Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

8 Good Books for your March Reading List

Mar 20 2014

Here are 8 good books to add to your March reading list.

Each has inspired me, intrigued me, or offered some kind of actionable advice for the trials of full-time affiliate marketing.

Enjoy!

Show Your Work

Anybody who has felt Writer’s Block should be jealous of Austin Kleon.

His first book, Steal Like an Artist, rode a wave of enormous fanfare to the top of the Bestsellers list and stayed there. I read the whole thing in about 50 minutes.

Nicely done, Mr. Kleon.

It’s like he slapped together his most read blog posts, sandwiched them between some artsy fartsy illustrations, and cashed the cheque.

That said, less is more.

Austin has a nice writing style that offers actionable advice on the ‘small things’ in your business life. It may only be a short read, but you’ll pick up at least two or three lightbulb suggestions.

Show Your Work is probably less relevant to affiliates than Steal, but it’s good for a quick pick-me-up over coffee.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win

Written by Scott Adams, aka ‘the guy who does the Dilbert comic’, this book has been passed round the affiliate community like a bad case of herpes.

Barman spoke highly of it, as did Charles Ngo.

I’m torn by it.

There is some excellent advice for living your life by systems instead of goals. Adams argues that goal-setting leads to discouragement through the constant exposure to failure:

“Have I achieved my goal? No, therefore I’m a failure.”

vs.

Have I followed my system? Yes, therefore I’m increasing my chances of success.”

He has some very good points.

The rhetoric is hurt somewhat by the corniest endorsements of positive affirmations I’ve seen since accidentally watching The Secret. It’s incredibly American. Those of a dry, British disposition will wait until the house has been empty for at least six hours before taking a crack at it:

“I, Finch, am a strong and confident woman.”
“I, Finch, am a strong and confident woman.”

Like most vegetarians writing a self-help book, Adams then spirals in to a tangent over the benefits of eating really bland food and exercising a lot.

Don’t get me wrong. I love what How to Fail has to say on systems and not following your passions. The rest sat uneasily on my feathers.

Still worth picking up.

Chronic Marketer

I picked up this book half expecting it to set our industry back a decade. The ugly ducklings of the marketing landscape: drowning in Mary Jane from 9-5, sometimes getting out of bed. Sometimes.

It was actually a really interesting read, packed full of insights from a guy who has lived and breathed the Adult industry (from a safe distance, as far as I’m aware).

If you want to know what marketing techniques you should be learning in 2014, there’s a very simple solution: go watch some porn.

It’s the most competitive online space, and it demands the most effective advertising.

Many of the persuasion devices we take for granted today were tried and tested in the porn business first. Brad Gosse touches on this in Chronic Marketer, but he also offers excellent advice for scaling your business and detonating any fear of failure.

The Lean Startup

I guess I’m a little late to the party. This book has been on my radar for a long time.

I finally picked up a copy only to find… these are the exact principles I, and most affiliates, have been using for years.

The Lean Startup boils down to three concepts: test, measure and improve.

Eric Ries argues that most companies fail because they commit time and money to unproven concepts. They go to market with the wrong product. The introduction of shorter test cycles would bring this mistake to light much earlier, and so he advocates the validated learning of minimum viable products.

Affiliates swear by lean marketing (which is why we’re the best online marketers in the world), so much of this book will merely highlight how wrong the rest of the world has been doing it.

While Ries may not be pioneering much of his own making, he certainly puts together a compelling argument. If you have any interest in startups whatsoever, this is a must-read.

If you already swear by lean principles, I suggest pillaging the many books on Toyota’s management for more.

Operation Mincemeat

One of the most famous (and successful) wartime deceptions ever attempted.

Operation Mincemeat saw the corpse of Major William Martin, a British Royal Marine, washed ashore in the south of Spain. Tied to his body was a briefcase full of personal items and important military documents. When pieced together by Nazi officials, those documents would indicate an imminent Allied attack on Greece. Except… Major William Martin never existed. The corpse was a Welsh tramp, the documents were all fakes, and the attack was aimed at Sicily.

Like many affiliates, I read a lot of psychology books. How to sell, how to persuade, how to do this, and how to do that. It gets repetitive. This book is a remarkable case study of persuasion at its finest.

It reconstructs how British Intelligence sold Hitler a story that would help change the course of World War 2.

A classic tale of ‘knowing your market’, with stakes that thousands of lives depended on.

Double Cross

Similar in theme to Operation Mincemeat, and written by the same author.

This is another story of seduction, persuasion and meticulous planning.

Double Cross follows the D-Day spies who kept thousands of German troops away from the successful Normandy landings — without firing a single weapon. A quintessential psychological mindfuck that the Nazis never recovered from.

The book is littered with real-life examples of cognitive ‘blind spots’ that a clever marketer can exploit. But more importantly, it’s a true story worth reading.

Inside Apple

I’m not an Apple ‘fanboy’, but I use many Apple products.

Gadget disclosure: I have an iMac and an iPad. My phone is a Samsung Galaxy S4. My laptop is, well… it’s an HP piece of shit.

Okay, here we go: I admire Apple, and you should too.

(Hissssssss…)

I’m intrigued by the secret sauce that goes in to Apple products. Such closely guarded secrets, and so eagerly devoured. How do they do it?

Inside Apple does a good job of delving in to Apple’s decision-making process. It puts forward a cohesive argument for whether that success can continue without Steve Jobs.

It’s a brisk read.

If you’ve seen the epic 590 page Steve Jobs biography hogging the bestseller shelf and thought, “Well, I’d like to know the guy’s tricks, but I don’t give a shit about his high school or upbringing“, then this is the book for you.

The Amateurs

If you are British, with an appetite for profanity, and a fucked up sense of humour — and especially if you enjoyed Kill Your Friends — prepare to lose a weekend.

The Amateurs is about golf, murder and sex.

A strange combination that produces immense belly laughs mainly because John Niven is such a bad, bad man.

Blog Updates:

As you can see, the site has been given a lick of paint. Crucially, my face is now featured centerfold on the homepage.

Treasure me, I won’t be here forever. (As I say to my girlfriend every night…)

I was gutted to miss the recent STM Bangkok meetup. I trust those of you who made the journey absolutely smashed it to pieces. Let me know how you found Thailand!

I’m heading to Bangkok and Hua Hin next month. I will also be at Clickdealer’s Barcelona meetup having scooped some tix from their revenue generating competition. Thanks Clickdealer!

When to Kill a Profitable Campaign

Feb 27 2014

Campaign A makes you $50/day. Campaign B makes you $10/day.

Which one should you work on?

Most people would say Campaign A.

There isn’t a correct answer.

What if Campaign A can be scaled to $100/day, but Campaign B can reach $1000/day?

Often we fail to compute one of the most important metrics of all:

The value of our time.

You only have 24 hours in a day.

A third of those are spent sleeping (and the rest are too often spent daydreaming).

If you are a one man team — like many affiliates — you need to pick the campaigns that have the biggest possible upside relative to your desired income.

It sounds so simple.

And yet you wouldn’t believe how many affiliates I see with big hopes and penny pinching campaigns.

On a typical day, how many hours do you spend ‘in the zone’ with your creative juices flowing? 2? 3?

Is it smart to waste those precious hours on a campaign that *even if it succeeds* will net you the same wage as a guy flipping burgers for The Man?

No offence, but I don’t think so.

There are exceptions.

If you can learn the craft whilst making a small profit, you are being paid for an extremely lucrative education.

That’s smart.

If you spend your time launching tiny campaigns on the assumption that lots of small wins will add up to one big success, you’ve got it tits up. The churn will beat you.

Get positioned where the economies of scale work in your favour.

Yes, even if it means giving up your profits.

It is much easier to hit success with one big campaign and dozens of losers. The alternative is lots of small winners that all need management to stay profitable.

Once you start managing small campaigns, its difficult to stop. You become emotionally invested in retaining small profits, putting out small fires rather than blazing a path to the bonanza.

On many occasions I have surveyed the carnage of my CPVLabs and made the tough decision to delete campaigns that were making me money.

Why?

Because time is money, and I was losing too much of it.

There’s a famous saying that goes:

“Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves”

Bullshit.

Not in this industry.

If you start managing pennies, you can forget about the pounds.

They belong to somebody with bigger balls and a bigger wallet.

Why Wayne Rooney Gets Paid And You Don’t

Feb 21 2014

At £300,000 per week, Wayne Rooney is about to become the English Premier League’s all-time highest paid footballer.

How could a hot-headed, granny-banging Shrek lookalike possibly deserve this much for kicking a ball around?

It’s very simple.

Because the market says so.

He’s entitled to every last penny.

But is he? Really?

There is a loud and passionate argument against Shrek’s pay raise.

One that goes (and often spells) like this:

Ah, yes.

Wealth Redistribution: splitting the right from the left since the beginning of politics. Second only to God Almighty.

The NHS attack is a common analogy used to explain why men like Wayne Rooney should be held in contempt for rolling in the moolah.

“I saw Aunt Betsy scraping her pennies together in the post office today. Bloody terrible, it is. She does real work that saves lives. If anyone deserves a pay raise, it’s Betsy. Not these footballers who only work 12 hours a week!”

Or so goes the line of thinking.

Yes, Wayne is rich and the vast majority of Aunt Betsys are not.

We get it.

So loaded is Shrek, in fact, that he can afford to buy an hour-long romp with one of his premium grandma hookers and still come away making a net profit under services provided. Now that is rich.

And it’s all because of the market — a judge of value somewhat more sophisticated than a Daily Mail comments section free-for-all.

There is a school of thought in the UK that goes like this:

High wages should be reserved only for those who perform life saving feats, or me.

Or me?!

Well, why not?

Show me somebody who doesn’t think they deserve a pay raise and I’ll show you somebody who has reached the very precipice of their career ladder.

I have trouble finding those from ‘the 99%’ who are happy to turn down a pay raise on the basis that somebody else deserves one more.

Most of us take what we can get, while we can still get it.

Those who don’t fall in to two groups:

a) Philanthropists: who often spend the prime of their careers as devout capitalist pigs.

b) Hippies: who believe that money can’t buy happiness, and seldom give it the chance.

Wayne Rooney is called a mercenery for taking the best possible deal on the market.

The same could be said for movie stars, bankers and the entire herd of Kardashians.

But it can also be said for me, and probably you, and certainly anybody who ever let their eyes linger on the salaries in the local job listings.

The cold, hard truth is this:

What you earn has absolutely nothing to do with what you deserve.

Nothing, zero, nada.

Your passions won’t make you rich, and neither will your daily good deed count.

Only the market can make you rich.

If you want to earn a lot of money, here are the two best options you have — besides winning the lottery:

Develop a skill that somebody will pay a premium for.
Develop a product/service that can be packaged and sold for a lot of money.

Given the choice, most people are already reaching for their lucky dips.

In a parallel universe, the next Wayne Rooney is developing his football skills and getting ready to sell them for £300,000 per week.

A thousand pounds for every brain cell, or so the joke goes on Twitter.

Well, I would be retweeting my way to the bank on those numbers.

It doesn’t matter what Wayne deserves to earn, the point is that he does indeed earn it.

And who benefits?

Shrek, undoubtedly.

But 45% of Shrek’s pay raise gets sucked back in to the system as taxed income. Which in turn is redistributed to pay for things like… NHS doctors and surgeons.

Of course, the economics are forgotten in a heartbeat. The real agenda has nothing to do with doctors and surgeons. Or economics.

It has everything to do with jealousy.

It’s his wage vs. your wage. Simple as that.

There is only one judge to determine who wins; who makes a killing and who breaks a back for small change. His name is the market.

And a cruel judge he can be.

“What is somebody willing to pay me?” This is the only truth that has any meaningful impact on your earning potential.

The way many people lead their lives battling for wealth, you’d forgive the market for stopping the fight in the first round.

They are woefully unprepared, trained in the wrong disciplines, mastered up to the eyeballs in degrees that might as well be titled ‘fannying around’, pushing shit up a mountain in jobs that can never give them what they want. Because what they want leads back to more money.

If the market had a voice, it would need only four words to get its message across:

“Work smarter, not harder.”

Not everybody defines happiness as the pursuit of money.

That’s probably a good thing.

But if you are one of the many who do, you need only look at the market for the clearest sign of what you should be doing with your life.

Affiliate marketers get that.

Wayne Rooney might only have 300 brain cells but he also gets that.