Finch's Tedious Rants | Finch Sells

I Have A Job, Swear!

Jul 20 2010

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now. It’s something that I’ve held back from posting because I know it’s of little relevance to the majority of readers who have already found and established a successful living with affiliate marketing. But I’m hoping it’s something you can relate to in the attitudes of people outside our industry.

I’m frankly tired of explaining to people that my job equates to more than a hammock and a retirement plan.

If you’re reading this now and thinking “Well, this arrogant pom seems to be making a good living and he only ever tweets about his balls, I think I’ll do what he does” …well, you’re probably not alone. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions I’ve had to explain to family and friends that my success is the result of repeated failure. You can’t skip the failure part.

Friends often ask me if I could show them how I make money. Just give them a glimpse of what it is that I actually do that gives me the right to avoid a morning commute. Well, y’know, what would you like to see? The campaigns I can count on one hand that are actually making me money? Or the thousands that never worked out?

People don’t want to lose money and they only want to reap the benefits of a job that in reality, can be as simple as milking blood from a stone. It doesn’t help that every ebook under the sun is pointing to making money online being a rites of passage that you’d be a retard if you haven’t tapped in to yet. But some of my friends haven’t even seen the ebooks. They just assume I’m operating in a surreal home office straight out of cloud cuckoo land.

“So, what you do is pay for advertising, right? You buy leads and sell them on for more? If I give you Â£200 from my work wages, when do you think you can pay me back the Â£400?”

I shit you not. It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been propositioned with these kind of “business proposals” time and time again since I became a full-time affiliate marketer. It’s a glaring example of the two misconceptions that annoy me most.

1. Money is the only reason for my success.
2. My hard work to pinpoint an opportunity is somebody else’s “dead cert” to bring home the bacon while they’re sat on their fat arses basically saying “Go, monkey, PROFIT”.

It’s got to the point where if I’m asked what I do for a living, I stop to think twice before answering that I traffick humans. Christ, it’s easier to explain and most people just don’t want to probe any further. Tell people you make money on the Internet at home, AT HOME, and they’re on you like the prom queen after two roofies.

I will honestly give anybody a fair chance, even if I don’t believe they’re cut out for the business. If somebody emails me looking for advice on how to get started, I’ll reply to them. If a friend asks me to watch over them while they create their first campaign, I’ll do it. But this isn’t an industry where one person’s success gives you an advantage in terms of avoiding failure.

I think we can all agree that one of the best aims in life is to be able to work smarter, not harder.

For many affiliate marketers, this is the reality. We’ve given up day jobs, broken free from the chains of a Monday-Friday 9-5. But fuck you if you think it came without sacrifice along the way.

Long before I quit my day job, I was working double shifts. I’d spend an entire day working in a London agency where you’d often be sniffed at for leaving on time at 5:30, then I’d go home and spend the rest of the night slaving away on my own. My weekends? If I wasn’t out socializing, I was working. The only reason I ever managed it was because to me, it was never really work. It was my passion and a step towards where I wanted to be.

People don’t see those steps. They see the end product. They might call round and find me sitting here in my lounge on a Tuesday afternoon, and to them it’s like a seismic mindfuck. How can they join the party? If affiliate marketing is such a piss in the park, how can they get started?

There’s one trait that nearly all successful affiliate marketers share. It’s the ability to see opportunity where others see only a bunch of pixels. I can’t stress this enough. I could take a friend’s hand and walk them through the many steps of preparing a successful marketing campaign. I could show them how to setup hosting, how to design an excellent landing page. I could even introduce them to my successful ad creatives. But what we can’t do is inject the same sense of opportunism.

I’m beginning to think the best way to strike a chord of reality with people is to ask them one question.

“If you never made a single penny with affiliate marketing, would you still enjoy it?”

It sounds ridiculous to think that any of us could enjoy a moneyless profession where the urge is always there to pull your own hair out. But for most affiliates, this is how it started. I remember receiving my first cheque for something like a hundred bucks and being over the moon. It wasn’t the money I cared about, it was the entrepreneurism of generating something out of nothing on my lonesome.

Would you feel the same? Do you care about the entrepreneurism or are you just in it for the quick cash? I can tell you one thing. Being an entrepreneur will kill you if it doesn’t thrill you. Some people just aren’t cut out for the stresses and strains. And believe me, there are plenty.

In my inbox, I have a bunch of emails starred from affiliates just getting started and wanting advice. I give them exactly the same pointers and yet some will enjoy success, while others will have to learn the hard way. It’s pretty much rooted to your own expectations and passions.

But you know what they say about the grass always being greener, right? If you’re stargazing at the apparently novel lifestyle of an affiliate marketer, ask him where he came from instead of where he is today. You’ll get a much more accurate depiction of what it takes to be doing this shit for the rest of your life.

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The Grind: Only Cool When You Know How To Stop

Jun 09 2010

There seems to be a sub-culture in affiliate marketing these days. It’s the by-product of a super competitive crowd, all working hard to stay one step ahead of their rivals. You’ve probably seen it splashed across your Twitter feed.

“Hey Joe, I can’t come out tonight. I’m busy grindin”

“I just dumped my girlfriend. She didn’t like my grind.”

“Forced to choose between the grind and playing with my balls, I choose the grind.”

Check out Ryan Eagle’s Twitter for more classic examples.

Affiliates seem to fail or succeed by virtue of “the grind”. The ability to work like a slave – through the night, through the morning – deaf to distractions and entirely committed to the art of getting shit done.

Everybody needs to be working at least 22 hour days or they’re just not working hard enough, right? I’ve been sucked in to this competitive mindset in the past, and I’m doing my best to wriggle my way free. The grind is only cool when you know how to stop.

I was sitting downstairs in my lounge the other day, vegetating like some kind of unshaven grizzly bear. It’s very rarely that I allow mindless police chases on budget Bravo TV to distract me from work, but I truly miss the days where I knew how to lounge around and do absolutely nothing.

That sounds like a step backwards. If you’re successful, why would you want to waste your energy on television while the opportunity of time passes you by? For me, it’s become an issue of retaining my health and limiting my insanity.

It’s very easy, as an affiliate marketer working from home, to get sucked in to working these grueling 16 hour days. And if like me, you enjoy what you do, the lure can be even harder to resist. During the earliest days, I built some kind of elitist dream where putting in those hours somehow made me more likely to be satisfied with my progress. It made me better than everybody else because I was somehow more committed or more in control of my destiny.

But if you don’t know when to stop, you’re not really in control, are you? You’re more of a prisoner than you ever were in your 9-5 when there was a clear beginning and end to your day.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that no matter how much money you earn, there will always be somebody earning more. If you fall in to the trap of pursuing this relentless grind, unable to dictate when your work day ends, it’s only going to be you that suffers. And I know personally because I’ve already suffered. My health has suffered, my moods have suffered. My ability to appreciate rare moments, simply festering on the couch with absolutely nothing to worry about – those have also suffered.

I went for a laser eye surgery consultation last week and somehow ended up referred to the hospital instead with skyrocketing eye pressure, pounding headaches and an overwhelming feeling of fatigue.

Ironically, I’ve always figured that my problems could be solved by money. My bad vision being one of them. I thought if I could afford to throw Â£5500 at surgery to correct my eyes, it would easily justify all those hours on the grind. But there are some things money can’t fix, so grinding for 16 hours straight isn’t always the answer. Even if affiliates are being systematically brainwashed to believe that’s the case.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working to reverse the trend. I’ve been slowly lowering the number of hours I allow myself to spend in front of a computer screen and trying to work in productive surges. I took some advice from lenstrom on Twitter and have been trying to integrate these health measures in to my day.

The biggest challenge for me is to learn that whatever lands on my desk, whatever lands in my inbox…it doesn’t always have to be acted on now. I’ve already caught some fire and some contrasting opinions on the matter.

Just two days ago I posted on Twitter: “Tomorrow…tomorrow is the day where I get back on track.”

These words seemed to raise some strong opinions from various affiliates. Apparently it came across as a sign of weakness. Why wait til tomorrow? Why not act today?

Well, that’s the attitude I’m trying to overcome. It’s not always in my best interest to act today. Everybody has to have an off switch, and the ability to resist the temptation to grind or work hard at every waking hour. It’s just not healthy. That I’m only 22 years old, and feel like I have the mental wear and tear of a 42 year old…surely can’t be healthy.

Yet everywhere you look across the affiliate marketing landscape, grinding hard is the cool thing to do. I read a forum topic a few weeks ago with the title line “How much do you earn in a day?”

A guy, admittedly with his head somewhere up his own arse, had wandered in bragging about his $1000/days. He promptly received a bunch of criticism that he was small-time, a little fish in a big ocean. He had no right to be smug. It got me thinking though.

Would I rather be the “big time” affiliate who’s torturing himself to add the next zero on his pay cheque? Or simply the smug dude who’s perfectly content with his $365,000/year? As far as I’m concerned, that’s not small time. Look at the average annual earnings in the United States and it’s anything but small time.

This industry seems to judge affiliates by the flash cars, the fancy mansions and the number of Americans they’ve convinced to shed the pounds with acai. It all boils down to money, and yet money is only a gateway to opportunities. It’s not happiness in itself.

I’ve always preached the need to work hard and harder than most. But the importance of appreciating what I already have is only just dawning on me. The next time somebody tells me to get back to the grind at 2am, or to stop thinking about tomorrow rather than today, I’ll probably tell them with all due respect – to go fuck themselves.

Need a larger slice of Finch?

I haven’t been posting much recently, that’s pretty obvious. I did take the time to do an interview over on Jonathan Volk’s blog though. You can check it out below.

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Why Successful Young Affiliates Grow Up Fast

Feb 16 2010

I won’t lie. There’s something incredibly satisfying about sitting on the train and listening to some suited twat big himself up on a Blackberry, all the while knowing that you’ve got the capacity to earn more than him and you don’t even have to get out of bed to do it.

Living in London, I invariably find myself in bars full of yuppy tossers and “touch base” talking clowns who’ve let the Christmas bonus go too far to their heads. Affiliate marketing is still such a young industry and it’s very rare that we get the respect we deserve for the hours we put in. But this is probably because affiliate marketers generally represent a very young demographic of businessmen and entrepreneurs. The business studies curriculum hasn’t yet had to suggest that we exist.

I was reading in the comments to the last post that much of the arrogance and drama in affiliate marketing can be attributed to a young crowd with more money than it knows what to do with. While we’re blessed with great opportunities, we have to find the discipline to ensure that they lead to long term success. For many marketers in their early 20s, like me, this is one of the biggest hurdles you’re going to face.

I think it’s great that a young generation has broken out from the academic ranks and found a successful alternative to degrees and 9-5s. Let’s be honest. Most of us in this business are stubborn individuals who want to succeed or fail on our own merit. I never enjoyed working for anybody other than myself. I think most affiliates are the same.

Thanks to the Internet, we’ve got the perfect platform to show those skills in an arena where you can’t be discriminated against because you can’t be seen. Only the output of your creativity is there to be judged. That was the huge appeal of the industry for me. A learning curve that keeps on giving.

But at the same time, if you’re a part of this younger generation, you need to think long and hard about the practicalities of what you’re getting in to. I’ve seen so many affiliates making huge profits and somehow blowing it up the wall and staggering back to their day jobs within the year. To reap long term results, you have to learn to channel the positive energy of being young, creative, and web savvy – to overcome the challenges of sudden responsibility and dealing with money. You also need to stay humble.

Why humble? Who gives a fuck about humble when you’re stacking dollar bills to the sky?

There are affiliates out there who are quite happy to boast about their earnings, shove screenshots in your face, and build up a personal brand that suggests only following their every move will take you to the riches. While I occasionally drape this blog in the necessary arrogance that it requires for a cynical crowd to take notice, it’s never a good way to run your business.

One of the most important things you can be doing as a young affiliate – or simply just a young businessman – is to learn, learn, learn and learn. It doesn’t mean shit that you’re earning crazy figures today. The second you let the money go to your head and sap away your desire to become better at your craft, you’re flirting with disaster.

There is always somebody better than you, always somebody earning more. If you forget to carry yourself with a humble willingness to learn and to listen to what other people are doing, you will completely toast your long term prospects of surviving. Or certainly achieving what you might have done in this industry.

There’s times where I browse WickedFire and it completely blows my mind that such a collective bag of dicks could ever have the social or diplomatic know-how to sustain good relations with a single network – let alone the far reaching contacts necessary to run a proper business.

I know there’s a lot of “front”, and many people will talk shit simply because they’ve established a net vBulletin post count of 10,000 in the noughties where faceless web bashing has become the norm. But sometimes, people will judge you by the only face they can see. There’s a lot more to be gained by carrying yourself with respect and actually giving something back to the community rather than shitting on it.

I often get asked what it’s like to be working for myself so young. I always answer the same: incredibly stressful but always worthwhile. I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of the boozy shipwrecked Friday nights on the lash that I used to enjoy week in week out. Not because I feel financially restricted, but because I’m carrying the weight of my own expectations on my shoulders. And I expect a lot from myself. If I’d allowed my ego to dictate my life, I would have crashed and burned long before now.

One of the drawbacks of being part of this younger generation of web entrepreneurs is that some of us simply aren’t ready for it. Teaching yourself discipline, motivation and the ability to plan ahead is not always easy when your first taste of success is as simple as refreshing stats. So many of us enter the industry full-time starstruck on the back of initial success. It’s a good idea to remember where you came from, and how your success can be as fleeting as the time it takes you to fall. Don’t let your bank balance go to your head and don’t book a worldwide cruise on the back of a good month’s work.

Networking with other marketers and sharing your knowledge is probably the single most effective way of gaining experience as an affiliate. We all have our own successes and failures to talk about. I can always tell when I’m talking to a young egomaniac with his head up his own arse. And I never share anything useful with these people. If you act like a lone riding dick with a chip on your shoulder, people will treat you like one.

There aren’t many industries where you can be so successful in such a short space of time. I hate to say it, but just because you’re making money, that doesn’t mean you’re great at what you do. I think many young affiliates will drop out of the business as competition becomes more fierce and the road to riches becomes harder to negotiate. Those still standing will probably be the ones who haven’t spent all day living the jet-set affiliate lifestyle they took for granted and thought they’d always have.

So you’re young and rich. That’s a notorious recipe for ending up old and lazy. Working hard through the good times, staying humble around your peers, and helping others to succeed. These are all qualities that are likely to work in your favour at some point. The riches for young affiliates are mind boggling. But you’ve gotta grow up fast to enjoy them.