Leaving The Day Job

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Today I want to reveal the real me. When I started this blog a year ago I was exploring affiliate marketing as a way out of my deadend day job. I was hoping to make enough money to quit that job but at the same time I didn’t want to burn my bridges. The company I worked for was involved in setting up an affiliate scheme and there was a real chance someone would find my blog and realise I was planning on quitting. Hence I adopted the pseudonym Monty.

Why was I so worried about them finding out? I’m still not 100% sure. There was a healthy dose of paranoia certainly but also I was concerned that they accuse me of a conflict of interest (affiliate by night, quasi affiliate manager by day) or that it would undermine my negotiating power when it came to salary rises. There was also a potential conflict of interest with one of my affiliate sites which promoted a niche my employer was also active in.

Needless to say that none of these potential conflicts actually occurred. I was very careful not to do anything which was underhand or abused my position. In fact, by the time I was really getting going as an affiliate my employer had effectively pulled the plug on their own programme.

Yesterday was my last day working in that job. As I’ve previously blogged I’m moving into a new role working in the public sector from Monday and at last I feel I’m able to step out from the shadows and reveal my true identity.

So hello, I’m Simon Briggs and I’m an affiliate.

I’ve just noticed (three days late) that it’s been a whole year since I started this blog. I might not have achieved my ambition of leaving the day job but I have learnt a hell of a lot about online marketing and I do have a new day job lined up so I’m moving in the right direction.

I’m planning to do another post in a day or two recounting what I’ve learned in the past year but I’ll just say now that I’m particularly pleased that this blog has achieved a PageRank of 3 and an Alexa rank under a million. Thanks for reading over the last year, thanks to everyone who’s subscribed to the feed and I promise I’ll try to most more frequently in future!

Why do so many of the “make money online” blogs have a flash car on the top their pages? You know 99% of them are faking it. Maybe John Chow’s got a real fancy motor, maybe Keiron has too but most of these folks are just making a couple of quid off Adsense a month. Maybe a bus pass doesn’t look so hot on your Wordpress header.

But I like to be part of the crowd so here you go, the Montymobile in all its glory:

This pretty much sums up my start to 2008 as far as affiliate work goes.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

I know there’s a load I should be doing but I just can’t seem to get over the fact that I need to be doing it.

OK, so that’s a bit of a linkbait post title and I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers or to have made a huge fortune but I am going to detail what’s worked for me so far with Facebook ads. Standard disclaimer stuff: this is what works for me, your mileage may vary etc etc

First off, I think you need a different frame of mind dealing with Facebook ads than with your standard PPC ads. With the likes of Adwords you’re wanting to find people who are searching for a product, ready to buy it with their credit card clasped firmly in their hot little paw. Facebook users, on the other hand, aren’t looking to buy anything, they’re looking at their mate’s wedding photos or attacking someone’s vampire/zombie/whatever. Facebook ads are more about saying “hey, look at this cool product, you might like it” rather than “hey, here’s the thing you’re looking for, now buy it”.

Obviously, Christmas is fast approaching and so the products that are doing well for me are gifts. I’m taking advantage of the demographic targeting on Facebook to put the ads in front of people who I think are likely to buy them as gifts for someone else. So if you were selling kid’s toys for example, you might want to target married people over thirty. Choose a product which is unusual and has an interesting photo. Facebook ads have very little space for text and a picture says a thousand words. Use the title to get attention and gear it towards the audience you’re targeting. Use the ad body to bullet point one or two key features and include a call to action.

As I’ve previously blogged, Facebook ads seem to be hooked up to some kind of random number generator where money is concerned. Unlike Adwords you don’t get told what the minimum bid is, nor do you get any idea of how many impressions you’re likely to get for any given bid. What you do you get though is an estimate of how many people match your chosen demographic profile. If your targeting is too precise you’ll end up with a couple of dozen users in your potential audience; too broad and there’ll be millions of them. I suspect that Facebook some how takes the size of the audience into consideration along with your PPC bid when deciding which ad to show. But I’ll be damned if I can find any rhyme or reason to it!

So how do we choose a bid amount? My technique so far is a fairly unsophisticated method called trial and error. I start a new ad at 10c per click and wait to see what happens. If the ad start rolling merrily away I reduce the bid and see what happens. If it stubbornly refuses to show itself I up the bid. You can change the bid at any time and it seems that that immediately affects your click cost but the decision as to whether your ad actually runs or not seems to happen less often.

As an example, I created an ad this afternoon with a bid of 10c. After half an hour nothing had happened. Impressions stayed on zero. So I went up to 20c, 50c and then, in frustration, a dollar and still nothing happened. I put it back to 50c and left it. An hour or so later I logged back in to see that I’d had several thousand impressions and one click at 22c. I took the bid down to 10c and the ad carried on rolling. So the advice there is not to be in too much of a rush to see the outcome of your bid changes. And conversely, don’t leave a high bid unsupervised as it might suddenly start draining your balance. I’ve also noticed that if you change your daily maximum spend during the day, the change won’t kick in til the following day. So if you hit your max spend by lunchtime you don’t seem to be able to restart your ads until the morning.

This is still a small scale trial and so far my ad spend is only in double figures but at least I’m making a positive return on investment. Whether this is scaleable longer term and to larger amounts remains to be seen. We need to bear in mind that the more targeted our ads the sooner ad fatigue will kick in because we’ll keep showing the same ad to the same people. I think a possible route to success is in creating lots of mini campaigns, tightly targeted, keeping a close eye on ROI and killing them when they stop making steady profits.

Yesterday I reviewed three solutions for making your blog accessible from mobile devices. One of these was MoFuse and I highlighted a problem I’d had with my RSS feed being truncated. I’m pleased to say that MoFuse have got back to me today to say they’ve identified and fixed the problem.

You can view the MoFuse version of my site here and I’ve also got ten invites to join the beta program to give away. If you’d like to receive one just request it in the comments below and I’ll send by email.

I’m the worst person in the world.

OK, maybe I should qualify that before you think I’ve either murdered someone or have forgotten my mother’s birthday or I’m just having another one of my affiliate income-related downers. I mean, I’m the worst person in the world to try selling something to online.

Realising this has caused another huge revelation to, erm, reveal itself to me. As an affiliate I’ve been trying to market to myself. And that’s as dumb as rubber nails.

I’m cynical. I’m educated. I’ve got more years of internet experience than most people think it’s possible to have. I’m wise to affiliate marketing and to the spammy tactics of some of its dodgier disciples. I can use price comparison sites. I’ve bought all manner of stuff online and I’ll most likely go straight back to the retailers I’ve used before. In short, don’t bother trying to sell me stuff online.

In many internet businesses, producing what you yourself want can be a very successful strategy. It’s called scratching your itch. You want a better search engine so you go and build Google. You want to keep up with your Uni mates, you build Facebook.

But for me trying to sell things to myself is pointless. I’m not going to buy. So instead I sit in front of the computer all day dismissing all my ideas as naive or stupid or “been done before”.

Well, maybe Monty, not everyone in the world has been round the HTML block(quote) as many times as you. Maybe what you think is jaded is fresh and shiny to them. You may think that Myspace is Geocities with more Emo kids but to them its hip (or whatever young people say these days). Maybe you need to round up some net neophytes and see what happens when they surf the web.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about hoodwinking naive newbies with old hat spamming and deception. What I’m saying is that I need to be more openminded about what may work with the wider population outside of Geek Towers where I reside. I’m scientifically minded and I should experiment and discover what works. You never know I might surprise myself.

What a crappy month September is turning out to be. Not only have I got a year older, as I do every September, but my fledgling affiliate income stream has dried out and become a tiny trickle.

I’ve blogged before about the possible impending recession and certainly the going-ons at Northern Rock haven’t done the retail scene any good. But there seems to be more going on. People just aren’t spending.

Are they saving money now for a Christmas splurge? Or have they learnt in recent years that desperate retailers will start discounting heavily as we get closer to the big day?

Whatever it is it’s not making my life any easier facing my first Christmas as a semi-pro affiliate. It’s nigh on impossible to judge whether the work I’m putting in is worthwhile. I can’t tell whether customers are holding back their spending or if I’m just crap at building websites and attracting customers.

So what I’m doing is a scattergun approach. Throwing simple little websites together in a variety of different markets. Hoping that the SEO is good enough that they’ll rank nearer Christmas and bring in some sales for me.

Of course, there’s the danger of spreading myself too thin and making 100 crap sites instead of one or two good ones.

I think I need to be pragmatic and accept that the first Christmas as an affiliate is going to be a learning rather than an earning experience.

I’d still like to get a nice Christmas bonus for all my hard work though ….

Dear Affiliate Networks

This is just a small request. Just a simple little thing which will make my life a lot easier. Please, please if you are going to give us Javascript snippets at least make sure they work!

I’ve just wasted an hour trying to debug the Javascript for a certain merchant’s search panel. Just to make it even more fun I’ve discovered in the process that the code refers to their Winter 2006 inventory so even when it works it doesn’t work!

Terrific.

All the best
Monty

Blogrush is suffering from a spam invasion. As I predicted at the weekend spammers have jumped at the chance of having their crap syndicated for free on some of the biggest blogs on the planet.

Blogrush emailed all their users last night with the following admission : “… the bozos have come out of the woodwork and are trying to cheat the BlogRush system. We have quite a few users that are abusing the system — from running scripts to auto-load the widget, to other fraudulent methods to earn syndication credits for their account that they do not deserve.”

Jason at One Little Duck has had enough of the spammers piggybacking on his site already and has pulled the widget. He rightly points out that “site owners/bloggers should remember that links on your own site are often seen as a recommendation by you to your users”

I’m hanging in there for the moment. I’m a bit concerned that the Blogrush guys didn’t see this coming but they reckon they have it in hand so I’ll let them see if they can solve the problems. Certainly the size of the network and the potential for getting your blog in front of so many new readers is not to be sniffed. And you can’t argue with the price either.

I’m grudgingly and constantly amazed at the ingenuity of spammers. They must get up very early in the morning to keep finding all these new ways of corrupting every idea everyone else comes up with. If only they could put that amount of energy into something useful we’d have cancer cured by now and be moving on to world peace, edible microwave meals and getting British trains to run on time.