Admittedly, I’ve only just found out that Nana Gilbert-Baffoe is the President of Tracking202, and not the sweet grandma posting articles in a rocking chair that I originally suspected.

70 male blogs vs. 0 female blogs is a staggering depiction of our industry.

In any other industry, Affbuzz founder Justin Barr would be eating lawsuits for his sexist discrimination and Victorian principles. He’s saved by the evidence that affiliate marketing is a raging sausagefest that shows no sign of abating anytime soon.

I’m using an ambiguous example. Just because there are so few female bloggers, doesn’t mean there are no female affiliates. Maybe they prefer to keep busy in the trenches? Maybe they don’t want to be terrorized by their WickedFire peers?

Have you seen how affiliate marketers flirt with the fairer sex? I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, but the phenomenon is best described as a bull in a china shop; or a teaspoon of honey in a beehive.

I do know a few female affiliates, and they are certainly capable. But they are exceptions to the rule. If you go to a trade show, the large majority of women are working on the corporate side.

I doubt there’ll ever be a shortage of female account managers.

Just like the male counterparts, their competence ranges from awful to excellent. You can shoot me for slander if I’m wrong, but it seems pretty obvious that some networks hire their account managers not only for their technical skills, but for their ability to inspire the loins of the young, testosterone-driven males they’re obliged to serve.

If I ever had to translate my dating ‘fantasy ads’ to the affiliate demographic, I’ve no doubt that “Would You Like to Date an Affiliate Manager?” would trigger a monster CTR.

We are working in a male-dominated industry. That much is clear. But why do men have such a stranglehold on the business? The qualities necessary to succeed are available just as readily to women as they are to men.

I have to confess that the gap in the market for an excellent female CPA blogger often keeps me awake at night. I wish I’d called this blog Charlotte Sells, or that I had the arse of Kim Kardashian, or that my tits weren’t so hairy.

Eventually I accept reality; that a gasbagging machine-gun of expletives like myself would struggle as a feminine brand. But it still hurts.

When you look away from CPA, and turn your attention to Internet Marketing as a whole, you’ll find lots of female bloggers. I mean, Christ, the ‘work at home mom‘ gimmick is one cow that keeps on giving milk. It’s a monster niche with huge scope for profit, but it rarely seems to push the envelope.

WAHM blogs will typically focus on low-risk, low-reward enterprise. I’m not knocking them. Such ventures make perfect sense when you have kids biting your ankles, and less time to spend in your basement. I find work hard enough with two puppies. I don’t even want to think about fathering an ankle biter that doesn’t have four legs.

In fact, many of the newbies reading this blog, those with no budget, would perhaps gain more from copying the tricks of the ‘stay at home moms’. They may not promise the same rewards, but at least those blogs are grounded in some kind of reality.

I sometimes wonder if affiliate networks could one day level the gender playing field. So much of our industry is branded around fast cars, a testosterone-driven ‘grind’, and strip clubs in Vegas. You can’t knock the networks for appealing to the majority of their clients. But is there an opportunity being missed?

How many more networks do we need with essentially the same brand in a different skin? And how many more male blogs will jostle for position on Affbuzz before a female presence bucks the trend?

It’s tough to say if affiliate marketing is dominated by males because of some natural gravitation in the male mindset, or whether it’s because 99% of the networks and blogs are conforming to the status quo.

Would more women get in to affiliate marketing if there were more female personalities blazing the trail? What if a network came along with feminine branding rather than the usual ‘hoes and dough‘?

I think the appeal of affiliate marketing as a business has no reason to be slanted so heavily towards males, certainly not on a scale of 70:0. But it could change very easily. As is so often the case, whoever acts first will stand to profit the most.

Recommended This Week

• Dating affiliates should grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost. Download a copy here.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

If you like to boast about your conference travels over Facebook, you should probably hold fire on this one. An Online Dating Summit sounds borderline desperate to the uninformed friend or relative; like some kind of speed-dating epic for the morbidly single. Rest assured, it’s not.

It’s actually the ‘leading B2B and affiliate conference for the online dating industry’.

You’ll find many recognisable names and brands at the show, assuming you keep your dating clean. It remains to be seen whether the likes of LocalSlags.co.uk put in an appearance. I suspect the dirtier realm of the CPA world could be tough to find on the expo floor.

Be2 and Mate1 will be fun to talk to. As will the many white-label dating providers that I’ve been taking a particular interest in lately.

The venue is Hotel Miramar, which means absolutely nothing to me. Sean Mulkeen seems to specialise in prostituting himself to the various corners of Europe, so maybe you could tweet him for an opinion.

I’ve made it clear in the past that I’m not a huge conference junkie. I don’t see the point in crossing continents for some free pens, a branded T-shirt and enough corporate slang to induce a migraine. But business is business, right? For serious dating affiliates, this looks like a good trip.

Of course, there’s the issue of location too. Ahh, Barcelona.

It’s been seven years since I last visited this great city, and although I only caught a fleeting glimpse before marveling at the Camp Nou, I know enough to say that it’s exactly my cup of tea.

You can tell a lot about a city simply by tallying its average pedestrian footsteps per minute. If London is a stampede to catch the tube, Barcelona is a dawdle to catch the sun. Just the way I like it.

Whether you like affiliate marketing, online dating, or tanking up your expense account with cheap holidays before April, the Online Dating Summit should be worth checking out. Hit me up if you’re going to be there.

Recommended This Week

• Dating affiliates should also grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost. Download a copy here.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

From the moment you enter grade school, you are told and indoctrinated: study hard, get good grades, go to a good college or university. Plunge into debt of 50k-100k and spend the next 4 years (at least) in getting a degree. Then of course, comes the internship which you wont get paid for. But it’s all OK! After all that, the fun really begins, because, finally, it’s payback time for all your hard work! You get a job and start at a whopping annual salary of (drum roll please)… 50k, if you are lucky.

I hear people who tried affiliate marketing for 2 weeks invested $500 and decided there is NO WAY to make money from it. I use the term “invested” because even if you lost all your $500 and didn’t make a dime, it was an investment in your education of online marketing. An investment not much different than the tuition you paid for your college degree. The fact a bonafide professor didn’t force feed you rehashed material from the syllabus doesn’t mean your education process is worth less.

In reality, you actually applied yourself and your mind doing the fabulous act of auto-deduction. You learned by yourself! Isn’t that true learning, perhaps even more valuable then the more docile, passive act of being “taught”?

Let me go back to the prevailing status quo and paradigm of what a middle class person should go through. So you’ve got a job. Now it’s time to buy a house and own your first asset. How will you do that, with your past college debt, and a job that by now pays you around 70k per year? The answer? More debt of course. Debt which is of course owned and controlled by the ruling faction – as represented here by the banks.

You are actually bred and indoctrinated into slavery. Modern day slavery. In a modern person’s mind, slavery means black people picking cotton in the plantations. But in reality, modern slavery means “owning” debt (of course you don’t own the debt, the bank owns it, and thus the debt owns you). You actually enslave your future income and salary to the bank. Thus, although you are not whipped by the splintered whip of the taskmaster on a daily basis, you are whipped by the thorn of debt instead. Debt which you must accumulate in order to acquire assets.

Maybe one day you’ll think about quitting your job, wanting to finally realize your old dream of becoming an artist? Maybe you wont even have a choice and you’ll get sacked? Results – lose your house, lifestyle and maybe even your family (will your wife want to stay with a person who cannot provide for her and her children? I’m writing from a male perspective so for all you ladies reading it out there, do consider).

In the US alone there were almost 1.6 million bankruptcy filings in 2010, an increase of 7.4 percent from 2009. There were more people who filed for bankruptcy in 2011 than people diagnosed with cancer, suffering a heart attack or graduating from college. An interesting read regarding these findings is Elizabeth Warren’s book – “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke”.

The situation isn’t much brighter in the UK either. The Guardian has just published a report by a leading thinktank group stating that middle class families are “unlikely to see their earnings return to pre-recession levels until at least 2020″… but it predicts that the income of the wealthy will continue to rise over the same period.

The odds are absurdly weighted against working class families and in favor of the wealthy. Mitt Romney’s recently published tax returns shows that the Republican candidate income between 2010 and 2011 was 42.6 million dollars. The tax rate Romney paid was 13.9% or 6.2 million dollars (recent Time’s article even states Romney overpaid his taxes by about 44k). How could that be? Yahoo finance explains “The GOP frontrunner acknowledged his federal tax rate is 15%, thanks to a loophole called “carried interest” that helps the GOP frontrunner pay a rate similar to a family earning $50,000”.

With the current trend of affairs, the state will not be able to take care of you when you are old and grey, when you have lost your ability to provide for yourself. What you have in your bank savings (or hiding under your bed mattress) is what you’ll have to maintain you for the rest of your natural life. It’s doubtful even if you’ll have a proper pension. And even if you do, it will most likely not be enough.

Sounds pretty grim right? NO! Your financial future and freedom depends on you. This entire article (as absurd as it may sound) was written in order to inspire you to take action, in order to make you understand reality.

In the past, the choices were much clearer, much simpler. They were black and white. By choosing the life of an employee with all its benefits and comfort, you would receive a monthly salary, paid vacation, dental or health insurance, steady hours and more. In other words stability.

The downside – you’ll never be able to buy that Bugatti, the 10 bedroom beach front house, or staying at the Ty Warner penthouse at the Four Seasons NY. On the contrary, you could have chosen the path of an entrepreneur, risk all you’ve got in terms of time and money. No steady income or insurance. Work 20 hours a day and still end the year broke. Invest years of your life and end with nothing or a mansion. I deliberately choose to portray the two options as extremes.

Today, I believe that, having that option or choice between an employee or an entrepreneur is slowly drawing to an end. Choosing to be an employee might cost you dearly when you reach the end of your working cycle. Your 401k savings will not be enough to maintain your standard of living. The world is slowly reverting to the days of the filthy rich and the filthy poor. The erosion of the middle class and social security is something we cannot deny.

Yes, the world might end by 2012, but just in case it wont. I suggest getting ready for the fact you might live until you are 80+ and perhaps start thinking about your financial status.

Finch: Definitely some very important points to consider. Personally, I don’t think employment and entrepreneurism have to be mutually exclusive. I think it’s possible to balance a job that you love, which may involve working for ‘The Man’, with good investments that take care of your future. Not every kid dreams of running his own business, but every kid should grow up with a solid education in how money works. Thanks for the post, Oded.

Recommended This Week

• Check out the Moneymachinefactory.org blog to hear more from Oded. You can also find him on Twitter.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add FinchSells.com to your RSS. And hey, follow me on Twitter, too. Thanks for reading.

The Samsung Galaxy S2 looked sufficiently tasty to merit a goodbye to my HTC, so I got the ball rolling. I hit 333 on my keypad and waited to be put through to somebody who could help me.

Calling a sales representative at Three is like challenging Derren Brown to a game of misdirection. There’s something deliberately perplexing about the South Indian dialect, and the guy on the end of the phone can call himself ‘Graham’ until he’s blue in the face; I’m still not buying it.

I believe I made the critical error of calling Three with the stated intention of upgrading. Had I waited for them to call me, I could have easily fudged their sales funnel with my threats to move network. Guys, if you ever want more from your phone contract, press x to speak to somebody about canceling your existing deal. It works every time.

To my surprise, it took all of about 37 seconds for the bloodsuckers to translate my keyword ‘new contract’ in to an apparent desire to be upsold the moon. I found myself being shoved towards ‘Steve’ on the sales team.

We went through the usual security verification, littered with bullshit idle small talk. Apparently there is a command in the Three support system that encourages employees to wish happy birthday to anybody whose birth date falls in a 4 day range. I found myself describing my celebrations three times in a row.

“Oh, I see that it was your birthday four days ago, Mr. Osborn. May I ask how you spent it?”

“Well actually, ‘Steve’, I spent it in the darkest corner of my basement. I’m still there now. I’ve been waiting for this call, ‘Steve’. I’ve been chanting my security answers in a tribal beat. Oh yes, I’ve been praying for this conversation, ‘Steve’. Now why don’t you tell me a little more about that Samsung?”

“…uh, excellent, now, Mr. Osborn…” By this point, his cordial laugh has degenerated in to a nervous hush. All thoughts of a commission have been banished in the name of a psycho on Line 107.

You see, the only way to play Three effectively is to beat them at their own game. And their game is essentially ‘the mindfuck’. It’s a tour de force in disorientation, rapid-fire T&Cs and blatant trickery.

It wasn’t long before I was being offered my sparkling new contract.

“Yes, Mr. Osborn, I can certainly help you today. Now, you say that you are interested in the Samsung Galaxy S2. Well, I am going to give you a special deal on that phone, your preferred handset. I’m going to give you unlimited Internet usage, 8000 texts, 8000 minutes for a monthly charge of just £40. Would you say that that is a good deal, Mr. Osborn?”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

“Excellent, fantastic. Well, that’s great. Now as a loyal customer to Three, I’d also like to tell you about a special ‘benefit’ that I’d love to offer to you exclusively. I think you’re going to really love it. Would you like to hear about that, Mr. Osborn?”

Marketing note: Clearly the salesmen at Three have the classic ‘benefits over features’ argument drummed in to their heads. They crowbar the words ‘special benefit’ in to their pitch like relentless drones. Also, they’re skilled at using one of my favourite sales techniques: they build up momentum by feeding a barrage of questions where the only answer is ‘yes’. Get a prospect to say ‘yes’ to a bunch of smaller questions and his answer to the big one is likely to be influenced.

By this point, I knew damn well where the conversation was heading. I’ve been cold-called several times by Three in the last few months. They seem absolutely determined to sell me a second handset, or to draw family referrals like blood from a stone.

Sure enough, ‘Steve’ pitched me with a second handset. 300 minutes, 200 texts and 500mb of Internet allowance. But best of all, I could have this handset absolutely free. Now here’s where their shenanigans get somewhat murky.

I asked twice, specifically, if the handset was available for £0 and no monthly charges. Both times, ‘Steve’ confirmed that it was.

Reluctantly, but sensing something was amiss, I agree to be sent the second handset. I figured I’d flog it on eBay, or give it to one of my many friends with cracked iPhone screens. I do love a gesture of irony.

Delighted with his coup, ‘Steve’ then hit me with the small print. The sales process is designed to extract audible sighs while you agree and confirm a merciless list of T&Cs. Eventually we neared the end, and I was hit with this…

“So, Mr. Osborn, today you have agreed to not one but two handsets. Firstly, the Samsung Galaxy S2 for £40/month, your desired handset, and secondly a Samsung Europa Whatever, absolutely free as a special benefit for being a loyal customer to Three…”

“…Now I have to tell you, Mr. Osborn, and it’s just a minor detail, but we can’t process the second phone in our system on a free contract. So what I’m going to do is set up two direct debits. The first will charge you £30 for the Galaxy S2, and the second will charge you £10 for the Europa Whatever, which of course, you are receiving free of charge as a special benefit for being a loyal customer. So, all in all, you will be paying £40/month for the Samsung Galaxy S2 and getting a second handset absolutely free of charge. Can I go through and confirm this on the system, Mr. Osborn?”

Hold on, what the hell?

Suddenly it hit me that from the moment ‘Steve’ offered me a £40/month contract, I’d been setup for one of the most long-winded upsell tricks in the book. I directed my browser at the Three website and sure enough, there was the Samsung Galaxy S2 on sale for £35/month. Forget the loyal customer bullshit. He’d actually given me a small discount on my intended phone, which I’m probably entitled to after seven years with the company. And his ‘special benefit’? It was no more than a second contract, lumbering me with a phone that I initially rejected.

Marketing note: Upselling can be effective, but even more effective is getting your prospect to agree to an inflated price and then bundling in the upsell. Customers are notoriously bad at valuing products. They rely on contrast and comparison to decipher the good deals from the bad. As soon as I signaled that I was happy with a £40/month price point, I took on the identity of lamb to the slaughter, so easy would it be to get me to approve of the same contract I’ve been declining for the last 6 months…

I tip my hat to Three, because by this point, I truly couldn’t have given a shit. I’d been on the phone for close to 30 minutes.

In the UK, we have a customer protection scheme for online and phone-based sales. It’s a statutory cooling off period, where contracts can be cancelled in the first few days (Incidentally, the same law does not apply in-store so always get your contracted shit online, guys.). I decided to wait for the phones to be delivered and then send back the second unwanted handset. By canceling, I would get the Samsung Galaxy for £30/month – finally, a good deal that looks, smells and tastes like a good deal!

So, I waited for the delivery and then called Three again… pressed 4 to speak to a cancellation assistant, pressed 6 to confirm that I was serious, pressed 9 to answer some algebra, before finally muttering the ‘secret word’ to reach the help desk: “ARRRGHHHH!”

It’s no surprise that from the moment I mentioned ‘cancel contract’, I found myself plunged in to a labyrinth of darkness, holding queues and the motherfucking Black Eyed Peas. If you think upgrading your contract is a pain in the arse, just try canceling one. Invariably you’ll find that the most persistent, crafty bastards are placed on these desks. Their mission is to make you think twice.

Before long, you’re pleading to speak to ‘Steve’ again. Except this world resembles the Orwellian dystopia, where ‘Steve’ is now known as ‘Abraham’, and your sanity is questioned for stating otherwise.

Note to service providers: If you’re a large company like Three, you can generally get away with making the cancellation procedure a thousand times more agonizing than the sales funnel. If you’re a small business, this is reputation suicide. In fact, I would even suggest that dealing with the customers looking to cancel is more important than wooing new prospects. Prospects are still prospects, they’ll come and go. But your customers possess the ammunition to leave your reputation in the gutter. Make life easy for them – even when their intention is to ditch you.

If you’re still following by now, you’re probably wondering: did I manage to cancel the contract? or did I succumb to the web of lies and tricky? Well, I’m about to find out.

After negotiating the Black Eyed Peas, a sore arse, and close to an hour being bounced around on hold, I finally reached the contract cancellation help desk. What did I discover? My contracts weren’t even active in the system yet! And, of course, the Three system is designed in such a way that inactive accounts cannot be terminated. I was told to call back today, which I’m about to do.

A final marketing note: If the customer is aware of his cooling off period, insist that he observes another cooling off period before he can make his final decision. If you’re that customer? Congratulations. The ‘cooling off period within a cooling off period’ is the very last hurdle guarding the light at the end of the tunnel. You’re almost home and dry!

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• I’ve recently re-branded FinchBlogs.com to cover a more personal flavour of the crap I’m currently working on. I’ll be blogging about issues even more obscure than sleazeball marketing, so check it out if you dare.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

Well, it was certainly different. Not a reference to my balls in sight.

Here’s iPyxel’s breakdown of the content included.

• Mass production of ads
• Approaching broad vs. niche traffic
• Tracking methodology and managing campaigns en mass
• How to target and split test properly
• Building long term campaigns by mitigating burnout
• Detailed explanations of POF nuances

The POF 7-Day Mastery Guide takes a step away from addressing specific campaign ideas. You won’t find case studies or ready-made banners to be stolen. Tom makes it perfectly clear that the creative process is not his bread and butter. He even surrenders that many buyers of his guide will be able to use it to make more money than he does.

That’s a tour de force in self-deprecation, although probably a confession he’ll want to disown if the Warrior Forum pounces on the product.

What the 7-Day Mastery Guide really homes in on is the development of systems, algorithms and cold-blooded ruthlessness in the way that you create, manage and cull your campaigns.

Unlike Tom, I am not a number’s man. I find it difficult to launch dozens of tightly targeted, flawlessly labelled campaigns, while tracking the entire process through Excel and running figures of ‘continue/pause’ in my brain. But that’s not to say that I shouldn’t make the effort to embrace his approach.

If Premium Posts Volume 1 sought to gun down some of the psychology that lurks behind a successful ad, the POF 7-Day Mastery Guide is a structured and highly organized manifesto for getting profitable as soon as possible, while losing the least amount of cash.

Throughout the guide, Tom keeps his core principles of sustainability and scalability close to every tidbit that he gives away. I think many POF advertisers are guilty of sacrificing these qualities in the frantic search for profitability, so it’s definitely a mindset that should be taken onboard.

The information is broken in to 7 sections, with one for each day of the week. Knowing how proactive most affiliates can be, I’d have been tempted to lower my expectations and call it a 7-Month guide, but alas.

Here they are:

• Day 1: Tom’s core principles, budget setting, loss limiting, basic targeting.
• Day 2: Getting to know competition, finding images, writing copy.
• Day 3: Ad creation, Photoshop batch processing, and split-testing mechanics.
• Day 4: Effective tracking, organizing your campaigns, avoiding burnout.
• Day 5: How to bid effectively, the concept of hurdling, session depth myths.
• Day 6: Direct linking vs LPs, maintaining campaigns, scaling effectively.
• Day 7: Preparing for offers to blow up, advance testing, and outsourcing.

The systems Tom endorses will almost certainly require a grand rethink in how you organize your campaigns. For example, after logging in to your account, what would you think if your campaigns were suddenly titled like this:

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I’d probably assume that I was having a stroke. But this is actually a hallmark of Tom’s immensely structured approach to his advertising. Campaign titles are decoded in to stone-dead giveaways of the targeting that lays inside, assuming you haven’t lost the wall chart. And as for the targeting? I found Tom’s insight in to compartmentalizing campaigns to be some of the best in the guide.

He explains the importance of session depth, frequency and login counts with great detail, refusing to settle for that annoying nugget of faux wisdom “users with login counts below 100 are golden, only target them“, as so many fall in to the trap of believing. There are some great tips for sustaining campaigns over long periods of time.

Tom once again resorts to mathematics to explain why campaigns adjusted to higher login counts need to be different from those going after the ‘new fish’. This is where his methodology for creating systems really shines through. Whilst most of us are busy judging POF users as either in or out of a target group, Tom stalks the users from cog to cog in his system. The guide shows, very effectively, how to maximize your chances of a conversion via layered targeting.

For experienced POF marketers, particularly those like myself who operate by instinctive catapultations of shite at the wall, Tom’s adherence to structure will get you thinking about how you can operate your own campaigns more efficiently.

I doubt that many marketers will have invested the same time or thought in to their own POF systems, and much of the information could be repackaged for traffic sources like Facebook where it would be equally relevant.

That’s not to say I’m a glowing advocate of every theory preached in this guide. Tom’s argument that 100 campaigns consistently making $5/day are better than one making $500/day has been used to divide affiliate marketers for years.

I fall in to the category that would much rather manage a single $500/day campaign, than spend my afternoon plugging tiny holes in tiny $5 campaigns. That’s just too much micro-management for my taste.

I also disagree fundamentally with one of the guide’s earlier suggestions that advertising to young men is easier than mature women. But I will avoid kicking up a fuss, blessed in the knowledge that this guide is likely to be consumed by a legion of Warriors who will follow that pointer to a tee.

As far as the quality of writing goes, I’d like to thank Tom for releasing an ebook that is readable, eloquent and a distinct improvement on many of the other ‘Mastery Guides‘ in circulation that have me gouging out my own eyeballs in disgust. Presentation is one of the areas where my own Premium Posts are in sore need of improvement, so I’ll be taking a page out of Tom’s book here. Literally. Sccchwipe.

All in all, I would recommend the 7-Day Mastery Guide to beginners and intermediates on the POF platform. It’s not flowing with campaign ideas, but then it doesn’t need to be. This is a practical, comprehensive and immaculate presentation on how to get your house in order. It will bring structure to your campaigns while focusing your mind on sustainability and scalability, the only qualities that really matter.

Recommended This Week

• Check out the iPyxel blog for some free tips and pointers to go along with the POF Mastery Guide.

• My own detailed assault on monetizing Plentyoffish is covered in Volumes 1 and 3 of Premium Posts, which have both received widespread praise. Grab your copies now. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. If you just can’t get enough Finch in your day, be sure to check out FinchBlogs.com, which is the twisted cousin of this blog.

I’ve grown to see affiliate marketing not so much as a long term business, but as a source of easy capital for the company I want to build. It funds my bigger picture. Yet every so often I get to speak to individuals who see the industry from an outsider’s perspective. They don’t view affiliate marketing as the cold blooded arbitrage it usually is. They see it as an investment opportunity.

To them, affiliate marketing is the goose that lays the golden egg. It carries the legendary hook of ‘doubling your money‘, even if those words are rammed home by experts with as much integrity as a broken record. Many smart affiliates are harvesting small fortunes from our industry, that much is true. When you hear such a constant barrage of rags to riches tales, there has to be some truth to the idea that affiliate marketing is one of the quickest methods of doubling, trebling and quadrupling your money.

One glance at the typical UK savings account and you will find that annual returns greater than 4% are a rarity, especially if you require direct access to your money. By the time inflation is taken in to account, your newfound spending power raises some tough questions. “Should I continue buying Iceland-range cheesy wotsits by the multipack? Or can I afford to upgrade to Kettles?”

Decisions, decisions.

Affiliate marketing, to anybody sick of calculating the scant difference between 3% and 4% returns, is full of bold promises. It teases with countless fables of got rich quick stories, those that defy everything taught in Business Studies class.

I’ve never hidden my preference for running campaigns that achieve at least a 75% ROI. It’s a remnant of the shoestring budget I started with. To most business minds, immediate 75% returns are the sort of bullshit fantasies peddled by first-time entrepreneurs with their figures in a twist (forgetting to pay themselves, for example). But they do exist.

So does the golden carrot of potentially skyrocketing profits make affiliate marketing a suitable investment strategy? Or is it, to steal a particularly tasty lyric, a siren singing you to shipwreck?

If you found £100,000 to invest and had never touched an affiliate campaign, could you realistically expect to double your money? Does money buy you a better shot at success?

Well, ROI is deceptive, particularly in a field like affiliate marketing. The juiciest profit margins are a distant third in our importance stakes, trailing both scalability and sustainability.

Let’s say you have £100,000 to invest. You despise the typical savings accounts. You’re looking for a much greater return than the 4% which the proletarians live and die by.

Many people assume that as long as there are affiliates comfortably rocking 75% ROIs, it should be a walk in the park to beat the typical savings rates. If 75% is possible, 4% should be achievable while wearing a blindfold with your balls in the jacuzzi. Right? No, wrong. You’re assuming:

A. You will launch campaigns that actually make a profit.
B. You will invest the entire £100,000.

B cannot happen without A, unless your stupidity knows no bounds. And A cannot happen unless you’re naturally acclimatised to the industry.

On paper it looks pretty easy for an affiliate marketer to pummel that £100,000; to reap massive profits that are beyond the scope of banks, or even the stock market. But the percentages are skewed.

4% return on £100,000 leaves you with £104,000 at the end of the year. That’s a profit of £4,000. On par with a typical savings account

But what if you only get enough campaigns profitable to spend £10,000? In that case, you’d need to hit a 40% ROI to match the savings account rates.

Of course, there’s no reason why you can’t use a savings account and work on affiliate campaigns. Except that in most cases, you would erase your gains. As an investment source of infinite growth, the system is flawed. You’re throwing money at arbitrage, which is hardly a value investment.

The purpose of a savings account is to make all your money work for you. The mechanics of an affiliate business are completely different. Many would argue that having £10,000 to invest is just as good as having £100,000. Plenty of networks will pay you weekly so the cashflow is irrelevant. We aim to invest externally, not internally.

Every wise investor should make a habit out of reading the market before he shoves his dick in it. And what happens when you read between the lines of our industry? You hear, over and over again, that affiliate marketers are rushing to invest their money away from affiliate marketing. What does that tell you?

Even though we can sniff the delights of a 75% ROI, or taste the doubling of our money in an afternoon’s work, we know that like any market experiencing rapid growth – the bubble will inevitably burst.

Unlike the stock market, which specialises in exaggerated panic-stricken meltdowns, affiliate bubbles are burst every day.

It could be a Facebook account getting banned, the collapse of a top offer, or the bankruptcy of a once-great network. Our business plans collectively resemble a trip through the Chessington Bubbleworks; fragile and a little bit whimsical, to say the bloody least.

My advice to anybody looking to throw their money at affiliate marketing as a means of investment is simple: don’t do it. Use your capital to build assets that the rest of us are in this very business to fund.

Recommended This Week

• For information on how to rock those 75% ROIs, and much more, hit up my Premium Posts. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

The Millionaire Fastlane aims to dispel the myth of Get Rich Slow, aka ‘every financial dream you’ve ever been sold’. DeMarco is a contemporary self-made millionaire; the type that we traditionally look up to in the Internet Marketing world. But then, this is no ordinary world. DeMarco made his fortune by selling Limos.com for several million dollars in the early 2000s. Now, he wants to hand us his blueprint for early retirement, using a clusterfuck of petrolhead metaphors and really, really tough love.

It sounds like a very familiar story arc, doesn’t it? Tell the already downtrodden reader that he’s been doing it wrong all these years. Then fill his shattered dreams with hope that a quick fix solution is there after all.

DeMarco distances himself from the popular ‘be your own boss gurus’ that he claims to despise. And yet his formula for setting the tone of the message is as textbook as a Clickbank sales page. While the first half of The Millionaire Fastlane is a merciless assassination of anybody and everybody who detours from his grand plan, the latter chapters are a brilliant portrayal of what it really takes to attract wealth.

Fastlane is a mixed bag. It’s 100 pages too long, and starts terribly by ticking off every last painful cliche of the Internet Millionaire. DeMarco is an abrasive, obnoxious and sometimes annoying writer. That happens to be one of my preferred methods of relating to young cash-hungry audiences, but MJ really pushes the boat out. The tough love tone could be forgiven, if it wasn’t for the breathtaking nonchalance by which he dispels the merit in any lifestyle but his own.

God forbid you read this book as the proud owner of a shitty car, or as somebody in his 50s or 60s. DeMarco ridicules anybody who hasn’t achieved early wealth as a urine-stained, wheelchair-riding lost cause of society.

The first 100 pages act as a relentless attack on what MJ refers to as sidewalkers and slowlaners, or anybody who hasn’t discovered his fastlane mindset. He unleashes a grandstand assault on just about anybody with a day job, and anybody with the audacity to follow a profession that requires working for The Man, or getting a college education.

It takes 17 chapters of preaching to the choir for DeMarco to simmer down and accept that we ‘get it’. We know why most people are destined to never be millionaires. We know that working 5 days in an office to enjoy 2 days of peace is not the greatest of trades. But Christ, does he ever ram it down our throats? Barely a page drifts by where we’re not forced to listen to his Lamborghini fetish, or an increasingly ridiculous diatribe of automobile metaphors.

So, I hated the first half of this book. The empty rhetoric left me wondering how such a broken beat could ever have hoarded the 5 star reviews that Amazon suggests, which made it all the more surprising that the chapters to follow are perhaps some of the best ever written on the field of personal finance.

As brash as DeMarco writes, his assessment of entrepreneurism is the sort that really gets you lining up the parallels with your own business. He provides a much needed demolition of the myth that being your own boss is synonymous with wealth and freedom. He even accuses us affiliate marketers of hitchhiking the road to riches and not being genuine entrepreneurs. He’s right, of course. And his message that creating systems is the true secret behind wealth will be reverberating in the head of anybody who persists with the first half of the book and gets so far as to read it.

There are moments in the closing chapters where The Millionaire Fastlane resonates with our kind in a way that I’ve yet to see any other book manage. It’s a perfectly executed kick in the GoDaddys. A much needed reminder that as long as we stay promoting other people’s products, we get no closer to dictating our own future. Indeed, DeMarco even confesses his love for affiliate marketing. He just wants to be in charge of the system, rather than a disposable part of it.

Without doubt, the first half of this book is a damning crucifixion of the modesty lacking in our industry, but by the time you reach the final page, you’ll be feeling too punchdrunk on inspiration to care.

You’ll feel the need to step out from the shadow of promoting products you have no control over. You’ll want to build real wealth that leads to real freedom. This illumination, if it comes, is the single greatest gift an affiliate marketer could ask for. For that reason alone, Millionaire Fastlane is a must-read.

Recommended This Week

• A detailed assault on monetizing Plentyoffish is covered in Volumes 1 and 3 of Premium Posts, which have both received widespread praise. Grab your copies now. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

As with any traffic source, or any advertising campaign, good things come to those who show patience – and especially those who aren’t afraid of losing money in the pursuit of much more.

I’ve traded tips and techniques with many Plentyoffish advertisers, and one of the recurring questions that pops up is how to combat unpredictable conversion rates.

Have you been there before? One day your ROI is impressive enough to book a spontaneous vacation, and the next you’re struggling to break even. You spend your morning coffee praying the marketing deities have woken up on your side; afternoon is spent with fingers crossed, legs crossed, and eventually eyes crossed having obtained a miserable headache.

Okay, if you haven’t been there already, you will do someday. It happens to all of us.

So how can we get some consistency in our conversion rates? How can we find the sweet spot where our ROI trajectory doesn’t resemble the Big Dipper?

NOTE: Before continuing, I have to ram this piece of advice down your throat: split test your offer across multiple affiliate networks. And even split test the offer. I couldn’t possibly overstate the importance of doing this – it can reverse a negative ROI overnight. The lack of loyalty will not endear you to your affiliate managers, but you’re in this to make money, right? Don’t become a network martyr.

An easy way to stabilize conversion rates is to tighten up your campaign’s message. Many Plentyoffish advertisers have an obsession with abstract marketing. They try gaming user attributes to attract a high clickthrough rate, often at the expense of a solid advertising message.

For example, let’s say an advertiser is promoting a typical CPA dating offer. In order to create relevance and catch the eye, his ad may read something like “More Single Smokers Needed, Join Site X!“, with the ad being targeted to single smokers.

These ads are rolled out as frequently as rat meat at a McDonalds drive-thru, but they lack a real message. Does Site X really appeal to single smokers? Is there actually a resemblance of a connection between the ad and the service being promoted? When there isn’t, conversion rates are likely to be erratic.

But why is that so? If the ad was competent enough to convert yesterday, it should work today, right?

The reality is you could advertise a dating service using just about any headline under the sun and it WILL score some conversions. Why? Because it’s appearing on a dating website! There’s no science to poor marketing. It is naturally erratic. The handful of conversions are a by-product, not an endorsement of your advertising work.

To achieve stable conversion rates over a sustained period of time, you need a stable message. Something that adds value to the sales funnel, rather than simply monopolizing user attributes. You need to pinpoint what the unique value of your offer is, create a meaningful message, and then rely on the powers of persuasion to convince your audience that the offer is right for them. This is only possible if you engage in real-world marketing, using hooks of genuine value. Attempting to lure smokers to a dating site under the illusion that they are ‘needed to meet the demand for more smokers’ is a shoddy hook – fitting of the erratic conversion rates it will likely produce.

Creating consistency and value in your message is one way to troubleshoot a wobbly conversion rate. What other steps can we take?

How about taking a structured approach to our testing?

A structured approach is definitely NOT this:

Day 1: bidding 0.55 CPM, 300 login count, frequency cap of 4
Day 2: bidding 0.65 CPM, 400 login count, frequency cap of 3
Day 3: bidding 0.85 CPM, 100 login count, frequency cap of 6, oh and a different landing page.

What happens when your conversion rate drops dramatically on Day 3?

Pick your reason from any of the following:

- The high CPM doesn’t convert.
- Low login counts suck.
- Your new landing page is hideous.
- Ads that have been showing for 3 days in a row stop converting.
- If the user doesn’t click in the first 3 views, he won’t convert.
- Day 3 was Christmas.

The actual reason? Who the hell knows?!

It’s impossible to diagnose a faltering conversion rate when you don’t have a structured approach to your campaign. So instead of fiddling with targeting parameters every 5 minutes, duplicate any campaign you wish to modify and then compare the results to your original campaign (which should still be running). Without controlling your variables, any data you collect is meaningless – and thus very expensive.

A final tip for stabilizing conversions is to limit the range of users you’re advertising to.

Ben has previously revealed on the POF company blog that 28% of the site’s inventory has a login count of less than 100. These users are the ‘fresh’ eyeballs. Another 30% of the traffic has a login count of over 550. These are the users who have seen pretty much every trick in the book. It’s going to take an innovative campaign to light a firework up their asses, but fear not, it can be done.

Between 100-550 logins you have the middle ground. It’s difficult to predict the behaviour of these users as the effects of banner blindness could swing either way.

My advice is to pick one or the other. Either target the first 100 login counts, or exclude them. Some advertisers take the middle ground and attempt to advertise to all users with a login count of less than, say, 300.

The problem with doing so is that it muddles your message by targeting two slightly different demographics – those who are new to Plentyoffish, and those who aren’t. Sometimes you can get away with it, other times you can’t. A better tactic, if you’re intent on targeting logins <300 would be to break the users in to two groups. A smart strategy would include two campaigns:

Campaign A: Targets login count of 0-100 (Strictly new users)
Campaign B: Targets login count of 101-300 (Users who have been around a while)

A more unstable approach is to lump those users together, so let’s have a Campaign C.

Campaign C: Targets login count of 0-300 (A melting pot of new and old users)

The difference in performance may not be obvious until a natural variation in the bidding on the platform.

Perhaps a swarm of new advertisers drives up the prices for the best quality traffic, so the volume in Campaign A drops dramatically – but the conversions are still stable. You’re left with an excellent conversion rate but not much traffic. Not a particularly alarming problem on its own, right?

Now consider what happens to Campaign B during this surge. The new advertisers may be rushing to grab the best quality traffic (perhaps yet another blogger recommended low logins FTW), but they don’t seem to care for inventory with a login count over 100. What then? Campaign B remains exactly the same. The conversion rate is stable like it always was. It’s a decent conversion rate, but not as good as Campaign A. The volume hasn’t changed though.

But let’s say you were to advertise using the Campaign C approach. You now find that you’re barely breaking even and the conversion rate has dropped alarmingly in the last 24 hours. How are you going to tell where the discrepancy came from? Why is the conversion rate on a seemingly terminal decline?

Of course you don’t notice that behind the scenes, you’re receiving less of the alleged best quality clicks because of the increase in competition on 0-100 logins. Instead, your high CPM is now paying for the next tier of traffic, which doesn’t convert as well but is costing you the same money. All you see is an unstable conversion rate, keeping you blind to the source of the problem – a problem that is very simple to fix.

This is just one of many problems that are notorious on self-serve advertising platforms. Different advertisers may swarm a demographic at any given time, which raises the prices, meaning that without knowing it, you’re suddenly bidding on completely different traffic. The only way to avoid the problem is to make sure that you’re bidding on just one demographic at a time, and that you’re setting the bid accordingly.

By doing so, your volume may vary dramatically, but the conversion rate should remain stable.

Of course, this is not science. Self-serve platforms by their very nature have hundreds of scenarios that may affect your ROI. But the bottom line remains the same. There’s big money on Plentyoffish, and it’s perfectly within your reach – but you must use your data as an advantage, rather than a deep pool to drown in.

Recommended This Week

• A much more detailed assault on monetizing Plentyoffish is covered in Volumes 1 and 3 of Premium Posts, which have both received widespread praise. Grab your copies now. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

So, how many affiliates blew their entire January budgets in the casinos at ASW? For the sake of my own business, I’d be happy to hear of a busy weekend.

Did you learn a lot from the networking experience? Was the conference worth the trip?

I find it a little strange that affiliates will fork out hundreds of dollars for seminars, key-notes and Q&A sessions when perhaps the biggest inspiration is Vegas itself.

If ever you wanted to learn from a well oiled moneymaking machine, you would be advised to tear your head away from the Meet Market and consider the windowless, clockless micro-economy that is Sin City in the middle of the night.

Nickycakes wrote a piece several years ago that summed it up well. Vegas is one of the most fitting metaphors for a Landing Page. Everything about it is designed to creep in your pocket, carress the balls, and expose your wallet. All, of course, without shaking the drunken smile from your face.

In many ways, Vegas is untouchable as a sales funnel. Not only does it skillfully and rapidly relieve us of our finances, but it does so in a way that we doggedly admire. Somehow, the art of cataclysmically gambling the night away, has been turned in to pop culture that is part of the experience. You go to Vegas expecting to come home lighter than you left, in every sense but the hangover.

So how can we improve our own marketing efforts to create the same free spending escapism? How can we build landing pages as positively badass as The Strip in the dead of night?

Perhaps the best guidance is to determine your goal first. Vegas gives the impression of a city built around a slot machine. From the ground up, it weaves a gigantic web where every road leads back to the desired action – you spending money. It’s difficult to avoid spending money because the execution is so consistent. When you get off the plane, make no mistake: ‘Vegas has you now‘. Opt-outs are hard to come by. The message is loud and clear.

How loud and clear is your marketing? Is your message being scrambled by half-baked execution? The slightest slip of bad copy, or conflicting calls-to-action, and you’ll suffer the equivalent of daylight pouring through a gorged window in the Palace casino. The user slips away and doesn’t look back.

Our job when we’re creating sales funnels is to fully immerse users; to guide them to a state where we have their full and undivided attention. Once we’ve taken away their sense of daylight, their sense of time, their sense of financial good footing, we have to decorate that world with a brighter proposition. Be that an illustration of rapid weight loss, of finding love, or even the freedom of a new career at home; our job is to channel the force of desire and guide it to an action before the moment of escapism has passed.

I think, as Nick suggested, the pull of Vegas is the claustrophobia: a bombardment of the senses that monetizes your confusion whichever way you turn.

It’s difficult to recreate the same psychological experience on a web page. It’s even more challenging to recreate the justification that stalks you towards the departure gate, ably excusing the $3000 dent in your bank balance, as if it were money well spent.

Well, was it?

I hope, for the sake of the affiliates who flew out to ASW on shoestring budgets, that it was a great conference and not simply a Tour De Force in young, rich and infamous binge showboating.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• I’ve recently re-branded FinchBlogs.com to cover a more personal flavour of the crap I’m currently working on. I’ll be blogging about issues even more obscure than sleazeball marketing, so check it out if you dare.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

“I will learn how to control my time. I will defeat procrastination. 2012 better watch out ’cause I’m coming to kick its arse…”

The statement of intent is admirable, but far too many of us fail to learn from mistakes of the previous twelve months. Do we expect them to just disappear? Irrationally, yes we do. We wait for a new dawn, pretend that we’re all the wiser, and then plunge head-first in to the same mistakes yet again.

I would guess that at least half of the people reading this blog woke up on January 1st with the desire to procrastinate less. We see it as the great barrier to achievement. “Well, if I could only bring my mind to focus on all the plans I’ve set for myself, I’d be as rich as my whiteboard says.”

Procrastination is a buzz term that bloggers love to blog about, writers love to write about and speakers love to speak about. It’s a universal phenomenon. To beat procrastination is to pin jelly to a wall. Just when you think you’ve cleared your head of all the distractions and white noise, along comes another unforeseen circumstance to obliterate your carefully laid plans. We end up feeling sorry for ourselves. No matter how hard we search for solutions, we still fall in to the same black hole lapses of productivity.

If you don’t challenge yourself to tackle the problem at its source, you might as well pencil in ‘beating procrastination’ as your annual challenge for 2013, 2014, and every subsequent year for the rest of your life.

So what is the source of procrastination? Ultimately, it’s the failure to foresee your own weaknesses. It’s not a lack of application, or desire, or ambition. Procrastination is simply what happens when you plan a future without addressing the fragility of the decision-making by your future self.

We can all assess procrastination logically in moments like these where we’re reading the obvious in black and white. Yes, we know it’s bad. Yes, we know it’s a hindrance. And yes, we’re all going to make an extra effort to conquer the problem. It’s natural to feel vaccinated against procrastination while you’re reading about it. Unfortunately, there is no vaccination. Just sensible planning.

To reduce the procrastination struggle, you need to make contingency plans for your future self; a much weaker feebler-minded self that has long forgotten your ambitions, and wishes only to cave in to short term satisfaction. Pretending that this alter-ego doesn’t exist is the fastest way to guarantee failure.

A naive New Year’s Resolution is to vow not to spend hours checking Facebook every day, using the thought of all the extra work you’d get done as an incentive.

A realistic New Year’s Resolution is to vow not to spend hours checking Facebook every day, and then LeechBlock the motherfucker so that its physically inaccessible between 9am and 8pm.

The difference between these resolutions is that one is driven by an idealistic hope that temptation will diminish given the right incentive. Much wiser than such hope, is a contingency plan for your weaker future self. Procrastination is just a term we give to the many temptations that control our short term decisions. Temptation is here to stay, and so is our habit of caving in to it like victims of a venus flytrap – unless we learn to tackle the temptation in advance.

Procrastination is not like smoking. It’s not a dirty habit that we can overcome with the right incentive. One day, even the most ardent nicotine fiend may find that cigarettes just don’t hold the same appeal. Such success stories prove that beating an addiction is painful but possible. Beating procrastination is not. It would require evolutionary re-programming that probably won’t be possible in our lifetimes. We are hardwired to cave in to short term temptation much more willingly than we will hold out for long term satisfaction. And that’s why you find yourself balls deep on Facebook when you should be hard at work.

If we can’t eliminate procrastination, what can we do? We can prepare for the temptations that have fucked us in the past. We can’t remove temptation, but we can control behaviour by putting our future selves on a metaphorical leash.

Here are some examples of steps an affiliate marketer can take to become more productive:

1. Pick a new traffic source, any new traffic source, and deposit $1000 immediately. The simple act of committing money to a project will do more for your ‘scaling’ than any amount of scribbling in a notepad.

2. Use LeechBlock to physically remove access to time wasting sites. Don’t just hope that you won’t waste your time. Physically stop your future self! There will be moments in the day where your attention is slipping and that future self sees no harm in a quick 5 minute session on Facebook. Make it impossible.

3. Find a business partner with a superior motive. Once upon a time, I built websites thinking the carrot of money in the future would inspire me to see them through to completion. I soon realised that this carrot would disintegrate when a better idea came along. Naturally, your future self has a bias towards ideas born in the present. If you want to really nail a big project, take on a business partner who is even more motivated than yourself. (Hint: Somebody who gives a damn about the niche.) Use their energy and passion to maintain your spark for projects when the honeymoon period (aka. the domain registration and WordPress installation) wears off. Let them know that part of their job is to kick your arse in to action.

4. Form your own mastermind group and set a daily recap. Sharing knowledge with other affiliates is one of the fastest ways to progress. I recommend kickstarting 2012 by forming a small mastermind group with 2 or 3 other marketers in the same position. Make sure there’s a group discussion at the end of each day. Use it to share your progress. Nobody wants to be the worst performer in the group, so use that competitive pride as inspiration to get a bloody move on.

5. Announce products before they’re ready to be launched. If you run a blog, or any kind of community, and still haven’t ticked off that 2012 must-do of releasing your own product, why not create a sense of urgency? Announce it in advance, tell everybody the launch date, and let your followers hold you accountable. Even better, promise 50% off if you fail to deliver it on time.

I hope everybody is optimistic and determined to make 2012 their best year yet, no matter how depressing my contrarian approach may seem. Never be afraid of making a fresh start and setting tough targets. Just don’t be so foolish as to make the same mistakes again.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• 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. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading. Happy Motherfuckin’ 2012.