Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

Gaming User Attributes For Better Or Worse

Mar 03 2011

I have many tools at my disposal that allow me to spy on the ads of my competitors. Tools that automate the task across Facebook and Plentyoffish on a sweeping scale that simply wouldn’t be possible with my own eyes.

I’m not a huge fan of these tools, personally. I use them, but I wish they didn’t exist. There are a thousand copycats for every creative marketer who manages to find a formula that hits the sweet spot. The harm far outweighs the good when you’re in the small minority who actually pave the way for others to follow (and rip, and steal).

Regardless, the tools are out there. If you’re not going to use them, somebody else will. So I choose to use them. One of the things that strikes me most about the ads I see being published is the sheer weight that affiliates are placing on user attributes to promote their offers.

Here’s the thing. User attributes are like the holy grail of direct response marketing. If we don’t have them, our best laid marketing plans are metaphorical turds being launched in to a whirlpool. On a good day, something solid will come out the other side. On most days, that’s not going to happen.

But give an affiliate some user attributes and what do you know? He suddenly becomes the world’s most in-your-face marketer.

A perfect example of an affiliate ad relying 100% on user attributes would be this:

“Single, UK Male, Aged 23?” Followed by some drivel about why you’re in high demand to join whichever dating site is paying him the most.

I’ve received a few emails asking me to elaborate on a post I made a couple months ago highlighting this issue. So let me explain the problem with ads like the example above.

Firstly, they have no relevance. If I’m answering “YES!” to all three of these attributes, it doesn’t mean I give a damn about your new dating service. For all you know, I could be clicking in the hope that being 23 and thrust out the womb in the UK somehow entitles me to a free monkey spanker. Imagine my disappointment when I land on a default Match.com lander and see some cake-faced bint in her panties asking for any poor sod with a credit card. Wait, I’m 23 year old English stallion though? Where’s my VIP membership?

That’s right. It’s nowhere. Because you sold me a false dream. So now I’m going back to my Plentyoffish account, crying boohoo, and falling victim to a better marketer who realised that my attributes were worth more than a dynamic headline.

I’ve explained many times the importance of having an effective sales funnel that acts on your original message. By knowing that a user is 23 years old, single and from the UK…you actually have a great foundation to build on.

But calling out those attributes is like reciting a horoscope and expecting me to stand like a fucking meerkat with my notepad ready. I know Mystic Meg is a fraud. I know I can’t be the only Aquarius in the world who should be “paying special attention at the water cooler today because new love starts with S and the moon is changing” or some shit.

Yes, it pains me to say it. But most victims of our marketing ploys have cottoned on. It’s going to take more than simply reading them a horoscope to get them to do what we want.

What you need to do is let your marketing create a picture that appeals to this demographic, without giving the game away that you KNOW their frigging attributes.

I think the attribute targeting that boggles my mind most is the “smoking” card. Do you really think that you can sell a service in one swoop by claiming that Match.com is looking for more single smokers? I mean, seriously? A smarter move would be to say NOTHING about what you know, use a nice stock image with a woman taking a puff from a cigarette and casually mention that you’ll find women who cater exactly to your lifestyle by joining Dating Site X.

Maybe even use a testimonial with a scorching hot female – miraculously the same age as the user, and from the same town (WTF?) – who happens to be enjoying a smoke while beckoning your loins forth. This kind of subtle marketing sends a message to the user without giving the game away that your marketing is actually a lot dumber than he has any reason to suspect.

Building fictional selling points in a service might grab you a few extra leads, but the long term damage is much more severe. You can’t sustain those leads when you’re kicked off the offer for poor quality.

I have several direct relationships with dating services who have been so happy with the quality of my leads that they’ve taken me on personally and offered me payouts beyond anything I can get with CPA networks. If I have one tip for developing relationships like these, it’s to keep your main sell simple.

I think it boils down to grasping the single biggest selling point of the service. Ultimately, the final shove down your sales funnel has to be an acknowledgment that the service IS exactly what it is. If you bait and switch, you better have humble intentions of scaling because you’re gonna get shot down sooner rather than later.

Exploiting what we know about the user is so important to a profitable campaign, and yet the art of subtlety seems to be lost on so many. It’s possible to grab a demographic by the balls without spitting out your bullet point list of desired attributes.

If you’re using landing pages, you have SO much opportunity to “divide and conquer” as I like to put it. I’ve seen many dating services publishing alternate landing pages aimed at niche markets – whether targeting by religion, race, age or location. And still, many affiliates choose to ignore them in favour of the manufactured selling points that bring them the highest CTR. These are the marketers who will drop first as competition increases and bid prices rise.

Once again, I’ve got to stress that so much of your success is going to depend on whether you treat this as a short or long term business. Our ability to target user attributes makes us an absolute Godsend for every single company that doesn’t know what we know. You can either use that advantage to game traffic, or you can use it to show the kind of stunning returns that will have companies paying higher and higher to retain your services.

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
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.

Are You Pretending To Work At Home?

Feb 23 2011

I think we’d all agree that it’s a great luxury to be able to work from home. As much as I enjoyed the social side of being in an office and having a laugh, there’s no place I’d rather be at 9am than tangled in my own bedsheets. Living in your comfort zone can provide the acid test for how committed you are to what you do.

Staying productive is something I talk about a lot because I believe self-discipline to be the single greatest asset to any entrepreneur, or anybody who controls their own working environment. Without it, we could spunk entire afternoons on YouTube or away from the office altogether.

I think we all know that it’s important to stay productive, but not many of us have reached the stage where we feel like we’re in total control of our environment.

So here are four tips for improving your productivity if you work from home:

1. Separate your work space from your living arrangements.

This is pretty much critical to your sanity. For over two years, I worked in a claustrophobic bedroom where I also drank, ate, slept and let the magic happen. The problem with having your office in your bedroom is that as affiliate marketers, we’re chained to a 24/7 industry that never sleeps. There’s always one more email to answer, some stats to refresh or a brainfart to research.

One of my priorities when I moved to Bangkok was to find a three bedroom apartment that had plenty of space. My girlfriend also works from home, so we opted for a 350 sq/m sprawling mass of rooms. We both have a home office, our puppies have their own bedroom and there’s more than enough space to be able to differentiate between “This is where I work”, “This is where I sleep”, and “This is where I shit”.

2. Have a schedule.

Many people consider the 9-5 to be a mental prison. The same hours, on the same days of the week for the rest of their working lives. But what can’t be argued is that routine adds order and momentum to your working day.

Nobody can tell you the best routine. Some people work better in the morning, while others can only think straight at night. Your location in the world also makes a difference.

When I have breakfast, America is going to bed and the UK is already fast asleep. This gives me a perfect opportunity to fire off my emails and work out. I can go for a swim, eat some lunch and really think about what I want to achieve before the morning has already passed me by.

If you’re going to have a schedule, you need to stick to it. So you need to plan ahead and leave time for that familiar experience of life screwing you over, or people having other ideas about how you should spend your time. It’s easy for those working at home to fall in to the trap of becoming everybody else’s bitch. Maybe your housemates want you to run errands because you have “all that time on your hands”. Or your neighbour wants you to watch out for a parcel delivery because it was too convenient to expect you to do them a favour than organize to pick the damn thing up themselves.

These are all familiar stories of how working from home can turn you in to a Samaritan at the beck and call of everybody else. So take back control and get some self-discipline. Even if it’s a flimsy whiteboard with your working hours scrawled in the kitchen for your wife to see.

You can always bust out my favourite tetchy complaint: “I didn’t get where I am today by taking care of other people’s shit.” You might be seen as unreasonable, but you’re in the right. Many of us have worked 16 hour days for months on end to be in the position that we are, so having a schedule that other people respect isn’t too much to ask.

3. Understand the difference between staying busy and getting work done.

Sometimes I have days where I only work for a few hours but what I achieve is significant because it’s a step towards a long term goal. Other days, I work for 12 hours and cross off dozens of tasks only to find that I haven’t actually achieved much because I’ve been “keeping busy” rather than making any measurable progress.

What is “keeping busy”?

– Optimizing campaigns without analyzing the data.

God, I hate myself when I do this. I’ll mark down a task for the day to optimize campaign X, and then I’ll go in and introduce some new ads or tweak my landing pages – but I won’t look at the data and make any logical assessments. If you’re forever split testing and never coming to conclusions that affect your future campaigns, you’re the perfect example of somebody who keeps busy for the sake of being busy rather than achieving goals.

– Managing people.

I’m not a project manager. So whenever I add a task like “communicate with Freelancer X and ensure project is running fine”, I know that I’m being lazy. These are things that you should either be doing automatically or handing to a dedicated project manager. It’s not a step forward for your business if you’re spending the day waiting for emails and feeling satisfied that you’ve got everything under control.

– Research tasks.

I find that if I include any item resembling “Research this…” on my to-do list, I will revert to my lazy high school trait of promoting the easiest task to the one most worthy of my time. I never add research tasks to my to-do list for one reason. They’re not measurable. I can’t hold myself accountable at the end of the day. It’s easy to flick through a couple of forum posts in the space of five hours and then by the end of the day miraculously forget that those hours were actually wasted.

To put it simply, if you’re going to set yourself tasks, you should know exactly what you’re looking to achieve. Otherwise the goalposts will move as fatigue sets in at the end of the day.

4. Cancel out the noise.

Yes literally, check out SimplyNoise. White noise is a brilliant way of canceling out the distractions all around you. I like to listen to music every now and then, but having a TV blaring in the background makes it damn near impossible for me to work productively.

My girlfriend manages to stay focused on her tasks while watching America’s Next Top Model with a laptop balanced on the sofa. She’s obviously a freak. I couldn’t bring myself to remember my CPCs from my CPVs if I had such calamity unfolding before my eyes on-screen. Whether you think it affects you or not, your brain is tuned in to what is going on around you. I find white noise to be the best way of weeding out those distractions and keeping my focus where it needs to be. Scamming the nation needs mind meditation, right?

If you’re falling in to patterns of laziness, maybe it’s time to start adjusting your home environment. You know… divorce the wife, move in to the attic, ask the cat to start feeding himself. Small tweaks. I’m not advocating Josef Fritzl measures, but discipline and clarity can be a good thing for all parties concerned. Show the world that you don’t mess with a man and his berries.

Recommended This Week:

Ironically, given the nature of this post, I would like to recommend you join a forum. 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 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.

Growing A Business vs. Living Your Dream

Feb 11 2011

It’s hot and it’s sweaty. Everybody else is at work and the swimming pool is empty. Three months ago, before I moved to Thailand, I didn’t have to deal with this predicament. The only empty swimming pool was nextdoor’s Argos inflatable, and even that was ice-ravaged by winter. These days, it’s the question I have to answer every morning.

“Do I dedicate today to my business? Or do I just enjoy this crazy life?”

I was whinging at my girlfriend a few nights ago, frustrated over how wasteful I thought we’d been with money. I managed to spend close to Â£10,000 in January (That’s about $15,000 for you Yankiepops) which is quite a feat considering Thailand has this misguided reputation as the place for living on a shoestring budget. I’m sure it is, by the way. But if you don’t learn Thai – or at least date one – you’re going to find yourself existing in a different economy to the natives.

My ambition has always been to live a nomad lifestyle. To roam between countries, plant a laptop on a beach, get some work done, then jump on the next plane. I guess this is what we call “living the dream”. And for the last few months, I’ve been privileged enough to enjoy that luxury.

Understand though, this variety of “living the dream” makes it very difficult to grow a business. Nobody puts as many hours of thought in to their work on the beach as they do at their desk. Unless you’re Nick Throlson.

I’ve found myself wrestling between two states of mind. Firstly, the desire to knuckle down and spend every penny and every hour investing in my business, taking it as far as it can go and only then enjoying the fruits of my labour. After all, this is the very same drive and work ethic that got me this far. Why stop now?

Or I can listen to the other voice in my head. The voice saying, “Hey Finch, It’s 35 degrees out, why aren’t you in the pool? You’ve earnt this much”

Inevitably, after laying down ten grand in a month, the conservative side of me rose to the surface and argued with my girlfriend that as much as I can afford to live this life, it’s just not going to let me grow my business as fast as I want to.

But she raised a good point. Why even have this lifestyle, location independent albeit paying the premium, if I wasn’t going to enjoy it fully?

I think the reality is that I do enjoy it. And I do realize how lucky I am to be in a position at 23, that many people will work a whole lifetime to never have a hope of sharing. But after spending every hour of my life that came before preparing for this luxury, I’m not quite sure how to react now that I have it. Do I stand still and cherish the moment? Or do I put my foot down and stick to the same working patterns that have served me well?

Affiliate marketing is a fast-paced industry where the voices around you will constantly be telling you to push for the next dollar. If you’re not putting in the extra hour to attack a new offer, it’ll be money left on the table for somebody else. We all remember how it felt to not be making money, so we don’t want to fall back in to those trenches. Money left on the table is what we hate most.

When I look at my finances, I realize I don’t have to bite this bullshit and react to every movement in the industry. I don’t have to jump on every niche, split test every offer or open every email. But there’s so little substance to the work that we do, you could be forgiven for thinking it would all disappear in a heartbeat. Reacting becomes a natural instinct.

As much as I’d love to grow my business Zuckerberg-style and bypass millions to aim for billions, I’m slowly accepting that it doesn’t have to happen today or tomorrow. Most of us are very young and have the time on our hands to let our businesses grow naturally.

If you buy in to the affiliate marketing dream, you become convinced that scaling from hundreds to thousands of dollars per day has to happen overnight or it’ll never happen at all. This was the attitude I had back in my London bedroom, where everything about my life was focused on taking that next step.

Recently, I stumbled across a website called Kiva which I remember Bryn posted about last year. If you’re ever feeling that you’re not progressing with your goals, or that your riches aren’t accumulating fast enough, this is the website to visit for a shot of reality up the arse.

Entrepreneurs from poverty-stricken countries can use Kiva to ask for loans to launch businesses that would change their lives, and those of their families, for the better. Anybody can register to donate to their businesses and over time you will get the money back. It’s hard to read through some of the loan requests without your conversion rates fading in to insignificance.

While many of us would love to pitch a tower in Silicon Valley and claim the dominance of an industry, we shouldn’t dismiss simply providing a living for ourselves as anything less than amazing in the current economical climate. I’m trying to remind myself that Growing A Business vs Living My Dream doesn’t have to be an endless power struggle between two negative forces. They’re both great privileges and they should both be enjoyed.

I highly recommend you check out Kiva. It’s a great concept. What better way to give back as an entrepreneur than to help other entrepreneurs who have much greater challenges than ourselves? If you’re reading this and not making any money, it’s certainly not for a lack of opportunity. A lot of the entrepreneurs on Kiva have only one opportunity in life. It helps to keep that in perspective no matter how shitty you think your daily stats have been.

Recommended This Week:

My dashboard tells me this is the 100th post on Finch Sells. It’s taken me two years to notch them up, but I’d like to think it’s a fairly fluffless collection of posts. If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Love you long time. Thanks for reading.
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.
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