General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

1 Deadly Trick That Converts (Even On Affiliates)

Jun 22 2011

When I chose my apartment in Bangkok, I unwittingly engaged in a sales process that has been tried and tested through the annals of time to produce enormous results.

Estate agents are masters of the art and will spare no blushes in the execution, even if you’re smart enough to know exactly what’s going on around you.

Here’s the situation. It’s 9am in the morning and the estate agent has arrived at your hotel. She tells you she has a few properties to view, and you eagerly jump in the back of her car to get started.

The first property is an absolute dump. Situated in the middle of no man’s land, no aircon, no transport connections and for the estate agent, no hope of a conversion. Of course, I play along nicely and express that it’d make a great home…for the right Thai family. Did she really think she could get me to a sign a contract for the exact property I wasn’t looking for? No, she didn’t, but she knew it would butter me up for what was to follow.

I vividly remember cruising from property to property, the specifications marginally improving to match my needs with each visit. By the end of the day, my girlfriend and I were exhausted and ready to retreat to our hotel room to mull over the options.

“But wait! There’s one more place I’d like you to see… I think it might suit what you’re looking for.”

Lo and behold, she hits us with the single best matching property of the day so far, and we’re both convinced that it’s right for our needs. The perfect size, all the aircon we could guzzle, fantastic sweeping views of Bangkok and a snooker table. A motherfucking snooker table. How did she know I’d fall in love at first sight with my own snooker table?

Maybe it had something to do with the email I’d sent a week ago casually stating what I’d really love in a dream apartment.

This leaves you to ask the question: Was she intentionally wasting my time with a bunch of crappy or “good, but just not quite there” properties? Or was it a fantastically executed tour-de-force of how to setup and nail a conversion?

No prizes for the right answer. Estate agents deal with people like me every day, and get many more opportunities to study the human behaviour than I do to prepare for the exploitation of it. I would tip my hat to her if I had one. It’s simply one of the most effective sales techniques in the book.

Use the power of contrast to create indecision and uncertainty based on the information you already have, before unleashing the ultimate solution that goes above and beyond all that came before. As long as your subject is suitably torn up to that point, there really is little he can do to fight the tactic. Besides, he’s getting what he wanted. Why put up a fight?

Okay, so how can we apply this art of contrasting to boost our affiliate campaigns?

The one commodity an estate agent has that an affiliate marketer rarely gets to exploit is time. While I was being driven around a city I had lived in for just 3 days in the back of somebody else’s car, an affiliate marketer has little “holding rights” over the subject. We have so many options to not listen to a sales pitch (exit the page, browse another tab, get distracted by our balls) that retaining attention becomes the most important stage of the process.

If we go back in time 18 months, you will recall a sweeping craze that involved dual-selling affiliate offers on the same page. Hey, if the reader is happy to buy an acai supplement for $39.95/month, why not hit them with an additional colon cleanse kit for $19.95/month? The upsell seems artificially cheaper after the customer has already invested in a more expensive item. Another valuable asset of contrasting.

Take one look at the GoDaddy checkout process to see the bastard child of Upsell in all his gory detail. Fuck you, GoDaddy. I only wanted a domain and now I’m sitting on 4 dedicated servers, an SSL certificate and enough Adwords vouchers to run my own charity. What part of No Thanks did you not understand?!

Even if we don’t intend to sell two items, it’s possible to sacrifice one as a way of accentuating the most attractive qualities in the item we do want to sell.

How many Plentyoffish members have heard of Match.com? My guess would be pretty much all of them. You can very easily throw up a landing page on POF that attempts to “sell” some basic and uninspiring benefits of joining Match. It’s not going to create much of a stir, but it does one thing very well. It butters up the reader for a more attractive proposition.

So when you hit them further down the page with a largely unknown, new and exciting dating offer, that offers a niche angle relevant to their needs (targeting a Divorced demographic with a Divorce niche offer, for example), you leverage the power of contrast to create a much greater incentive in the reader’s eyes. It’s very subtle, but super effective when executed well.

Dating is just one vertical of many that can be exploited in this way. My favourite angle is to develop the classic long sales pitch – notorious for shilling Clickbank products – only to give away something 100% free at the end. Gaming registrations, downloads, even zip submits if you can get the traffic cheaply enough.

Conversion rates soar in to the sky, particularly if you nail a demographic that is already keyed in to how these long sales letters are typically used.

One of the most effective landing pages I ever built was a flog that promoted $3 job search leads. It was ridiculously profitable because it leveraged the expected extravagance of a flog’s claims, and then gave away something for free when the user wasn’t expecting it. I drew my own conclusions that most of the success was actually down to the contrast from what other affiliates were doing.

Whatever the reason, a little contrast can go a long way. Take a lesson from the estate agents of the world!

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The Personality Traits Of A Successful Affiliate

Apr 25 2011

It doesn’t take much in the way of marketing knowledge to become a successful affiliate. This is one of the reasons the affiliate world has generally been seen as the outcast simple cousin of real world marketing. Go to a trade show that isn’t centered on affiliates and you’ll meet a lot of corporate suits who visibly wince at our presence.

Certainly at London Adtech, I felt like a caged zoo animal. Met by stares and lots of “oh, how’s that working out for ya?” as if I’d stumbled in to the hall by mistake and would swiftly return to a late bloomer college that might actually take me somewhere in life.

This outsider reputation doesn’t surprise me. The affiliate industry was never likely to smell of roses. And most of us are carrying dirt from sometime or another.

We are a different breed to the vision of marketing expertise they preach in the textbooks. I often receive emails from fledgling affiliates who are trying to break in to the business, based on their inclination that they’re well suited from whatever job they were doing before. But is there such a thing as a good career path in to affiliate marketing?

Most of us are orphans from the academic ranks. College dropouts, guys that weren’t suited to the 9-5 and just about everything in-between. I don’t think there’s a qualification in the world that makes you suitable for affiliate marketing. 95% of the challenges you face will be overcome by the attitude you bring to them.

So what are the personality traits of a successful affiliate marketer? This is just as relevant to those of you getting started, as it is to those of us looking to improve. In an industry with zero barrier to entry, the best tool you have is your attitude.

The single most important personality trait I can pinpoint is the compulsive need to complete what you start. I don’t know how many dollars have been wasted by affiliates who abandoned what they started, but I know that it’s more than I’ll ever earn in my lifetime.

Money does not get made by doing a half-arsed job of your best laid plans. If your notebook is littered with more scribbles than your FTP log, you’re probably planning too much and achieving too little. But this is a very hard personality trait to shake. It’s born out of procrastination and indecision. Two killers to any healthy business.

The only advice I can give for completing what you start is to set tangible goals and invite your loved ones to take a swing at your balls if you fail to meet them. You can start by restricting your daily tasks to the bare minimum. It’s not worth setting yourself a huge to-do list if you never follow through and complete it. I find that setting just two or three key tasks per day keeps me on track.

Hand in hand with the ability to finish what you begin, is the virtue of perseverance and willingness to fail.

Unprofitable campaigns, rejected creatives and flat-lining conversion rates do not make you a bad affiliate. They just add chapters of knowledge to your eventual scrapbook of success. I can’t stress highly enough how the difference between making money and losing money is often so tiny that you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering why any self respecting guru would want to give away such a nugget. The answer, of course, is they never do.

Successful affiliates don’t settle for failing. They use each misplaced idea as a stepping stone to the one campaign that pays for all those that failed before.

If you can’t handle losing money, or being forced to learn from your mistakes – no marketing degree is going to save you. And that’s why so many academics fail and exit the affiliate world with tails between legs. They can’t handle their degrees counting for nothing. Success goes to the affiliate who embraces each failed campaign and learns something new.

Finally, I think it’s very important to have a strategic mind when it comes to testing new variables. You should adopt a structured approach to how you attack any campaign, instead of flinging different ideas at the wall. If you’re going to promote an offer, test it properly. Every successful campaign needs a baseline around which it is built. This might be the age demographic you’re targeting, the profession of your target market, or even the landing page itself.

You can’t effectively pinpoint the unprofitable parts of a campaign if you’re forever pissing around with new variables.

Perfect example. What do you stand to gain in running a dating offer from 6pm to 11pm, deciding you’re not happy with the conversion rate, and then switching to a different offer from 11pm to 4am? How will you ever know if the dayparting or the offer itself lead to the variation in your ROI? This is classic affiliate indecision. Jumping the gun before you’ve given your campaigns a chance to sink or swim in a way that you can at least learn something.

If I had to throw in one more personality trait of a successful affiliate, you can never go wrong with some controlled desperation. A lot of affiliates succeed because the final destination far outweighs the alternative of slaving away in a shelf-stacking day job for the rest of their lives. Not to belittle the shelf-stackers among us, because I’ve been there myself.

But if you see the industry as a fast track to making money, you’re as handicapped as the guy who sees a golf club as his ticket to challenging Tiger Woods. Not because you’re lacking the skill – we don’t need much – but because your attitude is all wrong. Desire is the driving force behind any successful affiliate, entrepreneur or human being for that matter. Without it, you’ve already failed.

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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.
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Pros And Cons Of Running Offers Directly

Mar 17 2011

Your ability to assess risks could make or break your future in this industry.

We all love to play down the risk attached to what we do. We naively expect to be paid for our leads and sales, whatever the circumstances, no matter what goes wrong further up the food chain.

Most affiliates only give a damn about risk assessment when it progresses to the stage of damage limitation. And that’s when you’ll start reading blog posts and threads about it.

Nobody wants to read about the steps you can take to keep your Facebook Ads account in tact. But everybody wants to read posts like “My Facebook Account Just Got Banned” or “This little bell-end won’t pay me“. Some affiliates are quite happy to pump thousands of leads in to small-time networks, without waiting for the first payment to turn black. It’s not cool to consider pausing a profitable campaign, right?

Well let me tell you, it’s even less cool when you invest everything you have only to get burnt by a bunch of scumbags who’ll find any reason not to pay you. Thankfully this hasn’t happened to me yet. But if you’re not careful, it could easily happen to you.

For those who worry about not getting paid, joining an affiliate network is often touted as the smart thing to do. Affiliate networks earn their slice of your revenue by taking on that extra risk. There’s the fear that by running an offer directly through the merchant, you open yourself up to the increased likelihood of getting stiffed.

As somebody who runs traffic both directly and via networks, I thought I’d throw in my two cents for the hell of it.

Running an offer directly is always going to be more lucrative at face value. The margin is all yours, and you should find yourself losing more leads in the shuffle. Less brokering means less tracking and in a picturesque world with little unicorns running free…less scrubbing. That’s more money to line your wallet with.

But only at face value.

You’re going to find it challenging to convince many of the big merchants out there to start paying you weekly off the bat. As most tuned-in affiliates know, cashflow is king. It’s better to be running solidly for 30 days a month than to find something that works then have to put the breaks on because you rinsed your wife’s entire savings one fine afternoon.

It can actually be more lucrative to run consistent traffic at a lower ROI, if you know that you’re getting paid every 7 days.

And even if a merchant DOES promise you weekly payments, from my experience, this is only as good as being told you have an invitation to send more invoices to their accounting department. Whether they get paid on time or not is a different ball game altogether.

Make sure you don’t make my schoolboy error of issuing an invoice with the standard payment terms of 28 days. Weeklies, my arse! No self respecting accountant is going to file your payment any sooner than they have to.

The most important advice I can give to anybody who plans to run traffic directly is to stay as transparent as you can possibly be. Once you have an account manager, you need to build a relationship with them and make sure your campaigns are squeaky clean from top to toe.

This isn’t purely for the sake of being a good little boy, but also because you can actually learn a lot about the shit you’re promoting. I run directly with a few dating companies and speaking to their internal people is like reading an entire private catalogue of OKCupid posts.

As helpful as affiliate managers can be, they have to spread their knowledge over hundreds of different offers. Much of the time, they’re basing their “what’s hot” recommendations on EPCs and revenue. By speaking directly to merchants, you can cut the crap and find out what’s actually in demand.

So…

Are the payouts significantly higher by running directly? You better believe they are. I know of one dating offer that fetches $5/lead through CPA networks. But by running it directly, I’ve seen payouts as high as $11/lead with an additional bonus for every registration that converts to a sale. When you’re delivering quality traffic, that adds up to the kind of EPCs that you simply don’t get on affiliate networks.

Ultimately, it’s only worth going direct if you have the two attributes that matter most; cashflow and quality traffic. The kind of traffic that backs out for the merchant and has them begging for more. It’s definitely worth exploring your options if you have sales under your belt.

Whether you’re working directly with a company or through an affiliate network, apply some common sense in your efforts to scale. No merchant likes being sent thousands of leads without first having the chance to weigh up how the traffic is converting.

Staying transparent and regularly asking for performance updates is probably the best way to stay on top of your campaigns and avoid getting burnt.

It all comes down to assessing your risks. There’s nothing to fear about running an offer directly, and there’s a lot more money to be made. But do you prefer the convenience of letting a network handle the drama? Or do you have the balls to place some faith in your work? There’s not really a wrong answer.

Recommended This Week:

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. Also feel free to check out my brand new site over at FinchBlogs.com.