Since caving in to the lure of a Kindle, my personal goal has been to read 100 pages of literature every day. It’s something I recommend every blogger should consider. If you run a blog, or produce any kind of web content, you should be reading regularly to enhance your own output. In fact, if [...]
2011 was one of the most eventful years of my life. I started it by living the high life in downtown Bangkok (literally, on a 15th floor apartment), and ended it sloshed on the dance-floor of Shepherds Bush Walkabout, an experience that has become uncomfortably familiar over the years. In between, I’ve travelled to Cambodia, [...]
I often get a headache when I think about where to invest my Internet Marketing dollars. I don’t want to be building websites forever. Besides, it’s only natural that the next generation will stumble across a medium even ‘newer’ than the Internet. And what happens then? We become dinosaurs, that’s what. Relics to the new [...]
It’s not rare to find that 80% of your sales are generated by 20% of your customers, or that 80% of your time is spent handling 20% of your chores. This skewed outlook on life and business was first observed by the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who lent his name to the theory. Pareto [...]
If you’re a reader of my affiliate marketing blog, Finch Sells, you will probably be aware that I’ve introduced paid content over the last 6 weeks. I thought it’d be interesting to see how many of my regular readers converted in to paying customers, especially given how fellow marketers can be notoriously hard to sell [...]
This weekend, I decided to engage in some research that never fails to get my blood boiling. What better way to spend your Sunday afternoon than by crawling the web making notes on how to boss Google’s search rankings?
SEO is to Finch, what the slaughterhouse is to cows.
It’s where I go when I feel like throwing my business plans before the judge and pleading for a stay of execution. “Dear Google, please take pity upon thee.”
So I loaded up on Victoria Sandwich, pointed my browser at Yahoo Site Explorer, and prepared mentally for the skullbreakingly arduous task of analysing my competitors’ backlink structures.
As it so happens, Yahoo Site Explorer is now defunct. My childhood sweetheart, the only SEO tool I ever truly loved, has been married by Bing and shepherded away – presumably to be shagged and ruined in some Microsoft developer’s basement. This has driven yet another wedge in my already unstable relationship with SEO.
Backlink research is touted as a ‘must’ before venturing in to new niches. Nobody wants to build a potentially lucrative website only to find that Joe Marketer has already pummeled Xrumer and assembled his gajillions of links to maintain search engine dominance through 2017. But there’s the paradox. Even though I make the effort to do backlink research, it rarely ever affects my decision to go ahead with a project.
“Wow, the competition has 3,990,374 backlinks. That’s pretty impressive. But I don’t like his choice of stock photos. I’ll build my site anyway.”
Ego often impedes the voice of SEO reasoning in my head. I hate the idea that success hinges on some bullshit measurement of who has the best/most backlinks. That’s why you’ll find me feeding buckets of fish laced with steroids to Google’s Panda in the middle of the night, then running away like a little girl as the ‘SEO Professionals’ come charging in disgust.
The whore charade makes me wonder if offline business ever used to be this way. If you took the regional equivalent of today’s Google, let’s say a local business directory, would it have been ranked and prioritised in the same manner? Are you telling me that to get my business spotlighted on a good page, I would have to cruise every last dark corner of the neighbourhood posting my business card through abandoned letterboxes?
Because that’s essentially what backlink building is. It’s handing your business card to anybody who will accept it, in the faint hope that a chief regulator, aka Mr. Google, notices the card in abundance and is mathematically satisfied that you’re worth half a shit.
No doubt this analogy would provoke an uproar from the local directory ranking experts. They would tell me quite bluntly that I’m wasting my time whoring business cards in the ghettos. They’d insist, “No, no. You need to get your business card adorning the windows of the palaces and castles!”
So, I’d work hard and mingle in those upper class circles. I’d send letters and scratch backs. My culture vulture would be well and truly on. But invariably, I’d discover that the owners of the palaces and castles aren’t interested in my business cards. Their interest extends only as far as their own financial gain.
Believe it or not, these Princes and Kings don’t classify what you promise to be “relevant content for their kingdoms” as fitting for their cause. Cruelly, they would rather engage in a furious 24/7 circle jerk behind closed doors than deal with the ignominy of your fresh arse on the block. So, what are you to do? You get on your bike, retreat to the neighbourhood, and blast your business card through 3,990,374 derelict letterboxes instead. Fan-tastic.
My conclusion? The backlink building game is fundamentally shagged. Don’t waste your time building backlinks. Just build a reputation for awesomeness instead.
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As I wrote several weeks ago, sales on my affiliate marketing Premium Posts have been going strong. That’s still the case. I’m glad they’ve exceeded the template of one hit wonder! The latest release, covering how to make money from dating offers, seems to have been received very well.
So, I’m excited to begin work on Volume 4. The theme is simply going to be ‘Outside The Box‘. I want to steer affiliates away from the idea that they can only be successful on Facebook and Plentyoffish. In reality, it’s much easier to be successful away from these traffic sources. Volume 4 will be about not only diversifying your traffic sources, but designing landing pages and ad creatives that break the mould.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching concepts – and profiting from them, which is always a moral relief! – so I’m excited to condense what I’ve found in to one diatribe of expletives, balls and occasional marketing advice.
I’m also going to be rolling out an affiliate program. It’s been a pleasant surprise that so many bloggers have been happy to write reviews for a free copy and no monetary gain. Which is why I’m all the more excited to throw in a commission and broaden my reach through word of mouth exposure.
If you run an Internet Marketing blog and haven’t read Premium Posts, I would be more than happy to send a copy in exchange for an honest review. Hit me up if that sounds interesting!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the Premium Posts. Where can I take them? How many volumes can I justify before the value begins to diminish? Well, I’m sure readers will be quick to tell me when the quality hits the skids, but I think I’d like to release 7 volumes and then focus my efforts on product creation elsewhere.
CPA affiliate marketing is a small pond. There is a very apparent shoreline where the sales numbers are fixed, no matter if I’m publishing a masterpiece or a stinking shipwreck. I’d like to move in to more scaleable markets, not just to make more money, but to deliver my writing to people that might be affected by it in a different way. There must be more to this world than motherfucking arbitrage and CPVLab columns. Please tell me if I’m wrong.
The whole process of selling my writing has really enforced that I see my future away from affiliate marketing. I’m already envisioning in my mind the final product on FinchSells.com to be a roadmap of why I got started in affiliate marketing, and why I decided to leave it.
That product is still many months away. I have a lot of work to do before I can shift the majority of my income away from the arbitrage column. But it will be a huge burden off my shoulder when that day comes.
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Since caving in to the lure of a Kindle, my personal goal has been to read 100 pages of literature every day. It’s something I recommend every blogger should consider.
If you run a blog, or produce any kind of web content, you should be reading regularly to enhance your own output. In fact, if you have any entrepreneurial instinct whatsoever, you will greatly improve your chances of success by reading regularly.
Most people accept that good writing comes from practice and lots of reading. What they often ignore is that bad writing is just as easy to inherit. Unfortunately, bad writing is a central trait of the blogosphere. It’s just as epidemic as the lack of actionable information, or the self-obsessed drivel regularly tossed out by writers with no journalistic qualities and not the slightest regard for being held accountable.
Blogs have become a staple part of our literary diets. While I’m a huge advocate of sharing information in this way, I think it’s a shame that so few bloggers actually take their writing seriously. It’s not just bloggers. Every day, I find websites scourged in bumbling copy that fails to communicate the author’s message.
So what’s the solution?
Not every blogger has the literary prowess to mug off Shakespeare in the style stakes. But I think we can all benefit from investing in a decent grammar handbook, and particularly by immersing ourselves in books that have been stamped for approval. You know that a book has been stamped for approval when you find it on a bookshelf, not on a Clickbank sales page.
Many of us have RSS readers loaded to the hilt with meaningless crap – often, horrifically written meaningless crap. Feasting on so much mediocre writing makes us susceptible to inheriting the flaws as our own.
In the business world, we say that the fastest way to achieve wealth is to spend your time in wealthy company. Well, let me tell you that the same applies for good writing.
We live in an age where tablets and smartphones make books as accessible as the nearest USB cable. How many hours do you spend commuting to work each day? How much television do you inflict on your weeping eyeballs? Cut down the crap. Get some literature in your life!
And not just any literature. Read books that challenge your imagination.
I’m currently indulging in a wide variety of genres from the brilliance of Orwell, to the science of Dawkins, with thousand-page-thick Psychology textbooks thrown in for good measure. Reading is a workout for the brain. If you’re not pushing yourself, you’re standing still. If you don’t sweat after a workout, it probably hasn’t been a great workout.
Blogs exist by rehashing the same nuggets of information in bite-size form. Most of that information comes from books, or worse, plucked from the blogger’s fat lying arse. Sites in the Internet Marketing space – hey, like this! – are notorious for providing reminders of the shit we should have done yesterday. They rarely deliver plans for tomorrow.
There’s little harm in that, but for two problems: the information can be extremely biased, and the writing often sets a bad example.
I’m not suggesting you sacrifice all blogs for a dingy afternoon in the library, although maybe you should. But we need to make an effort to escape our comfort zones and feed the brain some literature of a little more substance. Our brain will thank us duly with new inspiration, new ideas and a much tighter hold over the English language.
If you have a blog, or any kind of web presence, you can steal a beat on your rivals by learning to communicate more effectively. The best way to do this is to read, and a read a lot. Writing is a tool that will aid any business. But to master it, you must expose yourself to a variety of literature. Not just the crap – like this – that piles in to your reader.
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2011 was one of the most eventful years of my life. I started it by living the high life in downtown Bangkok (literally, on a 15th floor apartment), and ended it sloshed on the dance-floor of Shepherds Bush Walkabout, an experience that has become uncomfortably familiar over the years.
In between, I’ve travelled to Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore. I’ve moved house no less than FOUR times. And I’ve singlehandedly kept the coffee economy afloat – firstly via Gloria Jeans and now Cafe Nero. If there’s any life lesson I’m eager to take in to 2012, it’s that I’d be an utter dipshit to kiss goodbye to as much deposit money as I did last year; a grand total that ended up a few notes shy of £5500. FML.
Indeed, the moment where I’m asked to commit my signature to any dotted line is now met by a ferocious growl, followed swiftly by brooding silence. The kind where you could be forgiven for anticipating that I’m about to eat said contract.
My new home is the Greater London suburbs. Greater London by name, Greater London most certainly not by nature. My stress levels have tapered off significantly since finding a semi-permanent home. But that’s not to hide the fact that the closest I get to an adrenaline rush is when an elderly neighbour trundles in to a pile of dog shit outside my driveway. Such is the pace of living in ‘Greater London’…
I think the most excited we’ve ever been was when we thought we found Hitler on a bus.
Alas, moving house has proven, without doubt, that one of life’s greatest miseries is the struggle of relocation. If I have to accept one more flat pack from a courier, I’ll be greeting the merciless prick with my very best “Here’s Johnny…” impression. That and obviously, the point blank refusal to “sign fer it, mate“.
Christ, there’s already one room in my house dedicated to the shit I’ve yet to recycle.
That’s my dining room, believe it or not. Correction: That will be my dining room when I get hold of some recycling bags from the council.
I already have some trips planned for 2012.
In May, I’ll be heading to America for a wedding, and to meet some of my partner’s friends.
New York, Chicago and Indianapolis will be our ports of call. Can you spot the odd one out? Yep, I’ve been told that Indiana’s biggest tourist attraction is the Indy 500 race, which doesn’t bode well for my souvenir hunt. I’m not a fan of motor racing at the best of times, but especially when it’s the retarded American version that takes place in a circular ring.
The only time I’ve found circular rings and cars to be compatible was in Destruction Derby on the Sega Saturn. And something tells me a Nascar event has gone badly wrong if it resembles as such.
Digs aside, I’m looking forward to visiting America again. It’s been a while since I last had my anal cavities probed at immigration. Remind me not to provoke Passport Control by smiling next time.
I’m also excited to travel back to Thailand at the end of 2012, although I’ve learnt another vital life lesson: don’t come home with a puppy. Unless you like handing over £3000 to government quarantine, as well as the puppy.
With trips to Spain, France and ‘somewhere beginning with B’ (hold hands, let’s pray it’s not Birmingham), it should be a good year.
Like most affiliates, my gameplan for 2012 is survival. Don’t get banned from Facebook, don’t get sued for false advertising, don’t get swallowed up by the competition.
Generally speaking, if I can succeed with just one of those targets, it’ll be a bloody good year.
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many people that I’m slowly moving my business away from affiliate marketing. As much as I love the money, the job is about as satisfying for the soul as a bicycle kick to the bollocks. The sooner I become less reliant on mindless arbitrage, the sooner I’ll be able to force myself out of bed in the morning.
My most important target for the year is to get published. I’ve always wanted to be an author, and this is the year where I’m determined to make it happen.
I’m currently writing a book that sums up the sleaze of working in the Internet Marketing business. While it could be difficult to find an agent for my profanity woven prose, I’m hoping one will take pity on me. Or read this blog and get in touch. Nudge wink ball tickle.
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“Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, rather we just try out a different query and search again.”
- Justin Owings
This is one of my favourite quotes on the subject of confirmation bias – our tendency to pick and choose facts where they suit us, neglecting anything that goes against our argument. It’s something that should interest all Internet Marketers, and particularly those who run blogs.
I often say that to be successful as an ‘expert’ or a consultant, you don’t need to know everything – just a tiny bit more than your average reader. You can be a successful blogger by validating what your audience already knows. It’s one of our many rational defects that we rarely seek new information, and would much rather find confirmation that our existing views are truthful and valid.
Confirmation bias: The tendency of people to favour information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.
Successful bloggers are brilliant at exploiting this bias. They roll out content that is designed to look informative, but usually only confirms what the reader already knew. The best bloggers will go one step further. They’ll produce content that validates what a reader can only speculate to be true, thus sealing the role of ‘authority in a niche’, as my fellow Internet Marketers like to put it.
Unlike journalists, bloggers do not have to stick rigidly to the confines of fact over fiction. The secret to success lies in how we are perceived. By feeding readers the right blend of useless crap they already knew, and useless crap they always assumed, we can portray ourselves as figures of authority where it isn’t truly deserved. Some of the biggest and most popular blogs in the world rely on steady diets of ‘expert advice’ that serve merely to nail us to our beliefs.
Confirmation bias is a psychological weapon that allows bloggers to gain followers without having any kind of academic link to their chosen topic. By engineering a steady dripfeed of content that satisfies without challenging, any single one of us can become an expert. The old adage that content is king makes sense, but it doesn’t tell the full story.
If you really want to command a following, stick to telling people what they already know. If you want to become the fabled Mr Big Pants ‘authority in a niche’, extend that content to what they also speculate to be true.
One look at my Twitter feed tells me that the Republican primaries are now in full swing. Have you seen the bickering on political blogs?
You’ll find that the most commented sites are those that rally similar minded folk by enforcing their beliefs and serving a rose-tinted slew of facts to support them. If these sites felt a duty to promote a fairer race, they would paint each candidate in a fair and unbiased light. Of course, to do so would be to ask readers to challenge their beliefs. It never happens. People don’t want to be challenged. They want to feel vindicated, that they were right all along.
Once forming an opinion, we would rather live in ignorance than appear to be ‘flip-flopping’. Ordinary bloggers can grow monster followings by latching on to this weakness and appealing to the confirmation bias in us all.
Internet Marketing doesn’t require years of expertise, neither does blogging. It simply requires the articulation of beliefs and opinions in such a way that readers can pursue them as their own. If you do this, you will always have an audience.
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I often get a headache when I think about where to invest my Internet Marketing dollars. I don’t want to be building websites forever. Besides, it’s only natural that the next generation will stumble across a medium even ‘newer’ than the Internet. And what happens then? We become dinosaurs, that’s what. Relics to the new youth.
So what’s the best way to invest for the future?
Should I buy stocks? Should I buy more websites? Maybe I should move strategically in to the world of real estate? You know what… screw that. Who needs a long term business when you can splash the cash on immortality?
By paying just $150,000, you can have your body cryogenically frozen in liquid nitrogen and [hopefully] brought back to life in the future. As soon as your heart stops beating, a team of cryogenic experts will descend upon your corpse and have you whisked away to one of many ‘life extension’ facilities. There, you will be stored at a temperature of below -120°C until some lunatic of the future is ready to thaw you out of your metal home.
I’m not making this shit up. Cryonics is a booming industry. Give it 20 years and Tesco will be selling the bloody thing as a gift experience for your loved ones on Christmas Day.
The great hope for cryonic customers is that science will advance to a point where terminal diseases are treatable; where immortality beckons for the rich. Before that, there’s the slightly more obvious matter of learning how to reverse the cryopreservation process.
There are a few popular myths to be debunked. Cryonics is not a ‘treatment for the dead’. It’s simply not feasible to plunge your spade in the nearest grave, weave a little Frankenstein magic, and revive the corpse as good as new. However, there have been many instances where humans have been pronounced dead, and later resuscitated.
The idea of future scientists being able to revive bodies that have been dead for days is a slap in the face to what’s known as the information-theoretic criterion for death – a term given for bodies where the cell structure and chemistry is so royally shagged that preservation would be a waste of time. ‘Real Death’, if you will.
In modern times, the lapse between a heart that no longer beats and medical death is restricted to a few minutes. Cryonics relies on this window of opportunity (what a morbid term) to immediately preserve the customer so that resuscitation can be resumed at a date in the very distant future.
Time is very much of the essence. If your corpse isn’t recovered swiftly, the shot at preservation is gone. If it’s reached in time, however, the body can be maintained indefinitely in the same state. Decades or even centuries may pass until its ready to be ‘recovered’, but the window of opportunity will still be there. The rest is down to science.
It’s a concept that reeks of science fiction, but one that is surging in popularity across the United States. Christ, just weeks ago, Larry King announced his intention to be frozen. Frankly, I was surprised that he hadn’t already undergone the procedure. Well, if it looks dead and sounds dead…
I find the idea of waking up in a different decade to be hugely intriguing. Maybe that’s because I’ve been watching too much Mad Men, but wouldn’t it be cool to refresh stats on a website you built over 50 years ago? Or is that thought too geeky? No doubt many Internet Marketers would still have zero commission to their name.
There is, of course, a religious debate to be had around this issue. Is it wrong to ‘play God’ where life and death are concerned? Honestly, I don’t have much time for the naysayers. In the last century, we’ve played God countless times in a bid to advance society through sophisticated drugs and better medical practice. We’ve been highly successful. Reversing the process of death is the final frontier, and it may not be as far fetched as it sounds.
If you’re interested, there’s one last dilemma to get your head around.
Neuropreservation vs. Whole Body Preservation
For a ‘budget’ option, you can opt for neuropreservation, which freezes only your head and is about $60,000 lighter on the wallet. Should you awaken in the next century, you will retain your sense of self, but should probably be prepared for some epic counseling that will make John Travolta’s problems in Face-Off seem like a breeze in the fucking park. That’s because your body will need to be ‘regrown’.
The deluxe plan does exactly what it says on the tin. Whole Body Preservation… or as I like to call it, the Austin Powers package. Be sure to embrace death with your best cheeky chappy pose. It’s going to be a long night, so you better give immortality that Kodak moment it deserves…
Is this legitimately what being frozen in time looks like? Answers on a postcard, please. I’d have it written in to my contract that I must be displayed in a glass box by reception at all times, or next to the water cooler…
If you don’t have $150,000 to spare but do like the idea of living forever, fear not. There are life insurance policies that can be taken out for as little as $30/month, with the beneficiary going to your cryonics agency. These fund the entire cost of the procedure.
Most importantly, you must remember to die gracefully. Messy deaths are generally frowned upon. Mowing your car in to a tree trunk, for example, is pretty much just shooting yourself in the balls. Worse, arguably. I would hazard a guess that terms and conditions apply, so please do read them carefully.
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It’s not easy to come up with creative ideas. One of the great myths of the ‘innovation gurus’ suggests that actively brainstorming possible solutions is the best way to stumble across a brilliant idea.
The reality is slightly more complicated. Brainstorming can only truly be effective if you give your brain the opportunity to serve up more than the same useless ideas your conscious mind is already familiar with. True creativity stems from the subconscious mind, of which traditional boardroom brainstorming rarely ever seeks the guidance.
My favourite explanation for how this process works is to imagine a small room with two men sat by a whiteboard. One of the men is imaginative and sublimely creative and yet hopelessly shy. The other man is extremely passionate and committed to his ideas, but is equally dominant and unwilling to listen to others.
If you were to enter the room a pose a question that required the men to work together creatively, there should be no prizes for guessing how the subsequent brainstorming sessions would unfold. The dominant man would lead the way, pitching his ideas with relentless enthusiasm but failing to tap in to the creative thought patterns of his colleague.
So what if we don’t want to harness the passion and conviction of Mr. Confident? What if we’re striving to dig deeper in to the creative mind of his shy colleague? The popular solution is to distract Mr. Confident. Let him watch TV, give him an iPad, do whatever is necessary to allow his creative colleague to take control of the session and present some truly creative ideas.
This drawn out metaphor is actually a very close match for the relationship between our conscious and subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is very loud, objective and logical – but it crucially lacks the ability to ‘think outside the box’. The subconscious mind, although not shy by nature, is a passive and reluctant observer to the thoughts we decide to run wild with. Just like the quiet colleague, it sits and waits for the room to turn silent.
Of course, the subconscious is infinitely more capable of producing breakthrough ideas, but to allow those ideas to develop we need our conscious minds to ‘tune out’ and delegate the job. This is what leads to the moment of inspiration in the middle of the night, or the comical lightbulb effect where brilliance strikes while you’re busy cooking dinner.
The subconscious mind never stops working on the questions you present to it, which is why it can be hugely beneficial to pose any questions that require creativity immediately before you distract your conscious mind.
If your favourite TV show is about to start in 5 minutes, it can be damn near impossible to get ‘real work’ done in the interim. So don’t bother. Instead, turn over your most challenging questions to the subconscious.
It’s a big help to write down the question, even if you feel like an embarrassment for doing so.
As an affiliate marketer, I might find myself reading the following dilemma over and over again: “How can I increase the profit on Campaign X from $100/day to $500/day?” Now if I turned over that question to my conscious mind, or worse – started to brainstorm the possibilities on my whiteboard – I would probably come up with the same ideas and the same problems.
But after repeating the question, and then sodding off to watch some TV, I can interrupt my usual line of thoughts and let the subconscious go about finding solutions. Those same solutions would rarely make it on to the whiteboard with the loud guy in the room doing all the talking.
You don’t have to watch TV. Simply keeping a puzzle book by your desk is a brilliant way of short-circuiting the conscious mind. As long as you’re kept busy with crosswords and number games, you’ll be unlikely to interfere with the subconscious genius at work.
The next time you’re seeking creative inspiration, don’t dwell on it. Pose the question, hand it over to your subconscious, distract yourself, and wait for the delivery. Having seen how stuck in its ways the corporate battlefield can be, I would suggest mentioning the process to your boss beforehand. I’m glad I work at home!
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So cometh the confession hour…
Who has a desktop that looks like this?
Given my rich celebrated history in front end web design (*snortle*), I am all too familiar with the sight. It screams to me… Friday afternoon.
You can forget the blue screen of death, it’s this rainbow of crackling static that poses a much greater risk to our hairlines.
While I do agree that productivity can be improved by culling the desktop clutter, you will also find a great deal of research which goes much further, suggesting that even our choice of wallpaper can affect working habits.
Is there such a thing as a productive desktop? Have I been shooting myself in the balls all this time with those whimsical dolphins, or the lovely sweeping Apple landscapes on my iMac? According to this University of British Columbia study, there is.
The study looks at how colour can affect our brain performance, using red and blue desktops to measure any cognitive boosts. It was established that test subjects with a red desktop performed better in tasks that required attention to detail and memory retrieval. However, the blue desktop was noticeably more effective for tasks that required brainstorming and creative thinking.
Juliet Zhu, author of the study, sums it up best: “Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution. The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”
“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquillity. The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”
In the light of this information, maybe I should change my desktop to vivid red whenever I’m feeling brave enough to bust open the accounting software? It would probably reduce the arse-numbing pain I associate with monthly reconciliation. Perhaps, if I’m short on inspiration for my affiliate campaigns, a swish of the ocean on my wallpaper would help.
Further studies have shown that solid colour desktops tend to work better than background images, which can steal attention away from the task at hand. Even if you don’t notice the distractions, your brain is latching on to every last glimpse of the image. So as tempting as it can be to place an affectionate image of your newborn son on the desktop, or your beloved pets, it’s probably not a smart idea.
It’s the same principle as listening to music on the job. You may think it boosts your comfort, helps you focus, and makes working a more pleasurable experience – I’m sure it does, on the pleasure scale – but the jarring influence of subconsciously following the lyrics (or furiously out loud, if you’re my girlfriend) shouldn’t be underestimated. And that’s why I am a huge white noise junkie, with some binaural beats thrown in for good measure.
Some people will go to crazy lengths to give themselves the best possible chance of staying productive. If you’re super cautious about your work, or perhaps enjoy indulging in the odd bit of freelance proofreading, you could go one step further.
Don’t just use a red desktop…
Paint the walls red. Buy red curtains. Force any visitors to enter your office lair in stark red overalls. Hell, you could become the devil’s child if you’re committed to the cause.
Likewise, if you’re missing the inspiration gene, you should probably just decorate your workspace in glorious royal blue Chelsea colours. Not only will you be boosting your creative thinking, but you’ll be supporting a real team in the process.
I’m shortly going to be running a case study on my affiliate marketing blog showing the effects of red and blue on consumer decisions. It should reveal some tasty tips for marketers, so for all my good fellow scumbags out there, keep an eye out!
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Hey, I'm Finch. A prematurely world-weary entrepreneur from England. I run an online marketing business, and far too many blogs. This is where I splurge my opinions on work, personal and irrelevant matters. All views are gospel my own.
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