The Affiliate Lifestyle | Finch Sells

The Dog Shit Littered Road To Affiliate Success

Oct 03 2011

This is a guest post by James Agate. James writes a blog about SEO, operates a few sites of his own and runs an SEO consulting firm that works with affiliates (amongst other clients).

The road to success is littered with dog shit. Affiliate marketing is no exception.

In my mind there are two kinds of affiliates. The ones that do a few things really well (develop a specialism) and earn themselves decent money in the process and then the other kind; that try too many things and end up earning mediocre amounts.

You’ve probably seen both kinds of affiliates at work.

There’s the super skinny sites that operate the manure model… this is an affiliate or website owner that has outsourced or just written piss poor content and sandwiched it between multiple horse shit offers in the hope that someone might actually feel sorry for them and click that ad and make a purchase. They are also the kind that merrily spend their AdWords balance sending people to a homepage or pay little attention to the commissions versus the CPC.

Then there’s the other kind that clearly understand how the business works and where they fit in the customer purchasing process. The fact that it is so easy to become an affiliate is part of the reason why so many affiliates have shoes caked in dog shit. People assume because it’s free and affiliate networks promise big payouts that all it takes is for you to whack up some vaguely relevant content and people will happily buy using your links.

In the immortal words of Daniel Craig in Layer Cake – “It doesn’t fucking work like that.”

What some affiliates forget are the underlying principles of running a successful business. You can ‘con’ a customer and turn a quid or you can look after them and enjoy lifetime customer value. I know which one I’d rather do.

Tip 1 – Encourage loyalty

We affiliates spend time, money and effort acquiring customers so we owe it to ourselves to try and retain them.

Think about it in money terms; if you spend £0.20 per click on a PPC campaign and you convert a £5 offer at say 5% you are going to hit profit if you buy 100 clicks. But what about if you took each of those 5 ‘customers’ and as well as the initial commission you managed to retain say 3 of them. You could then promote multiple other related offers to those 3 retained users and next time you need not spend that £0.20 buying them, they know you, trust you and you know what kinds of offers they like.

I can certainly do more of this and if I am honest, I haven’t cracked the loyalty thing quite yet on all of my sites but I’m getting there one pre-pop, email grabbing offer at a time.

Tip 2 – Don’t spread yourself too thin

This isn’t just a tip for affiliate marketing but more of an online business tip in general. ‘Real businesses’ make carefully considered investments in projects based on the likely risks and returns, weighing up the pros and cons in a rational fashion. Since you’re running an online business, you should do the same.

I’m not saying you need a committee or to embark on a complex journey of planning, research and feedback but having a solid grasp on the following is key to your success: who you are targeting, the problem you are solving, the business model you are going to use, how much is it going to take to get this thing off the ground, how much time will you need to commit in the first instance and on-going (and do you have that time), what is the likely return and how long will it take for you to see a return (and can you wait that long).

I’m pretty sure it’s the unwritten rule of internet business that you shouldn’t buy another domain or start another project until you’ve covered the setup costs of your last project or at least got a solid plan in place that is going to get you there.

The late, great creative director Paul Arden said that people are always looking for the next opportunity, forgetting that the project they have right in front of them IS the opportunity.

Tip 3 – Add value

Some people like to dress up the affiliate marketing business as a complex beast. The fact is that if you want to make big fat juicy commissions then you had better capture that customer right at the sweet spot – when they are at the info seeking or comparing alternatives stages in the buying process.

You can entice them by adding something of real value. There’s a reason why the likes of MoneySupermarket.com are so successful and that’s because they focus on providing real value to the end user. If your site makes the life of the user easier, solves a problem or is generally useful then they will be more than happy to oblige and click your affiliate link.

I try to build sites that are genuinely useful or solve a problem. I have a site that helps people out of redundancy and a site that helps people start a business as well as a few others. I’ve started websites in all sorts of niches like broadband, mobile phones and life insurance without truly thinking how I was going to make it work and what I actually brought to the party.

I’d be lying if I said that my sites were all about the user because I don’t run a charity and I try to ensure everything I do at least in some way contributes to my bank balance but I like to give my sites the appearance of being user focused.

Tip 4 – Don’t chase the money

I once blew a month’s money in two days chasing life insurance commission. Think you’ve got deep pockets? Not compared to these guys. They can afford to drop £30 a click because they either A) have more money than sense B) they are backed up by some mega rich brand that ‘needs’ to be present on that term or C) a combination of the 2.

There wasn’t anything wrong with my website, my keyword research or my ad writing skills. I simply didn’t have the budget to sustain that pesky pilot phase of every PPC campaign. Even if I had got there I probably wouldn’t have had the cash flow to support the demands of the campaign. Painful, but I’m glad I realised that fairly quickly otherwise I might have actually wiped myself out.

Look for gems. Niches or affiliate offers that are underserved or underrepresented or at the very least have good opportunities in i.e. some good keywords are low competition, low cost so at least give you a look in. They are still out there, the other day I found a whole niche with really decent search volume and on several of the bigger keywords, parked pages were actually ranking in the top 5!

If you are going to target a competitive market then you had better have a good USP.

Tip 5 – Relax

As any affiliate will tell you, there’s nothing worse than to sit there hitting refresh every 2 minutes wondering why your AdWords balance is going down but your affiliate network balance isn’t going up. Behaving like this will do little more than turn you into a nervous wreck.

Be thorough in your planning, spot-on in your execution and then to a certain degree you have to trust your instinct and let the thing run its course. You want to look at bigger patterns i.e. daily, weekly, monthly.

I’d like to think I have developed this mentality because I’ve got balls of steel but in actual fact I have just come to realise that worrying about a campaign is quite damaging to not only your health but also your bank balance. You may pause or delete a campaign before it has been given a chance to hit profitability or before at the very least it has been given the chance to show you where the profits might lie.

Giving up on a website too soon is also another crime that I have committed. When you kick off a project you have all the enthusiasm in the world, this tends to fade as it becomes increasingly clear that it’s not as easy as you imagined. Stick with it because if you truly believe in something then you will get there eventually. That annoying man that’s obsessed with “re-inventing the vacuum cleaner” spent nearly a decade on his idea before earning any real money from it.

A word of warning however, don’t let things go too far. Be clear in your own mind how much you are prepared to commit before you write the project/site/campaign off as a lost cause.

To sum up

You know just how easy it is to start life as an affiliate. If it cost you £1000 to join each program I guarantee you wouldn’t take it so fucking lightly and that’s the point. You need to focus on how you are going to turn this website/campaign/idea into the money tree your parents told you never existed – that’s the secret to avoiding the queue outside the job centre. As Finch would say, affiliate marketing really isn’t a piss in the park.

I’ve learned all this the hard way because I reeked of dog shit when I started life as an affiliate. I adopted the scatter gun approach. I started as many sites as I could, as quickly and cheaply as possible and then prayed my bollocks off that one might make me some money – yes I even had one dedicated to compost!

I escaped the dog shit by realising there was a problem and making steps to correct that (washing my shoes, selling domains, closing down websites and focusing on core projects), you can do the same, it’s never too late.

I learned the wrong way to be an affiliate and you’d be surprised how doing the wrong thing can actually be the better way of learning how to do it properly. A man that makes no mistakes makes nothing and all that. I like to tell people it was one big experiment when in actual fact it was good ol’ fashioned naivety.

Recommended This Week:

Be sure to check out James’s blog, SkyRocket SEO. I stumbled across it several weeks ago and was impressed by the content. Plenty of takeaway tips to sink your teeth in to. You can also follow him on Twitter. Cheers for the guest post, James.
I’d also like to say a major thanks to everybody who has purchased my Premium Posts so far. I’ve been genuinely flattered by the feedback and sheer number of sales. It’s nice to know that so many of you are willing to pay for ~~my balls~~ my grand wisdom. Plentyoffish advertisers, read this for more info.

10 Giveaway Signs That You Work Too Much

May 10 2011

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re stubbornly refusing to go to bed as long as yesterday’s campaigns still need fixing. Your eyes are sore, your back is creaking and your balls are mash potatoed from the chronic strain. Does this sound like last night to you? Even worse, does this sound like EVERY night?

I believe I could write an encyclopedia on how to live the most unhealthy life imaginable while working from home. It’d be pretty fucking girthy too, because I’ve learnt every trick in the book.

This is not my attempt to claim a medal or the dubious honour of “Guaranteed to be Dead Before You”, but rather a wake-up call for any other affiliates who are putting themselves under an unhealthy amount of strain. It’s something that applies to everybody, whether you’re making money or not.

Blistering tension headaches – Last year, I went to get laser eye surgery only to find that my eye pressure had soared to such a level that some crazy popping shit would have probably gone down if they’d operated on me. Okay, they weren’t ready to explode, but I was on the receiving end of some blistering tension headaches. You remember the high school advice about taking a fifteen minute break every hour? We are the square eyed gremlins that should actually be listening.

I’ve managed to get rid of my constant headaches. Which is a relief because they can be quite debilitating for anybody who works in front of a screen. Drink lots of water, maintain good posture and take regular breaks. A good backlighting helps too.

Days become one – Is your 2011 Christmas calendar marked with “same shit, different day” from January to December? Right from a young age, we’re given structure in our lives through the regularity of school on Monday to Friday. Most people then find themselves in day jobs that follow the same pattern. For those who wake up one day realizing they don’t have to go to work anymore, days tend to merge together and it can be very easy to grow tired through the absence of a healthy fixed schedule.

It’s not a sin to take the weekend off. But if you have no recollection of what day it is, or the date, or even the time, you probably need to introduce greater structure to your day. One thing I’ve noticed is that I budget to spend whatever time I have on the same tasks I’ve set. Give myself too much time and I’ll simply work twice as slow. So by giving yourself two days off, you can force greater productivity out of the remaining work days.

Checking your phone constantly – How often do you find yourself having your ear chewed off in a really boring pub conversation, quietly wishing the bastard across the table would just drink up so his bladder bursts and you can check your Gmail? Just because technology is at your fingertips 24/7, that doesn’t mean you’re constantly on the job.

I haven’t used a mobile phone in over 7 months since I moved to Thailand. That’s partly down to a desire to be disconnected from distracting pocket vibrations, and partly because my instruction manual is in Thai. Either way, your emails aren’t going to disappear. And you don’t want to end up acting like this.

Volatile mood swings – Does your mood correlate with your stats? Are you a whimsical little treasure on good days and a WickedFire poster on bad days? Most full time affiliates are passionate about their jobs to such an extent that the pride and engrossment of running their business can cloud all sense of judgment. So if you have a bad day and your ROI plummets, it can be very tempting to let the stats control your mood.

Part of overcoming volatile mood swings is your ability to recognize that the good days are closely intertwined with the bad days. None of us are enjoying profitable campaigns without a rich memory of the nights spent bashing our heads at a brick wall. You have to embrace that this is the way it goes. You chose not to have the security of a guaranteed salary. In return, you have the freedom to excel and earn as much as you deserve.

Fleeting bouts of insomnia – When you’re eating pizza for breakfast, you know you’ve got problems. I prefer to do much of my work at night, but I still get a lot of sleep. So much so that my maid is probably convinced I’m a vampire by now.

It’s a simple fact that the brain cannot and will not function at it’s optimal level if you’re not getting enough sleep. If you work through the night, take a two hour nap, then get up and go again – you’re going to hit a wall sooner rather than later. It might not come directly in the form of passing out at your desk, but the body will find it’s way to hate on you. Lack of sleep also ties in very closely to volatile mood swings.

Sore back, neck, shoulders and abdomen – How is your posture? Most of us spend unhealthy numbers of hours sat at our desks, and this will wear the body down if your posture is all wrong. For me, the most important things to remember are to keep my back straight to avoid stomach and abdomen cramps. And also to have the correct line of vision with my monitor.

Those of you with multi-screens are much more likely to suffer from eye strains and pounding headaches because the eyes have to work that much harder. You should be eye-level with the top of your screen. If you’re constantly craning your neck and switching to new screens, it’s going to increase the tension. Ryan Eagle probably has the headaches of a squashed badger with his 17 screen setup.

Social butterfly to Friday Night Hermit – A side effect of days becoming one, it can be very easy to lose grip on your social life if it becomes the afterthought of running a business. I’ve mentioned in many posts how I used to be much more social before I took on the responsibility of earning my own wages.

Back in my day job, Friday felt like Friday should. You’ll often see that entrepreneurs and affiliates find it very difficult to capture that same Friday feeling when in their minds, they’d love to have one extra day to get done everything they’d sat down and planned on the previous Sunday night. Either way, you can’t afford to become a hermit. There’s no point in earning a fortune if you can’t muster the freedom to actually enjoy it.

Shortened attention span – One of the primary reasons why I have become a total sucker for white noise and binaural beats. Ever since high school, my attention span has been nothing short of a pain in the arse. I’ve often been left wondering how so many great ideas could slip through my fingertips, only to be distracted by the next. It’s a painful cycle and I can’t stress highly enough how focus and concentration are kingpins to any entrepreneur’s chances of success.

The good news for me is that binaural beats and white noise have done wonders for my focus. It all depends on the individual, but I recommend them highly if you suffer from a lack of clarity in what you’re trying to achieve when you sit down at your desk.

Failure to recognise your successes – This can be devastating, truly devastating, to your mood. If you can’t recognise a success – no matter how tiny it is – you will never be successful. Success isn’t born out of the look of envy in other people’s eyes at Affiliate Summit. It comes from within. You have to be able to acknowledge your own triumphs as often as you kick yourself in the balls and resent those inevitable failed campaigns.

Similarly to appreciating success, you need to be able to say “Enough is enough” on those rare days where you cross off all your tasks and still feel you could do a little more. In the end, you’ll work yourself to the brink. Giving up against your will becomes the only option. Why spoil a good day? Reward yourself when you achieve your goals!

God awful dieting – Hold hands, I have a confession to make. I am currently cleansing my system with raw food. This probably sounds, to my typical readership, like a genuine pussy move. But listen, there’s only so many Jumbo Sausage Rolls one man can handle before he starts to feel like the casting director of Biggest Loser is stalking him in the streets. While I have no interest in becoming a vegetarian, I do see clearly how a bad diet can leave me feeling half-baked.

After bitching about my pain last night on Twitter, dearest Barman of ppc.bz offered this cookie of advice:

“hit the gym to build some muscle you lazy git”

I usually only trust Barman’s judgment where weed porn and cutting-edge Billy Mays gifs are concerned, but in this case, he has a point. Exercise and dieting are fundamental cornerstones for not feeling like a lazy slob. My excuse for eating poorly has always been that I don’t have time to cook. And it’s not so much the cooking, but more the subsequent fire that keeps me occupied. But this is just another symptom of working too hard. Any excuse to avoid the alternative.

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.

Survived: Two Years Of Full Time Affiliate Marketing

Mar 31 2011

April marks the two year anniversary of my luminous full-time career as an affiliate marketer. I could use this occasion to celebrate the arduous hours spent scratching my balls, surfing for dating pics, or munching reheated pizza over my inbox. But where would be the sense in that?

Two years is a long time in an industry that doesn’t know how to stand still. I quit my day job at the height of the rebill boom back in 2009. And I must’ve pissed off Lady Luck somewhere along the line because my last day at work happened to coincide with the death of all my profitable campaigns. What do they call that in the corporate world? Something like “a difficult period of transition”?

You haven’t felt a “difficult period of transition” until you’ve been sat in your new home office, on the first day, wondering how to make a living for the rest of your life.

The answer, as I eventually came to discover, was by scrapping and slaving away. It might not have been the most graceful jump in to running my own business, but I just about managed to keep my shit in tact. The first year was an eye-opener in every sense. I moved slowly from promoting rebills towards more sustainable offers that didn’t require a WHOIS registration just to sleep at night.

For all the success I enjoyed pushing shameless rebills, my business was in no way equipped to deal with any serious growth. That’s the price you pay for being obsessed with dollar signs but blind to the supporting acts that lay the foundations of any successful business. If you don’t have an accountant, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you don’t have somebody you can go to for expert business advice, bam, there goes your kneecap too.

Christ knows how much money I surrendered in 2009 through taxes alone thanks to my stupid tunnel vision. The attitude I adopted was paramount to poison.

“Taxes? What do you think I am? A banker?” I didn’t register a company, I didn’t bother taking on an accountant and I sure as hell didn’t treat my work like a real job.

I had to learn that it wasn’t all about me. And no individual is smart enough to make the correct decision every time in all aspects of his work. So if my first year as a full-time affiliate marketer gave me a reality check, I suppose the last year has been spent acclimatizing to that reality.

I’m still no closer to being able to explain what exactly I do for a living (“Err, I build websites and market products… Ahh, forget it. I’m just a web programmer“), but at least I feel like my business is not about to be swept from underneath me.

One thing I can say for sure, if you’re making those first tentative steps in to affiliate marketing with a very limited budget, it gets easier. It might not feel like the shit is even possible when you’re still turning up negative ROIs, but it does get easier.

It’s amazing how in two whole years of doing what I do, the actual success formula has changed very little. Sure, the traffic sources come and go. The offers are swings and roundabouts. But making profitable campaigns is very easy once you’ve locked down the method in the madness. So much of affiliate marketing is about finding that one sweet spot, and then running with it until it stretches no further.

One of my most successful dating landing pages is something I threw together back in 2009 and have barely changed since. While I’ve learned a lot since then, and keep pushing myself to learn more, you’re never more than one small break away from making it in this industry. One moment of genius, one great idea…and so much can snowball from so very little.

The basic mechanics of affiliate marketing are as simple as they ever were. But moulding everything around it in to a successful business takes a lot more thought, a lot more work and a lot more time. Something tells me two years is just the start.

Recommended This Week:

If you’re based in the UK and worried about your affiliate taxes, now is the time to sort them out. Before the new tax year! I highly recommend Crunch for their flat-rate £60/month service. It takes a few days to get setup, but it’s worth it for peace of mind if you don’t already have an accountant – or fancy shafting your old one.
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
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.