How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 5 Overcoming Duplication (5)
How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 5 Overcoming Duplication
(Links to all parts: Part 1: INTRO | Part 2: Long Term Money Secrets | Part 3: List Segmentation | Part 4: Bridging the Gap | Part 5: Overcoming Duplication | Part 6: Surveying and Splintering)
When I got into “mail order” in the mid 1990’s, I was enthralled by the number of “recent mail order buyer names” available on the list rental market to mail to—there were literally millions, and there still are (direct mail is bigger than ever).
When I actually did mail order in the early 2000’s to the Biz Opp space, I ran into something unusual. Sure enough, there were plenty of new “hotline names” each quarter (hotline names are the names of people who bought something through the mail in the last 30 days, showing their recent interest, like I discussed in the list segmentation article, these names are more likely to buy), but I always wondered where these “new” names came from since everyone rented everyone else’s lists.
Were they truly new or were they just the same names from the last quarter? And where did all these “new” names come from, how did they get on the lists?
Did they come from infomercials? From magazine ads? From outer space? Something was off to me about these “new” names, so I had my mailing house do a merge/purge on the last 2 years of lists I’d rented, providing me a duplication report. Sure enough, 80% of the names were dupes, and we were renting the same names over and over. BUT (and this is important) we were still making money. Why? Because we varied our offers and postcards to those names every time we mailed. If we didn’t, we would have lost money.
This type of duplication exists in online marketing, and because of the efficiency of technology, you can burn out traffic sources quickly with the same creative. There is not an infinite universe of names (clicks), and most marketers are marketing to the same pool, many with the same offers, and many with ripped banners and landers. Sure, there are filters you can use to market to mostly new audiences, but this tends to shrink audiences greatly. For the most part, you are marketing to the same people over and over—that’s one big reason why campaigns that start out great can die quickly.
This is nothing new, the same thing exists in magazine advertising. Every month you are getting your ad in front of essentially the same audience, so it will never be as good as the first time you run it. Gary Halbert called it “the suck out” since the first time you ran it, you “sucked out” the most responsive readers.
Note: for entertainment purposes, here is the ad I used to run circa 2006 in publications like Blackbelt, Natural Body Building, American Curves, and several other now defunct magazines. Wrote it myself (it’s in pdf).
http://effortlesscommunication.com/johnalanisad.pdf
The key to long term profits in affiliate marketing is to learn to make money with duplication. Remember in my “long term vs short term” article I said “clicks are people too?” That means they have varied interests that flash on and off at any one time. If you are in front of them when that interest “turns on”, you can get a conversion.
Take, for example, my list of horny guys. Late at night, all they may care about is getting off, so a casual dating offer would appeal to them. But early evening, right after they come home from a bad day at work, a girlfriend, even a wife meeting them at the door may be much more appealing. So a mainstream or foreign dating offer would be more appropriate.
Perhaps a friend showed up at work, bragging about a hot younger girlfriend, and he starts thinking it would be nice to have one too. Get in front of him with a Russian or Asian dating site, and you might get a conversion.
Or maybe he starts to feel low energy throughout the day, puts on a few pounds, and starts to look and feel unattractive. Get in front of him with a testosterone booster, and you might have a conversion. Or perhaps he has too much to drink one night and can’t get it up- an ED or “too soft too often” stamina offer might lead to a conversion. Maybe he finally gets a date, hooks up, and lasts 15 seconds, much to her disappointment and his embarrassment. So a “PE” (premature ejaculation) offer would be appropriate. Or perhaps an enlargement offer so he can prove his manhood the next time.
You get the point. Promoting the same offer to this guy over and over is going to lead to him getting bored. But promoting a wide variety of offers relevant to him is the key to profit.
Think of an audience as a swarm of fireflies with their taillights blinking on and off. Within the entire audience, nothing changes- they are still the same group of fireflies. But their interests wink on and off, and when you are in front of them with an offer when their “interest light” goes on, you have a good chance at a conversion. Another name for this is a “moving parade of interests.”
In opt in email marketing, you are almost always mailing to a duplicate audience on a day to day basis- the same people who click on an email in the morning are pretty much the same people who click on one in the evening. Yes, the composition of your list will change as you add new email addresses, but on a day to day basis, the audience you send to pages or offers via email will be pretty much the same people. But when you send them to multi-offer landing pages with a lot of different offers on them, you can catch their interest in the moment.
That’s why software like
On my internal landing pages, I have placements for foreign dating, mature dating, mainstream dating, ED, Enlargement, how to attract women (PUA offers), even sweeps at times. I rotate pictures, banners, offers, the order of placements, color schemes, etc. understanding that the audience composition changes slowly, and it is for all intents and purposes the same audience on a day to day basis (but it changes dramatically week to week and month to month as I add new email addresses.
Yet the more offers I present, the more likely I am to catch the moving parade of interests, and when a prospect clicks on a specific themed offer (say Asians), I know they are “in heat” and I quickly follow up with similar offers. A page like this not only overcomes daily duplication by appealing to multiple interests, it becomes a segmentation vehicle to precisely target prospects who have demonstrated interest in a specific topic. If a guy, for example, clicks on an Asian placement, you would not want to send him ED offers- he’s not interested. You would want to send him Asian dating offers, and vice versa. A guy who clicked on an ED offer is not interested in Asian dating (at that time), but he sure is interested in fixing his ED, and is responsive to every ED offer on the planet.
Duplication can, at first appear to be annoying because, hey, we’d all love to find one magic banner, one magic landing page, and one magic offer to send to the whole internet and get rich, but it rarely works that way. More money is made more often by doing the hard work, creating an audience, promoting a wide variety of offers to that audience, getting them to self select (segment), then by following up with offers matched to their demonstrated interest. Messy, yes, but success comes from a messy kitchen.
Stay tuned for the next article…
How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 6 Over coming Duplication Part 2 of 2 Surveying and Splintering
Hey John- am loving this series! Thank you again for doing this!
This is a great series! Thank you. I've been doing something similar for the past year, creating an initial list and then splintering to additional offers. Each splinter becomes a new "brand or persona" so the initial people, don't think they are getting blasted by the same person/company each day.
The issue has generally been tracking long term performance of leads/sources as they get splintered. Without the ability to track over time I've been hesitant to scale on the front end.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the rest of this series.
Originally Posted by global34
I always configure long, somewhat convoluted source codes with three important parts to them:
1) the Source
2) the amount spent
3) the date the buy started
When I go back to the same source, I always keep the source code part the same, but change the buy amount (if applicable) and the date started. What I want to be able to do is to “eyeball” a conversion and know exactly where it came from.
For example, a source code may look like:
SourceA2K111519
The source part is SourceA, the amount spent is 2k, and the date the buy started is 11-15-19. These three elements combined give you an enormous amount of historical data.
Whenever I do an initial buy I always make sure the source code goes into the ad tracking field of my email system, and whenever I mail I ALWAYS append it to the link in the email via personalization. That way I can pass it to the affiliate network using subid’s, for example s2. A link in my email blast would look like:
http://www.effortlesscommunication.c...source=%%merge members_.source_%%
If I wanted to track by persona (and I am a big fan of doing what you mentioned), I could simple add an identifier to the end of the source code, such as say, P1. So, the link would look like:
http://www.effortlesscommunication.c...source=%%merge members_.source_%%P1
You can pass this value to your affiliate networks, then export conversions, put them all together in Excel and run reports. I do this on occasion, but I usually like to “eyeball” conversions over a date range, and that gives you a really good feel for what works and what doesn’t.
Using source, amount of buy, and date range as the source code gives you another piece of valuable data—you can export recent 30 day clickers and run an analysis by source code of the sources that continue to click.
I did this over the summer and the biggest thing that jumped out at me was this: email addresses that come from other email lists (instead of opting in, say, via a banner ad) keep clicking at a rate far higher than those that come from a banner. This makes sense if you think about it—emails that came from another email list had to open and click an email to get on your list, so they are clickers. Emails that came from banners are not necessarily clickers- they may enter an email address, but they don’t open and click at the rate that emails sourced from other email lists do. Just as a buyer is a buyer is a buyer, a clicker is a clicker is a clicker. In order to give you money, an email address HAS to click, so clickers are very important.
When I did my analysis over the summer (2019) I was pleasantly surprised to discover how many email addresses were still clicking from email blasts (not banners) that I’d paid for in 2017. It was an eye opening revelation, only made possible because of what I put in the source code- Source, Amount of Buy, Date of Buy.
I could literally compare two equally priced buys (say $2k) from about the same time, one banner, one email blast, and see the number of clickers still active from each buy. It was like turning on a light switch, the number of email addresses still clicking from email blasts was a multiple of those from banners. That immediately told me to focus my capital on buying email blasts instead of banners. I’m not interested in buying the whole internet, just a part of it, so how I allocate my capital is very important to me, and the historical analysis I was able to perform because I had properly configured my source codes was a business changing event.
That’s the power and importance of long term historical tracking and why it is important to set it up from the beginning.
John, Thank you again. This is huge. Using the merge tags with the affiliate links is a great idea. Thanks for all of your information, I'll be working on implementing this in the near future.... while waiting to read the rest of you series!
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