No Click Left Behind - Premium Posts Volume 5 - STM Bonus Post (15)
No Click Left Behind - Premium Posts Volume 5 - STM Bonus Post
Hey guys. This is a special short bonus post, exclusive to STM, from the latest volume in my Premium Posts series. Volume 5 was released yesterday. Details here.
Not every ‘super affiliate’ was born with a never-ending budget of dollars to spend and dollars to waste.
Unless you are one of the rare few to move in to affiliate marketing with your fortunes already made, you are probably just like me – and a thousand other affiliates – you like to make every dollar count. You wish you could squeak every last dollar of revenue out of your campaigns, while minimizing the losses when it all goes tits-up (which it will, regularly).
I try to follow a motto called ‘No Click Left Behind’.
George W. Bush tried to follow a similar motto called ‘No Child Left Behind’. If I can have even half of the success that George Dubya had… well, I’d be an incredibly unsuccessful man.
No Click Left Behind
What is No Click Left Behind? And why is George W. Bush rearing his ugly smut head in an affiliate marketing product?
No Click Left Behind is the adoption of an affiliate marketing mindset where we aim to maximise the ROI from every single click to our campaigns.
How much money do you spend on Facebook? On Plentyoffish? On Google? On media buys?
If you’re like most affiliates, you will throw however much money it takes for results to magically appear.
I’m betting that in the process, you lose conversions that could have been. You lose leads that would have been. You lose revenue that should have been.
We spend so much money on paid traffic and yet we are astoundingly wasteful in the returns we expect. It’s either profit or loss. Success or failure. Affiliate marketing or McDonalds.
I’ve now spent 3 or 4 years spending money from my own pocket on ad campaigns. It took a while, but I eventually reached the conclusion that adopting such a nonchalant attitude towards my ad spend was only leaving one sore arse in the food chain: my own.
I’ve since spent endless hours examining the typical CPA conversion funnel (okay, I’m exaggerating. Probably about 3 and a half hours).
How can we make the most out of every single dollar?
Here are some of my suggestions for the manifesto of No Click Left Behind.
Branding Your Landing Pages
If you are a dating affiliate, like myself, you probably have several domains registered with all kinds of ludicrous brand names:
DannysTopDatingFixes.com
FinchysSoldierCowboyFiremanSuperHunks.cjb.net
Let me ask you. How long do you spend developing actual websites behind your landing pages?
For a long time, I spent… no time.
Then it dawned on me that if I was spending $500-$1000/day on dating traffic, and simply passing that traffic on to another dating offer – wasn’t I guilty of a colossal waste?
What was happening to the rest of the traffic, the users that didn’t convert? I would never see those clicks again, and yet there’s no such thing as a refund from Facebook or Plentyoffish.
We forget that even when you’re doubling your money, even when you’re turning $500 in to $1000 with a hot campaign, very rarely is that campaign entirely efficient.
Maybe as part of your $500 ad spend, you purchased a total of 750 clicks. Let’s say 150 turned in to leads (aka money in your pocket).
What happened to the other 600 clicks that didn’t convert?
They are gone. Vanquished! Never to return lest ye decide on another swish of Mr. Plastic Fantastic credit card for more advertising.
While we may look at a campaign that doubles our money as a raging boner of an affiliate marketing success story. It’s still a waste when you consider that the large majority of that traffic disappeared in to cyber space.
My suggestion is that we continue to focus our top priority on maximising conversions.
But we should also look at ways to generate value from the non-conversions.
The traditional way of doing this, as I’m sure you are aware, is to build a mailing list.
Note: Sites like Aweber and MailChimp are great for setting up mailing lists. Watch out on Aweber though. The sordid urchins charge you even for users that have unsubscribed from your lists.
Instead of playing arbitrage by purchasing traffic and immediately passing it to the merchant, building a list demands that we capture the data first. We use an opt-in form to grab the user’s email.
Once we have the user’s details, we can send a confirmation email and after confirming the opt-in, the user can be redirected to the CPA offer for an initial return on our investment. That's nice, but it’s the lifetime value we’re salivating over.
Lifetime customer value can make even the loftiest of payouts look like small fish.
However, pursuing opt-ins can often leave a dent in your initial ROI. If the offer isn’t accessible without joining a mailing list first, you have to expect a significant drop off in your immediate conversions.
That initial ROI is the drug of many an affiliate marketer, and it proves almost impossible for some of us to sacrifice the initial gain for a much larger gain somewhere in the future.
We are infatuated with short-term gain in this industry. It’s a plague-like disease.
There is, however, an alternative method of building long-term value and maximising short-term ROI on the same page. I’m amazed at how many marketers have neglected it for so long.
Pretty simple, right?
There is no golden law of affiliate marketing that says you can’t integrate an opt-in form with a landing page that fully sells an offer.
This is one of my recently favoured methods of making sure no click gets left behind. If the user isn’t sold on the offer (statistically very likely, remember), you have a second line of attack to monetize the scraps.
Your opt-in form should be compatible with the offer. They should work well in tandem.
For example, it would be pretty bloody stupid to waste your time creating the traditional landing page, only to include an opt-in form talking about a ‘top secret dating site’ that is blowing the others out of the water.
Make sure your message is consistent.
Freebies and giveaways are excellent opt-in bait for the dating niche, just as they are everywhere else.
So, what happens once the user has opted-in?
Wouldn’t it be nice to promote any dating site you wanted? Not just those white-listed by Facebook and Plentyoffish?
Good news. You can promote whatever the hell you want after you’ve secured the opt-in – so long as your traditional landing page pushes a white-listed offer to get through approvals.
I’ve been using this method with a client of mine (well, the only client. I’m not normally down for consulting). It strikes the perfect balance between short-term ROI, and long-term data capture.
I can't stress this highly enough though...
If you are going to build a mailing list, there isn't a single success story that came about by being half-arsed about it. You can't just blitz your list with offer A, offer B, offer C and some viagra pills on Christmas Eve. Shit does not work like that.
A mailing list is a long term asset with a slow burn execution strategy. You will need to develop lots of quality content to seed the list with. I recommend only 1 in 8 messages be related to an offer you're promoting. The rest should be quality content.
Standalone Landing Pages Compromise Trust
Have you ever considered that the traditional affiliate style of amateur landing page, amateur pictures, weird domain and no further branding is a little… untrustworthy?
It’s just a thin ‘orphan’ page with seemingly no site built around it.
If you want to use the dual-gunned approach of landing page + opt-in squeeze, I highly suggest you do away with this affiliate culture.
Brand your landing pages.
Buy a domain, brand it, and build a blog around it. Don’t worry, you can turn the comments off.
I know the thought of genuine customer feedback is enough to soil the pants of 98% of affiliates reading this now.
Once you have an ‘umbrella’ site, you can add some branding to your landing page. It doesn’t have to be a complete navigation and category listing. Too many distractions is most definitely a bad thing.
However, a discrete logo, some footer links and the opportunity for the user to click back to the main blog are trust dealmakers. They make the landing page less jarring. It no longer appears like a homeless orphan waiting to pick the user's pockets.
And what do you suppose the main blog should look like?
Well, I’ll let your imagination do the talking here.
But let’s just say once the user has clicked through to your blog, those Just Hookup and Local Slags offers are fair game. You can be much more liberal on the pages that aren’t directly under the scrutiny of Facebook ad team eyeballs.
It Doesn’t Have to be Shady
I have a couple of websites that fall under the category of ‘dating blog’, and besides drawing their traffic from a few carefully researched keywords on Google, they also whore a lot of my remnant landing page traffic.
The way I see it, if I have $1000 worth of highly targeted singles passing through my premises every day, that’s a golden opportunity to build a valuable website related to dating – with high quality content – and additional layers of monetization waiting for them.
Why watch that money disappear in a puff of smoke when an offer stops converting?
Remember: The majority of your traffic will not turn in to leads. Are you happy with that? Maybe you are. But in a marketing landscape of skinnier margins, where failure is rife and success so increasingly rare, it pays to be the guy who attacks every click as if it’s the only one that matters.
I picked up PP5 yesterday. (Forgot to use the coupon code. Doh! Use the extra $7 wisely!!)
As always, it's great content. Lots to think about and implement.
Great post !
Not to forget that if you're not building a blog expecting to drive traffic with SEO (you need unique content for this), you can find thousands of PLR articles online ready to use and create your brand new website overnight.
"The money is in the list" makes a lot of sense to me, and it's an adage heard in the last few years in the world of product owners (the practice seems to be less widespread in AM). Everybody was using squeeze pages and auto-responders a few years back.
However, if anything I've seen more and more product owners switch to video sales pages without a squeeze. That includes a couple of the top products on Clickbank. I've discussed this a bit in the second half of this thread.
What's your take on that Mr. Finch? 
Exellent read, never ever thought of doing this. I guess this is why experts say read and read and read, and this reading has got me some points to take action on :P
Got volume 5 yesterday, pure gold; and this is the exact bonus that I needed!
Thanks Finch.
Awesome post.
I've recently really wanted to try something like this; to merge what I already know about making websites & SEO (or the shit show SEO has become) and what I've learned about paid traffic, to make a cash-printing machine of a website, complete with a logo, a mailing list and the whole nine yards.
I think the one thing holding me back personally is "what if it doesn't work?". There's a significant time risk here.. but not so significant that I have a valid excuse for not at least trying it. Then again, with proper split-testing, this could mean having enough slightly different content to make 20 websites.
Same goes for mailing lists. I've started down that path before, only to run off with my tail between my legs when I realize there's a disconnect between the time and $$$ I'm throwing at opt-ins, and my immediate returns. Which is why I like your opt-in form on the same page as offer CTA so much.
I think what scares me more is the complexity and possibility of losing track of everything. It is/was so simple with the traditional direct link or landing-page-from-nowhere on omfgadzzz.biz style paid traffic campaigns, because it's easy to see exactly what's happening to your money.
Part of that is Prosper202's fault for not having an easy, flexible way of tracking anything beyond those types of campaigns -- which is why I'm getting CPV lab -- and part of it's me being paranoid and wanting to know where every last dime I spend is going.
Keeping track of my ROI after an opt-in and trying to calculate the lifetime value of a subscriber has always confused the hell out of me. Every link out of an email has to go through your tracker? What about physical products outside a CPA network? Clickbank products? Those don't let you fire conversion pixels...
Don't get me wrong, I've let go of my fear of losing money since starting in this game. Moving around this kind of cash would have given me a heart attack a few months ago. I just want to know WHERE the money I'm spending is going. I suppose knowing that it's going toward another chance of converting should be enough, but some idiot part of me feels better knowing it's gone forever than not knowing where it went next!
Now that's insane.
One last concern for me: Do I have to put my name on this shit? LOL! Getting into the dating or (worse) pick-up industry full time, as even a faux-authority, would be something I'd want to hide behind a pen name for. And use someone else's picture for. And, come to think of it, wear rubber gloves while managing. It's not my thing... to the extent I don't want my real identity anywhere near it.
Of course I'm just thinking out loud; there's plenty of ways for me to hide my identity and, even if confronted by someone whose opinions I actually care about regarding it, can say I just paid someone else to do it and I'm just all about the Benjamins.
But this information is GOLD man, thank you for sharing. I'm definitely going to give this a try in the coming weeks.
Great reading! Did you ever try that optin in an exit pop? And with a well established dating blog you could also "brand" your emails for more credibility.
Kudos for your Finch, this is a really good post.
Thanks for the post man.
Originally Posted by jmgraff
Originally Posted by bangkokbaby
For many marketers, the video is probably seen as another unnecessary cog in the sales funnel. But if you're going to take the time to do a mailing list properly, I don't see why you can't get a professional video done too.
Originally Posted by flowmotion
And yes, exactly. The branding builds trust. It's less of a jarring disruption.
Having a logo, and some footer links, makes any page feel like less of a moneygrab.
No I never tried. But I would definitely split test exit pop versus having the optin on the lander.
Btw, what angel are you using when promoting a dating offer on a "branded" lander? You know since you are not posing as being a part of the offer.
hey Finch killer bonus post thanks you! I've also picked up PP5 last night and I'm going through it this weekend to digest and learn. I'm definitely starting to do more with collecting emails, I know I'm leaving money on the table as I have several mailing lists in my Aweber account that have a few hundred folks that I haven't mailed anything to yet.
Originally Posted by flowmotion
Man... Finch this post and PP5 is exactly what I need. Thank yoU for an amazing post, and I will be picking up PP5 right now!
Originally Posted by flowmotion
You do have to be careful running branded landing pages though. Some of the more risqué LP ploys are not suitable, like the countdown tickers...
Ah ok. At the top om my head, that seems much harder to pull off, but also a lot of advantages like opening for new angles and ideas. If its not to much to ask, could you share one of those landers in 3rd person veiw? You know, for educational purposes 
Nice blog you have btw
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum