’t have is the first sign of financial insanity. There’s only so far you can kick the can down the road. I’m all for reinvesting money to build a business. But to do so at the expense of ignoring debt is delusional; as is persisting with the faith that it will go away, or that paying it back will be easier at a later date.

Everybody who ever went bankrupt once thought their debt would be easier to pay at a later date.

So let’s be honest. When you look at your earnings vs your outgoings and find an extra £100 of disposable income, do you immediately piss your pants with unbridled epileptic joy? Is the opportunity of binge consuming too good to resist? Maybe you see it as a golden opportunity to invest in a new business idea. Shit, maybe you throw your extra earnings on the stock market.

I think this is stupidity of the highest order.

Pay back what you owe. The easiest way to relieve stress while running a one man business is to minimize your outgoings, whereas carrying unnecessary debt is the stupidest way of shooting yourself in the balls if it all goes tits up.

Let’s say you’ve racked up £5000 on your Mr. Plastic Fantastic. It’s tempting to think that time will be a great healer to those debts. So when your monthly statement arrives, you wince for a moment and then toss it aside. Mmm, the sweet smell of escapism. Instead of doing the sensible thing and paying back as much money as you can afford, you stick to the minimum repayments. Yeah, that £9.57 will go a long way. You feel like the fucking gingerbread man screaming “Argos, you’ll never catch me now!” But, of course, Argos will catch you. Painfully so. And you’re not even a gingerbread man. You’re just a tosser in the red.

Next month, your new statement arrives and lo and behold, you’ve barely scraped the surface of your original debt. You are a slave to interest. Even the dude printing statements at Argos calls you his little bitch behind your back. Yes, you’ve become the picture-perfect sucker that credit companies swear by.

Why is it so tempting to turn a blind eye to debts? Worse yet, when you have money to spare, why is reinvestment – or worse, blind indulgence – more appealing than repayment? Unfortunately, we are hardwired to resist giving up what we think we already have, even when that possession is deluded. We’d rather receive £50 today than wait for £100 next year. And this attitude contrives to keep us in the pockets of the industries that exist to monetize our greed.

Well, if the large majority of us weren’t such pigeons of consumerism, we’d learn to spend what we could afford and ‘the crunch’ would be a term reserved for those living their luxury lifestyles in castles built on sand.

Whether you appreciate the implications or not, all of your debts are working against you – day by day – for as long as you allow them to accumulate interest. If you spend your disposable income on reinvestments rather than repayments, your investments better be pretty badass. Your ROI needs to be discriminately high to not only produce profit, but to pay for the money you are leaking every month through those deceptively flexible minimum repayments.

Another issue I struggle to understand is our fixation with reward schemes. Reward schemes are the sales devices used to satisfy our weakness for instant gratification, the same trait that encourages us to accept £50 today instead of £100 in a year. Generally, they are used as distractions; woven in to contracts that aim to milk every last pound of that ‘reward’ back, and so much more.

It seems that many people have yet to catch on that you can have the best points scheme under the sun, but if you fail to make the full repayments on your debts, the accumulated interest will annihilate any hope you had of a freebie. The same for airmiles. Fucking hell, don’t even get me started on airmiles. I will happily take whichever card attempts to blinds me with the least bullshit. And if I hear airmiles, I instantly know that I’m swimming in it.

The people who run up gigantic debts on credit cards, then fail to repay them under the pretense that it’s okay “cause I’m earning airmiles, innit bruv” should be taken back to school and either educated, or simply shot behind the bike shed. I haven’t decided yet. It’s the same irrational logic that inspires a mildly psychotic Bible-Belt housewife to spend her days extreme couponing in the name of good value.

To put it simply – before I spiral further in to the extreme couponing rabbit hole – clearing debts as soon as possible is nearly always the best way to spend your money. It may not feel good. But it’s the best value deal. Once you’re out of debt, go ahead, reinvest like there’s no tomorrow. Splurge your extra cash on drugs and prostitutes if it makes you happy. Whatever rocks your boat.

Just don’t choose to be in somebody else’s pocket. That’s pretty dumb, and very inefficient.

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