Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

The Grind: Only Cool When You Know How To Stop

Jun 09 2010

There seems to be a sub-culture in affiliate marketing these days. It’s the by-product of a super competitive crowd, all working hard to stay one step ahead of their rivals. You’ve probably seen it splashed across your Twitter feed.

“Hey Joe, I can’t come out tonight. I’m busy grindin”

“I just dumped my girlfriend. She didn’t like my grind.”

“Forced to choose between the grind and playing with my balls, I choose the grind.”

Check out Ryan Eagle’s Twitter for more classic examples.

Affiliates seem to fail or succeed by virtue of “the grind”. The ability to work like a slave – through the night, through the morning – deaf to distractions and entirely committed to the art of getting shit done.

Everybody needs to be working at least 22 hour days or they’re just not working hard enough, right? I’ve been sucked in to this competitive mindset in the past, and I’m doing my best to wriggle my way free. The grind is only cool when you know how to stop.

I was sitting downstairs in my lounge the other day, vegetating like some kind of unshaven grizzly bear. It’s very rarely that I allow mindless police chases on budget Bravo TV to distract me from work, but I truly miss the days where I knew how to lounge around and do absolutely nothing.

That sounds like a step backwards. If you’re successful, why would you want to waste your energy on television while the opportunity of time passes you by? For me, it’s become an issue of retaining my health and limiting my insanity.

It’s very easy, as an affiliate marketer working from home, to get sucked in to working these grueling 16 hour days. And if like me, you enjoy what you do, the lure can be even harder to resist. During the earliest days, I built some kind of elitist dream where putting in those hours somehow made me more likely to be satisfied with my progress. It made me better than everybody else because I was somehow more committed or more in control of my destiny.

But if you don’t know when to stop, you’re not really in control, are you? You’re more of a prisoner than you ever were in your 9-5 when there was a clear beginning and end to your day.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that no matter how much money you earn, there will always be somebody earning more. If you fall in to the trap of pursuing this relentless grind, unable to dictate when your work day ends, it’s only going to be you that suffers. And I know personally because I’ve already suffered. My health has suffered, my moods have suffered. My ability to appreciate rare moments, simply festering on the couch with absolutely nothing to worry about – those have also suffered.

I went for a laser eye surgery consultation last week and somehow ended up referred to the hospital instead with skyrocketing eye pressure, pounding headaches and an overwhelming feeling of fatigue.

Ironically, I’ve always figured that my problems could be solved by money. My bad vision being one of them. I thought if I could afford to throw Â£5500 at surgery to correct my eyes, it would easily justify all those hours on the grind. But there are some things money can’t fix, so grinding for 16 hours straight isn’t always the answer. Even if affiliates are being systematically brainwashed to believe that’s the case.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working to reverse the trend. I’ve been slowly lowering the number of hours I allow myself to spend in front of a computer screen and trying to work in productive surges. I took some advice from lenstrom on Twitter and have been trying to integrate these health measures in to my day.

The biggest challenge for me is to learn that whatever lands on my desk, whatever lands in my inbox…it doesn’t always have to be acted on now. I’ve already caught some fire and some contrasting opinions on the matter.

Just two days ago I posted on Twitter: “Tomorrow…tomorrow is the day where I get back on track.”

These words seemed to raise some strong opinions from various affiliates. Apparently it came across as a sign of weakness. Why wait til tomorrow? Why not act today?

Well, that’s the attitude I’m trying to overcome. It’s not always in my best interest to act today. Everybody has to have an off switch, and the ability to resist the temptation to grind or work hard at every waking hour. It’s just not healthy. That I’m only 22 years old, and feel like I have the mental wear and tear of a 42 year old…surely can’t be healthy.

Yet everywhere you look across the affiliate marketing landscape, grinding hard is the cool thing to do. I read a forum topic a few weeks ago with the title line “How much do you earn in a day?”

A guy, admittedly with his head somewhere up his own arse, had wandered in bragging about his $1000/days. He promptly received a bunch of criticism that he was small-time, a little fish in a big ocean. He had no right to be smug. It got me thinking though.

Would I rather be the “big time” affiliate who’s torturing himself to add the next zero on his pay cheque? Or simply the smug dude who’s perfectly content with his $365,000/year? As far as I’m concerned, that’s not small time. Look at the average annual earnings in the United States and it’s anything but small time.

This industry seems to judge affiliates by the flash cars, the fancy mansions and the number of Americans they’ve convinced to shed the pounds with acai. It all boils down to money, and yet money is only a gateway to opportunities. It’s not happiness in itself.

I’ve always preached the need to work hard and harder than most. But the importance of appreciating what I already have is only just dawning on me. The next time somebody tells me to get back to the grind at 2am, or to stop thinking about tomorrow rather than today, I’ll probably tell them with all due respect – to go fuck themselves.

Need a larger slice of Finch?

I haven’t been posting much recently, that’s pretty obvious. I did take the time to do an interview over on Jonathan Volk’s blog though. You can check it out below.

Stuff you never thought you needed to know about Finch Sells

Also, follow me on Twitter here.

The Power Of Keyword Sets On Facebook

Jun 03 2010

One of the things those gurus love to preach is the usefulness of targeting your Facebook ads with keyword sets. If I hear one more promise that “yeah it’s easy, you just like add some keywords, and then you get a crazy high CTR”, I’m going to stab my eyeballs out with the half-eaten chicken dippers on my desk. It’s only easy if you know where to start. And most people don’t. So let’s start with the basics.

I’m going to show you an example of how keyword targeting worked quite nicely for me last year. The clue for why I’m willing to part with this information is hidden at the end of the last sentence. It worked last year. It might work now, it might not. One thing you’ll learn quickly about keyword targeting is that it has a much smaller scope for scaling. Keyword targeting can make you money, but clever demographic targeting can make you rich. Great marketers have mastered both.

So why do we use keyword sets?

If we’re bidding CPM, we’re paying every time our ad is displayed – no matter who views it, and no matter how relevant they are to the offer. Simple logic dictates that we want to reduce the number of stray eyeballs catching our message to only those who are likely to qualify as potential customers. We can do this by using keywords to search for users who’ve added certain information to their profile.

A fine example was Many Body Theory’s post last month, showing how to create a dating ad on Facebook for insane ROI. The gist of the post was that in order to find people who’d potentially be interested in joining a dating site, we could add “zoosk” to our keyword set and target only users who’ve mentioned or liked Zoosk on their profile.

Suddenly, your target market is reduced from a few million to 30,000 users. The CTR will improve with a great leap but the problem is obvious. How do we scale beyond 30,000 users? Even if every single user popped us $4 per lead, that’s still only $120,000 revenue.

This is where you have to get creative with your keyword sets and learn what I like to call persuasion via association.

Here’s an example of persuasion via association:

You’ll noticed I’ve blurred her face out. This is a standard trick I use at the end of the night, after a few too many pints, when I’ve failed to get lucky and instead dragged home a London ghetto rat. Blurring helps, kids. Especially in the morning.

On a serious note, I’ve been working recently to ensure that I only use images if I own the creative license to them. It’s a massively ignored problem in the affiliate world. And although I’m not perfect – some of my creatives still need replacing – you should think twice before sourcing directly from Bing. You’ve got shit in your pants and if the owner of the original image catches a whiff, you’ll probably hear all about it.

Anyway, why is the example above effective? Put simply, it isn’t. Not until you combine it with some highly targeted keywords. Let me show you how it comes together…

See where we’re going? All of the keywords are closely related to Manchester United Football Club. Facebook has made a big song and dance about approving ads that sell “unrelated features” in a product. You could argue that Manchester United has absolutely nothing to do with Cupid, Zoosk or whatever dating site you want to promote. But there’s no mention in the ad copy. The only reference we have comes from the girl in our image. She’s wearing a United jersey with that familiar MySpace camera angle that works so well on dating ads.

I’ve experimented a lot with this on Facebook, and it still proves to be successful even after the latest blitzing round of guidelines changes.

The eyes of single, male, Manchester United fans are much more likely to light up when they see an attractive girl flaunting the jersey of their favourite team. It’s a double attention grabber. And if you’re subtle about it, you should be able to get the ad approved before making some vast and sweeping changes to your destination landing page. And that’s where the money is made with this kind of technique.

When I talk about using persuasion via association, there’s a thin line to be obeyed. Capturing the attention of the user with a little association is one thing. Obliterating your quality score by sending a bunch of leads that think they’re going to a dating website with thousands of sexy female Manchester United fans…that’s a different business altogether.

The key is to design a landing page that references your original message – you might find other female United fans when you join us – and build a greater more powerful urge in the reader’s mind. A more powerful urge could be well I’ve been looking around for a girl that shares my interests and I can’t find one, maybe I should give this site a shot?

It’s a lot easier to execute your sales pitch once you’ve grabbed the user’s attention. And you would be amazed how something as simple as an attractive girl wearing the jersey of a guy’s favourite football team can be enough to flick a switch in his mind. Suddenly the service being advertised is cool and compatible. It feels like something where his kind belong. Unfortunately the entire concept will fall apart if you don’t get the landing page pieced together correctly. I’m not going to share my tips for sealing the deal so to speak, so you’ll just have to get testing for yourself.

While this is a very small and niche example, I hope you can appreciate how marketing with keyword sets doesn’t have to be so linear. You don’t have to stick to a favourite football team that your campaign is based around. It could be a favourite band, a certain hobby…the possibilities are pretty endless. As long as this retarded craze for people to “like” shit on Facebook continues, there are always going to be opportunities for marketers to herd individuals in to groups.

If you can find a mutual interest in a large demographic, you can write the kind of laser targeted ad copies that will demand and receive your reader’s attention.

Recommended This Week:

Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!

Building An Affiliate Business With $0 Investment

May 26 2010

That’s right, I’m sniffing for linkbait again.

When I use the term “Super Affiliate”, what image springs to your mind? Is it the picture of a top baller, sprawled across a sunbed, dripping Armani, and occasionally snapping his fingers to make more dollars fall from the sky?

Is it the eternally vivid image of Shoemoney wedged between a flock of scantily clad wenches at the Playboy Mansion?

Part of the reason why most marketers will never get close to that super affiliate lifestyle is because they’re looking at it from the wrong angle. They only see the rewards, and never the groundwork that the smug bastard covered to build his platform to brag from.

Behind most successful “super affiliates” is a sound business plan. One of the things I hear quite often from new marketers is the complaint that they don’t have the money to invest, or the freedom to spend enough money to attain this super affiliate state of luxury. Have you taken the time to look at the background of most top affiliates? The only shared quality is a desire to be successful.

Some people start with $10000 to invest. Maybe they’ve tucked away their savings and prepared mentally (or read a shit ton of blogs) to get started like a virgin mountaineer would at the foot of K2. To achieve something out of nothing. To reach the summit with knowledge in their head of what lays ahead, but no real experience of handling it. These are the marketers you probably hate if you’re built in the same mould that I was.

I had zero cash to invest other than the leftovers from my monthly pay packet. I’d guess that many aspiring affiliate marketers are in the same boat. You want to make it, but you just can’t fathom a way to generate income out of so little. I think it’s perfectly possible to build an affiliate business with a lack of start-up investment, and I believe that because I managed it myself.

How do you get visitors to your site without money? How do you generate leads organically without having the spending power to use paid traffic?

Get your thief on, we’re going hunting for coupons.

It’s always perplexed me why so many affiliates fail to see the appeal of coupons. I don’t use them anymore, but I would never be sitting at home scratching my balls right now if I hadn’t sniffed them out and used them as my “risk free” assessment of paid traffic. If you can plug a $50 voucher in to your Google Adwords account, you have a very rare situation where it’s possible to make what I’d call a “return on virtual investment”.

I was lucky enough to stumble across a campaign that was making me 300% ROI on Google Adwords when I was getting started. With the money I had in my bank account, it simply wasn’t possible to spend more than $200/month without having to jump London’s Oyster barriers or steal my lunch from the back of a van. But with coupons, ANY money you make is a profit.

If you’re from the UK, and I can’t believe I’m about to recommend this…but fuck it. Get down to your local WHSmiths. Search for a magazine called .Net. Look inside and you should find a free voucher worth Â£40 on Google Adwords. Jack that shit and clear out the pile. By the time you get back from your lunch break, you should have an Adwords budget of Â£200. And it isn’t even your money. I did this and with a 300% ROI, I was technically making Â£800 from…zero.

I should use this opportunity to thank .Net magazine. The secret to Internet riches, quite clearly. Or a criminal record if it goes wrong.

I have my tongue in cheek, thank God. There are ways to get your hands on free advertising coupons without stealing. Check out both Digital Point and the Warrior Forum. You can probably buy a $75 voucher for 10 bucks from some dude with no better business idea than to steal them from WHSmiths (ahem).

The point is, when you have no money to invest, you have to be looking for opportunities like this to give yourself the launch pad to start spending your own money. It didn’t take me long to use coupons to get on to weekly payments and to generate enough revenue to be able to re-invest it in to my business. But obviously that wasn’t the only opportunity I saw along the way.

There are two free traffic sources, right under your nose, that have incredible potential for making money without investing a penny. Only the currency of your time. Those traffic sources are classified sites and Yahoo Answers. Now as I understand, it’s a lot harder to make money on Yahoo Answers these days. But do you see why it was an open gold mine?

People asking questions, people looking for specific solutions to their needs…Christ, if you’re in the business of lead gen, your eyes would water at how simple it could be to game the system in to huge profit at no expense of your own. There is easy money out there if you expand on Yahoo Answers and look further afield for similar opportunities.

Classified sites were an enormous boost for me when I was assembling my cash to invest in the early days. I’m not going to venture in to detail about how you make money on sites like Craigs List and Gumtree. But any straight thinking affiliate should be able to smell opportunity like Justin Dupre outside the gates of an all-girls Thai college.

There are many ways you can jump from having zero money to having $10000 in as little as a few months – without ever spending a penny of your own on paid traffic. But the most important leap of them all is that you realize this thinking can only ever be temporary. Once you’ve established money to invest, it’s important to shed your fear of spending it.

I doubt you’ll find a single super affiliate who hasn’t yet overcome that fear of spending money. It’s necessary to grow your business. Don’t get caught up by the fact that the gurus are dropping six figures a day on their favourite traffic sources. You will never compete with them from day one. It’s your job to scrap and hustle, to seek out opportunity, to establish your own business that gives you a chance to scale in time.

It’s a lot easier to operate CPA campaigns with enough money in the bank to be able to run on 20% ROI. The job gets easier in that respect. I like to use the mountain metaphor. If you try to catch up with the top guys at the summit, without building your base camps along the way, you’re probably going to get blown off the mountain altogether. To get to the summit, you have to grow your business in stages. And at each stage, you’re going to have to acclimatise to the new pressures and the new risks. Because the distance to fall gets a little greater every time.

It’s a slow process, and I could slap every guru out there who preaches otherwise. But even if you’re sitting at home with nothing. Zero, nada, a pint of water and Pot Noodle for lunch. All is not lost. There is opportunity EVERYWHERE for those who are willing to seek it out.

Need a larger slice of Finch?

I haven’t been posting much recently, that’s pretty obvious. I did take the time to do an interview over on Jonathan Volk’s blog though. You can check it out below.

Stuff you never thought you needed to know about Finch Sells