Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently, but I haven’t had anything I felt inspired to write about, and I’ve been working/traveling a lot.  Anyway, I wanted to give a big thank you to Azoogle, particularly Maggie and Mitch.  Azoogle was the very first Affiliate network I joined and they have taken care of me since day 1.  They have gone above and beyond what most networks do for their affiliates.  They’ve flew me to NYC for my Birthday, flew to see me and took me to a Hurricanes NHL playoff game, they sent me to the Playboy Mansion, not mention countless gifts/dinners/parties.  Basically, you’re stupid if you’re not working with Azoogle.

Just recently I moved to a new condo and when I told my AM at Azoogle (hi Maggie), she decided to send me some house warming presents.  Azoogle was kind enough to send me an LG Blu-ray player and an Epson 6100 projector for my new “movie theater”.  I made a little video below:

If you’re not working with them you should, they’ve never once failed to meet my expectations.  Heck, when I was in France my AM called me at 1am her time, 7am my time, to update me on an offer for on a media buy I was launching.

This post can be applied to lots of different jobs and lifestyles, but it is mainly aimed at affiliates and business owners.

When I left my corporate job last year (6 days away from being 1 year to the day, not that I’m counting ), I did it for 3 reasons:

1. To Make significantly more money
2. To be my own boss and not deal with a corporate hierarchy/BS
3. To work less and on my own schedule

At this point in my life I have accomplished all 3 goals, but that wasn’t always the case.  When I first started, it took awhile to learn to make more money and in order to do it I was working longer hours, and at the time I was ok with that.  But as I learned more and my business grew, I learned how to work smarter and not work longer.  January 2009, right after Affiliate Summit West, is when I started doing this, and my earnings have increased dramatically every month since.

My old schedule consisted of me getting up around 9am, working all day, eating dinner and then working until 2-3am, sometimes longer.  My days of doing that are gone, in terms of affiliate marketing.  My current schedule is usually to wake up around 10-10:30am, get to the office in time to go to lunch and I am out by 6, and I do 1-2hrs of work outside of this office, tops.

The reason my schedule has changed so much and my earnings have gone up is because I started focusing on the most important/high volume tasks and less on every task that will make me money.  For instance:

• I’ve pretty much stopped doing SEO for affiliate sites. It takes up too much time that I could be spending on media buying or not working at all.  When in reality, the money you can make from SEO is peanuts compared to high volume media buying.  I don’t mean to piss of SEO people or say SEO isn’t a valuable/important task, because it is, I just choose no longer to focus on it given my current business model.
• I stopped running every offer.  I used to run 4-6 verticals at a time, now I focus on 1-2 and make them large.  Once I started doing this (I was a 1 man operation) I was able to scale my verticals much bigger than when I was trying to focus on tons of campaigns.  I contend it is better to be one of the top players in a niche instead of being a small to mid-size player in several. But to each their own.
• I started focusing on traffic sources that required less oversight/daily optimizations and could yield much higher sales volumes.  I decided that I would stop spending countless hours optimizing keywords in PPC campaigns or blocking sites in content campaigns, and I would focus on spending money with large ad networks where less attention was needed.  Yes I know I am leaving some money on the table, but I am ok with that.  I don’t have to earn every available dollar.
• I realized that you don’t win an award for working longer hours than the next guy.  No one gives a shit about your tweets that let the world know you’re working an all nighter, no one cares.  So why work long hours if you don’t have to?  Learn how to beat your competition through being smarter instead of working around the clock.
• I stopped doing so much competitive intelligence.  I used to make it my job of knowing who was running what offer, where they were running it, etc.  When I started focusing on my stuff more, I started to better.

These are just a few things that I started doing that have helped me to work less and earn more, allowing me to live the lifestyle that I ultimately wanted.  What are some things you do?

A couple days ago I did a podcast interview with Andrew Wee for his blog.  It is fairly long, like 45 minutes, but it goes over how I got my start, what I did before AM, how I work on campaigns, platforms I use, compliance, etc.  Hopefully someone will find it useful.

You can listen to the interview here.

This may sound simple and it is, but it seems to me that learning how and when to take risks is the biggest separator between unsuccessful and successful people.  Very few people are successful in life that don’t take risks.  Me personally, I am naturally risk averse when it comes to money/business.  I don’t always play it safe, but I am rarely the one that goes for the home run.  I have found this to be good and bad.

After going to Ad Tech in San Francisco, I realized that the biggest difference between myself and the affiliates that are larger than me, is not that they know more or have access to information I don’t have, it is that at some point they took some big risks.  Now I am not an advocate of taking risks that don’t make sense, but there are times when they do make sense.  Whether it is doing a very large media buy, doing a homepage takeover, starting your own product, or taking heavy losses on a PPC campaign to break into a market, there are times when you have to take risks.  Assuming your risks make sense, the rewards can be huge.

In regards to affiliate marketing, you can’t just immediately take risks when you start.  You need to learn the ropes, save a little cash, get a feel for what works, then you can take some risks.  There comes a point in time when in order to reach the next level, to be the best, you have to start signing insertion orders for $1M, $2M, or more.  Right now in affiliate marketing, unless you’re doing mid to high six figures a day, you’re really not one of the biggest players.  The way these guys do it is by taking risks and spending a BUTTLOAD of money each day on ads.

So if you want to be average or middle of the road then it’s fine to play it safe, but if you want to be the best or in the top tier, you eventually have to start going for the home runs and hope they work out.

I took this picture on my iphone while driving from Charleston, SC to Charlotte, NC. This might be the ugliest, most impractical car I have ever seen.

For the most part, I don’t watch network TV, I am usually on HBO for what little TV I watch. Now that Entourage is in between seasons, I am getting kind of bored with TV. My other favorite shows are South Park, The Wire, The Boondocks, Wall Street Warriors, and Nip/Tuck to name a few. Unfortunately just about everyone of these is out of season right, well Nip/Tuck starts back on Oct. 30th I think. But I have no idea when The Wire is coming back on and from some of the things I have read, this next season might be the last. The Boondocks is an awesome show, but it has been about a year I think since their last season. I am getting bored re-watching my downloaded season 1 (oops, did say downloaded, I meant bought). Not to mention, I just found out the other day when reading the wikipedia page on Wall Street Warriors (a show on the HD channel MOJO) that it was basically a 6 part mini-series. I sure hope they film more of those because I really like it.

Seriously though, I just bought a new Samsung 40″ 1080P LCD and I have no good shows to watch, or any true 1080 content for that matter. I think I need to make the leap from streaming downloaded movies ( I have an addiction) to my xbox media center, to buying (dare I say) true HD content.

Here is my attempt at a recap on making the #1 article across all sections on Digg, on August 17th. I wish I had been able to do this sooner, but I have been terribly busy at work, not to mention in Michigan watching my Mountaineers beat the Wolverines. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

This is the picture that made #1:

Quick Facts on my Digg Post here. These numbers are total numbers to date starting from the day it was submitted to Digg, August 16th.

92,470 Pageviews and 81,224 Unique Views (just for the How to get Fired from Dairy Queen Picture)

2:23 Average Time on Page (I am surprised it was this high)

Ever wonder what a #1 article on Digg looks like in terms of analytics? Here is what my Google Analytics looks like:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just an update about the previous post. The post about getting fired from Dairy Queen, the one below, made #1 on Digg this past Friday. It was submitted during Thursday afternoon and made popular in the wee hours of Friday morning while I was sleeping. It was a nice surprise to say the least, to see that 40,000+ people had come to my site while I was sleeping. The post received about 700 users on Thursday, 71,000 on Friday, and so far about 2,200 Saturday and today each. I am pretty happy with how the site held up, never offically going down but getting slow at some points during the day on Friday. Kudos to the wp-cache plugin helping with the load and Nationvoice.com for hosting my site for me in Dallas (through The Planet I believe). I will post a much more comprehensive update later this week on life after the front page of Digg, covering total users, time on site, number of links gained, jump in alexa, jump in Technorati ranking, and how long did I continue to see traffic from from this particular Digg post, which received a little over 1800 Diggs. Basically just an in-depth look at how the site was affected by becoming the #1 article on Digg.

*Per Jon West’s need for me to specify, when I say #1, I mean #1 across all topics or top of the top 10 list.

This is how you get fired from Dairy Queen

A recent study at Vanderbilt University found that women who get cosmetic breast implants are 3 times more likely to commit suicide than women who do not. I am assuming that “cosmetic breast implants” refer to people who are receiving a breast enlargement and not implants for some other medical reason.

The study had some other interesting findings, these same women with breast implants are more likely to die from smoking, drug or alcohol abuse than women who do not have breast implants. It is definitely worth the read.

Here is a list of 5 easy ways I have found that young professionals, others too, can make free money by continuing to do things they normally would. These might seem really easy and it is because they are. Here are 5 ways to make several hundred or thousand dollars extra in a year.

Use Your Credit Card
In this day in age, it doesn’t make sense to use anything other than a credit card to make purchases. Today, Credit Card companies are offering every type of reward under the sun to attract new customers. The best thing to do is to take advantage of these offerings and get rewards for purchases you would normally make. After graduating college, I did research into which type of credit card(s) I should apply for and here is what has worked for me — cash back cards. I think cash back cards are the way to go. I don’t fly enough to get use out of a flyer miles card, not to mention paying an annual fee for a card is usually not a good idea. Currently I carry 2 credit cards, an American Express Blue card and a Bank of America Financial Rewards Visa; both are cash back cards. In 2006, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, rated the AMEX Blue the best personal credit card on the market. If that isn’t good enough, it looks pretty damn cool. With this card, you can get up to 5% cash back on gas, grocery, and pharmacy purchases. I get a 1% back flat rate on my BofA Visa. I try to stick to the AMEX wherever possible, then use the Visa if someone doesn’t accept AMEX. The best way to maximize credit card rewards is to stick to 1-2 credit cards, and use them as much as possible. The more cards you have, the less rewards you can accrue usually. Depending on your spending habits, you could receive as little as $50, or as much as several hundred dollars back in a given year.

Start an Online Savings Account
Online savings accounts have become a very popular model, particularly the ones from ING and HSBC. The great thing about online savings accounts are that they offer much higher interest rates than traditional accounts (comparable to money market rates, sometimes higher) and are FDIC insured (unlike money market accounts). Currently, HSBC offers a 5.05% online savings account and ING Direct offers a 4.5% online savings account. How much is your savings account making? Odds are that it is with your local bank and you are making MUCH less than this. I have recommended the HSBC account to several friends and it has worked out very well for them. At 5.05%, that is a lot off free money you could be receiving.

Contribute to a 401k
While contributing to a 401k alone will not give you free money, there are tax breaks however, most every company today offers a matching program. People should always pay themselves first, which is why everyone should force themselves to contribute to their 401k to the point that it receives the max contribution from the company. Assuming you can afford it, many would be surprised as to what they can cut out of their life in order to be able to participate in a 401k (alcohol would do it), everyone should be receiving this free money.

Refer a Friend to Your Bank
Most every bank is offering a reward for referring new customers. The rewards range anywhere from $25 to $50. How do you refer a friend? Try to find a friend that is moving and switching banks, or merely looking to switch banks, and then have them list you as a referrer when they sign up at your bank. Easy money.

Refer a New Hire at Your Company
Have a friend looking for a job? Refer them to your company. Most good companies offer employee referral bonuses. I know that at one of my jobs, my employer was offering anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for employee referrals, and in some cases much more for highly skilled employees. There was a rumor going around at this job that a girl, straight out of college, referred several friends from school and made enough to buy a new car. Not that I am advocating this, but many people use craigslist to find and refer employees.

You can pick and choose which of these you want or can implement, but these are 5 easy ways to make several hundred, or several thousands dollars extra a year. Let me know if any of these have or do work for you.

I read this article last month and thought it was on point as it discusses 10 marketing and sales tips from strippers. Funny concept too. Its a shame they don’t teach stuff like this in school. Well these tips, and stripping too I guess. Actually, that is part of a new prostitution major at a school in New Zealand. Enjoy!