General Affiliate Marketing | Finch Sells

Is The Warrior Forum A Pyramid Scheme?

Aug 12 2009

I could be convinced.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve stumbled across this hell hole of an Internet Marketing forum and actually posted there. Not for long admittedly. As far as messageboards go, this is the shit that George Orwell pissed his bed sheets over as a small child.

Here is a board that thrives on the principle of getting nowhere in Internet Marketing. Let me correct myself. Nowhere beyond the actual confines of The Warrior Forum.

It amazes me that this place sustains a stuttering eco-system of guys and girls who make money on the SHEER PRINCIPLE of making money. I can’t imagine they make more than the odd ebook sale – but it’s still mind boggling to understand that this shit is happening. Real time. As we speak.

Every other member has a link slinging an ebook. You know the kind? Probably hand-picked from a collection of 72,000 in a Demonoid torrent. These people strike me as the sort of hob goblins that spend 6 months researching key terms for a soon-to-be-hot niche, only to roll out an acai berry blog in 2011.

It’s plain as day that the best performers in the Warrior Forum marketplace are making their money from selling crap to…fellow Warrior Forum members.

Okay, fair dos. You get the odd smattering of urchins from Bangkok looking to send 5000 visitors to your site in 24 hours – but as far as quality services go, I can only assume that these guys have accidentally homepaged the Wayback Machine and forgotten how to close the window. A brief glance over the latest threads and you’ll see questions like “Am i being geolocated?“, “How does this blog know where I am?” and my favourite of all time, “Does posting links on Google work?”

Now, I’m not trying to knock too heavily on the happy go lucky community of The Warrior Forum. I’m sure they’re all hard working mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. Christ, they better be hard working. But I’m writing this to anybody who’s new and getting started in the business. Anybody who reads some ridiculous sig link and is already on the phone to jack in his day job.

IF IT SMELLS LIKE BULLSHIT, IT PROBABLY TASTES LIKE BULLSHIT.

I spend day after day searching over new tools and systems that are allegedly going to make my life easier as an affiliate marketer. If I worked 365 days, I’d probably only stumble across something worth paying for on 5 of them.

When you get good at affiliate marketing, you become a good judge of the scam artists and the guys who are actually rolling out a quality service. I’m using the Warrior Forum as an example – I don’t hate the place – it’s just a terrible breeding ground for poor marketing. It’s like walking in to a fully immersive flog and personally, I come away from the place feeling just a little bit creeped out by the smiling avatars.

There is no magic recipe for success. And if there was one, it wouldn’t be sold on WF – or on any forum.

No successful affiliate hits the jackpot and then decides to sell it for $27.95 in an instant download. These guys seem to have established a mini circle jerk to pay the bills. I’ll buy your book, if you get three retards to buy mine. And so the madness spirals out of control.

I do a lot of work on traffic sourcing strategies that receive hardly any coverage across the many affiliate marketing blogs. Christ, most of my money is made from traffic sources that I haven’t even hinted at once during the lifetime of this blog. That’s just how it works.

You can go on Affbuzz and read to your heart’s content – you’ll get absolutely nowhere without action.

No secret worth knowing is handed to you on a plate.

Time and time again I’m getting contacted by guys who want a hint there, a nudge in the right direction here…but what can I say?

When you uncover a marketing tactic that works – you’ll appreciate the value of shit not getting saturated. If you’re new and fresh to the affiliate marketing business, you need to grow some thick skin when it comes to sales talk. The reality is that the best tool you have for this industry is Notepad and your keyboard. Time to get skeptical about everything else.

Beating SEO Kids At Their Own Game

Aug 06 2009

Most of us doing affiliate marketing have some kind of tear stained love-hate relationship with SEO. I got my first ever commission after ageing several years, wrinkling over slightly, and finally converting a long tail search term.

When I think of SEO, I think of ballbreaking keyword research and a drawn out link building program that could reduce a grown man to tears (or just a Black Hat manual). But the more money you spend on PPC, the more glaring it becomes that you’re paying to get your shit advertised alongside a bunch of free listings that are spitting out pure profit.

Now I know what everybody says. Link building? Writing articles? That, is the work of slavery, and damn near offensive to many.

Even beyond the attitude that it’s time consuming, boring work, and a waste of market knowledge – some affiliates seem to assume that it simply isn’t possible to catch up with the top rankers. Well, maybe you can’t work as hard as an army of Indian kids spinning out articles for $1 a pop. But you definitely can work smarter.

Through PPC, you can rapidly discover the keywords that produce regular sales. You do this by busting out your Adwords account, setting the crosshairs on a bunch of search terms, and then letting rip with your own money. Sure, you might lose money. But you can’t buy the knowledge that comes with knowing what sells.

Say you’re one of these organic search guys who lays down the foundations of an SEO campaign before a single sale has been banked. A good SEO campaign requires good targeting and good groundwork. You might spend 6 months optimizing a site of 300 pages to reach the top of Google for term “xxxxx”.

What if “xxxxx” doesn’t convert? Those 6 months would have been better spent on Redtube.

Coming from a PPC background, you can test the waters and find exactly which terms are converters. Get yourself 4 or 5 super targeted keywords, spin a domain out of them, and do your own SEO groundwork accordingly.

There’s no point wasting your own time on articles. But Christ, you wouldn’t believe how many affiliate marketers are so tight when it comes to paying a kid in Asia a small fee for getting some work done. If you’re truly enjoying the high life, employ a genuine professional and you’ve already got a competitive advantage over many of these top ranking sites.

Most affiliates build a successful campaign and ask themselves “how can I scale this bigger?”. Not many ask themselves “how can I reduce my costs?”

Reducing your costs will usually make a campaign more profitable than spreading your net and scaling upwards. I realized this after I noticed that I was making more money from a few organic sales than I was from 25 PPC sales in a day.

Fact is though, if you’re going to build long-term sites for your affiliate business – you’ve got one major problem.

How do you build a long term site for a short term product?

When I log in to Convert2Media, I see about 25 different Google offers. It looks a bit like this:

Google Profits
Make Money on Google
Google Money Profits
Profiting on Google
Google Income
Google Money Income

So how do you even think about building a site to rank naturally when the name of the shit you’re slinging is gonna change before you’ve opened the FTP to publish it?

I should say first of all that if you’re actually using the term “Google” when you push bizopp rebills, you’re walking in to a firestorm of legal problems. It’s blatant infringement on the Google brand. Even though the actual advertisers do it, why do you think we have so many Google bizopps in the first place? Rinse, say sorry, and repeat.

If you want to promote any kind of CPA rebill, you’re going to have to build your own brand and focus only on the terms that don’t change over time.

Sure, “acai burn” might be a popular search term today – but there’s no guarantee that it will be tomorrow. “Cure my fat ass” on the other hand, is always going to be a go’er, because let’s face it. America is fat.

For long term success, you need to be targeting the keywords that are here to stay. Ranking takes time and it isn’t really a good fit for the cut throat nature of the CPA industry.

The safest way to build a long term future in affiliate marketing is to target sales instead of leads. You can’t fuck with the quality of a sale. But that doesn’t mean we all have to bend over backwards and become bitches of Commission Junction. There’s still money to be made from long term sites pushing short term offers. That’s if you get it right from the beginning.

I see quite a few guys trying to build review sites for dieting, cleansing and whatever else is pulling a $37 commission. I can only imagine that they’re PPC burners, because it doesn’t make sense as a long term goal otherwise. These CPA offers are getting rebranded practically every day. You need to target the needs of the market, not the product on the shelf.

Life After PPC: Is Media Buying The Way?

Aug 03 2009

I’m sitting here at the moment, scratching my balls, and staring at six or seven open windows. MSN Adcenter, Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing Solutions…Christ, I’ve even bothered to bust out a dusty Ask PPC dashboard.

I see zero columns galore. You could say my PPC accounts are flatlining. Today’s spend: $0.00.

Truth be told, I’ve been sick of PPC for a while now. I know there are guys out there milking the cow dry on a wave of PPC profit. Even with the latest clampdowns, affiliate bans and account suspensions – marketers are still finding ways to bend the rules and get PPC campaigns profitable. I’m not suggesting every affiliate is a rule breaking fiend, because that’s one of the biggest myths going. Half of the fucking Internet is on a commission these days.

I’ve been working on a few business strategies that stray away from buying by the click. I’ve experienced a lot of success with PPC, but I get the sense that the walls are caving in. It’s getting harder and harder to game the system. Now you might not like it, but a lot of the time that’s what being successful with PPC is about. It has to be when the competition is getting so fierce so fast.

Anyway, I’ve been running my own media buys for a while now. Recently, they’ve become my primary source of income. I’ve gotta admit, for a guy who came in to affiliate marketing with no traditional marketing background, it’s been a baptism of fire.

PPC is two skills combined. The ability to brainstorm 1000 terms in Notepad, and the ability to see which ones are putting you out of pocket.

If you can do that, you can make money. It’s pretty simple in theory.

The second you venture in to media buys, you’re faced with two problems.

1. What sort of demographic is my offer targeted to?
2. How can I reach that demographic without wasting money on a thousand others?

The clickthrough rate, for example. If you’re a PPC guy, it probably means something to you. A quality score here, some extra volume there.

If your clickthrough rate bombs on Adwords, what do you do? You rewrite text and resubmit. Ultimately you don’t pay, because it’s PPC.

The majority of media buys can be broken down in to either CPM or tenancy based agreements.

CPM, if you don’t already know, is Cost Per Mille. That sounds a bit confusing, but it actually means cost per thousand impressions.

To put things in perspective, I got in touch with Ciao the shopping comparison channel and asked them for a CPM quote for 300×250 ads. They got back to me with Â£15.

Â£15 CPM?

1000 impressions for Â£15.

Marketing Sherpa states an industry average clickthrough rate for the 300×250 ad at 0.37 percent.

After a little notepad action, you can work out that an industry average CTR is going to get you a monumental 3 clicks for that Â£15 spend.

If I were to go with Ciao and throw up an average banner, I’d be paying the equivalent of Â£5 CPC. That’s probably about $7.50 to you Americans. You’ve gotta have a pretty smashmouth landing page to catch even a whiff of a profit on those numbers.

Needless to say, I do not recommend Ciao for CPM based advertising.

And here lies the problem with any media buy. You’re out on your own with a pencil and some gut instinct for company.

Not only do you need to hunt down the best advertising deals, reaching the right demographics, but you need to overhaul your creatives accordingly. A landing page optimized for Adwords and almost guilty at the fact that it’s slinging a rebill? Get the fuck out.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I waved goodbye to Adwords. No more distracting SEO efforts. No more pinning my hopes on a contextual link that some intern isn’t supposed to find, but my target audience is.

If you’re going to move in to media buys, make this your first objective. That list of precautionary measures you took to avoid the Google slap? Time to hit the rewind button and scrap every last one of them. You’re not trying to quietly divert unsuspecting Google searchers to an affiliate offer. You’re not trying to offer “valuable content” that doesn’t act solely as a bridge page. You’re trying to sell something, right? A bridge page is what you NEED.

With these impression-based purchases, you’re advertising to a majority of people who don’t give a shit what your offer might do for them. They haven’t searched anything. They haven’t asked for a review or a scam warning of XXX product. So on that rare occasion where you capture the attention of a would-be customer, you’ve gotta have the landing page that gets the job done. None of this Adwords affiliate shame bullshit. Throw your offer in their faces because you’re gonna need to if you plan on making money with CPM.

I spoke to a guy last week who had snapped up banner space for a dieting offer across a massive network. A huge network. He was paying a super high CPM, with no cap, and had managed to blow around Â£8,000 over the course of a month. His return on that investment? Something like Â£3,000.

He got me to take a look at one of his many landing page variations and it immediately struck me that he was driving traffic to a site that looked more Wikipedia than Amazon. People are supposed to be buying shit through you? Well, give them something to buy.

When you’re targeting demographics, you have to get to the point and sell what you’re gonna sell. You can’t roll out an Adwords friendly wiki of drivel and hope that some chance-clicker is going to find your affiliate link.

It’s worth getting in to media buys if only to complete a full circle of online marketing. PPC platforms are great for affiliates. They’re self-serve and you can flick the switch on a campaign before you cream a few thousand dollars in to the abyss.

Media buys just ain’t so simple. That’s why it’s so rare that I talk to somebody doing them who’s having success. It’s probably also why the biggest earners I know live by them.

You’ve got to completely change your mindset before you go to market. A campaign has to be rolled out at it’s optimum. If your creative sucks hard, you’ll pay for it before you have chance to correct it. CPM is a bitch for slow starters. Get a designer and have him put together some visually appealing graphics that are gonna catch eyes.

Many affiliate marketers roll out half baked PPC campaigns and only get them profitable after a few weeks of scrapping aside the dead weight. If you want to get good at media buying, you can forget that approach to business.

Do you think a bigtime advertiser throws a commercial on television without researching the target market? Without split testing it’s own sample audience? Without physically doing everything in its power to get that ad ready to have maximum impact from the get go?

You have to wipe the slate clean and do your research. Start thinking demographics. How can you appeal to them? How can you capture their attention?

And that’s what I’m talking about when I mention a full circle in online marketing. Many of us delve in to PPC and start thinking of the costs of a click and a conversion rate as if there’s nothing else attached to making money online.

Media buying requires that same knowledge, but also the ability to match demographics to invisible variables. It’s almost like, you know, real marketing.

So I guess this is an insanely long outburst about nothing in particular. I will actually post some media buying tips in the week. It’s not actually as emotionally crippling as I’ve made it out to be. I think.