General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

Stop Thinking Short Term, You Stupid Fuck

Dec 23 2009

I apologize for the inevitable tantrum that’s about to unravel. If you’d spent the last several days battling with Linux viruses and Chinese fucktard organizations, you’d be equally pissed off and ready to go all Scrooge on the world.

This is something that has been grating at me for a while now. It’s quite common that I’ll be emailed a simple question like, “Have you tried pushing acai on Facebook?”

Yes, I have. And yes, I stopped.

Not so long ago, I was talking to an affiliate manager of a network that will go unnamed. I was told that Offer X in the acai niche would sell really well if I cloaked it and ran it through Facebook. I’m not stupid enough to do something like this personally. I have actual campaigns that are profitable on Facebook which I would rather not lose. More to the point, I believe in the theory that you’d be an absolute retard to burn all your bridges to chase a few extra dollars of profit.

What really concerned me was the idea that affiliate managers are actually pushing this advice on their publishers. Are you out of your fucking minds?

It’s easy for a network to sit there and tell a publisher to go compromising a personal account by selling a prohibited product through Traffic Source X. But it shows a massive lack of respect to the naive affiliate who’s trying to earn an honest wage. What happens when the affiliate gets shut down? Sure, there’s some personal responsibility attached. But I’d be tempted, knowing what I know, to tell any affiliate manager who pushes advice like that on me to go fuck himself. Which is, ironically enough, exactly what I did.

What I’m trying to say here, is that if you’re a hard working affiliate, you need to look out for yourself and take what a network throws at you with a pinch of salt.

I’m forever opening my inbox to see messages that read like this:

“Well, why don’t you try Offer X. It’s really taking off and seeing big volume right now.”

Network wide volume means jack shit to me. Profitability is all I care about. I couldn’t honestly care less if an offer is blowing up and seeing thousands of leads per day. I would much rather push through one lead that gives me a return on investment that I’m happy with. This is where networks will try to fuck you over and fill your inbox with false promise.

But, hey, you can’t hate on the networks for doing their jobs. The more experienced you get at this game, you better you become at being your own judge of an offer’s viability.

What really gets on my tits is the outrageous attitude from certain affiliate managers who believe that because they’ve been placing your pixels for five minutes, they somehow know what’s good for the long term success of your business. Telling an affiliate to go and try acai on Facebook is no better than Google turning around and saying “Thanks for the money, now go rot in a hole somewhere.”

Or “We appreciate your leads…while they lasted.”

“Teehee, motherfucker. This is the sound of us banking on your banned and blacklisted ass. Refer us to friends though, right?”

Before you ask, no I haven’t been banned from Facebook. But I’ve heard a lot of stories from people who’ve suffered that fate. Much of the blame must rest on the publisher. I’m not for a moment suggesting that a network is responsible for an affiliate going out and breaking the terms and conditions of a traffic source. This is more of a rant against stupidity.

Let’s say you decide to push acai on Facebook.

It’s profitable and there’s big money to be made there. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read that much. With some simple targeting, a cloaking redirect and a slice of luck – you can probably ride the fat loss waves well in to 2010 making some good bank. But there is your problem.

You might not make it in to 2011 with Facebook account in tact.

We’ve seen the backlash from Google and we’re seeing a similar backlash from Facebook. It’s possible to get a new account after being banned, but it’s about as pleasurable a process to follow as a gentle fist up the jacksy.

You can enjoy a few great months of addictive profit and life changing ROIs, but when the screws come unhinged, you’re left without a Plan B. And whatever Plan B you might have had is going to be severely compromised by the fact that Traffic Source X now has you blacklisted and wants nothing to do with your business.

Is that the way forward for an affiliate marketer?

Some of you are crazy sons of bitches who will simply ditch the wife, change your birth name, move to Alaska and open up a new advertising account. Whatever puts the notes in your pocket, right? That’s one way to do it, I guess. But you’re going to be forever searching for loopholes while I would rather be kicking back on a sunbed and enjoying a legitimate long term business growth.

Here’s the greatest catch of affiliate marketing. You don’t have to be clever to make money. Any affiliate with balls the size of Texas can bend the truth far enough that it lines his pockets with the dollars he craves. But at some point – today, tomorrow, maybe next year – you’re going to have to deal with the hand you’ve been dealt.

I’ve spoken to some truly shady black hat Internet marketers in my time. Not just affiliates, but “entrepreneurs” who will completely reinvent the rulebook of what’s acceptable if it’s financially suitable to them. You know what nearly all of these guys have in common? They all WISH they could have the same success on the straight and narrow.

Many of them are incredibly smart and more than capable of carving a long term business. But they get blinded by the short term riches and choose paths that I’m sure, in many cases, will eventually come back to haunt them.

You can base your business decisions on what will line your pockets today (slinging acai on Facebook, pummeling bizopp on Google)…or you can keep a level head and try not to burn all of your bridges in a few short months.

When you come back down to earth and realize that affiliate marketing is a full time career and a full time responsibility, it’s probably going to dawn on you.

You’ve got work to do.

The Challenges Of Full Time Affiliate Marketing

Dec 09 2009

Here comes another entry to my Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle series. Or as PPC.bz’s barman so elegantly put it:

“Dear Diary,

BAaaaaAAAaaaaaAaaaaahhhh!”

I would save myself from the reputation as the emo voice of affiliate marketing, but I think this is something that doesn’t really get spoken about enough. The number of part time affiliates far outweighs the number of us monkey riding this industry for a day job. I get the chance to speak to a lot of relatively new affiliates. Many have aspirations to jack in their 9-5’s and they want to know the best way to get there fast.

I find myself juggling between the advice of “fight for your dreams” and “you fucking retard, get back on the checkout desk, you’re gonna starve”.

I’ve said over and over again that a career in affiliate marketing is just that – a career. It’s not some casual job description you pin on your badge while sunbathing in the Caribbean. Your lifestyle will change completely in those first few months that you decide to go it alone.

Many affiliates forget that for whatever success they’ve been having with one hot shot campaign, it doesn’t come close to the guarantee of a monthly pay cheque. No matter how insignificant your work wages may seem in comparison, they are guaranteed.

When I first started making significant money with CPA marketing, you would find me sitting in coffee shops with a scrapbook. I’d sit there calculating how much cash I’d have earned by Month X and Month Y if I continued earning X ammount per day. This is the single most dangerous thing you can do as a part-time affiliate – especially if those numbers are pinned on a small handful of volatile campaigns.

You only have to look at the recent Google account bannings to see how a money spinning regime can collapse overnight. I’ve rattled on about diversifying for months now. If you’re serious about doing affiliate marketing full-time, you should be comfortable moving in to any niche and working with any traffic source.

People ask me how much money I think they should be making before they give up their day jobs. Firstly, how the fuck should I know? And secondly, basing your career decisions on current earnings is like deciding to climb K2 because you fancy a workout. You’re going to run in to the unexpected, you absolute psychopath.

I know this because I’ve made some pretty drastic decisons with my own career. I quit my day job having branched out in to only two traffic sources, and a handful of offers. By all accounts, I should be slapping myself with naive disgust right about now. I’m not because I had the initiative to learn quickly when I saw the danger signs.

If you’re going to move in to this industry full-time, here are the immediate challenges you face.

Managing your time – What is the point in going full-time if you’re simply going to wake up at 11am and watch your stats all day? You should have just stayed in the day job and enjoyed your temporary riches with the security of a guaranteed pay cheque to underline it. Hell, if you’re doing that, you CAN afford to splash out on the luxuries in life.

This is a challenge for affiliates both experienced and new. Assuming you saw your success as a part-time affiliate, you’ve probably become accustomed to the idea of seeing a return on a few hours of work. It’s not so easy to motivate yourself when you know that riches are such a beautiful sight to watch when they’re flowing like gold from a tap. Unfortunately, for all of the three hours it took you to setup that initial jackpot campaign – you could spend the rest of your lifetime trying to find the next one.

If you expect to be able to turn on profit like a tap, you’re digging your own grave.

Instead of being entranced by the money I saw beginning to flow when I first hit success, I chose to remember the many hours and desperate times where shit hadn’t gone to plan. As hard as it may be, you have to turn your back on the allure of whatever riches you’re earning and get back to work. Otherwise when the tap runs out, you’re back to square one.

Social sacrifice – Do you really understand the true involvement of running your own business? If you’re managing your time correctly, you are going to be busy. If you don’t feel that you’re busy, you’re probably not doing enough to stay ahead of the pack.

Nothing prepared me for the personal burden of becoming entirely responsible for my own finances. I used to be socializing at every opportunity. Down the pub on Monday, drunk in a club on Tuesday and travelling out of town by Friday.

These days, a night out rarely passes me by where business is not somewhere close to the forefront of my thoughts. Some would see that as a prison. I’m passionate about what I do though and working has always been an enjoyable experience.

Whatever social gain you think you’re going to find by quitting your day job, rest assured that it will be neutralized by the sheer weight of responsibility that comes with slinging shit full-time.

Staying positive through hardships – I’ll be the first to admit that when I worked for other companies, I was never shy of a bitch or moan. If something went wrong that I was personally accountable for, I could play pin the blame and deflect attention from my own failures.

The biggest challenge for me over this last year has been embracing a new attitude. You simply have to be prepared to smile at the shit that gets thrown in your face. It happens every day. Every morning I open my email and instead of forwarding various tasks to my colleagues like I used to, I add them to my own to-do list. There are constant tests of your character. It may be an email that your Adwords account has been suspended, that an offer has been pulled, that your server was down for a few hours last night.

You can’t nonchallently forward these issues on to your boss. You ARE your boss. And your pay cheque will be the one taking the hit if you don’t stay on top of them.

There have been nights in recent memory where I’ve been sat at my desk, eyes aching, wondering just how I can turn a campaign around or get back on track. A part time affiliate would probably think “eh, was good while it lasted”, and that’s exactly where you have to stay strong. The industry is so volatile that if you stick to what you know you do well, it won’t be long before you see a return on it. Just be prepared to lose money and take a battering to your confidence in the process. It can be a lonely struggle.

I’ve already written several posts about how you should be investing for the future. It’s the single most important thing you can be doing to alleviate some of the stress. Short term fast burning affiliate campaigns are a recipe for long term unrest if you’re not moving methodically towards a more sustainable business.

Dating CPA vs. Dating CPS

Dec 02 2009

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that dating offers are hot shit in affiliate marketing.

The dating niche is one of the few markets that we can all trust to still be here in a few years time. There will forever be a demand for matchmaking websites. Some dude will always be looking to improve his sorry excuse of a love life from the comfort of his stained bed sheets. And even if Facebook takes over the world, we’ll still have Zoosk. So you better get used to “Want A Girlfriend? It’s FREE!”.

Dating has become such an integral cornerstone of CPA marketing that we sometimes forget to test new business models. If you’re one of the guys who combs a network for the first $5 free profile submission going, you’re probably missing out on some ripe marketing opportunities.

Most affiliates assume that the CPA model will always pay better than a CPS offer. Is that the case? Well, have you tried it for yourself? Then you probably should. For all the expert advice of split testing ad copies, it seems pretty ridiculous that an affiliate could forget to split test lead/sale.

It was only recently that I took a few hours out of my day to do a little market research. I stumbled across a UK based dating network called EasyDate.

Two offers that I regularly see flouted on Facebook – Be Naughty and Date The UK – are both listed on EasyDate. The only difference is that the street payout for both is a whooping Â£4.50. For the trans-atlantic amongst us, that’s approximately $7.50/lead.

I’ve scoured most networks for these offers and the street payout is normally between $5-$5.50. Even with a bump you’re not going to get close to $7.50/lead. So what’s the catch?

The quality of your traffic, my friend. EasyDate is a performance based network, which is enough to send the alarm bells ringing for the majority of dating affiliates – myself included.

pay-per-lead

What the flashy screencap above demonstrates is the margin that the advertiser is looking to deal with in terms of leads to sales.

To receive the maximum lead payout of Â£4.50, you need to be averaging 15% for your lead-sale conversion rate. Even if you have no burning desire to test this, it makes for pretty interesting reading. On most CPA affiliate networks, we never get to see the invisible “quality score” that tells an advertiser whether our traffic is converting. But if you’ve ever had an email stating that you need to improve the quality of your traffic, this is why. Your leads aren’t backing out in the sales department.

Most affiliates will look at the chart above and think, “Damn, I’ll carry on sending my junk traffic ’til I’m kicked off the offer, cheers for coming”. That’s fair enough. It gets a bit more interesting when you look at the CPS program though.

pay-per-sale

Â£25 for a sale? That’s $45 for a dating subscription, no scratchy payout by anybody’s standards.

The downside to promoting a sale based offer is the lack of visible progress unless you start converting. There’s little way of knowing if your traffic is producing a lead or simply closing the window to head elsewhere. You could be making $40 for leads that never subscribed to the full program – instead of $0 for zero sales. But you’ll never know if you’re only being paid by the sale.

This got me thinking. Well, what if I could continue to send my traffic to a lead-based offer, and somehow seperate the premium converting traffic and funnel it through to the Â£25 payout instead?

If you could just know in advance which leads are most likely to become sales, you could filter them from the trail and send them to the CPS link. Besides collecting your usual payouts for the leads, you’d receive the occasional Â£25 sale. It has the potential to blast your ROI to much higher ground. We already know that the advertiser is happy to give you the maximum payout if you can hang on at a 15% lead-to-sale ratio. This tells us a little about the expected conversion rates – particularly when we look at the payouts a network will offer.

The problem is seperating that traffic and picking out the users who are obviously willing to spend for a shag. To do this, you need to understand the true essence of delivering quality leads. You need to understand which segment of the market are buyers, and which are merely tryers. In dating terms, you need to seperate the desperate from the really desperate.

I’d also like to point out that I’m not suggesting you hijack your own quality score by sending the best leads to Offer X and sabotaging Offer Y with junk traffic.

It simply makes sense that if you have somebody reaching your landing page by the search term “cheapest dating site”, you’re looking at a potential sale. Why send them through the lead offer when you could do a little PHP link switching and funnel them to the CPS offer instead? Sure, you will lose some leads. But it makes a lot more sense than setting up a CPS campaign and then sending a bunch of clicks from “free” infested search terms.

It’s much easier to implement this form of traffic control when you’re promoting via PPC. If you have access to the search term, you can make a sensible guess at whether the user is a buyer or a tryer. The presence of “free” in the search term should be an immediate trigger to send them to the CPA offer. In fact, you shouldn’t even be using “free” in your ad copies. That’s going to fuck up your quality score regardless of anything else.

Beyond simply analyzing the search terms, I can think of one or two methods of filtering potential buyers by simply getting cheeky with your landing page. You could even resort to having two links on the same page if you’re clever about it.

Whatever you choose to do, moving in to Dating CPS offers is always going to be a gamble. I’d recommend getting in touch with your affiliate manager. You know those emails you get sent every now and then about low quality traffic? It works in reverse. Get your AM to ask the advertiser how your traffic is performing. If they’re happy with the ratios, it’s a good sign that you could be lining your pockets with some extra money by opening the floodgates on a little CPS.

If you know that you have quality traffic, you’re selling yourself short on those $4.50 payouts.

I highly recommend you head on over to EasyDate if you’re working in the UK dating market. They have pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, and a hybrid model where you get paid for both. Maybe your best option is to stick with what’s already working. It doesn’t make sense to ignore what’s out there though. Go figure it out for yourself.