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Survived: Two Years Of Full Time Affiliate Marketing

Mar 31 2011

April marks the two year anniversary of my luminous full-time career as an affiliate marketer. I could use this occasion to celebrate the arduous hours spent scratching my balls, surfing for dating pics, or munching reheated pizza over my inbox. But where would be the sense in that?

Two years is a long time in an industry that doesn’t know how to stand still. I quit my day job at the height of the rebill boom back in 2009. And I must’ve pissed off Lady Luck somewhere along the line because my last day at work happened to coincide with the death of all my profitable campaigns. What do they call that in the corporate world? Something like “a difficult period of transition”?

You haven’t felt a “difficult period of transition” until you’ve been sat in your new home office, on the first day, wondering how to make a living for the rest of your life.

The answer, as I eventually came to discover, was by scrapping and slaving away. It might not have been the most graceful jump in to running my own business, but I just about managed to keep my shit in tact. The first year was an eye-opener in every sense. I moved slowly from promoting rebills towards more sustainable offers that didn’t require a WHOIS registration just to sleep at night.

For all the success I enjoyed pushing shameless rebills, my business was in no way equipped to deal with any serious growth. That’s the price you pay for being obsessed with dollar signs but blind to the supporting acts that lay the foundations of any successful business. If you don’t have an accountant, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you don’t have somebody you can go to for expert business advice, bam, there goes your kneecap too.

Christ knows how much money I surrendered in 2009 through taxes alone thanks to my stupid tunnel vision. The attitude I adopted was paramount to poison.

“Taxes? What do you think I am? A banker?” I didn’t register a company, I didn’t bother taking on an accountant and I sure as hell didn’t treat my work like a real job.

I had to learn that it wasn’t all about me. And no individual is smart enough to make the correct decision every time in all aspects of his work. So if my first year as a full-time affiliate marketer gave me a reality check, I suppose the last year has been spent acclimatizing to that reality.

I’m still no closer to being able to explain what exactly I do for a living (“Err, I build websites and market products… Ahh, forget it. I’m just a web programmer“), but at least I feel like my business is not about to be swept from underneath me.

One thing I can say for sure, if you’re making those first tentative steps in to affiliate marketing with a very limited budget, it gets easier. It might not feel like the shit is even possible when you’re still turning up negative ROIs, but it does get easier.

It’s amazing how in two whole years of doing what I do, the actual success formula has changed very little. Sure, the traffic sources come and go. The offers are swings and roundabouts. But making profitable campaigns is very easy once you’ve locked down the method in the madness. So much of affiliate marketing is about finding that one sweet spot, and then running with it until it stretches no further.

One of my most successful dating landing pages is something I threw together back in 2009 and have barely changed since. While I’ve learned a lot since then, and keep pushing myself to learn more, you’re never more than one small break away from making it in this industry. One moment of genius, one great idea…and so much can snowball from so very little.

The basic mechanics of affiliate marketing are as simple as they ever were. But moulding everything around it in to a successful business takes a lot more thought, a lot more work and a lot more time. Something tells me two years is just the start.

Recommended This Week:

If you’re based in the UK and worried about your affiliate taxes, now is the time to sort them out. Before the new tax year! I highly recommend Crunch for their flat-rate £60/month service. It takes a few days to get setup, but it’s worth it for peace of mind if you don’t already have an accountant – or fancy shafting your old one.
If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

Dear Affiliates Suffering From The Truman Effect

Mar 10 2011

I wouldn’t be a true Londoner if I didn’t spend every hour of the day complaining, bitching, whining or just generally living as the Daily Mail tells me to live. And so a few months ago, I had a decision to make. Commit to another year in the Rat Race, endlessly overspending in a city where my high income would be seen as no more than par for the course. Or move to Thailand and engage in a little lifestyle arbitrage.

If you don’t know what lifestyle arbitrage is, I guess the best way to explain it would be “to get the maximum bang for your buck out of life”.

Or to quote Charlie Sheen; #Winning.

Most affiliates have “fixed income”. I say that with a hint of irony, obviously, but what I mean is that we can go anywhere in the world and still be present in our jobs. We can be making exactly the same money whether we’re chained to the suburbs of the neighbourhoods we grew up in, or traipsing across the globe on the back of an elephant.

It’s easy to get caught up in the obsession of making more money. There’s a common feeling among some marketers that more profit will somehow equal a better standard of living. While it’s true sometimes, the nature of our jobs throws so many more options to the mix. Lifestyle arbitrage has always been close to my mind. I guess that’s what you get for growing up and making ends meet in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Everybody knows a job in London pays significantly more than a job outside London (for those in the UK), and that’s because the cost of living is so much higher.

But what if you could earn a London executive salary while living somewhere cheaper?

When I was an affiliate working in London – albeit let’s face it, a guy sat at a desk twiddling his balls who just happened to be near the Metropolitan line – I was automatically raising the stakes of how much I’d have to earn by restraining myself to such an expensive city. I could handle it, and I did handle it, but why pay the premium when you have the one trump card that ejects you from the rat race altogether? A fixed income that doesn’t depreciate with the economy around you.

I remember reading a few comments saying it was an embarrasing step backwards when I announced I was moving to Thailand. A baller would never turn his back on the American Dream, would he? Why trade the western way for a bunch of ladyboys and “third world” living?

Well, I’ve spoken to various affiliates earning large figures, and many of them haven’t even visited a country outside their own. This is particularly the case in America. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But are you sure you’re aware of the sheer opportunities that full-time affiliate marketing has already opened up to you?

You can go anywhere and do anything. It’s a license to live! The sort of privilege you look back on when you have three kids and a bunch of responsibilities, thinking…damn, why did I blow the easiest chance I ever had to go and live the dream?

I remember when I made the decision. I was sitting in a Nero coffee shop with my girlfriend, nursing a property viewing hangover and weighing up my next move. It was only when I’d been forced in to making a decision (my rental contract was expiring) that I actually weighed up my options.

Inevitably, you can decide to pay the premium if a particular lifestyle is all you want to know. There’s nothing wrong with bedding down and saying “this is what I know, this is what I love”. But that attitude is ingrained in adults who’ve been chained to the careers they’re supposed to have. It’s an attitude born out of convenience more than anything. Thanks to the Internet, we are the kind of professionals that lifestyle arbitrage was made for.

My decision was pretty simple really. I could spend $3000/month renting a shoebox apartment in Central London, or I could spend that same money living in a huge apartment with my own pool, gym, games room and temperatures of 35C all year round.

So I decided to move to Thailand instead of Fulham Broadway, convinced in all of about 7 minutes that it was time to make use of the greatest luxury an affiliate can have; the flexibility to go anywhere.

This is lifestyle arbitrage. Changing your life in an instant by simply defining your own economy. It’s about getting more for less, just because you can. A choice that confronts you every day, but one that most choose to ignore. I’m willing to bet there are countless professionals who will read this post, who could choose to get more from their lives if they seized the true potential of the flexibility this industry provides.

I know we all have our puppet strings. For every reason to get up and go, there are several you can find to justify why you need to stay in the rat race and keep on grinding the grind. Loved ones, friends, kids, commitments, responsibilities…yeah, these are all perfectly valid reasons why you might not be able to get up and move to the other side of the world.

But it doesn’t have to be that extreme. Opportunities for lifestyle arbitrage are everywhere when you become your own boss. So many of the stresses and strains we place on ourselves are there because we expect them to be there, and because we feel too absorbed by the status quo to challenge them. Ultimately, I think most of us resign ourselves to the idea that we’re going to be corporate slaves for the rest of our working lives. A bunch of Truman Burbanks forever thinking about flying to Fiji but watching the years go by and getting no closer.

If your affiliate career ends tomorrow, when will you ever get a better chance to see the world without having to report to your boss at the end of the week?

You can stack money until the taps run dry, but it’s not all about money. Are you doing enough with your life to make it all worthwhile? Or are you just accumulating interest in the hope that someday it’ll add value to your life?

Recommended This Week:

In the last few hours, I’ve launched a brand new site – FinchBlogs.com – which is going to offer something a little different to the already rammo “blogging about blogging” niche. Every month, my readership on this site has grown to the point where I’m collecting readers who don’t even know what affiliate marketing is, but still come to see if they can make some sense of it.
The temptation has always been to branch in to more general entrepreneurial topics where I think I can help an audience larger than just affiliate marketers to make money. The more diversified my business becomes, the more I have to remind myself that most of you guys only give a damn about the tips and posts that make a difference to you.
Of course, I don’t want to to become one of those affiliate bloggers who starts publishing shit that has absolutely zero relevance to real life affiliates. So I’m keeping this blog for strictly affiliate related perspective. But if you want to read more of my thoughts and tips on general online business, subscribe to the new blog and you might find something you like.
If not, don’t worry. There’s plenty of my balls to go around.

Are You Pretending To Work At Home?

Feb 23 2011

I think we’d all agree that it’s a great luxury to be able to work from home. As much as I enjoyed the social side of being in an office and having a laugh, there’s no place I’d rather be at 9am than tangled in my own bedsheets. Living in your comfort zone can provide the acid test for how committed you are to what you do.

Staying productive is something I talk about a lot because I believe self-discipline to be the single greatest asset to any entrepreneur, or anybody who controls their own working environment. Without it, we could spunk entire afternoons on YouTube or away from the office altogether.

I think we all know that it’s important to stay productive, but not many of us have reached the stage where we feel like we’re in total control of our environment.

So here are four tips for improving your productivity if you work from home:

1. Separate your work space from your living arrangements.

This is pretty much critical to your sanity. For over two years, I worked in a claustrophobic bedroom where I also drank, ate, slept and let the magic happen. The problem with having your office in your bedroom is that as affiliate marketers, we’re chained to a 24/7 industry that never sleeps. There’s always one more email to answer, some stats to refresh or a brainfart to research.

One of my priorities when I moved to Bangkok was to find a three bedroom apartment that had plenty of space. My girlfriend also works from home, so we opted for a 350 sq/m sprawling mass of rooms. We both have a home office, our puppies have their own bedroom and there’s more than enough space to be able to differentiate between “This is where I work”, “This is where I sleep”, and “This is where I shit”.

2. Have a schedule.

Many people consider the 9-5 to be a mental prison. The same hours, on the same days of the week for the rest of their working lives. But what can’t be argued is that routine adds order and momentum to your working day.

Nobody can tell you the best routine. Some people work better in the morning, while others can only think straight at night. Your location in the world also makes a difference.

When I have breakfast, America is going to bed and the UK is already fast asleep. This gives me a perfect opportunity to fire off my emails and work out. I can go for a swim, eat some lunch and really think about what I want to achieve before the morning has already passed me by.

If you’re going to have a schedule, you need to stick to it. So you need to plan ahead and leave time for that familiar experience of life screwing you over, or people having other ideas about how you should spend your time. It’s easy for those working at home to fall in to the trap of becoming everybody else’s bitch. Maybe your housemates want you to run errands because you have “all that time on your hands”. Or your neighbour wants you to watch out for a parcel delivery because it was too convenient to expect you to do them a favour than organize to pick the damn thing up themselves.

These are all familiar stories of how working from home can turn you in to a Samaritan at the beck and call of everybody else. So take back control and get some self-discipline. Even if it’s a flimsy whiteboard with your working hours scrawled in the kitchen for your wife to see.

You can always bust out my favourite tetchy complaint: “I didn’t get where I am today by taking care of other people’s shit.” You might be seen as unreasonable, but you’re in the right. Many of us have worked 16 hour days for months on end to be in the position that we are, so having a schedule that other people respect isn’t too much to ask.

3. Understand the difference between staying busy and getting work done.

Sometimes I have days where I only work for a few hours but what I achieve is significant because it’s a step towards a long term goal. Other days, I work for 12 hours and cross off dozens of tasks only to find that I haven’t actually achieved much because I’ve been “keeping busy” rather than making any measurable progress.

What is “keeping busy”?

– Optimizing campaigns without analyzing the data.

God, I hate myself when I do this. I’ll mark down a task for the day to optimize campaign X, and then I’ll go in and introduce some new ads or tweak my landing pages – but I won’t look at the data and make any logical assessments. If you’re forever split testing and never coming to conclusions that affect your future campaigns, you’re the perfect example of somebody who keeps busy for the sake of being busy rather than achieving goals.

– Managing people.

I’m not a project manager. So whenever I add a task like “communicate with Freelancer X and ensure project is running fine”, I know that I’m being lazy. These are things that you should either be doing automatically or handing to a dedicated project manager. It’s not a step forward for your business if you’re spending the day waiting for emails and feeling satisfied that you’ve got everything under control.

– Research tasks.

I find that if I include any item resembling “Research this…” on my to-do list, I will revert to my lazy high school trait of promoting the easiest task to the one most worthy of my time. I never add research tasks to my to-do list for one reason. They’re not measurable. I can’t hold myself accountable at the end of the day. It’s easy to flick through a couple of forum posts in the space of five hours and then by the end of the day miraculously forget that those hours were actually wasted.

To put it simply, if you’re going to set yourself tasks, you should know exactly what you’re looking to achieve. Otherwise the goalposts will move as fatigue sets in at the end of the day.

4. Cancel out the noise.

Yes literally, check out SimplyNoise. White noise is a brilliant way of canceling out the distractions all around you. I like to listen to music every now and then, but having a TV blaring in the background makes it damn near impossible for me to work productively.

My girlfriend manages to stay focused on her tasks while watching America’s Next Top Model with a laptop balanced on the sofa. She’s obviously a freak. I couldn’t bring myself to remember my CPCs from my CPVs if I had such calamity unfolding before my eyes on-screen. Whether you think it affects you or not, your brain is tuned in to what is going on around you. I find white noise to be the best way of weeding out those distractions and keeping my focus where it needs to be. Scamming the nation needs mind meditation, right?

If you’re falling in to patterns of laziness, maybe it’s time to start adjusting your home environment. You know… divorce the wife, move in to the attic, ask the cat to start feeding himself. Small tweaks. I’m not advocating Josef Fritzl measures, but discipline and clarity can be a good thing for all parties concerned. Show the world that you don’t mess with a man and his berries.

Recommended This Week:

Ironically, given the nature of this post, I would like to recommend you join a forum. If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.