Become an Affiliate Marketer | Finch Sells

An Affiliate Marketer Going Slightly Insane Before 30 and His Daily Routines

Aug 07 2013

Finch, how do you deal with managing multiple campaigns at once?
I’m hoping to build a large enough safety net to do affiliate marketing full-time from October. Are there any steps you’d recommend for building good routines?

Managing Campaigns & Time

Full-time affiliate marketing is the same as part-time affiliate marketing.

You only need an hour to do it well.

The biggest difference in going full-time is that you can afford to work on other projects, those in the ‘real world’.

I think this is good for your hairline. It takes the pressure away from belonging to an industry that is forever being handed the last rites.

Even if your one motivation is to become a successful affiliate marketer, I would not recommend creating campaigns from 9 to 5. You’ll go broke fast.

This was drummed in to my head quite recently by a realisation that I’ve wasted half my career to date. Thank god I’m 25.

Choosing Your Battles

A few weeks ago, I’d wake up, check my stats and one campaign would stick out like a sore thumb.

I had dedicated my left ball to this campaign. Crafting the angle, honing the ads and even meddling with JavaScript. It felt like my baby.

But it was only breaking even.

I was spending $400 on this campaign every day. Some days it would edge to a slight profit, others it would dip to a loss. But every morning I would wake up expecting my most recent changes to have launched it out the ballpark.

And they never did.

Eventually, I gave it the finger.

The irony is that no sooner had I stopped wasting time on this ground zero campaign, my energy shifted to another.

This second campaign was in a similar situation; roughly $300/day spend, but with a profit of $100-$120.

I had ignored it because it was profitable. Worry too much about diversification and you’ll commit this sin too.

One late night brainfart inspired me to apply one of the landing pages that I’d tested on my failed break-even campaign, and you can probably guess what happened next.

The conversions skyrocketed. From $120/day profit to $250+/day.

It was a helpful reminder of the Pareto Principle.

Don’t waste your time (and money) beating a dead horse.

If you have a campaign or a website that is doing well, make it do better before you think about creating something else.

I’ve stopped spending thousands of dollars on campaigns that are break even or a marginal success. I prefer to bring excellence to the increasingly rare handful that benefit from the optimisation.

In short, don’t run too many campaigns.

There are some campaigns that I have documented in my Premium Post series which, while helpful to the reader, will never be on my agenda. I don’t have the time or resources to focus on $20/day campaigns.

So, here’s a simple task.

Assume you have one hour today to work on the campaign that’s going to pay your bills for the rest of the year.

What will you work on?

There is no difference between part-time and full-time affiliate marketing. This answer should always be the same.

I believe in Parkinson’s law. Work expands to fill the time you have available.

So give yourself an hour and do something more sustainable with the rest of the day.

Establishing Routines

My day is split in two halves:

The morning – spent analysing data and planning.
The afternoon – spent acting on data and creating.

Before I start work, usually around 9am, I will traipse to the local petrol station and fill up on Costa Express. It’s a habit my girlfriend has used to draw comparisons with Alan Partridge; a massive compliment, and a man whose sweaters I would die for.

My morning is rarely as creative as the night before.

It’s tough to be creative when your last great idea is still simmering in flames.

I prefer to analyse data without jumping to conclusions, safe in the knowledge that damn near every traffic source I work with is fast asleep and unable to approve my ads until the sun rises across the pond.

The rest of the day is a blur of frantic creation, lots of writing, lots of Photoshop, and lots of Skyping.

Perhaps the fastest way to save money in this business is to ensure that you talk to your affiliate managers before launching a campaign, any campaign. Make it a routine.

I’m quite blunt with a four step assault:

1. What’s your top performing offer, by EPC in [country]?
2. And its top performing landing page?
3. What’s your second top performing offer, by EPC in [country]?
4. And its top performing landing page?

Followed by a thank you, followed by silence, followed by split testing.

I don’t like small talk.

I will sometimes regret finishing work if my whiteboard is clean before 9pm.

On these rare lonely nights, I’ll read (at least three books per week), watch television, fight the crickets, before eventually slipping back in to my office with an idea that sounds better than it did at lunch.

Data Routines

For somebody who prefers to work with words, it disappoints me that so much of my day is spent buried in numbers; analysing them, anticipating them, praying for them, going bloody insane from them.

Launching a successful affiliate campaign is less about creativity; more about patience with numbers.

I know this sounds like a bloodbath, but if you can’t calculate where the numbers are likely to work in your favour, you’ll be broke before lunch.

So if there’s one routine you’ll do well to adopt, it’s placing trust in your stats and data.

They never lie.

Whatever your tracking software, be it CPV Lab, Tracking202 or iMobiTrax, a most important routine is to use it, and use it well.

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The Affiliate Marketing Survival Guide 2013

Feb 08 2013

Remember what I said about making money on the Kindle?

Well, I took my own advice.

I’m happy to announce the release of my first ever affiliate marketing book on the Kindle platform, and I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Included inside:

A fast-tracked introduction to the affiliate industry
My take on the expected (and unexpected) trends of affiliate marketing in 2013.
A look at the still-talked-about moneymaking methods that went bust in 2012
How to build an affiliate marketing brand for the future
Why our industry is at a dangerous crossroads, and what you can do about it
How to build a sustainable online business for 2013 (minus the bullshit)
A crap ton of useful resources

This is a completely rewritten overhaul of last year’s free Affiliate Marketing Survival Kit, which was a very brief overview of the industry and where I saw it going.

Checking in at over 28,000 words, Survival Guide 2013 is bigger, better, ballsier and bang up to date.

It is also dirt cheap.

I am using this guide as a marketing experiment on the Kindle platform, and for that reason, I’m charging less than 5 bucks. Yes, the price of a Starbucks for a complete analysis of the affiliate marketing industry as it stands in 2013.

And that’s from somebody who isn’t going to bullshit you with a pipe dream. I’m so confident, I even slapped my real name on it.

What’s the worst that could happen?

~~You’ll lose a Starbucks.~~

You can read the introduction for free over on Amazon. Just choose your market of choice below:

Enjoy the book, and keep an eye on this blog. I’ve got lots of brand new content coming next week.

How to Learn by Osmosis: The Traits of a Successful Affiliate

Nov 20 2012

There are many blogs, forums and ebooks where you can learn the intricacies of online marketing. Some are great, some are poor, but nearly all are inferior to the process of learning by osmosis.

Osmosis is the art of unconscious learning. It is where we stop studying materials, and start absorbing them.

1) Park balls on knowledge 2) … 3) Profit $$$

Learning the Facts vs. Learning the Meaning

Imagine two kids go in to a lecture. One has a stack of notepads and pens. The other has his hands in his pockets. We’ll call them Kid Prepared and Kid Unprepared.

As the lecture begins, Kid Prepared starts scribbling notes. His hand whirrs furiously across the page, siphoning sound bytes and trying to record every last tidbit for future consumption.

In the next seat, Kid Unprepared stares blankly, soaking up the information and searching for its meaning.

Who do you think is more likely to be successful?

The plague of academia suggests that it will be Kid Prepared; the perennial note-taker, he who responds so intently that no fact is left behind. He is the kid that breezes through college, aces his degree, and should be changing the world.

Except in the real world, success goes to he who shuts the hell up and listens.

Learning by osmosis is all about listening. It is absorbing the world as a human sponge. It is how you apply meaning to what you see around you.

This innate talent for plucking the meaning out of a lecture, rather than the facts and figures, is how we develop intuition, which is the pulling force that separates successful entrepreneurs from bankrupt sob stories.

If you are an affiliate marketer, or if you do any kind of work online, learning by osmosis is especially important.

I believe many affiliates are trapped in the superficial mindset of Kid Prepared. They’ve read all the books, blogs and forums, but their ability to translate those principles in to a tangible business plan is still highly flawed.

They know what to do, they just don’t know how to do it. Their intuition is lacking.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde

That was 122 years ago.

God only knows what Oscar Wilde would make of the Internet. There has never been such an overflow of information at our fingertips – and most of it is useless.

Here are three strategies that are great for unconscious learning. They share a common trait, and that is to tear you away from your comfort zone.

Joint Venture with the smart and passionate

When you are running more online businesses than you can keep a tally on, promoting dozens of products, in a handful of different verticals, there is no way in hell that you can retain as much information as somebody who has specialised expertise in a single market.

The best you can hope for is an exceedingly good business partner who is willing to share the bacon.

My view is that every affiliate should be joint venturing, but only with the right people.

We are primarily monetization experts who know how to drive traffic. Our weakness is usually the product. We just don’t understand what we are promoting properly, and the Internet plus its millions of consumers suffers for it.

When I joint venture, I do so with individuals who are passionate in the market we are targeting – much more passionate than myself. Not only is their spirit contagious, but it pays to have somebody who is in touch with the grassroots of that market.

The secret to creating awesome affiliate websites is not rocket science. It’s having your ears pinned to the ground.

When you work with somebody who knows the market conditions, or is the market, you can learn a hell of a lot by shutting up and taking stock.

“If you always hire people who are smaller than you, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you, we shall become a company of giants.”
– David Ogilvy

I believe this same principle applies to personal growth, career advancement and just about any item in a respectable Bucket List.

Work with people who know more than you, befriend people who are happier than you.

If nothing else, I’m sure your Facebook feed could do with the detox.

Bounce off a small mastermind group

Small mastermind groups are brilliant for those who work on their own. I’ve noticed a booming trend of Skype groups in the affiliate space.

If you can gather 4 or 5 ambitious minds, meld them to a routine, and share everything that is learned – the task of conquering affiliate marketing is suddenly a team effort.

Not only can you bounce creative ideas off your partners, but they will hold you accountable when you’ve spunked the entire day playing Civilization V with no new ads to show for your efforts.

Ahem.

Nobody wants to be the weak link in a mastermind group.

Get your mind out of the basement

What are you learning from your work environment?

If you work at home, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to unconscious learning is the home comfort that you are surrounded by. A stale non-challenging work environment is a catalyst for stale, unambitious ideas.

If you really want to take your business to the next level, you should first try taking it out of your mother’s basement. In your head – and probably in the literal sense, too.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many benefits to working from home:

No commuting in the winter cold
No boss peering over your shoulder
No colleagues to steal your milk from the fridge
No shirt and tie, more slippers and slacks

But there is one major disadvantage:

Who – and what – are you going to learn from?

The whole principle of learning by osmosis, of unconscious learning in general, is that we absorb the world around us. If your work revolves around a dank, stench-filled office that hasn’t been scrubbed since 2007, then that is not a particularly healthy world to absorb.

I believe business growth is stunted by the lifestyle that most Internet Marketers choose to adopt. It’s not that we don’t have the opportunities to learn from behind a screen, it’s that we fail to grasp them.

We wrap ourselves in home comforts while the truly great achievers are contorting their minds with new and uncomfortable challenges.

I can’t stress this advice firmly enough: network, network and network some more.

There is a sad belief that if we rock up to a marketing conference and fail to uncover a golden nugget, a brilliant traffic source or a hot new offer, the experience has been a giant failure. While I can understand the need for inspiration in these challenging times, the strongest incentive to network is the effect of being around equally ambitious minds – as well as the social interaction.

Your networking does not have to hinge on strictly marketing conferences.

Talented entrepreneurs are aware that some of the best ideas you will ever have are the result of ‘cross-pollination’ from meeting diverse and unusual characters a world apart from your usual comfort zone.

I often say that you can tell a lot about a man by his five closest friends, and you can tell a lot about his career by his five closest advisors. If we are the product of those combined forces, it makes sense to choose them wisely.

There’s a simple solution.

Don’t allow yourself to be influenced by your comfort zone. Snap out of it.

We, more than anybody, are prone to falling back on home comforts when we should be gasping to learn more. If you want to unleash the full effect of learning by osmosis, the good news is that you already are.

You just need to change the source.

Recommended This Week:

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