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Category: Writing and Blogging

Bloggers: How to Deal with Criticism, Haters and Trolls

| April 20, 2012 | Comments (2)

There are three things you can take for granted when you run a highly opinionated blog.

Criticism, haters and trolls.

The first in that list, criticism, is perhaps the hardest to swallow.

I believe one of the reasons why so many blogs die is because their owners find it tough to deal with the raft of criticism when their writing reaches a wider audience.

When you stick your neck on the line and make your opinions heard, it can take a while for the first criticism to appear. Many times, bloggers will get used to a small crowd of praise and positivity towards their posts. Followers congregate much sooner than haters, and it’s only when a brand verges on the realms of notability that the haters are likely to come out of the woodwork. It’s at this point that many bloggers, in my opinion, get trigger-shy.

They realise that with a growing readership, there are so many more toes to stamp on than there were before. The provocative, truthful and energizing posts get thrown out of the window, replaced by non-offensive and fence-sitting gibberish. They are less keen to offend, or risk a great backlash. They would rather satisfy every eyeball to the point where their voice becomes weak and mixed, or they will abandon the blog altogether.

It’s a great shame. Some of my favourite bloggers, through no coincidence, attract more than their fair share of haters and trolls.

Haters and trolls are irritating. But they are not the end of the world. What really can frustrate is the justified criticism. There are two forms of justified criticism: a difference in opinions, which is unavoidable and not a bad thing. Or a hole in your argument, usually the result of lazy posting or ill-considered comments.

A few months ago I wrote a supercharged negative review of Rich Dad Poor Dad. I wrote it in about 40 minutes after devouring the book in all of its gory mediocrity. Now I’ll admit, I got carried away with some of my criticism. But I wasn’t expecting it to reach the Top 5 on Hacker News and send thousands upon thousands of Rich Dad junkies my way.

In retrospect, I have now adopted a ‘no post goes live on the day of writing‘ policy. The cooling off period allows me to read the post with fresh eyes and detect any unnecessary exaggeration, or to add extra reasoning where needed. I believe I was also guilty of ‘small blogger syndrome’.

I wrote the post expecting it to appeal to my usual motley crew of readers, which it did, but I got lazy – and perhaps defeatist – in not considering what would happen if the post actually ventured outside my usual readership. The result was tens of thousands of new readers either loving or hating (depending on their take on the book) my preaching to the choir.

That lesson has taught me a lot about best practices for those running highly opinionated blogs.

Firstly, keep your usual readership in mind, but don’t fall in to the trap of preaching to the choir. Always aim to challenge and win over new readers. Avoid simply ‘phoning in’ posts. A lot of bloggers never venture beyond cult hit status because they’re too paralyzed with fear to overcome the criticism they might receive from existing readers for growing as a brand.

This can backfire spectacularly if your writing becomes so niched-in that your arguments are dripping with in-group bias. The outside reader sees only a very closed mind, even if your followers love you.

Secondly, if you are going to make a controversial statement, prepare to be challenged by those who stumble upon your views with their own fully fleshed arguments to the contrary. In essence, prepare for criticism before it arrives. You can’t slag off people, concepts and arguments and expect your blog to be a widespread success without very sound reasoning to back up your points.

Nothing intimidates haters and trolls like a confident voice in charge of his views and muse.

Objectively, however, criticism and mixed opinions are unavoidable. If you get lazy with your argument, and that argument goes viral to be seen and rebuked by thousands of readers – many ruffled by your obnoxious 24 year old entrepreneur posturing – you’ve only got yourself to blame. A cooling off period is essential.

Re-read your work and play Devil’s Advocate. What are the weak points? What statements are poorly backed up? It’s easy to miss these vital factors when you hit the Publish button while your cheeks are still flushed with writer’s venom.

I’m slowly learning that the best time to publish new material is when I’m in a neutral mood. Not angry, not sad, not overwhelmed with joy (psst, last spotted in 1997). Tilted emotions typically lead to skewed views on the world. You will attract rightful criticism, and rightful criticism is always the most demoralizing to your work if not learnt from rapidly.

It’s fine to write material when you’re in those moods. But when you are the editor of your own content, it’s important to separate the ego from the neutral observer. You can’t do this by publishing 5 minutes after writing.

And what about those haters and trolls? They can surely only be a good thing. They are the evidence that your brand is sticking, and moving in the right direction. The best way to deal with such urchins is to carry on as you were. Embrace the disagreements, and those occasionally hateful voices. At least it means you’re being heard.

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7 Unexpected Benefits of Being a Blogger

| March 7, 2012 | Comments (8)

Blogging has an awesome upside. There are many advantages, and not all of them revolve around making money.

If you’ve ever dabbled with the idea of launching your own blog, here are 7 unexpected benefits that might tip you towards your first post.

1. A Good Blog Makes Money

Okay, that’s get it out of the way, shall we? There’s no denying that one of the greatest benefits of running a successful blog is the money that it brings.

There are many ways to generate money. You can sell banner space, sling affiliate products, or use them as battlegrounds to take over the blogosphere with your own shady product creations. Many writers use their online reputations to pick up consulting gigs.

The money should never be your number one reason for starting a blog. But I also don’t buy the overused line that “I write to help others“. That’s bullshit. Every blogger has his own agenda, and it is usually either commercial or ego related. In my case, it’s a bit of both.

2. Free Shit is Nice

My girlfriend and I are both writers. She is a fashion, beauty and lifestyle blogger. I’m an affiliate marketing blogger. Guess who gets the better free shit? I’ll give you a clue. If you think it’s me, you need your head examined.

Over the last 18 months, my girlfriend has blagged an absolutely huge raid of freebies. She gets sent products every week. We’ve also enjoyed free holidays, free hotels, free Michelin starred dinners and a whole lot more.

My favourite freebie was an expenses-paid trip to an absolutely luscious hotel called The Library in Koh Samui. Imagine waking up to this in the morning…

Koh Samui, The Library

…and knowing that you got it because you splurged some opinions on a WordPress once upon a time.

So what freebies do I receive as a blogger in the Internet Marketing space? Well, other than the occasional trip to visit a network, and the ‘thank you’ Christmas presents, the biggest perks are the free access to paid services and products.

It’s not five star hotel material, but I’ve saved thousands of pounds with free copies of products that have come in very useful for my business. Popular forums like Stack That Money and Aff Playbook have unleashed a wealth of information that has been both profitable and practical to my business. And of course, it tastes even sweeter when it’s free.

I regularly get blitzed with software and tools before they go public. Not that I end up reviewing many products, but I simply wouldn’t receive them if I hadn’t established a blog.

I’ve learnt that free shit is good, which is why my next blog will probably be called FinchTravels.

3. Preferential Treatment

In affiliate marketing, having a blog isn’t just the trademark of a huge ego. It’s a valuable device for getting preferential treatment, and for deterring shady companies from screwing you over.

Many affiliate networks will have no problem in stiffing a loud-mouthed publisher who doesn’t follow their guidelines to a tee. But if you have an influential blog, those same networks will always think twice before messing with you.

I’ve heard many horror stories of new affiliates getting rough treatment that simply wouldn’t happen if they had a platform to voice their grievances. It’s deterrence, and no more. I’ve never directed a complaint at a company over my blog, and that’s probably because they bend over backwards to make sure I don’t have a reason to.

The downside to having an influential blog is the enormous amount of sucking up that comes your way. Internet Marketing harbours a lot of fake individuals, and if you have a platform where they can promote their message, you’ll find the urchins congregating around your inbox like flies to a turd.

4. Stay Social in an Unsocial World

My industry is not the sort where your day ends at 5pm, and you can hit the town to wash away your weekly sins with seven pints and a Jägerbomb.

The opportunity to wade through London’s bars and clubs doesn’t present itself very often now that I work at home in the suburbs. Since I quit the day job, my social life has become something that requires effort. It demands jumping on a train and heading in the opposite direction to the hoards commuting home wearing disconsolate frowns.

So how does blogging come in to this? Well, firstly, I wouldn’t call blogging a form of socialising. As I look around me, I’m accompanied by a Maltipom and a bunch of sausage roll wrappers.

Maltipom in the office

Social, my arse…

But what blogging does offer is an opportunity to express yourself explicitly.

When I blog, it’s like a tsunami outpouring of whatever is frustrating me on a given day. Occasionally, people will leave comments telling me I’m a closet genius, although more often they’ll compare me to a complete dumbarse. Hey, whatever, that’s okay.

Simply expressing myself and reading the comments has a therapeutic appeal. It opens the walls of my home office and assures me that there are other people out there facing the same challenges.

If you’re working a lonely job – like Internet Marketing, or coding, or anything that happens to be remote – running a blog can help you connect to your peers. It takes away the illusion of isolation.

If Jack Nicholson had a blog in The Shining, maybe he’d have kept his shit together.

5. Lend Authority to Other Projects

Assuming you’re building a blog that is just as focused on you as the brand, as it is on the subject matter, there’s enormous potential to use it to lend authority to other projects you may be working on.

Launching a new website from scratch is a tiresome struggle on many fronts. There’s the SEO, the initial word of mouth, the seeding of fan pages. Christ, the process can suck the giblets out of even the most patient of souls.

Having a blog to lend authority to your new projects is an excellent headstart. It’s like a piggyback over the first few weeks of trauma, tantrums and ball-ache.

I actively cross-promote my projects, and if I ever want to give a new site a boost, I can generally drop a link to lend some authority. This works both in the eyes of interested readers, and the Google juggernaut.

Blogging gets a bad name for relying too heavily on mindless self-promotion, which is probably justified. But mindless self-promotion rocks when you can get away with it. Why the hell not? Nobody has to read your drivel. Most just choose to anyway.

6. Getting a Job is Much Easier

How many people spend 20 years traipsing through education only to find ‘the dream job’ is still out of reach once they’ve graduated?

I posted several months ago that the blog is becoming the new degree.

Anybody can write a résumé, but the résumé shines only a tiny spotlight on an individual’s talent. It doesn’t reveal much, and it will always be weighted relatively against the next submission in the pile, which is often as thick as a J.K Rowling brainfart.

I advocate blogs as a great starting point for expanding your career opportunities. They reveal far more about your understanding of a subject than an introspective résumé ever could.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t list your qualifications and achievements somewhere on the site. If you have them, anyway. I’m a high school dropout, and school is something I try not to talk about.

The beauty of a blog is that you will be judged by the thoughts, arguments and knowledge you put forward. Every comment, every subscriber and every reader is a testament of your influence – even if they don’t agree with you.

Blogging is a way of proving your worth that doesn’t cost a penny.

Unfortunately, if your dream job involves rising through the football ranks or becoming a world renowned brain surgeon, you should probably look elsewhere. If somebody is operating on my skull, I want to know that they’ve been to university and paid their dues, not that they’ve dabbled with some WordPress widgets in their basement.

7. I Would Explode if I Didn’t Have One

Writing is a creative outlet. It’s a scientifically accepted mood improver.

Ever since I was 16, I’ve kept some form of journal or blog to document my various moments of insanity over the last eight years.

The vast majority of those outpourings I cannot look back on with anything other than disgust and a beetroot face. I find it impossible to read my own writing, even on subjects as notoriously heartless and cold as affiliate marketing.

Regardless, writing has a therapeutic quality to me. Just by putting in to words whatever I’m feeling; professional, personally, even politically; I can isolate the mood swings and stay focused on my actual goals.

It’s a tough process to explain to anybody who doesn’t share the feeling. I’m sure many readers will treat the idea of therapeutic writing with looks of disdain. Writing is certainly not a universal passion.

Nonetheless, I would explode if I didn’t blog. It’s probably the biggest benefit of them all. Making money, expressing myself, and not exploding. The only incentives I need.

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How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

| February 3, 2012 | Comments (3)

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change.

Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time.

We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful running your own business, to steal a cricket metaphor, your tail has to wag. You have to find a way to maximise what you achieve when you’re not playing very well. This is easier said than done.

Build Momentum with Small Actions

There are days where I find myself staring banally at the screen, not a single pixel tweaking my imagination out of the gutter.

These slumps usually arrive in the mid-afternoon, and if I’m not careful, they’ll ruin the rest of the day. When I find myself drifting badly, I like to set a menial task; something requiring little brainpower that I can tick off within minutes to elicit the tiniest flame of achievement. It could be replying to an email, or cleaning my desktop, or formatting the chapter headings in my latest round of Premium Posts.

The objective of these menial tasks is not to make giant strides on my biggest projects, but simply to regain momentum. A tiny achievement leads to a slightly bigger one. I often find that no matter how much I’m dreading a task, by diving in headfirst and staying focused on it for 5 minutes I can build enough momentum to see it through to the conclusion.

I hate leaving what I’ve started. And that’s a blessing for which I’m eternally grateful.

Forget the scale of the tasks on your to-do list. Break them down by negotiating the first 5 minutes. It’s amazing what a difference small steps can make.

Battle Lack of Direction by Committing Early

Every large project has the potential to drag on while you battle ‘downtime’ and the precarious middle stages. I rarely have trouble committing my ideas to a plan of action, and I’m wise enough to know that immediate action is required to kickstart those plans. I also find it easy to put the finishing touches on my shiny new works.

Where I suffer, and I’m sure I’m not alone, is in the middle stages. Internet Marketers often have a gajillion projects on the mind, including those that they haven’t even started. The most vulnerable phase of any project is the vast chasm between laying the foundations and casting the finishing touches.

How many WordPress installations do you have with page structures in place, finished designs, a sprinkling of content but no sign of activity since 2009?

Some people complete their websites, launch proudly and then erase them from memory. Why? Because they don’t realise that finishing a website is just the beginning. The hard middle part is marketing it, gaining traction and connecting your brand to people who give a shit. Or maybe they do recognise this and have simply given up. It is, after all, the most challenging aspect of any web project.

Maintaining direction while a project drags on is tough.

Being an Internet Marketer who frequently works on websites that are somewhat disconnected from his own passions, I like to take on business partners – passionate individuals who love the concept more than myself. This acts as a driving force. The partner has the determination to maintain the original vision, thus preventing me from abandoning ship.

Even with a partner onboard, every large project must be broken in to smaller goals and milestones. Momentum is the catalyst for nearly everything I do. I like to launch concepts as soon as possible.

When I’m launching my own products, I will get the sales letter written and the website marketed before I even finish the product. Users roam the site, click to buy, but instead of being allowed to pay, they’re told the product is temporarily sold out. In my stats, I see a potential sale. This triggers a surge of motivation as I rush to complete what I started. It’s also an excellent method for measuring demand without committing to the whole shabang.

Note: This applies to SEO, especially. Long gone are the days where I attempt to rank for keywords without running an initial PPC campaign to gauge whether the traffic converts.

Beat Writer’s Block by Mastering Second Gear

Writers live and die by the amount of time they manage to spend in The Zone.

The Zone is a productive state where flow, style and inspiration come together in harmony to produce fireworks on the page. When a writer is locked in to his Zone, it all seems so easy; both to himself, and to his readers. The problem, of course, is getting there.

When you create your to do list the night before, it’s simply not realistic to set tasks under the assumption that you’ll be in The Zone all day. What every writer has to have in his artillery is a second gear. He has to be able to make the most of his least productive time.

For me, in blogging terms, that means throwing ideas, quips and phrases in a draft. It doesn’t matter if the wording is horrible, or if the ideas are disjointed. Perfectionists will spend hours dilly-dallying over the slightest details only to find that by the end of the day, they’ve barely scribbled 500 words.

It’s important to understand that ideas do not exist in any other place but your head. Until you’ve taken the action to commit them to paper, or a WordPress draft, they will lapse in and out of memory, eventually ceasing to exist. For a writer who can only produce while he’s in The Zone, failing to take action on those brief moments of inspiration is a death toll to his output.

Every great writer needs a second gear. He must be able to write without worrying that his drafts are a damning indication of the completed work.

Use second gear to record ideas, get phrases on paper, collect together any irony that could be tied in to your posts as humour. You can’t write great material in second gear, but you can certainly invest the time wisely. When you snap in to The Zone, you’ll demolish the material you prepared earlier, like a jacked up Blue Peter presenter on steroids.

Being Bored is Not An Option

One of the reasons I upgraded from my stack of books to a Kindle was so that I could carry an immense wealth of reading in my coat pocket. I live in London, where trains and buses can suck hours out of the day. If I were to commute in to the city centre, it would take 50 minutes each way. That’s 100 minutes of sitting on a train, avoiding the gaze of strangers, and generally being an unsociable southern urchin.

Instead of wasting that time reading the tube map, or worse – the Evening Standard – I take out the trusty Kindle and plunge in to my 100 pages a day. It’s a simple matter of using every minute in the day to your advantage.

The people who complain about having no time in the day are the very same people who sit in silence, staring morosely at their reflections in the train window. Well no shit, Sherlock. They probably come home to watch X-Factor, too.

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The Future of Premium Posts

| January 21, 2012 | Comments (5)

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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Stop Reading Blogs, Start Reading Books

| January 19, 2012 | Comments (11)

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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Grow A Monster Blog By Manipulating This 1 Human Flaw

| January 4, 2012 | Comments (2)

“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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  • Don’t forget to subscribe to the FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter. Have a banging 2012!

Monetizing a Blog With Premium Posts: Does It Work?

| November 4, 2011 | Comments (16)

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 to.

The results from the first 6 weeks have been promising. I’ve taken just under $15,000 in sales, which I’m hoping will double in the next couple of weeks (Volume 2 was released yesterday).

While $15,000 is certainly a nice side-income to go with my usual marketing projects, I think the most exciting development is simply discovering that the premium content angle can work.

I’ve spoken about the concept on Twitter and a few people have quite rightfully pointed out that paid content can only be successful as long as the standard of the posts is kept high. I couldn’t agree more with the need to deliver quality content, but this is one of the reasons I’ve chosen standalone products instead of the currently popular subscription model.

Subscription based Internet Marketing forums are all the rage right now, and I’ve had the pleasure of checking out most of them. Sites like Aff Playbook, Stack That Money and IMGrind all do a fantastic job of delivering valuable content – and I’m sure they make a lot more money out of it than the $15000/month my Premium Posts have delivered so far.

The issue for me is commitment. I could potentially roll out a subscription based service, but it would create an enormous burden of pressure to keep delivering excellent content month after month. There really is little margin for error with a crowd that is so tough to please.

It’s the type of model that is much more sustainable on a forum where you have dozens of different personalities offering their own useful advice.

I’ve gone with the Premium Posts on a themed basis, so users with particular interests can buy information that should hopefully be directly relevant to them. With no subscription deadline, I can take full creative control and spend however long it takes to deliver content that I’m proud of, and that I think my readers are going to enjoy.

I hope that by adding products slowly, and keeping the quality high, I can build up a sizeable ‘passive income’. I’m also hoping that readers who have been converted in to paying customers will become more loyal to the brand.

Ironically enough, after releasing Premium Posts Volume 1, my blog received 6 of it’s 10 highest traffic days in the history of the site. Far from driving readers away, it seemed to generate extra visitors.

Releasing the products has also allowed me to seize a lot of traffic from forums and blogs linking to the announcement, which will presumably help my SEO. Not that I give two shits about SEO, but it’s a nice bonus.

Perhaps the opportunity that excites me most is the idea of exporting the Premium Posts concept and implementing it on other blogs.

It’s constantly preached that creating products is the best way to produce a long-term stable income, no matter what kind of site you’re running. While it will definitely be a challenge to provide the same incentive for purchasing paid content as affiliate marketing brings (who wouldn’t want to make more money?), I believe the concept has legs on it.

It should be interesting to see the results over the next couple of months. I’m definitely looking forward to making blogging a more profitable cornerstone of my business.

Recommended This Week:

How To Brand Yourself And Your Blog

| April 8, 2011 | Comments (8)

This is NOT a step by step guide for how to become the next Make Money Online guru. I don’t want to be known as the guy who suggested our industry needs a hundred more self-proclaimed experts of the “make money by talking about making money” skillset.

Instead I want to talk about blog branding in general. And this applies to every blog owner, whether you’re a scumbag pick-up artist, a music journalist or just some crazed motherfucker with access to a WordPress.

You see, blogging as a means of making money is a lot more complicated than simply spunking random thoughts in to a journal and hoping your friends click the Facebook link. To make it a viable business, you have to brand yourself effectively.

Step 1: Understand what makes a trend setter in your niche.

Before you can brand your blog, you have to understand the very unique perception of what makes a trendsetter in your niche. For those of us in the “Make Money Online” market, that’s pretty straightforward. You want to portray yourself as a Made Man. A big trousered, fine dining, sunbed lounging, rich, son of a bitch. But in other markets, especially if you’re blogging about topics you’re not experienced with, it can be a little tougher to pinpoint the trendsetter gene.

For example, if you’re a music blogger, how can you create an illusion of importance? You could be exploiting the leaked albums market for a start. Getting to reviews before any of the mainstream sites and then claiming you were sent advance copies. Is it bullshit? Absolutely. But to your readers, you appear one step ahead.

If you can muster photos where you’re posing with the stars after a gig, get them featured in your header banner. To you, it’s a cheesy fan picture where you’re blushing bright red. To your readers, it’s the evidence you get invited to the hottest after-parties in town.

It doesn’t take long studying a Pick-Up Artist blog to establish where the trendsetter gene is at. You need to show as many drop dead gorgeous bombshells hanging off your arm as your page load time can handle. For most of us, this means creating a false blogger identity. Or, you know, going to a Playboy Mansion party.

The point remains the same. Whatever market you’re blogging to, a good brand is one that should be viewed with importance, jealousy or just plain admiration. You win nothing by sounding ordinary.

Step 2: Say what other people can’t put in to words.

Some of the best bloggers in the business, in my opinion, are those who find ways to phrase what their readers simply can’t put in to words. They convey general sentiment as if they’re voices of the people. This is an insanely effective technique that can propel your readership through the roof by viral power alone.

To do it well, you need to become the ear to the ground of public sentiment. It’s necessary to be exploring the very heart of your niche, in the trenches, so that you can write in such a way that appears genuine and honest.

The most successful posts I’ve ever written for my affiliate marketing blog, are those where I don’t give away a single tip that can be used to make money. But rather they’re the posts where I dig down and really get to the bottom of the stresses that come with being an affiliate. It’s effective because everybody can relate to them. If you can have somebody nodding their head while they read, you’re already halfway to branding your blog. Exploit unspoken public sentiment, and your blog will become relevant.

Step 3: Invite readers in to your world.

One of the easiest ways to build trust in a product is to whack your face on the Sales Letter. It’s bullshit logic, but it’s tried and tested. By the same virtue, including your face on a blog can give identity to your work. I personally can’t stand this craze of including cartoonized avatars as blog photos. Are you really that self-conscious?

You’re fighting for individuality in an ocean of rival bloggers. It might not change your fortunes, admittedly. But including a photo – whether it’s the real you or not – can help readers establish an image of your personality.

You’ve probably noticed how I love to flood my blogs with endless invitations to get in touch, to follow me on Twitter, to add me to Facebook. You’re probably thinking, Christ, it won’t be long ’til he’s asking me out for dinner and riding his hand up my leg. This isn’t some cybersleazey attempt of mine to find a BFF. It all boils down to being open with your readers and instilling a sense of trust.

How many of the acai berry floggers took the time to create fake Facebook profiles for their superhero “Before and After” characters? You should have tried it if you didn’t. Just one subtle illusion of openness that completely skyrocketed conversion rates, both for myself and the few other urchins I tipped off about it.

An open accessible brand is much more likely to leave a reader with positive thoughts, especially if you’re in the business of selling something.

Step 4: Remind your readers how important you are.

Listen, there are ways to show that you are a voice of authority without coming out and saying “Hey, you better listen to me, bitch. I’ve got a thousand subscribers.”

It’s always good to refer to emails you’ve received, tweets you’ve been sent and questions you’ve been asked. Instead of writing a huge “How To” post for no apparent reason, explain in the introduction how a highly valuable client recently asked you to offer your thoughts, and now you’re ready to share them for any other listeners. Same content, but conveying a completely different image of your importance.

Through this technique alone, you wouldn’t believe how many actual high value clients have subsequently contacted me. Portray yourself as Mr. Big enough times and shit, people actually start treating you like one. Such is the power of the Internet where people can’t see you scratching your nuts, eating cheesy wotsits, and pretending to be a big deal on your Acer laptop.

Branding yourself and your blog is about more than finding the right Blogger colour scheme. It has to be something you consider with every sentence, every opinion and every post you publish. People are going to judge you by whatever you give them, so give them something good.

Recommended This Week:

  • Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
  • If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!

  • If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

Is A Blog Worth More Than A Degree?

| March 28, 2011 | Comments (5)

It’s easy to dismiss blogs as a colossal waste of time. They can be wild ego trips, or pointless attempts to feel more understood by your peers. Guilty as charged, that’s probably how it started for me. But when I say that blogging is the smartest career move I ever made, I’m not exaggerating.

I honestly believe that regardless of whether you’re trying to write for a living, make a few industry friends or simply spew your early morning drivel, blogging is one of the most powerful ways of adding value to your name. The value may not be immediately evident, but neither is a résumé until it’s delivered to the right mailbox.

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the blog is the new résumé. I don’t have a degree, or an academic background. I can’t rely on Masters honours to justify my ability to get a job done. To put it simply, there isn’t a single slip of paper in my filing cabinet that could pass as a certificate for my work. Christ, the only certificate I have at all is a swimming award from my primary school. And even that I somehow managed to fake.

One of the great appeals of working on the web has always been the level playing field. I love that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, or what your story is. You can be as relevant as you want to be in almost any field or industry, just by having the knowledge and putting it out there in the right way.

As we see on a daily basis in the “make money online” niche, it rarely even matters if you have the knowledge. Blogging is all about perception. It doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are, just that your readers are buying in to the right image. But forget about the readers and the meaningless subscriber stats. Have you heard the saying, If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room?

How true is that for bloggers?

If you’re the smartest marketer in affiliate marketing, why the hell would you be blogging about it? Exactly, you wouldn’t. But by blogging about a topic you’re involved with, you instantly make yourself relevant to the field. And when you become relevant, you get leverage with people that simply wouldn’t be approachable to Average Joe with no web presence. I’ve never seen blogging as talking down to a crowd. It’s a two way relationship, and a great way to establish a reputation.

Since launching an affiliate marketing blog over at FinchSells.com, I’ve pretty much guaranteed that if my business were to fold overnight, I’d only have to open my inbox to find work opportunities. That’s not to say I’ve done it well or achieved any more than the next blogger. It just comes with the territory of being relevant in my industry and establishing credibility through a web presence. In effect, my blog has become my résumé. Except I don’t have to read job listings or go combing for contacts on LinkedIn, because opportunity tends to present itself.

A couple of years ago, I saw friends leaving university with degrees and qualification to their names. But for many of them, it wasn’t enough to secure a job in the area they studied. How ridiculous is that? 16 years in education only to join the same rat race as the rest of us. Does that mean a successful blog has become more valuable than a degree?

Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to use a blog as a platform to a career in marketing than it is for, say, structural engineering. But if you have expertise, you should make every attempt to show it!

Blogs and portfolios are the way forward in 2011. The résumé deserves to die an ugly death for turning all of our individual qualities in to one uniformed template in Microsoft Word. If you have a special talent, or simply a career to fight for, you can often make it happen just by talking about it and becoming relevant.

A blog doesn’t have to be a profitable moneymaking machine. It can simply be a professional stamp of what you have to offer in your line of work. We all like to make fun of the stay-at-home-mum bloggers who write piles of sweet nothing to a circle of fans that eat it up anyway. But if you’re sitting on your degree and expecting qualifications to carry you up the ladder, I think it’s time for a reality check.

It’s not about the talent you have, but what you do with it that counts. Perception is everything to so many careers. And a successful blog can make you relevant in whatever industry you’re trying to crack.

Recommended This Week:

  • On the subject of putting value in yourself, I highly recommend Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. That man has a way with words that can light a candle up even the pluckiest of arseholes.
  • Like this post? Feel free to subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
  • If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!

Reverse Engineering Your Article Writing Career

| March 22, 2011 | Comments (1)

Like many Internet Marketers, the very first money I made online came as a hired writer. It seems painful to even contemplate the idea of sitting at my desk and writing ten 500 word articles in 2011, but that’s how I discovered the possibilities of making money in my bedroom.

As a sixteen year old who’d just dropped out from school, I saw every moneymaking opportunity – online or offline – as a chance to justify my decisions and say a big fuck you to further education. When you cremate your ticket to university, you kinda have to develop a killer instinct when it comes to making money.

But I guess writing articles was never the most glamorous way to earn a living. It would start off with enthusiasm. The words would flow from my keyboard and in my head I’d be counting the pesos with every saved text file. After a couple of hours, I’d find myself twisting phrases and sentences in to whatever upped my word count. But it was easy money.

You can often gauge how serious somebody is about making money online by how willing they are to get their hands dirty with cheap labour.

If you’re serious about producing some extra income, writing articles for other people is about as legitimate as it gets. The money won’t put you on a jet plane anytime soon, but what are you expecting? The miracles you were promised?

After several months of writing the same shit for different people, I began to ask myself just who was using this gibberish further up the food chain. Why would anybody need 100 different articles explaining the merits of marketing on MySpace?

If you’re one of those article writers, you’ve probably asked yourself the same questions. Just who is using this crap? Are they making any money from it?

Well if articles keep getting outsourced, somebody keeps profiting from them. It would make sense to learn how to profit from your own work, wouldn’t it? I know many article writers are just looking to make a quick buck to pay the next bill, but if you look at the economics of it all, you could be doing so much better.

I remember Googling one of the articles I’d written to see how it was being used. Sure enough, there it was, propping up a Rocket Spanish course with the entire website consisting of no more than my own hard work and a bunch of affiliate links. Being an eagle eyed little bastard, I decided to take it upon myself to start writing articles for my own personal use. That’s right. I became a Clickbank whore.

And, of course, I didn’t make much money.

Just as most people don’t when they’re getting started. It’s part of the learning curve. A successful entrepreneur fails, fails, and fails again. If you want to believe any differently, by all means be my guest. There’s plenty of experts who will take your money to fuel that short term belief.

So eventually I got the right idea. Instead of writing articles for other people, I saw the potential in building my own assets. And if you’re writing articles for a living – or just to make ends meet – I hope you can see the potential in having your own assets too.

The problem is, you need a vision… and patience. Endless reserves of patience.

Articles are no good on their own. Christ, I’ve already spilled my guts how I think they’re barely relevant at all moving in to the new decade.

But the economics of cheap article labour are a very good introduction to the world of Internet Marketing, SEO and whatever the current flavour of the month happens to be for successful entrepreneurs who already make money on the web. Who better to learn from, right? Better than Digital “I’ve got a method that would make you money in 2006” Point.

You don’t even have to be writing articles to get a good grasp of where money is being made. Just by browsing through regular Elance listings, you should notice familiar trends.

I often give this advice to writers looking to transition in to more lucrative work, and it never gets old. If you want to see where there’s money to be made, look at where there’s money being spent. You’ll find either successful entrepreneurs, or blind ass investors with not many repeat buys to their names.

Some people prefer to be team players. There’s nothing wrong with that. And for many online writers in third world countries, the money made through article creation alone is enough to live a life of relative luxury. I remember how exciting it was to take the leap from being a cheap labourer to somebody who defined his own project milestones.

But the way I see it, if you’re going to be a writer, you should be aiming for the top. There’s not much money in the middle grounds. And where there is, you’ll find fierce competition. If lazy 500 word articles are how you make your money, maybe you should consider moving up the food chain and adding some longevity to your work.

It’s not hard to reverse engineer your way to the top. To be in a position where you’re the boss rather than the bitch. If you need a little help along the way, drop me an email. For the first half of my Internet Marketing career, Bitch was my middle name. I know how it feels, and I sympathize with other writers in the same boat!

Recommended This Week:

  • Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
  • If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!
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