Month: January 2021

New Year GIF by HostGator

Seeing as I mainly run push traffic as well as build out push subscriber lists, I thought people may be interested in my views (conceited I know) on this traffic source for 2021 and so I thought I’d share my thoughts below (also writing things out help me think and crystallize my plans):

Around to Stay and More Like Email

Despite the naysayers I expect push to be around and stay. This is because I think push can be very useful. For instance it serves as a great outreach for businesses that want to reach their customers/prospects regarding their latest sale but not have to deal with the hassle of building out a full fledged app.

And so instead of drawing the analogy to push vs pop I would say it is more alike to email. And just like email used to be, push is also flooded with spam and abuse.

Clamping Down On Spam + Harder to Get Subscribers

Facebook Spam GIF

Biggest difference between email back in the day and push nowadays is that push is pretty much controlled by one company, Google. Hence they have much more control in controlling things like spam/abuse and you are already seeing this in 2020 with the changes like a quiet UI.

I expect this theme to continue in 2021 where they will introduce client side changes (i.e. in Google Chrome) that make it harder for you to get push subscribers as well as harder for you to reach your push subscribers.

Eventually they will also clamp down on the sending side. Just like how email servers have a reputation score I expect this to eventually get introduced to push sending servers as well.

Improvements To Push Management Softwares (Hopefully) 

2020 saw a host of new push software come out and expect that we’ve probably hit the point where we need better software and not more. The biggest issue I expect (or hope) will get addressed is the ability to build funnels for push notifications just like you would for email.

Not sure if anyone has tried but building out a sequential funnel for push on a software like Truepush (this is the one I use most) is very very painful. As far as I know, OneSignal should be fairly similar too.

Hence I expect that we’ll get software that aligns closer to how we manage emails.

In-Page Push Carve Out

I think people will realize in-page push is not push (most do already by now). It is much closer to display ads or interstitial than classic push. Just think of how you see in-page push, so far I’ve been seeing them a lot on streaming sites (which historically is filled with pops/display ads) whereas classic push shows up in the notification section of phones and computers.

The quality of in-page push is usually much worse, hence traffic sources really should be carving out in-page push (I’d rather see them grouped with display or interstitial). 

Uncertain: Will It Come To Apple/Safari?

Given Apple’s focus on privacy and what not, I can’t imagine them allowing push unless they decide to build their own version of it (since they pretty much have their own version of everything). However whether this is even worth their time really depends upon how Google handles the governance of push traffic as a whole. So yea I think this one is a bit of a stretch and we will probably need to just stick to in-page push to reach Apple users.

In Conclusion

If it isn’t clear already my view of push is that it will continue its evolution to become more like email. 

Spamming people will still work from time to time but not ideal long term. More and more people will begin managing their own push list and there will be more emphasis on creating value with your content as well as sanitising your list properly (just like how you need to manage email bounce and complaint rates).

Similarly my focus in 2021 is still primarily in push but with a longer term view in mind. There will be more effort in managing our own push lists to cater to our audience so as to build “moats” around my business. Hopefully I can find a way to share more of this information with everyone, though honestly just tracking the LTV of a push subscriber makes me do this:

New Girl Ugh GIF

Weird Sushi GIF

Been a while since I updated, thankfully I’ve just been busy and have been healthy and well (though my sanity, like others, is on edge given the various degrees of social distancing measures and how 2020 has gone). Anyhow, since we are still at the start of 2021 I thought I’d kick off on some of the things I’ll be working on this upcoming year.

Push Push and More Push

As the old adage goes, “Don’t fix what’s not broken.” Despite the naysayers push traffic is still very much alive. It has been nice to use in 2020 and despite the drop off we are very much committed to this traffic source. We do expect some changes in 2021 (will cover this in a later post) but for now will milk the proverbial cow until it no longer lets us.

Scaling Vertically Instead Of Horizontally

In 2020 we tried to scale horizontally with some success and have decided to just double down our efforts in the areas we’ve somewhat figured out. Affiliate marketing is getting more competitive due to the abundance of resources online (and believe more people are taking a look at anything online marketing these days) and so it takes specialist knowledge to compete which is why we want to dive deeper into what we are doing well in and scaling that further.

Hiring + Training

Ugh hiring, the necessary evil. Sure it is a pain in the ass but to really scale and develop specialist knowledge we really do need more manpower. We’ve been steadily ramping up in Q4 2020 already and the quality of candidate pool has been relatively higher lately (probably due to unemployment and covid). So now it is just a matter of us spending the effort and energy to develop a process around it such as building onboarding procedures, training manuals and all the other fun stuff (ughhhhh).

Eyeing Investments

With Tesla stocks on a meteoric rise and Central Banks’ money printer on, I expect asset prices to continue to rise and that this is probably a good time to pay attention to investments (since I’m expecting we get out of COVID in one piece eventually). Also COVID has brought about a lot of changes to the world and just in 2020 I’ve seen many new opportunities pop up despite the weakening economy. Hence I’ll also be keeping my eyes open and ears to the ground to see if there are some new trends/ideas that I could capitalise on and wade into the “blue ocean” (in reference to blue ocean vs red ocean) scenario.

Blog Monthly Updates

I usually enjoy writing but have lately been extremely lazy (at least with updating this blog specifically). So as such I set myself a personal goal to update this blog at least once a month this year.

Last Word

All in all, work-wise 2021 seems to be an extension of 2020 with a much larger focus on the stuff that solo-affiliates hate (which is infrastructure) but is much needed if I really want to hit the next level in my affiliate/entrepreneur journey. Despite how shitty 2020 was I expect 2021 to be filled with opportunities for those of us that are on the lookout and so I will definitely be keeping my eyes peeled.

Tired Wake Up GIF by Working Title

Hopefully by the end of the year we will all be gorging ourselves on awesome sushi.

Dinner Eating GIF by Sandwich

Yours truly,

Sushiparlour


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