I've made millions online - ask me anything!

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I'm new around here and figured I'd jump right into the mix and do an AMA. Here's the short version on me ...

I've been online since 1998. Financially speaking I've gone through the lowest of lows, and the highest of highs. I've made millions, and I've lost millions. At my peak I was making around $250k a month in profits online.

I've made tons of money as an affiliate, and also selling my own info products and web apps/services.

My bread and butter though is straight lead gen via paid traffic. I've spent millions on advertising, and I’ve literally generated millions of leads online both for myself and other companies.

I'm a direct response marketer - I don't do SEO, and I don't do "social media".

I also don’t do mobile. I know nothing about mobile advertising or creating apps. Was just too busy killin' it to learn something new when mobile came along...

I actually don't love Internet marketing - it turns out I'm just pretty good at it. If I'm being completely honest, it has always just been about the money for me.

Now that money isn't much of a motivating factor, I really don’t have much interest in this stuff any more so I’m going to take a break and see how I feel in 6 months or so.

In the meantime I’m going to start looking in to some other businesses, getting active here on the forums, and I’m looking forward to learning and sharing as much as I can.

Oh yeah, one more thing I should tell you up front …

Much of what I’ve done isn’t very fastlane. I spent far too long “grinding” and “hustling” rather than building real businesses and real assets. That’s one of my biggest regrets.

I can’t complain – but I definitely need to be more mindful of this going forward.

OK I think that’s it for now so go ahead and ask me anything!

*** UPDATE ***

While I'd like to individually help everyone in the world, it's obviously not possible. There's no way I can keep up with this thread AND PMs. Please don't PM me questions, unless it also includes some kind of lucrative rev-share offer or you're willing to pay me at least 5-figures monthly as an advisor.

 

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That's a pretty good problem to have from my point of view! Any recommended reading / studying for a rookie that would like to be glued to his computer and highly paid? I'd love to say I'm sick of being stuck at home making shit-tons of cash! seriously though, I really would like to better understand how to build a system like that. There's a lot of mis-information out there and a nod in the right direction would be great. Thanks.

You're not going to like my answer on this one. The answer is to just work like a maniac and learn as you go. When I started out I literally worked 80+ hours a week, 7 days a week, non-stop. Maybe not the healthiest way to do it, but almost every super successful person I know goes through this same process. I ate, slept and breathed Internet marketing for many YEARS. Not weeks or months, but years. You know what they say ... do for a few years what others aren't willing to do, so you can blah blah blah however it goes.

Keep in mind there were no courses on how to do any of this stuff when I started out. These days there are some good ones out there that can help speed up your learning curve. I would definitely recommend trying to learn from others as much as you can for sure. It just depends where you are and what you want to learn next though. Identify that and then do a little research to see who is selling the best info product or course on that topic, and grab it. Don't let the broke a$$ wannabees convince you that paying for info is dumb because you can get it all "free" if you just spend enough time looking for it. That's a bunch of bullshit - your time is way too valuable for that.

Before I forget, here's one piece of advice that may or may not apply to you...

marketing skills + basic techie/programming skills = M-O-N-E-Y

I'm the farthest thing from a "nerdy programmer" you could imagine, but over the years I've learned a little here and a little there and these days I can literally create almost anything I want in terms of web-based applications or services. I've taught myself PHP, MySQL, the basics of managing and maintaining servers, etc. With a few projects, I'm positive that my ability to iterate quickly was the key to my success.

Outsourcing is great and all that, but dealing with flakey programmers is not. If we're competitors and you have to wait days to have one little change made on your site - something that I can do in 5 minutes - who do you think is going to kick who's a$$?

I went into one market that was dominated by a pretty big company, and within 2 years I had literally kicked their a$$ and essentially put them out of business. I basically just took what they were doing, put my own twist on it and made it better for customers, and I was just too agile and they couldn't keep up with me and my tiny team.

If you think you have the mind for it at all, I highly recommend that EVERYONE give PHP and mysql a try. You'd be surprised at how quickly and easily you can learn the basics of LAMP development, and how big of a competitive advantage it can give you.

 

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What advice would you give someone just getting into paid traffic? What to start with? What to read/learn?

It somewhat depends on what you're promoting, but ...

The only thing you need to know is that the "secret" is testing and tracking. That's it. I promise.

Everything else you'll have to experiment with on your own. There is no "best" anything. There is no one-size-fits all answer to any of this. Just pick something that interests you or fits your budget, and go do it.

Some people make millions with PPC. Others hate PPC. Some do PPV. Some do media buys. Some start their own affiliate programs. You'll never know what's going to work for you until you try it.

I've done it all but paying affiliates to send me traffic is how I made most of my money. Once I had the proper systems in place I found it to be the most efficient and scalable way to get as much traffic as I needed.

The key here is to simply have a great freakin' offer. If you have a highly-profitable offer you'll attract affiliates and partners without even trying, and they can send you almost unlimited amounts of traffic.

And yes, you can do this even when you're "just" an affiliate yourself. I've made millions paying affiliates to send traffic to my pre-sell pages where I pitch something and send the users off to another site. It's all just arbitrage.

Just make sure you split-test and track everything. That's honestly all that matters.

 

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What are your main traffic streams for paid traffic?
Are you into media buying as well, or just ppc?

I've done just about everything over the years. I started out with PPC many many moons ago, back when you could get penny clicks from GoTo. I remember the good old days when you could slap up a crappy "thin" affiliate site and get clicks for pennies from Google for almost any keyword. Talk about easy money! As time has gone by this isn't really possible anymore, and depending on what you're promoting you may not even be able to use AdWords as they are more and more strict about what you can and can't promote. Not to mention the costs just keep rising every year. That's the "problem" with RTB platforms - costs will basically keep rising forever until only the top few percent of advertisers can afford to compete. Great if you're one of those top few percent, not so great for everyone else.

Anyway, personally, I've spent millions on PPC over the years. Depending on what you're promoting FB is another good option, although they are quickly going the way of Google. Another good place to advertise is POF.com. They have the best platform by far. Most people just promote dating offers there, but I've had success promoting all sorts of stuff.

Over the past handful of years I've shifted towards running my own affiliate programs. That's where I spend the most money on "paid traffic" nowadays. I have 1000s of affiliates that send me 10s of 1000s of clicks a day, even to my own affiliate pre-sell/landing pages.

This is a more "advanced" strategy but it's a great way to go once you know your numbers. It's just basically arbitrage. For example, if a lead is worth $3 to me, I'll setup an affiliate program where I pay my affiliates $2 a lead. Then I basically make $1 a lead and build a huge list that I can make more money off of in the future, with literally no risk. Basically I get paid to build huge lists.

Did you build email lists or did you just push the traffic via landing pages staight to the affiliate offer?
If you didn't build email lists why? It seems like building email lists along promoting affiliate offers increases profits and you actually build an asset.

Yes, building lists is a no-brainer and you should almost always do it. With that being said, and I'm going to sound like a broken record on this point through the thread, but there really is no right or wrong way to do this stuff. I know people who make millions just direct linking to affiliate offers, and I've done it myself. Most of the guys doing really well with this stuff generally get really, REALLY freakin' good at one thing - and yes you can still make money direct linking to affiliate offers. It's just not as easy as it used to be.

Also are you into non english markets or just the english speaking market? Competition seems to be a lot lower in non english speaking markets.

I've only ever focused on the major English speaking countries - US, CA, UK, and AU/NZ has generated probably 98% of my income.

I do know people who focus on promoting only spanish dating offers, etc. Almost anything can be profitable if you're willing to put in the time and effort to figure it out.

How did you go about creating your own information products? If you outsourced it how did you do it?

Well, creating info products is really easy. Something like a basic ebook can be written in a weekend. In my case my info products have been a handful of ebooks, but mostly "membership sites" where people pay for access to certain types of content. I hate creating actual content so in my case my products were often just re-packaged content I got from other sources (not PLR crap, but great content), or certain types of data that people could slice and dice however they wanted. I have written a few ebook-type products myself though too.

For the content-based sites I would usually pay someone to gather, condense, and spruce up the content for me. They'd usually update it for X period of time as well. Believe it or not you can buy great content very inexpensively. Would you believe you can "interview" an expert in almost any field and often pay them as little as a few hundred bucks for an hour or two of their time? You can record it all and then convert it into whatever format you want to sell it in - an ebook, an audio program, etc. You can find these people on RTIR etc.

For the data-based content sites, this is usually all fully-automated just by pulling in data from various APIs. The value I added is by integrating various tools, etc. that allow users to slice and dice the data in exactly the way they need. Think a keyword tool for example.

My favorite are web-based services that people pay for as this type of thing usually has a much higher perceived value than something like an ebook, and these projects are just more fun (to me) to work on.

 

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"Make a great offer" - excuse my ignorance making something more complicated than it is, but in the affiliate world is this something that has a high payout per sale and is in an active market?

If theres more, can one point me to the right direction of what this really means, perhaps an example?

Doesn't matter if you're promoting affiliate products, your own products, or generating leads for that matter. A great offer is simply that, a great offer. Something that's hard for your target prospect to resist. Say you're promoting some nutritional supplement...

A boring crappy offer is "xyz product costs $39 for a months supply, click here to order".

A better offer would be "you can try xyz product for free, just pay $6.95 for shipping and handling. If you want to continue receiving xyz supplement, just do nothing and we'll bill you the low low price of just $39 a month."

A great offer might be "we're so sure you'll freakin' love xyz that we're going to send it to you absolutely free. you don't even have to pay for shipping. just enter your credit card so we know you're a real person, but don't worry - we won't charge you a penny today. try xyz for 30 days and if you love it as much as we think you will just do nothing and next month we'll charge you the low low monthly price of just $39 blah blah blah".

If you're selling any kind of software or web-based service, a great offer generally involves some kind of free trial, rather than just asking people to pay upfront and trust your word that it's great. See what I mean? If you make a great offer like this and your product is actually any good, everything else will usually just fall into place.

Just look at the offers you're making, and try to make them better. To the point where you don't really even have to "sell" them anything. Try to make your offers a no-brainer for the end user.

Don't get me wrong, copywriting can make or break an offer - but only if the offer isn't great. I generally create offers so "great" that I don't need to hire 5-figure copywriters in order to hard sell the customer. With some of my offers the copy literally doesn't matter because the offer is so good.

Combine a great offer WITH awesome copy and now you're cooking with fire. I've had conversion rates over 10% with a $47 product because I know how to make a great offer, whereas most people are lucky to see 1-2% conversions. And this is with cold traffic.

Another way people do this with info products is to just tack on crazy amounts of "free bonuses". You wouldn't think it would work as well as it does, but sometimes you can literally overwhelm the user with bonuses to the point where they feel like they'd be stupid not to take advantage of whatever you're offering.

You know the ones I'm talking about - "this bonus is valued at $97, this bonus #2 is valued at $150, blah blah blah but it's all yours free if you take action today". This stuff works, and works especially well if the bonuses are actually valuable and have real value and you don't just give them PLR crap "valued at $97".

Here's another example of a pretty great offer I've been seeing a lot of lately. People are doing webinars and only charging after the fact. You register for the webinar with a credit card, then you get to consume the entire webinar/content. If you don't think it's worth whatever is being charged, you just send an email and tell them not to charge you. All else being equal, this is a great offer that will almost always convert better than if you just said "click here to pay $97 and register for the webinar" or whatever.

The underlying concept is that if you make a great offer, everything else matters that much less. People go crazy split-testing one color headline vs. another and other little things trying to get an extra few percent boost in their conversion rate. This is all fine and dandy, but by taking a standard normal offer and turning it into a "great" offer, you can literally double or triple your conversion rates overnight.

 

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How did you make your own offers when promoting strictly other people's products as an affiliate (and nothing of your own)? Was it just adding bonuses or did you do other stuff too to make your offer better than everyone else's?

Just so we're clear when I say I created my own offers as an affiliate I mean I created an offer that other affiliates could promote for me. So here's an example that I'm sure you've seen in the biz opp space ... a home business "matchup" offer.

You go through your favorite affiliate networks and you find 5-10 decent biz opp offers that pay you anywhere from $1-2 per lead when someone enters their name and email. Ideally you want to find as many as possible, and as many different types of offers as you can.

Then you create a simple site of your own where people can get "matched" with a biz opp that's right for them. On your landing page you ask for their name and email, and 2 or 3 survey questions such as "are you looking for something part-time or full-time?", "how much can you afford to invest to get started?", and maybe another relevant question based on the offers you've chosen.

Then when someone comes to your site and enters their info, your system will "match" them with say 3 biz opps that you're promoting, based on their answers. Obviously the more offers you have to work with the better the "match" will be for them.

So now you need traffic, and that's where other affiliates come in. You now setup your own affiliate program or put your new offer on the affiliate networks and your offer is simple. Just like the others, you offer $1-2 per lead, when someone submits the form on your landing page.

Once you optimize your little funnel you should be able to get each user that submits the form to signup for at least 2 of the offers you match them with. Assuming all the offers pay the same, and you pay the same as well just to keep the numbers simple, you've now doubled your money every time someone fills out your little home business survey.

You'll also be building a large mailing list, essentially for "free". So you can make a bunch more money promoting stuff to the list over time.

This is what I call affiliate arbitrage. It works GREAT.

I've done it numerous times over the years and made tons of money doing this. Both in the biz opp and other niches. In fact, I'm sure some of you guys out there have signed up for some of my offers like this.

 

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If I may ask, what's the barrier to entry in this type of industry?

What stops anyone on this forum to replicate your success?

I read a lot about how much people can make doing this, but there must be a reason why everyone can't be as successful as you have, right?

The only barrier to entry with what I've done is that most people aren't willing to work as hard as me, and they give up whereas I don't. I've had this on my wall behind my desk since day one. Motivational stuff is sometimes corny, but this is my only secret to success:

http://c811328.r28.cf2.rackcdn.com/10093_zoom_double_735550.jpg

The key take away is at the bottom ...

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

That's me, and I promise that you can take that to the bank.

 

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How are you accessing the offer? Are there certain metrics that you look at to gauge if it's worth the time / money?

If you're referring to affiliate offers, the safest thing to do is just copy other people. Not blatantly rip them off, but just see who is doing what successfully, pick something where you think you can add value, and then just copy what they're doing but do it a little better.

As far as determining if something is worth the time and money, you'll develop a feel for it over time. Once I hit my stride I never had a "failed" project again. Because I just kept doing the same thing I knew I was freakin' good at it, in different markets. Starting out I think the best thing you can do is copy what others are doing. Unless there is an obvious barrier to entry, generally speaking if someone else is doing something successfully you can probably do it too. This will eliminate a lot of risk when you're starting out.

Do you target a specific audience and then go looking for the offer or vice versa?

Yes. I recommend you always identify a hungry market of people that has money to spend first, then work on giving them what they want. NEVER start with the product or offer and then try to figure out how to sell it. Never ever.

Have you found a quick and low cost way to access the offers / your products to determine if they're worth tweaking and spending more money on?

Starting out you should really use the "copycat" method and you won't really have to worry about this kind of thing. Go to Clickbank for example and check out all the top selling products. Pick one that looks interesting. Reverse engineer what they're doing, and then just go and do it yourself - hopefully in a way that's even better and provides more value to the customer. It's pretty hard to screw up doing this.

 

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You mention your work ethic a lot - do/did you ever struggle with productivity? If so, how did you overcome it? If not, how did you stay motivated?

The only time I ever struggled to stay motivated and productive is when I was making more money in a week than most people make in a year. I also made the common but newbie mistake of thinking it would last forever and I blew a ton of the money I made. Don't make that mistake! Sure it's great to reward yourself along the way, but definitely save/invest more than you spend. Fortunately I made so much that even though I blew a ton of money I could still "retire" tomorrow if I wanted to and live quite comfortably.

Honestly I think it's not a great sign if you find it hard to stay motivated. I dunno though, I've never had that problem. If anything I've been the opposite. TOO motivated. But bottom line if you can't stay motivated you just don't have a strong enough "why" for what you do.

In your opinion, what are the 3 most important keys to success when creating your own info product?

Honestly the product is almost irrelevant (assuming there is a need for it, it provides value and solves a problem, and all that jazz). If you want to make money selling an info product what's most important is your offer, and that's where you should spend the majority of your time. If you have a GREAT offer you can sell ice to eskimos as they say.

Are 'your own affiliate programs' are digital products?

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Yes all my stuff is "digitial". I've never sold physical products. Well I have dabbled with a few things here and there but nothing to speak about.

What's the best way for someone to attract affiliates to their own product?

Have a great offer that generates more revenue per click than any of your competitors. Do that and nothing else matters.

(write that shit down, it's HUUUUUUUUGE.)

 

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What are your thoughts on landing page sites like unbounce and instapage are they worth it or do you just recommend making one from scratch with wordpress?

Personally I learned to do it all myself very early on. I don't regret that at all, and I'd say if you're in this for the long haul at some point you should learn how to create sites with as few tools as possible. In the beginning there are certainly more important things to work on so I'm sure these various "landing page creators" can be helpful. This type of stuff didn't exist when I learned the ropes though.

Believe it or not I don't even use wordpress. Over the years I've developed somewhat of a custom "framework" that I use for all sites. Again, wordpress didn't even exist when I learned how to do this stuff. By the time these kinds of things came along I was set with all the custom tools, etc. that I could possibly need and there was no benefit to using all this new fancy stuff lol

I've been online a long a$$ time. When I got online Yahoo's homepage was literally a list of links. Google didn't exist, etc.

find an offer -> do a media buy -> drive people to landing page -> catch lead -> send people to offer-> collect $$

That's one way to do it. The key is to test, test, TEST each and every one of those steps. Test one weight loss offer against another, test and track the crap out of all your ads, test various landing pages and NEVER stop, test different ways to monetize the leads on the backend, on and on. Testing is all that matters in direct response marketing. If you learn this you can't fail unless you give up too soon.

Here's a random somewhat related tip ...

Everyone starting out in affiliate marketing is worried about their ROI. And the higher your ROI the more you can afford to spend on advertising. So generally the higher your EPC the more likely you are to dominate your market...

But imagine if you only had to breakeven, or you could even lose a little, on your advertising. Then you could pay even MORE for ads and get even more of the traffic in your market, and leave most of your competitors scratching their heads wondering how you can afford to pay so much for your ads. You can do this with almost anything, and just make your money on the "backend". I have one site where I've done this and I have a list of over a million people that I can continually market to and make money from. I'm the first to admit it's not the highest quality list in the world, but it still makes me some nice money every month.

Combine the fact that you only need to breakeven with a highly-optimized site that converts like crazy and almost no one will be able to compete with you in the marketplace for traffic. I could go on and on for days on this stuff. This is just one more little strategy ...

 

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Jeezus. You must be some kind of IM savant lol.

I feel like if I ever figure out how to make money online... I probably should forward 20-30% to you. Such incredible info.

Nah man. If you reverse engineer a website - or any business for that matter - that you know is making money, then you do the same thing but even BETTER, it's actually kind of hard to NOT make money. Sure there's lots of moving parts that you'll need to figure out to do it if it's your first go at it, but seriously, it's that easy. I definitely don't recommend going off on your own with some crazy idea to make money if you're new to this "game" and your goal is to make as much money as quickly as possible. Just pick a niche that you're at least somewhat interested in, see who's doing what and who the market leaders are, then just copy what they're doing and try to "create a better mousetrap" in the process. It's really almost impossible to fail doing this, unless you give up before getting all the pieces right.

 

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I can completely relate to everything you've said about affiliate marketing. Especially about the physical toll it takes on your body. This is not a healthy business. You literally feel yourself deteriorating and aging.

Yeah, they are just now really figuring out exactly how bad it is for your body to sit down for 8 hours a day. I don't know if it's even remotely accurate but I read something recently that said that sitting down for 8 hours a day is worse for your body than smoking a pack of cigarettes in terms of your long-term overall health. Many of your body functions literally shut down when you sit down for hours.

In an effort to try to combat this I built a 2nd workstation setup in my home office. It's an identical copy of my main multi-monitor setup - but it's all on a stand up desk. I try to split my time between the two, and you do start to get used to working standing up after awhile, but I'm not all the way there yet. Many people are able to easily work standing up for 8 hours a day at a computer though.

Of course, standing up in mostly one position all day isn't great either. The best part about working standing up is that you can move around so much more easily. If I'm standing and my phone rings or I have to think about something for a few minutes, I'll automatically just start walking around my office. On the other hand if I'm sitting, I'm much less likely to do this.

I highly recommend a stand up workstation though. Most people really have no idea how bad sitting all day is. If you're super active, have any kind of back pain, etc. I recommend you give it a try even more strongly. After the adjustment period you might find that your whole body just feels better like I did.

Sounds like you're at the point where it's not about the money anymore... so now is the opportune time to get out. Although a 6 month hiatus might make you excited to get back in it again, so watch out for that.

Yep, we shall see. Even though I haven't built any "real" businesses or assets over the years, I have learned loads of valuable skills. I feel confident I could literally build any kind of web-based business there is if I wanted to (short of building the next facebook or anything else that would require me to have 100s of employees. That I'm just not cut out for!)

I'd like to find something to do offline - primarily because I really don't want to spend much more of my life in front of a computer. But if that doesn't work out, I can always come back and make plenty of money online which is a cool "plan b" to have.

Web Apps and SaaS was something I've always been interested in, but never felt I found a good enough market that has the right opportunity to dominate and has the scale. Can you share other examples of areas that you've had success in? Maybe not specifics, but some examples that might get the creative juices flowing.

Selling picks and shovels to the gold miners is almost always a slam dunk assuming you execute everything else well. There are an almost unlimited number of web-based products and services you could create and sell to people that sell stuff online. These people will pay for anything that saves them time or money or increases their bottom line in some way, and the number of potential customers just keeps growing daily. If your web app does something valuable, it pretty much sells itself. Higher perceived value than most info products too, so you can charge more. I have no problem paying $100 a month for something that saves me even 2 hours a month of tedious work.

I created one of the first popular ad tracking systems for Internet marketers. I had 1000s of customers paying me anywhere from $20 to $100 a month. I also created one of the first automated PPC bidding systems back when there were no APIs, etc. On that one I had 100s of businesses paying me anywhere from $100 to $1000 a month before I sold this to a competitor. I could go on and on but just think about any service that online marketers are currently paying for. Then go create one just like it, but better. This could keep you busy forever and make you as much money as you want within reason ...

Curious about your affiliate traffic... did you partner with a couple guys you knew individually that could bring the volume? Or mostly put your offers on CPA networks and/or Clickbank? With so much fraud and crap out there, it seems best to work with just a few guys on private. But then your business is at the mercy of a couple affiliates.

I've done it all and like most things there are pros and cons of everything.

I've had several #1 products on Clickbank bank in the day when I promoted crappy biz opps and that kind of stuff. Probably the easiest money I ever made, but I was young, dumb and desperate at the time. I sure felt "dirty" doing it though. I wasn't scamming anyone, but I wasn't exactly providing tons of value either.

I haven't done anything with Clickbank in years, but it seems like not much has changed. 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.

I have my offers on lots of affiliate networks. Some times I'd give one network an exclusive, some times I'd let them broker it out to just a few other networks, and some times I'd have an offer on as many as 25+ different networks at the same time. As always there are pros and cons of each.

If you get on the networks you definitely need to have a system for dealing with fraud, especially if you're paying for leads. I developed pretty sophisticated anti-fraud systems over the years to deal with all of this, but absolutely, dealing with fraud is a big part of what you'll be doing if you scale a lead-based offer on the networks.

These days there are a few different tools you can use. One I see being advertised a lot is called cpadetective. I was going to launch the same exact service myself based on the custom tools I developed, but just never got around to it. At least this is something that can be outsourced to a VA. At my peak I had a part-time employee who's only job was to spend 3-4 hours each day going through various reports, catching the fraud that slipped through our automated filters, and cleaning up the "messes" that the fraudulent activity caused.

I've also worked with just a handful of partners directly for traffic. It can work, especially if they're just as dependent on you as you are they. I think that's the key to making it work long-term.

 

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What industry did you work within with success?
What industry did you work within that was failure?

Over the years I remained insanely focused on just 3 big niches - health, wealth, and relationships. The stuff that has always sold well, and always will. Obviously you have to sub-niche it down from there, but I never ventured off into the unknown and literally had no real "failures".

In the early days I honed my craft promoting scammy biz opps, and once I learned the ropes I was able to relatively easily duplicate that same success in the health, fitness, financial, and dating markets.

Any ideas what's next? More lead gen? For me, it was writing ... got real tired of my industry. (not the lead-gen part.)

I honestly don't know what's next. One thing I do know is that I'm pretty sick of sitting in front of the computer for many hours a day, so I hope to NOT be doing that. As a competitive athlete I also really hate the way it wrecks your body. Most people don't realize this.

I'm going to be investigating some different offline business ideas, but if I end up staying online I'll definitely have to be smarter about things going forward. The problem with what I've done in the past is that it all revolved around me. Basically I just created a really high paying job for myself. I've had employees off and on over the years, but *I* was the "secret sauce" that couldn't be outsourced.

 

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[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.

 

[naesm]

******A WORD FROM ANOTHER 7 FIGURE MARKETER IN AM ********

This is my first post on this forum. First of all would like to say what a great place with tons of great info.

I am also at a crossroads in my business, I feel like I could be the one writing this as it's exactly my experience in AM.

I definitely haven't done the volume that limitup has done but am approaching seven figures since 2013. I also focus on paid traffic arbitrage. I started in dating, moved on to nutra, and then began doing high volume toolbar installs.

My best month so far was in Aug where I netted about $80k. At the time it felt great, but then I was at the mercy of the network and advertisers and other issues (offer conversions dropped, updates on how google handled app installs, payout drops).

So even with making all this money it didn't feel good and here's why. At the end of the day when you are promoting someone else's offers especially with an affiliate network, if I'm not working or an advertiser decides to kick me off the offer my business literally evaporates over night. Like MJ says, this violates CONTROL, I really have none.

Now my business is back to not doing much (october revenues of about $50k and netting about $20k, I am feeling stuck and not knowing where to go from here. I am a little tired of AM, the emotional roller coaster of crushing it one day and the next making nothing can you hard on you.

It's an interesting time when you don't really have to work anymore, but you still really want to build wealth so you never have to work again. I could quit working for years and live the same lifestyle I have now but the fear of not having enough creeps in.

I remember in December 2013 I was setting my goals for the upcoming year. My first goal was to make $100 per day.

The reason I came here was to get new ideas for businesses, opportunities etc. Right now I have hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in a checking account not knowing what to do with it earning nothing in interest and losing money inflation adjusted. I am not saying this to brag but to paint a clear picture of my situation. I know that I have to put this money to use. My risk tolerance is pretty low. I have been looking at real estate in Mexico and other business opportunities but can't seem to pull the trigger on anything. It's hard to take a 10% cash on cash return on a piece of property in Mexico when you are used to doubling your money everyday in AM.

Thanks again for the awesome thread

 

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[limitup]

So, learning YOU were the secret sauce,

has led you to what new discoveries?

whats the focus to make the secret sauce, other than YOU now?

Z

My "problem" is that I always only wanted a lifestyle business. At least up until recently I've had ZERO interest in building a "real" company that would require me to go and open an office, hire a bunch of employees, etc. Still not sure I'd be happy doing that. I've worked from home for the past 15 years, when and how I wanted, with no real responsibilities, and for the most part I've loved every minute of it. It has limited me though for sure. With some projects there's only so far you can go working from home with a handful of "virtual employees."

I'd be lying if I haven't contemplated where I might be if I had "given in" and tried to build a real business. Several of my projects over the years definitely had the potential to be 10x bigger had I chosen to do this. I could just never get myself to do it.

I'm an idea guy, and I always will be. To me the fun is in coming up with a new idea and building something out of nothing. Once a site is up and running and making money, I lose interest VERY quickly.

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 - unlike a 6-figure a month advertising-based campaign. You just can't outsource the management of this kind of thing, because anyone qualified enough to do it is already off doing their own thing. You just can't hire people like me.

 

[limitup]

Where would you suggest one would start learning "testing and tracking"? I've been looking at my analytics, etc. but still am confused on how to start testing and tracking everything and where to learn how.

Just google "split testing" or "a/b testing" and start learning up on it. Google Analytics even has split testing built in now. Another super popular service people use is visualwebsiteoptimizer.com. But you definitely need to have a good understanding of the concepts involved before you start doing it. But in a nutshell the concept is simple - create 2 different versions of something (a banner ad, a landing page, whatever), throw a bunch of the same traffic (key!) at each one and see which version generates the best results. Then rinse and repeat, forever!

 

[limitup]

Basically he could make customer LTV bigger by successfully selling those same customers training seminars, upsells, basically valuable products over time. Right? Just making sure.

As my math goes - if you pay $15 for someone who spends $15 it's just breaking even. If you spend 15$ for someone who spends $1500 that's a better deal.

Basically the bigger question from me would be about the same thing. What are some ways you would suggest to use to make customer LTV bigger besides OTOs and online/offline seminars, if any?

I think I was going a little too fast with so many replies yesterday, so I'll clarify a bit on this one because it comes up a lot...

If you find that you can't compete with your competitors in the traffic "marketplace" - meaning you can't seem to afford the prices they are paying for ads - it just means you need to work on strengthening your offer and/or your monetization.

Obviously one thing you can do to combat this is to work on increasing your conversions via split-testing. If you increase your conversions this will obviously allow you to pay more for advertising and better compete in the marketplace. Try split-testing both little and "big" stuff - everything from the headline on your landing page, to the entire offer like I've talked about earlier in this thread. Improving your offer from good to great can literally double your conversions overnight.

Then there's the monetization of your users or customers. Basically you want to try to squeeze every penny out of your customers as possible, but you obviously have to be cool about it, continue to provide real value, and not be obnoxious about it.

At the point of sale you have upsells, downsells, OTOs, and all that jazz.

After the sale you should continue to monetize your users/customers by promoting other stuff that can truly help them. This could be more of your own products, other peoples' products, or usually a combination of both.

In terms of your own products, generally the best way to maximize your customer LTV is by having a suite of related products with escalating prices. For example, you get people in the door with a low-cost $27 info product. Then you sell them maybe a $97 product, then a $297 product, all the way up to a $997 or $1997 product, high-end coaching or seminars, etc.

Yeah it's a lot of work, but this is how you can even afford to lose money on the front end to acquire lots and lots of customers. If you know your average customer is worth $482 you can afford to spend a lot more to acquire customers than your competitor who only sells a $97 course for example.

 

[superleggera]

limitup - great thread. I am from your world - but did not scale up till your levels, and I had decided quit in order to start building something more substantial.

I owned an offer in the dating niche, and I went the whole nine yards - optimized conversions (split test like a madman until I hit 4%) and price points (found a sweet spot which added +30% to my topline). EPCs were healthy, and I was making up to $4 per optin in terms of LTV for "buyer countries" - US, UK, AU, CA.

The dating advice niche is predominantly driven by ad swaps and JVs - it's nay impossible to advertise on Google, and Facebook PPC, while profitable, the sales cycle is super long. No volume at POF. Banner drops were iffy, and highly dependent on specific sites; scaling was a problem. Didn't try RTB exchanges. Porn sites were an option but that's something I chose not to do.

And so to scale, I had to rely on SEO because (1) there's not much of a choice left, (2) the ROI of organic traffic was awesome, and (3) I hated doing JVs with dating gurus who owned some really questionable products. But as anyone knows, dealing with Big G is a bitch, and Penguin 1.0 wiped out 75% of my business overnight. But I rebounded and soon was dominating Google again, surviving two Penguin updates after that (don't ask me how). Penguin 2.0 hit and it was not as bad as 1.0, although business definitely dipped.

Post Penguin 2.0 I did some serious soul searching and in the end I decided to walk away because of a few factors:-

1. I can no longer identify with the niche as I got married to a wonderful gal and had two kids.

2. To take the business to the next level I will need to get off Google and do the dating guru circle jerk which I absolutely despised.

3. Competition was brutal, and as you said, offer is everything, and the competitors were making some seriously outrageous claims which I had no doubt would convert like gangbusters. Seen those videos which sell "magical magnets" which you could strap on your penis and automatically attract women to you? Don't laugh. After working in this niche for three years, I know a winning concept when I see one.

To compete, I would need to be more aggressive in my claims in order to kick up the LTV which then enables me to buy banner drops at... porn sites. A complete non-starter for me.

To summarize, while i am with you *most* of everything you say (have a good offer, increase LTV with upsell/downsell/cross sell flow, optimize EPC), I would like to point out a couple of exceptions -

1. When your competition do the things you're unwilling to do (which could well border on being illegal or immoral or both) then expect to get your butt kicked, big time.
2. In some niches you're forced to default to certain traffic channels only, and they could well dry up or the platform might change (think Big G).
3. In my experience, EPCs could be more dependent on list quality than the offer itself. And there's "niche fatique" which needs to be accounted for as well, and so while you may be owning an offer in an evergreen niche such as dating or bizops the funnel would need to be "refreshed" periodically.

I'd agree with you that this "job" is not something that can be outsourced and it's definitely not passive. The money's good, but I don't recommend this to anyone starting out because it's far more efficient building an asset which you could monetize AND sell later right from the beginning. I wished I had known this sooner... for I have wasted three years of my life building up sand castles in the air.

The good news is that I now have a good chunk of money to spend on my next project, but I'll never, ever go back again.

 

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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.

 

[limitup]

1) What is your average email marketing email open rate, ctr rate, and conversion rate? so let's say if you send 1000 emails, how many open the email, how many people click on the link in the email, and how many people actually bought?

These numbers can be all over the place and still be considered "good", so you shouldn't worry about my numbers. I honestly don't have this info handy anyway because as I explained in previous posts I haven't managed any sites in awhile now. These kinds of numbers are all relative to other marketers in your niche, but especially just to compare your own numbers month by month, etc. But it all depends on traffic quality, how things are presented on your site, how and why they got on your list in the first place, how well you nurture your relationship with your list, and so many other variables. You can compare your numbers with others in your market to get some kind of baseline, but really what you should do is monitor your own numbers and just constantly try to improve them.

2) What is your average cost per lead to bring 1 visitor to your site or offer?

With almost all of my projects in health, wealth and relationship niches, I generally paid anywhere from $1-5 per opt-in lead. I tracked everything to the penny so for example I knew exactly how much traffic from any particular source was worth. With my affiliates I would pay some affiliates $2 per lead and others $4 per lead because their lead quality was that much better. Again there is no right or wrong, or one-size-fits-all answer, to this kind of question.

3) What is your average email subscription rate?

Do mean opt-in rate? What percentage of people that hit my landing pages put in their info? Again, it depends on the site. I've been happy with as low as 5%, and I've seen as high as 60%, and everything inbetween. All were profitable.

4) How to do effective media buy? are you buying google adwords, or place banner on someone else websites? if it is the latter, how do you find out if the website has high traffic? can you share some tips and tricks?

Hmm there are entire courses and volumes written on this topic. I've done it all, and it can all work. It depends on what you're doing, what your goals are, how much you're looking to spend, etc. Are you getting the theme here that there are no right answers to a lot of these kinds of questions?

Generally speaking when people talk about media buying they are referring to relatively high dollar ad campaigns on big huge sites via various ad networks like advertise.com, adbrite, clicksor, pulse360, etc. With something like this you generally need to spend 1,000s just to get enough traffic to test a handful of ads. This is definitely not for beginners, but rather, this is something you work towards. Once you've dialed in your offer and you know all your numbers, this is a great way to scale your offer/traffic.

Buying ads one at a time on individual sites is a great way to get traffic. It takes some legwork but you can find some real hidden gems out there. And the cool thing is that you can outsource most of this work to a VA. Let them research, find the sites, gather all the advertising details in terms of what's offered, costs, etc. and then you can take it from there. Every now and then you'll land on a goldmine where you can get super targeted highly-converting traffic for 5 or 10 cents a click, etc.

To get an idea of how much traffic a site gets, you can use something like alexa which is a good starting point. If you're talking about "big" sites that get a good amount of traffic you can use more advanced tools like compete.com and quantcast. Google Ad Planner is probably one of my favorites. There's also google trends for websites which most people don't even know about. Lots of data available. There are also a few tools that aggregate data from multiple places. One is called dataopedia and I think there's another one called attention meter (sorry it's been awhile since I've used these!)

 

[limitup]

Great thread, thanks for sharing all this info!

As someone in AM as well, I was wondering what was the process of creating your first offer? Did AM make that process easier since you had better connections or skills?

My first product was awesome. 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.

Long story short I basically copied what they were doing, put my own twist on it and created what I thought was a better product, and then I aggressively recruited their affiliates and partners. I made a small fortune on that one.

The "copycat" technique is by far the safest way to get started. I'm not talking about blatantly ripping off someone's landing pages, and their product verbatim. But there's nothing wrong with modeling what someone else is already doing successfully, and just "creating a better mousetrap."

What were some ways to make affiliates flock to your offer besides giving a higher payout?

For the most part, unless you're talking about someone you have a relationship with, affiliates only care about EPC and that's it. Affiliates will flock to the offers in their niche with the highest EPCs. Period. End of story. Whenever you see a "top 5" or "top 10" review site for example, the products are "ranked" by EPC in descending order 99% of the time.

 

[limitup]

How do you implement this if you're just starting out promoting an offer? Is it the way the copy is written to show the value of the offer (you did mention previously copy isn't the main thing you tweak, but maybe at this stage it would be)? Is it just something that takes time? Possibly adding testimonials as they come in?

No nothing like that. That stuff doesn't add value.

By value I mean something that is going to further help the user/customer.

For example, say you are promoting FatBurner2000 as an affiliate. One example of a way to add value to the equation is to educate the user about the product, why it works, how it works, how they can get the most from it, how to get the best results, and even better - giving them something of value when they take action.

For example you could say something like "after you buy FatBurner2000 just forward me your receipt and I'll send you my short 12-page ebook showing you 3 simple exercises I do in less than 10 minutes a day that can help you lose that stubborn belly fat up to 348% faster!" That kind of thing.

The only limit is your imagination. I'll be honest and say that most people who do this kind of thing just make shit up, but obviously that's bad kharma and the best way to achieve long-term success is by providing true VALUE. As each day passes, affiliates and marketers that don't provide true value are being kicked to the curb.

 

[limitup]

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?

Actually it was neither of those. I'm completely self-taught. I've been "in to" computers since I was a kid, and I was experimenting with direct mail and other direct marketing strategies when the Internet came along so it just made sense. Actually at first it was just "marketing" on AOL and Compuserve classifieds and stuff like that before the web caught on. Then it was usenet newsgroups. This was back when Yahoo's homepage was literally just a list of links, there was no Google, most people didn't know what email was, etc. Seems like a lifetime ago.

But anyway long story short I was in to direct mail like I said, and when the Internet came along I just remember saying to myself I think there might be something to this Internet thing, and it looks like I can advertise cheaper and get faster results on this Internet, so I'm gonna give it a try. If I only knew then how big and important the Internet would become, I'd be a billionaire for sure. I was online when you could buy domains like business.com for reg fee (which at the time was super expensive like $100 or something I can't even remember!)

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 "knew" it would work because I knew other people were doing it. I'm of at least average intelligence and I have a sickening work ethic, so I figured if they could do it I could do it too.

And short of things that require innate athletic talent or insane amounts of resources you simply don't have and can't get, I think this holds true for just about anyone who wants to do anything.

The "sickening work ethic" part is the only problem for most people...

 

[AllenCrawley]

I'm going to start sounding like a broken record but really you just need to focus on creating an incredible OFFER. The offer is 10x more important than the actual product.

For a viable long term fastlane business that doesn't rely on constant PUSH marketing I'd suggest a product centered (product focused) business vs an offer centered/focused business as @MJ DeMarco suggests. I'm really starting to understand the power of the product centered business. As MJ has stated before, your product should be the FIRE and your marketing the GAS. Not the other way around.

The following are quotes from this thread and are a must read..

Hypothetically imagine for a moment that you had the cure to cancer. Ultimately, you would need to sell the solution. You would need to know how to market. Sell. Convince. Persuade. After the initial momentum builds of sales, the product will do the rest through word of mouth, social media, referrals, and recommendations. Copywriting, marketing, and sales accelerates the momentum. To put it analogous, your product should be the FIRE, your marketing the GAS.

In my mind it becomes manipulation when your copy is slick and persuasive, but the product behind the slick and persuasive is just an illusion of that copy, a paper tiger, a mere surrogate to "stand in" for your manipulation. When I hear people around here say "printing money" it makes my stomach turn because that to me is not a product focus, (a pull) but a money focus (push). A push focus, 100% marketing 0% product makes you no different than any other money chaser trying to make a fast buck. The product becomes irrelevant.

In Jason's thread he mentions being product agnostic where you don't care what the product is. I agree with that -- as long as your product kicks a$$ and you know it. I'm aware of @JasonR 's product and frankly, I think it kicks a$$.

But being product agnostic with garbage for the sake of running copy to "print your money? "

I'll take the zero.

Great copy can sell skateboards to the elderly. Ice to eskimoes. Sand to Arabs. But at the end of the day, this makes you a great pusher and great manipulator, not someone who is solving problems. And if anyone is questioning it, yes, great pushers and manipulators can make great fortunes. A lot of them also end up in jail or indicted for fraud. For example, I haven't seen the Jordan Belfort movie... but my initial impression of what I've heard is that this guy is not a Fastlaner, but a great pusher and a great manipulator. The guy in my avatar as well.

 

[limitup]

When doing media buys do you think it's best to study a traffic source and then promote a product relevant to their needs or would it be better to take a hot offer(like product with top gravity score on CB for example) and then find traffic sources with customers that this offer could be of interest to?

You can actually do either. Generally speaking I like to identify a large "hungry" market and then sell them what they want or are already buying, but I wouldn't recommend this for a newbie because there are more moving parts and more stuff you'll have to figure out. For a newbie I'd recommend you go the latter route and find a hot product that you know is selling, then you can focus on "reverse engineering" how other people are selling it successfully and model what they are doing. This is do-able even for a total newbie.

 

[limitup]

My questions:

Dont u feel like a f boss after all uve achieved?

and

What are your goals now for the upcoming 2 years?

I did for awhile, but I was young and stupid too.

I wasted tons of the money I made, and also lost a bunch in investments I had no business being invested in.

Fortunately I made quite a bit during my affiliate days so I still had a nice chunk left.

I've since started a SaaS business that is going great. I was actually going to create another AMA about it the other day but someone else had just started a SaaS AMA thread so I figured I'd hold off a while...

 

[MJ DeMarco]

What industry did you work within with success?
What industry did you work within that was failure?

I’m going to take a break and see how I feel in 6 months or so.

Any ideas what's next? More lead gen? For me, it was writing ... got real tired of my industry. (not the lead-gen part.)

Thanks for the post ... should be very interesting and valuable to all.

 

[limitup]

Hey, wondering why you didn't do this in INSIDERS. But, your choice was your choice.

I'm new around here. What's the pros and cons either way? Hadn't even given it a second of thought.

1) What do you say the WORST part of what you were doing before would be?

That's easy - the fact that I was the secret sauce that made everything work. If I ever took more than week or two off things would start going downhill fast. As I mentioned much of what I did wasn't very fastlane. In essence I just created a really high paying job for myself.

2) Would you do it all again if you had the chance?

It's a tough one. For the most part, I always did what I felt was the right thing for me at that moment in time. I definitely should have looked at building some kind of "real" business much sooner, but it was always kind of a catch-22. I was making so much cash that I couldn't just give it up, but since it required me to work so much to make it I didn't have the time to do anything else.

I would have had to REALLY wanted to do something else because it would have literally required me to "throw away" huge amounts of cashflow in order to pursue anything else. I guess I wasn't willing to do it at the time. I did consider it a few times though.

 

[limitup]

I gave a preso on this @ BnP but using the leads for my own use and not selling them out. The cool thing is that I get all the backend. I know why scale you can make tons of money in CPA lead gen, but its another affiliate marketing job that I would rather not have. The only lead gen I have been interested and am currently doing outside my own clients is for services that have long customer life cycles and recurring monthly payouts. Those are pretty fun to build.

No doubt. For the most part I agree. Of course there's nothing that says you can't do both - sell the leads AND keep them yourself.

You said you were doing lead gen, are you doing large info capture or just name/email?

I've done it all. Depends what the lead buyers want. I've done everything as simple as generating name/email leads and getting paid a buck or two, all the way up to 3-page forms where I got paid $100+ for a lead.

When you say arbitrage through getting your own affiliates, what is your payout reduction rate to get affiliates driving traffic for you, and why would they not just find the original offer?

My "margin" is usually anywhere from 25% on the low end all the way up to 100% or more. The more savvy partners usually demand higher payouts, and of course I would always pay more to a partner if they can deliver volume. As far as why most people wouldn't just do it themselves, it's because most people are lazy. That and the fact that I almost always add a lot of value to the process, which is a big part of my success. I've done some direct linking (especially in the early years when it was so freakin' easy), but that's not how I've made most of my money.

What is your experience with companies scrubbing big time and payout reductions/non-payment?

I have lots of experience with this. Here's what it comes down to. Your goal is to be in a position where you generate so much traffic or so many leads for a company, that they depend on you. At that point YOU have all the leverage and they can't screw with you. That's the simple truth.