General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

The Super Affiliate Secret To Success

Apr 21 2010

I know. What a trashy linkbait title, right?

Your bullshit-o-meter is probably looking for one good reason to close the page so I’ll cut to the chase. Scaling a successful campaign is the secret to success. And it’s not even a secret. But you’re here now, so allow me to continue.

One of the questions I get asked a lot, normally by non-affiliate friends, is “How much do you spend on advertising in a day?”. If you haven’t trained yourself to fire back with “As much as I can”, then there’s something fatally flawed in your mindset.

A key reason why some affiliates fail to take their earnings to the next level is simply a lack of ambition. A willingness to settle for X/day and not re-evaluate targets when they’ve reached them.

I have to admit, I was guilty of this same flaw when I first started marketing. Back when rebills were as common as the sun rising in the east, I was milking a cash cow for more money than I knew what to do with. But not everybody has the instinctive “super affiliate” trait of chasing the maximum profit. You have to think big to win big.

I was trapped in the salary mindset. I saw that if I continued to earn X/day, I’d have made X/month. And that figure, being a mind-blowing leap from my work wages at the time, was enough to kill my ambition. I didn’t look to scale my campaigns any further than I was already happy with. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

A lot of marketers end up frustrated or beating themselves up over their failures to match the success of higher earners and bigger ballers. Maybe this is you. But I can guarantee one difference in their attitude to yours. They never stopped redefining their goals. They never stopped looking to scale their campaigns.

Great ideas do not run on tap. A winning concept isn’t going to slap you in the face over morning coffee every day of the week. So when you find something that works, you have to make it work big. One successfully scaled campaign will pay for months of failed concepts. And this is how many super affiliates operate. I’m elbowing myself in the balls at every mention of the term “super affiliate” here, because it’s a fucking joke and a definition invented to keep the Warrior Forum ecosystem alive.

How many times have you had a successful campaign producing profit that you’re happy with, looked at your options for scaling, and dismissed an idea because it’s too much work for too little return? You’re happy with what you’re currently earning, right? That satisfaction can kill ambition. And it will kill your ability to grow your business.

There are several steps to scaling a campaign, and I’m going to outline my usual thought process when I’ve found an idea that’s making me money. Note that these points are catered more towards social traffic. If you’re a PPC player and you can’t think of a way to scale your campaign, you’re a retard.

1 – What other age demographics can I incorporate?

I have one dating campaign which is producing 200-300% ROI. It all started with one ad targeting American 30-40 year olds. One week on and I’ve now adjusted the copy and images to target Americans of all ages from 21-65. I could have lived quite comfortably off the original campaign. It required research in to different offers but the concept was a winner.

2 – Can I develop the same concept for the other gender?

Many of you running dating ads are guilty of this. The majority of affiliate marketers are male. We have this nasty habit of targeting males as an instinctive step towards what we know we can relate to. Are you settling for 50% of what you could be earning if you opened your mind to targeting the fairer sex?

3 – What happens if I raise my bid prices?

Are you one of the many marketers who starts bidding low and slowly raises the price until you’ve reached a level of volume you’re happy with? If you’re producing 100% ROI, you have absolutely no excuse not to raise those bids a little higher and test the results. Don’t settle for the lowest bid that hits your magic profit number. If you have the luxury of bidding higher and staying profitable, DO IT. Basement bidding will only work until somebody comes along with an equally good concept and the balls to pay more for the traffic.

4 – Can I take the campaign in to English-speaking international markets?

Do I even need to stress this one? CPA offers don’t have to be restricted to the United States. I know affiliates who earn crazy money and haven’t generated so much as a single lead in North America. If you have a winning concept, it should be common sense that scaling in to other English speaking countries is likely to raise your profits. Look for similar offers and bring your campaigns to Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa. With the right offer, you may even be able to hit Asian markets with large numbers of English speakers.

5 – Can I be bothered to get my creatives translated for non-English-speaking markets?

Now this is where you’re going to start shaking a lot of your competition. Only a small percentage of affiliates make the effort to translate their campaigns in to foreign languages. It just so happens that the small percentage usually consists of some of the smartest and most profitable marketers out there. With cheaper traffic and much less competition, I think you already know that you COULD scale internationally if you wanted to. It’s whether you can be bothered to take those extra steps.

6 – Can I take my successful campaigns to other similar traffic sources?

This is the final step to successful scaling as far as I’m concerned. You’ve maxed out the age demographics. You’ve adjusted your offers and creatives for different international markets. What next? It’s at this point where I take a moment to glance over the test data that I’ve accumulated in the time that it’s taken me to expand a campaign as far as I already have. I’ll take the best performing creatives – those with the highest ROI – and I’ll use them as my test barometer for new traffic sources.

To take a classic example, let’s say you’ve got a PPV campaign producing the kind of profit margins that keep your bed wet at night. You’ve optimized and developed a list of URL targets that produce consistent results. Where can you go from here? I’ve been in situations like this before where I’ve explored the URL target a little further and noticed that it actually has Content Network placements on the same page.

Easy money!

Even without content network placements, if you’ve found a really obscure URL that drives converting PPV traffic to an offer – can you get in touch with the webmaster? How about paying for a single banner placement on that page? When you consider that a large number of the visitors don’t actually have Vomba installed to spring your pop-ups, a banner placement is likely to catch the rest of the traffic. I’ve said it over and over again but there are many ways to skin the cat.

Once you learn how to successfully port your campaigns across various traffic sources and advertising platforms, you’ll begin to realize that it doesn’t take a million great ideas to be a super affiliate. One good idea, developed and scaled as far as it can go, will usually put you ahead of your peers.

I’d recommend you check out this extensive list of traffic sources for ideas of where to scale your campaigns. Scaling isn’t just the secret to earning more money. It’s the secret to a stable and well diversified affiliate business. If you’re working in this industry without ambition, it won’t be long until somebody jacks your good ideas and buys a new yacht with them. Make every winning concept count.

Like this post?

Finch Sells is the anti-typical affiliate marketing blog, designed and written for real affiliates. If you’re interested in reading more and grabbing the odd tip, follow me on Twitter. I don’t sling you shitty ebooks but I do talk about my balls. So you’re morally obliged to, okay?

That’s what I thought.

A Full Time Affiliate Pays More Than Just Taxes

Apr 17 2010

If, like me, you’ve spent much of the last week combing over your accounts to prepare for a new tax year, it’s likely that a thousand failed campaigns have flashed before your eyes.

One of the great advantages of taking time out to review your yearly accounts is that it often drives home your failings as well as your successes. I’ve been systematically logging in to every traffic source and every network. You’d be surprised how many bad ideas I’ve run with in the last year. The recurring thought of the week has been, “Hey Finch, what the fuck were you thinking? Asking if a Jewish guy wants a girlfriend for Christmas? You twat.” But this is a good thing, surely?

The more mistakes you make as an affiliate, the less scope you have to ruin your next great idea.

I’ve rediscovered the campaigns that filled me with so much excitement when I jacked in my day job twelve months ago. And of course, I’ve seen dozens and dozens of half arsed concepts that were always going to fail, yet I still ran with them at the time. I’d like to think that I’ve upped my game and if nothing else, put in the ground work that 95% of affiliates are scared of covering for fear of failure.

Considering this is such a young industry, I’d be surprised if there’s not a few marketers out there in the same boat as myself. Drunk on the power trip of making money, and yet somehow bigger virgins than Mary in the art of running a business.

I’ve always been very keen to stress that affiliate marketing as a career isn’t all about kicking it back and making a fortune on traffic brokering while your shit smells of roses. And I stress it because I was an absolute retard when I gave up my day job. I had just turned 21 years old, with the kind of tunnel vision that saw me calculating my daily earnings and multiplying by 365 for what I thought I’d be sitting on as I write this now.

Recently I’ve been cruising some Internet Marketing forums – yeah, I know, somehow only I can make that sound dirty – which I often do when I’m looking for topics to write about. One of the threads that caught my eye was a question posed on WickedFire. A guy asking the masses if he was ready to give up his day job and go full time affiliate marketing.

I was tempted to reply with “If you care about your career, for the sacred balls of Christ, don’t go putting it in the hands of WickedFire…” but I think I was eating a pizza at the time. Seeing how it’s almost exactly a year since I made that decision myself (to go full-time, not to eat the pizza), I thought I’d offer my own insight.

So what are the magic income figures you need to be hitting before you’re ready to exist without a guaranteed pay cheque? They don’t exist. I hate to break it to you, but anybody who tells you otherwise is throwing equations out of his arse. There’s no guarantee your wife will spend as much as his.

I’m no statistician, but I’d stake my house on the average affiliate marketer being much younger than the average businessman. Many of us are affected by sudden changes in our fortunes. Steady business development and gradual growth are two terms that you simply don’t associate with the typical affiliate. I think it’s why a large number of the successful marketers amongst us are complete and utter dicks. Overnight success can make a man feel much smarter than he really is.

If you’re trying to decide whether you can afford to quit your day job based on financial calculations alone, you’ve got a real headache on your hands. Some people will say you should be able to live comfortably for six months without earning another penny.

For me, the real challenge has never been about earning enough money to pay the bills. Of course, that should be your number one concern. Especially if you have a family to look after. But adjusting to the dozens of stresses that come hand in hand with being your own boss, that has been the story of my year.

It’s not all about the money. I’ve spoken to quite a few affiliates and one of the qualities that many of us seem to share – I say quality, it’s almost like a burden – is the difficulty in separating work from the rest of our lives. The second you hedge your bets on affiliate marketing as your future, the levels of stress take a turn that you’re simply not going to be able to appreciate until you’ve left your day job and seen the full time grind for yourself.

I’ve been sitting here dealing with my taxes, and it’s nice to know that I’ve made good money and that I can live comfortably. But then I ask myself, “what would I like to achieve in the next twelve months?” Money doesn’t enter the equation.

I feel like I’ve sacrificed far more than a day job to be where I am now. For better or worse. Full time affiliate marketing is a huge lifestyle change. When the chips are down, it’s an inescapable mindfuck. There’s been more than the occasional morning coffee where I’ve been left feeling completely powerless to revive my fortunes while shit hits every fan around me.

If you’re not ready to sacrifice the little peace in your mind, right before you go to sleep, that you’ve got a day job to full back on if it all goes wrong – then no, you’re probably not ready to make that jump. You’ve got to be a little bit stupid and a little bit irrational to see the long term prospects in an industry that changes while you sleep.

Work has consumed me in the last year. I’ve had to sacrifice friendships, relationships, large parts of my social life and the freedom that came with it. I say I had to, but I really didn’t. For a 22 year old who thought this would be a piss in the park, I guess I never really appreciated the challenges ahead. And when it hit me, slowly over the months, success turned in to a form of obsession.

If you’re working from home, yes, it’s a great freedom to have. You can work anywhere. But the novelty of being able to log on to your laptop and consider yourself setup for the day is actually a burden in itself. Whenever I’m online, I feel somehow chained to my job. People can, and do, take the chance to message me on Facebook, AIM, Twitter, Skype…the list goes on.

I know some of you reading this now will have found your own ways to separate work from play. And it’s absolutely necessary if you’re looking to avoid a slow and painful mental breakdown.

Looking back at all the mistakes I made last year, the campaigns I must’ve been drunk or high to come up with, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Every successful affiliate marketer has a bunch of shit he’s tried that just didn’t cut it. You don’t suddenly find clarity when you go full-time or gain a few years of experience.

I can live with those mistakes because they’re part of the job. The mistakes I regret are those that lead to me blurring the lines between business and my personal life. And I believe they’re the mistakes that most marketers are likely to repeat if they decide to quit the day job and move in to this industry full-time.

You can’t prepare for this job with financial projections. None of us know what revenue is on the cards from week to week. But you can avoid a lot of the mistakes I’ve made by making sure that from Day One, you’re ready to work harder than you ever worked in your 9-5.

Maybe you’ve built up a nice portfolio of moneymaking websites. Maybe you’ve saved enough money to invest and you’re ready to take the leap in to affiliate marketing full-time. Give it your best shot, but don’t let it take over your life. It’s very easy to go too far and find that the dream job working out of a hammock has the potential to be a much greater prison than even the plainest 9-5 desk cubicle.

My goals for the next tax year aren’t to earn more money, or to add a bunch of extra zeros to my next pay cheque. Sure that’d be awesome. But I’d much rather be able to sit here and look back on a year that took less out of me mentally. Time for a holiday!

On a side note, – because I’m not going to donate a whole post to it – this blog is now one year old. I seem to be whoring links from all over the affiliasphere these days so I consider it a decent success. Thanks very much for reading. You crazy motherfuckers.

Like this post?

That’s what I thought.

How To Stop Thinking Like 95% Of Other Marketers

Apr 02 2010

One of the benefits of being a “blogging personality” in the affiliate world, and hopefully a trusted one, is that a lot of people come to me with their best kept ideas and ask for my input. My inbox seems to attract some incredibly creative minds and it can be enlightening to hear some of the strategies that other marketers have devised. But for every innovative affiliate, there must be a thousand hopeless sheep.

A couple of years ago, it may have been possible to drag some bum off the street, teach him a trick, show him FTP, and hey presto – you’ve got an affiliate marketer. The barrier to entry was so low, and the competition so light, that anybody with half a mind for selling the bullshit dream could run wild with profit. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case.

You can’t just plug in, profit and piss off anymore. There has to be method to your madness, because other marketers have upped their games to combat the rising costs of saturated traffic sources.

The key to success is no longer to apply some basic newbie guide, but rather to innovate and strike the market before your peers. The biggest money in affiliate marketing goes to the guys and girls who jump on an idea before everybody else. The problem is, there can only be so many ideas to go around. Having to innovate to survive is a scary thought because as we all know, moments of inspiration do not run on tap. They can be days, weeks or in the case of my good friends over at the Warrior Forum – cosmic light years apart.

But what too many marketers don’t realize is just how far one good idea can go.

Imagine being the guy who had that moment of inspiration and decided to submit a Facebook flyer with the simple title “Want A Girlfriend?” all those months ago. If I had to take an educated guess, I’d imagine that he probably targeted his ad to the usual 25-39 crowd in the United States. But because nobody else was cashing in on the same concept, it was easy money.

These days, entering the same market with the same simple concept is a challenge where most will fail emphatically. Those who succeed will have split tested until blue in the face, rinsed through a hundred different creatives, and probably still have trouble sleeping given the delicate margins between profit and loss.

Entering a saturated market means you have to be good at what you do. Damn good. So what’s the most logical business direction you can take?

Judging by some reactions, it would probably be to bitch, moan, and sob that Facebook doesn’t work. All the while glaring enviously at those who still seem to be profiting with the same god damn ads every single day. Isn’t it just a slap in the face?

No, the solution is to stop thinking like 95% of other marketers. If your to-do list reads like a bunch of tips from an affiliate marketing blog, then you’re not thinking far enough outside the box. You’re just one of the many sheep with the same list of ideas and the same half-hearted execution that will ultimately result in failure and more bitching and whining.

When I’m brainstorming new ideas, I like to ask myself – “How can I get rid of a few more competitors? How can I avoid as many other affiliate marketers as possible and still reach my intended audience?”

If I’m taking a dating offer, maybe my targeting doesn’t read like this:

Male
25-34
United States

Because isn’t that what EVERY affiliate marketer will be thinking? You’re instantly competing with not only the established affiliates, but a thousand other newbies who’ve simply thrown up a “test ad” in the most obvious market. Thinking obvious gets you nowhere.

Let me just tell you that the single quickest shortcut you can take in the dating market is to switch that targeting from men to women. I guarantee that you’ll filter out 90% of the newbie slash retarded competition. You’ll still need to do a lot of work to find a winning concept. But it’s a step away from the obvious, a step towards your first untapped market.

Once you start taking those steps, it won’t be long before you’re marketing internationally, in foreign languages, to specific keyword subsets…carving your own niches out of the inventory. Whatever. Just know that if you’re doing your best and your best isn’t profitable, your best is not good enough. So move on and find a market which hasn’t already been raped up the arse by a thousand other affiliates.

If there’s one success story you should be listening to, it’s not that some dude is banking five figures a day on dating ads in April 2010. It’s that the guy who did it FIRST…had the easiest ride.

Do you want to spend the rest of your week scratching the margins, desperate to sustain a minimum CTR, because you know just how banner blind your target audience has become? Well, instead of split testing new titles, perving for 110x80s on Bing…why don’t you take matters in to your own hands? Find a market that every other affiliate and his dog hasn’t stuck his wang in yet.

Brainstorm your ideas, look at them carefully, and do the opposite. If you can stop thinking like 95% of other affiliate marketers, you’ll find yourself reaching markets that are still willing to listen to your bullshit.

Got a question for an affiliate marketer?

Seeing how I don’t like using AIM and emails get all too easily lost in the shuffle, I’ve opened a Formspring account where you can ask questions related to affiliate marketing, or whatever else tickles your fancy. No smart arses, please. I don’t like people trying to be wittier than me.

Click here to ask Finch a question