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Dear Internet, Print Me Some Money

| February 16, 2012 | Comments (7)

Internet Marketing is littered with enough false promises to make your eyes water. Ever since the turn of the millennium when Internet stocks created fortunes and lost them twice as fast, our industry has been riddled with high expectations, a circumspect grounding in reality, and far too much bullshit to keep a tab on.

My work has revolved around the Internet for my entire professional career. I advanced from designing websites, to assembling the code behind them, to selling ad space on them. Along the way, I’ve developed a keen eye for spotting opportunities on other websites. From primitive arbitrage, to site flipping opportunities, to abusing loopholes in ways that the webmaster never intended.

I’ve seen many moneymaking strategies crash and burn, whilst others have evolved with time. SEO, for example, requires a conservative and professional approach in 2012, with an ever-increasing number of bullets to dodge. It used to be easy. Why? Because nobody else was doing it.

Fast forward to 2008. Affiliate marketing had become perhaps the greatest wealth generator for idiots the digital landscape has ever known. Life was so simple. Find an offer to promote, upload an ad to Facebook, wait for approval, and bank the rich returns. Inevitably, the rest of the world caught on. And here we are now. Prices have never been higher, and so the degree of creativity necessary to succeed has risen. Thousands of novices want to become affiliate marketers, and yet the task gets harder with every passing day. They’re 4 years late to the party.

Affiliate marketers who made their millions in the big boom have been fast-tracked as experts on a subject that has detoured dramatically from its original path. Novices may look up to those experts, but the painted picture from the top is rarely anything but smoke and mirrors.

Nature has a time-honoured method of punishing good moneymaking strategies once they reach the public domain. If the strategy becomes common knowledge, or too exposed to unskilled buffoons, any benefit to be gained from the opportunity is lost. Of course, the strategy lives on in the imagination of the baying crowd. Many will happily pay to hear about the next magic button, the next get rich quick scheme, blissfully ignorant to the reality. As soon as lucrative information becomes public knowledge, it loses its value.

As an Internet Marketer, I see this happening time and time again. Legitimate moneymaking opportunities are born, profited from, and then swiftly rendered useless as a ‘guru’ leaks the techniques to the masses.

These gurus are rarely true exponents of the techniques they talk about. They are poorly skilled at making money with genuine enterprise, so they choose to sell the concept instead. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Their decision to teach ruins the opportunity for the true exponents, and it creates a glorious pipe dream for everybody else. Market law dictates that when a lucrative strategy becomes too easy and too popular, it fails.

In the stock market, wise investors know that a bull market is riddled with danger when Average Joe can be seen throwing his money at it – especially if he’s offering the same ‘hot tips’ to his neighbours and friends.

The same applies to just about every ‘easy’ strategy in Internet Marketing. Unless you’re the innovator, the strategy is guaranteed to be anything but easy by the time you’ve read about it in a PDF.

99% of information products are bullshit on this basis. The grander the promises, the further detached from reality they become.

One of the golden rules you have to ask before considering any information product is simply, “Why is the author giving this information away?”

The bizopp market is constructed around some of the most illogical consumer decisions of all time.

If you honestly believe that a multi-millionaire is going to give you access to the blueprints of his success for $19.95, you’ve lost your bloody marbles. Why do people not ask “Why?”

1. Why would a millionaire need to sell his blueprints?
2. How effective can those blueprints be if they’re on sale for $19.95?
3. If he really wanted to give back to help others, why charge at all?

Honestly, there are no exceptions. You will not find a single moneymaking strategy in the world that ticks all three boxes of easy, sustainable and profitable.

There are easy and profitable strategies… but they don’t last, and often require leaving your integrity at the door. If you’re an affiliate marketer, slinging acai berries to half of America was easy and profitable. But sustainable? Not with an FTC lawsuit wedged firmly up your arse.

Likewise, you’ll find plenty of easy and sustainable strategies… although I haven’t yet seen one that made anybody rich. Extreme couponing is an easy and sustainable strategy, but only if you value your time at close to nothing. Maybe a nuclear blast will bring profitability to your giant stash of Frosted Flakes, but failing that; good luck.

And then there’s the smart choice: profitable and sustainable strategies… the blueprint of all great businesses. Average Joe might not like to hear it, sitting at home in his underpants with $19.95 to invest, but these strategies are several galaxies detached from being easy. They require the creation of real-world value. And there you’ll find the only blueprint of wealth generation with a proven track record: adding value to the world.

If you can’t create value for somebody, somewhere; you don’t deserve your early retirement. That’s a contrasting view with the many ‘magic button’ infomercials; those that prosper when your sense of entitlement grows. They insist that success is your God given right; that the world is doing you wrong if it fails to deliver a Pina Colada on a crystal sandy beach.

Whatever your personal beliefs, or your own sense of entitlement, the market will not change. Anything that you can buy for $19.95 is readily available for the rest of the world to buy too. If you intend to become richer than the market average, you have to do more with the information than most of your neighbours and friends. Or better yet, blaze a completely new trail for others to copy.

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Rich Dad Poor Dad Review

| February 7, 2012 | Comments (62)

This book, shockingly ranked #1 on Amazon for Personal Finance, might as well have been called Rich Dad Poor Dad Hopelessly Deluded Author. It’s so far detached from real-life wealth generation, that you should probably confine all future Robert Kiyosaki works to the Fiction section. He clearly specialises in talking out of his arse.

It’s five years since I was first recommended Rich Dad Poor Dad, a bestseller that I have always treated with skepticism given the murky nature of Kiyosaki’s upselling regime that sits behind the brand.

After reading the book in two pained sittings, I can safely say that anybody who recommends this slice of warble as valuable literature in the field of personal finance, is out of his damn mind, and knows jack diddly squat about personal finance.

Before we even get to the plot, it has to be said that Kiyosaki is a terrible writer. His storytelling unravels in scenes that would not look out of place in a poorly scripted infomercial. This, of course, is no coincidence. The infomercial is a perfect match for Kiyosaki’s primitive take on wealth generation. The rich are a collective, and the poor are a suffering crowd. It’s in such simple terms that Rich Dad Poor Dad thrives.

It’s difficult to decipher the author’s exact message at times. But I think I’ve nailed it down to 3 key points:

1. Education is important, but always second to financial literacy. People turn out poor because they’re not taught financial literacy.

2. Real estate is a fastlane to wealth. Buy properties at discounted prices, flip them and bank the just rewards. He doesn’t give details on how to implement this ninja wisdom, or how to beat the market. He places the burden on ‘insider tips‘. Mmm, fruitful.

3. Pay yourself first. Even if the government comes knocking on your door, you deserve to be paid first. The best way to do this, in Kiyosaki’s opinion, is to hide under the umbrella of a corporation. The author fails to recognize the difference between business expenses and personal expenses. I’m sure at least some of his devoted readers will have taken the words to heart, used expense accounts to buy rolexes, and will have enjoyed the fist of the IRS lodged firmly up their arses ever since.

Early in the book, Robert explains how he and his best friend Mike became swept under the wing of Rich Dad, a fatherly figure hated by his employees but blessed with the secret of knowing how to generate immense wealth. What could it possibly be?

The boys, at this point, are only 9 years old. Rich Dad puts them to work every Saturday, paying a pathetic 30 cents for their time. One day Robert snaps and can’t take it any longer. “You said you’d teach me the secret of wealth! All you’re doing is forcing me to bust my guts for nothing!”

At this point, Rich Dad launches in to a mind-bending interpretation that he has actually done the boys a favour. He’s proven that the rat race is no way to spend a life.

Note: I’m pretty sure exploiting child labour in the manner of Rich Dad is considered illegal, even in America. Somehow, the madness only escalates.

What follows is a laughably contrived debate between alleged moneybags entrepreneur and inquisitive 9 year old Kiyosaki. I don’t remember how savvy I was at 9 years old, but I’d be amazed if I was able to remember even a fraction of the investment ‘wisdom’ that Rich Dad throws in the face of this kid. It’s clear that the encounter is entirely fictional and designed to portray a conversation between Rich Dad and the reader. But what does it say about the lessons to be learned that Kiyosaki has cast the audience as a hapless 9 year old child?

Just like that, Robert sets off on his adventure in search of riches and fame. Well, I suspect he achieved one before the other.

I could find only one bright spot in the entire book. It arrives out of the blue when Kiyosaki expresses the importance of investing in assets rather than liabilities. This is basic financial footing. Don’t spend more money than you bring home. Invest extra money in assets, and stay out of debt. I can see how the big reveal – Kiyosaki calls it the only rule of wealth that matters – might bring clarity and a sense of direction to those who have been doing it wrong. But for everybody else, it should be common sense.

Kiyosaki explains very little about where to invest money, nor what makes a good asset. But he does launch in to a tirade about the importance of paying yourself first. The argument can be summed up best with this stroke of genius:

“When I occasionally come up short. I still pay myself first. I let the creditors and even the government scream.”

Perhaps I’m missing something, but if this doesn’t tick the right boxes for ‘catastrophic financial tip of the year’, then I don’t know what will. More tellingly, it goes against every sound cashflow suggestion that he squeaks in to the first few chapters, removing any hint of a saving grace from the diatribe to follow.

How can you truly appreciate the importance of assets vs liabilities when you’re continuously battering your credit rating by refusing to stump up cash for your bills and debts?

Kiyosaki argues that it doesn’t matter. Paying yourself first is ideal, no matter how loudly the government screams, because even if you don’t have the money in your bank account, the over-commitment will inspire and motivate you in to making ends meet. It’ll force you to grow as a businessman. What?! No really, what the fuck? Does he have the slightest Scooby what he is ranting on about?

One could argue that attempting to blood financial wisdom from a Kiyosaki sales device is like watching a SmackDown divas’ pillow-fight in the hope of extreme pornography. Expectations need to be met by reality. Yet I was still left wondering how such a half-baked cocktail of metaphors and generalizations could ever be met with widespread acclaim. Then it tweaked. The Warrior Forum flashed before my eyes, and normality was restored. Common sense looks like genius when it’s viewed from a cesspit of stupidity.

Do yourself a favour. Don’t buy Rich Dad Poor Dad.

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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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Lessons Taken From My First (24) Years

| January 27, 2012 | Comments (3)

I can remember only embarrassing figments of my last few birthday celebrations, and sometimes I consider that a blessing in disguise. Between the ages of 18 and 22, I must have untagged enough photos to fill an entire hard drive with scandal.

Yesterday by comparison, my 24th birthday, was a relatively sedate affair.

Instead of scraping pizza from a beer-sodden kitchen counter, I carved steak from a pool of watercress and braised shallots. Instead of being spanked, and whipped, and publicly abused by Geordie strippers with candles not designed for cakes, I enjoyed the quiet company of my girlfriend, who thankfully, was not carrying handcuffs.

Unlike those who create New Year’s Resolutions to focus on their goals, I prefer to wait until I’m hanging up my birthday cards. I use the moment to reflect on all that I’ve achieved, or haven’t, and I redefine goals for the year ahead.

I’ve always seen New Year’s Resolutions as a shameless merry-go-round of excuses. If January 1st arrives and you’ve missed your targets, there’s little sense of failure in setting the same goals again. But there’s something much more powerful about using your age as a measurement of development.

“Before I turn 24, I want to achieve…”

As opposed to the open-ended, “My New Year’s Resolution is to…”

You could be setting the same resolution for the rest of your life, but you’ll never turn 24 again.

Most people don’t need to endure such a rigorous round of annual self-appraisals. But then, most people already have structure to their working lives. It comes in the form of a career ladder.

You aim for promotion at 25, a nice middle-management role at 30, senior responsibility at 40 and perhaps one day, with fingers crossed and wood touched, a stake in the company at 50.

Your career ladder is placed before you in granite stone. If you haven’t climbed sufficient rungs by your next birthday, you’ll choose politics or mismanagement as your justification, backed up by a hope, a prayer, and a promise from the wife that things will ‘fall in to place‘ soon.

I’m generalizing quite badly, but from a personal perspective, I never felt the same pressure to succeed as a 21 year old web developer, that I do as a 24 year old master of my own destiny. I think that’s partly down to having nobody to blame but myself.

We love hierarchies of order. For an Internet Marketer, there’s no hierarchy. We can only compare our fortunes with those posting screenshots of their earnings, and the forum members recounting stories of ‘how much I earned today’.

In a typical job environment, we look at ageing directors and senior managers with fading hairlines as the best representations of what we hope to become. These figureheads are reassuring to anybody with a 9-5 because they remind us that time is still on our side, or more importantly, that experience breeds power.

The same comfort does not extend to Internet Marketers, or anybody who runs a business online.

We are forced to look to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world for our perception of what is achievable. The scale of relative achievement for online businesses is simply immense, and we formulate our own hierarchies around these vaunted young entrepreneurs. We want to be like them: rich, famous, powerful.

The fact that many of our role models rose out of nowhere to take the world by storm gives us many sleepless nights. The ambitious prodigy in his 9-5 may wish to leap up the career ladder, but it’s difficult to find examples where the road to success has been travelled at the speed of light, as it is so frequently by Internet millionaires.

The jump from office cubicle to director’s executive suite is daunting but clearly mapped. We assimilate that time, politics and good fortune will get us there someday, so we aren’t hard on ourselves for the years that go by where nothing seems to happen.

For an Internet Marketer, the years that pass without huge success can be crippling to morale.

When people like Zuckerberg transcend industries before leaving college, it scrambles our perception of the hierarchy. We no longer associate role models with those who have accumulated vast swathes of experience and paid their dues; we associate them with brilliance, innovation and the ability to rise from basement dwelling zeroes to billionaire heroes in the blinking of an eye.

The weight of expectation we shoulder by simply knowing what is possible in our industry makes it difficult to measure success in any reasonable manner.

In short, we lose access to all the excuses that justify the career ladder’s predictably slow ascent.

We’re forced to accept that any mismanagement, politics or glass ceilings are strictly of our own making.

The regular reminders that other young entrepreneurs are blowing up billion dollar empires before their 21st birthdays adds even more pressure to our lives. We compare ourselves religiously, and it’s difficult to keep success in perspective when the scale of achievement is so huge.

What kind of career allows for you to double your income on a yearly basis and still feel hopelessly at sea? I’ve tormented myself on many occasions, stargazing at the obscure wealth I know to exist, while resenting my own good progress just because some Internet Marketer somewhere is even further ahead.

These are troubles that are best kept in check by developing a sense of what success means to you as an individual, rather than as an industry average. So when I was setting my new goals yesterday, for the first time in five years, my #1 target did not involve taking over the world.

Some might call that a stain on my ambition.

“Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Well… I fucking hate that quote.

Every time I hear it, I feel like offering the dimwit a straight swap with one of the Russian Cosmonauts currently lost in space. Go and see how much they enjoyed missing the moon.

Whimsical ambition should never be favoured over realistic, achievable targets. And that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken from the last year.

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Building Backlinks: The Fastlane To Insanity

| January 23, 2012 | Comments (7)

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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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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Buying a Yacht vs. Defaulting On Your Argos Card

| January 13, 2012 | Comments (2)

There seems to be a lot of discussion in the Internet Marketing world over how best to create a lasting business, and particularly where to reinvest your profits if you create one that works. Knowing as many affiliates as I do, this is great to hear. It’s nice that people are waking up to the reality that reinvestment is critical for long term business growth.

Unfortunately, life is rarely as simple as spend spend spend. Many of us, through starting businesses and throwing balls to the wind, have taken on large amounts of personal debt. So, when is a good time to reinvest, and when is a good time to pay back what you owe?

There’s a reason why I voted Tory in the last UK Election: spending money you don’t have is the first sign of financial insanity. There’s only so far you can kick the can down the road. I’m all for reinvesting money to build a business. But to do so at the expense of ignoring debt is delusional; as is persisting with the faith that it will go away, or that paying it back will be easier at a later date.

Everybody who ever went bankrupt once thought their debt would be easier to pay at a later date.

So let’s be honest. When you look at your earnings vs your outgoings and find an extra £100 of disposable income, do you immediately piss your pants with unbridled epileptic joy? Is the opportunity of binge consuming too good to resist? Maybe you see it as a golden opportunity to invest in a new business idea. Shit, maybe you throw your extra earnings on the stock market.

I think this is stupidity of the highest order.

Pay back what you owe. The easiest way to relieve stress while running a one man business is to minimize your outgoings, whereas carrying unnecessary debt is the stupidest way of shooting yourself in the balls if it all goes tits up.

Let’s say you’ve racked up £5000 on your Mr. Plastic Fantastic. It’s tempting to think that time will be a great healer to those debts. So when your monthly statement arrives, you wince for a moment and then toss it aside. Mmm, the sweet smell of escapism. Instead of doing the sensible thing and paying back as much money as you can afford, you stick to the minimum repayments. Yeah, that £9.57 will go a long way. You feel like the fucking gingerbread man screaming “Argos, you’ll never catch me now!” But, of course, Argos will catch you. Painfully so. And you’re not even a gingerbread man. You’re just a tosser in the red.

Next month, your new statement arrives and lo and behold, you’ve barely scraped the surface of your original debt. You are a slave to interest. Even the dude printing statements at Argos calls you his little bitch behind your back. Yes, you’ve become the picture-perfect sucker that credit companies swear by.

Why is it so tempting to turn a blind eye to debts? Worse yet, when you have money to spare, why is reinvestment – or worse, blind indulgence – more appealing than repayment? Unfortunately, we are hardwired to resist giving up what we think we already have, even when that possession is deluded. We’d rather receive £50 today than wait for £100 next year. And this attitude contrives to keep us in the pockets of the industries that exist to monetize our greed.

Well, if the large majority of us weren’t such pigeons of consumerism, we’d learn to spend what we could afford and ‘the crunch’ would be a term reserved for those living their luxury lifestyles in castles built on sand.

Whether you appreciate the implications or not, all of your debts are working against you – day by day – for as long as you allow them to accumulate interest. If you spend your disposable income on reinvestments rather than repayments, your investments better be pretty badass. Your ROI needs to be discriminately high to not only produce profit, but to pay for the money you are leaking every month through those deceptively flexible minimum repayments.

Another issue I struggle to understand is our fixation with reward schemes. Reward schemes are the sales devices used to satisfy our weakness for instant gratification, the same trait that encourages us to accept £50 today instead of £100 in a year. Generally, they are used as distractions; woven in to contracts that aim to milk every last pound of that ‘reward’ back, and so much more.

It seems that many people have yet to catch on that you can have the best points scheme under the sun, but if you fail to make the full repayments on your debts, the accumulated interest will annihilate any hope you had of a freebie. The same for airmiles. Fucking hell, don’t even get me started on airmiles. I will happily take whichever card attempts to blinds me with the least bullshit. And if I hear airmiles, I instantly know that I’m swimming in it.

The people who run up gigantic debts on credit cards, then fail to repay them under the pretense that it’s okay “cause I’m earning airmiles, innit bruv” should be taken back to school and either educated, or simply shot behind the bike shed. I haven’t decided yet. It’s the same irrational logic that inspires a mildly psychotic Bible-Belt housewife to spend her days extreme couponing in the name of good value.

To put it simply – before I spiral further in to the extreme couponing rabbit hole – clearing debts as soon as possible is nearly always the best way to spend your money. It may not feel good. But it’s the best value deal. Once you’re out of debt, go ahead, reinvest like there’s no tomorrow. Splurge your extra cash on drugs and prostitutes if it makes you happy. Whatever rocks your boat.

Just don’t choose to be in somebody else’s pocket. That’s pretty dumb, and very inefficient.

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My Plans For 2012: Survival, Flat Pack Disposal and America

| January 9, 2012 | Comments (11)

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.

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.

Christmas recycling

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.

Travel Targets in 2012

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.

Business Targets in 2012

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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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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