My Landing Page Tips For Small Payout Offers
“Do I need a landing page?” Visit a marketing forum, and you will see this question treated with scorn. Affiliates are adamant that, 90{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of the time, a landing page is required to make money. You cannot simply direct link…
OUT NOW: A Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing
Buy it now In case you thought this blog had died and gone to Heaven Hell… Nope! I’ve been scribbling away in the darkness and I’m relieved/delighted to finally announce: A Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing The book has just…
Convert The Unconvertibles | Finch Sells
There’s a lot of advice in the affiliate marketing world about how to build profitable campaigns. Some good, some bad, some as healthy as a fist in the balls. Much of this advice shields affiliates from the elephant in the…
A Year In South East Asia
It’s been a while. In fact, it’s been so long since I last updated this site, I’m betrayed by my own strapline: “I’m a 26 year old high school dropout.” Well, it was true two years ago. Now I’m a…
Premium Posts 2016 Edition is Available Now
The Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing in 2016 I’m giving birth to a monster. The brand new volume of Premium Posts is completed, signed, sealed, delivered and ready for you to download. It is a vast 381-page dossier of the…
Why I Quit Launching Affiliate Campaigns
About a year ago, I stopped launching affiliate marketing campaigns. It was an easy decision, despite those campaigns being my primary source of income for the last decade. As was the decision to quit this blog. Well, as you can…
My FUT Hair Transplant: The First 5 Months
Those who have seen me in the last 5 months, or seen my updates on Facebook, will have noticed a slight change in appearance. I’ve piled on 200 lbs and taken to smoking cigars. I’ve had a hair transplant. I…
3.5 Years In Recap | Finch Sells
Well, it’s been a while. Just when you thought the world couldn’t descend in to a more farcical state, I’ve decided to blog again. There are a few reasons why I wanted to ‘check in’ after 4 years AWOL. The…
New Premium Posts, Plans for 2015 and Good Reads
Christmas is coming. I can tell because the seasonal fatty in me aches for Gingerbread latte and industrial-sized buckets of mulled wine. Now is a great time to be an affiliate marketer. Mainly because it’s a bad time to be anybody else. Take the rest of the workforce, for example: Wake in the darkness, spaz at the cold, wrap in seven layers, power-walk through the black ice to an overheated tube where the chances of catching a nice, hearty flu increase fivefold with every station passed. Rinse …
5 Things I Would Do If I Were Starting Affiliate Marketing Today
“What would you do if you were starting from scratch in affiliate marketing today?” This is one of those questions that pops up on forums, and lands in my inbox often. It’s difficult to answer. Mainly because it suggests we should be able to predict where our future money lies. I don’t think there’s a single affiliate who doesn’t wish he broke in to the industry a year earlier. The ‘industry one year ago’ is a rosier place. It always is, and always will…
How Much Could I Pay You to Quit Affiliate Marketing?
There was an interesting poll up on the STM Forum this week: What guaranteed monthly salary would you accept to quit affiliate marketing for a job in the corporate world? Just under 50{57b8cc37fd24bce1cf64c8b05d9407ce9171516056c1f5e762677747187a0de4} of the affiliates who replied said you’d have to pay them at least $500K per year to quit affiliate marketing. That’s pretty remarkable. Anybody who works in affiliate marketing knows that there’s no such thing as a fixed income. To turn down a guaranteed …
Melting in Dubai at Adsimilis Meetup 2014
September was a busy month. I’ve just got back from the Adsimilis Dubai Meetup, which was bookended by two weeks in monsoon-lashed Krabi and Phuket. A bunch of social commitments (or as I only half-jokingly refer to them: “going outside”) meant that by the time I reached Dubai, my campaigns weren’t so much suffering from banner blindness, but paralysed from the neck down by weeks of neglect. The churn in this industry is absolutely insane. Alas, I’m back in the trenches. Energised and motivated. Ready to…
“Deeply Insolvent” Banners Broker to Surrender Assets
It looks like justice is finally catching up with Chris Smith, Rajiv Dixit and the men behind Banners Broker. Two years ago, I wrote a series of posts exposing Banners Broker, a so-called ‘online advertising broker’, as a sordid ponzi scheme. I received all kinds of threats, smears and public verbal bashings. You can read the 2000+ comments from…
Dude, Where’s My Margin?
Feeling the squeeze? Ever get the impression that your affiliate campaigns are having to work twice as hard for half the profits? If you work in any of the major verticals — dating, gaming, adult, apps, etc etc — on any of the major traffic sources — Google, Facebook, POF, BuzzCity, Decisive, Exoclick — you have surely seen the effects of an explosion in competition, and the rising costs that it entails. There is a swelling crowd of hungry affiliate marketers, and most of them are armed with the same weapons: The same banners same…
My 2 Weeks in Bangkok and Hua Hin
Want to feel energised, more productive and ready to take on the world? Take a holiday. My advice: Go to Thailand. I am freshly returned from a 2 week hiatus spent lolloping on beaches, soaking in the blistering heat of a subtropical summer at the peak of its powers. Some random observations: Jesus Christ, it’s hot Thailand in April is hot with a capital HOT. I should have remembered this from living there. Given zero chance to acclimatise by London’s damp fart of …
Your Daily Schedule vs. The World’s Greatest Achievers
How does your daily schedule compare to those of history’s greatest achievers? Info We Trust has gone all kinds of viral with this intriguing visual breakdown. It spotlights the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Benjamin Franklin and several other legendary pioneers. Whose schedule does yours resemble? (Click for a larger version) Famously Creative Charles Darwin excelled in short bursts, his primary work ticked off before noon. This was accompanied by a final surge of productivity as he lay…
When Working From Home Becomes Hell
I just read a blog post from Mark Rofe, fellow Internet Marketer and creator of the ingenius Wank Sock, who has just made the decision to return to work. It’s an interesting topic. (Although I bet you’re now thinking about wank socks). Is the 9-5 really such a bad thing? Is there a time to forget the false paradise …
The Scaling Fallacy: Life As An Affiliate Whack-a-Moler
Jack creates 10 campaigns in 10 countries on TrafficJunky: Here are his morning stats: Germany: +$45 France: +$10 Switzerland: -$5 Netherlands: +$20 United Kingdom: +$12 Australia: +$25 Canada: -$21 Belgium: +$42 Turkey: +$20 Sweden: -$10 JACK’S TOTAL PROFIT: $138 Bill creates 1 campaign in 1 country on TrafficJunky. Germany: +$90 BILL’S TOTAL PROFIT: $90 Which affiliate would you rather be? Come on, it’s a no-…
The Rise of the Content Marketing Moron
In case you didn’t hear, there’s a new craze in town. It’s called Content Marketing. There’s a serial site-killing Google Penguin on the loose, and he seems to be eating bad SEOs for breakfast. Many of those bad SEOs have been reincarnated as bad Content Marketers. It goes like this: Stage 1: “Hmm, I sure would love to rank highly on Google. It’s a shame the Penguin had to munch…
Good to Great Copywriting in 24 Hours
David Ogilvy, the godfather of advertising once wrote, “Never send a memo or a letter on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it.” David Ogilvy: One of the greatest ‘Mad Men’ that ever lived. We may have abandoned the letter, but we shouldn’t abandon common sense. Before sending an …