Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

Racial Stereotyping: It Ain’t Cool But It’s Profitable

Sep 13 2010

I was recently asked to troubleshoot the problems of a dating campaign where an affiliate had chosen to target single men in London. This was, to his reckoning, a “niche market”. But despite having very targeted London ad texts (“Meet Up In London”, “Looking For A Girlfriend In The Capital?” etc), he was still busting out with a low CTR and a mediocre conversion rate.

It’s not hard to diagnose why this would be the case. Anybody who’s ever lived in London, or traveled here, should be able to recognize that it’s one of the most culturally diverse and ethnically divided cities in the world. In fact, I’d have to say it’s probably one of the worst choices imaginable for a “niche city market”.

The whole point of segregating your market – or pinpointing a niche – is to find a common denominator in who you’re trying to sell to. It could be the fact that you’re marketing directly to single mums, black people, Japanese people…whatever.

If you choose to market to single men in London, you might think that you have a unique slant on your dating site. But it’s not enough. The composition of London’s single population is incredibly diverse. There are some regions in London – like Hayes – where I’ll get on a bus and feel like an alien from outer space for being white and speaking English.

Despite the ethnic diversity, many affiliates choose to use ad texts and images that represent their own demographic. Have you ever wondered why so many affiliates choose to promote dating offers to single men aged 25-35? It’s because that’s what they can relate to. It’s what they know. If you commit this error by stereotyping London as a white city, full of 25-35 year old single men who all share your personal taste in the fairer sex, well…have fun scraping the barrel for a profitable CTR.

White men are likely to click on ads with liberally dressed white women. Black men, surprise surprise, are more drawn to black women. You don’t need me to stress the importance that Muslim singles place in finding a partner from the same religion. You’re blowing an insane number of impressions on people who will never click your ads if you fail to filter the uninterested parties out of your campaigns.

You’re simply never going to get the most bang for your buck if you ignore these racial stereotypes. It’s just not going to happen, homes. And most affiliates don’t even get as far as to consider the stereotypes to begin with.

I’d strongly advise you check out this recent post on OKCupid about The Real Stuff Racial Classes Like. This is dynamite information that should set your mind racing for ways to target various races.

If you’re going to launch a Facebook campaign marketing to London singles, you should really be looking at the ethnic breakdown of each borough in the city. And even how rich each borough is. We have an instinctive attraction to those of our own class. You can then choose to run your “White blonde chick” creatives in only the boroughs where there’s a White Caucasian majority.

You can also avoid spunking money up the wall by filtering out the boroughs where Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities dominate the ethnic makeup. Or better yet, why not make some money by targeting them separately? This is where the low hanging fruit is waiting to be snatched.

I’m talking in UK examples, but every country in the world has variation in it’s ethnic makeup. Too many marketers have a “one size fits all” mindset. And while it can still be profitable, you’ll never know how much money you’re wasting.

Consider even a highly successful dating campaign with a 0.25% CTR on broad targeted America. When was the last time you took that campaign and divided it in to 50 smaller campaigns targeting each state? I would wrap my tail between my legs and fuck off never to blog again if you didn’t find at least 5 states where the ROI was dramatically different to your overall figure. These can be culled for more profit. Or you can research deeper in to the makeup of the state and produce creatives that more accurately portray the class of the peoples you’re marketing to. You know, whatever you want, whatever makes you money.

Geotargeting a campaign is a flimsy, wasted and overdone technique. It used to be like steroids for your CTR. But we’ve all been on RedTube enough times to realize that, actually, there aren’t THAT many slutty singles queuing up to chat to me from [insert your town here].

I can tell you now that 90% of affiliates out there won’t even bother to target deeper than the country of the user. If you’re slinging a “Work At Home” opportunity to the whole of America, do you REALLY think a housewife on some southern Texas ranch is going to respond in the same way as a city-savvy New York socialite?

Back when I was promoting bizopp rebills, the easiest way to improve my CTR and conversion rate was simply to target individual race classes.

A flog is essentially a marketing tool devised to make the reader think “Hold on, I can be like this”. Well, the flog is a lot more effective if the reader can relate to the social class and background of the person giving the testimonial. It’s logic that can be applied to any niche, anywhere, anytime.

Stereotypes exist for a reason, and for the most part it’s because they’re fucking true. Don’t be too politically correct to dare to exploit them. There’s plenty of us out there who already do just that and reap the rewards from them.

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The Benefits Of Being A Lazy Disorganized Bastard

Sep 07 2010

My desktop is a barren wasteland. A derelict graveyard of broken down CPA campaigns, rogue index.php redirects and semi-pornographic dating imagery.

I recently made the decision to invest in a new dual screen setup for my Mac. The idea being that with two screens, I’d have one for my emails and one for whatever I’m working on. Well, it didn’t really pan out like that. Blessed with twice the space, I now hoard twice as much shit. There are icons and folders scattered all over the shop. I have landing pages tucked away in places where your computer probably doesn’t have places.

One of the benefits of having a gigantic hard drive is that you rarely need to spare a thought for your disk space. I’m not much of a digital hoarder. I have the discographies of Radiohead and Of Montreal, a slowly expanding library of The Wire, and not much else. I don’t have much reason to empty my trash can. So I don’t.

It was only last week that I took a sweeping glance over said trash can. I’d imagine I was probably young enough to still be growing in to my chest hair love rug the last time I dared open that shit. Somehow on this nostalgic voyage in to the unknown, I rediscovered every single CPA campaign I’ve ever created. All the way back to late 2006. Considering I have an output of creating a campaign on most days of the week, most weeks of the year…it was quite a collection.

It’s really dawning on me, in the time it’s taking to sort through this shit, that we can be pretty rash to disregard good ideas and interesting concepts if we fall at the first hurdle. How many marketers out there test new campaigns and then ditch the creatives that don’t turn over a profit? It’s almost instinctive and I’m guilty as sin.

There’s no such thing as a perfect landing page. Some of the creatives I’ve been familiarizing myself with took me a whole day to put together, and about five minutes to disregard. Let me tell you how my usual house maintenance goes.

The brain wave strikes and I harvest a bunch of landing pages to sit on my desktop. I upload them to my server and setup campaigns. They either fail or succeed. Most of them fail.

The next day, I’m hung up on a new concept and the previous day’s work gets unceremoniously dumped in to a folder called “To Sort”. A couple of weeks later, “To Sort” becomes “To Sort From August”. Give it a few more days and “To Sort From August” finds itself clicked, dragged and subchilded inside a new “Seriously Finch, Sort This Shit Today” folder.

What happens next?

Yep, I throw a hissy fit and it gets dumped in the trash. Never to be seen again.

Today I have been slowly and meticulously restoring each and every failed landing page in to an archive. This is the sort of task I would only normally embrace if the other items on my to-do list were building backlinks or some other lame shit. But it’s actually great for finding inspiration.

When I first started affiliate marketing, I judged the success of my campaigns on whether I could choke a positive ROI from them on Google Adwords. Well, that ship sailed and so did the optimized – and actually quite effective – landing pages that I had at the time. But for all the hours I’ve spent preaching about building assets in this industry, surely every single landing page you create is an asset that you should store and reserve for the future?

Why trash your hard work? Even if a campaign totally bombs on Facebook, it could still make a killing on POF or PPV. The traffic source and targeting are where your profit is normally made. But you wouldn’t throw your toys out of the pram and never market to “25-30 year olds” again just because targeting them once didn’t work, right?

Sure enough, a few of these old campaigns were retarded from the get-go and never destined to pay my council tax let alone make me rich.

I opened an old dieting creative and almost choked on my coffee when I saw the strapline:

“Be Honest, Love, You Can Afford To Lose A Little – Can’t You? …Don’t Be A Fat Bitch”

Vintage marketing. Offend the masses.

But in all seriousness, I’ve found some great inspiration and some excellent concepts that I was far too green as a marketer to ever make work at the first time of asking. I’m slowly working through the lot and screen-capping every landing page.

Two of the biggest stumbling blocks for new marketers are:

1. Giving up on campaigns too easily.
2. Lack of creativity.

Think twice before you disregard your failed efforts. Maybe when a new traffic source opens up, or when a new offer lands – they will suddenly become relevant again. You should remember that not many campaigns succeed at the first time of asking. If you trash everything that isn’t an overnight success, yes, you will have room for more porn on your hard drive. But you probably won’t be very rich.

It’s important to learn from your mistakes. And it can be tempting to mass delete work that ultimately flourished like a damp squib. But don’t do a Finch and bury your one moment of inspiration six folders deep in July’s “To Sort” pile. Sort that shit and keep it for future reference! You might make money from it someday.

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Clearly the moral of the above post is that you’d be a retard if you didn’t follow me on Twitter.

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I’m trying to think of more shit I can ask you to do, but I’m pretty much out of ideas until I get an ebook. Stay classy, affiliate marketing.

Getting The Most Bang For Your Buck

Sep 01 2010

It’s a new month full of new projects and new targets. Kids are about to go back to school and Christmas is looming in the not too distant future. If mindless seasonal fever does the trick for you, I guess you could say it’s a great time to make some money online. Same as it always was.

I’ve been speaking to quite a few virgin CPA marketers recently. One of the recurring questions I get asked is “If I have X amount to spend per month, where do you think I should invest it?”

Working with a limited budget is something that most of us had to deal with when we started. You’ve probably noticed how a lot of the top affiliates out there are young entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s. These are guys and girls who probably didn’t have fortunes to invest.

Personally speaking, I’d only just turned 21 when I first hit success. Besides the odd scrunched up tenner in my back jeans pocket, most of my money was…err, the bank’s money. When you’re crashing in to your overdraft on CPA campaigns, you kinda have to get the most bang for your buck. Or you’re metaphorically shagged.

I consider myself lucky that much of my initial investment was made at a time when you could rip out a CPA campaign and treble or quadruple your money overnight.

ROI is especially important when you’re just getting started. If you’re barely managing to break even on your campaigns, and wondering how the top affiliates manage to build up these empires – well – cheer yourself up with the knowledge that it gets easier. Everything gets easier. You just need to scrap away. Increase the size of your investment pot, by any means necessary, and get your cashflow sorted.

My life as an affiliate is a lot easier now that I can get away with running 25% ROI campaigns. I don’t really care if I blow a few thousand dollars in a day, as long as I’m seeing profit and enough of it to cover the risk and outgoings.

Let’s say you have a monthly budget of $500 after deducting what your wife’s blown up the wall to fill her wardrobe. It’s tough to pinpoint where to start. Do you go in to promoting car insurance offers on Facebook? Rebills on PPV? Maybe even gaming offers on the content network?

The way I see it, if you don’t have much money to invest, there’s no point in entering a market where volume is a necessary ingredient to survive. Thinking of slinging a dating offer to 25 year old guys in mainstream America? Forget about it. Even if you find a profitable campaign, the ROI is likely to be so slim that it’ll take you twelve months of waiting on cheques in the mail before your business has taken a single step forward. That’s the reality if you’re working with Facebook, Adwords or even POF lately.

If you don’t have a big budget, your mind should naturally be focused on cornering small markets instead. Now you’ve probably read this endorsement of scaling and placed your finger on the reply button, ready to call me a lousy lying hypocrite. Yes, scaling is what puts the finishing touches on a super affiliate’s new LA mansion. But without having money to invest – and lots of it – scaling is like climbing in to bed after too much tequila. Really fucking difficult and really fucking slow.

I’ve posted time and time again about laser targeting your campaigns; both on PPV and Facebook. This is the tactic I used regularly before I had the muscle to compete with other big spending affiliates on broad demos.

If you’re looking to promote dating offers on a small budget, make yourself familiar with the niche markets where it’s possible to make a killing with highly targeted, albeit low volume, campaigns.

Markets like Single Parent Dating, Black Dating, Jewish Dating, Asian Dating…these are all great entry points for the newbie marketer wanting to increase his capital with a high ROI. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you’re wasting an entire budget only to claim ten bucks of profit with Mate 1.

If there’s no logical micro-market for you to target, it’s just as easy to create one for yourself. Your network might not have a suitable offer for Midget Albino Dating, but that’s not to say your CTRs aren’t going to be through the roof if you decide to target them anyway.

The key to initial success is to sweep underneath the heavyweight affiliates. If you can’t compete with their budget, compete with the time and care that you dedicate to your campaigns. Pay attention to the details, the small print of the demos. Produce creatives that strike close to the mark.

As an affiliate who now works mainly with broad demos covering millions of people at a time, I can say that there are a lot of micro-markets that I’d love to scale in to and dominate – if only I had the time. But I tend to dedicate my resources to those mainstream campaigns where most of my money is made. And it’s the same for many high volume affiliates out there. Your best opportunity is to cover the ground that we don’t bother getting dirty with. Like a local politician going door to door while we can only put a sweeping ad on TV.

There are some campaigns that I had to turn down as a newbie marketer simply because they weren’t cost-efficient. And yet they might have been producing 50% ROI. That’s madness, isn’t it? Like your mum buying you a unicorn for Christmas only to slap her in the face and moan that you wanted something more mythical. Beggars can’t be choosers, but profit isn’t always the footprint of money well spent.

It’s important to make every penny count while you’re still dealing in small business steps. Forget about the rulebook that super affiliates abide by. They’re competing on a different playing field under different rules altogether.

The CPA landscape is dramatically different in 2010. It’s no longer possible to fill your boots with overnight riches by going straight for the kill in huge mainstream markets. You need to operate on the fringes, reap profit where the markets aren’t so saturated, and dig deeper to grow your business.

Just started advertising on Facebook?

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