Every now and then I receive an email from a frazzled affiliate with bloodshot eyes and questions like the extract below. I’m going to answer it here for the benefit of anybody suffering similar growing pains.

“Hi Finch. I’ve been running affiliate campaigns on FB/POF for over 18 months now and I’ve made good progress in the dating niche. I still feel like there are opportunities passing me by for a lack of resources/time/etc. There are so many traffic sources I want to try and so many offers, but I’m maxed out and finding it difficult to grow the business. It feels like scaling means sacrificing profitability. Do you have any experience of hiring an apprentice to help with expanding your campaigns? Or even to help organize the management side? If so, how do you keep them loyal instead of running their own offers?”

What you are referring to sounds like the classic affiliate marketing plateau.

Most arbitrage affiliates will be familiar with the point of diminishing returns where their overall ROI starts to suffer from spreading efforts too thin. Maybe you’ve neglected the creatives in Campaign X, or saturated every last eyeball in Demographic Y. By attacking too many markets, or too many traffic sources, you can quickly find yourself working extremely hard to make very little progress.

Instead of looking to hire an assistant, your first step should be to analyse the systems you currently have in place.

We all know it’s important to track campaigns using software like CPVLab or Tracking202. You don’t make money if you don’t see where you’re losing it first. But just as crucially, you need to have a system in place that adds meaning and structure to your tracking.

For me, this starts with a good labelling system.

If I’m running multiple campaigns across Facebook, Plentyoffish, Juicy Ads, TrafficJunky and so on, each broken in to multiple countries and demographics, the first thing I want is a way to distinguish overall performance without going in and viewing every last campaign’s stats from the day before.

If you label your campaigns poorly, the CPVLab dashboard is going to resemble a clusterfuck of insignificance. Sure, you’ve got the data on your doorstep. But if you can’t remember the difference between POF DATING CANADA, FB CANADIANS, and CAN MEN 35+, how are you going to make fast, efficient decisions that enable you to manage multiple campaigns?

Most affiliates are happy to track individual campaign performance. Yep, of course they are. They know the importance of data. But tracking data is one thing, managing it is another. You must have a good consistent labelling system to avoid getting your titties in a twist. And more importantly, so that you are motivated to actually use the data.

What’s the point in having CPVLab or Tracking202 if you can’t use them to get a meaningful status update in the morning? You want an overview presented on a plate; one that makes sense to you.

To stay organized, I like to group my campaigns by traffic source in CPVLab. I will then label using this system:

[Country] [Gender] [Age Bracket] [Keyword] [Optional Identifier]

For example, I might have a list of campaigns like this:

• FR-M-3045-SingleParents
• UK-F-2530-BlackDating
• UK-F-2530-BlackDating-002
• US-M-4050-GolfDemo

For traffic sources like Juicy Ads, I’m likely to have multiple campaigns for a single placement (based on a country redirect). For these placements, I use:

[Placement] [Country] [SubID] [Optional Identifier]

• SiteX-DE-SX1
• SiteX-AT-SX1
• AnotherSite-US-AS1
• ThirdSite-IE-TS1

Note: The SubID will also be passed to the networks I work with. That way if I have lead quality issues and I’m running multiple campaigns in the same country, I can distinguish which placement is sending the bad apples. Doesn’t really matter how you track this, just as long as you do.

Now, admittedly, there are more effective ways of labelling. And you can track on a much deeper level if you so wish. But this is the system that I’m happy with. If you are not confident with your ability to oversee multiple campaigns, you will run in to the affiliate plateau. Or to put it simply, you will start launching grenades.

So, step 1 for scaling effectively: get organised. Don’t just track data. Create a system that gives you confidence in it.

The subject of when (or even if) you should hire an assistant is a tricky one.

There are generally three schools of thought:

A. Give a man a campaign and you pay his bills for a month. Teach him how to run them and he’s got his face wedged in strip club titty by Friday night. And he probably doesn’t work for you by Monday. Loyalty, what loyalty?

B. Choose the right personality with the right drive, ambition and skill set. You could have an apprentice today and a business partner tomorrow.

C. Give design work to designers. Give programming work to programmers. Delegate the grunt work; focus your own time on the high value decision making. Keep the core of the business to yourself.

I am generally quite cynical of School B, but that’s only because I’ve yet to find the right ‘apprentice’ to turn in to a business partner. I much prefer the thinking behind School C, and it can be summed up with one classic quote:

“First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you. Third, leave them to go get on with it.”
- David Ogilvy

Ask yourself, what is the single most lucrative skill that an affiliate marketer can possess?

In my opinion, it’s his ability to weigh up opportunity (niches, offers, new cheap traffic sources) with reality (past performance of campaigns, basic maths) and then move quickly to strike while the iron is hot. We are not designers, programmers, or copywriters. Our money is made by plugging market loopholes.

This is something that requires a lot of time spent watching and waiting for opportunity.

My view is that you can’t pay enough attention to your primary job requirement if you are balls deep in CSS and HTML.

Our efforts should be focused on managing campaigns and finding new ones. The production work – the copywriting, banner design and etc – should be first on the chopping board when we run in to the plateau and scaling becomes a problem. Why? Because we can hire somebody to do that, but we can’t hire somebody to think like an affiliate.

Of course, for every step you take away from the grunt work, your ability to manage effectively has to grow exponentially. There’s no point in taking on top class designers if you fail to communicate with them, or fail to budget for them. There’s no point in trying to scale campaigns if the ones you already have are slapped across your tracking dashboard in a state that is nigh on impossible to manage.

Does that mean you shouldn’t take on a ‘Number Two’ as your apprentice? …Ever?

It’s a personal decision, but if I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to avoid individuals who offer to work for you because they like the sound of your career and want to ‘get involved’.

Note: ‘Get involved’ is a popular London turn of phrase that translates to “Join the party”. It betrays the intentions of those who think affiliate marketing is their one-way ticket to the Caribbean. Always think twice about partnering up with those who see your career as a piss-up in pyjamas.

I have taken on apprentices in the past who have made all the right noises about wanting to learn the ropes and get to grips with affiliate marketing. But when push came to shove, they would much rather ‘shadow’ my own campaigns than pick up the ball and create their own.

So, how do you define a good candidate for The Affiliate Apprentice?

Very few people graduate from university with a degree in affiliate marketing (and I can imagine those that do know the price of everything and the value of nothing). The best way to describe our skill set is as chameleons floating in cyberspace. We adjust to our surroundings and seize opportunities using a small but varied set of talents.

Should an apprentice be good at HTML and CSS? Should she be a modern day Peggy Olson copywriting whiz? What about somebody with experience in the industries we cling to?

It’s difficult to nail down a job description for an affiliate without matching it to several individuals you already know who would be absolutely terrible at the job. And that’s why I don’t even try.

Most successful relationships, business or otherwise, benefit from opposite forces holding them together. A little yin and yang goes a long way. I believe in those same principles for a business partnership.

If you are looking for a carbon copy of yourself, put a mirror in your office and work longer hours.

But if you want to bring an apprentice through the ranks, find one with a skill set and the personality to eventually become a valued compatible business partner – NOT a replacement for yourself. This is more likely to keep your egos apart.

Of course, remember: the only person who fully gives a shit about your business is you. Especially in an industry as soulless as affiliate marketing.

Don’t hire an apprentice to be your pawn. He’ll have no hesitation in taking your best ideas and playing you for a fool.

It’s a well known fact that affiliates don’t have many great ideas (just read this blog for confirmation). The ones we do have should be valued highly… and not found in a training manual circulating oDesk.

Happy hiring.

Got a question you want answered on the blog? Send it to me here.

Better yet, it’s free.

Many will be familiar with the team behind Follow. It’s led by Wes Mahler, Nana Gilbert-Baffoe and co; the same guys that brought you the fiercely popular Tracking202 software, a tool that has been worth millions of optimised dollars to the affiliate industry.

It was this proven track record of delivering awesome products that caused my ears to perk when the launch announcement went out yesterday.

Follow straps on to your browser and aggregates data from a number of trusted sources, including analysis powerhouses WhatRunsWhere and MixRank. It’s available across all of the major browsers and can be installed, for free, in about 37 seconds.

Once you have Follow installed, you will notice a green F in your browser that can be used to bust open a sidebar full of useful metrics and analysis.

Everything you need is contained within the sidebar…

Analysis includes:

• Compete ranking
• Alexa trends
• High volume keywords
• SEM spend
• PPC competitors
• Ad networks used
• Top countries advertised in
• Associated affiliate offers
• Known landing pages
• Top ad placements
• Banners used
• Text ads used
• Quantcast demographics
• Linked Twitter accounts and recent tweets
• Reverse IP lookup
• WHOIS information

That’s a real clusterfrazzle of potentially useful information, particularly for affiliates who are building assets over the long haul in a competitive space.

One of my favourite features is the affiliate offer finder.

Follow scans through a collection of networks to see if the website you’re viewing has affiliate offers available. If so, it tells you where to find them, and what payouts you can expect. This is a really handy feature. All those times you’ve stumbled across a cool service and thought, “Holy shit, this product looks half decent. If I wasn’t such a CPA scumbag, I’d promote it! But that would involve research…”

Well, now you can beat procrastination stations with one click.

Follow is operating in a crowded space, there’s no doubt about that. Barely a week goes by where I’m not asked to check out the latest spying tool. Most of them are functional, but they gather dust fast. What I like about Follow is the speed and ease-of-access to the data.

It’s speasy.

It ain’t easy being speasy (it ain’t easy being white).

If, like most affiliates, you enjoy keeping your nose wedged firmly in the competition’s business, Follow will make a nice addition to your toolbar. Snap it up.

From CPCs to EPCs, from CPMs to CTRs… what may appear to the uninitiated as random digits on a screen, can be optimised and manoeuvred in to a recipe for serious, serious moo-lah. But only if you know how to work them. And thankfully most people don’t.

The EPC Spreadsheet

Many affiliate networks distribute spreadsheets of their top performing offers, complete with EPCs, conversion rates and ranking by revenue.

Affiliates seem to love these documents, despite the warped data they can represent. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if 50 new publishers are direct linking one offer, while 5 veterans are pre-selling another, the EPCs are going to look favourable for the pre-sold offer. We take a lot of this bias for granted in the pursuit of easily consumable golden nuggets.

EPC spreadsheets are good for ruling out dud offers, and a welcome helping hand for deciding where to start, but they are not an accurate representation of how your marketing will perform.

If you run a lot of campaigns, and particularly if you are an adopter of the ‘throwing shit at the wall’ technique, I suggest creating your own performance spreadsheets.

In short: Learn to make use of your data.

You pay for it. You bust your balls for it. Why waste it?

If affiliate marketing is all about numbers – and it is – then failing to stockpile your data should be seen as a karate cock slappable offence.

With every campaign, you can store data on multiple levels.

Country Specific Data

I have a file for every single country that I advertise in, as well as an Excel spreadsheet with an overview of the key points I need to remember.

In the spreadsheet I aim to correlate some baseline metrics for each country based on the hundreds of thousands of dollars I have spent arbitraging my damn hairline away.

Metrics such as:

• The best offer in that country, by EPC
• The second best offer, by EPC
• Average CPM/CPC to draw traffic from each of my favourite traffic sources
• Average landing page CTR (some countries can be bashed for 70%, whilst others are tough to optimise beyond 35%). No idea why. That’s why it’s important to take notes.

Note: Media buyers should have doubts about running a campaign if the gulf in performance between best and second best offer is enough to eat up most of their profit. Have a Plan B, or stick to low-risk marketing on self-serve platforms.

There’s no shame in being a one trick pony, and there’s no sense in being an over-confident donkey who just blew $15,000 on a campaign that has no viable Plan B.

My countries overview spreadsheet is a permanent fixture on my desktop.

How many times do you find yourself surfing through new traffic sources, checking out the minimum bids and running calculations in your head to see if you might get profitable? Get that data out of your head and on to paper.

I will say it again: affiliate marketing is all about the numbers.

If you get in to the habit of recycling your data and archiving it for future reference, you will soon find that there is no such thing as a failed campaign. Only more numbers. Numbers that will lower the risk, and the uncertainty, of your next investment.

There are two forms of filing that can also help you.

Digital archiving

What do you do with those landing pages and creatives once you’ve pushed them through the FTP?

I used to let them fester on my desktop before eventually click-and-dragging in to a spiralling abyss marked ‘To Sort‘, one day to be found a dozen archives deep.

I’ve since got in to the habit of storing every single landing page in a country coded folder. If you start this today, you are unlikely to see immediate benefits. But six months down the road you will have enough assets to move quickly in to just about any market in the world.

Naturally, a good labelling system is vital. 1001 folders titled ‘LP1‘ are more trouble than they are worth. Name your landing page variations accordingly. For example: Rules, Qualifier, Short Sell, Sales Letter, Squeeze, and so on…

If you are particularly adventurous, you will have multiple sub-variants inside each folder. Again, name them based on their distinguishing qualities. Future You will be grateful, unlike 2011 Me, who spent many hours fishing through his Trash Can looking constipated.

Paper archiving

Besides the overview spreadsheet and the digital files, I keep a paper record of every single country that I advertise in. As you might imagine, some are thicker than others. Australia is starting to resemble a J.K. Rowling brainfart, whilst a stiff breeze sends China in to my laundry basket.

What do I store in the paper files?

A whole raft of miscellaneous information, such as:

• Print outs of successful creatives
• Printed mind maps of available offers matched to networks (Get MindNode)
• Email correspondence with affiliate managers
• Skype conversation transcripts from networking sessions
• Related forum posts, case studies and follow alongs (Join STM)
• Cheat sheets of common language translations so I can understand my own ads (surprisingly helpful!)
• Popular local slang terms

You could probably do this shit in Evernote, but I like the smell of paper.

Every single campaign you run is a haven for data and insights that can be tucked away and referred to in the future. Some of those insights will be relative to a traffic source, others to a country, and lots will be to a particular offer or creative approach. If you are the kind of affiliate who regularly gorges on network EPC spreadsheets, there’s very little excuse for placing less value in the data that you bought.

Data is no guarantee of success

Affiliates are pretty lousy at predicting how their campaigns will perform. This is a damn near universal trait.

I thought it was just me; a bumbling fool in an ocean of wizard mathematicians. But no, having sat through my share of mastermind sessions recently, I can say with confidence that many of you are just as bad. Collectively we project numbers about as accurately as ReBumberclart Republican Karl Rove on Election Night.

Nate Silvers, we ain’t.

Let’s see…

You’ve spotted that you can snap up 200,000 impressions per day at a CPM of $0.70 and you hope that with a combined ad CTR of 0.25%, a landing page CTR of 30% and a conversion rate of 1/10, you’ll be enjoying a 100% ROI.

You’ve gone so far as to multiply your $140/day profit by 30, and have tentatively pencilled ‘$4200‘ next to a sketch of ‘JUNE‘ with doodles of the cocaine and hookers that you’ll buy with the harvest.

Initial estimates are fine. But don’t kid yourself. You are not going to have an accurate idea of the true numbers until you bite the bullet and go live. And it’s usually at this point that most of us scrunch up those hopeful projections, launching them in to the office bin while snarking viciously:

“How was I to know my CTR wouldn’t nudge past 0.06%?”
“A 3% conversion rate? Are you shitting me? No? Are you SCRUBBING me?”

If you place too much trust in your estimated numbers, you will find yourself so disenfranchised at the end of Day 1 that there’s a good chance you’ll have abandoned ship before the weekend. That’s how money gets wasted and confidence wanes.

Data spreadsheets and detailed files can help to rein in your focus. But they will not perform miracles, and they will not turn your brainfarts in to fairy dust.

There’s a famous quote from Thomas Edison:

“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Naturally, like any wise bastard from years gone by, his words have been passed through memos and mutilated on blogs to the point where you’re just as likely to recognise them as:

“Genius is 20 percent my balls and 80 percent my balls.”

Well, I’m more of a Pareto Principle kinda guy.

It’s tough to say how much of an affiliate’s success stems from genius. But I do know that moments of creative brilliance are rare, and data is not.

Many affiliates carry around their stats as a burden; a constant reminder of how wrong they can be. The best affiliates bounce off their data not as crushing evidence of an initial bad judgment, but as vital signposts for where they need to improve. Sometimes the signal gets lost in the emotional sting of losing money. C’est tragique, now get over it.

You can make a lot of money by applying basic data-driven principles to very ordinary advertising. It’s not rocket science. And the next time somebody asks me what I do for a living, that’s exactly what I won’t tell them.

Numerous studies have shown the ability to delay gratification as one of the biggest indicators of success through life.

It can be relevant in so many ways; from your ability to budget, to the type of woman you wake up next to, to your willingness to stoneface a Sausage & Egg McMuffin in favour of training for a marathon at 5am. The latter of which, in my case, will never ever happen.

Those who can resist temptation in pursuit of long-term goals are blessed with an enormous advantage over the playing field. It is the essence of focus, concentration, productivity and even the classic quote that an affiliate can’t go 7 hours without seeing on Facebook:

Looking at the career of Internet Marketers, many of us were exceptionally good at delaying gratification when we made the jump to running our own businesses. But it doesn’t always stay that way.

In a rather cruel twist of fate, the more successful you become, the more distractions that entwine their way in to your life. It’s kind of like Muse, the band. Does anybody remember how awesome Muse were in 2002-2003?

Here’s a reminder:

Fast forward ten years and you’ll find a caricature of a space rock trio who have clearly spent too much time indulging in fantasies of the apocalypse. If Matt Bellamy spent less time playing with his [admittedly very rich] balls on Above Top Secret, and more hours alone with his guitar, he’d probably write better rock songs.

Many artists produce their best work when the rewards and recognition are nowhere to be seen. It takes a special personality to cancel out the white noise; to produce the best possible work; when distraction is all around him. And that’s what success brings: distraction.

Vincent van Gogh, one of the greatest painters of the last 300 years, died alone and depressed. You could count on one hand the number of people that appreciated his work. Van Gogh’s tragedy, among many, was that he blew his brains out before seeing the recognition he deserved. But it does go some way to explaining why that work is so highly regarded, particularly for its emotional honesty.

There are only so many distractions that one man, a paintbrush and his mental illness has to bear. The product of that delayed gratification – van Gogh’s lifetime battle with depression and introspection – is what we now call genius.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that the way to get in touch with your best possible work is to despair and retreat from the world. But I do believe that anybody who has the privilege of working from home has to become fine-tuned to his ‘levels of comfort’.

Too much comfort is a bad thing.

Too many distractions will fuck with your ability to see straight through them and catch the bigger prize.

On a personal level, this isn’t something I had to worry about before I quit my day job.

For a period of several months, I would work all day in the city, and then all night in my bedroom. There’s very little reward at 9:02am, day after day, parking at your desk and feeling like your every fibre has been shagged by a pygmy hippo. But there’s an awful lot of potential if you can sustain the act long enough to achieve progress that wouldn’t have been possible at Pound a Pint Night.

The better you are at delaying rewards, the more productive you are likely to be in the meantime. Likewise, the more motivated you are, the more natural that is going to become. Learning to delay gratification is thus a two-part recipe of finding the right motivation and instilling the right discipline.

The effects it can have on your life are pretty remarkable…

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

One of the most famous studies in to delayed gratification took place over 40 years ago at Stanford University, courtesy of psychologist Walter Mischel, 600 children, and a plate full of marshmallows.

Mischel led each child in to a room free of distractions where they would find a treat of their choice, usually a marshmallow (would have demanded a salted caramel brownie personally, but whatever). The children were told they could eat the marshmallow if they so wished – or wait 15 minutes, and receive two. A very simple premise: more good things come to those who wait.

All of Mischel’s guinea pigs were aged 4 to 6, and it was hoped that the experiment would reveal the age at which a child learns to defer gratification. Sure enough, there was a clear correlation between the older children and a better ‘waiting game’. But it wasn’t until a follow-up study, twenty years later, that the groundbreaking extent of those marshmallows became apparent.

The children who had shown the best ability to defer gratification; to wait for the second marshmallow; had gone on to lead strikingly more successful lives than those who caved in to the immediate reward.

The first follow-up study in 1988 revealed that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent“. A subjective analysis, admittedly, but one that would be backed by further findings.

The children who delayed gratification were later paired to better SAT scores, greater academic achievements, a healthier body mass index, among other favourable life outcomes.

Whether the ability to delay gratification comes from nature or nurturing is difficult to assess. A 2011 brain imaging study on the same Stanford test subjects (now seasoned guinea pigs) showed greater activity in the prefrontal cortex for the adept delayers, whereas those who struggled to resist the first marshmallow saw increased activity in the ventral striatum, an area of the brain commonly associated with addictions.

Biology and marshmallows aside, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how a talent for delaying gratification is useful in our world of immediate distractions.

A large number of affiliates walk this earth with the patience of bloodhounds OD’ing on viagra. They wouldn’t wait for the second marshmallow. They’d karate cock slap Mischel, steal the entire bag, and be promoting Adult Friend Finder before lunch.

So…how do we manage that? How do we keep an eye on the greater prize? How in the name of Lucifer’s anus do we learn to defer gratification?

Improving Your Ability to Delay Gratification

Alter The Path of Least Resistance

The Marshmallow experiment is interesting, but one of the conditions I find troubling is that the marshmallow had to remain in front of the child at all times. It was never more than a sweeping arm’s grab away, which is like sticking a bee in front of honey.

What would have happened if the child had been forced to stand up, cross the room, and climb up a pile of boxes if he wished to have the marshmallow? This is what we call altering the path of least resistance.

You take temptation, you bag it up, and you get it the hell out of your sight.

In doing so, you considerably raise your chances of removing a bad habit, or not doing something stupid.

Take for example the confessions of a shopaholic.

What’s a good way to stop yourself from splashing the cash on excessive online purchases that you probably can’t afford? Well, taking your credit cards and freezing them in a block of ice is one option.

I make this the equivalent of the consumer ‘cooling off’ period. If a purchase is truly necessary, it can wait 24 hours while the ice thaws.

Note: I highly suggest you get your groceries in before freezing Mr. Plastic Fantastic, and do not try this with your business cards. It will not say much for your professionalism.

The frozen credit card is a good example of how placing a roadblock in the path of least resistance can save you during a moment of weakness. It’s pretty extreme, but it’s a step in the right direction for people who never learn.

If you can take a bad habit and put it 30 seconds away, there’s a good chance you’ll remove the habit. I spoke about this before in my Premium Posts with examples of blocking time-wasting websites, putting your phone in another room, hiding the PS3 controller in your loft, and so on. Alter the path of least resistance.

The less immediate the distraction becomes, the more likely you are to procrastinate over pursuing it, and maybe – just maybe – get some bloody work done.

I heard an amusing tale from a Yorkshire friend who didn’t want to have sex on a first date, so she would turn up in her least attractive underwear and abandon sexual hygiene for the day. The theory being that no matter how drunk she got, she would always remember that it wasn’t a good night to go home with company. I think she probably overestimated the underwear receptiveness of Sheffield men, but I can see her logic. Fair play to the crazy bitch.

Clearly, one of the best ways to delay gratification is to understand your own thought processes so that you can prepare for weak decisions and create gremlins to prevent them.

For example, if you are the kind of guy who likes to take a break from work to play a few games of pool, firstly a) Don’t be so stupid as to buy a pool table for your dining room.

And b) If you are going to be so stupid, use it as a laundry post from Monday to Friday so it doesn’t kill your career.

(Life lessons. You’re welcome.)

Kids Need to be Taught About Money

I believe in this quite passionately.

In school, we spend hours teaching our kids about how Jesus fed 5000 with bread and fish, but we don’t teach them how to manage their money. That’s a pretty fucking big problem in my book.

Schools need to do away with political correctness, starting with religious education, and get teaching kids some life skills that actually matter. Like how to manage their finances. How to budget. How to distinguish between materialistic needs and paying the god damn gas bill.

While bestselling hack-jobs like Rich Dad Poor Dad have attempted to instill a wiser attitude towards finance in today’s younger generation, it should not be a responsibility left to men like Robert Kiyosaki. It should be taught in schools. In the absence of any foreseeable change, parents have to pick up the ball…

Pressure on Parenting

I was having a conversation the other day about the difference between Yes parents and No parents, and whether it is good or bad for the kid being raised.

Like many key skills in life, the seeds of delayed gratification are sewn in childhood. Parents who feel inclined to say yes to their child’s every demand are likely to give him a skewed attitude towards the supply and demand of ‘getting what you want’ when he reaches adulthood.

I would argue that, similarly, parents who never praise, or who keep both eyes locked on expectations and ‘minimum requirements’ (you will get a degree) are likely to inherit children with damaging self-esteem issues. And those can be just as difficult to shake.

Either way, I encounter so many 8-12 year old fuck-ups on the London buses that I can’t help but think the best advice is “If you’re not ready for them, don’t fucking have them.”

Parents need to prepare their kids for the real world by teaching them about money, and the critical law that governs just about every facet of our lives: supply and demand.

Money doesn’t grow on trees, and neither should it. Expecting millions when your net output is peanuts just isn’t going to work, as the Western electorate is only just discovering. If everybody could have what they wanted; all of the time; nothing would be worth having because all that would be left is sticks and stones.

Delayed gratification is a virtue to those who understand it, and a royal pain in the arse to those who don’t. Would it be better any other way?

I don’t think so.

And on that note, I’m off to shove my pool table in the freezer.

Have a good week.

Hopefully not.

I’d be worried if your day involved my balls.

One of the easiest ways to tell apart an affiliate marketer from another online professional is by inspecting his clusterfuck of a to-do list. On it you will find tasks that defy pattern, logic and – too often – sensibility.

I have explored many different theories of task management. From restricting my day to a maximum of 3 valuable tasks, to assigning letters and numbers to each, to completing the most important task first, to working in pomodoro sequence, to cramming more tasks in to a polyphasic sleep schedule (and completely shagging myself in the process).

One of the takeaway lessons from these experiments, besides appreciating my need to sleep like a real human being, is that clustering similar tasks is nearly always more effective than jumping between projects like a Kardashian on crack.

Multi-tasking does not exist.

Science has a gone a long way to proving that ‘effective’ multi-tasking is one of the great myths in our generation of workaholism. The brain cannot focus on two tasks at once. It can only stop, start, and switch. Any illusion of multi-tasking is actually the ability to do this fast and effectively.

Affiliates, being suckers for to-do lists with juddering changes in direction, have it harder than most. We have to balance many different skills with the regular burden of being ‘the guy who works from home and can therefore a) pick up the kids, b) wait for a delivery, c) take an hour out of the way to run errands’.

Go ahead. Look at what you’ve worked on today and count the number of times you’ve slammed the ‘reset’ button.

• Every time you switch from analysing campaigns to creating campaigns, that’s a reset.
• Every time you switch from designing campaigns to blogging, that’s a reset.
• Every time you switch from blogging to trolling oDesk, that’s a reset.
• Every time you pick up a phone or refresh your inbox, that’s a reset.

Generally I find that the more resets I ask of myself – the more shifts in focus – the less productive I become and the greater my tendency to procrastinate. Too many resets and a kitten will eventually perish.

There’s a very simple solution.

Cluster your tasks and reduce the number of resets in your day.

Instead of working on multiple demanding projects, choose just one. Get in ‘the zone’ and cling to it like a fly to a turd.

If you are anything like me, you will have 6 or 7 projects occupying your whiteboard at any given moment. In this case, a project per day is wishful thinking – a great way to ensure you spend a lot of time grafting with none of the thrill of actually finishing something. If you are balancing multiple projects, I suggest dividing your days in to an AM and PM. Then clustering your tasks accordingly.

I might have a day that looks like this:

AM: Blogging for FinchSells.com
- Reply to comments
- Draft post
- Follow up blog related emails
- Brainstorm Premium Posts concept

PM: Scale TJ/Exo Campaigns
- Assess campaign performance
- Update creatives and reset bids
- Scour for similar targets
- Creative research
- Launch in new region

In the past, I would smatter my tasks on a colossal to-do list, which left me hopping between unrelated items, or worse, sandwiching my important tasks with stupid shit that would completely obliterate my focus.

By focusing on just one project for the AM and one for the PM, you can leverage your lunch break as a natural reset. I have been known to go slightly AWOL on my lunch break, venturing in to town and succumbing to caffeine-aided introspection for hours on end. That’s okay. The AM and PM is purely symbolic; a shift in focus marked by the annihilation of a Halloumi wrap and a brief respite.

Of course, the acid test of any task management philosophy is how you deal with chores and the arrival of the unexpected. For the latter, I have matured enough to pick my battles. That means slowly falling deaf and blind to the most common distractions of affiliate-kind, which from my experience is one question that never ceases to relent, “Could I be working on something that makes me more money than what I’m already working on?” The temptation is always to say yes, whereas common sense says if you don’t finish your shit, you’ll never know and you’ll have wasted your time.

If an awesome CPA offer lands in my inbox, it’s probably not so awesome if it’s gone by tomorrow. If my accountant has an urgent question (“Hi Finch, where are you siphoning your money?”), he’ll be phoning me instead of adding to my Inbox Unzero.

Acceptance that your entire life isnt going to crumble and burn if you fail to adopt a 24/7 vigil over the call of your name is pretty fucking essential to anybody who wants to stay sane (or get something done) in this industry. As for chores, well, there’s only so many times you can wear the same shirt before ‘not smelling like a mountain troll’ becomes more important than your task management.

I have started to assign one day of the week to chores.

Just chores, nothing else.

Now that I live on my own, there’s a lot more flexibility in how I handle them. If i want to quit festering in my filth and bust out a vacuum, then that’s my initiative. The could rather than should makes a huge difference.

Simple acts of putting the laundry in, taking out the trash, or returning a phone call might only take minutes, but in momentum and concentration, they are like a sucker punch to the loins. Save it for your lunch break, or the end of the day, or just do what I am *almost* too ashamed to admit… and hire a maid.

Remember, every time you switch attention from your goal, that’s a reset.

“We overestimate what we can accomplish in a day and underestimate what we can accomplish in a year.”
- Bill Gates

It’s one of my favourite quotes, and it’s true.

How do you know when you’re overestimating what you can accomplish in a day?

Simple.

Wait for Friday evening and see if you feel like a sack of shit.

If it happens every week, then there’s probably something wrong with a) your expectations, or b) your task setting.

Well, hold on tight… 

What happens to the human brain after four years in affiliate marketing? Is twenty-something dementia an inevitability? Does the industry have a future? These are questions that have been landing in my inbox with increasing regularity since the launch of my Affiliate Marketing Survival Guide 2013.

I’m going to condense one of the hardest years of my life in to 7 takeaway brainfarts. Make of them what you will. 

You Can’t Live Off ‘Potential’ Forever

I had a slight identity crisis through the winter. You might refer to it as a first world problem, but I live in the first world, and we all have our battles. Sucketh on.

When I launched my affiliate business, I was 21 years old and a lot of my identity and self-worth was built around being a young entrepreneur instead of a slave to academia. As the years have gone by and my friends have left University and started their own careers, I’ve struggled to rationalise how this particular brand of entrepreneurship – affiliate marketing – correlates to the type of business figures and moguls I’ve come to admire. 

My own identity has been placed under the hammer, and while I can justify advertising until my face burns blue, I’m not entirely at peace with the legacy of it. 

I read a fantastic piece of advice in The Chimp Paradox that goes like this:

Imagine that you are 100 years old and on your death bed with one minute left to live. Your great-great-grandchild asks, “Before you die, tell me, what should I do with my life?”

Whatever your advice was to your great-great-grandchild is really the advice to yourself. If you are not living by this advice, which is the essence of your existence, you are living a lie.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the transition from a young guy in the industry with stars and dollar bills in his eyes, to being an established part of that industry and then not being sure if the industry is what he would want on his tombstone. This, in large part, has forced a dramatic shift in where I spend my time, and where I see my future. 

Writing 1000 Words Per Day

One of the best decisions I’ve made in the last year is a commitment to write at least 1000 words every day. 

Sometimes my writing involves commercial products that I intend to release, sometimes it involves blog posts (like this), and sometimes it means wave after wave of scribbles in one of about 5,000 moleskines.

I went through a phase of brutally recommending the 1000 words a day as catharsis to anybody and everybody who would listen. The truth is, everybody is different. Writing is just one of many different forms of expression, it only so happens to be the one that best erases my stresses and strains.

Whether you are a writer, an artist, a social butterfly or somebody who can only think straight with adrenaline coursing through his veins, it pays damn well to get in touch with the medium that allows you to express yourself and ‘get it out’. Finding what works for me (although I already knew) is definitely one of the plus points of the last 12 months. 

A Bad Diet is a Big Handicap

After growing sick of Masterchef breakfasts, I recently rocked up to Whole Foods and pillaged the supplement and shake aisles for more vitamins than I’d previously ingested in my other 25 years combined. 

While I have slipped back in to bad patterns recently (a broken fridge will do that to a man), there is no mistaking the benefits of eating well. The effect a good diet – and particularly a nutritious breakfast – can have on your productivity is absolutely mindblowing. 

I have a sweet tooth, some might even say a McTooth. But I’ve seen what difference processed crap has on my ability to think clearly, and to sustain that focus for hours at a time. I will be damned if I don’t consolidate some major dietary changes in the next 12 months. It’s money on the table in billable hours.

Mind Power Experiments

I recently followed a tip from Charles Ngo and have been taking L-Theanine supplements mixed with caffeine and Green Tea before the more intense parts of my day. Kiss my balls in advance, I’m not talking about RedTube.

L-Theanine is an amino acid that can lower anxiety and reduce the psychological and physiological effects of stress. It is relatively free from side-effects (everybody reacts differently, do not assume I wear a white coat), and one of many nootropics that *may* boost cognitive performance. If Limitless grabbed you by the gooch, they are worth checking out. 

While I have started to build up a tolerance to L-Theanine, it remains a pretty badass supplement when used sparingly to trigger a 3 to 4 hour burst of lucid focus, something I swear by when I’m writing. I kicked back a dose before writing this post and my eyes haven’t left the screen. Godsend. 

Another ‘mind hack’ I’ve become very familiar with in the last year is hypnosis. No, not the apocalyptic Derren Brown kind, but gentle, relaxation techniques. I took 7 hours of professional hypnotherapy from Darren Marks in Harley Street (recommended), and the sessions have helped me to get a grip on some damaging personal issues that were getting my titties in a twist. 

Cheap self-hypnosis tracks are available all over the Internet, for just about any pursuit imaginable. Even if you don’t ‘believe in hypnotism’, they are excellent relaxation tools for 20 minute breaks.

Relationships can’t be immune to change

The last time I mentioned my relationship, it was in glowing terms with an engagement and a move to America on the horizon. Well, that didn’t work out so well. I broke up with my ex in February, and the quiet on this blog has a lot to do with the force of the change ripping through the rest of my life. 

There was no hatred, no resentment, no posturing to spare the blame. Just a sad mutual realisation how something that once felt so right; over days, weeks or months; had splintered in to something that no longer was. That’s the story. 

I resent the 24/7 gossip mill culture that says scapegoats need to be found, drama made, or an opinion of a person has to shift if you break up with them. It’s Grade A bollocks, and I have no time for the bloodthirst.

Even worse, there’s judgment from the passive observer (who could only possibly find fulfilment in an episode of Hollyoakes); he or she who thinks that two grown adults making a decision has to reflect badly or tellingly on one of them. 

“Where did it go wrong? Who did what?”

C’est la vie. 

Sometimes life throws you lemons. 

Instead of making lemonade, I prefer to throw them back at the idiots who need conflict and bitching to get through their days. That’s pretty much all I want to say about it. 

This is an affiliate marketing blog. And yes, I use the term loosely. 

I Cannot Dance

Holy shit.

Being single again has reminded me how garishly offensive-on-the-eyeballs I can be when unleashed on a dancefloor.

My friends knew this already, but I had forgotten the fact over time.

I want to take this opportunity to say sorry in advance for the empty bars, clubs, etc.

It’s not you, London, it’s definitely me.

And what about Affiliate Marketing? Is it Dead?

No, she lives. 

There were times in the past few years where I felt overly paranoid for questioning when Lady Affiliate Marketing would pop her clogs and we’d all be forced to look for a day job. 

The bottom line is that any change is gradual, and even our worst fears (traffic source meltdowns, offer implosions) are negotiable by diversifying carefully, not resting on your laurels, and reading your RSS once in a blue moon.

Basically, don’t live under a rock, don’t pretend you’re invincible, don’t brag about your success (Karma is a bitch) and you should be okay. 

One day, the industry will resemble a completely different beast. That’s true. And yes, one day the tactics that worked in 2013 will be laughed at by the Internet nerdscallions of 2017. 

Who needs to lose sleep over it? 

The rest of the ‘unanswerable questions’ have a time, a place and a name.

They’re called 2014, 2015 and 2016. 

Keep your eyes open, work hard, don’t be a complete fuck-up, and you’ll be just fine. 

Recommended This Week:

• For a more complete dissection on where affiliate marketing stands, I suggest you pick up this Survival Guide, updated for 2013.

I decided to compile a list of all my favourite tools, networks, blogs and resources. Feel free to flick through it below. If just 1% of it is enlightening and/or informative, then this won’t have been a collossal waste of time.

Enjoy.

(I’ll be editing the list regularly. Well, semi-regularly.)

Blogs

CPA

FinchSells – Well, hello.

Mr Green – New Zealand’s best (and maybe only?) affiliate marketing blog?

IM Grind – Daily Internet Marketing news. Fetish for infographics.

Aff Helper – Regular contributions from all over the affiliasphere.

Charles Ngo – Popular affiliate and rightly so. Don’t think he’s ever put out a bad post.

Adult Media Buying – Man o’ Scandal? You’ll enjoy this. Sound advice for making a filthy dollar.

PPC.bz – Hilarity, affiliate marketing and… weed porn?

Wall of Monitors – The blog of affiliate marketer ‘HeavyT’. Shares more than just his monitors.

Perform(ance Marketing) Insider – The Daily Mail of affiliate marketing rags.

Perform(ance Marketing) Outsider – Amusing parody, that often manages to be more relevant than the above.

IPyxel – Lots of tips for getting profitable on Plentyoffish.

StackThatMoney – Head straight to the Case Study section.

Luke Peerfly – Award winning affiliate manager with a busted brand if he ever leaves Peerfly.

Nicky Cakes – The blog that got me in to affiliate marketing. No longer updated, some classic reads in the archives.

Aff Playbook Blog – Lots of practical tips, especially useful for PPV marketers.

Zac Johnson – One of the longest running CPA blogs out there.

CTRTard – Helmet wearing CPA dude. Where did he go?

Ian Fernando – Travels the world pointing his finger. One of the last remaining active CPA blogs.

Rohail Rizvi – Affiliate insights and regular ‘earnings reports’ if you need some inspiration. Doesn’t seem to post much these days.

Justin Dupre – Has been caught staring at more titties than any other marketer in Thailand.

Riley Pool – He said he was going to post a new campaign every day, then he disappeared completely. A recurring trend in the affiliate blogosphere!

Bryn Youngblut – I just love his name. Another once prolific CPA blogger who has vanished, presumably back to Monkey Island whence he came.

Inside Affiliate – Check out his older posts on PPV.

Affiliate Help – Covers a lot of the basics in an easy-to-read manner.

POF Blog – Advertising on POF? Ben can hook you up with some good strategies.

Who Is Andrew Wee? – The kind of guy who seduces affiliates with ice cream and chocolates.

AM Navigator – Interesting perspective from those managing affiliate programs. ‘How to monetise us pawns…‘

Moby Affiliates – One of the few blogs dedicated to mobile affiliate marketing.

Mob Aff Blog – Another one, written by an angry Russian dude.

Affbuzz – Aggregates the latest CPA news.

Affposts – Like Affbuzz, emphasis on newer posts.

Conversion Optimisation

UnBounce – Delicious landing page optimisation tips.

Conversion XL – ‘Extra Lucrative’ conversion advice.

Topping Two Percent – Excellent write-ups, lots of juicy info on how to squeeze the maximum out of your landing pages.

Boost CTR – Light a rocket up the jacksy of your search and social ads.

Optimizely – Full of A/B testing examples.

Shock Marketer – Consistently good advice, no fluff.

Conversion Voodoo – Company blog with plenty to say about improving conversions.

General Marketing

OKTrends – Unmissable insights for anybody working in the dating niche. You need to read this.

Kiss Metrics – More data analysis than a marketer can shake his stick at.

ViperChill – One of the most informative Internet Marketing resources on the planet. Featured in the Guardian.

Sugarrae – Impressive collection of straight shooting posts. Covers a spread of Internet Marketing topics.

Direct Response – One of my favourite direct marketing reads. Don’t just beat the competition; crush it.

Blue Hat SEO – Outdated as hell, still an epic read.

Shoemoney – Love him or hate him, you can’t not know Shoe if you work in this industry.

Inside Facebook – Essential reading for the sadists otherwise known as Facebook marketers.

Dukeo – Has really come on strong in recent months. Lots of great content for affiliates.

SkyRocket SEO – One of the few SEO blogs I keep coming back to.

Generation Y – Tips on how to survive working from home, from those already surviving it.

PPC.org – Tips and tricks for clickety clicks. Heavy focus on Google.

Skimlinks Blog – Regular dollops of advertising industry news.

Think Traffic – Consistently good advice for brand building and traffic swallowing.

Networks

There are so many networks out there. I’m only going to recommend those that I’ve tried personally, or those with near unanimous praise.

CPA

Adsimilis – If you’re sick of networks posturing over who has the biggest grapefruits or the dopest bling, then sign up with Adsimilis. They ‘get’ the affiliate mindset, without adopting it for themselves.

A4D – Led by Jason Akatiff, A4D is one of the most highly regarded affiliate networks in the business. You’ll be tough pressed to find a bad word said about them.

Convert2Media – Recognized by 500 INC. as one of the fastest growing companies in America.

Neverblue – Tons of great mobile offers, and one of the rare few genuinely ‘international’ networks. Made my first ever CPA commission with Neverblue. *le sniffle*

Above All Offers – If Eli Aloisi puts even half the time in to his network as he did with the BlueHat blog, this has to be worth joining.

F5 Media – Founded by the same guys who brought you the STM Forum, F5 packs a bunch of strong dating offers.

Monetise – Promising network with a heavy slant towards UK offers.

Peerfly – Strong industry following, popular launch pad network for beginners.

Incent.ly – Owned by Peerfly, dedicated to incentive traffic.

Mundo Media – I haven’t tried them, but I’ve heard good reviews. Mobile seems to be their specialty?

Ploose – Good for adult dating and hookup offers.

Cupid – Vast selection of dating offers from Cupid.

People Meet – Home to the People Meet brand. Excellent converters.

Date Connected – Another direct dating/hookup merchant, home to JustHookup. Can you guess which niche I work in?

Traditional

CJ – Known for its shoddy treatment of affiliates, but with so many good offers, you’ll want to join regardless.

ShareASale – Much respected Chicago-based network. Large selection of boutique CPS offers.

LinkShare – Another colossal network. Better support than CJ.

ClickBank – Where many an affiliate marketer sold his first shining turd. Sketchy digital products galore. They have the audacity to start deducting commissions through ‘admin fees’, which will piss you off.

Amazon Affiliates – Underrated by CPA affiliates, overrated by everybody else.

Google Affiliate Network – Boo the irony.

Mobile

OfferMobi – One of the leading mobile performance networks.

Revived Media – Created by the prolific IMGrind team. Dedicated mobile network with great reviews.

KissMyAds – Mobile affiliate network. Regrettable name for the dinner table?

Linking Mobile – UK based, recommended to me. I haven’t tried them.

Conferences and Meetups

Affiliate Summit – The premier affiliate marketing conference, where affiliates convene to talk shop and party in strip clubs (or drown in sausage).

A4U Expo – Popular performance marketing conference, especially in Europe. A bit suity.

ad:tech – Digital marketing conferences scattered all around the globe. Very suity.

LeadsCon – Vegas/NYC based event dedicated to lead generation.

AM Days – Specialised conference for the management of affiliate programs (aka, how to deal with unprofessional slackers in their underpants).

Self-Serve Traffic Sources

Below is a relatively small selection of traffic sources that I can personally recommend. For a more comprehensive list, see this sprawling bookmark cert on 3things.

Search

Google AdWords – Still the King of search PPC. Not an easy dragon for the affiliate to slay.

Bing Ads – Closest alternative to AdWords. Less booty lashings.

7Search – You’ll need to be on your game to find a converter in here. Only troopers hit the green.

Social

Facebook – Hugely competitive. Potential to make you rich. Quickly.

Twitter Ads – …Good luck.

POF Ads – Target dating users down to the hair color. Saturated but still powerful.

Adly – There’s something I find immensely entertaining about the prospect of affiliates soliciting celebrities for their ads. What’s the worst that could happen?

Cubics Adknowledge – Advertise across a selection of over 1200 Facebook apps.

Contextual

Media Traffic – Good PPV network for single opt-in submits and gaming offers.

TrafficVance – Highest quality PPV traffic in the business. Requires $1000 deposit.

Lead Impact – Good starting point for PPV marketers. Lots of room to scale your campaigns.

DirectCPV – Haven’t tried them but they’re always giving free coupons away. Sign up and make the most?

Display

AdBlade – Self-serve, popular choice for the CPA affiliate (particularly those who dabble in rebills).

50onRed – Intext and display ads available. $500 to get started.

BuySellAds – Buy direct placements on high profile websites. Easy to use. Tough to find the good spots.

Buy Ads – More direct placements.

Pulse360 – CPC-based with lots of high quality traffic. Expensive. Won’t work on lower payout offers.

engage:BDR – High quality display traffic that you’ll need some budget for.

SiteScout – Low risk media-buying entry point for affiliates. Suggest you start here.

MochiMedia – Great launch pad for newbie affiliates in the gaming niche.

Ad2Games – Lots of quality gaming traffic. Heavy German influence.

CPM Star – More gaming traffic. Only limited experience with this one, looks decent.

Juicy Ads – Incredibly lenient, self-serve adult dating platform. Cheap. Great for learning the ropes.

Traffic Junky – One of the most popular sources of adult traffic in the world. Big volume. Equal competition.

Exoclick – More adult dating by the bucket load. Probably not *quite* as good quality as TJ, but offset by cheaper traffic.

AdBucks – Don’t be fooled by the minimal interface. This adult display source packs a donkey punch.

Retargeting

AdRoll – Named the #1 Advertising Company by Inc. Magazine. Growing fast, seems to be everywhere. Oh wait…

Retargeter – Renowned for having one of the best customer service teams in the business.

Chango – Specialises in search retargeting rather than site retargeting.

Mobile

AdMob – The daddy of mobile advertising. Now owned by Google.

Leadbolt – Temperamental but popular platform.

InMobi – Lots of traffic, not the best interface for a newbie.

Adfonic – Over 100 billion monthly impressions.

AdModa – Has a useful Campaign Planner to help you avoid desolate markets.

JumpTap – Hit and miss customer service, high quality traffic. Worth sticking with.

Search Marketing Tools

SEOMoz – Powerhouse in the SEO world. Monitors your search and social performance for a good price.

Open Site Explorer – Part of SEOMoz, but free to use. Offers a bird’s eye view of your site’s current standing in relation to competition.

Spyfu – Download your competitor’s profitable keywords (then do your damn best to find them).

SEO Book Tools – Useful all-in-one resource covering most of the SEO board.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Don’t live by this tool, but don’t completely ignore it either. Useful when applied in context.

Forums

Subscription

Stack That Money – My forum of choice for affiliate marketing discussion. I’m a moderator here, and it’s the only forum I post on. This is high-end CPA advice for those who are actively running campaigns. Costs $99/month, worth every penny.

AffPlaybook – Another popular forum, particularly with North American affiliates. This started as a specialist forum for PPV, but it now covers pretty much every avenue for the CPA affiliate. Costs $67/month.

IMGrind – I’ve never seen it. Reports suggest it attacks Internet Marketing from a broader scope and is not aimed directly at the CPA affiliate. Costs $99/month.

The Dojo – New paid addition on the CPA Fix forum. Lifetime access for a one-time payment.

Free

WickedFire – Where the occasional golden nugget can be found buried between tits, ass and Rick Astley. Generally NSFW.

Affiliates4u – Very active forum, heavy European influence. Better place to network with merchants and product owners than it is to find other affiliates.

ABestWeb – Largest affiliate marketing forum in the world, with a heavy corporate slant. Where the utterly blind converge with the suited and booted.

CPA Fix – Mostly focused on CPA marketing, seems to specialise in free traffic sources and generating leads on a budget.

Must-Read Books

The Affiliate Marketing Survival Guide 2013 – Written by yours truly. My uncensored take on where the industry stands in 2013, and most importantly, where your business needs to stand in 2014.

Ca$hvertising – A must-read for any direct response marketer. Golden tips for improving your sales funnel with an emphasis on getting the conversion now.

The Millionaire Fastane – A book of two halves. Skip the preaching first half, but burn the value creation tips of the second half in to your retinas and live by them.

Influence – A seminal classic from Robert Cialdini that many affiliates glow over as the most important book they ever read.

Ogilvy on Advertising – Classic work, now decades old, yet Ogilvy still speaks more sense than most. The lessons of an advertising great.

The Happiness Advantage – Wise words for those whose happiness depends on the next stats refresh.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – A modern classic on understanding people. A skill that pays the bills in this biz.

You Are Not So Smart – Light, fun, breezy read on the many psychological biases and flaws that an affiliate marketer could do untold damage with.

Outsourcing and Delegating

ODesk – Great place to hunt for programmers, designers and virtual assistants.

Easy Outsource – Hit and miss pool of Filipinos for hire. Some golden workers, some… not so much.

Elance – Slightly more expensive, and generally more ‘westernized’. Use Elance to hire specialised writers for your ‘money’ sites.

One Hour Translation – If you are running foreign campaigns, it can be tempting to cut corners with language translation. Don’t do it. Use this site to get your landing pages and creatives translated within the hour.

Guru – Another big cat in the outsourcing world. I’ve never used it.

Fiverr – Seriously, is there anything that can’t be outsourced to Fiverr? This site is like a slap in the face to every freelancer who cherished his hourly rate. Good for us though…

99 Designs – Crowdsource your design work. Pricy but spoils you for choice.

Mailing Software & Tools

AWeber – Popular email marketing tool. Loses points by charging for unsubscribers, still my favourite.

MailChimp – Has a free option up to 2000 subscribers.

OptinSkin – Sends your opt-ins through the roof. Used on this site. Developed by Mr. ViperChill.

Mobile Resources

Inside Mobile Apps – Probably the best resource on mobile app dev.

HowToGoMo – Test how your site looks on mobile devices.

Mobilizer – Great mobile browser tester, free app.

iMobiTrax – Mobile tracker from the guys behind IMGrind. Looks very impressive.

MobGrind – Useful aggregator for mobile news.

PPC.bz Mobile Resource List – A list within a list. So what?

Content Publishing

WordPress – Has opened up content publishing to the mass market. Love you, WordPress.

Joomla – Flexible and aesthetically pleasing platform.

Clickthroo – Landing page builder with over 100 templates and split-testing functionality.

600+ places to share your content – Use, don’t abuse!

Research Tools

IMDB Coming Soon – If you like to monetize trends, this is probably the most underrated resource on the planet. Pick a blockbuster movie in the distant future, build your website, eat the traffic.

IMDB Just Announced – Get your first mover’s advantage on.

Google Search Trends – Analyse the latest search trends. You’ll need to act fast if you want to make any money from them.

Google Ad Planner – It’s almost like they want us to advertise with them!

Amazon Future Releases – Drill down your search by categories to find the hottest products coming soon to your niche.

Yahoo Clues Beta – Clues is a pretty good name for it. Data that gives you a headache.

Think With Google – Small mountain of research in to consumer trends. Broad in scope, interesting nonetheless.

Compete – Popular research tool. Scratch the underbelly of your competition, sniff out their popular keywords, monitor traffic metrics.

What Runs Where – Spy on the world’s most successful display campaigns.

Mixrank – Good, underrated alternative to WRW.

Adult AdSpy – For adult dating marketers with good self-control. Wank ‘o clock.

Offervault – Handy tool when searching for CPA offers.

oDigger – Network reviews and offer searcher. I wouldn’t place much faith in the star reviews, but the rest of the site is useful.

Creative Tools

BannerSnack – Suck at making banners? Use this.

Icon Finder – More arrows and buttons for your landing page than you could ever possibly need.

Ugly Banners Work Better – Oh yes they do. This is a sweet tool for fuglifying your creatives and increasing that all important CTR.

Jing – Don’t miss inspiration when it comes. Jing allows you to capture images and clips on the fly. Great for scoping campaigns.

Convertasaurus – Select two calls-to-action and watch them fight to the death. Not sure how accurate but pretty cool?

Browser Shots – Always be testing how your landing pages look in different browsers.

BrowserStack – Best browser tester I’ve found so far. Works for mobile too.

Tracking Tools

Complete Solutions

CPV Lab – Premium but oh-so-easy campaign tracking. My favourite.

Tracking202 – More customisable than CPV Lab, and free. Can be a little fiddly if you’re a technophobe.

Bevo Media – ‘The only place affiliate marketers need to be.’ All in one suite. Never tried it.

iMobiTrax – Mobile tracker from the guys behind IMGrind.

Tracking Everything Else…

Optimizely – Popular A/B split testing tool with a free trial.

ClickTale – Spy on your website’s visitors.

Crazy Egg – More spying goodness. Eye tracking technology.

Google Content Analytics – Some very useful (and free) website performance insights from the big G.

Visual Website Optimizer – A/B testing, multivariate testing, heatmaps. Free trial available.

HasOffers – If you’ve ever wanted to create your own affiliate program…

Cake – See above. Another network favourite.

POF ExcelBundle – Free collection of Excel tools to optimise and manage your Plentyoffish campaigns.

Productivity Tools

Producteev – One of the best takes on David Allen’s Getting Things Done system to date.

Wunderlist – New favourite of mine. Simple to-do lists. No clutter.

Trello – Excellent tool for managing your workflow.

LeechBlock – A must have for ‘work from homers’. Block yourself from time-wasting sites.

Pomodoro Timers – Nine timers for the popular productivity hack where you break your day in to 25-minute work stints.

Yast – Track where you are spending your time. Needs a sand pit to bury your head in upon analysing results.

Sanebox – An absolute Godsend for anybody who spends Monday morning drowning in emails. Filter the chaff.

WriteMonkey – Spend a lot of time writing? This tool removes every last distraction from your screen. Write monkey, write.

Miscellaneous Tools

Concierge – All-in-one shop for every service an affiliate could possibly need, from copywriting to server tuning to legal advice.

FTC Guidelines – Well, this you did not expect.

Evernote – Remember everything, everywhere. I could not live without Evernote.

Ad Calc – Estimates your anticipated CPCs, EPCs, CTRs, CPMs, BMIs and so on…

SimplyNoise – One of my favourite ways to stay productive. Use this free tool to increase your focus and block out any noisy distractions.

SimplyRain – Like white noise, but slightly more pleasing on the ear. There’s nothing like a heavy thunderstorm to block out the irritating arsewipe from across the office…

Flippa – Sell websites, buy websites. Flip your god damn balls for profit if you so wish.

UBot Studio – Beast of an automation machine. Amazing for web scraping and point-and-click task gobbling.

Mr Green’s POF Uploader – Carpetbomb POF with your ads. Nice time saver.

GeoSurf – One of the best proxy tools on the market.

Maxmind Geo Tools – A staple in affiliate marketing landing pages, this open source tool lets you serve different content to different countries. Worth thousands if used correctly.

OIOPublisher – Sell ad space on your websites. Full geotargeting available. Excellent plugin.

Slanguage – Good resource for local slang. Give your campaigns a local touch.

Cool Slang – More slang, careful how you use it.

The Premium Post Series – Seven volumes of explicit, juicy affiliate marketing tips, straight from this author’s arse.

LastPass – Because when you work with a gazillion networks and a billion traffic sources, remembering passwords can be a pain in the arse.

Crunch Accounting – £70/month for excellent accounting software and advice whenever you need it. UK only.

Web Page Test – Slow landing page = Low conversion rate. This tool checks the speed of your pages.

VTC – I have a soft spot for VTC. When I dropped out of school, I taught myself everything online-related using this site.

Lynda – Video tutorials for just about anything business related.

Useful TED Talks

‘How to get your ideas to spread’ – Seth Godin doesn’t like to play it safe.

‘The tribes we lead’ – Seth Godin on the power of building a tribe, and how to lead one.

‘Life lessons from an Ad Man’ – Rory Sutherland on the difference between ‘real’ value and perceived value.

‘The happy secret to better work’ – Shawn Achor shares some of the secrets from his Happiness Advantage philosophy. Enlightenment for affiliates.

‘The power of time off’ – Stefan Sagmeister on the revitalising effect of planned time off. When was the last time you did nothing?

‘The puzzle of motivation’ – Dan Pink on why most managers get it wrong.

‘Trial, error and the God Complex’ – Tim Harford on why trial and error is the way forward. It really is.

‘What physics taught me about marketing’ – Dan Cobley’s fascinating if slightly contorted slant on what marketing and physics have in common.

‘Schools kill creativity’ – Hugely popular talk from Ken Robinson that I wish I could have sent to my teachers 10 years ago.

I will be adding to this list over time, and it’s only natural that I will have forgotten a few deserving sites and tools. If you think something needs adding, feel free to plug it in the comments.

When I’m home alone, I like to watch documentaries, shit panel shows, and TED. 8 out of 10 Cats isn’t the best fodder for the brain, but the documentary section on Netflix has yet to let me down.

I’ve been inspired by three documentaries in the last week, each in a very different way. Instead of burying their lessons in my viewing history, never to be recalled, I thought I’d share them with you guys.

Each film is around 100 minutes long, and utterly compelling from start to finish. I suggest getting your little grubby paws on them.

Man on Wire

The Fearless Genius

On August 7th 1974, Philippe Petit set off on a quiet stroll from the World Trade Center’s South Tower to the North Tower.

Except it was no ordinary stroll. It was the wire walk that stunned the world.

A quarter of a mile above the ground, Petit walked between the ill-fated towers not once, not twice, but eight times.

He enthralled the stunned crowds, somehow finding the grace (and the balls) to lay flat on his back, to kneel to the heavens, and to mock the enraged NYPD who spent over 40 minutes pleading for him to retreat to safety.

At one point Petit offered to surrender. He neared the guards, clearly amused by their dumbfounded horror. A performer to the end, he couldn’t help himself. He turned 180 degrees and raced back in to the abyss, his feet leaving the wire, dancing, showboating. All this a mere 110 stories from instant death below

It took the threat of being ‘captured by helicopter’ to bring an end to Petit’s stunt. He stepped back on to the roof, straight in to police custody, and that was that. New York City continued onwards to work, albeit with a slightly shellshocked stagger.

Philippe Petit had dreamed about the Twin Towers for six years. He planned his stunt long before the towers had been fully constructed. He called it his destiny, and he spent a lifetime training to make it so.

It was the ultimate heist. To break in to the towers, to evade security, to rig his wire in darkness, and then to walk.

The only thing certain was that failure would result in death.

Petit’s life was a combination of gruelling training – both physically and mentally – and undercover sleuthing, of which Solid Snake would be proud.

One does not simply… break in to the World Trade Center, climb to the roof, set up a wire and dance across merrily, balls flapping in the wind.

Such acts require grapefruits of steel a lot of careful planning.

Petit had an unwavering belief that he would one day step across the New York skyline and be immortalised for the feat.

Against all odds, he is remembered today for the culmination of his dream on that [unfortunately] misty morning. And perhaps even more remarkably, he is still alive to tell the tale.

It’s difficult to contemplate what rushes through a man’s mind as he takes his first step off the edge of the South Tower…

Imagine the mental toughness required to place your entire body weight forward, away from safety, on to a three quarter inch wire, while every bone in your body buckles from vertigo as the 1,368 foot drop looms ever closer below.

It can barely be quantified. I shit my pants at the very thought.

But then the average onlooker hasn’t spent a lifetime eating, breathing and sleeping the same reality as Petit. Total conviction drove this man to an achievement that went beyond impressive. It was superhuman.

Petit’s stunt was beamed around the world. There was no publicity, no advance warning, and no precedent. Just 40 minutes of daredevil lunacy that forced an entire city to stop in silence, and to stare at a man in the sky.

His journey is captured brilliantly in the Man on Wire documentary.

Bobby Fischer Against The World

The Calculating Genius

Successful businessmen are distinguishable by their ability to think several steps ahead of the competition. They visualise the game we call life, they gauge their moves – as well as what life intends to throw back at them – and they make a decision based on the likely outcomes.

To be just one step ahead is to be blessed.

Now consider the excellence of a chess grandmaster…

“There are 400 different positions after each player makes one move apiece. There are 72,084 positions after two moves apiece. There are 9+ million positions after three moves apiece. There are 288+ billion different possible positions after four moves apiece. There are more 40-move games on Level-1 than the number of electrons in our universe. There are more game-trees of Chess than the number of galaxies (100+ billion), and more openings, defences, gambits, etc. than the number of quarks in our universe!”
- Chesmayne

A novice chess player can enjoy much success over fellow amateurs by thinking 3 or 4 steps ahead.

A grandmaster will regularly think up to 12 moves ahead.

The best of the best have such astonishing memorisation and visualisation techniques that their brains can filter through billions of potential positions and pick the best possible move while you and I are still processing the last.

What made Bobby Fischer so remarkable was that he could make those calculations barely a decade after leaving the womb.

His excellence was the result of endless hours analysing positions and outcomes in excruciating detail. He was a child prodigy in every sense.

Aged just 14, Fischer became the youngest ever US Champion. A year later, he was the youngest grandmaster in chess history. He would travel the country holding exhibitions where he would compete against 30-40 amateurs at the same time, soundly beating them all, swaggering from one table to the next.

Fischer’s life revolved around the chessboard to such an extent that his mother forced him to see a psychiatrist to try and kick the addiction. It was all he ever talked about, all he ever cared about.

The problem for Fischer, as many calculating geniuses have discovered, was that he never knew how to switch his brain off. He wouldn’t just think 12 steps ahead on the chessboard. He’d think 12 minutes ahead at the supermarket. He’d analyse each and every part of his life in such cynical detail that, inevitably, his world came crashing down. The paranoia turned Fischer in to a recluse.

In 1972, Fischer took part in the ‘Match of the Century’ against World Champion Boris Spassky of the USSR. It was the game that put chess on the map. A battle of East vs. West during the height of the Cold War. The tormented, troubled Fischer vs. the latest in a long line of Russian champions.

In the days leading up to the showdown, Fischer was suffering from such inner turmoil that there was doubt he would even show up. After several delays, he eventually got on the plane, and promptly made one of the most spectacular blunders of his career. He lost Game 1, then no-showed Game 2.

Facing a 2-0 deficit and written off by almost everybody, Fischer surged back in to the match and eventually beat Spassky 121/2 – 81/2. He returned to the United States a celebrated hero; an A-list celebrity; the 29-year-old World Chess Champion.

It was the last competitive match he ever played.

Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title in 1975. He disappeared in to obscurity, fled the USA, and eventually became known for an anti-Semitic political agenda that would see him die in lonely exile.

Fischer had a brilliant mind capable of superhuman calculation, but he was just as capable of self-destructing at any given moment. It is a sad and familiar correlation of genius.

Indie Game: The Movie

The Artistic Genius

Indie Game follows the exhausting efforts of four independent games developers as they battle through deadlines, Internet trolling, and Microsoft’s lame support to catch a lucky break.

Now, I don’t know much about designing games (even though I once dreamed of it as a career), but thankfully the film doesn’t require any inside knowledge. You need not give a damn about XBox Live or Mario-style platformers. You need only recognise the trials and tribulations of working in isolation, wondering when it might someday pay off.

Someday, someday. That is the hook.

The film covers the development of Super Meat Boy (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes), Fez (Phil Fish) and Braid (Jonathan Blow) with over 300 hours of archived footage.

The smell of blood, sweat and tears emanating from their bedroom slash home-offices is palpable throughout. This is a documentary made for affiliate marketers.

Indie Game covers many hotbed talking points, including artistic integrity vs. monetary return. Most interestingly, it touches on the process of launching a product and watching the online world react.

If you’ve undergone this cathartic rites of passage, you’ll be able to relate to the uncontrollable nervous energy. The not knowing what to expect. The sheer blindness of working on something so hard and for so long that you can no longer tell whether it’s a work of art or a glistening turd.

One developer states matter-of-factly that if he doesn’t launch his game, he’ll have no choice but to kill himself. It’s an extreme threat, but clearly non-negotiable.

Another developer suffers a launch day bitch slap from Microsoft where it’s a wonder that he hasn’t yet been arrested for hunting down Bill Gates and burning him at the stake.

The film is slow out of the blocks, but it’s impossible not to be fully invested by the final third. The payoff is immense, a proverbial kick up the arse if ever you needed one.

Anybody who works online can relate to that passing moment of accomplishment between achieving one goal and drowning in the next. Indie Game: The Movie is like a surge of adrenaline for those on the brink of achieving something awesome.

Watch this shit and your motivation will soar. That’s the best compliment I can give it.

Suggestions for Inspiring Documentaries

What films have inspired you to go out and achieve big?

Your suggestions are welcome, especially if I can find them on Netflix.

Boom!

Recommended This Week:

• I want to say a special ‘thank you’ to everybody who’s picked up a copy of my brand new Affiliate Marketing Survival Guide 2013. The book shot straight to #1 on Amazon’s Marketing bestsellers in the space of 12 hours. Booya! If you haven’t yet grabbed the book, a) Why are we still friends? b) Get one here. It’s $5.

On May 3rd, StackThatMoney and F5 Media are hosting what promises to be an epic night of networking, schmetworking, boozing and (probably) red light district cruising.

This is going to be one of the biggest affiliate events of 2013, and you don’t want to miss out. The meetup also coincides with Queen’s Day on April 30th.

What is it about Amsterdam that attracts the world’s top CPA marketers?

We probably shouldn’t answer that question. It’s obviously the stroopwaffles.

Queen’s Day is a national holiday in the Netherlands, and this year will be even more chaotic than usual. Prince Willem-Alexander will be succeeding his mother to become the first King of the Netherlands since 1890, thus turning Queen’s Day in to King’s Day.

The Dam is sure to be bouncing, and in more ways than usual.

How do the Dutch like to celebrate a changing of the monarch? The same way they celebrate every other day: by being awesome, slurping mayo, and staying vocal all night.

…Albeit in a slightly oranger shade of clothing and hair than usual.

The downside to this national event is that hotels and flights to Amsterdam are going to be more expensive than usual.

Book accommodation early or be prepared to spend your evenings paying €50 per 15 minutes to curl up feebly in a hooker’s nest. You snooze, you lose.

For more information and to RSVP, check out the official Facebook Page.

Recommended This Week:

• I want to say a special ‘thank you’ to everybody who’s picked up a copy of my brand new Affiliate Marketing Survival Guide 2013. The book shot straight to #1 on Amazon’s Marketing bestsellers in the space of 12 hours. Booya! If you haven’t yet grabbed the book, a) Why are we still friends? b) Get one here. It’s $5.

Well, I took my own advice.

I’m happy to announce the release of my first ever affiliate marketing book on the Kindle platform, and I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Included inside:

• A fast-tracked introduction to the affiliate industry
• My take on the expected (and unexpected) trends of affiliate marketing in 2013.
• A look at the still-talked-about moneymaking methods that went bust in 2012
• How to build an affiliate marketing brand for the future
• Why our industry is at a dangerous crossroads, and what you can do about it
• How to build a sustainable online business for 2013 (minus the bullshit)
• A crap ton of useful resources

This is a completely rewritten overhaul of last year’s free Affiliate Marketing Survival Kit, which was a very brief overview of the industry and where I saw it going.

Checking in at over 28,000 words, Survival Guide 2013 is bigger, better, ballsier and bang up to date.

It is also dirt cheap.

I am using this guide as a marketing experiment on the Kindle platform, and for that reason, I’m charging less than 5 bucks. Yes, the price of a Starbucks for a complete analysis of the affiliate marketing industry as it stands in 2013.

And that’s from somebody who isn’t going to bullshit you with a pipe dream. I’m so confident, I even slapped my real name on it.

What’s the worst that could happen?

You’ll lose a Starbucks.

You can read the introduction for free over on Amazon. Just choose your market of choice below:

• United Kingdom
• United States
• Canada
• France
• Germany (still processing)
• Spain
• Italy
• Japan
• Brazil

Enjoy the book, and keep an eye on this blog. I’ve got lots of brand new content coming next week.