I've made millions online - ask me anything!

[eStan]

I've definitely thought of doing something in the health and fitness industry. As a very active and fit person, and a competitive athlete, it's actually one of my few real passions. It's something I'm going to be thinking about over the next 6 months while I try to figure out what to do next.

I think I have a pretty good idea for a health and fitness related product that currently doesn't exist, that's needed by about 1/4 of the adult population. I've just never had the time to devote to starting an entirely new business in an entirely new industry. Until now that is ...

You should make a killing with your expertise, wish you the best of luck, even though what you do is not based on luck much at all. Health/Beauty is the best vertical to get into IMO given the high margins and ceilings set only by your own imagination. There is a shitload of money here if done right.

I was just reading about the success of Hydroderm for example which sold over 100 MILLION bottles of anti-wrinkle cream so far. Granted they were among the first big skin offers but still..100 freakin' million bottles.

By the way, I love hearing success stories like these as I'm sure we all are. Could you share some similar ones you have encountered over the years? Besides yours, what are some crazy numbers others have done that you know about, hope you can share some.

 

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[Kingmaker]

I read every single post in the thread - thanks for all the great information you provided, limitup!

My question is: Can you name some websites that you visit daily or forums that you are a member of related to the specific topic of 'Making money online' and where you get your new information about your craft?

 

[Genium]

I am glad I came across this thread,there is a ton of quality information. I have to spend more time reading it all! Thanks for this

Anyway, I have 3 digital products I have created that are all similar, and I have a website for them: Sylenth Sounds

My question is, how should I go about bringing in potential customers? Should I work on the sites SEO, promote the products via social media, or Google AdWords?

As of now, I have had around a 2% conversion rate on the products, which isnt good. Maybe my prices are too high or I am not marketing correctly.

Thank you!

 

[Pinnacle]

I am glad I came across this thread,there is a ton of quality information. I have to spend more time reading it all! Thanks for this

Anyway, I have 3 digital products I have created that are all similar, and I have a website for them: Sylenth Sounds

My question is, how should I go about bringing in potential customers? Should I work on the sites SEO, promote the products via social media, or Google AdWords?

As of now, I have had around a 2% conversion rate on the products, which isnt good. Maybe my prices are too high or I am not marketing correctly.

Thank you!

In addition to Limitup's advice, I would do some research on Douglas Price, the founder of ProSoundEffects.com. I remember reading about him in The 4 Hour Work Week. At one point he was making around $10k per month from his business which is and was extremely similar to yours if I'm understanding your site correctly. I'm sure he's long been a millionaire from his business by now.

According to his website: "Pro Sound Effects (PSE) was founded in 2004 by Douglas Price and was a featured chapter in best-selling business book, "The Four Hour Work Week." For the record, we no longer work 4 Hours Per Week – more is required to take it to the Next Level..."

The point is that following some of his early approaches--coupled with Limitup's advice--may be what you need to increase conversions.

 

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[limitup]

By the way, I love hearing success stories like these as I'm sure we all are. Could you share some similar ones you have encountered over the years? Besides yours, what are some crazy numbers others have done that you know about, hope you can share some.

Anything you can think of, people are doing it. I knew one guy who was spending over $100k per day on advertising. He basically built an almost fully automated arbitrage system (similar to automated or algorithmic trading). It was primarily based on direct linking to various weight loss and skin care offers. The system automatically "optimized" itself based on which offers converted best from which traffic source, even taking into account the time of day. He had 30-50 offers going at any one time, and all the traffic came from the various RTB platforms using generic ads so that the traffic could be diverted to any offer in his system. Haven't talked to him in ages but last I heard he was averaging around an 8% ROI and worked a few hours a day. Crazy stuff!

I know a handful of the "million dollars in a day" guys. I never understood that model really. After refunds and paying out 50% commissions to affiliates and JV partners, they usually end up with around $300k per million in sales. So when you see the "gurus" talking about how they made a million in a day, obviously they're talking about revenue and not profit. 300k is not bad but anyone here is surely smart enough to realize that most of the time they spent months working on the project that culminated in that one million dollar day. The guys who do these big launches usually see about 50% of their total sales on the first day, and another 50% that comes in over the next few days to a week, then they usually shut the offers down, take a break for a few months, and start working on another project. Personally I don't really like this model, but it would definitely be cool to be able to say you brought in a million bucks in a day...

 

[GOB]

Hey limitup!

I like your story, and especially your efficiency very much(who doesn't?). It is maybe not a specific question, but here we go:

I'm new to this internet marketing stuff, but I can see potential in here. I have language skills to target English, Spanish, German (and Hungarian ) speaking markets. I have some programming skills in PHP, MySQL, C# and Java. My finances are limited, but I can work 80+ hours a week, and have no problem to sit in front of computers for the next 5-10 years. My main goal would be for this year to quit my 9-5 job, and earn at least $800-1000/month online, as much passive income as I can reach. Then, build something bigger, more "fastlane". Where would you start learning and working? If I search it, there's like million sites to learn internet marketing, but I'm not sure which one would be good. I have some experience with health, accommodation and dating industries, but not that much.
If you would start now, which direction would you go into?

 

[limitup]

My question is: Can you name some websites that you visit daily or forums that you are a member of related to the specific topic of 'Making money online' and where you get your new information about your craft?

In all of my years online I've never spent much time on forums, and especially not on any of the "social media" sites. In the very early days I spent some time at warrior forum, but quickly "outgrew" that place. I also used to hang out over at wickedfire for awhile but that was mainly for the entertainment value. I used to follow a bunch of marketing related blogs that I had loaded up in my RSS reader, but not so much anymore so I honestly can't help there. My best advice is to stay focused on whatever you're doing. It's too easy to get distracted and waste time online. Overall my #1 resource has always been Google. Whenever you come across something you want to learn more about you can always find what you need by intelligently searching the big G for info and answers.

Of course, now there are a few decent paid private affiliate marketing forums that didn't exist when I came up. The two big ones I'd recommend are stack that money and imgrind. These are definitely worth the money IF you use them intelligently. Other than that the only other forum I'd spend any time on is this one ...

 

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[limitup]

Anyway, I have 3 digital products I have created that are all similar, and I have a website for them: Sylenth Sounds

My question is, how should I go about bringing in potential customers? Should I work on the sites SEO, promote the products via social media, or Google AdWords?

I don't know anything about your niche so I can't say.

My best advice is to see what other successful people in your niche are doing, and do that. In addition to prosoundeffects.com also checkout dubturbo.com - I know Norb makes great money from his site/products.

Don't take it personally but both of these sites look 10X more "professional" than yours does just at first glance. Something to think about.

A 2% conversion rate isn't that bad. That's about average.

It's just impossible for me to give you any serious advice though since I don't know anything about your business or even your niche.

Your conversion rate is primarily based on the strength of your offer (assuming decently targeted traffic, a professional looking website, and all that stuff that should be a given) - so I'd start there. Also like I said, see what the more successful people in your niche are doing and model them. That's the "secret".

With a bit of research and testing you should be able to figure out where your competitors and others in your niche get their traffic, what their conversion rates are, what their sales funnels look like, etc.

 

[freedom fighter]

Alright, I’ve been lurking here for a while but this thread made me finally register on the forum (what’s up everybody!). I’ve read the thread from start to finish and I find your posts really inspiring and educational.

Initially, when I started learning about IM my plan was to create an info product business in one of three big niches with the use of Clickbank platform. I wanted to do it the way you described in your previous posts – analyze top selling product owners, reverse engineer and provide better value. However, I quickly lost my eagerness, because I couldn’t find any area/niche with high potential and which I would like to build my business around. Majority of top selling CB products (which attract lots of affiliates) are just scams and pure BS, from: “earn 1k a day in 30 days without lifting your finger” to “get ripped six pack in 10 days while playing your xbox”.

In conclusion, you already wrote how I feel about that:

“I know they recently cracked down on some of the ridiculous biz opp stuff they allow on there, but from what I can see these are really the only types of products that kill it on Clickbank and can leverage their affiliate base in a way that makes the steep fees worth it. Most of the health and fitness products are also borderline "scams", the "speed up your computer" and registry fixer type products are all borderline scams, and on and on. Not technically scams maybe, but 99 out of 100 of them don't deliver what's promised in the sales copy. And unless that's the kind of business you want to be involved with, I don't think you'll find Clickbank very useful.”

This is what is selling well but it is not what I’d like to be involved with and tell my friends/family about.

1) How did you brand your businesses while having offers in various niches? Did you use multiple pen names?

2) Did you position yourself as an expert or you just leveraged “real world” experts and their content (interviews etc.)? I think that in info product business the author’s story and experience are pretty important and just selling as a brand doesn’t have the same power here.

At the moment I only run a small Kindle publishing business which I like but I know it won’t take me anywhere close where I want to be ( = it won’t be my fastlane business). That being said, I decided to put my main focus on software + web apps (saas) and mobile apps. I find these kinds of ventures more ethical, easier to sell, very scalable and more fun to work on. And my questions are:

3) How do you FIND and VALIDATE your software/web apps ideas? I mean a situation when you can’t get any information if a particular saas business is profitable and worth trying to “copycat”. It’s easy to get to know whether some mobile apps are successful or not, because app stores provide this kind of information. But there are no such marketplaces for web apps and saas etc. How would you do your research and make sure you picked a good market?

4) What do you think about the following validation process:
- create a landing page informing about a software product/service before it’s even built
- buy some ads (fb, linked in etc.)
- analyze if the idea is worth pursuing (signups etc.)

5) I know you mentioned BizBuySell, do you use other similar sites that helped you create your successful products?

6) I’m not a techie and this is why I wanted to start with an information business. My plan is to find a good dev for a long-term cooperation and maybe in the meantime learn some coding basics myself. My worst nightmares are: losing money on building something nobody will want and not being able to fix or do anything if the developer suddenly leaves.

I have around $10k to invest. Do you think it’s enough to create a competitive software product/service or I should better try to find a way to build something awesome & “ethical” in info market first and then move to software with bigger capital?


Uff, that’s a one freaking long post.

I’ll really appreciate if you read it and post your answers. I’m sure they will help many other “freedom fighters” having similar thoughts
Thanks for starting this thread and congratulations on your success!

 

[theBiz]

I was browsing bizbuysell and saw an info product based site for sale. There were all their revenue and other numbers in plain site, and their URL. I couldn't believe they were making so much money with such a crappy site and crappy offer.

Love their site, been a long time user.


like this one for 14 million?

I wouldent mind being a broker for these businesses, nice little commission. Just remember you heard it hear first... the next show on Bravo, i can see it now-----Million Dollar Listing -Internet Business Brokers

For sale

 

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[limitup]

like this one for 14 million?

Personally I don't think I could ever buy a business for that much money (or anywhere near it) with only an 8% margin. Seems way too risky to me.

 

[theBiz]

It seems to make alot of sense for people who are excellent marketers to buy businesses that are just leaving alot of money on the table. Businesses driving traffic at an efficient price but not monetizing properly. Even to start it makes alot of sense, years i wasted i should have just bought something and jumped into it, many, many people can manage a business, starting one is 100x harder. Easier to increase something current than start from scratch so great idea to model one, maybe even better to buy, especially for the action fakers out there, atleast maybe they can re-sell it for something once they get tired.

I bet you could pick up many sites that have weak sales funnels and turn them around into big profits.... finding them on the other hand..... probably just as hard as finding passive income @ 20%.

 

[ryanco]

Limitup,

Thanks for shining so many of us! Just wondering which email auto responder do you use? Like ,say Aweber, you can get banned pretty quick as they take 'spam' very very seriously. That's what I heard.

I am currently running traffic as an affiliate and getting 75% commissions for each sales I bring in. Now, I am trying to cut him out and run my own whitelabel product (very similar). When I planning how i can get them sorted and calculating the metrics, I realized that the merchant is not making profit at all, in fact it can be a small lost for each sales affiliate bring in for him.
If your product is good, how much margin will you be giving to your affiliate for each straight sales? Or you dont make money at all but make sales when buyer calls in

 

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[limitup]

I bet you could pick up many sites that have weak sales funnels and turn them around into big profits.... finding them on the other hand..... probably just as hard as finding passive income @ 20%.

Like just about everything it seems it's harder than it sounds on the surface, at least in my experience.

It's not that hard to find small sites to buy, but they are too small to even interest me. This could be a great strategy for some, but once you get to a certain point sites that make a few grand a month aren't even worth looking at. This is mostly what you'll find if you go looking for sites to buy.

And on the flip side, "bigger" and more developed sites/businesses with good cashflow are no different than real estate or anything else - you can't easily find great sites to buy for significantly less than they're worth.

For the prices they command, I would rather just duplicate the site/business vs. buy it if I wanted to get into that niche. Unless it was something that had some huge barrier to entry or unique advantage in the marketplace...

 

[everelusive]

Is something a little off subject ok?

You mention being a competitive athlete, what do you compete in?

 

[Johnathan Ta]

I think this would be a valuable question to ask.
It should help many of us.

Many of us here, are not any form of internet marketers.
Many of us create physical products / import various items and invent in many different markets.

My question is:
As a successful AM yourself, how would you recommend an individual with physical products find internet marketers to work with us.
I have a keen eye for a great product, I lack the know how and steps to execution to get its existence onto the screens of thousands of potential customers. As a man of the trade, what would I have to offer to tempt you into putting your valuable expertise into promoting my product.

This question has emphasis on physical product - any particular sites or routes you would take for AM?

Where and how could I go abouts offering an affiliate program juicy enough for someone like yourself to bite into.
Is it typical to pay the affiliate the lions share of the profit? I personally view professional internet marketing as something very valuable, volume beyond what anything I could accomplish on my own.

 

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[Jonleehacker]

Observing this thread and reading your posts about your past. What stands out to me is how early on you said you wanted this to become the most popular thread ever on this forum, and if it didn't, then it would be because of lack of effort on your part.

To me, now that your goal is about to be achieved, that demonstrates so much about your character.

With that kind of focus, clarity, vision and determination, you are the kind of person I would love to see working on something much bigger to benefit humanity. Like Elon Musk with his electric cars or Richard Branson with space tourism. You have the talent and mindset to accomplish something substantial.

I think you should shift away from creating products and look at solving larger problems. My two cents, very impressed with your story and your spirit.

 

[Manu]

Hey limitup, I wanted to thank you for all you're sharing, but specifically for explaining the relationship between product, offer and copy and their relative importance.

I created an info product and had everything figured out: the funnel, the trust building process, the testing, the offer, and countless other stuff I'm not mentioning. But the main thing I knew I was missing was assigning offer and copy their weight within the equation. Up until now I was just doing trial and error. I spent far too much time trying to put the best sentences in the right order and what not... Now after reading you I thought of a bunch of simple things I can do that will very probably improve sales.

If I'm right not only I will have built a successful "funnel" but I'll have learned great skill for further projects, so thanks very much again. Claim your free Spanish ham whenever you want .

To keep with the spirit of this thread and as if you hadn't already done enough, I'll ask you three questions.

1. What's your take on risking money to invest in developing assets, businesses, etc? I mean are you the kind of guy that has 1 million in the bank and risks 800k in some business that can blow up or lose it all? This question just crossed when you talked about losing millions (although you then explained it happened in other offline ventures). I think I have the right mindset in this area 'cause I see money mainly as a tool. But maybe I need to tolerate even more risk.

2. What's your criteria to decide you're not interested anymore in selling a product (even if it's yours). ROI decreasing under a certain line? Interest in other projects? If so, what makes another project more interesting?

3. Out of curiosity, but seriously if you don't want to answer to this one then np. Could you roughly break down your income by source? I mean % of affiliate sales, % own products, % investments, etc.

Thanks again and again limitup!

PS @SabaZ I know you asked limitup but I'll just give you my honest poing of view and hope it'll help you. If you're in a hurry to make money online I'd go to a site like elance, odesk, or even fiverr to directly sell your services online. Whatever they are. On fiverr you can sell almost anything (for a low rate). It's not the best way to go but if you're in a hurry you'll make money faster than learning to create "systems" online.

 

[limitup]

I'm new to this internet marketing stuff, but I can see potential in here. I have language skills to target English, Spanish, German (and Hungarian ) speaking markets. I have some programming skills in PHP, MySQL, C# and Java. My finances are limited, but I can work 80+ hours a week, and have no problem to sit in front of computers for the next 5-10 years. My main goal would be for this year to quit my 9-5 job, and earn at least $800-1000/month online, as much passive income as I can reach. Then, build something bigger, more "fastlane". Where would you start learning and working? If I search it, there's like million sites to learn internet marketing, but I'm not sure which one would be good. I have some experience with health, accommodation and dating industries, but not that much.
If you would start now, which direction would you go into?

It's really hard for someone like me to answer these kinds of questions for you. If your first goal is to make $800-1000 a month that shouldn't be hard to do at all, and there are literally 1000 different ways to do it.

The key is whether you make the required effort to learn what you need to learn, and then execute on it.

There is huge money online in promoting health and dating related products and services. These are 2 of the most competitive "niches", but that's only because there is so much money to be made in either.

I would say pick whichever one you know the most about and/or most passionate about and focus on that.

As far as the specifics of what to do to get started, again there are 100 different ways to go forward. I firmly believe there is no one size fits all answer to any of this, and a HUGE part of it has to do with finding something that works for you. In the beginning I "failed" at a bunch of different things while experimenting to find what I liked and what I was good at.

So honestly I recommend you just pick one of those niches, then start searching google for things like "dating affiliates", "dating affiliate marketing", and that type of thing. Spend a week or however long it takes reading up on everything you find.

If you have a little money to spend on ads, probably the quickest way forward for you would be to promote dating offers on POF.com. So if you want to do that, in addition to the other stuff also search google for "advertising dating offers on POF" etc. and you will honestly find all the info you need. There are people with blogs, etc. who have written entire ebooks on promoting dating offers on POF.

When it comes to either of these niches my absolute best advice is to make sure you get really niche with it. Think sub-niches. And even sub-sub-niches. Do not just promote generic dating offers to generic dating traffic. What you want to do is target sub-niches like Jewish dating, fitness singles, nerd dating, dating sites for animal lovers, etc. There are sites and offers for all of this, and much more more.

By really zero'ing in on a sub-niche like this you'll see lower advertising costs, higher conversions, and higher ROIs.

Also search google for things like "niche dating" etc.

 

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[limitup]

This is what is selling well but it is not what I’d like to be involved with and tell my friends/family about.

Yeah, unfortunately you're right. And it's that much harder competing against people that don't "play by the rules." For example, hardly anyone runs flogs and "farticles" any more since the FTC started cracking down on them. They convert like crazy because they're so deceptive. But there are still people that promote the hot offers using this type of deceptive advertising, and it's hard to compete for a lot of the traffic because they can afford to pay more since their campaigns will generally convert better than yours. These days the only people running these are young guys with big balls and a don't give a crap attitude, people in 3rd world countries who think they're untouchable, etc. Unfortunately there are still lots of them out there though.

1) How did you brand your businesses while having offers in various niches? Did you use multiple pen names?

Yes, I've always used a different pen name for each product/site, even within the same niche.

2) Did you position yourself as an expert or you just leveraged “real world” experts and their content (interviews etc.)? I think that in info product business the author’s story and experience are pretty important and just selling as a brand doesn’t have the same power here.

I've never really positioned myself as much of an expert or used that in my marketing. I'm a relatively private person and you will not find my real name, picture, family, etc. plastered all over the Internet. In fact, you won't find me at all because that's the way I want it. A lot of people just make up fake personas and make up these really crazy stories and experiences, but I just never wanted to do that. It's one thing to use a pen name, it's an entirely different thing to basically lie through your teeth and just make stuff up.

I've always focused on creating GREAT offers and providing value, because when you do that everything else matters that much less. You don't need to position yourself as an expert or "guru" if you simply make great offers. You can read some earlier posts in this thread for more info about what I mean when I say a great offer.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with doing it the other way as well. If you're only promoting stuff you're proud of and you want to build yourself up and plaster your face all over the Internet, there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of the internet marketing and fitness "gurus" do this. I'm sure everyone has seen Mike Chang and his "six pack shortcuts" ads all over the Internet...

3) How do you FIND and VALIDATE your software/web apps ideas? I mean a situation when you can’t get any information if a particular saas business is profitable and worth trying to “copycat”. It’s easy to get to know whether some mobile apps are successful or not, because app stores provide this kind of information. But there are no such marketplaces for web apps and saas etc. How would you do your research and make sure you picked a good market?

In my experience if you truly understand a market, the customers in it, their frustrations, their needs, etc. you should be able to gauge this yourself to a pretty good degree. Honestly I would say that if you're not sure if your web app or SAAS will sell, you probably don't know your market well enough.

If you want the best chance of success you should absolutely model what someone else is already doing successfully. You may not know how much a site is making, but if you see a site being advertised all over the place for months on end, you can be pretty sure that they're making money.

I definitely wouldn't recommend you go and create something completely new and unique that doesn't exist in the market UNLESS you are 110% comfortable with the fact that this is NOT the way to make money as quickly and as safely as possible. No matter how great you think your idea is, these are the types of things you should pursue once you're financially comfortable IMO.

With that being said there are some things you can do to test. For example, you can setup a simple landing page with a short survey and then run some highly-targeted traffic to it. Offer people some kind of free bonus, a discount when your product is released, etc. to answer 1 or 2 big questions. If you make it simple and straightforward, and quick and easy for them to answer, a lot of people will answer and most will answer truthfully. This is a good way to get some good intelligence quickly and relatively inexpensively.

But again, if you model something that you already know is working, the whole process is a billion times easier ...

4) What do you think about the following validation process:
- create a landing page informing about a software product/service before it’s even built
- buy some ads (fb, linked in etc.)
- analyze if the idea is worth pursuing (signups etc.)

Ah, hadn't read far enough ahead before I typed up the above. Yes this is a great strategy that many people use. 100% yes to this.

5) I know you mentioned BizBuySell, do you use other similar sites that helped you create your successful products?

Nope, I stumbled onto a pot of gold on BizBuySell literally 10 years ago and honestly haven't used it since. Just in the few weeks have I started using it again just to see what other types of businesses are out there and see some of the numbers behind them.

When you become fully immersed in your market, you'll know about all the top sites, your competitors, the customers, their frustrations and desires, etc.

6) I’m not a techie and this is why I wanted to start with an information business. My plan is to find a good dev for a long-term cooperation and maybe in the meantime learn some coding basics myself. My worst nightmares are: losing money on building something nobody will want and not being able to fix or do anything if the developer suddenly leaves.

I hear you. Follow my advice above and you shouldn't have to worry about this. For example, you know that people need and use autoresponders. If you "build a better mousetrap" you'll know with 100% certainty that people will want to buy and use your service.

I have around $10k to invest. Do you think it’s enough to create a competitive software product/service or I should better try to find a way to build something awesome & “ethical” in info market first and then move to software with bigger capital?

Software development adds up real fast. With that kind of budget you should probably stick to a very simple product/service/script that wouldn't cost more than a few grand to develop. Or stick with info products for awhile like you said.

 

[limitup]

Just wondering which email auto responder do you use? Like ,say Aweber, you can get banned pretty quick as they take 'spam' very very seriously. That's what I heard.

I mainly use my own custom autoresponders that I've developed over the years, but I do occasionally use aweber. As far as spam complaints go, if you're getting a bunch of spam complaints you're just doing things wrong. Subscribers should look forward to receiving your emails. Spam complaints are the market's way of telling you that you need to up your game. You're either "selling" too hard, you're not giving people what you said you would, you're not adding value, your content sucks, etc.

I am currently running traffic as an affiliate and getting 75% commissions for each sales I bring in. Now, I am trying to cut him out and run my own whitelabel product (very similar). When I planning how i can get them sorted and calculating the metrics, I realized that the merchant is not making profit at all, in fact it can be a small lost for each sales affiliate bring in for him.
If your product is good, how much margin will you be giving to your affiliate for each straight sales? Or you dont make money at all but make sales when buyer calls in

I obviously don't know the specifics but the merchants you analyzed could be buying their product in huge quantities and getting volume discounts that you can't get as a newbie.

If you're talking about info products, did you analyze their entire sales funnel including all of their upsells, downsells, OTOs, etc.? Any "advanced" marketer with a solid backend is thrilled to breakeven on the front-end sale, so yeah, there's usually more to it than you see on the salespage for their introductory product.

You need to go through their entire sales funnel, buy their stuff, see what else they try to sell you, see how they follow-up with you after the sale, etc. Many marketers get people in the door with a cheap $35 product and make most or all of their money selling them 10 other products over time.

 

[limitup]

Is something a little off subject ok?

You mention being a competitive athlete, what do you compete in?

I'm an extremely competitive amateur tennis player.

 

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[limitup]

As a successful AM yourself, how would you recommend an individual with physical products find internet marketers to work with us.
I have a keen eye for a great product, I lack the know how and steps to execution to get its existence onto the screens of thousands of potential customers. As a man of the trade, what would I have to offer to tempt you into putting your valuable expertise into promoting my product.

This question has emphasis on physical product - any particular sites or routes you would take for AM?

Where and how could I go abouts offering an affiliate program juicy enough for someone like yourself to bite into.
Is it typical to pay the affiliate the lions share of the profit? I personally view professional internet marketing as something very valuable, volume beyond what anything I could accomplish on my own.

I'd recommend you go back and start at the beginning and read everything in this entire thread. I've talked about this a bunch. I know it's a lot to read, but honestly the answers are there.

Long story short you need to create a great, high-converting offer that generates a good EPC for your market or niche. If it's profitable for people to promote your stuff, affiliates will flock to you.

If they make twice as much money promoting a competitors offer, no one will promote your offer (except for a small handful of newbies maybe, people you have an existing relationship with, etc.).

Affiliates generally have no loyalty and only care about the dollar. Your job is to create a highly-optimized offer that will allow them to make as much money as possible from their traffic. More than they make promoting your competitors. If you can do this, you won't be able to turn off the traffic if you wanted to!

This mostly applies to the really competitive niches where the majority of affiliate traffic usually goes to a relatively small handful of offers. There might be 500 "how to make money online" offers on Clickbank, but 90% of the affiliates are only promoting the top 5-10 most profitable offers.

If you're talking about other less competitive niches this is the way to completely dominate it, but it wouldn't be absolutely necessary if your potential affiliates aren't going to immediately compare you and your offer to 10 other highly optimized and highly profitable offers that they could promote instead.

 

[limitup]

Observing this thread and reading your posts about your past. What stands out to me is how early on you said you wanted this to become the most popular thread ever on this forum, and if it didn't, then it would be because of lack of effort on your part.

To me, now that your goal is about to be achieved, that demonstrates so much about your character.

With that kind of focus, clarity, vision and determination, you are the kind of person I would love to see working on something much bigger to benefit humanity. Like Elon Musk with his electric cars or Richard Branson with space tourism. You have the talent and mindset to accomplish something substantial.

I think you should shift away from creating products and look at solving larger problems. My two cents, very impressed with your story and your spirit.

Right on, thanks for that. That really is my, and I believe the ONLY, secret to success.

I'm not a big self-help motivational guy and a lot of that stuff can get pretty cheesy, but as I mentioned in an earlier post I've had this framed posted up on the wall behind my desk for at least 10 years. I don't know where I came across it but it resonated with me and I've had it on my wall ever since:

The part at the bottom that you can't read sums it all up nicely. These are the words I live by:

"The difference between history's boldest accomplishments and it's most staggering failures is often, simply, the diligent will to persevere."

I don't get out of bed and recite them every morning or anything like that, but the framed posted on my wall is just a nice reminder when I need it.

I've heard a few Will Smith quotes that also stuck with me. I think the guy is a little too full of himself sometimes, but this sums it up for me as well. It might as well be me saying these words. Like him, I believe this is the only real secret to success. As he says "it really is that simple."

Will Smith - Not Afraid to Die on Treadmill.mov - YouTube

And here's a longer version with more where that came from...

Will Smith on Greatness and talent vs skill (MUST SEE) - YouTube

I would LOVE to work on something "bigger" and more meaningful. I've even started taking extra showers lately, because that's where I seem to get my best ideas.

 

[limitup]

1. What's your take on risking money to invest in developing assets, businesses, etc? I mean are you the kind of guy that has 1 million in the bank and risks 800k in some business that can blow up or lose it all?

Absolutely not. It may be out there but right now I can't think of any situation where I'd invest 80% of what I had into a single project. If I had 200 million and I'd still be left with 40 million if it didn't work out, and it was the biggest no-brainer investment in the world, maybe.

2. What's your criteria to decide you're not interested anymore in selling a product (even if it's yours). ROI decreasing under a certain line? Interest in other projects? If so, what makes another project more interesting?

Well over the years I've done a lot of "hustling" and "grinding" with all different types of affiliate and lead gen campaigns. In competitive markets, it's unusual for any one offer to remain at the top for very long because there are so many new competitors and offers coming into the marketplace on literally a daily basis.

If you do this stuff you just have to roll with the punches. Normally what will happen is that the profitability of an offer will simple start to decline at some point, and keep declining until it fades away or the advertiser shuts it down. Generally speaking if you look in the really competitive markets like health, wealth and relationships you'll be hard pressed to find more than a handful of offers that have been around for even a few years.

Me, I get bored easily. Once something I create is up and running and making money, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly. I like to create stuff, and I've always had a list of potential projects and ideas literally 20+ pages long. That's just me. Like I said in my original post, a lot of what I've done isn't very fastlane so some of this is a case of do what I say (and what others like MJ say) and not what I do.

3. Out of curiosity, but seriously if you don't want to answer to this one then np. Could you roughly break down your income by source? I mean % of affiliate sales, % own products, % investments, etc.

Well I don't run any sites or campaigns any more. I slowly sold them off or turned them over to another company to manage for me. They just send me a nice fat wire every month for my cut.

I have money stashed away but aside from 2 rental properties I don't have much else in the way of investments right now. Most of my money is pretty liquid and sitting in very boring low yield investments because I don't feel qualified or ready to invest yet. This is what I'm working on learning now.

 

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[Manu]

Thanks for the answer limitup. Just wanted to add something a little off topic here...
I recently heard that Lincoln had bipolar disorder. Maybe that's common knowledge in the US (I'm from Spain)... I just wanted to point out that his accomplishments and perseverance were even greater because that's one really f***ed up illness.

 

[Johnathan Ta]

I'd recommend you go back and start at the beginning and read everything in this entire thread. I've talked about this a bunch. I know it's a lot to read, but honestly the answers are there.

Thanks for the reply,

I actually did read through the entirety of these pages, just didn't soak things up as well as I should of as I'm on night shift lol.
Thanks so much for your expertise and input on this thread - every so often, successful people truly give back. This type of information is so valuable to me and I'm sure so many others "trying to make it"

 

[vipervin]

If I continue online I'll probably stay focused on software and web apps. That's where I have the most fun, they are easy to sell and scale, and I can outsource most/all of the work

1) Recommendations on where to outsource software/web app development? I'm trying to get one developed, but weeding through unqualified firms is a challenge.

2) Epic AMA.

 

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[freedom fighter]

I've never really positioned myself as much of an expert or used that in my marketing. I'm a relatively private person and you will not find my real name, picture, family, etc. plastered all over the Internet. In fact, you won't find me at all because that's the way I want it. A lot of people just make up fake personas and make up these really crazy stories and experiences, but I just never wanted to do that. It's one thing to use a pen name, it's an entirely different thing to basically lie through your teeth and just make stuff up.

I've always focused on creating GREAT offers and providing value, because when you do that everything else matters that much less. You don't need to position yourself as an expert or "guru" if you simply make great offers. You can read some earlier posts in this thread for more info about what I mean when I say a great offer.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with doing it the other way as well. If you're only promoting stuff you're proud of and you want to build yourself up and plaster your face all over the Internet, there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of the internet marketing and fitness "gurus" do this. I'm sure everyone has seen Mike Chang and his "six pack shortcuts" ads all over the Internet...

I've read them, I know what you mean by saying great offer. You made a great point that there's no need to position yourself as an expert if the offer is awesome.

Actually I'm rather like you and prefer to stay behind the scenes. "Mike Chang" business model is not for me (neither creating fake personas etc.). I even have a hard time using pen names & short bios for my Kindle books. Sometimes I feel like I just should hustle more and don't care so much about "some details".

I totally agree with you that modelling someone is the best way to start a business for a bootstrapper. The toughest part is to choose a good role model but not good enough so there's place to compete against it (I know it was just an example but I don't see myself competing with Aweber).

Anyway, many thanks for all your replies, good stuff - I appreciate it.

 

[Chazmania]

When you were first getting started in the late 90's, how did you learn your craft? Was it through friends/mentors or did you just know somebody that was working with early internet marketing? You said it was non-stop 80+ hour weeks in the beginning, how did you know with such clarity that what you were doing was going to work? I remember the web back then (you've got mail!) it was a shell of what we have today.

By the way, thanks so much for doing this thread it's been awesome!