Landing Page Tips | Finch Sells

How Not To Crack A Lucrative Foreign Market

May 31 2011

Have you ever seen ads that look like this?

Probably not. But that’s because you speak English… like most affiliates. This is what happens when an affiliate tries to scale his campaigns in to a different country without bothering to translate them properly.

They end up reading like they’ve been crafted by Robert Patrick on a bad day.

You may snigger, but these type of creatives are not unusual at all. Many affiliates who dare to venture in to foreign markets are hopelessly aided by Google Translations and a tendency to fuck up even the simplest of sentences.

Google Translations is about as trustworthy as my old shortcuts in French class. I hold the proud distinction of passing a French oral exam despite my speech being littered with random outburts of German. How could I screw something up so badly, you ask? Very bloody easily, with the unreliable assistance of poorly programmed word-for-word translation software.

If you want your ad creatives to look genuine, and not thrown together with the style of a madlib machine, it’s important to take your translations seriously. I would suggest you check in to One Hour Translation for small jobs, or hire yourself a cheap translator on CraigsList if you like your outsourcing to be more personal.

Pro Tip: Hire the best translator for the job. This isn’t a power trip. Try not to allow your judgment to be clouded by 17 year old Macedonian school girls who claim “Of course, I can speak fluent Japanese…you look so cute!“. You think I’m joking? Spend 10 minutes recruiting for jobs on CraigsList and you’ll feel distinctly more ordinary for the effort.

It’s important to translate your creatives correctly, not only to drive a greater CTR, but to keep your aura of professionalism in tact.

I’ve heard several horror stories of companies refusing to pay for leads and sales that were delivered legitmately, simply because the ad creatives were poorly constructed in a foreign language. It harms the brand, they claim. I’d be inclined to agree. Though refusing to pay the previous leads strikes me as a little draconian. A slap on the wrist and a “you naughty boy, you” should have been enough. But alas, these situations can be avoided by putting care in to your ad copy.

Let’s say you have the best creatives, translated in to pitch perfect lingo that the natives can understand. What is the next step for getting a campaign profitable in a foreign market?

I can’t stress highly enough the importance of cultural relevance.

Once upon a time, I submitted a Jewish dating ad with the headline “Girlfriend For Christmas?”. It wasn’t until about 4 days later that I felt, for the first time in my life, sufficiently more stupid than a Facebook intern that I would quit my bitching over disapprovals. For a few hours, at least.

Having run dating ads in almost every continent, I can safely say that the tone, language and imagery of a profitable campaign will vary drastically across the board. But, yes, if you were wondering, boobs are still king.

If you’re advertising to Hong Kong or Taiwan, it makes absolutely no sense to flood your ad imagery with scantily clad hobags of the American Pie realm. Different countries have different perceptions of beauty. And although dating throws up some of the biggest differences in culture, there are examples to be found in practically every vertical under the sun.

Let’s say you’re advertising an e-cigarette offer. The difference in tone between advertising to midwest America and the center of Amsterdam is going to be quite severe. As somebody who has sampled both of those parts of the world, I often wish for the two cultures to share a dinner party together where I could watch as a fly on the wall.

The media in each region portrays a vastly different image of smoking. If you approach your Netherlands campaign with the wording of a Midwest state dweller who knows only what he sees on Oprah, your ads are probably going to be met with a lot of confused Dutch stares. Perception, in advertising, is everything!

It’s important to approach your international ads with just as much patience as you would with a domestic campaign. If an offer doesn’t convert after 6000 impressions, that doesn’t mean an entire country has spoken. I only cracked the Singaporean gaming market after learning how to exclude Andrew “The Impression Whore” Wee from my targeting. Patience and perseverance are pretty much par for the course in any kind of Facebook marketing these days.

I also have to point out that dating offers designed specifically for the native country regularly outperform those that have simply been opened up to the new market and translated across with haste. I can’t pinpoint why, but it probably has something to do with a better understanding of the culture. Be sure to test all your options before confining another campaign to the scrapheap.

What can’t be argued is that there are still TONS of opportunities to launch profitable campaigns outside the popular trifecta of USA/UK/Can. There are times where I cry myself to sleep that I never took French class seriously. If you have the knowledge of a second language up your sleeve, what are you waiting for? Use it!

And if not? I have about 47 bilingual Macedonian schoolgirls that you’re welcome to borrow*

Recommended This Week

If you’re looking for a network to serve your international campaigns, EWA has an insane selection to choose from. Last time I checked, they had 580+ dating offers from practically every corner of the world. And that’s just dating. I run traffic through EWA daily. For all the outrageous Eagleisms popping up on Twitter – and in banner spaces on sites like this – you can’t knock what they do. The hype is justified by a mighty solid network that cares about it’s affiliates. Get registered here.
If you’re not already a member 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 – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

* JOKE. Seriously, this is a respectable blog.

Get Your Boobs Out, Affiliate Marketers

May 26 2011

It never ceases to amaze me how my best laid marketing plans struggle so consistently to match the power of boobs.

You might think boobs are just… boobs. Squashy mounds of goodness that sit at the heart of the WickedFire ecosystem. But actually, boobs are much more than that. They are lethal weapons of mass destruction, and when dropped in the right places, you can practically stun your readers in to handing over their credit cards.

I wish I was making this shit up.

No matter how many times I split test the effectiveness of boobs in ad images (and conveniently, I try that tactic a lot), I keep getting the same results. The ads showing boobs consistently outperform those where cleavage is tucked safely out of sight.

This is understandable if you’re promoting dating offers, a vertical where physical appearances are likely to play a significant hand. But the CTR also jumps, with the help of a little cleavage, whether you’re promoting sexy lingerie, home business kits or even your aunty’s antique decking furniture.

Boobs sell. To both men and women.

For some first hand examples of just how well they can sell, check out the Facebook Ads presentation by Shoemoney last year. I’m not a regular reader of Shoe’s blog, but the video has some great insight.

I wish turning on the money tap could be as simple as collecting a stockpile of cleavage photos, but you can probably see the flaw in that plan. Facebook is not particularly friendly when it comes to approving ad creatives that draw attention to skin.

If you’re ready and waiting to upload 63 saucy images of low-cut tops and enormous G cups, think twice about the repercussions of doing so. Have you received an email like this?

Hi useless tool who pays us money,

We’ve noticed that you are currently running Facebook Ads that violate our Advertising Guidelines or Terms of Use.

We do not allow ads to contain images that are overly explicit, provocative, or that reveal too much skin. Images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual, or in violation of community standards, will not be allowed.

Please delete any ads that violate these policies within 48 hours to bring your account into compliance with Facebook policies. Continuing to run ads that violate our policies may result in additional action being taken on your account, including possible termination.

Thanks for being an affiliate so we don’t have to care about you,

The Facebook Ads Team

When I received this message a few months ago, I did what any fast thinking affiliate would do. I removed every last one of my dating campaigns and replaced them with adverts to raise money for the Japanese earthquake victims.

I feel dirty for admitting it. But the easiest way to preserve an account is to give Facebook a damn good reason to think twice before pulling the trigger. So to this day, my account looks like the workstation of a good samaritan, promoting a hundred valuable causes on budgets of $1/day.

Does this make me a bastard? Probably so.

The point I’d like to make is that sexing up your campaigns on Facebook is a risky strategy. As effective as boobs can be, you should definitely be focusing on the figure and suggestion of cleavage, rather than flat out shoving some titties in a jpeg.

I always try to aim for photos where the skin is completely hidden but the outline of the cleavage is plain to see. I don’t know what kind of science this is bordering on, possibly whatever science applies to generating a good CTR without getting banned for having a great CTR.

If you can’t bring yourself to risk banishment from Facebook, there are plenty of traffic sources that are much more lenient when it comes to allowing boobs. Christ, if you dare to venture on to a network like Traffic Junky, you’d be a square to even consider publishing an ad without full frontal nudity.

Perhaps the best advice I can offer is to actually consider why it is that boobs are so effective as marketing tools. It’s not the cleavage itself, but a subconscious switch in the user’s mind that responds to a trigger. There are many other visual clues you can use to produce this reaction, and many of them have nothing to do with sex.

Recommended This Week

Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
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 – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

Do You Give Up On A Conversion Too Easily?

May 02 2011

When a conversion rate fails to live up to your expectations, how many excuses do you have ready?

“The network is scrubbing!”
“The quality of the traffic sucks…”
“Somebody stole my cookies!”

It’s important to realise that while some factors of a healthy conversion rate are beyond our control, we can still have a vice like grip on the others.

Over the last year, I’ve managed to muster some of the highest conversion rates in the dating vertical. And I’ve done it by simply losing less clicks than my competition. That sounds like a stupid statement, so allow me to explain.

For every product you promote, there are many different angles you can take in selling it to your customer. But the only angle that matters is the one that is specifically relevant to the needs of that customer.

The problem with a vertical like dating is obvious. Individual taste can cover such wildly different ends of the spectrum, you’d be fucking nuts to design a landing page that satisfies everyone. We can opt for laser targeted campaigns instead, and this gives us a much healthier conversion rate – but at the price of volume.

It’s always satisfying to run a mainstream high-volume campaign where your market isn’t restricted to a demo that has scaling difficulties from birth. These are usually the campaigns that turn on the money tap. To achieve them, you need to be able to restrict the number of conversions you lose through poor sales funneling.

Troubleshooting Your Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel is the one element that distinguishes you from every other marketer. We share access to the same stock images, the same offers and the same traffic sources. It’s only when we combine them together and create a sales funnel that the conversions are won or lost.

Fluidity Between Clicks – I’ve written about this before, but it never loses relevance. Your ad creatives must transition smoothly in to your landing page, and then serenely on to the offer. Bait and switch marketing can get you so far, but you have to deliver fluidity in your sales funnel to minimize the loss of conversions.

Let’s say your headline reads “Instantly Get More Messages On Dating Sites”

This grabs a good CTR by the balls, but without fluid transition in to a landing page that elaborates and successfully funnels the user in to your next action (presumably registering on a dating site), it’s going to be a letdown. You can’t use a headline like this and then say “…by joining Match free!“, without harming your original message.

If you’re going to bait and switch, your landing page has to deliver an effective transition between your clickbait headline and your end goal. So in this case, giving five quick reasons why joining Match will make you Mr. Popular would make the transition much smoother.

Understand “YES!” Psychology – The more often you can get your reader to subconsciously answer “Yes!” to rhetorical questions, the more likely they are to develop a positive frame of mind. A positive frame of mind is important because it inspires action. You don’t win sales by casting thoughts of reflection or indecision.

The single greatest burden that stops John Doe from becoming your next customer is his ability to conjure limitless excuses and alibis for not buying your shit. We are all blessed with an internal reasoning system. In order to justify spending money or time, we need to be sure that the positives far outweigh the negatives.

For many marketers, this knowledge gets lost with the illusion that simply catering a page for what the user clicked on will be enough to deliver the sale. It rarely is. A click shows no more than a fleeting interest. In order to convert that fleeting interest in to a paying customer, we have to satisfy their doubts and create a great deal of positive imagery.

To create positive imagery, you first need to cut down on the escape routes that every reader will instinctively seek. Cynicism is a killer for any landing page that doesn’t address specific concerns. If you fail to understand the primary concerns that would stop somebody from accepting your product as a solution, the game is over before it started.

Of course, some markets take less cornering than others. It doesn’t take much to sell a weight loss pill to a hopeless beached whale who believes any excuse that aligns with her disgust for the treadmill.

“Wouldn’t it be great to emphatically blast those pounds away and look fantastic before the summer?”

“Wouldn’t you pay a bargain $30 for exclusive possession of the superpill that works quicker than any diet to reverse YEARS of harmful habit? Is this a price worth paying to capture the body you thought had disappeared forever? We think the perfectly toned, healthy you is worth MUCH more than $30…”

By subconsciously answering yes to the enforcement of positive imagery, your reader’s brain is kept stimulated and occupied. More importantly, the common excuses and alibis – those deadly conversion killers – are never allowed to dictate the thought impulses.

The fastest way to apply this to your landing page is to make a simple change in the way that you look at them. Become the Scrooge of your target market. Brainstorm every last reason why a user would REFUSE to commit to your product, and then work backwards. Take the biggest excuses and blunt them with positive imagery.

In the example above, price is countered with scarcity (exclusive possession?) and the classic trick of asking what would be the much greater price of NOT buying the product.

It’s possible to spin almost any negative in to a positive. And that is the chief purpose of a good sales funnel. Kill indecision before indecision kills your conversion rates.

Monetize The Scraps – If you can’t get a conversion, get an opt-in. Failing all else, co-brand your landing page to add value to an existing site in your portfolio.

It struck me a few months ago that I’d been driving thousands and thousands of clicks to dating landing pages, and yet I’d never thought to co-brand them under the umbrella of the dating blog I already ran.

Sometimes the offer you’re promoting simply isn’t right for a certain kind of visitor. You can forget about that demographic entirely and accept the lost clicks, or you can attempt to monetize the scraps. This is possible either through a second upsell – “Well if you don’t want to join my dating site, how about an ebook to help you on the one you’re already on?” – or by co-branding your assets.

I figured that if I had a ton of clicks not converting in to sales, why not address it frankly on the page? You can post a simple notice saying that you’re sorry they didn’t want to join Site X, but you’d love for them to subscribe to your dating blog instead. Or to check out a different offer. Or to hand over their Amazon cookie. Whatever. There is no limit to what you can achieve with a little hustle and lateral thinking.

In conclusion… The best way to stop losing conversions is to remember that not every click comes from a user who thinks as you do. And for every impossibly low conversion rate, create additional value to monetize the sales that never were.

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 – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.
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. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.