General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

Angle Creation: How to Juice Your Campaigns

Jun 13 2012

Affiliate marketing is all about creating angles. It’s about playing cupid between merchant and customer, finding the common ground where the two parties can be brought together in profitable matrimony.

Creating angles is the part of affiliate marketing that I enjoy the most. It’s the brainsplurging stage where I sit down with a blank whiteboard, scribble the offer in the center, and then force myself to concoct dozens of incentives and selling points for that offer.

In my opinion, one of the main reasons for offer burnout is plain uninspired thinking. If 1000 affiliates choose an offer and run with the first angle they think off, there’s likely to be a bottleneck where most people lose.

If, however, you take the time to venture beyond the tried and tested angles, you can come up with some creative takes that will prolong the lifetime of your campaigns – and therefore your sanity.

What Makes a Good Angle?

Not all angles are created equal. Some have better hooks by nature when it comes to producing a desired action.

If you’ve ever read Ca$hvertising, you’ll be aware of the Life Force 8.

The Life Force 8 consists of eight very basic human needs that are hard-wired in to each and every one of us. They don’t need to be sold to us. They exist by default.

Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.
Enjoyment of food and beverages.
Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.
Sexual companionship.
Comfortable living conditions.
To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.
Care and protection of loved ones.
Social approval.

A campaign angle can consist of just about any hook you can imagine. But to really get under the skin of your target market, the angle should embrace one or more of the Life Force 8 factors.

These aren’t wants. They are needs.

Let’s use my favourite example, RichMen.com, to show how angles can be constructed out of thin air.

Now, I’ve trolled the RichMen dating offer. I’ve spied thousands of ads, read hundreds of different ad copies. Through it all, I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that I think most affiliates ‘phone in’ these ads. They rarely get their creativity out of second gear.

The default angle used by most affiliates is broody gold-digger seeks wealthy fancypants. While that may be a perfectly viable take on the offer, it’s also a bottleneck waiting to happen.

I’d say 80% of affiliates scramble to make coin from the same 20% of ideas.

They enter new verticals and go for the lowest hanging fruit, not appreciating that there’s a crush in the market because every other beginner is working on the same Plan A.

When you brainstorm your angles, it’s often a good idea to discard the first 2 or 3 ideas that come to mind for popular offers. Why? Because your first 2 or 3 ideas are going to lead you in to that bottleneck, in to the crush.

How to Easily Source New Angles

So, going back to RichMen.com, assuming we avoid the original gold-digger angle, how can we come up with new and exciting angles that other affiliates haven’t already beaten to death?

An easy method is to take your offer and stack it up against the Life Force 8.

Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension.

“Joining Rich Men… gives you the chance to meet a man who will get you out of the rat race, let you retire early, let you enjoy the peace and freedom you’ve earned for yourself.”

Enjoyment of food and beverages.

“Joining Rich Men… is your ticket to be wined and dined. No more scoffing takeaway with a derelict Stella swigger who answers you only in grunts. Drink the finest sparkling champagne in the city with a mouthwatering date!“

Freedom from fear, pain, and danger.

“Joining Rich Men… removes your fear of living from pay check to pay check, of wondering who is going to pay your 13 year old daughter’s University bill. Rest easy with a man who can take care of you!”

Sexual companionship.

“Joining Rich Men… will put the spark back in your bedroom. These men are confident passionate winners and the only thing bigger than their wallets is, well…”

Comfortable living conditions.

“Joining Rich Men… is a commitment to the life you’ve always wanted and deserved. Does this mansion look big enough for you? Can you imagine the walk-in closet space? Find a man who has room for your shoes.”

To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses.

“Joining Rich Men… is a statement that you only settle for the best. Imagine the look on your colleagues’ faces when you introduce them to Mr. Right. That’s your Mr. Right.”

Care and protection of loved ones.

“Joining Rich Men… will give your child the best possible upbringing, and the best chances in life. It’s tough out there. Meet a man who’s already made it. You only deserve the best.”

Social approval.

“Joining Rich Men… will finally put an end to the smug gloating of your married friends. Bag a Prince Charming, fall in love, and watch how green it turns them! These guys are IMPOSSIBLE to find elsewhere.”

Now, some of these examples are a little crude, offensive, sexist, whatever. But my point is that by keeping the Life Force 8 in mind, you can easily brainstorm and stretch an offer in to multiple different forms.

Once you’ve chosen an angle that you’re happy with, you can then worry about getting the pitch of the copy right, not offending anybody, and adjusting your voice to the style of the market. That’s the difficult part, but it’s usually the step that comes before success.

Plug in Your Eyes and Ears

I often say that the many niches of affiliate marketing are trapped in the vision of a male twenty-something scumbag. That’s the typecast demographic of the average affiliate marketer, and we tend to see the world through our own eyes – for better or worse.

Most landing pages look and read as if they’ve been written by… well, the kind of person we’d expect to have written them. For dating offers aimed at 25 year old horny men, that can be a good thing. For parental offers aimed at 40 year old single mums, it’s definitely a bad thing.

So, this is an important point:

Angles exist outside your own mind.

Yes, they do. Some of the greatest selling angles known to man (or woman) are foreign to us because we are in radically different life situations.

For example, an affiliate marketer who has been sitting on his arse for 4 years, never having to commute, never having to engage in office politics… is going to slowly disconnect from the professional lifestyle. He’ll forget what it felt like to be struggling in that day job. It’s one of the reasons, in my opinion, why so many affiliate marketers start in the bizopp niche and then move in to new verticals over time.

How many blogs have you seen from ‘Warriors’ looking to make money by posting about their journey to make money? Some of them are relatively successful, because if a Warrior knows anything, it’s how to struggle for a living online. And that struggle sells. It’s not the shit they post about that drives the comments and sales, it’s the shared struggle of we’re in this together.

It’s easy for me to sit here and judge. But the reality is that just because a Warrior Forum moneymaking angle is alien to me, that doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable. Okay, it probably is less valuable. But the insight in to people is not.

It’s the same for all the Work at Home Mom blogs. I find them to be pretty weak imitations of the better marketing blogs out there. But then I have to bring myself back down to reality and remember that it’s not the marketing advice that’s being sold. It’s the lifestyle. It’s a shared sentiment that has no relevance to me, but is powerful nonetheless.

The WAHM gimmick is an angle that exists outside the scope of my own mind, until I wake up enough to focus on it, to view the market conditions from outside my own life situation.

You can’t afford to trap the world in your own eyes. Your eyeballs need to be hanging vacantly in the middle of the street, soaking up conversation and watching the shit out of people. You need to be listening to their needs, acting on their desires, and transmuting that information in to a body of work that smells less like the aforementioned twenty-something scumbag in disguise.

Good angle creation is rarely about agreeing with something, or holding any kind of positive or negative sentiment towards it.

It’s about spotting the way people see themselves and living vicariously through them for a few sweet seconds. If you can translate their least public thoughts in to ad copy and images on a page, you stand a good chance of controlling the next move.

Recommended This Week

Make sure you grab your copy of the newly released Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s the perfect tonic for anybody wanting to crack this industry on a shoestring budget.
Also be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.

4 Processes That Make Money for Affiliate Marketers

May 23 2012

If you’ve read Premium Posts Volume 5, firstly, congratulations. You have some mighty fine taste. And secondly, you’ll be aware that I’m a big fan of focused concentration when it comes to getting campaigns launched.

At the very start of Volume 5, I made it clear that you should avoid spending a single dollar on affiliate marketing until you can answer the following questions:

What niche am I going to work in?
What traffic source am I going to use?
What demographics am I going to target?

These are three pivotal questions. Answer them correctly and you’ll avoid the rather severe strain of throwing-shit-at-a-wallitis that most of us seem to be suffering from.

If you can’t answer these questions, you are committing the same madness as a businessman without a business plan. It may work for a small handful of Delboys, but for most of us, unfocused concentration is a recipe for mediocre results.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a skill in its own right. I prefer to think of affiliate marketing as an umbrella term for a group of professionals who are great at getting their noses dirty in other people’s business. Our defining quality is that we do a better job of generating customers than the companies we work for. That’s our ‘value creation’, our gift to the world.

So, being honest with yourself, how much do you know about the companies you work for?

I bet you know their payouts and EPCs, right? But what do you know about their customers and products? What do you know about their current marketing efforts, and most importantly, what can you do to help them?

I believe success (or failure) depends on your ability to really nail the following processes:

Demographic research – Understanding the people you’re marketing to.
Offer research – Understanding the offers you’re promoting.
Technical research – Understanding the conversion flow.
Platform research – Understanding the traffic source.

Finally, throw in a helpful dollop of good old fashioned common sense and basic maths.

Note: Taking maths seriously will save you a lot of money in testing. When you can rule out campaigns by knowing intuitively that the maths don’t work, you’re doing it right.

Let’s take a closer look at the four key processes above.

Demographic research

Are you the kind of marketer who slings products to fratboy college kids on Tuesday, only to be cold calling retirement homes on Wednesday? How many different demographics might we find in your crosshairs?

The reality of understanding a demographic is that unless you are that demographic, you’ve got a lot of work to do.

If you want to sell products to a foreign demographic, one that isn’t directly compatible with your own life experience, there are two ways forward.

1. Use audience measurement tools to gain a better understanding of the demographic.
2. Spend time in the trenches getting a feel for the demographic.

Audience Measurement Tools

I’m sure you’ve heard of these, right?

They are crowbarred in to practically every conversation about affiliate best practices.

Google Ad Planner – Yes, it belongs to Google. And yes, we still hate Google. However, bitchiness aside, Ad Planner is a pretty badass demographic research tool. Use it to dig under the fingernails of an affiliate offer’s existing audience.

Quantcast – Affiliates love this site almost as much as they love talking about it. Quantcast has some excellent insights in to what a site’s audience might be interested in.

I particularly like this example for Plentyoffish.

What are POF.com users interested in? Oh, you didn't know?

So, pretty much every niche in affiliate marketing…

Compete – Kinda like Quantcast, but with the full honeybadger makeover. Pop-ups and upsells all over the shop. There’s good data nonetheless.

Spending Time in the Trenches

As much as I enjoy squirreling through small mountains of data, I believe the best kind of demographic research involves putting faces to percentages. You can’t hope to understand the mindset of your target audience if you haven’t looked beyond cold numbers.

I know that most of the offers I’m likely to promote are either riddled with scandal, or part of a niche that has previously been riddled with scandal. It’s just the affiliate marketing way.

Love it or hate it, you can learn a lot about a target market’s mindset by looking at the devastation of what has converted before.

I guarantee that by spending 30 minutes checking out sites like Scam.com, your inpiration palette will be overflowing with juicy consumer concerns and possible reflex psychological triggers that stand in the way of a conversion.

I know we’d all love to believe that our target market is a gigantic field of lambs waiting to be slaughtered, but these lambs have often been burnt before. Many times over.

Those working in the weight loss niche know full well that the number one concern is how to distinguish yourself from the hundreds of other solutions that didn’t work.

How do you manage such a feat? By spending time in the trenches!

Use forums like Scam to gauge the public sentiment towards certain websites and verticals. Draw up a list of the primary concerns and make those points your challenge to rebuke. Your landing page should be an island of reassurance.

Alternatively, for a really effective prod at your demographic, ask a friend or relative (one who ticks the right demo boxes. obviously) to take a look at your ads and landing page. Take notes on how they react to your creatives, where they click, where they stumble…

Note: Don’t try this shit if you’re working in the adult dating market. Nobody reacts naturally to porn with their nephew taking notes behind them on a clipboard.

Offer research

I dedicated 25 pages to my process of offer research in Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s something you should take very seriously if you’re on a small budget, or… you know, if on some basic level, you value your money.

Offer research involves scoping beyond the usual affiliate concerns. Yes, it’s nice to have payouts and EPCs documented in a spreadsheet, but understanding ‘what’s in it for me’ is not going to get you any closer to understanding the offer itself.

If you get too creative with your campaigns, you may find yourself selling an angle that simply doesn’t exist – or isn’t compatible with the offer itself.

All those “Would You Date a Soldier?” ads are redundant if you promote a dating site that has nothing to do with the military, especially if you make no attempt to bridge the angle on your landing page.

Before promoting any offer, bombard your affiliate manager accordingly. Find out any information you can about the merchant. What types of leads are they looking for? Is there a certain demographic that is deemed ‘quality’ traffic? Does the merchant run any offers that you’ve already promoted?

Grab the bigger picture by the balls. Just by looking at a campaign through the eyes of the merchant, you can focus your creativity on angles that are going to be viable for all parties concerned. This in turn will boost your quality score. Your value as an affiliate will increase tenfold.

I don’t like wasting my money. Who does? Unfortunately, you will almost certainly spunk dollars up the wall if you fail to research your offers properly.

Technical research

Many affiliate marketers are speculators. They base decisions and optimizations on what sounds plausible in their heads. They turn a blind eye to the technical side of what is happening once their ads turn green.

What happens when a user arrives on your landing page? Can you script the entire process from initial click to conversion?

Understanding your conversion flow is priority number one if you hope to advance beyond speculation. How can you even begin to make informed decisions about a campaign if you can’t grasp the fundamentals?

What page does the conversion pixel fire on?
Do you get paid for a single opt-in? A double opt-in? A profile photo upload? A download, installation and ‘first play’?
What steps/interactions are required for the user to qualify as a lead?
Are there are agent-specific limitations on your campaign (e.g toolbars that require a certain browser)?

If you can’t script your campaign from click to conversion, it’s time to bust out a notepad and make understanding the conversion flow a priority before you spend any more money on traffic.

Platform research

If you are new to affiliate marketing, or maybe just floundering hopelessly, here’s a simple pointer: commit to a single traffic source and stick with it. That traffic source might be Google, Facebook, Plentyoffish or an obscure platform that nobody gives a damn about. It doesn’t really matter.

Once you commit to a platform, understand that it’s your duty to learn that platform inside out.

If our jobs were limited to understanding somebody else’s product, we would all be out of work. It’s our knowledge of traffic sources and how to generate leads cost-effectively that keeps us in hot demand.

Here’s a simple question. Where do you spend most of your advertising dollars?

Got the answer to that? Now tell me why you’re better than 98% of the other advertisers using that platform.

If you can’t claim to be in the elite 2% with a straight face, then you haven’t spent enough time researching, testing and understanding the platform. Until you make that effort, your net worth to the industry is microscopic.

Mediocre knowledge of an offer + mediocre knowledge of a traffic source
= Not going to be working in 2013!

Excellent knowledge of an offer + excellent knowledge of a traffic source
= Congratulations, you stand a chance. Not an entitlement to success, but a chance.

Recommended This Week

Make sure you grab your copy of the newly released Premium Posts Volume 5. It’s perfect for anybody wanting to crack this industry on a shoestring budget.
Also be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.

What Runs Where Gets a Makeover & Upgrade

May 04 2012

What Runs Where is a competitive analysis tool that many of you will be familiar with.

It’s one of the most popular research tools in the affiliate space. If you are involved with any kind of banner buying or advertising on the Google Content Network, What Runs Where is a one stop shop for all the campaign ideas you could ever need.

I gave it a positive review last year, but I had a few complaints about the interface. I saw it as unnecessarily complicated and confusing for a media buying newbie.

There was no shortage of mesmerizing data, but the software was low on shiny, whimsical bells and whistles. Presentation isn’t everything, but it certainly makes life easier when you’re plunging through mountains of data and numbers.

Well, it turns out the What Runs Where team has taken that complaint onboard. The software has recently been upgraded with a brand spunking new interface.

It’s looking really good.

What Runs Where

What Runs Where now supports an additional three countries; Spain, Germany and France; to go with the previous collection of America, Canada, Australia and the UK.

The new targeting is particularly helpful for offers that dominate in European markets, like the Need For Speed example above.

Not only can you spy on prime sources of European traffic, but you can swipe readily translated creatives for your own testing purposes.

Of course, in the interest of not being a total dickbag, let me remind you…

Stealing is bad, kids.

Use What Runs Where to pinpoint the market trends, and then create something better.

Running the same creatives on the same traffic sources is only ever going to leave you two steps behind somebody much richer than yourself. That said, this is probably the single most effective tool for digging data from right under the fingernails of your competition.

Another welcome new addition to What Runs Where is placement suggestions. It’s the first in a series of so-called ‘actionable insights’ that will be landing in the future.

Placement suggestions sifts through what I can only imagine to be a nuclear-sized wasteland of data remnants. It looks at an advertiser’s existing placements and then suggests additional placements based on that data. I’m not sure how accurate – or how profitable – the internal algorithm is, but at first glance it looks very useful.

If I were to search through Christian Mingle’s placements, for example, I would find a huge list of sites that the merchant is currently targeting. By using placement suggestions, I can find alternatives – ranked by similarity – that aren’t currently being targeted.

This looks like a great tool for steering clear of competition. I’ve already found some niche, off-the-wall placements, that I’m in discussion to place small buys with.

What Runs Where is a data-beast. That much was known before. It’s encouraging to see that the team are taking active steps to turn their huge hoard of data in to insights and actual campaign suggestions.

I still think there’s potential to go further and give more meaning to the data. The algorithms are clearly powerful and effective, but little is said of how numerical ratings such as Similarity and AdStrength are calculated. I think it would be awesome if these terms were explained and perhaps graphed and documented to shed new meaning.

All things considered though, What Runs Where is still the honeybadger of all affiliate research tools. A must-have data slayer for anybody involved with media buying.

Recommended This Week

Head over to Finch Premiums for 300+ pages of my affiliate marketing tips.
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