General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

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.

Golden Rules For A Landing Page That Converts

Feb 05 2011

One of the most common questions I see on affiliate marketing forums is the classic “Should I link directly to an offer or build a landing page?”

I can count on one hand the number of campaigns I’ve made money from without the help of a landing page. Direct linking may work for some. But it’s never outperformed any of my campaigns where I’ve pre-sold the offer ahead. Now that doesn’t mean you should take my words for gospel. The equation is altered by your choice of niche, traffic source, keyword targets, and probably what you ate for breakfast this morning.

But that’s besides the point of this post. I think if you’re going to use a landing page, the least you can do is make it a good one. I’ve seen some jawdroppingly bad landing pages over the years. So bad they could only have been designed by the Escobar Status dude (baby please come back).

If you haven’t checked it out already, StackThatMoney had a very useful post this week offering seven conversion boosting scripts. Some of these are highly relevant to the landing pages you should be creating. But while they will all make a difference, they don’t quite add the missing ingredients which most marketers tend to overlook – the language you use to persuade.

Our actual landing page copy is one of the most important links in the affiliate chain, and it’s often the last to be split-tested. We pay so much attention to our faltering CTRs and our faintly different banners that we often forget to split test this decisive persuasion tool. That’s probably because it’s a lot easier to find a new dating stock image than it is to learn how to write better copy.

The best landing pages act on the message of the ad that preceded them and channel the focus towards your end goal. Presumably to get the user to sign up to some crappy service he’d be embarrassed to tell his friends about. If you’re wondering why your landing page isn’t making a difference on your bottom line, it’s usually because the sales funnel is leaking relevance.

If your ad doesn’t gel with the benefits you’re listing in your landing page, the user is going to click away.

If the offer doesn’t deliver the benefits you’ve described in your landing page, the EPC is going to be low.

I look at dating ads on Plentyoffish and often see headlines like “Our Women Need More Tall Smokers, Join Now!” And I think to myself, okay, maybe I missed the release of Mate 1’s latest “Free Weekend Pass For Nicotineheads” landing page. But I haven’t, so is this really a sophisticated marketing ploy? No, it’s just a cheap trick to increase CTR based on user attributes. It may enjoy short lived success while the CTR is strong, but inevitably it falls apart because the correlation is wafer thin and built on cones of sand.

If you’re going to exploit user attributes for your ads, you have to choose attributes that actually have some relevance. Otherwise you’ll lose way too many eyeballs in the jump from ad to landing page. Getting a user to click from your landing page through to the merchant is actually very easy. But only if you’ve pre-qualified them with ads that tie in to the benefits you’re about to sell.

At the heart of your campaign, it doesn’t matter how great your landing page is as a standalone advertisement. It has to tie in with your previous ads in order to be effective, or the user will simply leave disenchanted.

I’ve regularly touted the benefits of using “YES language” on a landing page. This is a copywriting technique where you ask as many rhetorical questions as you can, always the with the intention of getting a resounding “YES!” from your reader. A headline like “Do You Want To Get Ripped In Time For Summer?” is more of an attention grabber than simply stating “New Formula Promises Abs Within Months”. There’s another language tool at work there, which I will come to later. It involves getting the reader to picture himself in various states. If you can control the states, you can control his emotion. And if you can steer his emotion in to a buying state of mind, congratulations, you’re a better writer than most affiliate marketers out there.

Use concise language and always write for the subordinate classes. Just because you have a degree in English literature, that’s no license to alienate 70% of your target market by typing like a pompous prick with his head up his arse. Short snappy sentences are the way to go. Something I like to remind myself in any of my copywriting is that ambiguity is never a good trait when you’re trying to sell something. It’s the mark of a copywriter who isn’t truly invested in a product or it’s benefits.

There’s a beaten dead horse lurking around affiliate marketing blogs that says you should always sell the benefits, not the features, of whatever you’re promoting.

Yes, you should. But understand that there’s a difference between selling the benefits and simply listing the benefits hoping one of them fills a “tick if applicable” box in the consumer’s head. I spy on many affiliate landing pages and it really shines through how bland and uninspiring the writing can be.

“Sell the benefits, not the features,” simply isn’t good enough. You need to sell those benefits in such a way that the reader has no choice but to imagine them sweeping through his life and making a change for the better. Reeling off the A-Z of “Things My Product Can Do For You” is technically correct in the marketing sense. But it’s just not effective, in my opinion, unless at some point those benefits flick a switch from “this could be me”, to “this WILL be me if I act now” in the reader’s head.

How do you do that?

You either have the natural talent, or you hire somebody else who does. It goes back to what I was saying in my last post about outsourcing. If you want the best, you better be the best…or be prepared to pay for the best.

Recommended This Week:

Looking for some excellent landing page case studies? 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
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Monetizing The Majority Not The Minority

Nov 29 2010

It’s very easy to build landing pages that are tailor-made for a specific offer. When an affiliate gets his paws on a paid traffic source, he can specify the countries he wants to be targeting to get maximum bang for his buck. That’s pretty damn essential. You can’t afford to send optimized leads to an American dating offer if 75% of your user base is clicking from the suburbs of Delhi.

It sounds like common sense, and it is. But then, not every affiliate decides to leverage the power of paid traffic.

If you develop long term websites where the main source of traffic comes from the organic search engine listings, it can be very hard to find suitable CPA offers that monetize the majority rather than the minority. To put it simply, targeting is a bitch.

There’s nothing I find more frustrating than having sudden tidal wave of traffic, only to find that the hits are from Ireland and my scattered CPA offers only accept UK leads. In my opinion, if you’re going to bust your balls on the arduous process of driving natural traffic to a site, you better make sure you’ve got all angles covered. Otherwise it’s the online equivalent of letting a catch slip through your fingertips, and I’m hoping a few Aussie readers know exactly how that feels!

I’ve always believed that CPA and long term passive earning websites are about as compatible as Jordan and Peter Andre. If you’re going to build a long term asset that stands the test of time and doesn’t require tinkering every Monday morning, you probably shouldn’t decorate it from head to toe in CPA offers. Depending on your niche, CPA offers are notorious for lasting the season but not the year. If you work in the dating vertical, you can expect to be hopping from offer to offer like a bandit on burning coal.

By choosing a marketplace ghetto like Clickbank for hoarding your affiliate links, you can generally assume that your website will stand the test of time. The good thing about Clickbank is that sales are accepted worldwide and the only targeting filter is the user’s willingness to pay. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not for a second advocating that smart marketers should flock to a platform notorious for it’s low quality products and sales letters straight out of 2002.

But to monetize the majority, you need to capture as many of the likely clicks on your website as possible. I’m forever hearing – and often preaching – the advice that AdSense is for suckers and well placed CPA advertisements are the way to monetize a website that thrives on natural traffic. AdSense has a time and a place. But if you’re going to use CPA without control over your target demographics, you need to get smart about it.

1. Change the focus from banner advertisements to a mailing list.

I have a website that draws a lot of dating related traffic from the organic Google listings. Banner advertisements are generally a waste of time. You need to match up so many qualifiers (country, age, gender) that you will lose the lead more often than not. The best way to negotiate this problem is to build a mailing list and simply collect the emails for yourself, along with the user’s native country and gender.

The site in question draws about 15% of it’s users from India. For the longest time, I wasted banner inventory telling these users to join American based dating offers. I was too lazy to care about the less valuable part of the market. It wasn’t until I started collecting their emails, and biding my time for an Indian dating offer, that I was finally able to monetize a 15% share of my asset that would otherwise have gone to waste.

2. If you’re going to use banner advertisements, serve them through OIOpublisher.

I’ve always been very hands-on with my banner creatives, even on sites that I own. I think somebody is much more likely to click an advertisement if I pre-qualify the user for the offer. OIOpublisher is one of my favourite WordPress plugins, and it’s actually in use on this site. Not only does it let me sell banner space on my affiliate websites, but it offers a very useful geotargeting function that enables me to serve different banners to different countries in the same space.

It’s easy to get a headache if you have a website in the dating niche boasting a traffic breakdown like this:

USA – 35%
Canada – 15%
UK – 15%
India – 15%
France – 8%
Germany – 5%
Other Countries – 7%

If you have no way of distinguishing a German from a Canadian user, you’re going to have an incredibly hard time monetizing the majority of your traffic. You can only ever monetize 35% of your traffic, unless you have dating offers that accept multiple countries.

With OIOpublisher, you can force German ads to display to German users. Maybe if you’re working in the weight loss niche, you would set a banner for your Indian users along the lines of “Indian Ebook Reveals Secret Behind Multi-Million American Muscle Ripping Formula“. The idea being that if you can’t target these users with your $35 rebill, you might as well hit them with a cheap Clickbank ebook that monetizes the minority but still significant 15% of your traffic.

I don’t endorse too many products for affiliates, but OIOpublisher has made my life a LOT easier when it comes to squeezing the most juice out of a static website. It also opens up a whole new realm of residual income opportunities. Find the right niche, attract enough traffic, and you can easily lure other advertisers in to paying $300/month for banner spots that recur automatically using OIOpublisher’s payments module.

I love working with brand advertisers who aren’t committed to instant ROI. It means I can focus my energies on developing great content. If you have six advertisers happily paying $300/month to occupy banner placements on your site, you can move away from being an affiliate altogether and focus on providing real world value. Rinse, repeat, scale and conquer.

Creating a solid infrastructure for a website that isn’t powered by paid traffic can be one hell of a challenge. But if you’re only monetizing a small minority of your users, you could be overlooking one of the easiest ways to expand your business and income overnight.

Recommended This Week:

If you have websites that drive traffic from all around the world, or simply want to sell banner space easily, grab a copy of OIOpublisher. Sexy beast that I am, I’ve created a coupon code that will get you $10 off. The coupon is WINDFALL-FINCH. Whatever that means.
If you’re looking to build your first mailing list, check out Aweber. Affiliates practically swear by it, and last time I checked, you could try it for a dollar.