Finch's Tedious Rants | Finch Sells

How To Lose $250 Digital Point Style

May 28 2009

Digital Point Forums isn’t exactly known for it’s useful information. But every now and then, a numb nut comes along and proves to the world exactly why there will always be a demand for the supermarket cleaner vacancy. Here’s how to waste your money quickly and effectively.

So I was gazing over the usual threads of “how do i get my site 2 rank”, “help me get pr2 guys” and “hi, cpa networks don’t accept me i think im from somalia”. You might criticize me for even wasting my time on DP in the first place. The only reason I browse the forum is on the off-chance that I’ll see a good idea being executed poorly.

Unfortunately, the majority of users are so far buried up their Clickbank asses that it’s a needle in a haystack chore.

Anyway, I was reading over a thread from one particular guy who was looking to promote his colon cleansing offer on a popular health related forum. He’d checked with the forum admins and agreed on a media buy.

48 hours of 468 x 60 banner advertising on the top of EVERY page. He agreed to pay $250 for this exposure.

Bare in mind that $250 to the average Digital Point user is probably a bank loan and stealing from Grandma Jean.

So the forum admins wired him up and he sat back waiting for the targeted traffic to lap up the offer. Who wouldn’t pay $1.95 for a colon cleansing kit on a leukemia related forum, right?

In a tragic and somewhat amusing twist of fate, the affiliate network pulled the offer just HOURS in to his advertising stint. Obviously the retard was sitting there clicking through his stats like some kind of nympho in a porn chain. So it must’ve taken him – oh I don’t know – all of about 15 minutes to realize that his banner traffic was arriving at a dead link.

Yep, he’d direct linked to the offer without sending traffic through his own redirect page.

DIRECT LINKING OFFERS W/O REDIRECT + MEDIA BUYS = HI, YOU’RE STUPID

So while the forum admin cashed the $250 all the way to the bank, Idiot X found himself sat in a bedroom in his underpants (probably) sending desperate private messages asking for his destination link to be changed. Oh, and pleading for advice on Digital Point for how he could redirect a network link to a different offer. Brilliant.

Guys, it’s not difficult to setup a basic PHP redirect.

If you don’t redirect your traffic, you’re adding needless hours of edits on to every landing page or website you ever build. Not to mention the fact that it looks sloppy and unprofessional.

Here, I’ll even supply the PHP code. Place it inside your standard PHP tags.

header('Location: http://www.link-to-the-offer-goes-here.com');

Save the file as an index.php, place it in a folder, link to the folder. Pretty basic stuff – but pretty fundamental to not being a complete affiliate marketing failure.

Hello, Affiliate Marketing

Apr 28 2009

So this is Finch Sells, another voice in a crowded space.

Here, you can expect a blog about making money online via the love-it or hate-it industry that is…affiliate marketing. A lot of people ask me what exactly is affiliate marketing. How can I afford to give up my day job in the middle of a recession?

Well, I don’t want to explain how I got started or what my day-to-day work involves. The information is out there if you want to know. Affiliate marketing can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. But it basically comes down to this: you make money or you don’t.

I don’t want to preach the basics or explain the difference between an EPC and a CPC. These pages are gonna be aimed at those of you who already have half a clue what you’re doing.

Even if you’re active in the usual affiliate marketing circles, it’s unlikely you’ll have heard of me.

Young Affiliate Mistake No #1: Spend too much time talking, not enough time doing.

You soon realize you’ve achieved sweet jack all except for warming your desk chair. Hey, that sounds a lot like my 2007.

Organic “natural search” occupied my agenda back then. It was essentially donkey work. I spent endless days link building and far too many nights at the computer screen crafting expert-review websites when the only thing expert was my ability to type utter bullshit and make it look believable. Not only did I realize that the money rewards were tight, but I got no satisfaction from pretending to care about the latest herbal mix diet some middle aged housewife had been saving a lifetime to try.

Certainly not enough satisfaction to justify a couple of Adsense clicks and a sprinkling of dollars and cents for my troubles. The money funded my morning coffee but not much else.

So I realized pretty quickly that my time was more wisely invested in the work that was actually going to pay my rent, improve my opportunities and save me from redundancy peril. I read some great resources. Most of you will be familiar with them, and if you’re not, go get familiar with them – Nicky Cakes, Blue Hat SEO, Slightly Shady, Seocracy – I turned what was blind theory in to PPC campaigns.

Guess what? A little blind theory can go a long way if you’re not a complete retard. Those campaigns are bank-rolling my wages while I craft the art of creative layabout. A creative layabout who can’t wait for his first summer of self-employed freedom.

You won’t find me on Wicked Fire (yet), I’ve never been to an affiliate summit and I was thankfully banned from Digital Point long before I had chance to enter the same brain-dead coma as it’s average poster. So why show my face when it’s all going so well?

…To sell you my new Clickbank ebook, right?

Come on, guys. With this endless fountain of knowledge, you could be sunning yourself on a yacht with a crowd of supermodel shag buddies hired just to cash your cheques. That shit’s only gonna cost you some shipping and handling now, a rebill in the morning, and the smell of regret in the future. So what are you waiting for?

Not quite.

I thought I’d offer some creative advice in exchange for the pittance of an occasional affiliate link click (bling bling) and the widening of my networking horizons. You might find this page useful, you probably won’t. If you’re anything like me, you’ve learnt that the best way to learn affiliate marketing is to get your hands dirty with the real deal.

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